Burning Twain

...Indeed, Twain's artistry arguably declined as he grew more polemical in his angry old age...

...It doesn't diminish Twain to raise questions about his credentials as social critic...

...And in recording there his travels among the la-di-da Europeans, he accentuated what was most recognizably American in himself...

...Mark Twain is the subject of the director's latest film, a two-part special that PBS will air on January 14 and 15...

...The problem is more that Burns and his collaborators (Dayton Duncan and Geoffrey C. Ward) have made little effort to fit Twain into the appropriate contexts of his own day...

...He is always the first this, the greatest that, and the only something else...

...As powerful and important as Twain's indictment of racism and slavery in Huckleberry Finn was, it seems downright silly to claim that he alone among the century's writers took on America's demons...

...Burns's admiration and fondness for Twain seem to be unlimited and unconditional...

...When, for example, actor Kevin Conway reads the passage from Roughing It about the approach to Carson City, the camera gradually tightens its shot of a photograph of Carson City...

...He seems to have graduated from unassuming documentarian majoring in American History to Historian who incidentally works in a visual medium (and a historian of extravagant ambitions at that...

...Burns makes much of the distinction between the private Samuel Lang-horne Clemens and the public Mark Twain...

...Scorning Twain's simultaneous pursuit of artistic certification by the English literary elite on one end and adulation by the American mob on the other, Mencken derided him as "monkey-shining at banquets, cavorting in the newspapers, shrinking poltroonish-ly from his own ideas, obscenely eager to give no offense...

...And Whitman urged that American literature be revitalized by words from factory and farm, from "around the markets, among the fish-smacks, along the wharves...

...It is beyond question, if not exactly hot news, that Twain enjoyed command of an impressive range of dialects, like the backwoods Missouri and slave dialects of his boyhood that anchor the fabulous narrative of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a wholly believable setting...

...but if you are 'no account,' go away from home, and then you will have to work, whether you want to or not...

...But either way, Burns exaggerates...

...In the end, Ken Burns's Mark Twain turns the American back into an American (albeit an unusually gifted one...

...One gets the sense from his work and his comments in the press that he has begun to think of himself as our appointed seeker of nothing less than the essence of the American spirit...

...But at the same time, it is a ringing reaffirmation of the even older and more central American values of social Protestantism...

...Twain lived and wrote in the Mississippi valley, Rocky Mountain West, San Francisco, and finally New York and New England...

...In his alternately impenetrable and platitudinous preface to the companion biography (I suspect that Burns personally had little to do with the main text of the book, or it too would be almost unreadable), Burns says that part of his purpose is to show how "Twain, alone among writers in the nineteenth century . . . confronted his demons and those of his countrymen and almost single-handedly invented American literature...

...And Twain went West during the Civil War (after a very brief stint in a Confederate militia, the Marion Rangers, mustered by childhood friends from Hannibal), where he was exposed to still more dialects and, indeed, a new western patois, as diverse regional dialects merged in the mining centers...

...One gets the sense that these same "contradictions" would be "hypocrisy" in a writer less dear to Burns...

...It was an expensive trait, for he played the capitalist badly, and the resulting bankruptcy disrupted the cohesion and stability of his family for many difficult years...

...So, for example, the documentary mentions that Twain's move to San Francisco in 1864 accidentally brought him into a "great, proto-psychedelic counter-culture newspaper society...

...In Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson notices this "rapid transition from the complex, the flowery, the self-consciously learned, to the direct and the economi-cal"—and he links it to the increasing mechanization of American society after the Civil War and to the literary legacy of the Civil War itself, a brisk and decisive "language of responsibility" that Wilson saw as common to the styles of Lincoln and Grant...

...Twain's Roughing It might be interpreted from one point of view as a devastating critique of the myth of the American frontier and its illusory promise of instant riches without effort...

...Whether considering Twain as stylistic innovator or social critic, to take just two examples, Burns fails to provide adequate historical perspective...

...It likely had something to do with the fact that he was less isolated than his predecessors...

...If instead of chalking Twain's clear style up to individual genius or virtuous lack of pretension, Burns had broadened his perspective, he might have placed it in the context of some relevant social currents of the day...

...weren't a bit depressed...

...That's true as far as it goes, but it leaves unanswered the question why southern writers were actually slower than their northern peers to render speech naturalistically...

...So, so like the children of the 1960s...

...We are left with an inadequate sense of what parts of American culture Twain absorbed and reshaped...

...And measured strictly by his ability to translate his content into the language of documentary film, Burns is successful, although even his camera itself can be overly deferential in the way it visually mirrors Twain's words...

...It's hard to understand why Burns limited himself to such a grave pair...

