Mark Twain, Half Twain

...When we last see Col...

...Here is Clay's reaction to the death of his mother: "He leaned upon the open coffin and let his tears course silently...

...This reissue of The Gilded Age comes with a long and, for the most part, quite helpful introduction by Justin D. Kaplan...

...But this is a desperate game I am playing in these days—a wearing, sordid, heartless game...

...In The Gilded Age, when a newspaper reports of a burglar that he served one term in the penitentiary and one term in the United States Senate, the burglar writes in: "The latter statement is untrue and does me great injustice...

...In Philip Rahv's useful if oversimple distinction of American writers into Palefaces and Redskins, Twain is taken as pureblood Redskin...

...And it is almost complete extenuation that he is a Senator...

...he wasn't our uncle, I don't know what he was to us—some kin or another 1 reckon—father's seen him a thousand times—hain't you, father...

...Sellers, who is one of Twain's finest comic creations, and the only solid gold in this gilt book...

...have...

...Twain contributed two main strands: the fortunes of the Hawkins family, who own 75,000 acres of worthless Tennessee land, and the related adventures of their friend Col...

...Together they planted roses by the headboard and strewed wild flowers upon the grave...

...If folk speech freed him, culture and history constrained him, and in the future this inability to breathe in the realm of ideas would produce the vulgarity of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the pretentiousness of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and the utter tedium of Christian Science...

...Far from being savage, Twain's satire is affectionate and often runny...

...and that ultimate masterpiece of oral narrative, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...Twain had similarly shown his defects to the world before The Gilded Age, in the philistinism and flogged wit of The Innocents Abroad...

...What does Laura think of her life...

...Then he put out his small hand and soothed the hair and stroked the dead face lovingly...

...Warner contributed other strands: the wooing of the Philadelphia Quaker Ruth Bolton by an ungilded graduate of Yale named Philip Sterling, with subplots involving Ruth's family, Philip's irresponsible friend Harry Brierly, and poor Alice Montague, who also loves Philip...

...The book's theme, its satire of the Gilded Age of Grant, is mostly heavy-handed and unsuccessful...

...I am driven to this far-from-helpful conclusion by the reissue of Twain's first novel, The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner (Trident Press, 453 pp., $5.95...

...His conversation is a marvel of visionary pyrotechnics...

...Great-grandmother died before hardly any of us was born—she was an Old-School Baptist and had warts all over her—you ask father if she didn't...

...Delightful" refers primarily to the re-creation of American speech, which Twain brought to a height of comic perfection not attained before or since...

...After a scoundrel robs her of her virtue by means of a false bigamous marriage, she becomes a Washington adventuress, breaking hearts and blackmailing politicians with equal ruthlessness...

...In later years these powers would produce Twain's triumphs: the comic mastery of his lectures (lecturing in Vienna in 1898, Twain reduced Sigmund Freud to paroxysms of helpless laughter by announcing the title of his lecture, "The First Watermelon I Ever Stole," pausing for a moment, then muttering: "Was it the first...

...No one achieves a fortune, however, except Philip, who discovers a coal mine for himself and Ruth's father by pick-and-shovel labor with his own soft Yale hands...

...When Washington Hawkins catches the Sellers family dining on cold water and raw turnips, the Colonel explains that the turnips are Early Malcolms, the finest and costliest variety in the land...

...Warner's parts of the novel are uniformly terrible...

...Here is a Homeric simile: "as a brook breaks into ripples and eddies and dances and sports by the way, and yet keeps on to the sea, it was in Ruth's nature to give cheerful answer to the solicitations of friendliness and pleasure, to appear idly delaying even, and sporting in the sunshine, while the current of her resolution flowed steadily on...

...Warner was a popular essayist who lived near Twain in Hartford, and it is hard to imagine what besides propinquity could have made Twain decide to collaborate with him...

...in the course of the action he is exposed and disgraced...

...Hawkins: "And after breakfast they two went alone to the grave, and his heart went out to his new friend and his untaught eloquence poured the praises of his buried idol into her ears without let or hindrance...

