Twain on the Brain

When I was growing up you couldn’t get away from Mark Twain, from the vintage card game ‘Authors’ to the 1970 animated TV movie A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court to the 1968 New Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the 1973 Reader’s Digest musical Tom Sawyer. Cheap hardcover editions of both Sawyer and Finn abounded at retail stores. They were seen as an easy introduction to classic American literature for the kiddies, embodying Romance (in both senses of the word) and Picaresque Adventure.

Then came the disillusionments of the Watergate Scandal and the Iran Hostage Crisis, and the American idea went into an eclipse. While never being de-throned from his position among literary circles, he became more problematic in social and pop cultural spheres. The ‘rancid’ and bitter aspects of Twain were emphasized to keep him more relatable and relevant, while his 219-time use of the n-word in Huckleberry Finn made his promotion as a ‘children’s author’ controversial to say the least.

David Fleming, our Creative Writing teacher in high school, was a huge proponent of his works, but I remember even then that the marginalization of Twain (and of the Western Canon) seemed to have begun. It all appears to have culminated in the assessment of Futurama’s Big Brain of Tom Sawyer (and by extension Mark Twain’s entire output) as a ‘corny slice of Americana.’

Despite all early promptings, I came to reading Twain fairly late in the game, but then my interest kind of took off. It was certainly helped by the Ken Burns 2001 documentary on Mark Twain, which helped contextualize both the man and his works. Before that I just sort of slid easily along on the common incidents and tropes, made familiar by a dozen adaptations: whitewashing a fence, pretending to be dead and showing up at your own funeral, lost in a cave, adventuring on a raft. “It was Injun Joe! He did it!” An eclipse of the sun and knights on bicycles. Riverboats navigating the Mississippi.

I was pleased to find the original sources of all these images and more. I can certainly see what prompted Mr. Fleming’s fascination with Twain, both life and works. Looking at him you see an image of the American character, with all its flaws and virtues, unquestionably ‘of a time’ but somehow timeless in nature, a comet blazing across the sky that will almost certainly come again. But in what form, and what will it see?