Quarter Twain

By John Skow

MARK TWAIN, AN AMERICAN PROPHET by Maxwell Geismar. 564 pages. Houghfon Mifflin. $10.

This latest critical appreciation of Mark Twain is not without blemish, being sloppy, narrow, quarrelsome, doctrinaire, vague, repetitive and ungrammatical. But it has its virtues too. The best of these is that Writer Geismar loves Mark Twain and quotes him joyously on almost every page. Sometimes he likes a passage so much that he quotes it twice, but Twain can stand that.

A second virtue is that a reader with patience enough to mush through the swampy parts of Geismar's argument will find modest patches of solid ground. The author is right in stating that Twain is too little known and understood as a critic of U.S. society, and that the harshly satirical writing of his later years, despite recent notice, is still widely unread. Mainly in the past decade, critics have been pointing out the same thing. But for most fond readers, Twain remains a humorist and pastoral novelist.

Geismar gives no coherent explanation of how the popular view of Twain came to be so unbalanced. Instead, he feuds shrilly with Justin Kaplan, author of the excellent 1966 biography Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, and with a succession of editors of Twain's posthumously printed Autobiography. Kaplan's supposed offenses are hardshell Freudianism (Geismar is an adherent of Freud's dissident disciple, Otto Rank, whom he peddles as if Rank were a mutual fund), and undue susceptibility to influence by the CIA. It is Geismar's fantasy that "cold war critics," including Kaplan and Charles Neider, the most recent editor of the Autobiography, deliberately suppressed and undervalued Twain's radical social commentary. Their fear, Geismar appears to believe, was that the satires would damage the U.S. position in its struggle with Soviet Russia.

The reader must do Geismar's real job for him. If he is familiar with Kaplan's study and the Autobiography, he can pick his way through this book and arrive at a reasonable explanation of the strange shape of Twain's career. Twain's outlook darkened and grew harsher in the last half of his life. During much of the same period he endured a harrowing succession of business catastrophes and deaths in his family. At the same time, as Geismar points out, U.S. society--Twain's raw material --was also changing. The young agrarian republic was becoming a complex state dominated by big business and the affairs of empire.

Geismar quotes great caustic batches of Twain's later prose, to show that he was an angry prophet who saw his republic choked by the corporate state. But Twain never did arrive at a consistent view of his world. As early as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, his feeling toward the technological society was widely ambivalent. He admired technology; he despised it. The U.S. was corrupted; it was the hope of the world. Man was a splendid fellow; man was changelessly evil. His own life reflected these inconsistencies. He delivered a fine speech lampooning accident insurance at a time when he himself was a director of an accident insurance company. He wrote the thunderations that Geismar admires, then gave instructions that they should not be published for decades. The most consistent product of such inconsistency was humor.

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