Clemens and Twain shall meet

Ron Powers

Scribner, 25

EVEN if you have never read the novels in which they appear, it is a fair assumption that the names Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer conjure up specific images: the pipe-smoking barefoot boy on a raft, drifting down the Mississippi; the cheeky rake-hell conning his friends into whitewashing a fence. Tom and Huck are more than characters. They are quintessentially American icons, reincarnated in forms as diverse as Bart Simpson and Holden Caulfield. But what of their author?

'Mark Twain' was not, of course, his real name. Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 and brought up in Hannibal, Missouri, he was an apprentice printer, Mississippi steam-boat pilot, Nevada prospector and local hack before his first work, 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' was published in 1867. At the height of his powers, he was so famous that a letter, addressed with only a silhouette of the author, would reach him at his eccentrically designed home at Hartford, Connecticut.

Clemens claimed that he "confiscated" his pseudonym - which means, literally, "mark two", or a depth sounding of 12 feet - from another steamboat pilot and aspiring writer, Captain Isaiah Sellers. That this story is revealed to be suspect at best is only one of the many ironies, ambiguities and contradictions explored in Ron Powers' majestic and stylish biography. 'Mark Twain' was as much a constructed character as either Huck or Tom. Although the biography takes as its title the famous nom-de-plume, its subject is the far more elusive Samuel Clemens.

Behind the stereotype of the genial, witty, cracker-barrel philosopher is a story of avarice, resentment, celebrity and political awakening. And behind that, as Powers argues beautifully, is the story of the emergence of modern America itself.

Mark Twain's first full-length work, Innocents Abroad, cast a gimlet eye over a party of evangelical Americans on the world's first tourist cruise around Europe and the Holy Land. With calculated effrontery and premeditated mischievousness, Twain skewered the nave pomposity of the New World and the cynical self-superiority of the Old; moreover, he flaunted his 'backwater' Western status - he had recently been described as "The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope". The book was a raucous nudge in the ribs to the 'polite' European virtues of the East Coast Brahmins - Emerson, Wendell Holmes and Thoreau - who constituted the aristocracy of American letters.

Their in-house journal, The Atlantic Monthly, nonetheless gave Twain's debut a very positive review by William Dean Howells, who later recalled his first meeting with Twain, who arrived, dishevelled, at the magazine's office to express his thanks in a typically shocking fashion: "I felt like the woman who was so glad her baby had come white."

Howells and Twain went on to become fast friends, and Innocents Abroad was followed by further volumes interlacing reportage, caricature and autobiography which met with thunderous denunciations and fulsome praise in equal measure. Twain's popularity with the reading public was enhanced by gruelling lecture tours in which he perfected his drawling, pause-laden performances. Powers is especially good on the comic tradition that Twain drew on, giving excellent sketches of such influential, though forgotten, figures as Artemus Ward.

TWAIN'S MERITS as an author stemmed from his self-educated background: he read voraciously, but was not beholden to traditional assumptions about the supremacy of 'English' literature (he famously described Shakespeare as "looking like a pork butcher"). Freed from the strait-jacket of imitation, he could bring the sounds of the American language to the forefront, especially in the characters of Tom, