Book Reviews

THE REST IS CHEATING Was Mark Twain the ‘poet of the Mississippi’or a ‘rock star ahead of his time’? Christopher Martin decides

This is the second biography of Mark Twain written by Ron Powers, a writer well-regarded for his television criticism who, understandably, has produced a portrait of the Victorian humorist, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, for the TV and rock’n’roll age. Twain was an autodidact. Early on he sampled a wide range of literature from the McGuffey’s Reader, which also led him to an appreciation of the Bible, familiarity with which became ‘a cornerstone of his intellectual edifice’. Powers recounts: ‘He read all the time, his choices as eclectic and humanistic as his narratives would prove to be.’ Twain relished language. In Powers’ view, Twain was a ‘passionate amateur scholar of language’, not literature, though he eventually produced ‘excellent if unorthodox literary criticism’. His three greatest books, The Innocents Abroad (1869), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn(1884), are full-length novels, but some

of his best work is also found in his short stories. ‘He valued brevity’ and helped to purge ‘American literary English of its heavy Victorian ornamentation’. Famously, Twain ‘adored aphorisms and built them throughout his life. Any language, to him, was a form of music.’ Twain is remembered as a poet of the Mississippi, the mighty river he got to know well working as a riverboat pilot. He ran a

Clara, Livy, and Sam photographed in 1900 (below). The figure known throughout the world as Mark Twain relaxes with his great literary friend and champion William Dean Howells in 1909, a year before his death (below left).

TitleMark Twain: A Lifeby Ron Powers

Price£25

Publisher Simon and Schuster

ISBN0743285794

couple of boats aground. He picked up his pen-name from the pilot’s call for ‘Mark Two’, and travelled on many other boats around the world, one voyage in the company of pilgrims to the Holy Land, resulting in a burlesque account of the trip in The Innocents Abroad. ‘Like most of his books,’ says Powers, ‘Innocentsis a grab bag of abrupt digression.’ Much of the material in that book was based on his journalistic

negro woman in Pudd’nhead Wilson(1894), who is Twain’s ‘first fully believable female character’. As Powers underlines, ‘Twain democratised the national voice by availing it of vernacular…’ When Andrew Carpenter Wheeler, writing as ‘Nym Crinkle’, reviewed Twain’s play The Gilded Age(adapted from his and Charles Dudley Warner’s Washingtonnovel), he may well have put his finger on Twain’s weakness as a writer: ‘The want of constructive art’. Or, asks Powers, ‘was it a weakness? The serendipity in Mark Twain’s narratives might be explained by his lack of formal training in rhetoric and composition. Or it might be explained by his intuitive understanding that he didn’t need it. The question begged by

Twain’s celebrity makes him an easy figure to relate to in our time:he had fan mail,drew large crowds to hear him tell stories,and he was as familiar as any film star with his trademark drawl,moustache and mass of hair

mailings to the newspapers, and it was journalism that took him to the frontier towns of the West such as Carson City and Virginia City. He captured the vernacular speech of the Western states, and also that of black America, as in his short fiction A True Story. His friend, the novelist and critic William Dean Howells, who gladly gave a first critical reading to many of his manuscripts, called this ‘one of those noble pieces of humanity for which the South has atoned chiefly if not solely through him for all its spite to the Negro.’ It is Roxana, a

Crinkle’s declaration is: if he had been schooled in the formal requirements of literature, would that have suffocated the divine, anarchic spontaneity that provides the greatest pleasures in his work?’ There was something intuitive about Twain’s storytelling, which could usually stand unaided in its short form, but for the longer fictions, he would rely on writer friends such as Howells to advise him on how to improve, at least, the structure of the work, which would usually be years in gestation. His greatest achievement is

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