The effect of his wife upon Twain the artist has provoked latter-day discussion. One school of thought holds that Clemens was forced, first by his mother and then by his wife, to "make good," i.e., to make money and be respectable. Moreover, thanks to the censorship of his wife, they say, he became not the New World Rabelais but a frustrated genius incapable of calling his soul or vocabulary his own. It is clear, however, that proof of Livy's "humiliating" dominion rests largely upon Twain's letters to Howells: that pair of devoted husbands married to invalids who made a gallant little joke over being henpecked. The notion that women exercised a gentle tyranny over their men folk, for the latter's good, always appealed to Mark Twain, schooled in Western theories that man was coarser clay and woman a rare and special being (as among the Washoe miners in Roughing It, who chipped m $2,500 in gold as a gift at the miraculous sight of a live woman). All his late new encouraged women to reform him improve his taste and manners. His three little daughters who shared in the family rite knout as "dusting on Papa, and the "angel-fish" of adolescent girls in his Bermudian Indian summer, were among the youngest of the sex whose devoted slave he rejoiced to was a kind o£ game in the feudal tradition, which he adored. But to assure therefore that Twain the genius was henpecked, baffled, unmanned by women in general and Livy in particular is to convert a jest into a cry to agnate converse influence of husband upon wife something deserves to be aid Twain's vitality rescued her from abysses of timorous living, his banter relaxed her serious disposition, and his religious skepticism destroyed her Christian faith.
as for the specific question of censorship, we know that Twain liked to read aloud en jailed the results to his daily composition, usually meeting the approval he craved, sometimes encountering a chill disfavor to which he was equally sensitive. He was a poor self-critic and knew it. He plunged into •writing without much plan or foresight. Levy’s judgment in matters of simple good taste and in pruning wordiness and irrelevance was clearly superior to his own in the heat of incubation. A careful examination of his manuscripts shows that Mrs. Clemens, like that other long-standing adviser William Dean Howells, objected to certain vivid words and phrases— "wallow," "bowels," "spit," "rotten," and realistic allusions to stenches and putrefaction which always tempted Mark Twain, so that he grumbled about her "steadily weakening the English tongue"—but that in mild profanities (like Huck Finn's "comb me all to hell'') and in rare inclinations toward the risqué (such as the farce of "The Royal Nonesuch") the author on second thought was his own most attentive censor. He was not above playing an occasional hazard with his critics to see how far he could skate on thin ice; then doubled on his own track back to safety. Just as he dreamed of the unabashed nakedness of a boy's freedom on a raft floating down the Mississippi, now and again he yearned for the lusty old ways of medieval speech, "full of unconscious coarsenesses and innocent indecencies," "good old questionable stories," as the Connecticut Yankee says. But quickly he reminded himself, as he observes in A Tramp Abroad, that the license of the printed word had been "sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years." To this curb in the main he gave unstinting consent.
Up to the time of his anchorage in Hartford in 1871, the most important facts about Mark Twain are the things that happened to him, shaping his development as an artist and filling the granaries of memory. After that date the chief milestones are the books he wrote out of that accumulation. His maturity and self-assurance can be gauged, growing from book to book through the next two decades, as he lectured at home and abroad, met the captains of literature and politics and finance, read widely if desultorily, and Perfected his early journalistic manner until it became one of the great styles American letters—easy, incisive, sensitive to nuances of dialect, rich in the resources of comedy, satire, irony, and corrosive anger.
The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It (1872) he learned, under emancipation from newspaper reporting, to take greater liberties with fact for art's sake. Both books owe such structure as they have to a rough chronology. Upon this thread Mark Twain the raconteur strings one story after another. The latter volume offers us almost all the classic types which Americans in general, frontiersmen in particular, had long since favored: the tall tale, the melodramatic shocker, the yarn of pointless garrulity, humor, the canard of impossible coincidence, the chain of free association that wanders farther and farther from its announced subject; the comedy of man in his cups, the animal fable, and the delusions of a lunatic. Paradox, surprise and understatement often heighten his effects. Anecdote continues to be the fiber of those later travel books, which show more fluency in repeating the essential pattern, but grow in world-weariness after the early gusto of the Innocents and the Argonauts. They include A Tramp Abroad (1880), with more travesty of European languages, guide books, and art criticism, and Following the Equator (1897), which reports Twain's lecture tour in Australia and India. Inevitable become his burlesques of sentimental poetry, parodies of romantic situations, yarns picked up in new places or recollected from the limbo of years. In this last book, however, flippancy at the expense of peoples and customs vanishes when the traveler reaches the threshold of Asia, as if the ancient disillusioned torpor of that continent had stricken the satirist dumb. These travelogues do not show Twain's gifts to greatest advantage. Flashes of notable writing occur, but intrinsically they are the potboilers of a master improviser.
4.2.The earliest novel he attempted was The Gilded Age, in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, published late in 1873, just as the panic was ringing down the curtain upon the worst excesses of that age. It harks back to their common knowledge of Missouri, where Warner had been a surveyor, and to Twain's passing observation of Washington in the winter of 1867-1868,[2] when after return from the Holy Land he had served briefly and unhappily as private secretary to pompous Senator William Stewart of Nevada and more successfully had begun to write humorous commentaries on the news (antici-pative of the late Will Rogers) for the Tribune and the Herald of New York. This phase left him with an abiding scorn for politicians, their intelligence and honesty. ("Fleas can be taught nearly anything that a Congressman can, is as characteristic as the remark that we have "no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.") Beside the bungling amateurs of Carso City, these were graduates in graft, scrambling for the spoils of what a lat -(critic termed the Great Barbecue. This same spectacle of post-bellum Winton which sickened fastidious Henry Adams and led even Whitman to optimist to pen the darker pages of Democratic Vistas, gave Mark Twain his first shining target for satire.
Warner supplied conventional plot elements of romance, gentility, pluck and luck, harmonized with the theme of material success, which the novel debunks at one level but praises fulsomely at another, when it is sanctioned by what passes among the majority as honesty. Twain himself was always dazzled by the romance of fortune, especially if it followed the ascent from rags to riches, as he shows in a story like "The £1,000,000 Bank Note" (1893). Yet he was aware of the ironies and unhappiness springing from the root of all evil, as revealed in "The $50,000 Bequest" (1904) and most superbly in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1899). In The Gilded Age the authors' wavering purpose resembles a mixture of Jonathan Swift and Horatio Alger. Satiric punches are pulled by the constant impulse to strike out in all directions but follow through in none. The vulgarity of a chromo civilization and the urge to keep up with the Joneses mingle with churchly hypocrisy, pork-barrel politics, high tariff, oratorical buncombe, abuse of the franking privilege, bribery, personal immorality in high places, profiteers of "shoddy," and the wider degradation of the democratic dogma.
The Gilded Age is clearly a world of optimistic illusion, proudly putting its best foot forward though the other limp behind in a shabby mud-bespattered boot. In the backwoods, stagecoaches with horns blowing enter and leave town at a furious clip, but once out of sight "drag along stupidly enough"—even as steamboats burn fat pine to make an impressive smoke when they near port. Credit is the basis of society; a typical parvenu boasts; "I wasn't worth a cent a year ago, and now I owe two millions of dollars." Most engaging specimen of this psychology is Colonel Sellers, a New World Micawber, who deals in imaginary millions while he and the family dine off turnips and cold water (man's best diet, he loftily assures them), and warm themselves at a stove through whose isinglass door flickers the illusory glow of a candle. Drawn from Twain's Uncle James Lampton, the Colonel is an epitome of the American dream that remains a mirage—impulsive, generous, hospitable, and scheming to enrich not only himself but relatives and friends, and incidentally benefit all humankind, a colossal failure who basks forever in the rush light of the success cult. Not dishonest by nature, in the heady milieu of Washington he begins to apologize for bribery ("a harsh term"), while hitching his wagon to the baleful star of Senator Dilworthy, drawn roan the lineaments of Kansas' notorious Pomeroy. In certain passages Mark win’s irony is whetted to a cutting edge, but the book's total effect is tar. In many ways both authors were children of the Gilded Age, resuscitate him. The modest laurels of a dramatic version of The Gilded Age, produced in 1874, led Twain and Howells to attempt in 1883 an hailer' sequel which, however, the stage Sellers of the earlier script, John T, declined to play because that character had been exaggerated brink of lunacy. The plot, as embalmed in Twain's novel, The Anieri Claimant (1892)[3], justifies the actor's verdict. It is one of the humorist's m strained and least successful efforts.
5.2 Critical analysis of “Adventures of Tom Sawyer”
Three years after The Gilded Age Twain published Tom Sawyer, the first of three great books about the Mississippi River of his youth. Beyond question, Huckleberry Finn (1885), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Tom Sawyer (1876) are, in that order, his finest works. The reasons for their superiority are not far to seek. In plotting a book his structural sense was always weak; intoxicated by a hunch, he seldom saw far ahead, and too many of his stories peter out from the author's fatigue or surfeit. His wayward technique as Howells recognized, came close to free association:
So far as I know, Mr. Clemens is the first writer to use in extended writing the fashion we all use in thinking, and to set down the thing that comes into his mind without fear or favor of the thing that went before or the thing that may be about to follow.
This method served him best after he had conjured up characters from long ago, who on coming to life wrote the narrative for him, passing from incident to incident with a grace their creator could never achieve in manipulating an artificial plot. In travel books and other autobiography written under the heat of recent experience, Mark Twain seemingly put in everything, mixing the trivial, inane, and farcical with his best-grade ore. But in the remembrance of things past, time had dissolved the alloy, leaving only gold. The nostalgia for a youth's paradise "over the hills and far away," for the fast-vanishing freedom of the West, appealed deeply to the age of boyhood sentiment enriched by Longfellow and Whittier. It also led to Mark Twain's strength; namely, the world of the senses and physical action. What he felt was always better expressed than what he had thought or speculated about. A boy's world freed him from those economic and political perplexities, adult dilemmas and introspections, where in rages and knotty casuistries he lost the sureness o touch that came to him through the report of his five senses or through the championship of justice when the issue was as simple as the conflict between bullies and little folk.
Jan his heart Mark Twain must have realized that essentially he was a man feeling, too sensitive to serve merely as a comedian, too undisciplined to philosopher he sometimes fancied himself. His forte was to recapture "his sheer joy of living, when to be young was very heaven. A great river flowing through the wilderness set the stage for a boy's own dream of selfefficiency, of being a new Robinson Crusoe on Jackson's Island. In the background moved the pageantry of life, colored by humor, make-believe, and melodrama; but the complexity of the machine age and the city lay far, far away.
Mark Twain did not write his first books about this dream world, but let he haze of ideality collect about it, reserving it luckily for the high noon of his powers. Apparently the first hint o£ this motif comes in one of his New ' York letters to the Alta California, in the spring of 1867, in which he happens to recall the town drunkard of Hannibal, Jimmy Finn (destined to return as Huck's father), and also the Cadets of Temperance which Sam Clemens joined in order to march in funeral processions wearing their red scarf. This latter incident crops up in Tom Sawyer. Shortly afterward in The Innocents, among the pleasures and palaces of Europe, Twain interpolated other boyhood memories. In February, 1870, on receiving a letter from his "first, and oldest and dearest friend" Will Bowen, one of the flesh-and-blood components of Tom Sawyer, he sat down under the spell of the past and wrote a reply calling up some eight scenes which later appear in Tom Sawyer and Hackle-berry Finn. Around this time he wrote a nameless sketch about a romantic lovesick swain who beyond question is Tom Sawyer. Designated as "Boy's Manuscript" by Twain's first editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, it was not published until 1942 in Bernard De Veto's Mark Twain at Wolf. Some four years later Twain made a fresh start, scrapping the earlier diary form in favor of third-person narrative. By midsummer, 1875, it was done, and off the press late in the next year (a few months after Clemens with his usual inconsistency had written Will Bowen a stern letter on August 31, 1876, bidding him dwell no more in the sentimental never-never land of boyhood, denying that the past holds anything "worth pickling for present or future use"). In this latter year Twain began Huckleberry Finn as a sequel, laid it aside during six years, went back to the story after his visit to Hannibal in 1882, and bushed it a little over two years later.
The first reader of Tom Sawyer, William Dean Howells, disagreed with the author that he had written a book for adults only. He quickly persuaded twain that it was primarily a story for boys, which would gad over their shoulder. Twain therefore withdrew a few gibes against Sunday schools and turned several phrases that smacked of backwoods frankness. Nothing of importance, however, was altered, nor did Tom suffer from transformation into the neat, obedient paragon which fiction for the so long had held up to their resentful gaze. The first chapter announces the Tom "was not the Model Boy of the village. He knew the model boy well though — and loathed him." The only resemblance Tom bears to t-K fictional creations of his time is in sensibility: he yields to self-pity relish every neighborhood tear shed over his supposed drowning, and almost fail upon hearing that even a villain like Injun Joe has been sealed in the ca Otherwise, our hero is of very different mettle. He steals from and Aunt Folly luxuriates in idleness, missives in church, huffs and like his friend Huck employs lying as protective coloration in a world of adult tyrants. Consequently, in some American homes the new book was read by grown-ups, then tucked away out of a boy's reach; its successor Huckleberry Finn, soon after publication was ejected from the town library of Concord, Massachusetts (where, a generation before, John Brown had been welcomed by Thoreau and Emerson), because Huck elected to "go to Hell" rather than betray his friend, a runaway Negro.
In 1870 Thomas Bailey Aldrich had published his mild Story of a Bad Boy;[4] twenty years later Twain's friend Hovels would reminisce of adolescents not too bright or good for human nature's daily food in A Boy's Town; a little later came Stephen Crane's recollections of Whilom Ville and William Alien White's of Bayville. They helped maintain the tradition of realism. In extreme recoil from priggishness, a line beginning with Peck's Bad Boy in 1883 flaunted incorrigibility above all. It is possible to overstress the picaresque intent of Tom Sawyer in turning upside down the world of Peter Parley and the Rolla books, or its analogues with that still greater novel, Cervantes' Don Quixote, in which some critics find the model of Tom the dreamer and Huck his commonsense henchman. Mark Twain's verisimilitude should not be overlooked in this search for "purpose." He wrote about boys from having been one in the Gilded Age, in a river town before the war.
To a stranger in 1887 he described this book as "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." These lads no more resemble Peck's Bad Boy than they do the model children of that improving story-teller, Jacob Abbott. Within a framework of superb dialogue and setting, of sensitive perceptions that turn now and again into poetry, against a background where flicker shadows of adult humanitarianism and irony, Tom and Huck grow visibly as we follow them. The pranks and make-believe of early chapters-whitewashing the fence, releasing a pinch bug in church, playing pirate in Tom Sawyer, and in its sequel the rout of a Sunday school picnic under the guise of attacking a desert caravan — are dimmed as the human values deepen and occasional moral issues appear. The Tom who takes Becky's punishment in school, and testifies for the innocent Muff Potter at risk of the murderer revenge, parallels the development of Huck from a happy-golucky gamine epitome of generosity and loyalty.