...Burns claims, for example, that Twain "understood that art could be created out of the American language before anyone else...

...Twain's streamlined, uncluttered prose style was part of a broader movement among northern writers after the Civil War away from the lacy, over-decorated prose that southern writers continued after the war to confect in imitation of European models...

...In these terms, Mark Twain succeeds better as an intimate emotional and psychological portrait of Clemens than a literary portrait of Twain...

...But Burns seems to invite measurement against a higher standard...

...His writing partner on both Jazz and Mark Twain is Geoffrey C. Ward, a fine political historian who doesn't bring the authority to artistic subjects that he did to Burns's most famous documentary, The Civil War...

...BY DANIEL WATTENBERG We are looking for % V / subjects," Ken Burns recently T T said of his documentaries, "that hold up a mirror to who we are...

...Chiding his younger self throughout the book for laziness, lack of follow-through, and susceptibility to the lure of get-rich-quick schemes, he concludes his account of his adventures in the West with this moral: "If you are of any account, stay at home and make your way by faithful diligence...

...Of course, Twain went much further with vernacular language...

...Or is it naive to think that Hawthorne faced up to demons from our national past when he wrote The House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter ? In showering Twain with superlatives for his fearless social criticism, Burns simplifies a complicated question...

...Mencken, who admired Twain as the towering literary talent of his day, nevertheless held in contempt the intellectual pusillanimity of the figure who was not just a man of letters but a popular performer and folk hero as well...

...But Burns so reveres Twain that even his "contradictions" are treated as good things, the humanizing foibles that make him accessible and familiar to lesser mortals...

...And in hinting at deep emotional springs—his father's professional and financial failures, his own perceived social and moral inferiority to his wife's wealthy, genteel, pious, and altruistic family—Burns gets further into the mind of the man than he does into the mind of the artist...

...And Twain often functioned as the spokesman rather than critic...

...The saga of his wild swings of fortune— from vast riches to crushing debt, from enveloping domestic bliss to the grief and loneliness of his later years— makes for such compelling melodrama that it could be a miniseries on CBS instead of a nutritious documentary on PBS...

...He "was never the conscious artist, always the improviser," wrote Constance Rourke, in her landmark American Humor...

...Both relished rural slang...

...Thoreau scattered fragments of conversation with local farmers throughout his journals...

...He could have easily added writers closer in spirit to Twain, like Tom Wolfe or PJ...

...And like them he was a withering critic, writes Burns in Mark Twain: An Illustrated Biography, the book that accompanies his documentary, "of police brutality, racism, anti-Semitism, religious hypocrisy, governmental arrogance, petty tyrants, and safe bourgeois life...

...Burns's film does not let TWain off scot-free...

...H.L...

...and his comic sense was theirs, almost without alteration...

...Celebrating Twain as the representative American and living embodiment of its values, Burns hints, perhaps unintentionally, at a source of the complexity: A writer cannot very well be a critic of the same national habits of mind for which he is also the preeminent spokesman and symbol, at least not at the same time...

...Whether as artist or social observer, his Twain is unique and without precedent...

...Like the children of the 1960s, Twain fought racial injustice long before everybody else...

...In a famous chapter in Life on the Mississippi, Twain himself blamed the postwar persistence in the South of "wordy, windy, flowery 'eloquence'" on the lingering influence of Sir Walter Scott...

...Twain's style may have been more immediately shaped by his background as a newspaperman than by his own brief war experience, but he was not immune to the indirect effects (through other writers) of the kinds of wider changes in literary sensibility that Wilson was writing about...

...The cultivation of brevity," he wrote, "was no doubt the result of the speeding-up of everything in American life...

...Ken Burns's last PBS documentary, Jazz, suffered from a similar tendency to view the arts in America as first and foremost arenas of racial, social, and political conflict...

...In Innocents Abroad, for example, he did a little tweaking of the philistinism of Americans on a jaunt to see the cultural treasures of the Old World...

...Dwelling on the social impact of Twain (as Burns and company do) at the expense of his aesthetic charms has the unintended implication that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is memorable, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, chiefly as an artifact of our literary history, rather than a classic of our literature...

...And what Burns sees reflected back at him by Mark Twain bears considerable resemblance to who Burns seems to think we Americans are: high-minded, forward-thinking baby boomers—not unlike, as it happens, Ken Burns himself...

...Why did Twain succeed where Harris failed...

...Burns has left Twain's individual genius in plain view, but his Americanness is obscured—which is an especially glaring fault in one in quest of the essential spirit of America...

...Popular humorists before Twain also worked, often, in dialect, whether on the lecture stage or the printed page...

...I am the American...

