Bohemian from the Sage-Brush

...Yet what Kaplan has to say about the books he concentrates on is so subtle and suggestive that it greatly enhances our understanding of all of Twain's work...

...It sets a standard of narrative pace, dramatic force and acute analysis in a field where prosy academicism has ruled for too long...

...This background of squalor, however, is not provided as a setting for the usual dispiriting, masochistic recital of the artist's defeat at the hands of a materialist America...

...he seems to be asking-but he contained his satire within a convention his audience was powerless to reject" That sort of comic triumph and the effect it inevitably had upon Twain's art is central to any effort to explain his "failure" as a writer...

...They in fact had only scraped the surface of a lode which Kaplan has mined with unfailing psychological insight and penetration...

...He was also a heavy drinker who had "gone on a marathon bender in Virginia City, and according to some in the West the name Mark Twain had more to do with marking up drinks on credit than it did with the Mississippi...

...He thus avoids going over the territory of boyhood and youth which Twain himself covered with incomparable skill and other biographers have wrung pretty dry...

...In fact his analysis of Twain's split personality, divided throughout his life between the roistering West and the genteel East, both justifies Van Wyck Brooks' early attempt to understand Twain's crippling conflicts in The Ordeal of Mark Twain and, making use of a mass of recently released documents and letters, strikes out in a totally new and revealing direction...

...Even in his old age, when he set out to tell the whole truth in his dictated autobiography, he was only able to give another superb platform performance for his delighted amanuensis, Albert Bigelow Paine...

...Kaplan shows that Twain was compromised as a serious writer by his training and success as a platform humorist...

...It is a split personality he depicts, and his biography is the record of a search for identity that was never firmly found and triumphantly established...

...He could observe in himself the same wild speculative mania he saw all about him...

...A wonderfully evocative picture of America in its Gilded Age of rampaging wealth and corruption and genteel Victorian hypocrisy, Mr...

...Sometimes the aggression burst through the carefully erected dikes...

...Twain's disgust with the corruption of his times was, as Kaplan observes, "partly an index of his involvement with them, and his disgust grew more bitter through the 1870s, the decade which was the core of what he called the Gilded Age...

...The lyceum circuit's sure-fire methods of pace and delivery, concealing a serious comment behind a humorous barrage, seemed tailor-made for Twain's particular talents...

...In this surcharged atmosphere of flagwaving, Twain got up and told the story of his own experiences as a soldier on the other side...

...He had been a wanderer on and off since 1853...

...Even now, after all that has been written about Twain, it comes as a shock to realize that the man who left California in 1866 to seek his literary fortune in the East was one who "had made no real commitment to place, social goal or identity...

...No man will dare more than I to get it," he wrote to his wife...

...He hobnobbed with the great men of the political and financial worlds he inwardly detested, and constantly took the license of the clown to poke malicious fun at the very men and ideals he supposedly admired...

...His part in the campaign was an old, festering wound and, as Kaplan explains, the speech had been worked over for years, since Twain's comedy was always an attempt to refurbish his painful past in terms acceptable to his wounded ego: "Against the background of the flatulent and bloodthirst oratory that preceded it, his speech was implicit insult and explicit deflation of the hallowed martial values-What was the war all about, anyway...

...Significantly, his best work was always laid in that pastoral past, openly romanticized in Tom Sawyer and subtly romanticized in Huckleberry Finn...

...To dominate such a demanding yet shallow audience was, for Twain, at once a delicious indulgence, a subtle degradation, and an act of aggression against the audience itself...

...and Twain himself admitted that he had no talent for introspection or self-analysis...

...His haunts were saloons and police courts, the morgue, and the stage doors of San Francisco's flourishing theaters...

...As Kaplan reveals Twain to us, we see a manic depressive whose bouts of depression and rage alternate with long moments of creative euphoria and energy, whose self-doubt erupts in violent, almost selfdestructive satire, and whose urge toward the good things of life as America defined them is always being blasted at the last moment by a saving sense of their absurdity...

