The Human Condition According to Mark Twain

By Bergotte

Mark Twain understood that civilisation is a confidence trick. Not a failed experiment or a work in progress or a fragile achievement requiring defence, but a sustained, organised, multigenerational deception in which human beings persuade themselves and each other that the cruelties they practise are either necessary, natural, or invisible. His comedy — and he is the great American comedian, the writer who made the nation laugh at itself with a completeness that no one before or since has quite managed — is the instrument through which this deception is exposed. The laughter he produces is the laughter of recognition: the shock of seeing the official version of things placed next to the actual version, with nothing between them but the gap, and the gap being everything. He is funny the way a surgeon is precise: because the alternative to precision is leaving something lethal inside.

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Samuel Clemens and His Mask

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, a small settlement of perhaps a hundred people near the Mississippi River, and grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the river town that would become the imaginative landscape of his greatest work. His father died when he was twelve, ending his formal education and beginning a life of itinerant labour — printer’s apprentice, journeyman printer, river pilot, prospector, journalist — that gave him an education of a different and more useful kind: direct, unglamourised acquaintance with the range of American life from its most prosperous to its most desperate, from the drawing rooms of Hartford to the mining camps of Nevada to the slave-holding households of Missouri that he had grown up in and that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

The pen name — Mark Twain, the riverboat term for two fathoms of water, safe depth for navigation — was adopted in 1863 and is itself a kind of argument: the writer as a man who measures depth for a living, who calls out the true bottom beneath the surface, whose professional function is the accurate reporting of how deep it goes. The name is also a mask, and the mask is important. The persona of Mark Twain — the drawling, white-suited, cigar-smoking American sage, the platform lecturer who reduced audiences to helpless laughter, the dinner companion of presidents and industrialists — allowed Samuel Clemens to say things that Samuel Clemens could not have said, to point at the gap between the official version and the actual version under cover of comedy in ways that the unmasked man would not have survived socially or perhaps legally.

He married Olivia Langdon in 1870, had four children, built an extravagant house in Hartford, Connecticut, became rich through his writing and ruined through his investments — a typesetting machine that never worked, a publishing house that went bankrupt — and spent the last two decades of his life oscillating between the public persona of the beloved American humorist and a private darkness of increasing depth and bitterness. His daughter Susy died of meningitis in 1896. His wife Olivia died in 1904. His daughter Jean died on Christmas Eve 1909. He died in April 1910, having predicted with characteristic precision that he had come in with Halley’s Comet in 1835 and would go out with it. He went out with it.

The late writings — The Mysterious Stranger, Letters from the Earth, What Is Man? — are the work of a man who had looked at humanity for seventy-five years and arrived at conclusions so dark that his literary executor suppressed them for decades after his death, judging them too damaging to the beloved public image. They are essential Twain. The comedy and the darkness were always the same thing, and the darkness is the completion of the comedy rather than its betrayal.

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The River

The Mississippi River is not merely the setting of Twain’s greatest work. It is its moral and philosophical centre — the standard against which everything else is measured, and the image of a freedom that the shore cannot provide and cannot tolerate. Life on the Mississippi, published in 1883, is the book in which Twain most directly articulates what the river meant to him: the years of his training as a pilot, the absolute necessity of reading the water — every ripple, every shadow, every change of colour indicating depth or shallowing or obstruction — as a matter of literal life and death, and the way this training in attention transformed his relationship to beauty. He describes learning to read the river so completely that the sunset on the water ceased to be beautiful to him — ceased to be something he simply received and began to be something he analysed, every lovely surface now a text to be decoded for the danger underneath. He mourns this loss and immediately complicates the mourning: the knowledge that replaced the beauty was genuine, and the beauty built on ignorance was a luxury he could not afford on a working river.

This passage is the key to Twain’s method. He is the writer who cannot afford the luxury of beauty built on ignorance, who has trained himself to read the surface for the truth underneath, and who finds — again and again, in the society around him, in the history he was born into, in the institutions his country claimed as its proudest achievements — that the beauty is sustained by a systematic refusal to read the water. The prettiness of the antebellum South depended on not looking at slavery. The innocence of American childhood depended on not looking at what the adults were doing with the land and the people they found on it. The comedy of Huckleberry Finn depends entirely on the reader being willing to look, and the darkness beneath the comedy is what looking reveals.

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Huck and Jim

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884, is the central work in the American literary tradition — the novel from which, Hemingway famously said, all modern American literature derives — and it is a book about conscience: specifically about the process by which a society corrupts the natural moral instincts of a child and replaces them with the official morality that serves the society’s interests, and about the possibility, fragile and imperfect, of resisting that corruption.

