In December, 1863, Mark Twain and Artemus Ward met in Virginia City, Nevada, spent a week or ten days together, and afterwards exchanged one or two letters. At least, Ward wrote to Twain twice, and portions of the first letter were printed in one of Twain’s columns in the Virginia City Enterprise. Twain, commenting that he hoped there was no impropriety in extracting a private letter, combined eleven sentences from the first, eighth, ninth, and the second (the last sentence alone, out of order) paragraphs. Ward joked about Twain’s hellish wiles seducing his aunt in New York and denied Twain’s idea of himself as the only "chastely-humorous writer" of the Western slopes (reprinted in Smith, Mark Twain of the Enterprise, pp. 129–130). Much was left out, but the joshing came through. Twain saved the letter.

After Twain’s death, a volume of Twain’s letters was collected by Albert Bigelow Paine, his literary executor. The Ward letter was published in the volume (I, 166-168) accompanied by a headnote that referred to a continuous week of merry-making. Paine’s note, however, gave no indication either for the general reader or scholar that any words or passages had been deleted from the text. In fact, there were substantial alterations, as a comparison of Paine’s text with the text of the actual letter, now in the Mark Twain Papers at Berkeley, shows:

[Reprinted with the permission
of the Library of the University of
California–Berkeley].

The textual differences between the two letters are arresting. Not only do the omissions reflect Victorian stereotypes and sensibilities. There is an obvious and conscious distortion of the context so that Ward is made to appear the drunkard. Twain’s drinking is effaced, and sexual innuendoes—which may refer to Twain himself—are banished without any trace, either in the text or in Paine’s headnote. The letter was distorted; the life was covered up.

The brackets in the original letter are inserted in editor’s blue pencil. There is little doubt that Paine himself made the decision to sanitize the letter because it would conflict with the image of Twain held by his readers. In the face of such tampering with documents, one might well wish for a revisionist approach to Twain’s life. Materials from the life have been deleted from the record, but such materials are of interest to current readers for the perspective they offer about the man and his works. Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain: God’s Fool (New York: Harper & Row, 1973; $10.00) takes up the last ten years of Twain’s life, from 1900 to 1910, with the intention of analyzing the suppressed life of Mark Twain from the new perspective, including a psychological approach to documents previously buried. To some readers Hill’s study includes much that is muck-raking, but others will recognize the value of the material which is restored to the record of Twain’s last ten years and to our evaluation of his life.

Professor Hill’s psycho-biography of Twain and the Twain family, for it really is a family portrait, has more of the air of the deletions in the Ward letter than of Paine’s inclusions. Nor is this surprising, since Paine’s own attitude toward Twain’s life is revealed to have been that it should be managed to enhance the Twain literary properties. The documents are laid out with imposing force. Much of the information comes from the personal diaries of Twain’s daughters and his secretary, Isabel Lyons. Warped, idealistic, frustrated, or adoring, the entries provide an irrefutable record of a Victorian family undergoing irreconcilable differences. Professor Hill is deeply involved in this material, and the psychological conclusions he reaches are overpowering: "The Clemens family was strung together like a number of other Victorian families by tensions and interrelationships as taut as the limits of sanity and decorum could stretch them." Stronger positions are taken, however, and Twain s erratic denials and recognitions of his family invite a searching inquiry.

The 1900–1910 period of Twain’s life was a period of general decline. His writing was poorly focused, and up-start critics like Eugene Angert reviewed his work from 1906 through 1909 under

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titles like "Is Mark Twain Dead?" although such skepticism was generally repressed. The life of the family as a family was rapidly dissolving. Jean and Clara both responded to Twain neurotically, and Livy remained largely off-stage, sheltered from a man whose presence drove her into collapse. Twain’s business deals—including his conflicts with the Harper House and a flyer in a miraculous food-substitute "Plasmon"—contributed little to his restfulness. The banishment of Kate Lyons and the failure to perfect autobiographical dictation to a literary art complete the dismal picture. The previously private documents which are now brought forward show unconscious motivating forces in Twain’s own attitudes and behavior.

Twain sought a model of Victorian propriety in his family life, and his inhibitions warped and frustrated his daughters and rebounded on himself. Jean and Clara were repressed in almost complete antithesis to the Sally Sellers model of independent womanhood which Twain appeared to advocate in books like The American Claimant, although not in early anti-suffrage newspaper humor. Huck Finn’ s innocent indifference to manners is oddly distorted in Twain’s inability to refrain from picking at and teasing sensitive points in the personalities of his wife and daughters. Hill’s exposure of this family life may very well make readers of Twain’s humor aware of the inconsistencies between the vision of the canon and the reality of family life. If the indictment, and the book has something of an indictment’s harshness about it, seems overdrawn at times—as in the flagrant gossip about "something unspeakable" between Twain and one of his teen-age angel fish in 1909—the implications for the literature are nonetheless pertinent and the employment of the usually untapped personal record is nonetheless valuable.

One of the most interesting areas of the book deals with A. B. Paine’s attitude toward Twain as a literary property. Paine’s intentions, as revealed in several well-chosen letters, were to restrict treatments of Twain to those which could be managed for the benefit of book sales, the Harpers’ and his own. Paine was willing to distort the record—as he did in the case of Artemus Ward’s letter—to make Twain conform comfortably to the Victorian stereotype. Mark Twain: God’s Fool should damage that vision beyond repair. Professor Hill states in his book, and has stated in a recent address, that he fully expects the picture of Twain to keep on changing as different critics apply different tools to the material. Undoubtedly this will be the case. Twain’s writings of the period are written off harshly, and although there is more justice in this view than in Maxwell Geis

mar’s gushers of enthusiasm in his recent biography, other readers will wish to find a middle ground. Insomuch as biography and criticism are involved together, a better basis is now available than the one Paine laid down.

Reading a few pages about the Hawkins family in The Gilded Age may convince many of Hill’s readers that Twain’s ideal family in literature had much in common with the family life disastrously worked out in his own experience. Huck Finn, too, as family head, is Huck Finn as monster—and some of the Victorianism expressed in Twain’s family is visible in Huck’s response to Mary Jane Wilks and elsewhere. Such generalizations by a reader would not be wholly inappropriate to the resources of the modern biographer, although Professor Hill does not venture into such an overly risky area. The book nevertheless throws shadows back over the preceding life and canon. If the family really did reflect the ethics projected in the novels, perhaps present-day readers should be more cautious in their assessments of the major works. Literary comedy is such a potent medium for establishing social ethics and for burlesquing social mores that personal situations are converted into literary abstractions, as are the ruptured families enslaved in Arthurian England by the antagonists of the Connecticut Yankee. Yet, underneath the exterior gloss of the Twain family portrait, personal forces as ruthless as the social forces described by the Yankee were at work. Hill’s revision of the record is consequently much needed, and raises much-needed questions, both for the family and for the vision which helped to create it.

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