The Devil Gets His Due, page 16
What explains Wood’s consequent obscurity is surely, at least in part, the equivocal status of that nearly anonymous “obscene” book over whose production he presided. Unlike most of Twain’s other later books, 1601 does not include in its front matter a portrait of the author, nor does his name appear on the title page. Also uncharacteristically, it was never sold—being, indeed, the only one of his works from which Twain never made a cent. But this is fair enough, since—as Twain wrote in 1906 to an inquisitive librarian—he never considered it a true sibling to his more legitimate books, describing it as a “Wandering Offspring” which “I hasten to assure you is not printed in my published writing.” Taking a cue from Twain, subsequent editors have excluded it from his collective works (the present volume and the Library of America’s Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays excepted).
It seems to me, however, that 1601 can only be properly understood in the context of Twain’s total oeuvre. Placing it in that setting makes clear how much this presumably unique book has in common with what critics considered his more characteristic ones. First of all, it deals with life in a foreign land, like so many other books by this most American of all American writers, beginning with his first, The Innocents Abroad, and continuing on until his unfinished last one, The Mysterious Stranger. But it takes us on a vicarious journey through time as well as space; and in this it resembles not just that full-fledged time-travel fantasy, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but also the Tom Sawyer–Huck Finn series, with its almost magical resurrection of the endless summers in an antebellum mid-America, otherwise presumably lost forever.
Finally, too, in this wider context it is possible to see 1601 as one of Twain’s many linguistic experiments—to which he was driven, I think, though he may not have been fully conscious of it himself, by a need to escape the restrictions of what Victorians considered a proper literary dialect. Sometimes he sought, as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and The Prince and the Pauper, to do this by counterfeiting archaic speech; sometimes, as in Huckleberry Finn, by attempting to reproduce in writing oral colloquial dialects. In 1601, he combines both strategies, interlarding the high diction of the Elizabethan court with the gross four-letter words which were then used solely in barrooms, back alleys—and, of course, pornography.
Even considered as pornography, however, 1601 does not stand alone among Twain’s works. In addition to jotting down the punch lines of dirty jokes in his notebooks, he wrote for the eyes of men only raunchy poems like “The Mammoth Cod,” and to a similar audience he made speeches like the notorious defense of masturbation delivered at the Stomach Club in Paris. Moreover, even in worlds intended for family reading, he flirted with taboos. So, for instance, in Tom Sawyer he discreetly describes Becky peeking at nude pictures in her teacher’s anatomy book; and in Huckleberry Finn he circumspectly hints at the phallic nature of the play put on by the Duke and the King for the yokels of a one-horse town in Arkansas.
Yet even at its hardest, Twain’s pornography differs from the run-of-the-mill erotic literature whose popularity was peaking at the moment he wrote 1601. In The Other Victorians, Steven Marcus argues that this popular genre was typically distinguished by three things. First, it is only “minimally verbal,” which is to say, it tends to make its readers oblivious to rather than conscious of the language in which it is written. Second, it avoids defining specifically the time and place of its action. Third, its characters are invariably young, since its essential fable is a projection of the male fantasy of potency, in which the penis is imagined to be “a magical instrument of infinite powers.”
But 1601, as we have already observed, is conspicuously verbal. Moreover, its time and place are specified in the very title; and many of its characters are old, most notably the aged narrator and the Queen herself, who is at the date of the action sixty-eight. Finally, when it ceases to be basically scatological, as it is from the start, and becomes fully erotic, the male fantasy it projects is not the dream of infinite potency but the complementary nightmare of genital inadequacy, as it is made clear by the mournful last line, “. . . which doing, lo hys member felle, & wolde not rise again.”
In the end, 1601 is not only truly American but, like much of Twain’s other writing, autobiographical. Of this Sir Walter Raleigh has earlier made us aware, telling of “a people in ye most uttermost parts of America that copulate not until they be five-&-thirty yeeres of age . . . & doe it then but once in seven yeeres”; thus leaving us to remember, as we close the book, that it was approximately at this age that Mark Twain married—for all his foul mouth, probably still a virgin.
