The Devil Gets His Due, page 17
In fact, his publishers finally issued the book only because they were contractually obligated to do so; and as they had foreseen, it received perfunctory notice in the press. One reviewer, trying to beat Twain at his own game, jocularly argued that since, like Shakespeare, he was an autodidact and school dropout, the literary works attributed to him must have been written by somebody else—probably Elbert Hubbard. Even those most deeply involved in the Shakespeare-Bacon controversy did not pay his book much heed. The only response of Greenwood himself, for instance, was a threat to sue Twain for inadequately acknowledging his borrowings. Naturally, with members of the critical establishment, to whom the “Baconian heresy” seemed as absurdly illusory as a belief in UFOs or Bigfoot, Is Shakespeare Dead? fared even less well. Typical is its dismissal in a recent Twain handbook intended for classroom use, which describes it as “an exaggerated pitch of a travelling salesman . . . repetitive, sporadic, and totally without direction . . . full of overblown, bombastic pseudo-eloquence.”
It is a judgment with which it is hard to disagree if Is Shakespeare Dead? is read solely as an inept attempt at literary criticism. But after all, as its subtitle indicates, it is a piece “from my autobiography”; and only by keeping this in mind is it possible to perceive the sense in which it is finally coherent. We must, however, be aware of Twain’s unorthodox notion that the right way to do an autobiography was “to wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you at the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale.” But this means that what pattern it has is unconscious, like that of a reverie or a dream.
Certainly, this is true of Is Shakespeare Dead?, which, despite its presumed subject, begins with an apparently irrelevant discourse on “claimants”: pretenders of various kinds, including not just Mary Baker Eddy and Louis XVII but (rather astonishingly) the Golden Calf and Satan. To be sure, Shakespeare is mentioned as a “claimant,” too, but only in passing; and before Twain manages to treat him at length, he has wandered off into reminiscences about his days as a riverboat pilot and the death on the river of his brother Henry. This in turn somehow segues into a not quite credible anecdote about his days in Sunday school and an explanation of his lifelong interest in Satan.
What is not clear, until he approaches the end of the book, is why Twain started it with the incantatory repetition of the word “claimants.” At that point, he reminds us of the pilot’s cry “m-a-rk-twain,” which indicates safe water but is also his nom de plume; and we realize that “claimants,” too, is a pun, this time on his given name, “Clemens.” Finally, in what he calls a “post-script,” he reproduces a clipping from a current edition of his hometown newspaper which identifies him as “Mark Twain or S. L. Clemens as a few of the unlettered call him”: thus not merely joining together both of his names, but ironically reversing their claim to authenticity.
Between his two encrypted signatures, Twain not only piles up proof for his anti-Stratfordian brief; but—like a proper autobiographer—tells us much about his own early life. Indeed, if all other records were to disappear, we would know from Is Shakespeare Dead? not just when and where Twain was born, when his father died and he left school, but also what trades he practiced before he became a full-time writer and where they took him. Of his later life, however, he tells us little (not even mentioning his wife or daughters, for instance), only that he ended up by being everywhere in the world, but especially in his hometown, honored and loved—his name a byword.
This, he insists, is quite different from the ultimate fate of the pretender from Stratford, remembered and mourned by none of his fellow citizens—his very name forgotten. But why, I am moved to ask, does Twain not merely insist on that difference but feel a need to cite objective evidence to prove it. Could it be that somewhere below the level of full consciousness he had doubts about the identity not just of England’s greatest writer but of one he needed desperately to believe was America’s greatest, namely, himself—whoever he really was, Mark Twain? or S. L. Clemens? or both? or neither?
Certainly, throughout his writing life he had been obsessed by that question: making the confusion of identities the thematic center of The Prince and the Pauper and Pudd’nhead Wilson, and ending Huckleberry Finn with Huck taken for Tom and Tom not sure who he is supposed to be. His own personal identity crisis, which he projected in those fictional ones, is more clearly revealed in the famous “Whittier Birthday Speech,” whose true significance has tended to be lost in subsequent analysis of the question of whether or not that speech scandalized the Boston Brahmins before whom Twain delivered it one ill-fated night in December of 1877.
The somewhat raunchy tale which Twain told in that inappropriate setting deals with a miner whose hospitality has been abused by three drunken louts impersonating three of those Brahmins, Emerson, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. But as Twain observed some years later, he could as easily have had them call themselves Beaumont, Ben Jonson and Shakespeare, since the real point of the story is the plight of the first-person narrator, who arrives at the miner’s cabin just after the three hooligans have departed.
After hearing the miner’s story, that narrator, who has begun his own story by informing us, “I resolved to try the virtue of my nom de plume,” explains that those other “littery” men were only imposters; to which the miner replies, “Ah—imposters, were they?—are you?” Small wonder, then, that some thirty years later Twain dreamed that he appeared at a “social gathering” dressed only in his nightshirt, and when he declared, “I am Mark Twain,” no one believed him. Surely, it must have been just such a dream that he was dreaming in the three years’ sleep from which he woke to write Is Shakespeare Dead?
