Mark Twain: God's Fool
Tyrrell, Judy
"Mark Twain: God's Fool" show Johnson's net vote to be 23.3 million with a popularity percentage of 33 percent and Goldwater's vote to be 7.5 million with a percentage of 11 percent. We see t h a t...
...The three-man race is more complex...
...and in pursuit of these several interests he looks in upon the gifted, trained, and influential stratum in the United States, Europe (especially Great Britain), and several technologically less advanced nations in Asia and Africa...
...I am not melancholy...
...nine were first printed in the decade immediately preceding their publication in this volume...
...Note t h a t this uncertainty applies only to elections using our present system...
...Surely any change in our system t h a t eliminates television commercials about l i t t l e girls being blown up by hydrogen bombs can't be all bad...
...Only Clara remained...
...In spite of my effort to maintain close attention, I was uncertain most of the time as to how much of the population was under consideration...
...The new voting plan removes these uncertainties...
...If all the k coefficients were slightly higher, at 0.8, Nixon's popularity index would be 30 percent, about the same as Johnson's in his "landslide...
...We should probably be grateful for this plethora of new information regarding Twain's family skeletons and approaching senility...
...If the proposed voting system had been in effect in 1968, the votes for each candidate would have been T, = kN, - ý89 - k~)V= - ý89 - k~)V3 T~ = k~V~ - ý89 - kOV, - ý89 - k~)V~ T~ = k~V~ - ý89 - kOV, - ý89 - kDV...
...Even a beginner's acquaintance with recent literature makes it clear that most writing about people referred to as intellectuals omits from attention all but a small segment of the population that qualifies as highly educated, highly influential, and highly endowed with ability to command response from others...
...There are twentythree essays in all...
...That is as much as you can say for the word "intellectual...
...I am willing, as reader, to do a good share of the work necessary to establish communication with an author, but it seems to me that throughout this book Professor Shils was considerably less cooperative than he ought to have been...
...he explores the institutions and the traditions which foster the appearance and development of intellectuals and support intellectual activity in the inclusive fabric of social structure and civil order...
...We see too t h a t Goldwater dipped perilously close to 0 percent...
...The three-man race, with one candidate having an inflexible base as at present, can no longer become a two-man race in the sense of scare tactics being used with impunity by the two major candidates...
...The reverse may not be true, and C's voter base may appear inflexible to A, but not to B. At the other end of the spectrum, a third, minor candidate having a reputation as a "moralist" or as everyone's second choice may profit greatly from the negative campaigning of two major candidates...
...Humphrey, V~ = 30.9...
...Neither can C the moralist gain unduly from the blood-letting of two major candidates...
...Hamlin Hill has certainly brought to light some revealing aspects of Mark Twain's character which are, I suppose, necessary to the total appreciation of a great literary figure...
...C's voter base is no longer inflexible, except for those voters firmly committed to him in a positive sense...
...I shall never be melancholy again, I think...
...To a candidate, winning comes first, but the vote percentage (mandate from the people, etc...
...If we take all the k coefficients as 0.7, we find T 1 = 16.2, T 2 = 15.5, and T~ = -2.8, and Nixon's popularity index is 23 percent...
...In spite of this, the new system would undoubtedly have a helpful moral effect on our presidential campaigns...
...The youngest Clemens daughter, Jean, was severely epileptic, and for several years, Hill contends, her father was repulsed by her illness and frequently sent her away from his house...
...Under the circumstances, one cannot blame Twain for switching to condemnations of the human race and of a God that arbitrarily and unjustly rewards evil and punishes good...
...And yet I cannot help but wish he hadn't...
...Those votes never belonged to Nixon...
...2) A candidate who really wants a mandate from the people will have to present his ideas in a positive form, because the way to increase his popularity index is to increase his confidence factor, k, and t h a t cannot be done by belittling his opponent...
...Clemens hired an accountant to audit his books, and discovered that Isabel had indeed spent approximately $2000 more than was allotted for her own clothes and furnishings...
...xii-xiii): he examines the charge that intellectuals tend to be alienated from their society and finds that this is by no means generally the case...
...When you see "intellectual" in the title of a book you know without looking inside that you are invited to read about people who have their antenna out for information and ideas, engage in subtle and elaborate reasoning, and communicate with other people...
...Twain's daughter Susy's death from spinal meningitis a t the age of twenty-five led the whole family to such morbid activities as annual celebrations of her birthday and anniversaries of her death...
...At any rate, the Ashcrofts were publicly scandalized, and all mention of either of them was obliterated from Paine's biography...
...I doubt that any has maintained a higher level of objectivity or has challenged and refuted cherished presuppositions and widely-accepted myths with less slippage into dogmatic assertion...
...The final chapter of this work offers the consolation that life is only a dream anyway...
...The actual vote difference between Nixon and Humphrey in 1968, V~ - Vs, was 0.8 million, but T, - T2 in this example is 0.7...
...In the 1968 race the vote totals, in millions, were: Nixon, V1 = 31.7...
...If A impresses a voter positively, he is one vote ahead, but if he frightens a voter away from B, then C profits exactly as much as A. Both A and C effectively gain half a vote (so A has to work twice as hard with negative campaign tactics...
...He had, after all, always preferred Satan's heroic uncontained energy to God's indifference...
...Here we see a small material effect on vote differences...
...Crushed by family disappointments, perhaps he must tell himself that life is just a dream...
...By accusing them of embezzling money, she appealed to her father's mercenary instincts and thus aroused his indignation...
...For the special case, k~ = ks, the result is T, - Ts = ý89 + k,) (V~ - Vs) and since the confidence factor k~ is less than one, T 1 - T~ will be smaller than V - V s. If Hubert Humphrey had campaigned more positively in 1968, with the new voting plan in effect, and had raised k2 to 0.75, while k~ and k3 remained the same at 0.7 the net votes under the new system would have been T~ = 16.9, T2 = 17.0, and T3 = -2.1...
...Instead we see an embittered old man furiously and unsuccessfully involved in speculation, neglecting those who love him and becoming at least p a r t i a l l y responsible for two of their deaths...
...is important, too...
...Mark Twain: God's Fool It is r a t h e r like being told there is no Santa Claus to read Hamlin Hill's biography of Mark Twain...
...But the bulk of the book is devoted to Twain's family problems which kept him from the humorous writing which had made him famous and for which the public still longed...
...one dates from 1938...
...The lovable American humorist, the teller of children's stories, the impish and adventurous Huck Finn whom we cannot help but identify with his c r e a t o r - - a l l these are suppressed in Hill's book which concentrates on the last ten deeply troubled years of Samuel Clemens' life...
...In spite of this example, the primary effect of the proposed voting plan is unlikely to be its material influence on the outcome of elections...
...With the proposed voting system a candidate might win an election by frightening voters away from his opponent, but he could not increase his own popularity, as measured by the net, T. Perhaps this might lead to t h a t much-desired end, a candidate stressing his own strong points rather than his opponent's weaknesses...
...But you won't know until you look further whether there will be any mention of holiness preachers, labor union officials, members of the National Academy of Sciences, or writers of detective stories--the brightest of whom, I venture, keep their eyes and ears well honed, devise arguments and propound conclusions that baffle smart people who haven't been initiated into the cult, and sound off eloquently when assured an appropriate audience...
...by Hamlin Hill Harper & Row $10.00 Much of Mark Twain: God's Fool is based on the previously unpublished diary of Isabel Lyon, Clemens' personal secretary, and it contradicts Albert Bigelow Paine's carefully edited Mark Twain: A Biography published in 1912, ten years after Twain's death...
...Satan is the Mysterious Stranger who, although he is not utterly malevolent towards mankind, is tragically indifferent to it...
...In the NixonMcGovern race, it seemed to be important to many people to have Nixon win with a greater (or smaller) popular vote percentage than Johnson in the 1964 election...
...But for a man of Clemens' means, this was not extravagant, and there is little reason to believe she was willfully dishonest...
...When Jean The Alternative January 1974 17 drowned in the bathtub, apparently as a result of an epileptic seizure, Twain felt a sense of relief, and wrote to his only surviving daughter, Clara: "O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it and safe--safe...
...I venture to say that his observations are touched with an unusual sensitivity 18 The Alternative January 19.74...
...They can be certain t h a t degeneration to scare campaigning will be punished, if only by a drop in their popularity index...
...The main point, however, is that with the new plan the major candidates will know precisely what part of a vote is gained and lost...
...tions for T1 and T~ show Johnson's net vote to be 23.3 million with a popularity percentage of 33 percent and Goldwater's vote to be 7.5 million with a percentage of 11 percent...
...She had spent these tragic years alternating between rest homes and a singing career, while spending her father's money and showing little gratitude...
...Wallace, V~ = 9.4...
...For motives that are still unclear, Clara determined to get rid of Isabel Lyon and her husband, Ralph Ashcroft, who had served as Clemens' business manager for several years...
...An extensive exploration of that literature forces a conclusion that there are about as many different sets of tests for being counted intellectual as there are persons writing on the subject...
...It is, in fact, possible for the loser, and even the winner, to receive a negative net vote...
...He profits, to be sure, and can watch happily as they knife each other...
...Olivia's "nervous prostration" which struck in August 1902 and lingered until her death in June 1904 must have been attributable in some way to her husband, because her doctors refused to let him see her during much of her convalescence lest she suffer a relapse...
