The Portable Mark Twain Read Online Free PDF Page A

showing any one how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea—other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.” The author proposes no cultural authority to report on his journey to the Old World and the Holy Land; what he does propose, on the other hand, is more extraordinary—that he can see, feel, and speak for a vast cross-section of the American public and serve as their surrogate abroad. There is, potentially, obnoxious presumption in this claim, but in point of fact, the public embraced the book. The publishers advertised Twain as “The People’s Author,” and if sales figures are any indication, they were right. Almost instantly The Innocents Abroad became a best-seller and remains one of his most popular books.
    What is more, in the course of writing The Innocents Abroad, the “Mark Twain” persona gradually, perhaps imperceptibly, began to become something more than an ad hoc impersonation, outfitted for the purposes of comic vision alone. His original plan was to give a comic account of his voyage with fellow travelers he eventually came to call “pilgrims.” As such, he was playing the part of irreverent journalist, whose imagination was stimulated by direct observation and recent experience. When the terms of his contract required him to produce a book manuscript much longer than he had anticipated, his notes and published “letters” to newspapers had to be supplemented by recollection. One result was that he abandoned the present-mindedness of the reporter for the broader purposes of the imaginative raconteur. He was becoming, almost in spite of himself, a “literary person.”
    This is oversimplification, of course. But the fact remains that much of Twain’s best writing is the work of remembrance. Roughing It (1872) recounted experiences several years old; when “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) was written, Clemens had been away from the river more than a decade; and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was a “hymn” to childhood precisely because it consisted of spontaneously youthful adventures recollected in maturity. Tom Sawyer, particularly, is nostalgic in the root sense of the word. There was likely a certain “homesickness” in Twain that motivated him to cast an eye backward to a simpler and mischievously happier time and to picture for the adult reader youth as it is remembered, perhaps at times even as it had been lived. Tom’s free play of his romantic imagination inflicted on his comrades, his successfully conducted pranks or his childish transgressions (followed swiftly by the expected punishment and the equally expected affectionate forgiveness), and his adventures in puppy love were gratifying to the writer and the reader alike.
    There are in Tom Sawyer, of course, sinister elements lurking about the edges of the novel. But what is finally more disturbing than the grotesqueness and the violence in the book is the apparent fact that Tom, for all his puckish defiance of the adult powers that be, is clearly and inevitably becoming neither wise nor mature but merely becoming a grown-up. In that sense, he is an embedded reporter from antebellum St. Petersburg who disturbs but never really challenges the prevailing social order. What is more, in the final chapters he uses his persuasive influence to bring the pariah Huckleberry Finn into the fold. Huck had meandered into the novel swinging a dead cat and having definite thoughts about how to cure warts and was conceived as one more comrade for Tom. To associate with Huck at all is in the eyes of the town an act of insubordination, and as a consequence Tom revels in his company. Nevertheless, Tom envies Huck’s aimless freedom, ignorantly supposing that sleeping in a hogshead and living hand to mouth is blissful relief from constraint. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt Tom’s sincerity