The State of Writing
It becomes easier and easier to say these days (we have known it for a long time) that the writer in the forties is essentially concerned with establishing alternatives to naturalism. This involves the re-instatement in his vocabulary of such words as “freedom,” “responsibility” and “guilt,” words which a little while ago he regarded as obscenities, and which even yet he cannot manage without uneasiness. All the better—that uneasiness redeems him from the possibilities of sentimentality, from the sterile certainty of the New Humanists, whose impertinent attacks on naturalism delayed for years the legitimate revolt of creative writers. It was necessary that we be able honestly to say of Babbitt and More, “Who the hell are they?” before a re-assertion of the autonomy of the individual could seem anything but a slogan of the White Terror. It is a help, too, that our leading naturalists have become middle-aged, ripe for ritual slaughter.
But best of all is that fact that our revolt began, as it were, against our wills, with technical annoyance, with offended sensibilities—rather than with a program. It was, for instance, the relentless blur of Farrell’s style, the failure of his ponderous honesty; Steinbeck’s shameless extortion of sentiment; the shapelessness of the Proletarian Novel, that moved us, protesting, toward the central recognition that failures of style and feeling were signs of the inadequacy of a tyrannical subject-matter, a systematic reduction of meaning, a “scientific” equation of the individual with the sum of his environmental causes. It was good for us as artists that our discovery of the need to re-establish focuses of moral responsibility, to be done with the featureless passive sufferer as hero was a function of our desire to write a good sentence and our resolve not to exploit indeterminate feeling. There is for the non-writer, I suppose, something trivial, even offensive in such a point of view, but the writer is convinced of the ultimate humanity, the essential morality, the necessity of the practice of his art, and he is tempted to trust his metaphors, his meters more than himself. There is, after all, on his shelf that monument to an opposite approach, memento mori and souvenir of his beginnings in one, Proletarian Literature in the United States.
Our generation is haunted by the memory of the profane mystique which created that drab memorial; when we were kids becoming a writer seemed, if not synonymous with, at least an aspect of, becoming a Communist; abandoning oneself to the proletariat and finding oneself as an artist seemed a single act—and there was a covert moral satisfaction (we did not have those words then, of course) in what was at once a self-sacrifice and a self-assertion. Our awakening was gradual, though a little faster than our political disenchantment, toward a realization of the enormous contempt for art just below the culture-vulturish surface of the John Reed Clubs. In such a critic as Edmund Wilson, the old heresy still persists, that art is a solace of exploitation-ridden societies, a second-best expedient that will disappear with Socialism; and scarcely one of us with such roots is entirely free of the suspicion that in coming to terms with our craft before righting the world, we are guilty. That concept, battered and despised, nags at us a little, whispers from underground “traitor!” because we do not spend ourselves utterly or, at least, first of all in political action; its prick is one of the many despairs of varying magnitudes we call these days “anguish.”
“Anguish”—I have avoided the word so far precisely because it covers everything from a cosmic passion to the meanest wringing of the hands. The proper anguish of our generation of writers as writers is compounded chiefly of that social guilt and the uneasiness I spoke of above at having to re-invent the whole vocabulary of ethical responsibility, that stubbornly insists, despite ingenuity and patience, in resembling what our fathers spoke in churches we have foresworn: apostasy and return, it is a contradictory self-reproach that will not somehow cancel out.
The writer has preferred always a foster-father to a father (think of Stephen Dedalus and Bloom); fleshly ancestors embarrass him, but ghostly ancestors he must have even in the periods of extremest experiment, and this is, as everyone knows, not such a period. The experimentalism of the twenties as it has survived in a thin academy of revolt seems a tyranny of the Interesting as perilous as the tyranny of Subject Matter in the thirties. We have legitimized the word “tradition,” and though our tradition is open to the point of eccentricity, we have moved from the mere evocation of ancestors toward a pious imitation even of forms. Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Donne, Hopkins, Rilke, Lorca, Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Kafka, James, Dostoevsky—there is scarcely a Culture Hero in the list that first comes to mind whose vogue does not go back to the thirties, some even deep into the twenties and beyond. Only Kafka belongs particularly to us, and behind him the witty anguish of Kierkegaard, but Kafka in especial, polysemous, obsessive, fragmentary—a Jew.
His Jewishness is by no means incidental; the real Jew and the imaginary Jew between them give to the current period its special flavor. In Ulysses, our prophetic book of the urbanization of art, the Artist and the Jew reach for each other tentatively and fall apart; but in the Surveyor K. a unity is achieved, a mystic prototype proposed: Jewishness as a condition of the Artist. In America in particular, where the impulse of the Frontier has become the doubtful strength of cities, a generation of writers and critics whose thirtieth year falls somewhere in the forties has appeared: Delmore Schwartz, Alfred Kazin, Karl Shapiro, Isaac Rosenfeld, Paul Goodman, Saul Bellow, H. J. Kaplan, typically urban, second-generation Jews, chiefly ex-Stalinist, ambivalently intellectual, but for all their anguish insolently at home with ideas and words. Before the advantage of their long maturity, forced early in the Movement, the writer drawn to New York from the provinces feels, in the terms Jean Stafford has so aptly exploited, the Rube, attempts to conform; and the almost parody of Jewishness achieved by the gentile writer in New York is a strange and crucial testimony of our time.
