We dedicated an episode of Copper Robot to discussing the life and work of Mark Twain, a week before the centennial of his death.
Twain’s voice is as alive and relevant today as it was when he was alive. That’s not always a happy thing, as when he spoke out against religious hypocrisy, bigotry, and American imperialism. We talked about Twain with two experts on his life and work.
Listen to the whole episode here:
Why is Mark Twain still a giant today? Twain is “every virtue and vice in what we laughingly call the American character,” said one of our guests, David Sloane, an English professor at the University of New Haven and author of Mark Twain as a Literary Comedian. “He’s an egalitarian, he’s an absolute democrat, he’s entrepreneurial to a fault.”
Sloane quoted from Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (link to Gutenberg free e-book edition) to make his point. “Pap always says, ‘Take a chicken when you get a chance, ’cause of you don’t ned one you can always find somebody who does, and a favor ain’t evern forgot.’ He is empathetic to others, ‘I reckon Jim was ‘mos white inside as I was.’ And egregiousness — he is always over the top. In fact, his motto is my motto: ‘Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you want afterward.’”
We talked about Twain’s life growing up on the banks of the Mississippi River, and how his frontier childhood affected the rest of his life and work.
“He spent a lot of his life critiquing smalltown America,” said our other guest, Harold Bush, a professor of English at St. Louis University, and author of Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age. “You might say he had a love-hate relationship with Hannibal and with Missouri the rest of his life. Depending on who he was talking to or what the topic of conversation was, he could say wonderful things about Missouri or he could say very terrible things about the slave system and small-mindedness.”
We discussed the changing focus on different elements of Twain’s work over the years. In the 1950s, you talked about the American heartland with regard to Twain, and social criticism and the awful towns along the Mississippi River that Twain portrays, Sloane said. By the 1980s, the character of Jim from Huck Finn figures prominently in Twain discussion, along with the related issues of race, and whether Twain is a racist.
Twain gets a lot of credit for enlightened views toward race. He praised African-Americans and counted many among his friends. But Nany Kayo, director of Virtual Native Lands in Second Life and a Cherokee in First Life, brought another perspective to our discusion, noting that Twain wrote scathingly about American Indians, shockingly so to present-day readers: “mark twain was a virulent racist against certain people. as a matter of fact,” Kayo said in text chat. She quoted from Roughing It, about Indians:
He is ignoble – base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent death can startle him into a spasm of virtue. The ruling trait of all savages is a greedy and consuming selfishness, and in our Noble Red Man it is found in its amplest development. His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts … The scum of the earth!
She added:
Mark Twain’s hatred of American Indians is well known among Natives and it becomes a divisive issue when Native American children are forced to read Mark Twain’s work, faced with praise of this writer as an American icon. It reinforces the impression that American Indians are not Americans.
We also talked about Sloane’s ancestry — in addition to being a scholar about Twain, Sloane is descended from another colossus of American history, Thomas Alva Edison. Sloane is writing a biography of his grandmother, Edison’s daughter Madeleine.
Watch the video of the episode:
Harold Bush and his Huck Finn avatar, by Rissa Maidstone of World2Worlds.
David Sloane and his Mark Twain avatar, also by Rissa.
