`Gorgeous Flaws and Terrible Genius'

I had forgotten how sloppy and inconsistent Mark Twain’s prose and general approach to craftsmanship could be. His best biographer, Ron Powers, speaks of Twain as “a purer product of America in his gorgeous flaws and terrible genius than most of his celebrants would ever want to consider.” Folksy stretches of Huckleberry Finn read like boilerplate cornpone, reminiscent of George Washington Harris’ Sut Lovingood tales and other works by the “Southwestern Humorists” that Twain is supposed to have transcended. Sometimes you despair of ever reading him again and then he surprises you:

“I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny – the hands was gone to the field; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves, it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering – spirits that’s been dead ever so many years – and you always think they’re talking about you. As a general thing, it makes a body wish he was dead, too, and done with it all.”

The falling cadence of the final phrase is masterful. This passage, the first paragraph of Chapter XXXII, reintroduces the theme of ghosts and haunting, and reminds us that Huck is at least as superstitious as Jim and most of the other people he meets along the river. It’s Twain’s genius not to set the scene in the middle of the Gothic night. It’s “all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny,” but the light of reason counts for little in Huck’s world. Out of such passages come William Faulkner and Ralph Ellison. Powers is admirably honest on Twain’s gifts and their limits. This is from Dangerous Water: A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark Twain:

“As a writer he had seldom shown concern for the received aesthetic demands of his craft. Form inconvenienced him; bother form; a Twain book, especially a Twain novel, went drifting like a river, from change to change, until it ended. Likewise consistency of tone, or consistency of anything: He would be uproarious one minute, maudlin the next, turgidly `historical’ the moment after that, and then the writerly voice might disappear utterly into a Cheshire smile of reportage. The characters in his novels could be shockingly cardboard, grown-up ones especially and grown-up females most especially of all. In this, too, he was distinctly American; form, the nuances of character and the edgy implications of gender were worse than precious; they were downright French.”

For me, seeing the Mississippi River from the air or land is always a powerful occasion. It’s the one natural feature I would suggest a stranger visit for insight into America and our history. The river is mercurial, at once powerful and serene. In Chapter VII of Huckleberry Finn, there’s a lovely river reverie, after Huck has faked his murder and is drifting in a canoe:

“I laid there and had a good rest and a smoke out of my pipe, looking away into the sky, not a cloud in it. The sky looks ever so deep when you lay down on your back in the moonshine; I never knowed it before.”

I remembered some lines in a poem written by another Missourian:


“I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god -- sullen, untamed and intractable,
Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;
Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;
The only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.
The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten
By the dwellers in cities -- ever, however, implacable.
Keeping his seasons, and rages, destroyer, reminder
Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.”