It is not surprising that Kafka pre-eminently conditions the revolt against naturalism in a generation with such a core; the obsessive, the parabolic, the irreducible become defining aims of our art. There are other elements to be sure: from Dostoevsky the underground man, the baptism in evil; from Joyce, Eliot or Mann, the exploitation of the Myth; from various Christian sources the concepts of Fall and Original Sin (though in the United States not a full-fledged Christian metaphysical school like that Charles Williams and C. S. Lewis in England have developed out of George MacDonald); from James a morality of style, from Hawthorne and Melville a symbolic audacity and complexity.
It is an unselfconsciously international complex; and indeed the Jew as writer helps mediate a traditional dilemma of the artist in America, the conflicting claims of an allegiance to Europe and to the American scene. But having left behind him the immigrant’s drive drastically to deny an abandoned past, the second-generation Jewish writer has learned to be aware of a tradition immediately his that is European and American at once; he is himself the guarantee of the singleness of Europe and America, and he escapes completely the polar tugs of a defensive chauvinism and an embarrassed self-abnegation before Continental culture.
In a second act of mediation, too, the Jewish writer plays a role, in the mediation between writer and intellectual. The typical American author in most periods has been almost aggressively anti-intellectual. One thinks of Twain or even of Melville, and in the generation just before ours of Hemingway and Wolfe and Faulkner, and, set against them, the melancholy academicians Spingarn and Babbitt and More. The immense impoverishment caused by that schism, the creative paralysis of the University, and the complementary weakness of ideas in our literature is scandalous; and that strange American invention, the non-academic, non-creative Intellectual, unfrocked, detached, the Comedian of Ideas, is that cleavage made flesh. The urban Jewish writer moving inward from the Schools of Marxism is at least not contemptuous of ideas, and, at best, he is convinced of the unity of his vocation from conversation to creation.
In this mediation to be sure, the great exiles, James and Eliot, and the Southern Agrarians have preceded the writer of our generation, but our situation is perhaps closer to the center than their special cases of expatriation or regionalism.
In the recent migration of writers into the universities this unifying tendency is being sealed. The possible meanings of teachings in a college are, of course, many—and the writer may be quite simply trying to earn a living, but in most cases there is something more: an impatience with the concept of freedom in the term “free-lancer”; an attempt to close the gap between criticism and creation, to make of the teaching of literature a discipline for discriminating readers; a stratagem to mitigate the alienation of the writer by attacking middlebrow culture on its most sensitive flank. For the writer as an individual there are many compensations (though he pays a desperate price in an accommodation to routine and what has been called the “black vacuum” of his students’ minds, an accommodation which he fears always may become habitual); he finds an adequate community and the possibility of making himself a better one. For the University, it has been a redemption from historicity and scientism in the study of literature and the arts. And for literature?—it is difficult to say. The average American university is not at all, as the word is conventionally understood, “academic”; there is, I think, little threat from that direction, but much from the appalling and profound weariness, the occasional despair that accompanies the spiritually expensive pursuit of teaching.
The writer in the Lansings, Madisons, Moscows and Lincolns of America schools with his own hand his own audience on a periphery he could not even dream in the centers of New York or San Francisco. We are entering a period, I feel, in which successful strategic raids into middlebrow territory will be increasingly profitable. The decline of experimentalism, and the re-institution of the plot as a concomitant of new notions of freedom and responsibility make possible an extension of the serious writer’s audience (Robert Penn Warren is a notable example in this country and Graham Greene in England); and there is the further factor that the production of middlebrow literature can no longer keep pace with the demands of its audience. The opening of the super-slicks to more serious writing, the flirtation of the Cosmopolitan with belle-lettres, the association of large commercial publishers with little magazines, the frantic excursions of editors up and down the countryside are not so much tokens of some radical change of heart, as of an incipient panic at a growing discrepancy between mass production methods of distribution and the low supply of popular literature; publishers and editors, abhorring a vacuum, turn in desperation, if not in love, to the more serious writer. This mild revolution will doubtless increase the pressures toward accommodation as well as opportunities for publication, and we must proportionally increase our wariness and our devotion. War, in all its senses, is the condition not the crisis of our lives; this at least we know in the late forties.
It is a dreary and tiny sector from which we as writers fight, and, I suspect it is not even marked on the maps of the General Staff; but there are moments when our struggle to preserve the integrity of play on the adult level, to defend the necessity of ambiguity and irony, to assert the morality of form and to specify feeling, seems to merge with a political conflict, with a real (as they say) war. It is not then our duty as writers to deny our vocation for a gun or the OWI, or to impugn the autonomy of our fictions with dogmatic assertions or pledges of allegiance. A poem or a story, after all, solves the problem it poses; the war successfully subsumed in a fiction, ends with the fiction; a successful poem is a complete and final act; if it leads outward to other action, it is just so far a failure.