...When the Colonel and Harry bribe the surveyors of a railroad to route it through their property at Stone's Landing, this has one important effect: "There was such a panic among the turtles that at the end of six hours there was not one to be found within three miles of Stone's Landing...

...The scene in which we see her at blackmail is preposterous from start to finish...

...More accurately, he was a Redskin who simultaneously aspired to Paleface and mocked that aspiration...

...He was notoriously reticent about dealing with mature sexual and emotional relationships, but he did write a kind of pornography of the dollar...

...Warner writes so carelessly that he contradicts himself on adjacent pages, and he will never say "house" when he can say "home," or "women" when he can say "the gentle sex...

...What most of these characters have in common is their vision of an effortless fortune, to be made by one or another speculative and unscrupulous promotion...

...The leaders of the "Weed" Ring are not convicted because "our admirable jury system" enables them "to secure a jury of nine gentlemen from a neighboring asylum and three graduates from Sing-Sing...

...Here is one of Col...

...Twain and Warner worked together on the showiest strand, the rise and fall of the beauteous Laura Hawkins...

...And so on...

...There is only one truly sanctimonious scoundrel in The Gilded Age, Senator Dilworthy, who masks his corruption with Christian piety...

...The turtles return...

...Twain's unforced humor, on the other hand, is thoroughly successful...

...Washington landladies will not rent rooms to Congressmen unless they pay in advance...

...When a mob bilked in one speculation decides to hang the Colonel, he gives them choice suburban lots in the next speculation...

...Van Wyck Brooks' efforts to credit Twain's Paleface aspirations to his wife produced one of the monumental travesties of biography, The Ordeal of Mark Twain...

...Honest...

...An early work of socialist realism, in short...

...Even here we can feel Twain's sneaking fondness for him: he is hypocritical with a certain sniveling style...

...After a bit he brought his other hand up from behind him and laid three or four fresh wild flowers upon the breast, bent over and kissed the unresponsive lips time and time again, and then turned away and went out of the house without looking at any of the company...

...and then together they went away, hand in hand, and left the dead to the long sleep that heals all heart-aches and ends all sorrows...

...Did you ever see a house afire...

...Eventually Laura shoots her seducer dead, is acquitted by a jury, takes to the lecture platform, and dies of disappointment at the turnout...

...Awful" in this case refers primarily to tear jerking sentimentality...

...Twain shares in the responsibility for the silliest part of the book, the sad story of Laura...

...I have space for only one example...

...Like the late A. J. Liebling, one of his most gifted heirs, Twain was drawn to every scoundrel in the world, if the fellow was not sanctimonious in addition...

...the formidable vocal range of Life on the Mississippi...

...Beriah Sellers, the most glib and optimistic of promoters...

...She had an uncle once that was bald-headed and used to have fits...

...When the bypassed town of Hawkeye outbids Stone's Landing in bribery, and the route is changed back, what happens...

...The plot of The Gilded Age is a crazy jumble...

...Once me and Jim Terry—" By 1873, when The Gilded Age was published, Twain had already shown the world his command of oral narrative in "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" and the wonderful Old Ram story in Roughing It...

...The votes of "high moral" Senators cost more than the votes of ordinary Senators, "because they give tone to a measure...

...Most of the humor surrounds Col...

...Congress is so jealous of its honor that if a member "had been proven guilty of theft, arson, licentiousness, infanticide, and defiling graves, I believe they would have suspended him for two days...

...Sellers, he is on his way to begin a new career in the law, with his sights set at Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and we have no doubt that he will make it...

...We used to have a calf that et apples and just chawed up dishrags like nothing, and if you stay here you'll see lots of funerals—won't he, Sis...

...My only disagreement is with Kaplan's tendency to take the book too seriously, to see it as "a novel of reaction and despair," "the most savage satire on democracy that American literature has to offer...

...Here is his adoption after the funeral by kind Mrs...

...No book is at once so delightful and so awful, and in that respect, 1 am sorry to say, it does typify the body of Twain's work...

...Sellers' twins talking: "It's our clock, now—and it's got wheels inside of it, and a thing that flutters every time she strikes— don't it, father...

...Kaplan is sometimes extremely perceptive, as when he writes: "By the process of displacement money plays the role of sex in Mark Twain's work...