...Summarizing his summary (pp...
...Of Nixon's votes, k~V~ were for him, and (1 - k0V~ were against Humphrey and Wallace...
...Under the proposed plan, the voter would have more freedom to express himself, and his motives would be more apparent...
...It is not surprising that in The Mysterious Stranger---one of Twain's last works which was compiled posthumously and has recently been revised--Mark Twain creates his own alterego in the form of Satan...
...If the equations for T, and T s are subtracted, the vote difference, T~- T2, is the same as the difference, V, - V~, of our present system of voting, so the proposed system cannot affect the material outcome of a two-man race...
...Under our present voting system, it is normally important to campaign positively in a threeman race, since taking votes from one candidate only to watch them go to a third is a poor victory...
...Professor Shils summarizes his work in an introduction to this collection...
...In addition to its moral effect, the proposed plan may even in some cases affect the material outcome of a race...
...If stand-out operators in these several categories are per se intellectuals, then a study of intellectuals in America can scarcely be differentiated from a study of the highly educated, the influential, and the custodians of prestige and authority...
...Shifting from one object of attention to another is not a ground for offense, however, for the essays which make up the book were written at different times for different audiences...
...At other times the author's attention is fixed on a much less numerous group vaguely characterized as "persons with an unusual sensitivity to the sacred, an uncommon reflectiveness about the nature of their universe and the rules which govern their society . . . who, more than the ordinary run of their fellow men, are inquiring [and feel] a need to externalize this quest in oral and written discourse, in poetic or plastic expression, in historical reminiscence or writing, in ritual performance or acts of worship" (p...
...Judy T y r r e l l R iew...
...In The Intellectuals and the Powers Professor Shils troubles himself almost not at and Other Essays by Edward Shils University of Chicago $12.50 all with definition, with consequent triable for the reader in my opinion...
...Voters frightened away from A by B will vote for B or stay home...
...It does, after all, help explain the sudden dearth of good literature from a writer who before 1900 had produced so much...
...The Intellectuals and the Powers There is a story about an Englishman who, rebuked for his sloppy dress, remarked that the purpose of the clothing is to mark the spot where the body can be found...
...I concluded that in many of the essays he was discussing a strip of the knowledgeable, articulate, and influential population that did not include the mine-run lawyers, doctors, engineers, professors, journalists, efficiency experts (who unquestionably are trained for technology, management, research, or public administration) but did include important functionaries of the society not likely to be viewed by themselves or anybody else as especially tuned-in on the sacred or um commonly preoccupied with the fundamental nature of their universe, who too seldomly read a book to be suspected of an urge to write one...
...The difference in net votes, T, - T2, under the new system can be found by subtracting appropriately in the last group of three equations...
...another appears not to have been previously printed...
...Humphrey's task was only to persuade the voters to vote for himself r a t h e r than against Nixon...
...Hill refers to other unappealing aspects of Mark Twain, such as his peculiar enchantment with fifteen-year-old girls and his sudden losses of temper...
...For lack of a better estimate, we take ý89 - k~)V 1 against each of the others...
...Most of the book is concerned with an inclusive group most clearly identified on page 76 as persons "trained for technology, management, research, and public administration...
...Keep in mind t h a t this change in net votes did not require Humphrey by some eloquence to win votes committed to Nixon...
...I see these major benefits of the system: (1) It gives the voter greater freedom in making his views known, and it gives the victor (and indeed all of us) a truer idea of voter attitudes about his programs...
...Possibly, as Bernard DeVoto maintains, this is the only satisfactory answer Twain can come up with...
...I think it is a fair statement that no other American scholar has examined the gifted and influential people of the twentieth century in the depth and with the care that mark these essays...
...but we suffer more because now our beliefs are more ingrained and inflexible than they were during childhood...
...Then (neglecting the factor of electoral votes) Humphrey might have won t h a t cliffhanger...
...In fact, if a third, minor candidate has a somewhat inflexible base, such as Wallace perhaps had in 1968, a three-man race takes on some features of a two-man race, and there is no penalty for negative campaigning...
...Failure to make clear who is under examination is a fault of the book in my judgment...
...But even she was not without troubles...
...Paine, a member of the Clemens household for several years, and Clara, the only one of Twain's three daughters to outlive him, continued the censorial tradition of Olivia Langdon Clemens, deliberately omitting from Twain's biography the unpleasant aspects of his life...
...This is sometimes forgotten in the turmoil of a campaign, however, because no one knows for certain where those votes will go...
...We see t h a t the popularity percentages do not add to 100 percent...
...And there were several...
Vol. 7 • January 1974 • No. 4
