Critique de Mark Twain par Josh

At roughly 1,200 pages, Ron Chernow’s biography of Mark Twain covers nearly every aspect of the humorist’s life in exhaustive detail. In this review, I’ll focus on a few of the central themes that run through Twain’s life and work: race, women, and business.

On Race

Sam Clemens was born in 1835 in the small town of Florida, Missouri. Slavery was legal in the territory, and his downwardly mobile parents had at one point owned as many as six slaves, though during his childhood they could generally afford only one or two. No one in Florida, so far as Clemens knew, opposed slavery. As he later put it, “I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it.” As a boy, he was friends with slaves - “we were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of.”

As Chernow notes, Twain’s views on race evolved over the course of his life. In 1868 he wrote, “the idea of making negroes citizens of the United States was startling and disagreeable to me, but I have become reconciled to it; and being reconciled to it, and the ice being broken and the principle established, I am ready now for all comers. The idea of seeing a Chinaman a citizen of the United States would have been almost appalling to me a few years ago, but I suppose I can live through it now.”

Twain’s early statements on race suggest that he accepted much of the racialist doctrine of his era, though he often put a distinctive spin on it. He consistently defended the rights of Jews and expressed admiration for them, but the phrasing of that admiration would not win many friends at the ADL: “the Jew is a money getter; and in getting his money he is a very serious obstruction to less capable neighbors who are on the same quest.”

In a similar vein, he defended Chinese migrants, who had arrived in the United States in increasing numbers in the 1850s and 1860s: “They are a harmless race when white men either let them alone or treat them no worse than dogs; in fact they are almost entirely harmless anyhow, for they seldom think of resenting the vilest insults or the cruelest injuries. They are quiet, peaceable, tractable, free from drunkenness, and they are as industrious as the day is long. A disorderly Chinaman is rare, and a lazy one does not exist.”

In his later years, Twain showed deep sympathy for formerly enslaved people. He argued for reparations, made personal donations to a number of Black causes, and formed friendships across racial lines. In 1884 he received a letter asking him to give a speech at a Baptist church and “began to rage as usual over the exceedingly cool wording of the request,” but, as he recalled, “Mrs. Clemens said, ‘I think I know that church; & if so, this preacher is a colored man—he doesn't know how to write a polished letter—how should he?’” Twain remembered that his “manner changed suddenly and radically.”

Twain’s racist remarks must also be seen in light of his general misanthropy. In a typical vein, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “we all belong to the nasty stinking little human race, & of course it is not nice for God's beloved vermin to scoff at each other.” He repeatedly suggested that if God had created humans, He should be ashamed of His work, writing (again to Howells), “[d]amn these human beings; if I had invented them I would go hide my head in a bag.”

This generalized contempt for humanity—including those whom others held in high esteem—casts a different light on some of Twain’s apparently racist comments. Describing his childhood, he wrote, “I was a playmate to all the niggers, preferring their society to that of the elect, I being a person of low-down tastes from the start, notwithstanding my high birth, and ever ready to forsake the communion of high souls if I could strike anything nearer my grade.”

Twain’s most famous portrayal of a Black character is Jim in Huckleberry Finn. Chernow agrees with critics that Jim is a two-dimensional comic foil who displays many of the racist stereotypes of the age. On the other hand, Jim is also the most sympathetic character in the novel and is portrayed far more positively than the equally two-dimensional Southern whites he encounters.

Chernow is rightly critical of efforts to bowdlerize the book by removing the word “nigger,” generally replacing it with “negro” or “slave.” It seems strange to me that efforts to “clean up” the novel have focused on this word. What is truly problematic in Huck Finn is that the Black population is held in chattel slavery. The word is considered offensive largely because it evokes a time when Black people were overwhelmingly enslaved—but in literature set in that period, that is precisely the point.

On Females

Twain inherited and embraced the nineteenth-century cult of femininity. He viewed women as morally superior to men, was a longtime supporter of women’s suffrage and “perfect equality” of the sexes, and was a devoted and faith