The Man on the Raft

MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN by Justin Kaplan. 424 pages. Simon & Schuster. $7.95.

Mark Twain was as conscious of posterity as any other writer who ever anticipated its judgment. He saved the thousands of letters that came his way and expected his correspondents to do the same (they did). Before his death at 74 in 1910, he commissioned an official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine. A large portion of Twain's estate--the fragments, stories, notes and autobiography unpublished during his lifetime--has since been paid into print by his literary executors. Yet none of it takes the full measure of the man himself.

No one disputes Twain's lofty position in literature: he was a true original, unmistakably and incorrigibly American. But critics have endlessly speculated on the astonishing and unfathomable range of a man who could address himself to such disparate subjects as frontier humor (Roughing It), the adventures of youth (Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), chastity (Joan of Arc), obscenity (1601, a privately published Twain excursion into four-letter Tudor conversation), and nihilistic despair (What Is Man?).

In a study of Twain published in 1920 and revised in 1933, Van Wyck Brooks argued that Twain fell short of greatness because he masked his reformer's spirit by writing humorous books--in short, by making a joke of a crusade. Twelve years later, Harvard Critic Bernard De Voto challenged that theory by showing that Twain's very humor was a crusader's weapon. With it, said De Voto, Twain exposed the hypocrisy of a century in which aggrandizement all too often passed under the name of progress. The distinctive virtue of Justin Kaplan's book is that even while failing to resolve all controversy about Twain, it does a commendable job of explaining why the controversy exists. A Simon & Schuster editor who resigned six years ago to write this first book, Author Kaplan, 41, approached his assignment with an impartiality that few other Twain biographers have mustered for the task.

Gloomy Conviction. Twain said that every man, like the moon, has his dark side. Even the lightest of his books is pervaded with that gloomy conviction. He disapproved of his century, his ambitions and himself. In 1866, when he was 31 and a relatively obscure journalist in San Francisco, he put a pistol to his head but could not pull the trigger. "Many times I have been sorry I did not succeed," he said, "but I was never ashamed of having tried."

He could make laughter, but not without opening a wound. "Truth is the most valuable thing we have," Twain wrote. "Let us economize it." "To be good is noble, but to show others how to be good is nobler--and no trouble." "If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man."

Many of Twain's books mirror the savage and embittered cynicism that lies on the other side of humor, and all of them are touched with violence and the despair of a man who courted the values of his time and despised himself for doing so. The raft on which Huck Finn and Nigger Jim drift down the river was Twain's own fantasy solution for evading nemesis. It was where he longed to be.

Hate List. But he could not come to terms either with his unruly genius or with life itself. "It is one of the mysteries of nature," he said in 1906, after his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis at 24, "that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live." He was, says Kaplan, obsessed with "the rustle and chink and heft of money." He kept a private hate list and added names to it all his years. "A liar, a thief, a drunkard, a traitor, a filthy-minded and salacious slut," he recorded, at 74, of a secretary fallen from his grace. The distinguished fared no better: he called Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune, "a skunk, a eunuch, a missing link."

In concentrating on the dark side of Twain, Kaplan's book illuminates the man whose every smile in print was calculated to bite. Without that dark side, Twain might have taken the same level in literature that is occupied by so many of his contemporaries: Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, George Washington Cable and Bret Harte. But blandness was not in him. He was a reformer--all edges, out of patience with his times, and desperately anxious to transmit the message to all who would listen. Kaplan's book helps explain why the world is listening still.

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