Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

Mark Twain as a Critic of America and India

Prof. D. Ramakrishna

Mark Twain as a Critic of America and India *

The aim of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in writing The Gilded Age was to reform, by means of satire, the corrupt and immoral life in America in the decades following the Civil War. The devastating satire of their writing was directed at parvenus who would ape the ways of their betters in society. It was what the authors call a “gilded” age as different from the genuine.

Basic to Twain’s writings like The Gilded Age and Following the Equator has been his journalistic skill. Like the New Journalists coming up since the 1960s, Twain attempts literary nonfiction or New Nonfiction in these works. As Richard A. Kallan says, “even the orthodox concede that the very nature of journalism defies absolute objectivity.” The New Journalism demands a more intense and personal kind of interviewing and research than does traditional reporting. Mark Twain achieved that long before New Journalists like Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer could do almost a century later.

Announcing publication of The Gilded Age jointly with Charles Dudley Warner, Twain stated that Warner “worked up the fiction” and he “hurled in the facts.” He told Rudyard Kipling in an interview: “Personally I never care for fiction or storybooks. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of    any kind….Get your facts first, and…then you can distort them as much as you please.” As a reporter in Washington and across the United States, Twain displayed great skill in sifting facts and telling the truth about men and manners. In collaboration with Warner, he produced The Gilded Age, a story based upon barely disguised current events, the book becoming a best - seller in his own time. Sub-titled A Tale of Today, it is a bitter satire on contemporary American institutions and personages in thinly disguised fictional form.

Mark Twain told his biographer Archibald Henderson: “When I began to lecture, and in my earlier writings, my sole idea was to make comic capital out of everything I saw and heard.” The satire in The Gilded Age has more comic overtones than bitterness. Henry James felt that Twain amused only primitive persons. Referring to this charge, Twain said in a letter to Andrew Long in 1889:

Indeed I have been misjudged from the first. I have never tried even in one single instance, to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger games - the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them...

As confirmed by his world-wide popularity, Twain is indeed a writer for the masses across the continents with unique reportorial skills and sense of humour tinged with satire. In spite of his declaration that “There is not a single characteristic which can be safely labeled as ‘American’“, he is essentially American in his concern for his country.

According to Clemens and Warner, they wrote The Gilded Age on being challenged by their wives to write better when they had been complaining about the moral tendencies of modern novels. They wanted to describe not only what to read but how to read in order to safeguard morality in public life.

Laura Hawkins misuses literature and falls from feminine purity and plays the roles of Washington lobbyist by means of her charms, of the murderer of the man who first seduced her and finally of a public lecturer. In Clemens’s presentation, Laura turns bitter on account of the failure of the man to support her. Added to this are her own false expectations resulting from her reading of her favorite romances. Warner develops this idea into Laura’s seduction by a confederate Colonel. He makes her withdraw from the society. While discussing morality at the domestic level, Warner shows the alternative to Laura’s moral collapse in Ruth Bolton’s intellectual and social awakening in the home of her friend, Alice Montague. Clemens and Warner present that kind of social and intellectual life as the apex of moral culture for the happiness of individuals as well as the society at large. In describing the three types of Washington aristocracy, namely the Antiques, the parvenus, and the Middle Ground, Twain suggests the public consequences of certain kinds of domestic behaviour. The book deals with the problem of developing public personality by means of a combination of domestic life and public responsibilities. As Greg Camfield says, Twain and Warner “suggest that home and hearth provide the best moral impetus for worldly success by providing both an idea for which to strive (and by which to strive) and practical balance against idealistic excess.

The Laura Fair trial drew the attention of the nation to the corruption of the American judiciary. The description of the presiding judge at the Hawkins trial, Judge O’Shannessy, corresponds to the general view of the New York bench:

...he found himself, when a boy, a sort of street Arab in that city (New York), but he had ambition and native shrewdness and he speedily took to boot-polishing and newspaper hawking, became the office and errand boy of a law firm, picked up knowledge enough to get some employment in police courts, was admitted to the bar, became a rising young politician, went to the legislature, and was finally elected to the bench which he now honored...and he had lands and houses to the value of three or four hundred thousand dollars.