...It's true that Twain's language was free of baubles and ostentation, but his narratives tended to be lazily ambling (like the Mississippi itself, observes Powers in the Burns companion volume...

...Writers Arthur Miller and William Sty-ron do appear in the film, but not to discuss Twain's writing...

...Fortunately, the famously depressed novelist William Styron appears in the film to confirm that Twain did indeed have a "dark, depressive streak, which is not uncommon among writers...

...Yes, in the baby-boomer version of American history, even Mark Twain was in the psychedelic San Francisco of the Sixties...

...O'Rourke (although that would have cut into the air time of the actor and roving Twain impersonator Hal Holbrook...

...Twain's penchant for tall tales, literary hoaxes, bruising physical humor, and comic contrasts between house-grown, book-learned Yankee tenderfoots and the ill-bred hell-raisers of the western frontier were all derived from a Southwestern tradition...

...As a child of the Mississippi and later a riverboat pilot on the great commercial and passenger transportation route, he heard a wider variety of native dialects...

...Perhaps tellingly, Twain reviewed a collection of these stories that appeared in 1867...

...Indeed, a number of important critics and cultural historians have argued that Twain never did manage to transcend this tradition...

...He had the garrulity and the inconsequence of the earlier comic story-tellers of the stage and tavern...

...So, too, Twain wouldn't be much of a mirror of who we are if he Daniel Wattenberg is a writer living in Washington, D.C...

...And yet, despite himself, "no one loved money and the comfort and luxury it bought more than he did...

...But before Twain, Whitman and maybe even Thoreau had begun to sense the artistic possibilities of spoken, everyday American English...

...It acknowledges his many "contradictions," like his denunciations of capitalist greed, despite his own unchecked acquisitiveness...

...And that's why the documentary is only a Mark Twain, not the Mark Twain...

...Still, Ken Burns's Mark Twain is never dull...

...Does this coast-to-coast scope qualify him as America's first truly national writer...

...Didactic purposes make a book like Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, and artistry makes a book like Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn...

...Journalist George Washington Harris's satirical Sut Lovingood stories of the 1850s and 1860s were narrated by an uncouth Tennessee hillbilly in a dialect that Harris tried so hard to faithfully represent on the page by phonetic transcriptions and intentional misspellings that the sketches are hardly readable today...

...Indeed, Twain blames the Civil War, only half-joking-ly, on the South's wholesale appropriation of Scott's gauzy romanticism, bogus ideals of chivalry, and attachment to rank, caste, lost causes, and the past...

...But he directed most of his mockery at the morally smudged decadence of Europe...

...He seems to have learned from at least one of Harris's mistakes: Sut misspelled words even though he was supposed to be illiterate, while Twain would give Huck enough schooling to justify his misspellings...

...One of Burns's "contributors," author Ron Powers, does discuss Twain's exposure in early boyhood to the local slave dialect on his uncle's farm in explanation of his later exploitation of vernacular speech...

...And if so, does his emergence as a national writer just as the nation was trying to repair itself after the fractures of the Civil War have something to do with his vast and enduring popularity and perhaps provide some background to Twain's boast, quoted in the program, "I am not an American...

...Of course, by placing Twain alone on a very high pedestal, Burns actually succeeds at isolating his subject from America...

...He found, in Constance Rourke's judgment, "what a composite" American of his day "could be expected to find, not only that [Europe's] monuments were decayed, but that the European was a dastardly fellow for the most part, however the circumstance might arouse laughter in the genial newcomer...

...How are we to gain even a general notion of where Mark Twain fits into the traditions of American literature, humor, and social criticism when Burns asks us to take it for granted that Twain transcended these traditions...

...Twain was "biting" about the "greed and get-rich-quick-fever" of his era...

...How Twain emerged from this uncooked and unwashed style of frontier comedy, if he did, to become a sophisticated social satirist is a topic left untouched by Burns...

...Enough politics has seeped in to give the film a detectably correct tint, but it is not enough to saturate what is mostly a pretty conventional "Great Man" portrait of a literary giant...

...The problem with Burns's TWain isn't so much that he fits too conveniently into the political context of our time...

...It's tempting to say that Ken Burns has finally found an answer to the most pressing need of today's left: a funny left-wing social critic...

...Innocents Abroad, which propelled him to wealth and fame, was published in 1869 and sold an astonishing 100,000 copies in two years...

...His reluctance to discuss literature and music on their own more or less autonomous terms seems to be a habitual fault of his films on artistic subjects...

...But Mark Twain is not actually that bad, not worth another letter-writing campaign on PBS bias...

...It is not clear from this whether he refers to Twain's frequent use of vernacular dialogue and narration or to the unpretentious simplicity and directness of Twain's prose style...