Huck Finn is thirteen, the son of the town drunk, outside the social order that Tom Sawyer’s world represents, which is precisely what makes him capable of seeing what Tom cannot see. He has not been fully formed by the confidence trick. He knows enough of it to speak its language, but not enough to have internalised it completely, and the novel is the record of the tension between his natural moral responses — which are, consistently, the right responses — and the official morality he has been taught, which is, consistently, wrong.

The central moral crisis of the novel arrives when Huck must decide whether to turn Jim in — Jim, the runaway slave who has become his companion and his friend on the raft, whose freedom is, by the laws of Missouri and the moral framework of Huck’s society, Huck’s obligation to betray. Huck writes the letter to Miss Watson telling her where Jim can be found. He holds it in his hand. And then he thinks about the river, and about Jim, and about the time Jim called him the best friend he ever had, and he says to himself: All right, then, I’ll go to Hell — and tears the letter up.

The scene is the moral summit of American literature, and what makes it so is the precise nature of Huck’s reasoning. He does not tear up the letter because he has worked through the ethics of slavery and concluded that it is wrong. He tears it up because he cannot betray Jim, because the specific human reality of the specific man on the raft overrides the abstract moral framework that says he should. He believes, at the moment of decision, that he is doing wrong — that he is damning himself — and he does it anyway, because doing wrong by his society’s lights is less impossible than doing wrong by the lights of what he actually knows and feels.

This is Twain’s most radical claim about the human condition: that natural human sympathy, when it has not been completely destroyed by social formation, is a more reliable moral instrument than the official morality that society provides; that the child who has not been fully socialised sees more clearly than the adult who has; and that the capacity for genuine moral action in a corrupt society requires the willingness to be, by that society’s standards, bad. Huck does not become a hero at the end of the novel. He lights out for the Territory — away from civilisation, away from the shore, away from the aunt who wants to adopt him and sivilise him — because he has seen what sivilisation does and he wants no more of it.

The novel’s famous problem is its ending, in which Tom Sawyer arrives and takes over and subjects Jim — already legally free, as it turns out, through a circumstance nobody bothered to mention — to an elaborate and painful series of Tom’s literary games, his romanticised escape plans drawn from adventure stories, while Huck goes along with it. Critics have argued for a century about what Twain intended. The most honest reading is probably the most uncomfortable one: that Tom’s games are the novel’s image of what literature does when it substitutes the romance of freedom for the reality, when the story of liberation becomes its own form of entertainment that leaves the actual condition of the liberated person unchanged. Huck goes along because he has always gone along with Tom, because the pull of the social world and its games is strong even for someone who has seen through them. The ending is a failure of nerve that Twain was honest enough to leave in, because it is true.

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The Confidence Man

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Pudd’nhead Wilson — the range of Twain’s fiction is as wide as American life itself, and each work takes a different angle on the central preoccupation. A Connecticut Yankee, published in 1889, is the most directly satirical: a nineteenth-century American engineer transported to sixth-century Arthurian England, who introduces modern technology and democratic institutions and ends by presiding over a massacre. The optimism of American progress — the confidence that technology and democracy represent the direction of history — is followed to its conclusion and the conclusion is catastrophic. The man from the most advanced civilisation on earth is also the man who kills the most people.

Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1894, is the darkest of the novels and the one in which Twain’s argument about race reaches its most unsparing expression. A slave woman, Roxy, switches her light-skinned son with the white baby she nurses, and the novel follows the consequences across twenty years: the black child raised as white, the white child raised as a slave, both formed entirely by the social position they occupy rather than the biological one they were born to. The novel’s conclusion — that race is a social construction whose consequences are entirely real and entirely lethal — was not a comfortable proposition in 1894, and it is expressed not through polemic but through the merciless logic of the plot, which demonstrates the proposition by simply following it out.

The confidence man — the figure who appears in various forms throughout Twain’s work and reaches its most concentrated expression in the Duke and the King in Huckleberry Finn — is the symbol of the social order itself: the man who makes his living by telling people what they want to hear, by performing the version of reality that serves his interests, by exploiting the gap between the official story and the actual one. The Duke and the King are comic monsters, and they are also, Twain insists, indistinguishable in their methods from the respectable institutions of society — the church, the law, the government — that perform the same function with more dignity and less honesty about what they are doing.

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The Innocents Abroad

The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869, is the book that made Twain famous and the one in which his comic method is most purely displayed. It is the account of an American excursion to Europe and the Holy Land, and its subject is the collision between American informality and European pretension — or rather, the collision between the American willingness to see what is actually there and the European insistence on seeing what the guidebook says should be there.

The Europeans, in Twain’s account, are performing a relationship to culture — performing reverence, performing aesthetic response, performing the historically informed appreciation that their education has told them to perform — while the Americans, unencumbered by the performance, actually look. This is comedy, and it is also a serious epistemological claim: that cultural formation, however valuable, can substitute performance for perception, can train the eye to see what it has been told to see rather than what is there. The famous moment in which Twain looks at the old masters in the Italian galleries and finds them dark, cracked, and unimpressive — and says so, against the weight of centuries of received opinion — is the river pilot reading the water again, calling the true depth.

The book is not philistine. Twain is not arguing that culture is worthless or that the American tourist who knows nothing is superior to the European connoisseur who knows everything. He is arguing that knowledge, when it has hardened into performance, becomes its own form of blindness, and that the willingness to say I don’t see it is the beginning of genuine seeing rather than its defeat.

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The Dark Laughter

The late Twain — the Twain of The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth, written in the last decades of his life and largely withheld from publication during it — is the completion of everything the early and middle Twain had been moving toward. The comedy has not gone. The precision of observation has not gone. What has gone is any residual hopefulness about the human species as a collective moral project.

Letters from the Earth, in which Satan writes home to the archangels describing the extraordinary spectacle of humanity, is among the most savage pieces of sustained satirical writing in the English language. The humans have invented a God in their own image — vindictive, vain, capricious, obsessed with praise — and then constructed a Heaven in which they will spend eternity doing the things they most enjoy on earth: singing hymns and playing harps, which they do not enjoy on earth and have never done voluntarily. They believe their God loves them while he destroys them by flood and plague and war. They believe they are the pinnacle of creation while demonstrating, at every opportunity, the bottomlessness of their capacity for self-deception and cruelty.

The Mysterious Stranger, in its various unfinished versions, takes this further into something that approaches philosophical nihilism: the dream-self of a boy in medieval Austria is visited by a being who calls himself Young Satan, who performs miracles with casual indifference, who destroys lives as easily as he creates them, and who concludes — in the novel’s famous final speech — that life is a dream, that nothing exists but thought, that the universe is a fiction and humanity a joke told inside it. It is the river pilot’s final reading of the water: all the way down, nothing solid.

Whether this is Twain’s considered philosophical position or the expression of a grief so extensive — Susy dead, Olivia dead, the money gone, the country he loved still maintaining racial terror thirty years after the war that was supposed to end it — that no other language was adequate to it, is a question that cannot be definitively answered. Both things were true. The grief was real and the darkness was considered, and they fed each other until the end.

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What Twain Knows

What Twain knows about the human condition — what the river and the boy and the comedy and the darkness all add up to — is something that the more formally philosophical writers in this series approach from the outside and that Twain knows from the inside: that the stories a society tells about itself are not innocent. They are the mechanism by which the society perpetuates what it needs to perpetuate and conceals what it needs to conceal, and the cost of the concealment is paid by the people whose reality the stories most require to be invisible.

Huck Finn is the instrument of this knowledge because he is not yet fully a story — not yet fully formed by the official narratives of his society, capable therefore of responding to Jim as Jim rather than as the narrative of Jim that his society has provided. The novel is the record of that capacity and its fragility, of the way the shore keeps reaching out to reclaim the raft, of the genuine difficulty of maintaining against the weight of everything you have been told the simple, costly perception that the man in front of you is a man.

The comedy is not a softening of this. It is the sharpest available instrument for making it visible, because comedy requires the sudden juxtaposition of what is claimed and what is, the gap held up to the light until the audience cannot pretend not to see it. Twain is funny for the same reason the truth is funny: because the distance between the official version and the actual version is, when you see it clearly, genuinely absurd. The absurdity does not make it less lethal. It makes it more visible, and visibility — the willingness to read the water, to call the true depth, to say all right, then, I’ll go to Hell and mean it — is the beginning of everything.

He went out with the comet, as he predicted. The river is still there. The raft is still moving. The shore is still trying to take everyone back.

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Sources and Further Reading

Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Penguin Classics, 2003.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Twain, Mark. Life on the Mississippi. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Twain, Mark. The Innocents Abroad. Penguin Classics, 2002.

Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Twain, Mark. Pudd’nhead Wilson and Those Extraordinary Twins. Penguin Classics, 1986.

Twain, Mark. Letters from the Earth. Edited by Bernard DeVoto. Harper and Row, 1962.

Twain, Mark. The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories. Harper and Brothers, 1916.

Powers, Ron. Mark Twain: A Life. Free Press, 2005.

Kaplan, Justin. Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain. Simon and Schuster, 1966.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices. Oxford University Press, 1993.

Ellison, Ralph. “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke.” In Shadow and Act. Random House, 1964.

Hemingway, Ernest. Green Hills of Africa. Scribner, 1935.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard University Press, 1992.

DeVoto, Bernard. Mark Twain’s America. Little, Brown, 1932.