Mark Twain (1835-1910), anti-imperialist thinker for all time

Mark Twain, ca. 1905

Well, we just missed his birthday, but what the hell. Born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, Mark Twain is a universal genius both for the value of his literary work and for his articles and thoughts, in which his humor and combat are unsurpassed. At a glance, we’ve collected a few samples:

“God created war so that Americans could learn geography.”

“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.

“A clear conscience is a sure sign of a bad memory.”

“The fear of death stems from the fear of life. A person who lives fully is prepared to die at any moment.”

I could fill a full-length article just with quotes from the genius. It would be enjoyable for me and even more so for the reader. But I must add two or three things about Mark Twain. He was an anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-hypocrite in his novels, short stories, articles, and in his public speaking. Many people still don’t know that side of him. The author of Tom Sawyer was and remains far from being solely a writer for children and teenagers. The book Patriotas e traidores: Antiimperialismo, política e crítica social  (Patriots and Traitors: Anti-Imperialism, Politics and Social Criticism), a selection of articles and essays by Mark Twain in a Portuguese translation edited by Prof. Maria Sílvia Betti that appeared in 2003, awakens this Brazilian reader to various movements and surprises. Truly, his fame is not exclusively North American: He belongs to the world.

Prof. Betti’s introduction is enlightening. She tells us that for decades, until the second half of the 20th century, Twain was purged, purified, and censored. Either for reasons of state, propaganda, U.S. foreign policy, or business, which all came to the same thing in the end. We had received and read a Mark Twain who is great for many young people, a good humorist for adults—and a writer who is absolutely blind to the blood drawn from other peoples by the imperialism of the United States government. Twain would have been a harmless 19th-century museum specimen with a drooling cigar in his mouth. According to Maria Sílvia Betti, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937), the official biographer and executor of Twain’s literary will, was also an active character in the deadly execution of his memory.

“What characterizes Paine’s relationship” with Mark Twain’s fictional and essayistic material is his desire to accommodate the author’s image to the molds of the stereotype that public opinion was led to accept and which, of course, left out the aspects of his criticism of American imperialism. Paine’s concern in this regard is made explicit in a letter he wrote to an editor at Harper & Bros. in 1926, suggesting that every possible effort be made to prevent other essayists or researchers from writing about the author, who had died at 74 in 1910, lest they see the image of the “traditional” Twain they had preserved begin to lose its luster and change. The biographer’s appeal to the publishing house is supported by a powerful argument within the logic of the publishing market: the fact that, in his assessment, the literary material owned by Harper would suffer a process of depreciation, were aspects of his thought exposed that would differ from those already established by the writer’s “critical fortune.”

The Twain we knew until then, alongside the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, was a Twain from the early days, the storyteller from the small towns of the western United States, the famous Jumping Frog, the teller of anecdotes, as in The Invalid’s Story. It was even said of him that he wasn’t a thinker, but a natural force who shook the world with laughter, like a primitive, an American Adam who saw everything with innocent eyes. His narrative technique, it was said, was essentially oral, and there was a great preference for autobiographical narratives. You can appreciate from Twain’s estate how much you can slander a person under a cloak of praise.

To be sure, the Twain rescued is infinitely better and more human. He is the storyteller of a masterpiece suppressed by the tradition of censorship, suffocated right from the title, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” This short story, whose revival by Howard Fast suffered the persecution of McCarthyism, is a story with the sting of a whip on all hypocrisy. In it, a small town proud of its absolute honesty—virtuous to the point of being the most incorruptible in the United States, because it ostentatiously protects itself from all temptation like reclusive friars—finally, after three generations of men of immaculate morals, reaches the end of the tale without a single upright Christian.

An author who pointed the finger at the imperialism of his country, Mark Twain remains so modern, seeming to be pointing at the imperialist United States of all times, by parodying the cynicism of the excuses for war:

“We were treacherous, but it was only so that good could emerge from apparent evil. It is true that we crushed a deluded and trusting people; we attacked the weak and friendless who trusted us… We stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of our guest; we bought a lie from an enemy who had nothing to sell; we stole the land and freedom of a trusting friend; we invited our young men to shoulder a discredited rifle and forced them to do the work that is usually done by thugs, under the protection of a flag that the thugs have learned to fear, not to follow; we corrupted American honor and sullied its face before the world, but every detail was aimed at the good….”

This Twain, in short, is a twin—a twin of ours, a brother of humanity. He is a brave man who turns against the cowardice of lynching Black people, against the persecution of Chinese people in California, against the business empire that survives on a sea of blood. The final tribute we owe him is to embrace this twin, this genius who in another voice could be Latin, European, Asian, and African.

And how nice it was to read the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn again.

New attention has been brought to Twain’s work in Percival Everett’s new novel James,  a retelling of Huck Finn’s adventures from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who accompanies him on his Mississippi River journey. It won the 2024 National Book Award for fiction.

There’s still a goldmine of bounty left in Mark Twain’s collective work to educate, entertain, and embolden readers for untold centuries to come.

Happy belated 189th birthday, Mr. Twain!

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CONTRIBUTOR

Urariano Mota

Urariano Mota is a Brazilian writer, journalist, and chronicler of Brazil’s culture, people, and politics. Mota is the author of the novels "Soledad no Recife," "O Filho Renegado de Deus," and "A Mais Longa Duração da Juventude." He writes a column for the Communist Party of Brazil website Vermelho and collaborates with Prosa, Poesia, e Arte. His most recent novel is "Never-Ending Youth," translated by Peter Lownds, and published in the U.S. by International Publishers of New York.