Is Shakespeare Dead?
Despite its misleading title, Is Shakespeare Dead? deals not with the problem of the poet’s mortality but with that of his identity. It attempts, that is to say, to answer the question of who really wrote the works attributed to the actor from Stratford, and therefore should more properly have been called Is “Shakespeare” Shakespeare? But death was much on Twain’s mind when he wrote this little book in 1909. He was still mourning his favorite daughter, Susy, who had been dead for more than a dozen years, and his beloved wife, Livy, who had been dead for five.
Moreover, the death of another daughter, Jean, lay just ahead, as did his own. The latter, at least, he must have foreseen, since his health was failing rapidly; and Halley’s comet, which had flashed across the sky when he was born—and to which he felt bound like a Siamese twin—was due to appear again the following year. It is scarcely strange, then, that the word “dead” intruded into the title of what was to be one of the last of his books published during his lifetime. What is strange, however, is that the test which follows is not melancholy but basically blithe and even at its most irascible moments punctuated with jokes. Indeed, it finally seems as if the mortuary title itself might be just another joke.
After all, we remember, in Twain’s first book, The Innocents Abroad, he recounts how he and some irrelevant fellow travelers would annoy their guides by asking a question “which never failed to disgust [them].” “We use it always when we can think of nothing else to say,” he explains. “After they have exhausted their enthusiasms pointing out to us . . . the beauties of some bronze image . . . we look at it stupidly and in silence for . . . as long as we can hold out . . . and then ask, ‘Is he dead?’” It seems reasonable that by playing the same game with the Shakespeare idolators more than four decades later, Twain was able to imagine himself once more a “bad boy,” challenging the cultural clichés of his elders.
But he was, of course, in reality a lonely old man, haunted by bad dreams and incapable of finishing any of the fictions in which he thought by embodying them to exorcise them. Only fragments survive of these nightmarish fantasies in which the terrified protagonist is shrunk and trapped in a drop of water, frozen into the eternal ice of the Arctic, overwhelmed by impenetrable darkness or blinded by intolerable light. The most nearly successful of such abortive ventures is the posthumously published pseudo-text called The Mysterious Stranger. Cobbled together and shamelessly emended (without acknowledgement) by Fredrick Duneka and Albert Paine, this account of an ambiguously satanic figure who ends by revealing to the young man he has bedeviled that all he has taken as reality is “a grotesque and foolish dream” has come to be accepted not just as one of Twain’s major works but as his final word to the world.
Yet though Twain was apparently working to the very end of his life on one or another of its three or four incoherent versions, it is not in fact his valedictory statement. Disconcertingly, that was Is Shakespeare Dead?—one of his least well received and most misunderstood works. Part of the problem, surely, is that this little book seems at first glance to belong to a genre which Twain did not customarily write, and not very successfully when he did: literary criticism.
His recorded comments on what he called “belles lettres” are few and far between. His preferred reading was popular history, philosophy and theology; and when he did try to read poetry and fiction it was at the urging of his friend and mentor William Dean Howells, who never ceased trying to induct him into the mysteries of high culture. Typically, however, Twain’s responses were negative, brief and in any case intended for Howells’s eyes only. Snidely and in few words, for instance, he dismissed both Edgar Allan Poe and Jane Austen, declaring, “To me his prose is unreadable—[like hers]. No, there is a difference. I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane’s. Jane is entirely impossible. It seems a pity they allowed her to die a natural death.” With almost equal brutality and brevity, he disposed of three other canonical authors, confessing, “I can’t stand George Eliot & Hawthorne & those people; I see what they are at, a hundred years before they get to it, & they just tire me to death. And as for the Bostonians, I would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven than read that.”
