Books: Savage Vision

LETTERS FROM THE EARTH (303 pp.)— Mark Twain, edited by Bernard De Voto —Harper & Row ($5.95).

Mark Twain’s dazzling Missouri humor always had hints of despair. Dark brooding crept into such cheerful works as The Innocents Abroad and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; it filled later works like The Mysterious Stranger, virtually blotting out all gaiety. The last writing Twain did, in 1909, was such a lugubrious assault on man and God that Twain’s surviving daughter, Clara Samossoud, refused to let it be published. In this, she followed the half-jesting advice of Twain himself. “Tomorrow,” he wrote William Dean Howells, “I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006—which I judge they won’t.” Considerably ahead of the year 2006, much of the banned material has now been published in Letters from the Earth—only incidentally in the face of Russian taunts that the U.S. had suppressed Twain’s antireligious writings. Letters adds little toward an understanding of the contempt Twain showed for religion in earlier writings, and is less likely to shock the modern reader than he imagined. But never before had Twain launched his attacks with such savage and scatological humor; Letters is a sort of last testament aimed at making the Old and the New look like nothing so much as cosmic comic books.

Blood-Drenched Lies. Twain takes a humorist’s advantage of the Bible: he makes the worst possible case for it by interpreting it as literally as possible. The crux of his complaint is his inability to reconcile a good God with all the suffering he saw in the world—an age-old problem that has bothered greater minds and produced greater musings. In the guise of Satan, Twain writes his letters to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel explaining the bizarre beliefs of mortals on a variety of topics: ON GOD: “It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God. It is such a confusion of contradictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmnesses; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of words, and concreted hellborn ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindnesses repented of in permanent malignities.” ON THE BIBLE: “It is full of interest. It has some noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”ON THE COMMANDMENTS: The Bible does not allow adultery at all, whether a person can help it or not. No lady goat is safe from criminal assault, even on the Sabbath Day when there is a gentleman goat within three miles to leeward of her and nothing in the way but a fence fourteen feet high whereas neither the gentleman tortoise nor the lady tortoise is ever hungry enough for the solemn joys of fornication to be willing to break the Sabbath to get them. Now, according to man’s curious reasoning, the goat has earned punishment, and the tortoise praise.”

ON HEAVEN: “[Man] has imagined a heaven and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual: sexual intercourse! Yet every pious person adores that heaven and wants to get into it. And when he is in a holy rapture he thinks that if he were only there he would take all the populace to his heart, and hug, and hug, and hug!”

Disease was an obsession of Twain’s later years, and he devotes the most inspired pages of the Letters to it. In his version of the Biblical flood, he holds Noah to blame for disease. When Noah discovered he had left the disease-carrying fly ashore, he returned in the ark to pick it up. It was welcomed with “hymns of praise and gratitude, the Family standing meanwhile uncovered out of reverence for its divine origin. Thus was the sacred bird providentially preserved.” Other malignant creatures join the flies aboard the ark: “Typhoid germs and cholera germs, and hydrophobia germs, and lockjaw germs, and consumption germs, and black-plague germs, and some hundreds of other aristocrats, specially precious creatures, golden bearers of God’s love to man, blessed gifts of the infatuated father to his children—all of which had to be sumptuously housed and richly entertained in the lungs, in the heart, in the brain, in the guts.” Those that lodged in the large intestine sang a lusty hymn: Constipation, 0 constipation, The joyful sound proclaim Till man’s remotest entrail Shall praise its maker’s name.

Menacing Monsters. Compared with the Letters, the other humorous pieces in this volume—many of them published before—seem familiar and tepid. Only The Great Dark, an incomplete novel, rivals the Letters.

It is beyond doubt the gloomiest writing ever done by Twain: a parable of the dismal fate awaiting happy lives. A father buys a microscope for his children. He wonders what life would be like inside a drop of water on the slide, and presto, the whole family finds itself aboard a ship plowing these microscopic waters. Real life has become a dream; reality is an endless voyage on an ever-dark sea filled with menacing monsters. Ultimately, the drop dries up and the family is roasted by the white glare from the light of the microscope. Twain did not need religion’s hell; he knew how to create his own.

Twain’s bleak outlook in his old age was shaped partly by personal tragedy: in the period of a few years, his wife and two daughters died. But Twain was also a 19th century American romantic with a romantic’s aversion to civilized society and—since he saw God only as a creation of man—to organized religion. His hostility deepened as the years went by. Probably his own idea of heaven was escaping mankind and drifting, alongside Huck and Jim, down a lonely, peaceful river.