...And after he had experienced his first limitless hold over a breathless audience, he found it a power hard to relinquish...

...For the occasion Twain had written a typical Western yarn, presenting the grand triumverate of New England letters-Emerson, Holmes and Longfellow-as three seedy, boozy tramps...

...Time and again, the bohemian from the sage-brush rescued the artist and man from the ignominy of utter capitulation to the power of wealth and respectability...

...The audience he held in his power, whom he soothed and coddled and attacked with comic skill-Twain himself compared his platform techniques to a dentist's drill hitting the nerve with explosive force-also made him powerless...

...The strain of self-accusation that runs through it, though couched in magnificent talk, was not the truth...

...But the popular lecture could not contain anything that 500 impatient people "could not all understand in a flash...

...Yet just a few weeks before he had carried off another act of aggression with great success...

...I consider it by far the best biography of a major American writer that I have read in years...

...Clemens and Mark Twain is also the story of the efforts of a notable American artist to come to terms both with himself and the society in which he lived...

...It was at a patriotic ceremony to celebrate Massachusetts' oldest artillery company's participation in the Civil War...

...his home was in his valise...

...The truth was that his influence on his wife and on Howells was much greater than theirs on him...

...Brooks claimed that Twain's women, allied with Boston society, notably personified by William Dean Howells, robbed him of his artistic freedom...

...He turned his wife Livy from a strait-laced puritan into a tippler, an unbeliever and almost a cynic...

...He was fascinated by the drive and power of America's expanding industrial society, yet longed for the pastoral quiet and charm of the vanished Hannibal of his childhood...

...The audience was aghast, not a single laugh broke the silence, and for long afterward Twain was haunted by his "hideous mistake...

...It did so humiliatingly at the dinner in honor of Whittier's 70th birthday...

...Her bowdlerizations of his work were in a sense dictated by his ex-bohemian's desire for status and a recognized place in society...

...Indeed, Paine soon realized that the stories Twain was telling him "bore only an atmospheric relation to history...

...He hated the corruption and specious glamour of the Gilded Age, yet spent a great deal of his time and energy trying to become a millionaire...

...Twain's fantasy, which remade the past and took humorous revenge on it, was the only "truth" he could tell...

...He moved in a sub-culture of reporters, entertainers, actors, theater managers, acrobats, ladies of the chorus, prospectors, and short-term promoters...

...At one low point a local editor described him in print as a 'Bohemian from the sage-brush' who was a jailbird, bailjumper, deadbeat, and alcoholic...

...His main interest is to show us how the disparate, often conflicting elements in the man named Samuel Langhorne Clemens went into shaping the personality we now know as Mark Twain...

...Twain emerges as a much more fascinating but much more pitiful and riven figure than any of his previous biographers had even imagined...

...In the present, Twain was a firm believer in progress who sunk fortunes in a series of mechanical inventions which invariably failed to pay off and finally drove him into bankruptcy...

...Mark Twain's bohemianism, as Kaplan shows, never was fully squelched by the respectable East...

...Mark Twain was a forceful artist, a compelling personality, who carried his conflicts within him...

...Kaplan is not intent on adding another chapter to that well-paying and basically unenlightening saga...

...Kaplan's account is more subtle and more convincing than Brooks...

...Kaplan shows that the matter was much more complicated: Twain wanted to be made over into the image of Eastern respectability, but his irrepressible bohemianism always thwarted such attempts...

...Perhaps Kaplan overestimates the value of such a pieced-together and flimsy book as The Gilded Age, but in the body of his biography it plays an important role, concentrating in its scope all of Twain's chief conflicts...

...True, in the effort to flesh out his portrait of the wastrel who longed to become a staid householder, Kaplan gives more prominence to such books as The Gilded Age and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court than to the accepted masterpieces, since the former works have more open and intimate connections with the social forces that molded, revolted and attracted Twain...

...Sam Clemens took these insults, and worse, shut up and left town...

...Clemens and Mark Twain, Atheneum, 424 pp., $7.95) when his subject is already 31...