Only three times before his essay on Shakespeare appeared did Twain write about literature at greater length. Two of these essays, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” and “In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” were published in the 1890s; the third, “William Dean Howells,” not until 1906. The last of these differs from the other two as well as from Twain’s brief epistolary comments, being overwhelmingly positive in tone. But this is scarcely surprising, since it is less objective criticism than a token of gratitude to one who even before they became friends had favorably reviewed Twain’s work. In any event, Twain seems to have felt the piece inappropriate to the persona called by his nom de plume, whose function it was to mock everything admired by the respectable and conventional—including high literature. He therefore, uncharacteristically, published it under the name S. L. Clemens.
But “Mark Twain” was the name under which he issued what is surely the best known and most often reprinted of his critical essays, “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895). As a matter of fact, school dropout and autodidact that he was, he signed it “Mark Twain, M.A., Professor of Belles Lettres in the Veterinary College of Arizona.” For a while, moreover, he tried to maintain a proper academic tone; but what begins as a patient explication de texte detailing Cooper’s lapses in taste and style quickly degenerates into slander and calumny. “Cooper hadn’t any more invention than a horse,” he writes at one point, “and I don’t mean a high-class horse, either; I mean a clothes-horse.”
What prompts the most extravagant of these outbursts is not Cooper’s literary ineptitude but the failure of certain self-styled experts to notice it. To make this clear, Twain prefixes to his essay what he considers particularly wrong-headed laudatory comments on Cooper by Professor Lounsbury of Yale, Professor Brander Matthews of Columbia and the British novelist Wilkie Collins; and then he observes scornfully, “It seems to me that it was far from right . . . to deliver opinions on Cooper’s literature without having read some of it.” In any case, what Twain is writing here is not criticism of literature but criticism of criticism—criticism twice removed; and so, too, is his earlier literary polemic against Shelley, published in 1894.
“In Defense of Harriet Shelley,” as its title indicates, is primarily a chivalrous attempt to redeem the reputation of that ill-fated lady from what Twain felt to be the unfair representation of her in Professor Edward Dowden’s Life of Shelley. He was, of course, irked by the good professor’s bland assertion that despite having abandoned Harriet and run off with young Mary Godwin, Percy could not be held responsible for Harriet’s suicide. But what seems especially to have enraged him was what he had apparently learned when his daughter Susy enrolled in Bryn Mawr, that Dowden’s book was “accepted in the girls’ colleges of America and its view taught in their literary classes.”
To rebut Dowden, Twain not only attempts to reconstruct the true history of the relationship which Dowden falsified; he also tries to demonstrate the falsity of the rhetoric with which Dowden did so. Ironically enough, as he makes his case, his own rhetoric grows ever more hyperbolic and shrill. “The Shelley biography,” he writes, “is a literary cake-walk . . . all the pages . . . walk by . . . mincingly in their Sunday best . . . It is rare to find a sentence that has forgotten to dress.” This metaphor, he informs us, is drawn from the folk culture of “our Negroes in America.” But once into the sort of adversarial criticism of criticism he relished, he draws on white high culture as well, telling us that Dowden’s biography is “a Frankenstein with the original infirmity supplemented by a new one; a Frankenstein with the reasoning faculty wanting.” This, too, is ironic enough, since the metaphor is drawn from the famous book by the second Mrs. Shelley; but the irony is twice compounded by the fact that Twain does not properly remember her book, confusing her nameless monster with its maker.
What had become evident by 1895, in any case, was that typically Twain was moved to write about literature only when his temper was aroused by critical opinions contrary to his own—especially if those opinions were propagated by academics. Thus, it seems inevitable that sooner or later he would get mad enough to take sides in the ongoing controversy about the authorship of the poems and plays traditionally attributed to “William Shakespeare.” Moreover, there seemed little doubt about which side he would support, since the scholars and critics who have determined the canon of Shakespeare’s works, as well as edited and commented on them, have by and large ended up believing that their true author is the actor from Stratford.
Yet there has always been a minority of nonbelievers; and there are indeed few of us who are not a little disturbed by the fact that justly or unjustly, among the acknowledged greater writers of the world, Shakespeare is the only one whose identity has been thus challenged over and over. The person who seems to me to have come closest to explaining why is Wyndham Lewis, who in The Lion and the Fox wrote, “That there is something equivocal and of a very special nature in the figure of this poet has been felt constantly; and people have always tapped his pedestal, inquisitive and uneasy, peered up into his face, scenting hoax. The authenticity of that face has even been doubted; it has been called ‘an obvious mask,’ the ‘face of a tailor’s dummy.’”
When it comes to saying who was the real author, however, there has been widespread disagreement among the anti-Shakespeareans. Francis Bacon has been suggested, and Anthony Bacon; the Earl of Oxford and a host of other earls; Sir Walter Raleigh, Christopher Marlowe, Queen Elizabeth and even a nun called Anne Whatley. Francis Bacon, of course, is the all-time favorite—as he was Mark Twain’s; though Twain could not quite bring himself to endorse him when he finally got around to addressing the Bacon-Shakespeare controversy in 1909. To be sure, he claims in Is Shakespeare Dead? that he had “a fifty years interest in the matter—born of Delia Bacon’s book—away back on that ancient day—1857, or maybe 1856.” But there is no evidence of this in anything he published earlier.
He had, it is true, kept working throughout his career on a burlesque version of Hamlet, in which a kibitzer from the nineteenth century breaks into the action of the play. But though this makes it clear that Twain always wanted in some sense to make Shakespeare his own, nowhere does the manuscript betray the slightest doubt about that playwright’s identity. Nor does 1601, which includes both Shakespeare and Bacon in its cast of characters. In fact, in it Bacon is described not as a poet, actual or potential, but as “a tedious sink of learning” [who will] “ponderously philosophize” though “ye subject bee but a fart.” On the other hand, “ye famous Shaxpur” is portrayed as reciting verses from King Henry IV and Venus and Adonis, whose authorship no one challenges, instead bestowing on him “prodigious admiration.”
Nonetheless, by 1909 Twain had somehow persuaded himself that his skepticism about Shakespeare dated back half a century and had only been “asleep for the last three years.” But he had, as is well known, an immense capacity for self-deceit, so that in this case, as in so many others, the real truth is hard to determine. Probably he really had, as he claims, supported the anti-Stratfordian position back in 1858, in a continuing half-earnest debate with George Ealer, the master pilot to whom he was then apprenticed, and a passionate pro-Stratfordian. But later, with no living opponent to combat, he seems to have lost all interest.
What revived it, apparently, was the chance arrival on his desk of the galleys of a book on Bacon by William S. Booth, which then led him to read George Greenwood’s The Shakespeare Problem Restated, whose anti-Stratfordian arguments he echoes in Is Shakespeare Dead?—even quoting a large section of it verbatim. His enthusiasm he shared with his daughter Jean, telling her, “I am having a good time dictating to a stenographer a day-after-day scoff at everybody who is ignorant enough and stupid enough to go on believing that Shakespeare ever wrote a poem or play in his life.” Clearly what pleased him was the opportunity to calumniate once more the kind of scholarly experts he had always despised, this time the historians and biographers whom he calls “these Stratfordolators, these Shakesperiods, these thugs, these bangalores, these troglodytes, these herumfordites, these blatherskites, these buccaneers, these bandoleers . . .” (133–34).
No one else, however, was convinced. Albert Paine, who usually praised uncritically whatever he wrote, was so dubious that Twain felt obliged to reassure him, falsely claiming, “I have private knowledge from a source that cannot be questioned. It is the great discovery of the age.” But the finished book contained nothing except a rehash of old arguments about the Stratford Shakespeare’s lack of schooling and legal expertise—interlarded with outbursts of vitriolic abuse. Even Isabel Lyon, who after Livy’s death was Twain’s closest female companion, felt forced to confess that it was “not gentle and not very clever”; agreeing therefore with other of his concerned friends that he was “slipping intellectually,” and that it would be wise “not to have his ideas made public.”
