March 27 , 2009

Mark Twain -- America’s Greatest Humorist

 

No single adjective can adequately describe his versatile talents. Even a cursory glance at his life and work indicates the many facets of his personality. The most scintillating of these was his uncanny faculty of creating humor. Hence in the scores of books written about him, the brilliance of this facet has received particular attention
Yet, No writer has neglected to mention the fact that the versatile genius of Mark Twain (1835-1910) encompassed his faculties as a writer – perhaps the best of America - an incisive satirist, a provocative social critic, a journalist who readily sacrificed objectivity in order to entertain his readers, a world traveler whose prolific pen kept recording his impressions of what he saw as odd or funny, a renowned lecturer, a ‘get-rich-quick’ miner who became a part of the fabulous ‘gold rush’ and lost all he had, an investor who similarly lost his wife’s wealth on a printer’s typesetting machine, a river boat pilot which gave him his pen name, ‘Mark Twain’.
His real name was Samuel Clemens.
On a visit to Connecticut some time back, I decided to visit the home of Twain and his wife, Olivia, built for themselves in Hartford, capitol of Connecticut, in the city’s most exclusive enclave.
He had traveled extensively throughout the country and had lived for varying periods of time in different parts of the vast country. But, he selected the plot where the house stands even today for, as he put it: “Everywhere the eye turns to it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”
He had been living earlier in San Francisco –a city whose natural beauty, to my mind, matched only that of Istanbul. But, he preferred a place with clear-cut seasons. “No land with an unvarying climate”, he said about California in his book Roughing It, “can be very beautiful”.
The 19-room elegant mansion, now a national historic landmark, was designed by an eminent architect and decorated by the renowned Louis Tiffany. During the seventeen years (1874-1891) that Mark Twain lived there, he fathered three lovely daughters whom he adored intensively, and produced the scripts of seven masterpieces including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
As a guide led us to the portal of the elegant house, I stepped back instinctively, held my breath to pray for the enormous deity of literature, one that demolished many false values, many cultural idols of the time with his intensely non-conformist, irreverent pen. His writings, his caustic comments, his witty sayings came rushing to my mind as we moved from room to room treated by the guide’s interesting accounts of the house lore and marveling at the maverick’s wit, character and courage.
In Huckleberry Finn, for instance, he demythologizes the culture that had bred slavery, stripping it of any romanticism. He makes readers of all colors to gaze into the imperfect mirror of race relations and prejudice in America. He was scathingly criticized for such ideas. But, as he has himself put it: “The man with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.”
I had always thought Ernest Hemingway, the winner of Nobel Prize for literature, to be the greatest American writer. But, Hemingway has called Twain “the headwater of American fiction” -the head of the clan of all American literary fathers and mothers.
The distinctive quality of Twain’s writings is that what he wrote over a century back is still fresh and as attractive. He endures; he never becomes stale. One gains the impression that he started writing yesterday and is writing about today.
Since his death, Twain has transcended ordinary fame and become an icon of American culture and humor the world over. His operating premise in all his works was that the American people are different from Europeans. Like the nation he would come to embody, he was always reinventing himself, always restless, always full of contradictions.
“I am not an American”, he once said, “I am the American”.
He undertook extensive travels to many parts of the world at a time when travel was by sea or by road and an unpleasant, time-consuming, and hazardous enterprise. His extensive travels had broadened his outlook on life and turned him into a cosmopolitan citizen. Travel, he said, is fatal to prejudice.
No wonder, Twain was constantly opposed to slavery and discrimination on the basis of race. His book about Huckleberry Finn evoked as much praise as controversy. It is one of the most banned and debated books in American literature. Hemingway asserted that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. To him it was “the best book we’ve ever had. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” There is no doubt that Twain was the most famous American of his day and remains in ours the most universally revered American writer.
About his vocation as a writer, the following comment of Mark Twain merit special attention: “Ours is a useful trade, a worthy calling, with all its lightness and frivolity it has one serious purpose, one aim, one specialty, the exposure of pretentious falsities, the laughing of stupid superstitions out of existence; and that whoso is the natural enemy of royalties, nobilities, privileges and all kindred swindles, and the natural friend of human rights and human liberties.”
On my way out of the mansion, I paused again at the portal and tried in vain to push back ideas as to how Twain would have reacted had he been alive today and witnessed the deviations, in the name of national security, from the liberties enshrined in the U.S. constitution. Would he have swallowed the provisions of the Patriot Act? How would he have reacted to the war on Iraq in total disregard of the worldwide protests against it? How would he have seen the phenomenon of Osama and his obnoxious cohorts? The ethnic profiling and “random search” at airports of all travelers with certain features?
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