Judges were installed by the Tammany Ring. O’Shaunnessy’s original appears to have been judge John McCmm, a protege of the Ring. McCunn was described as “outwardly good - natured and even jovial” though corrupt, treacherous, and vain, accumulating a fortune of a million and a half dollars through fraud. In the novel, judge O’Shaunnessy has a “rather jovial face, Sharp rather than intellectual,” believing that a dependent judge can never be impartial, has “prudently laid away money” and had acquired lands and houses worth several hundred thousand dollars. (399)

The novel’s attack on court corruption is directed toward abuse of the jury system. The jurymen are described as “Low foreheads, and heavy faces they all had; some had a look of animal cunning, while the most were only stupid.” Among the most important voices of protest against the jury system was that of Mark Twain.

The acquittal of Laura D. Fair was consequent upon the defence plea of “emotional insanity.” Clemens established the theme of the Laura Hawkins acquittal – beneficent insanity. Laura Fair confessed to have committed the murder. But the public reaction of her acquittal on grounds of insanity was polarized.

While the Laura Fair trial had been headlines intermittently from June 1871 until January 1873, the Pomeroy scandal had been in the headlines almost continuously from the end of January until the first week ofMarch 1873. The political satire was felt intensely during those days in the reviews of The Gilded Age. The New York Herald said that the novel transferred “incidents and institutions bodily into its pages” and the London Evening Standard that “every line of the work can find a parallel in the New York press alone.” The Boston Saturday Evening Gazette claimed to recognize not only Pomeroy but also other senators like Cameron, Nye and Harlan and national scandals like the Credit Mobilier expose. Two of the railroad group of characters were recognized by Heart and Home.

In The Gilded Age, Twain and Warner have exposed the contemporary scene for the sheer enjoyment of it. Mark Twain is obviously attacking the blacksheep among the judges hand in glove with corrupt politicians of his time. Perhaps like political corruption, the nexus between politicians and the legal fraternity too might be a universal phenomenon. Mark Twain’s aim is to expose this fraud affecting society when it is infested with lawyers capable of perverting the process of law using money to make things appear to be different from what they are to benefit their politically connected litigants.

Senator Dilworthy is involved in the scandalous American – Indian and Negro affairs. He attends so many “gatherings for the benefit of the Indians.” Pomeroy the real – life prototype of Dilworthy volunteered his services as “friend, agent and protector” of Negroes, but it was actually a project for land – stealing and plunder. Twain is critical of the religious hypocrisy of the politicians. Religious perversion and opportunism are the objects of the attack when he refers to the “great big metropolitan religious papers that know how to serve God and make money at the same time.

On account of the economic turmoil in The Guilded Age, Mark Twain found himself caught in financial straits and in the process of escaping from his predicament, he embarked on lecture tours abroad to earn money to clear his debts at home. In describing his experiences as a traveller in the exotic lands visited by him, he uses his reportorial skills well to narrate the details of the places and the humans inhabitating them. Even if the tone of his travelogues is not intensely satirical, there is nevertheless the clinical scrutiny of a sensitive observer.

Like Herodotus, called the “first travel writer” and Thucydides who said he “described nothing but what I either saw myself or learned from others of whom I made the most careful and particular inquiry,” Mark Twain belongs to the tradition of travel literature with his own unique journalistic ground. Like Lewis and Clark and Washington Irving, he has described his journeys of exploration with historical interest too.

Referring to his travels abroad, Twain wrote in his notebook: “During 8 years, now, I filled the post – with some credit, I trust - of self-appointed Ambassador at large of the U.S. of America – without salary.” He was enthralled by the exotic sites of India and noted in large letters in his notebook: “INDIA THE MARVELLOUS.”

