‘Mark Twain: Social Revolutionist’ by V. F. Calverton from Modern Monthly. Vol. 9 No. 9. April, 1936.

MARK TWAIN is one of the most misunderstood men in American literature. Familiar to the populace as the author of boys’ books, humorous stories, and tall tales of the hinterland, and acclaimed and accoladed by librarians as the Charlie Chaplin of American literature, the real Mark Twain, the significant Mark Twain is still unrecognized and unappreciated Of course, the critical commendations and apostrophes of Waldo Frank, Van Wyck Brooks, Henry L. Mencken, and Bernard De Voto have helped rescue something of the real Mark Twain from oblivion, but each of the above critics had a special axe to grind with the result that the Twain they hacked out very often bore more resemblance to their own personalities and philosophies than to that of their hero. What was worse, little that they said ever reached or influenced the general reading public. To this day, it is only the literary intelli­gentsia who know the real Twain. In the high schools and in the libraries, it is still the misunderstood, the slapstick Mark Twain, that is taught and recommended.

It is to be hoped that Mr. Edward Wagenknecht’s Mark Twain: The Man and, His World, a study far less virile and far less acute than those of previous critics, nevertheless will succeed, because of rather than despite those limitations, in introducing the real Twain to that wider reading public. Mr. Wagenknecht has nothing new to add to Twainiana, but at the same time he has no axe to grind; consequently, the real Twain who emerges from the pages of his book is a less complex-ridden, a less Galahadic­motivated, but a more plausible and a more convincing personality.

Mr. Wagenknecht deals in revealing detail with Twain’s general sympathy for unpopular causes and personalities. His defense of osteopathy, of Mormons, of Jews, of Negroes, of all sorts and kinds of oppressed movements and peoples, is illustrative of the indiscriminate nature of his enthusiasms. But what Mr. Wagenknecht does not deal with adequately are Twain’s social attitudes and convictions. Not that Mr. Wagenknecht ignores them, but there is a most culpable naivete in the manner in which he cites them without interpreting them, without recognizing or realizing their relationship to the social background of the time.

Twain’s life is more than the biography of a personality; it is the record of an age, the epitome of an epoch. Starting out as an optimist, an apostle of democracy, and a believer in the fructifying genius of this country, he ended up by becoming an immedicable pessimist, losing every shred of his faith in democracy and in America. Toward the close of his days, he became convinced that the United States was being rapidly converted into a monarchy.

Disgusted with the fact that the country had developed into a plutocracy, and convinced that that result had been achieved through the corruption of Congressmen by the Wall Street interests, he averred that “it could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”

What Twain felt about America toward the end of his life was what Dreiser, as he relates in his autobiographical narrative Dawn, had already come to feel as a young man, and which all the young men of the new century were to feel with increasing despair. When the United States “snatched the Philippines…(and) stained the flag,” Twain knew that the American dream was over. When Tchaikoffsky, the Russian revolutionist, asked Twain to address a meeting in defense of the Russian Revolution of 1905, which was then being waged, the latter replied that the time had come when the United States needed a revolution as well as Russia.

While Twain never developed an integrated social philosophy, founded upon sound economic doctrine, he, nevertheless, arrived intuitively at certain fundamental sociological truths which few of his contemporaries reached. “No people in the world,” he declared, “ever did achieve their freedom by goody-goody talk and moral suasion; it being immutable law that all revolutions that will succeed, must begin in blood, whatever may answer afterward.” In the light of those words we can better understand his comments on the right to revolution, a right which he urged we must never surrender:

“You see my kind of loyalty was loyalty to one’s country, not to its institutions or its office-holden. The country is the real thing, the substantial thing, the external thing; it is the thing to watch over and care for, and be loyal to institutions are extraneous, they are its mere clothing, and clothing can wear out, become ragged, cease to be comfortable, cease to protect the body from winter, disease, death. To be loyal to rags, to shout for rags, to worship rags, -that is loyalty to unreason, it is pure animal…I was from Connecticut, whose Constitution declares ‘that all political power is inherent in the people, and all free governments arc founded on their authority and instituted for their benefit; and that they have at all times an undeniable and indefeasible right to alter their form of government in such a manner as they may think expedient.’

“Under that gospel, the citizen who thinks he secs that the commonwealth’s political clothes are worn out, and yet holds his peace and does not agitate for a new suit, is disloyal; he is a traitor.”

It is that aspect of Twain which Mr. Wagenknecht fails to do justice to in his otherwise interesting portrait of the most indigenous and the most significant prose writer this country has produced. Twain’s love for the humble and lowly, for the downtrodden and disinherited, was more genuine and comprehensive than Whitman’s. “There are no common people,” Twain wrote, “except in the highest spheres of society.” Twain loved the masses, the river pilots, the coach drivers, the chimney sweeps, the bricklayers, the steeple­ jacks, the car conductors, because he felt himself a part of them as he never felt himself a part of the upper layers of society when he had to meet and mingle with them. He preferred to be back with Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, and N***r Jim, with the people he knew, the things he knew, the places he knew, which explains why he never aimed “in even one single instance to help cultivate the cultivated classes…but always hunted for bigger game­ the masses.”

Modern Quarterly began in 1923 by V. F. Calverton. Calverton, born George Goetz (1900–1940), a radical writer, literary critic and publisher. Based in Baltimore, Modern Quarterly was an unaligned socialist discussion magazine, and dominated by its editor. Calverton’s interest in and support for Black liberation opened the pages of MQ to a host of the most important Black writers and debates of the 1920s and 30s, enough to make it an important historic US left journal. In addition, MQ covered sexual topics rarely openly discussed as well as the arts and literature, and had considerable attention from left intellectuals in the 1920s and early 1930s. From 1933 until Calverton’s early death from alcoholism in 1940 Modern Quarterly continued as The Modern Monthly. Increasingly involved in bitter polemics with the Communist Party-aligned writers, Modern Monthly became more overtly ‘Anti-Stalinist’ in the mid-1930s Calverton, very much an iconoclast and often accused of dilettantism, also opposed entry into World War Two which put him and his journal at odds with much of left and progressive thinking of the later 1930s, further leading to the journal’s isolation.

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