Personal Revelations Of Invasion Of MLA In Hopes Of Making Off With Knowledge. Failure As A Possibility Looms Heavily. by Richard Benyo Semi-Special Corrspondent Territorial Enterprise

Rich Benyo as Mark Twain

Part Three

THE AUTHOR AS PUBLIC INTELLECTUAL

The venue for the 9:00 p.m. Sam Clemens session was commodious to the previous session's claustrophobia. The hall was large, the ceilings high, the presenters collegial preparatory to the session.

Although we had heard of and read most of the presenters, there is always a shift of gears necessary to move the persona to the person. In this instance, the shift came easily.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, moderator and president of the Mark Twain Circle of America, editor of the Oxford Mark Twain and author of Was Huck Black?, arrived dressed in, appropriately, black. The panel consisted of Jim Zwick (Syracuse University), Siva Vaidhyanathan (Wesleyan University), Fred Kaplan (Queens College and CUNY Graduate Center), and David Bradley, a writer from LA.

The way Shelley Fishkin described the session in her column in The Mark Twain Circular was: "A discussion that willl explore what happens when someone parlays his fame and recognition as a writer into a bully pulpit from which to engage the social and political issues of his day. Centered on Twain and his engagement with such issues as imperialism and copyright, but branching out to explore the phenomenon in general." The session was attended by roughly 20 stalwarts, whose ranks would have no doubt been swelled had provisions by the MLA been made to allow in the intellectually unwashed masses to enjoy the show.

Jim Zwick, proprietor of perhaps the best Mark Twain website in existence http://marktwain.miningco.com Naw, let's not equivocate and instead editorialize here a bit: it is the best.), admitted that he is sort of working on a book on Mark Twain. His current passion in that regard is the Anti-Imperalist League and Twain's involvement with that group later in his life.

Siva Vaidhyanathan admitted to be working on a book on Mark Twain amidst his current passion for research on copyright and immigration. Siva cited Mark Twain's doing the undoable by wearing a white suit in the middle of winter when he appeared before the Library of Congress to address the issue of copyright, also citing the fact that early in his career, Twain was all for an author's work being in the public domain--until he began to write best-selling books only to have Canadian and British publisher steal his work.

Fred Kaplan, who is working on biographies of both Gore Vidal and Mark Twain, raised the basic question of whether Clemens thought of himself as a public intellectual and then ran past the audience parallels between Vidal and Twain, i.e. both were wickedly humorous, both could be charming and cutting, etc. He felt that both writers resonate so much "within me."

THE WORKING WRITER SPEAKS

David Bradley, a black (or more accurately, brown; a fellow journalist would wish us to be accurate in all things) journalist and novelist from Los Angeles, was the first person we met who was not writing a book on Mark Twain--at least he didn't admit to it. He opened his remarks by remembering 1981 when he was called upon to be a "public intellectual" during the process of pumping his book The Chaneysville Incident. He admitted that the novel didn't sell well but opened a market for doing the occasional op-ed piece that was a good source of beer money. We found ourselves frantically scratching down whatever Mr. Bradley said. Not only did he say things worth hearing, but he said them well, no doubt because he had first forced them through the sweatbath of committing them to paper.

We share some of our favorites and pray he won't feel moved to slap n injunction on us for passing them out free of charge in direct conflict with the MLA's stricture against anyone grabbing knowledge without first paying the going tarriff:
"I found it possible to make beer money by shooting my mouth off in public, so long as I restricted myself to certain topics and called it an 'op-ed' piece. And I also discovered that this was an avenue that was actually more open to me, a black writer, than it would have been had I been a white writer. Put a bit oversimply, a lot of people, some editors among them, assumed that, by virtue of my being a black person, I would have considered and knowledgeable opinions on any number of 'black' topics. Mostly I didn't. But by virtue of being a writer, I knew that if somebody was paying me, I could come up with a considered and knowledgeable opinion if I had a little time to do research. And if I didn't have the time, well, I knew I could write what would look like a considered and knowledgeable opinion."

"I do not mean to say the opinions I express are not sincerely held. Knowing it is at least possible that an idea will receive public circulation makes me far more conscious of the need to believe things, and to express beliefs with precision and as much complexity as possible."

"But Mark Twain is an icon of American Literature, and whenever academic types--present company excluded, of course, and no disrespect meant...well, maybe a little--whenever academic types start talking about icons, they tend to get a little irrational. Some refuse to hear anything other than that the icon did anything but walk on water. Others argue the icon only tried to walk on water, but actually had feet of clay. Then they drag him through the resultant mud. What's really strange is when they try to do both at the same time."

"The first is that there is no man named Mark Twain. There was a public persona called Mark Twain that was created and maintained by a writer named Samuel Clemens. That simple fact compounds the problem of the contradiction between the public and the private. The second is that no man would go to such trouble to create and maintain a persona if there were no purpose to it. If you think I am pathological and confused, imagine the potential for confusion in the Clemens household. Did Mrs. Clemens have sexual relations with Samuel Clemens or with Mark Twain? And lest you think the answer easy, I would remind you that Mark Twain often wrote in bed. The third is that Mark Twain was white. I do not mean white like Samuel Clemens was white. I mean the construction called Mark Twain was white, and I mean white like Melville's Moby-Dick was white. The model for Moby-Dick, I would remind you, was not a real white whale, but a real beige whale called Mocha-Dick. As some of you know, I have my suspcions about the racial nature of Samuel Clemens, which may seem fanciful. But I would argue that we cannot ever ignore the fact that Clemens made Twain's visible persona white on white in white. That image, as Shelley Fisher-Fishkin has pointed out, was widely known and exploited for commercial purposes. I would argue that it was exploited by Clemens for commercial purposes--and possibly for social purposes as well. I would argue further that we cannot talk about Mark Twain as a public intellectual without acknowledging that Samuel Clemens created and maintained Mark Twain because Mark Twain could do things that Samuel Clemens could not do. Some of those things may well have been to express ideas that Samuel Clemens could not express. Some of those things may have been to consider ideas Samuel Clemens could not have considered. It is possible that Mark Twain had ideas that Samuel Clemens never could have had--and maybe even didn't..."

AROUND AND AROUND WE GO

Ms. Fisher-Fishkin steered the discussion around the table for another circuit, with varying responses, some of them actually getting to the gist of the question of whether Mark Twain was an intellectual to begin with. Of course, a negative answer to that question would have stopped the discussion right there, and for a while the leanings were in that direction, for would a public persona who said something profound about "everybody drinks water" have dared consider himself one of the intellectual class, no matter how much he might desire to hang out with them?

Near the end of the discussion, a young feller who claimed to be French literature major and who had apparently wandered into the hall by mistake, rose to ask what the hell was going on here? Hadn't anyone considered the (apparently superior) European tradition of intellectualism and interrelation with the church? There was a hushed silence, whether from confusion or the profundity of the question it was hard to discern. Apparently nobody in front wanted to remind the young feller that the Europeans worked a lifetime and more to hoist themselves up onto a pedestal (overbearing French, uncompromising Germans, Austrians in perpetual denial, etc.), while Americans spent their time knocking out the underpinnings of the pedestal. There was a great deal of academic politeness heaped upon the besotted young man in hopes he would go away.

After all was said, the conclusion seemed to be that Mark Twain was not only not a public intellectual, but not an intellectual at all, a conclusion that seemed obvious from the start. We are certain the assembled scholars adjourned to a local pub to continue the discussion, while your semi-special correspondent hiked the dozen blocks, past semi-slumbering sidewalk denizens esconsed in battered sleepingbags like so many pimentoes in olives, to liberate his automobile with unrotated tires from the parking garage for the 75-mile trek home, where he eagerly anticipated his next foray into the mad metropolis three nights hence to enjoy "Mark Twain: New Perspectives on Established Works," which promised such mouth-watering bonbons as "Mark Twain as Western Outlaw: Language and Manhood in Roughing It and Life on the Mississippi." Had we known Sam Clemens' sexuality while in the Nevada Territory was to be a point of contention, he might have foregone the pleasure.

THE NEXT SESSION AFTER THE LAST ONE

This session was scheduled for 8:30 p.m. on December 30. Befuddled by our second trip into The City in less than a week and hoping to escape quickly at the end of the session, we parked in the Hilton underground garage, there to quickly learn why those who served the gold miners became far richer than those who actually dug for riches.

The session was held in a room that had the distinct feeling of a mine: narrow, low ceiling, stark light and profound shadows. Susanne Weil of Whittier (California) College ("'The Crying Defect of My Character': Hank Morgan, Mark Twain, and the Business of Determinism.") was unable to appear due to a death in the family. Facing the audience of 18 were Laura Skandera-Trombley of Coe College, the moderator, and Joseph Coulombe (of the University of Tennessee at Martin according to The Mark Twain Circular and of the University of Delaware/Newark according to the MLA program; obviously a young man on the move) and Rosemarie L. Coste (University of Texas), who would present a paper titled "Drinking and Temperance in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

Ms. Laura Skandera-Trombley, a competent and personable young woman, caught the audience up on the increasing interest in Mark Twain, from the upcoming Ken Burns documentary to the increasing number of books on Twain in the docket. Many in the audience and each presenter nodded their heads knowingly, no doubt well along on a book of their own on Mark Twain. She then extolled the virtues of each of the presenters, whom she had just met. Mr. Coulombe presented a swell paper, which will no doubt be a key chapter in the book he is writing on Mark Twain, in which he reckoned that men in 19th century America were becoming feminine and weak. None of the women in the audience took him to task for that sexist statement; none bothered to cite Mrs. E.J. Guerin, who in 1855 and again in 1857 led wagon trains to California while disguised as a man, sporting the nickname "Mountain Charlie." Neither did he explain the adreneline- and testosterone-fueled rush to the California gold fields in 1849. Nor did he explain how hundreds of thousands of weak men died shooting at each other in a fandango called the Civil War. We assume he was speaking of highfallootin' 19th century males being weak.

He then made brave to cite Andrew Hoffman's Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens [William Morrow and Company, New York, 1997) contention that during his Western adventures, Sam Clemens engaged in homosexual relations with his fellows. He did state that there was no proof of this theory, but did attempt to bolster it by citing the abrupt breakoff of relations between Clemens and certain of his former male friends, inferring, we assume, that only homosexual men abruptly break off relationships; he may be correct--it has been a few years since we attended college and richochetted off all kinds of relationships.

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Email: Rich Benyo at dvdick@metro.net

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