“You had better shove this in the stove,” 29-year-old Samuel Clemens wrote in a postscript to his older brother Orion and Orion’s wife, Mollie, on October 19, 1865, “for . . . I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.”
But then there’s the matter of candor. The aforementioned anonymous AP writer’s lament is certainly understandable–today more than ever, when we seem to have developed an insatiable appetite for the minute details of the private lives of our literary (and other) lions, fueled by decades of revelations about Scott and Zelda, Arthur and Marilyn, Gertrude and Alice, Elvis (like Edgar Allan) and his teen queens, Ernest and his manhood. We know how old George Bernard Shaw and William Butler Yeats were when they had their first sexual encounters (both in their late 20s); we know that Thomas Carlyle never slept with his wife (he angrily bolted from the room on their wedding night when she burst into giggles as he lay masturbating beside her in the dark and never shared a bed with her again–that’s the way I heard it). But the private life of Mark Twain has always remained persistently, perplexingly, perniciously beyond our grasp. He seems to have enjoyed sex–his characterization in one of his manuscripts of heaven as an infinite orgasm would indicate no less–but we know virtually nothing of his sex life beyond what can be surmised from the dates of his marriage and the births of his four children (the first, who died young, born almost exactly nine months after the wedding).
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And his feelings about women are only a part of what Mark Twain never really tells us: the exact nature of his sympathies during the Civil War, for example, and how and why they changed; his real attitudes toward race relations, particularly with blacks and, in San Francisco, with Chinese; his religious beliefs and how they evolved. Mark Twain, America’s greatest writer, was also our national tease. He was as guarded as he was outspoken, as conventional as he was outrageous, and as intensely private as he was flamboyantly public. The dichotomy has led some writers to posit that he had a kind of split personality, that Mark Twain was the public persona and Sam Clemens the private man, and that as he aged–and outlived his wife and two much-loved daughters–the embittered public humorist subsumed the real man. Others have championed a different split: that Mark Twain was the real McCoy, the rough-and-ready, iconoclastic, brash young storyteller from the west, Sam Clemens the civilized, acceptance-seeking veneer imposed by his genteel eastern wife Livy, so thoroughly laid on that the real Mark Twain was smothered beneath it.
They tell tales of drunken revelries, including one Christmas Eve Twain and the then-celebrated humorist Artemus Ward (from whom, Twain later said, he’d borrowed much of his lecturing style) spent clambering over the rooftops of Virginia City in the Nevada Territory. The binge ended the next morn in front of a saloon “where, astride a barrel, sat Mark Twain, whom Artemus Ward, with a spoon, was diligently doping with mustard, while he inquired of bystanders if they had ever seen a more perfect presentment of a subjugated idiot.” They tell of Twain getting bushwhacked in the Gold Country, robbed, though he didn’t know it till sometime later, by his friends as a practical joke; of Twain bumbling into a boxing match and emerging with a nose “like an egg-plant,” causing him to leave town (Virginia City) until the swelling subsided. And they tell these tales without comment, laying them before the reader amid the more prosaic notes without any indication that what’s to come may be comical or of unusual interest, as if they’re not even aware that might be the case. It is, in its way, a scholarly equivalent of the approved western story telling approach, the “solemn idiot” school of which Twain became undisputed master.
The author of these early letters is a callow youth and in no way a skilled writer. His prose is often wooden, his descriptive passages slavishly conventional, his attempts at humor a bit strained. But he also has an eye for detail and a curiosity so active that the letters soon begin to evoke a different age–a time when poetry was routinely printed in newspaper obituaries, when U.S. senators were paid $8 a day and had to slog through the mud to get to the Capitol, when the Washington Monument was still under construction and the Croton Aqueduct, bringing water into New York, was one of the engineering marvels of the age.
Despite that distressed Associated Press reporter’s assumption, there’s nothing inherently “candid” about anyone’s letters. Some letters are clearly meant for the widest possible circulation from the outset–Lord Chesterfield’s to his son, for example. Some are so intensely private they make you feel like a voyeur–James Joyce’s salaciously analingual letters to his wife, at the opposite extreme. Most of course fall somewhere in between. But even in the letters of a fairly formal, by today’s standards, gentleman like Anton Chekhov, we feel we get an in-depth portrait of the man. Mark Twain’s letters, at least at this pivotal stage of his career, are not so forthcoming.
