Professor David Peimer
Why You’ve Got to Love Mark Twain!

Professor David Peimer - Why You’ve Got to Love Mark Twain!

- Goes without saying, but all thoughts to all our family and friends in Israel and everywhere. So, okay, I’m going to dive in with Mark Twain. And a little bit of a difference because I think that there’s something about this guy that, I mean, Thomas Edison said it, you know, you know, one loves one’s family. Well, he said, you know, he thinks every American, I’m paraphrasing here, loves their family. And then if they had to choose somebody else, they would generally select Mark Twain to love. That’s Thomas Edison, interestingly, saying it all those years ago. What is it that makes this man lovable in a way, not being mushy, sentimental, and what is it that makes him real and alive, perhaps, that he can still connect with us, you know, over a century and a half later. Is there anything, or does he really belong to an interesting but historical past? And I think there are things, I really do, and I find myself, every now and then, going back to Mr. Twain and reading it with a smile and a bit of a warm glow, which I try to say to myself is not sentiment but is genuine. And I think there is something of that humanity in the man, a wisdom in the man, which transcends his own particular era. And obviously, the defining part is the Civil War and after that in America and before that. So, you know, I think there’s something profoundly deep. And the other thing about it is obviously the wit, which I think is extraordinary. And his ability with language to put together words in a certain way, which constantly surprise and inspire and yet give us a smile. You know, I think Churchill managed it quite often and, you know, quite a few other writers, but not easy. And the prodigious amount that he wrote is extraordinary.

And I think that does last over the years. And we can talk of, you know, Jungian archetypes of the wise man and the humorist, the wit, the satirist, et cetera. But he’s constantly giving us that satirical, marginal perspective on human foibles, human life, history, society, all the things that we get all caught up in in our lives and other things as well, which I want to talk about during today. So a little bit about his life and then about his wit. The two main books, obviously, on Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. And then a couple of clips I want to show with two wonderful American actors, Hal Holbrook and Val Kilmer, who acted in one-man shows about them based on Mark Twain. I think they capture some qualities of the character so well. And then I want to have a look at what he wrote about Jewish people. So just to… And I sort of feel this question of why do we like Twain in this way still and with this kind of genuine fondness? And in tough times, sometimes it can be very useful and helpful, I think, to go back to these icons of humanity almost. Okay. So Mark Twain, these are some pictures of him, obviously. The one at the bottom is, which I’m going to show, it’s the only film ever made of Mark Twain. And it was done by Thomas Edison who went to visit him in his home. That’s fascinating. Twain is a writer, he’s a satirist, humorist, very popular, especially for the two main novels.

Edison, from a very different world of science… But such respect between them that Edison goes to him and films him with a silent movie camera. That bottom clip is from that, which I’m going to show a little bit of now if we can… Sorry, if we can go onto the next slide, please, before that. This is Mark Twain in Nikolai Tesla’s laboratory 1894. So he was a lifelong friend of Tesla also. Fascinating that the scientists, you know, not only literati and humorists and satirists and others, but he was very close and he had patents that he had, Mark Twain. Friendly with Tesla, going to visit him often. There’s a picture of a young Mark Twain in Tesla’s laboratory. Going to see Edison, Edison coming to him. All of these things in his life. Go on to the next slide, please. This is some fun pictures. The top one on the left is he got an honorary PhD from Oxford University here in England. And then some fun pictures next to it. And then there’s the classic, I think one of the classic caricatures of Twain, you know, done by a satirical cartoonist, you know, the white hair, the pipe, and, of course, the white suit that he always had and the moustache. Very aware of, and way before celebrity was even rarely thought of, I think he prefigures the notion of contemporary celebrity, Mark Twain. And he knew how to commercialise it. He knew how to make it an icon, and he knew how to make it globally.

And obviously, in America, so fascinating and attractive and intriguing. He understood what we today would call obvious celebrity. And you know, how they’ve almost, well, to a degree taken over from leaders, from heroes almost, this whole obsession in our times with celebrity. But I think he got it very, very early on in the way that Charles Dickens did in England going out, you know, reading his works, Twain doing the same, giving talks, you know, even more than Dickens, I think because he spanned America and then did it around the world, travelling much more than than Dickens. So a couple of the fun pictures here. If we go on to the next one, please. So this is Mark Twain filmed by Edison, as we’ll see. Just a short, yeah, short little clip. If we can show it please. Thanks, Emily. So you can see a silent movie, there he is. Obviously, it’s black and white, but he’s still in his white suit. And there’s Mr. Twain. It’s the only known film of Mark Twain. And Edison coming to his house to film it. I think it brings a bit of the reality into our collective imagination of Mr. Twain. You know, nothing great about it, but it’s as an archival source, you know, just wonderful to the human reality, the human behind it, you know? Okay, thank you. If we can hold it, freeze it there for a moment. Thank you. So, humorist, essayist, entrepreneur, disastrous investor, lecturer, writer extraordinaire, William Faulkner called him the father of American literature. The writer obviously of the two great novels, “Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” 1876, and “Huckleberry Finn,” 1884.

