Samuel Clemens

From Philosopedia

Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain) (1 June 1835 - 21 April 1910)

“Both Mark Twain and his inventor, Samuel Clemens, continue to give trouble to those guardians of the national mythology to which Twain added so much in his day, often deliberately,” Gore Vidal has written. He then cites an “academic critic,” Guy Cardwell, who “tells us that Clemens was sexually infantile, burnt-out at fifty (if not before), and given to pederastic reveries about little girls, all the while exhibiting an unnatural interest in outhouse humor and other excremental vileness.” Vidal adds, “It is hard to believe that at century’s end, academics of this degraded sort are still doing business, as Twain would put it, at the same old stand.” Referring to Cardwell’s description that Clemens was “banal anal,” Vidal comments, “as opposed to ‘floral oral?’ ”

Vidal is one of many, including William Dean Howells, Bernard DeVoto, Van Wyck Brooks, and Lionel Trilling, who have praised the unique American writer generally considered to be one of its top humanists. Mark Twain’s What Is Man? (1906) and Letters from Earth (published posthumously in 1962) contain a savage attack on orthodox Christianity. Generally conceded to be one of the foremost if not the foremost of American authors,

Contents 1 The Clemens Wit 2 His Freethought 3 Misfortunes 4 The Egress

The Clemens Wit

Clemens is noted for his humor and philosophic gems:

• Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.

• Man is kind enough when he is not excited by religion.

• Man is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion - several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

• Adam was but human - this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake; he wanted it only because it was forbidden.

• When angry, count a hundred; when very angry, swear.

• He (Satan) hasn’t a single salaried helper; the Opposition employ a million.

• The first thing a missionary teaches a savage is indecency. He makes him put clothes on. He is as innocent and clean-minded up to that time as were our first parents before the Lord and not ashamed. He hid the knowledge of indecency from them; the missionary doesn’t.

• Satan to newcomer, with discontent: “The trouble with you Chicago people is that you think you are the best people in Hell - whereas you are merely the most numerous.”

• Martyrdom covers a multitude of sins.

• There is nothing more impressive than a miracle, except credulity that can take it at par.

• Clothes make the man? Nonsense! Clothes are not important. Why, I’d rather associate with Sarah Bernhardt, without a stitch on, than with General Grant in full uniform!

• In God We Trust. It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased. It always sound well - In God We Trust. I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.

• It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me - it’s the parts that I do understand.

• . . . now at least, in our immediate day, we hear a Pope saying slave trading is wrong, and see him sending an expedition to Africa to stop it. The texts remain; it is the practice that has changed. Why? Because the world has corrected the Bible. The Church never corrects it; and also never fails to drop in at the tail of the procession - and take the credit of the correction. As she will presently do in this instance.

His Freethought

With Voltaire-like wit, he satirized hypocrisy and gullibility in The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), which some considered cynical. He mercilessly attacked Mary Baker Eddy’s new religion in Christian Science (1907), which some said was sacrilegious. His daughter, Clara, suppressed Letters from Earth for a long time after his death, believing Soviet Union intellectuals were using it to mock American values.

In their Freethought on the American Frontier, Whitehead and Muhrer conclude that basically Clemens was a theist. The late critic Philip Foner wrote, in Mark Twain: Social Critic, a good analysis of the writer as an infidel:

• It is true that, rather early in life, Twain began to doubt the truth of his religious teachings, and, as his faith in Christian dogma vanished, he rejected orthodox religion. Nonetheless, Twain was deeply interested in the relationship of institutionalized religion to man and society, particularly in reconciling Christian ethics and the social structure of his own day. Hence, while he indicted the influence of religion and the church when it served to fetter man and society, he also called for a religion and a church that would help man and society. A sincere, courageous, vital, realistic, dynamic religion for him meant one that would inspire people to create a better world. He urged all churches, as a major step toward this goal, to tear from Christianity all the camouflage of self-deception, hollow sham and hypocrisy, to strip it of the ornamentation of the ages and to return to the original, sound principles of Jesus Christ—the ethics of humanity. Although Clemens would not like to have been called a philosopher, he might agree to being described as the first philosopher ever to discuss the moral position of the God who created flies.

Twain in his The Book of Mormon called the Mormon bible “an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.” In Following the Equator, he observed, “There are those who scoff at the schoolboy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said ‘Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.’”

In Pudd’nhead Wilson’s Calendar, he wrote, “Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.”

Huckleberry Finn, arguably his best work, has also been termed the major United States novel. Its theme, man’s inhumanity to man, has appealed to adolescents, as has his Tom Sawyer, with its humanistic and happy ending.

Secular humanists are particularly interested in some of the lesser-known works that show his philosophic outlook: Extracts From Adam’s Diary (1904); Eve’s Diary (1906); and Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven (1909).

Clemens was one of the first seven chosen by secret ballot to be one of the original members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He did not, however, receive the most votes: William Dean Howells, whose works have not had the long life of Twain’s, did. Clemens, however, received more than Henry James.

In 1908, responding to a person who asked if he would include Jesus among the 100 greatest men of history, Clemens said he would include Jesus as well as Satan. “These two gentlemen,” he explained, “have had more influence than all others put together, and 99% of it was Satan’s.” He added that the devil is “worth very nearly a hundred times as much to the business as was the influence of the rest of Holy Family put together.”

Misfortunes

Clemens and wife Lizzie, daughter of Judge Jervis J. Langdon of Elmira, New York, had three daughters and one son. His personal misfortunes were many. His son died in infancy, and one daughter died in her teens. When his wife died, Clemens never remarried. Some critics have suggested that his personal troubles led him to become misanthropic. But even when he was in bankruptcy, he was a public hero, one who was greatly in demand as a speaker. Clemens enjoyed speaking out bitterly on public issues, for example denouncing imperialism and objecting to the European subjugation of the Congo.

In the year before Clemens died, his daughter Jean drowned Christmas morning in the bathtub in her father’s house in Redding, Connecticut. As a result, his daughter Clara, who was married to Ossip Gabrilowitsch, inherited his entire estate.

The Egress

A known prankster, Clemens once arranged that his obituary be printed in New York newspapers, after which he had cabled from London that “the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”

When he did die in Connecticut, he was too weak to speak and had written a note to his nurses, “Give me my glasses.” On the bed when he died was Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution.

{BDF; CE; CL; EU, William F. Ryan; FFRF; FUS; JM; RAT; RE; TRI; TSV; Gore Vidal, The New York Review of Books, 23 May 1996}