Mark Twain says That India “is the mother and home of that wonder of wonders –caste– and of that mystery of mysteries, the satanic brotherhood of the Thugs. Referring to the Caste system, he feels that India is not able to lead the other nations on account of the divisive effect of the system:

Even though there is some truth in what Twain says, due to the basic inner strength of the Indian mind, the cultural pluralism notwithstanding, India has been eventually a strong nation compared with many others, both Eastern and Western, despite upheavals in the power structure. Twain admits that India had the start of the whole world in the beginning of things. She had the first civilization; she had the first accumulation of material wealth; she was populous with deep thinkers and subtle intellects; she had the mines, and woods, and a fruitful soil.” In The Wonder that was India, A.L. Basham describes at great length the richness of the majority Hindu culture before the Islamic invasions followed by Christian incursions. As Twain says,

It would seem as if she should have kept the lead, and should be today not the meek dependent of an alien master, but mistress of the world, and delivering law and command to every tribe and nation in it. But, in truth, there was never any possibility of such supremacy for her. If there had been but one India and one language - but there were eighty of them!

Whatever the situation by the time of Twain’s visit to India, despite all the multiplicity of castes, creeds, and languages, India today is emerging as a world power with great technological advancement, contributing to the growth of western nations like the U.S.

In the course of his travels in India, Twain is greatly amused at the landscape of villages with clusters of mud houses (139–­1 40). He is revolted by the killing of girl babies since they would be liabilities for the parents (141) and also by the practice of suttee, the widow burning herself on her husband’s funeral pyre”(130–131). But he is amazed at the “Indian resignation, Indian patience under wrongs, hardships, and misfortunes” (148).

While describing the Ganges front with the series of ghats, the burning of dead bodies, the floating of half-burnt bodies and the gushing of the sewer water into the river, Twain wonders at the piety with which the devotees bathe in the highly polluted water.

Twain wonders about the wisdom of the ancient Hindus:
How did they find out the water’s secret in those ancient ages? Had they germ-scientists then? We do not know. We only know that they had a civilization long before we emerged from savagery. (177)

Twain calls India “a paradise for the Thug” and says: “India was full of clever men with the highwayman instinct, and so, quite naturally, the brotherhood of the Thugs came into being to meet the long – felt need.”

Twain is sometimes critical of the Christian missionaries in India. He objects to what he calls the “missionary trade” since its theological efforts are devoted to making people, especially children, traitors to the religion of their parents. He finds that some natives pretend to be Christian converts in order to gain material benefits from the white man.

While expressing his wonder about India, Twain says that a traveller in India has this monotony of dust-colored dead levels and scattering bunches of trees and mud villages. You soon realize that India is not beautiful; still there is an enchantment about it.

Sometimes it is difficult to know when Twain is really appreciative and when he is ironic. While admiring the “wonderful India,” he reports on the squalor, superstition, and moral degeneration rampant in the country. The Indians spent hours kneeling in prayer, he says, while Americans were robbing and murdering. Even now Indians would continue to kneel and pray, the majority being traditional – minded, believing in the Karmic process. But many Indians in public life have equalled, even excelled, the Americans in the art of plundering. Twain quotes from an article in one of the chief Indian journals of those times, the Pioneer, concerning “the breed of rascality in public life in India and America:

In spite of all his caustic criticism of the goings on in India of those times, Twain was greatly interested in the Indian people, as Arthur L. Scott says, “with their singular appearance, customs, and traditions.” His critical observations of the Americans in The Gilded Age and the Indians in Following the Equator are mainly aimed at a few people corrupting the systems. Twain is indeed a great lover of mankind and his intention in attacking the two societies as a satirist is only to improve them.

* Extract from the paper presented at the International Seminar on “Mark Twain at the end of the Century” held at the American Studies Research Centre.

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