And I always liked it, and I’m sure many people have studied in far greater depth than I have, the two novels. And that, of course, it’s the adventures. Very popular at the time, you know, the adventures of, in literature written in certain cultures in the West, and it is an adventure. They are adventure, “Boys’ Own” stories, you know, and they take us on an adventure. They take us on a travel trip, almost. A fantasy, a reality, a romantic. You know, do they remain romantic? Are they sentimental and nostalgic? Do they have nothing to say to us today? I want to argue that they do have a couple of things still to say, even though they are obviously of their periods. And a man profoundly defined, I think, by that whole civil war period, obviously. Before, and obviously, during the Civil War and afterwards, that extraordinary period in American history, which is if one imagines in that moment, you know, utterly earth-shattering in a way, and yet, able to keep humour and wit about him, and a man who’s not scared to travel. He travelled so much, which gave such a perspective on the world, and not that many writers did from England or America, I was talking about the West at the moment, travelled nearly as extensively as Mark Twain did. And I think there’s something, as we all know, you know, it does, the cliche is broadens the mind, but I think it’s true, it really does.

So the two great novels, 1876, 1884. He earned money from his writing, his lectures, where he earned most of the money. He lost most of it, disastrous investments, but bankrupt and a standard oil executive, Henry Huddleston Rogers, helped bail him out. Yeah, this is a guy who’s involved in his world of investing, making money, losing money, writing, travelling, having an opinion on everything, and writing adventure novels, you know, “Boys’ Own” stories, you know, he’s a guy who’s living basically. As we all know, I’m sure, many people know, he’s born shortly after Halley’s Comet passed relatively close by to Earth. And of course, he predicted that his death would accompany its return and was, you know, not that many days off the mark. I mean, he did die. His parents had seven children and only three lived beyond early childhood. When he was four, the family moved to Hannibal, Missouri. the port town on the great Mississippi River, and inspired, and of course, as we all know, Hannibal, Missouri, inspired the fictional town of St. Petersburg in the two big novels of his. Of course, slavery was legal when he was in the early stages of life. His father died of pneumonia when Mark Twain was 11, which is important because he has to go out and earn money to help support the family, make something, he has the family and he’s got to forge his own life. Everything. 11 years, father died. He leaves school when he’s 18. Amongst many other jobs, he worked as a printer in New York, and he educates himself in public libraries in the evenings. Gets a pilot licence so he can pilot, steamboat pilot, up and down the Mississippi. And of course, that’s where the pen name Mark Twain came from, a craft or a river depth of about two fathoms, you know, mark twain, and he liked that name. So Samuel Longhorn Clemens becomes Mr. Twain.

I think it’s also important he doesn’t have university education. He’s got to go out and earn some bucks for the family at a very young age. And for himself, he’s got to forge his own sense of adulthood, of manhood, you know, all of those things at this age. And I think it does mark him, that on a personal level, together with obviously the Civil War era that he’s living in. So I think that the fact that he has to self-educate, I think, you know, one can’t underestimate for a second, in the age… And I don’t want to get into what’s the nightmare happening on so many universities in the west, certainly in England and America at the moment, but that their very concept of going to university, education, you know, all the rest of it that we know, he has none of it. And I don’t think we can underestimate for a second the profound importance and the profound ambitious drive to work in the day and do it at night. Self-educate. Then he goes to the west, and there, his experiences in the west and the west is opening up more and more. We spoke about the cowboy period last week. There’s only 30 years between 1865 and 1895 is the real cowboy period. And you know, all the myth in the 25% are black cowboys and the myth around the cowboy era ‘cause there were only 45 actual deaths from gunshots, which is an average of, you know, 1 ½ a year maximum, and yet such a mythology created around it, not only by Hollywood, but by entertainment agencies and agents all over. So 1865, 1895 is, in a sense, the cowboy period. So he’s living through all of these things.

Go to the west, the frontier, minimal law, to put it mildly in one way. It inspires his novel, another one written in 1870, “Roughing It.” He moved to San Francisco, 1864, and he found his vocation as a journalist, which is important because it’s the ability, in those times, especially, not a journalist today, necessarily, which is filled with influencer, social media influence, obviously instant communications, TV and so on, but is the written word. And to write it and send out the writing, globally. And I think the focus on thinking and writing thoughtfully to communicate to as big an audience as possible is so crucial, to be a journalist in this period. And today, it’s much more about, you know, how you create a celebrity of yourself as a performing journalist, I want to suggest. It’s not only your ability with language and ability to ask questions, you are a performer and a celebrity. Very different notion of the idea of journalists as it would’ve been if we imagine his times. It’s writing travel adventures. It’s seeing life as stories, writing stories, a facility with language, a love of language, putting words together to not only describe but interpret events in one’s own native American country or around the world, create fiction with nonfiction. The blurred boundaries are merging. 1867, he works for the “New York Tribune” and they fund his trip to Europe and the Middle East, you know, 'cause, of course, he went to what was then, obviously, Palestine, the Middle East and Europe. He married Olivia in New York in 1870, and she came from what is known as, inverted commas, a wealthy, liberal family. Through her, he met abolitionists, atheists, activists for women rights, which is crucial. Harriet Beecher Stowe, he meets, Frederick Douglass 'cause Olivia’s father has helped Frederick Douglass. The marriage lasted 34 years until her death in 1904.

She rejected him a couple of times. But being Mark Twain, he persisted and won her hand. Financially, he made money through his writing, as I mentioned, and the lectures. He lost the most through, as I mentioned, disastrous investments. He even lost a large portion of his wife’s inheritance. But always got back to his lecturing and writing, which attracted huge audiences. Reading and… To hear his lectures in order to get back, to recover financially. He lectured in Hawaii, Australia, Sri Lanka, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Europe, England, Austria, the Middle East, as I mentioned. This is an extraordinary amount of travelling in those days. And again, a journalist, travel writer, adventurer, all those things come together in his period. And there is something nostalgically romantic about imagining oneself doing all of that, which is so different from, you know, being a travel writer or a journalist even today. All these other things have to be taken into account. But the very idea of discoveries and new things happening all over, I think it is part of his world. And of course, the new America is being born, and he finally returns to America after a lot of travel in 1900 to pay off his debts. He was in great demand as a speaker like Dickens. And his solo humorous talks. And I’m going to show these clips from the two actors I mentioned to give just a glimpse of what it might have been like to go and listen to him talk. Of course, it’s all before movies and everything else. So it’s a form of mass entertainment. And I love the idea of a writer, a journalist, a travel writer, an adventure writer creating enormous audiences and people going and listening to them in the ancient, ancient art of storytelling.

Something so human about that theatrical interaction. It’s tragically in… And he almost, in a way, begins, I think, a version of standup comedy because there’s always the humorous twist in Mark Twain, which is very different to Charles Dickens and others, they’re reading their stories, which are meant to be gripping so that you’ll come back to the next lecture where he’ll read the next part of the story, you know, what’s going to happen next. I think that, you know, together with this notion of understanding the celebrity status in it’s very, very baby phase, I think you also get a sense he has of a standup comic, what becomes much more today, you know, you feel the one liners are coming through character and thought rather than just standup, deliver as many witty one liners. And I think it’s a secret to really great comedy. You know, Trevor Noah, I think, captures it 'cause he tells stories, you know, which are about himself, but in ways which I think echo a little bit of Mark Twain, I’m not saying consciously. An 1896 tragedy, his daughter, Susie, dies of meningitis. And of course his wife, you know, some years later. I think the other thing that he brings is colloquial speech into his wit, into writing “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer.” He brings that kind of a celebration of, you know, the crafted ordinariness of everyday colloquial language. You’re not trying to get for a highfalutin, you know, a whole different kind of elitist almost language, but, you know, speaking to people, educated or not. Obviously in the two great novels, he draws on his own life.

And as Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain, 'Huckleberry Finn.’” So it’s not, you know, these guys are not just trying to give him false praise. This is from Faulkner and Hemingway, really locating the beginning of, a huge amount in this guy, in Twain, storytelling, wit, characters, all of these things. And understanding how to try and capture human stories on the canvas of vast historical change. I think, autobiography. He was only published in 2010. He insisted it was 100 years after his death. It became a bestseller. Interesting. 100 years after his death, an autobiography becomes a bestseller, his own autobiography. I don’t know many writers who can achieve that at all. In 1900, he had many political awakenings, I think partly connected to his wife, Olivia, you know, and her very liberal instincts and life in terms of, obviously, suffragettes, in terms of women’s rights, obviously post-slavery, you know, and many other things, and equality and ideas of it. He described his political awakening in 1900, interestingly about the Philippine-American War. And he wrote, “I wanted the American Eagle to scream into the Pacific. Here are a people, the Philippine, who have suffered for three centuries. We Americans can make them free as ourselves. Put a miniature of the American constitution, a float in the Pacific, start a brand new republic. It seemed to me a great task.” Beautiful writing. And he goes on, “But I have thought since then, and I have read about the end of the Spanish-American war, and I see that maybe we have gone to conquer, not to redeem.” Great mistake that he in intuits and understands, made by many cultures throughout history, you know, gone to conquer, not redeem. There’s an interesting story, true or not.

When the Nazis captured Stalin’s son, and that Stalin’s son said to them, “If you had come as liberators, not conquerors, you might get far more of the Soviet people behind you.” I’m paraphrasing what may or may not have been a true story, but is quite a well-known story. And that’s a subtle but very important difference how one is seen by the host nation, in a way. He was critical of American, sorry, of European imperialists, in particular Cecil Rhodes with, you know, the great imperialist wanting the path from the road and the rails from South Africa all the way up to Cairo. King Leopold II of Belgium, the horror visited on the Belgian and the Congo people, terrible, the tragedies in that period of colonisation. And of course, the colonies in Africa and scramble for Africa. He understood the flip side of revolutions, the French revolution, you know, and how it lent in the end to a military dictatorship with Napoleon and the reign of terror and all these things. So he understands history, cultures, worlds. This is a really self-taught, thoughtful, wise man. And I’m going to focus on the archetype of the wise guy, the wise man. Civil rights, of course, he was a supporter of the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, and he talked about, you know, colonisation as robbery and humiliation, slow murder in merciless ways, slow murder in merciless ways, through poverty and our whiskey. Always got to throw the twist in, and our whiskey. So you have a smile at the end, even though it’s a devastating critique, especially for his own times. “A humorous thing in this world, man’s notion is that he is less savage than other savages.” Interesting phrase that he puts it in one phrase, you know, and he sees the terrible dark humour in that phrase, I think.

On religion, of course, he was critical of organised religion. He wrote, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.” Hmm, one sentence, he gets it. And I love, it’s not just aphorism, I think, it’s more than that. It crystallises a whole body of thought in a phrase. He avoided, however, being smart, publishing his most controversial opinions on religion because, of course, he could be banned and not sell, and nobody would come to his lectures and other things. He raises money to build a Presbyterian church in Nevada in 1864. But he also writes, “One notable thing about Christianity is that it is bloody, merciless and a predator.” It’s the words that are put together that are endlessly evocative. And then the wit. “I like dressing in plain white. One of my sorrows when the summer ends is that I must put off my cheery and comfortable white clothes and enter for the winter into the depressing captivity of the shapeless and degrading black clothes.” You have to laugh and smile. You have to… One has to enjoy the relishing of language and the wit. All he’s talking about is changing some clothing from summer clothes into winter. But he’s got to always find another way to come into it from the margin, from the outside, into the banal, the very ordinary. We also can’t ignore that he grew up seeing violence and death at a young, young age. Nine years old, he sees a man murder a cattle rancher in front of his eyes. He watches a slave who’s attacked by an overseer with a piece of iron viciously. The town, of course, inspired the town, Hannibal, you know, inspired what became novel St. Petersburg in the novels, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

But these imaginary river towns on the Mississippi are complex places in his book. They’re not just naive, nostalgic, pretty boyhood adventure story places. They’re exuberant, but there’s also cruelty, poverty, drunkenness, loneliness, boredom. All of this is subtly, I think, in the novels. He, as I said, he went to out west and he did a whole lot of things. That’s where he started to become a journalist and then travelled abroad. 1869, he wrote one of his book, I think, really good travel books, “Innocence Abroad,” published, became a bestseller. And he becomes so well known, so well iconic through the novels, his travel writing that a massive figure in America and way beyond, I would say. And of course, writing the novels. Okay, if we can go onto to the next one, please. Okay, this is just, again, a picture of him, right? Well, this is now Val Kilmer in a play that Val Kilmer worked on for a couple of years where, he’s a wonderful actor, he’s playing Mark Twain. It’s his own script, which he got to help with, but he worked with.

• “Wish to saddle his mind. It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me, it’s the parts that I do understand.” He’s just got a way of being non-judgmental and loving about all of our flaws that’s really inspiring. I think people will enjoy the play. We had a terrible teacher, Mrs. Wiley. She stood above that class with her old, boney hand shaking and staring right at me. “Now, are there any idiots in the room? And if there are to please stand up.” So after long silence, I stood up. “Oh, oh, oh, now then young Sammy, why do you think you’re an idiot?” I said, “Actually, I don’t, I just hate to see you standing up there all by yourself.” Nailed her.

• I think he’s trying to give us a sense of obviously Twain living, you know, in his play, “Citizen Twain.” And as Val Kilmer says in the interview, “Non-judgmental human foibles.” You know, that’s his way of coming in even to all this massive changes in history and all his travels and his life going on. Okay, if we can show the next one is from Hal Holbrook.

• I miss my home and family and my fireside and the cats. I like cats. They’re quieter than children. I like everything about cats except their singing voices. We have one, a Presbyterian soprano. She is partial to hymns. Sings “Old Hundred” on a picket fence every night out back of the house. It’s useless to shout at her. She takes it for applause and tries harder. I have often thought how beautiful she would be in death. But a cat is a fine animal. If you could cross a man with a cat, you’d improve the man and deteriorate the cat.

• This goes onto another piece.

• When I was putting together my first book, I did a stretch in Washington as a newspaper correspondent. And every day I went over to the Congress and reported on the inmates there. It is very entertaining. One of ‘em, one of 'em got a bill passed to construct a dam where there wasn’t any water, but they didn’t find out about it until they built the dam. So they had an investigation to see if they could build a river to save the dam. God made idiots first. That was for practise. Then he made Congress. I have always wondered why God invented lawyers. Did his mind wander? The more I see of lawyers, the more I favour hanging. Now, I’ve never taken any exercise except sleeping and resting. I could never see any benefit in being tired. When the urge to exercise comes over me, I lie down until it passes away. Now, as for drinking, I have very strict rules about that. When others drink, I like to help. But the point I want to make is that you cannot reach old age by another man’s road. My habits protect my life, but they’d probably assassinate you. You have to make up your own rules and then stick to 'em. And that’s not as easy as it sounds. But there’ll always be somebody trying to improve you. Try and take all the pleasure right out of your life and replace it with dreariness. But don’t let 'em. If you can’t make 70 by a comfortable road, don’t go.

• Okay, if we can show just the beginning of the next one. Show this one.

• We want to know what the human race is truly like, observe it at election time. That’s when the parade of half truth goes marching by. It’s a monument to the gospel that truth is stranger than fiction. The candidates rearrange the facts to suit themselves and keep the lies and the half truths spinning in the air while the great gullible public cheers and shouts and stomps its approval the way they always do when a politician has just said something they don’t understand. We can discount 90% of what the candidates say at election time and assign to the softening of the brain because the contents of their skull could change places with the contents of a pie. And nobody be the worst off it but the pie. There is not one brain among them superior to the rest. And yet this sarcastic fact does not humble the arrogance or diminish the know-it-all pronouncements of a single ignoramus among them. They are the science of an ancestral procession of ignoramuses, stretching back to the missing link. The one true fact that rises above this circus of mendacity and misrepresentation is that truth has no place in Washington.

• I think it’s extraordinary how Val Kilmer, briefly at the beginning, and then Hal Holbrook capture in their two performances something of the character that we imagine Mark Twain to be. And how they put together these witty one-liners and yet create a sense of storytelling, sense of sharing with us some of the standup comic of today. But this is going back over a century. And you know, that their insights and wit seem almost as fresh as they should be written yesterday in our own times. I find it extraordinary that somehow Mark Twain got it and was able to put it into his words with the humour so the rage and the pain is underneath like all great humour, but is, of course, covered in wit, which makes us much more endearing and much more connected to it. I think it’s fantastic. And you know, Hal Holbrook’s performance, I think it went on for over two years. He won an award, had over 2,000 performances, I think, or it went even longer. So, so many years after he lived, still attracting so many audiences. And it’s because in these performances, of course, they are very good actors, but they are creating character, and through that comes the stories, the wit, the ancient art of storytelling. It’s not just standing up and delivering, you know, funny one-liners. Very, very different. So we get a whole attitude and a vision of life, ultimately. And I don’t think I’m romanticising here, but a vision of life. And that’s the journey they take us on. And that’s what Mark Twain does for us. You know, and a vision which is partly nostalgic, belongs to a whole other era, but at the same time, it echoes, you know, because it is a certain witty wisdom inside it.

Okay, if we can show the next slide, please. Right, the two great novels and of course, you know, and I want you to show these, 'cause these are from very early days of the publication of, first, “Tom Sawyer.” And obviously, there’s the boy, look at the clothing, the costume, what’s behind, adventure story, “Boys’ Own” stuff. All of this is in it, you know, it’s obviously it’s meant to be romantic and fun and lively. Everything of young boys, you know, adventure times, romantic and all of that. Tom has a series, genius for adventure, genius for adventure. This idea, which goes way back, going back to Don Quixote and others, you know, storytelling as adventure, life as adventure, travel writing as adventure, travel itself, life, daily, everything. All of this without getting over romantic about it. It’s a different sense when one uses that word inside it. And yet it must have been so normal. And so just part of the everyday parlance in his own time and yet is, you know, we can approach it cynically or romantically or both in our own times. But I find that it opens a bit of a moment of fun. Let’s have a look at, you know, I think that he… And of course because this was based more on his life in a way growing up, you know, on the Mississippi River, you know, “Tom Sawyer” was based more, and he wrote, sorry, I think it shows the conflict between individualism, which may be hubristic, it may be even arrogant, self-confident, over-confident and self-invention, which goes way back in culture to the Greeks and others. But that wonderful dramatic tension between a kind of self-pride bordering on arrogance, of individualism and self invention, which became something, I think, of a wonderfully American theme in life and a way of seeing, a way of living, you know, from the old world to the new world, trying to get at it somehow inside this character.

Of course, he understood publicity, branding, as I said. He understood how to use 19th century media. I mean, if he lived today, I’m sure he’d be using Twitter and blogging and X, I mean, whatever, all these things, Facebook, I’m sure he would be one of the first to be using it all, this cult of a celebrity for commercial aims. In fact, “The New York Times” once had a headline in his times Mark Twain turns into a corporation. So he understood, of course, he understood the hucksters and the hustlers and the grifters and, you know, all of that as well, which later become more like the Damon Runyon characters, if you like. He understood how to take ordinary life and make it something mythical. The same way as those writers of the original cowboy stories and filmmakers understood how they could take from something quite ordinary in a way and make it into mythical. And that’s where he’s bridging and that’s where the adventure comes in to relatively ordinary stories about a gun slinger, about a young kid called Billy whatever. And he, you know, is good with a gun. How to turn these stories into something mythical and yet based on something ordinary, and that is as ancient as writing and literature itself and poetry, you know, to turn it into myth. Bob Dylan does it brilliantly in his lyrics. He turns ordinary experience of emotion and life into something mythical with a thread of a link to reality. So the cult of the personality, the cult of the lecturer, the cult of the novelist, cult of the commentator, the travel and humour writer is all in this sort of folksy humour that we see in the portrayals, I think, by those two actors. And of course, “Huckleberry Finn” is a raft trip down the Mississippi, episodic tale. It’s almost like a Garden of Eden journey, Edenic.

Away from civilization and a glimpse of the human wilderness and, of course, social issues with sharp aphorisms. And that’s where I think how he has that turn of phrase with the wit. And many can do that turn of phrase and aphorism, but not with the wit. He writes, “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” I’ve always come back to that line so often. “The very ink with which history is written is merely fluid prejudice.” I mean, it’s more than an aphorism that is clever. It’s biting satire about human society. Of course, “Huckleberry Finn” is based on a real boy. And you know, we all know the beginning of the novel, I’m quoting, “He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed. But he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” And isn’t that the ultimate archetype for a mythical hero? That he was unwashed, he wasn’t fed well enough, he was ignorant, this and that, a boy, but he had a heart as good as any boy ever had. It’s a good heart, but the world is what is so corrupting and dark and evil. And that’s the clash, fundamentally, in growing from boy to adulthood, in growing from child to maturity. That’s a fundamental clash that he sees. And we can see it in these images, you know, carefully chosen. Here’s the good heart, you can see it. We see it in the Dickens novels so often, but it’s how the world corrupts and darkens. “Huckleberry Finn” based on two of, I think, of the most foundational ideas in America, individualism and race, of course, obviously, you know, with character, Jim, et cetera. Individualism and race.

And not just that, but does one conform to one way of thinking or another? Does one follow individualism much more or not? I mentioned in the films of Sergio Leone, the cowboy movies. He understands and he follows individualism much more than conforming to anything. And that’s where he takes the entire myth of the cowboy much, much further. Whether it’s real or not is a separate story, you know, but creates great fiction. And what’s Huckleberry’s great clash? It’s between individualism or compromise to a group, in a way, it’s built inside it, part of the great clash of American cultural literature and the world and the myths that were absorbed in other parts of the world. As Mark Twain wrote, “Courage is resistance to fear.” Always loved that line. It’s not just the absence of fear, it’s the resistance to fear. I want to show a little bit more of his humour. A couple of other great lines. “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” It’s that twist, just a word or two. And we get the wit and the insight. “Part of the secret of a success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside.” “There is no distinctly American criminal class except Congress.” And we saw some of that played out. “Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” It’s almost as if he’s writing today. “God made idiots. That was for practise, then he made school boards and Congress.” I mean, the way of phrasing it. Got to laugh, and it’s over a more than a century later. “Truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” “Man was made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.” Little bit more about “Tom Sawyer.” It’s a novel, obviously, of simplicity, but I think there’s hidden complexity in it in this boy’s adventure story.

We go through Tom’s encounters with adult world represented by Aunt Polly. There’s Judge Thatcher. We see Tom’s romance with Becky. Finally, to the adventurous triumph of evil in the person of Injun Joe. Aunt Polly is obviously the adult foil for boyhood, but she provides the emotional security, you know, with the love that she can give. So Tom has to grow up by challenging through his wits. This goes back to what I’ve often spoken about Oedipus in the “Odyssey of Homer.” It’s the cunning, it’s the trickery, it’s the wits. Not just humour obviously, but how to use one’s own survival instincts in order to not only survive, but make it in the world. And that means in the ancient meaning of the word cunning, not the contemporary jargon or interpretation, but cunning. And it’s in other cultures in Africa and elsewhere that it’s a virtue held up at the top. You know, you need it to survive and to grow up. And we all know the fence whitewashing episode. He has to outwit his friends. He has to persuade, you know, how to achieve it, outwit, outthink, some trickery, some cunning, some thoughtful, in order to succeed as a kid growing up. Okay, go onto the next slide, please. So “Huckleberry Finn,” of course, we all know the raft trip. “Tom Sawyer” is an imaginative reconstruction of his youth. And it’s from the perspective of early middle age that’s interesting to me. It’s early middle age, it’s not much older. It’s a man in his early 30s, late 20s writing it. Not much older writing of youth going way back. You know, we think of others writing. Usually they’re older in their 40s even, Kerouac and others talking about, you know, a youth. But this is really boyhood times. And “Huckleberry Finn” is from this early middle age writing. And this is the transitional state, I think. One of the great transitional states in America, between frontier and modern society, in reality and myth. The novel is published 1876, not long after the Civil War.

Mark Twain’s idol, the idol of boyhood is set in a moment of profound history, which deepens the adult’s recollection of time. A time of innocence, perhaps, a time of joy, a time of cruelty, all the boyhood stuff. But when it’s interwoven with that huge history, it takes on all darker and lighter tones. And let’s be honest, obviously the American wilderness was never an Eden. That image does haunt the American and the global imagination. There was a yearning for a garden of Eden. There was a yearning that something in the past was better. A nostalgia, an imaginative mythical creation. Sometimes maybe more real, sometimes much less, I feel. So here, there’s a duality of youth and age, creative and destructive. There’s a need for security and freedom. And there’s wilderness and there’s civilization. It’s also a boy’s need and going out for the freedom. It’s the dualities. It’s history as duality. Psychology as duality. The delicate balance in the writing between lyrical, beautiful writing and satirical biting wit. And I think, and it’s even in the relationship between Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, it’s all there. There’s an escape. The quest for freedom. I mean, all these things are fairly obvious. But I think as modernity is coming post-slavery, a whole new world has to be born, a whole new sense of identity and self. And I think he’s trying to grapple with it inside, you know, inside this book in particular. And in the end, the moral climax is in Chapter 31 where Huck says that he would rather go to hell than turn in Jim. And that’s the call, rather go to hell than turn in not only his good friend but the runaway slave. So, and that is a theme played out in so much literature and film and, you know, forever, going on and on. We can’t help rooting for him, for Huck.

We can’t help rooting in this battle of morality. Okay, if we go on to the next slide, please. And in this, which feeds into what I want to talk about finally about what Mark Twain wrote about Jewish people. In that “Huckleberry Finn,” we see a profound predicament. Is the novel more about from Mark Twain’s perspective and our reading perspective? Is the novel more about a white man fighting his conscience or fighting for his conscience? Or is it more about a black man fighting for his freedom or both? I think that one of the foundational metaphors and realities of American history and culture is inside that novel in particular. And that’s why I think Hemingway also sees it as giving birth to so much of American literature. Okay, this, I want to read a couple of things that Mark Twain wrote about Jewish people. I think it’s so important ‘cause as we all know, he went to the Middle East, and I think these words are still so powerful today. This is what he said to his daughter, Susie, on the left. And what she recollected later. “The Jews seemed to him a race to be much respected. They had suffered much, had been greatly persecuted, so to ridicule them seemed to be like attacking a man when he was already down. That all the history of persecution and the hell of Jewish history seemed like attacking a man when he’s already down, not just a victim when he’s already down, but what’s the other person, the perpetrator doing? What does it feel like from the Christian, in this case, Mark Twain’s perspective? I think he puts it just so well in a sentence. And then on the other side, this is Mark Twain. That’s reported by his daughter, Susie.

This is by Twain himself. "Samson was a Jew, therefore not a fool. The Jews have the best average brain of any people in the world. The Jews are the only race who work wholly with their brains. There are no Jewish beggars, no Jewish tramps, no Jewish day labourers of toilsome mechanical trades.” Get that in writing. “They are peculiarly and conspicuously the world’s intellectual aristocracy. The Jews constitute one quarter of 1% of the human race. It suggests a nebulous puff of stardust lost in the blaze of the Milky Way. Properly, the Jew ought hardly to be heard of, but he is heard of, has always been heard of. He is as prominent on the planet as any other people. And his importance is extravagantly out of proportion to the smallness of his bulk.” Moving on to the next slide, please. “His contributions to the world’s list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine are very out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvellous fight in this world in all ages and has done it with his hands tied behind him. He could be vain of himself and be excused for it. The Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Persian’s roads filled the planet with sound and splendour, then faded to dream stuff and passed away. The Greeks and Romans followed and made a great noise. They were gone. Other people have sprung up and held their torch high for a time, but it burned out, and they sit in twilight now and have vanished.” Go on to the next slide, please.

“The Jews saw them all, survived them all and is now what he always was, exhibiting no decadence, no infirmities of age, no weakening of his parts, no slowing of his energies, no dulling of his alert but aggressive mind. All things are mortal, but the Jews. All other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret?” I have come back to this so many times, and I wanted to share this at the end of today’s talk because this is Mark Twain. Let’s go back, over a century ago, travelling the world, all the stuff I mentioned about his life, writing adventure stories, having a perception of Jewish people and writing this. I don’t only want to quote it because of, inverted commas, the positive light of showing Jewish people, but bringing a wise, insightful mind with humour and a way of putting words together of what is his secret. He’s profoundly trying to answer that question, profoundly interested, profoundly wants to know, profoundly respectful. And understanding the vast, vast and massive sweep of history of the Jewish people. Whether we say the Jews, you know, that we are the other in the West, the eternal other, the outsider made good, this enormous, endless history. Whether we agree with Sartre’s idea in his fantastic book, “The Jew and the Antisemite,” which is the idea of the scapegoat of the West. Whether we see the survivor notion, the deicide, whatever, the thriving, the making of it, the not making, the tiny percentage in the numbers, whether we agree more with Hannah Arendt of the parvenu, the upstart made good, the outsider/upstart made good, the parvenu, or the pariah as she says it. You know, Hannah Arendt has those two phrases about Jewish people.

Whatever our perception in what is the secret, we may never know the core, but I think Mark Twain tries in a genuine, intelligent way with all his wit and his remarkable facility with language come to some insight. And these words ring true again and again and again for me. And I don’t think I’m being romantic or nostalgic, I think he got it. And the fact that he could do this and so many other things that I described already, I think shows quite a remarkable and unique mind that lived in this time. And now I’m going to finish the rave about Mr. Mark Twain, who I often come back to when I want to lift, to be honest. Okay, let’s hold it there and go on with the questions.

Q&A and Comments:

It’s Monty. “Mark Twain said, 'It’s easy to give up smoking, I’ve done it many times.’” Exactly. Jill.

“Frederick Douglass had the same genius for self-promotion.” Yep, absolutely. And I think, you know, many others, there’s no question. You know, charisma, crucial. What might’ve been known more as charismatic self-promotion and today is more manufactured celebrity for the internet image and for the TV image.

Paula. “Oscar Hijuelos wrote ‘Twain and Stanley into Paradise,’ which is historical novel about the decades of friendship between Twain and and HM Stanley.” Oh, interesting.

“He was a friend of General Grant’s.” Fascinating. Thanks, Paula.

Lorna. “What I remember most is his tongue-in-cheek Europe travel log.” Yeah. So much is tongue-in-cheek.

Paula. “I wish I could talk to you about Mark Twain. I used to teach some of his lesson known works, ‘The Mysterious Stranger,’ ‘Adam and Eve.’ He was so prescient in his satire.” Yes, ultimately, he’s a satirist, as you’re saying, Paula. I agree completely. I’d really understanding the satirist, going way back to Aristophanes 2 ½ thousand years ago and others, juvenile in the Roman part. But understanding satire. “Catch 22.” You know? Got it completely. That’s great.

Elliot. “It’s remarkable that Twain who did not himself ever have a college education, sponsored and paid the tuition.” Yes. “For the first black student ever to matriculate at Yale.” Absolutely.

Q: Elliot, Paula. “What’s your vision of the revisionist versions of ‘Huck Finn’?”

A: Whoa, that is another whole talk. And I don’t want to sit on the fence here, but I always believe when it’s to read literature of its era and see it in its historical… I’ve always believed in context. You know, you can look at Shakespeare, and of course, it’s universal and there’s remarkable writing, the greatest writing ever. But Shakespeare is also on the cusp of the end of feudalism and the beginning of individualist capitalism and the rise of the psychology of the individual. You can also see that with the advantage of hindsight and advantage of seeing historical context. I don’t think one ignores the other. I think they’re of their time and are beyond their time. So I think the revisionist versions are polemical, as opposed, whatever the revisions, as opposed to one’s got to see context, I think, in order to really understand human society, culture, history. Context is or is crucial.

Trevor Noah says the same about humour. He says, “To really understand satire and humour, you got to understand context.”

William. “Journalist, celebrity. ‘New York Times’ didn’t have bylines.” Okay, great, thank you. Joan. “When Ulysses S. Grant went bankrupt, it was Twain who insisted that he write his autobiography, which not only kept Grant occupied but was a huge bestseller. Grant was suffering from cancer.” I didn’t know that. It’s fascinating, Joan.

Ruth. “When I was a student many years ago, I was taught that ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was the great American novel. Years later it was banned.” Yep. I know it’s banned. And you know, so many things. You know, I mean, “Black Beauty” was banned during Apartheid South Africa because how could a how could a black person be beautiful? I mean, you know, all, from the right and from the left, you know, we can have as polemical perspectives.

Sandra. “Mark Twain, ‘Man is the only animal that blushes or needs to.’”

Yeah, Ron, good to see you. Hope you well. “Hal Holbrook wrote and starred in ‘Mark Twain Tonight!,’ the one man show was hugely popular in America.” Great. “He reprised it over 50 years.” I didn’t know it was as long as 50 years. That’s fantastic. And Hal Holbrook is the one that I showed, you know, the most of the clips from. And I think he really, of course, we are imagining Twain, but I think he gets as close to the character as we can imagine. In all these things I’ve spoken about, the comic standup, intelligence, the wit.

Peter. “When travelling in then Israel, he wrote that they hardly saw anybody in days of travelling and that the land looked completely neglected.” Exactly. I agree, Peter. R.

Kate. “Click here for a virtual tour of Mark Twain’s house.” Oh great, thank you.

Rochelle. “Election time, so prescient. wonder what his thoughts?” Well, that’d be, if you wanted to write a wonderful piece of fiction, imagining Mark Twain coming back to politics today, not only in the US but elsewhere.

Q: Sharon. “What’s your opinion of some schools banning ‘Huckleberry Finn’?”

A: You know, I’m against banning, I’m going to say it outright. I don’t believe in banning in a free country, in a free democracy, free speech, et cetera. I don’t believe in it. And I think it needs to be taught in context, and the historical context, the cultural context. Otherwise, how do we ever learn anything, you know? How do we understand anything? We will never understand the connection between history and identity and culture. The great post-colonial theorist, Stuart Hall, who I revere, had this wonderful phrase that identity is always in production. And he meant that identity is always changing, always shifting, moving, like in constant production because of the constant interventions of history. And because history is constantly changing in a culture, so identity is always going to change and shift. It’s never just either or. It’s always. We are not the same as we were when we are 12 years old as 40 or 50 or 70.

Muhammad Ali, “If I have the same thoughts at the age of 50 as I had at the age of 20, I got a serious problem.” Identity is always in production.

Ron. And to teach culture as in production, to teach literature contextually with history in production.

“Will Rogers, born in Oklahoma, and it was an Indian territory, was extremely popular. American cowboy. The view on politics, not dissimilar from Mark Twain.” Oh, that’s really interesting. Thanks, Ron.

Q: Romaine. “How did Twain marry his cynicism with his positivism?”

A: Well, you know, one of the great phrases, cynicism is the last refuge of the romantic. I think we are all born of dualities inside ourselves, which makes us profoundly human. All too human. We have the romantic, we have the cynic, we have the individualist, and we have the conformist to the group ethos. We always have a combination of both, I think.

Q: “Was he an atheist?”

A: Romaine, yes, that’s what he said.

Q: Joan. “What did he say about Israel?”

A: Well, I think I’ve used those quotes, what he wrote about Jewish people, and I think that says it so much. That’s iPad. Thank you. Yes, I’m Jewish. My sister and her family live in Jerusalem and have for, she’s lived there for what, 45? No, 50 years. My sister’s lived in Jerusalem for 50 years, and her family there, and I’ve got lots of cousins. Came from Cape Town, Zimbabwe, South Africa, in all parts of Israel that matter. Lots of very close cousins. We have a huge, big family WhatsApp group as you can imagine.

Q: Ralph. “Did he have Jews as part of his circle of friends? He seemed to know them well.”

A: That’s a really interesting question. And I tried to find out before, as preparing for today. I couldn’t find out… A few cliches here… I couldn’t find out in depth really. You know, really close. Not just acquaintance, you know, one meets briefly in life here and there. It’s a great question, Ralph, and I’d love to know if you find out more.

Catherine. “Enid Blyton’s so-called racist words at the time have been scrapped.” I know. I don’t know what the latest is with what they’ve done with Mark Twain and language, you know. Well, let’s go back to Shakespeare’s Shylock. I mean the word Jew, I think it’s over 30 something times. And all the adjectives before the word Jew remain in the play. That hasn’t been changed. You know, and there’s a reason. So, you know, I think that captures it.

Gita. “Surely would ban ‘Mein Kampf’”. Well, that always becomes the profound question, Gita. Absolutely. I would say that it can be studied in a very specific context. Again, context of history, context of understanding, the most extreme, horrific period in Jewish and global history. The most unspeakable evil and terrible, terrible time with Jewish and global history. And I think understood in context and studied very specifically in context, you know, evil needs to be understood, evil needs to be known. Really, really terrible, terrifying things. But again, in a very, very clear context.

Ron. “The Muhammad Ali thought was expressed by George Clemens long before Ali.” Okay, thank you. But I do know he said it ‘cause I heard him say it, but I stand corrected, Ron. Thank you.

Gail. “For what Twain thought of the holy land in his time. I read his wonderful travelling with innocence book.” Ah, thank you. Okay, so thank you, everybody, and thank you again, Emily. Hope everybody is well and take care.