MARK TWAIN: An American Prophet

by Maxwell Geismar ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 1970

Maxwell Geismar seems impelled to fly in the face of established opinion. In Henry James and the Jacobites he produced an enormously belligerent assessment of the Master's career, as well as an equally vitriolic denunciation of critics such as Wilson, Trilling, and Auden, a ""bewitched, bemused, and Circe-ish circle,"" conspiratorial aesthetes covering the fact that James was a snobbish expatriate for whom luxury was ""the highest human good."" In Mark Twain, he takes to task Van Wyck Brooks, Bernard DeVote, and Justin Kaplan, all those who living in a ""never-never land of psychic anxiety without social content"" have fostered the ""myth"" that the creator of Huckleberry Finn was a divided genius, ravaged with guilt, pessimism, self-doubt, precariously held in bondage to an edenic childhood. ""But the central point of the present book is that Samuel Clemens was not a major talent frustrated at midpoint. . . . In his old age he only became freer, bolder, more open and honest, more emancipated both socially and sexually, from the taboos of his epoch which, at base, his spirit had never accepted."" Writing at white heat, with the fervor of an avenging angel, spangled with smatterings of righteous incoherence, Geismar brings to light much neglected material, chiefly letters and essays, putatively demonstrating that Twain was worldly and alert, aware of economic and political chicanery, Christian hypocrisy, even the true nature of Anglo-Saxon imperialism, as well as a forerunner of modernist thought concerning sexual liberation and the deadening effects of civilization. Geismar stresses the prophetic, revolutionary aspects of Twain, but, in truth, the numerous quoted passages are much too contradictory to support any one interpretation. Twain, it appears, was ambivalent about everything--money, marriage, the masses, above all, himself. Unfortunately, ""the drama of discrimination,"" James' phrase, does not interest Geismar. There's a refreshing exuberance here, butt the doctrinaire bias is, in the end, fatal.

Pub Date: Oct. 6, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION