The Ordeal of Bernard DeVoto

MARK TWAIN AT WORK--Bernard DeVoto-Harvard ($2).

The work of Mark Twain is America's literary Comstock lode and its foremost assayer is bellicose Bernard DeVoto (Mark Twain's America, 1932). As custodian of the Mark Twain Papers, Critic DeVoto has been busy since 1938 panning through an immense, theretofore jealously guarded mound of pay dirt: Mark Twain's letters, notebooks, manuscripts. Much of this haphazard heap is just rubble. But some of it is ore that assays high. And it contains clues galore to the size & shape of Mark Twain's talent, his working methods, the ambiguities of his mind and spirit.

Mark Twain in Eruption (TIME, Dec. 2, 1940) was DeVoto's first report on his findings. Mark Twain at Work, the second, is less a book than a preface. It is only 140 pages long, and is intended primarily for literary specialists. But it is of interest to anybody who has ever enjoyed Huckleberry Finn. For these three essays are a continuation of Bernard DeVoto's self-imposed literary ordeal--the critical reconstruction of Mark Twain. The first is about Tom Sawyer, and includes the shaky sketch--Mark Twain's first try at fiction --from which it grew. The second is about Huckleberry Finn, and DeVoto prints several revealing pages of Mark Twain's notes for it. The third tells, briefly, of the years of all-but-annihilating personal crisis which Mark Twain managed to resolve in The Mysterious Stranger.

Most exciting for lay readers is the essay on Huck Finn. Characteristically, it never occurred to Mark Twain, when he started Huckleberry Finn, that he was writing something of matchless newness in the world's literary history. He wrote the first half of the book "more to be at work than anything else," laid it by unfinished for six years, then added some of the most magnificent chapters in U.S. literature and a folderol ending. For Mark, says DeVoto, "felt no difference in value between the highest truths of fiction and merely literary burlesque." He had almost no ability to "think and feel [his material] through to its own implicit form." He jotted down and never touched ideas like these:

"House-Raising.

"Beef-shooting.

"Debating Society.

"Quilting. The world of gossip of 75 years ago, that lies silent, stitched into quilt by hands that long ago lost their taper & silkiness & eyes & face their beauty, & all gone down to dust & silence; & to indifference to all gossip." Says Bernard DeVoto: "We could have used those scenes, if Mark had found a way of using them."

Bustle-Ridden Rabelais. The myth of Mark Twain as a frustrated, bustle-ridden Rabelais (see Van Wyck Brooks's The Ordeal of Mark Twain) is nearly dead. DeVoto has done more than any other critic to kill that petticoat ghost, but in this book, with fresh evidence at hand, he gives it another kicking around. The author of the ribald 1601--itself a symptom of inhibition--needed neither his staid friend William Dean Howells nor his gentle wife Olivia to wash out his mouth with soap. Mark Twain, says DeVoto, "was almost lustfully hypersensitive to sex in print; he was, in fact, as a writer, rather more prudish than Howells." This fact is subtly related to his limitations as a writer. He had a simple genius for making all males, of any age, come to life, even in a few lines. Middle-aged women, like Tom's Aunt Polly, are fully and tenderly vivid. But Mark Twain's young women, says Critic DeVoto, are just so much "bisque" and "pasteboard." Mark Twain never could write about love.

Shakespearean Abundance. This failing severely limits the realistic depth of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain does not record "the curiosity, the shame, the torment" of adolescence; and in that particular sense Mark Twain's whole memory of Hannibal is "a libel [on] a full-blooded folk." But "in what he perceived, in what he felt, in the nerve-ends of emotion, in the mysterious ferments of art which transform experience, he was a great mind--there has been no greater in American literature." DeVoto notes the almost Shakespearean abundance of life that floods Mark Twain's two greatest books--the "authority over the imagination of mankind" which gives them their strong mythical enchantment. Nevertheless, some readers may find it hard to agree that Huckleberry Finn is "as dark a book as Moby Dick" still harder to agree that its bitterest lines--Huck's meditation on slavery--excel the best of Jonathan Swift. But discerning critics will be grateful for DeVoto's evaluation of the heroic role of Jim, for his mapping of the streaks of cruelty and abject, indigenous meanness which are too easily overlooked in the broad morning sunlight of Mark Twain's unliterary prose. They will also be grateful for DeVoto's unabashed adoration of Huckleberry Finn, for it is one of those rare books which, like the half-created civilization that it brings to life, demands to be scorned, laughed off as juvenile, or adored.

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