The Ordeal of Mark Twain. Van Wyck Brooks.

The Ordeal of Mark Twain
Van Wyck Brooks
New York: Meridian Books, 1929 (1955)

Why read it? According to the author, Twain was a writer who could have made a significant contribution to the world’s literature, but became sidetracked by his success and popularity as a humorist. Possibly explains his extreme bitterness in the latter part of his life. He never fulfilled his destiny. Desired wealth and prestige as well as fulfillment of his creative instinct. He couldn’t have both. “The poet, the artist in him consequently …withered into the cynic and the whole man had become a spiritual [invalid].”

Some sample ideas from the book: “Society and his mother wanted him to be a business man…. How often this dilemma has occurred in the lives of American writers; it was the dilemma which, as we shall see in the end, Mark Twain solved by becoming a humorist.” “…he had no essential pride in his work…. He did not think of it as a true expression of himself but rather as a commodity…..”

The author [Van Wyck Brooks] is heavy-handed in developing and supporting his thesis. He apparently has gone over everything available and picked out only those words that support his belief that Twain prostituted his real talent to his mother, to his wife and to society in general. “Marriage had been, for Mark Twain’s artistic conscience, like the final whiff of chloroform sealing a slumber that many a previous whiff had already induced.” “Mark Twain’s pride was not in his work; it was in his power and his fame.” “He was a potential artist living the life of a journalist.”

“As we run over the list of his books, we see the majority of them, including virtually all his good work, were not so much creative as reminiscent, descriptive, autobiographical or historical. It is generally understood that when people in middle age occupy themselves with their childhood it is because some central instinct in them has been blocked by internal or external obstacles; their consciousness flows backward until it reaches a period in their memory when life still seemed to them open and fluid with possibilities.”

Quote: “The making of the humorist was the undoing of the artist.”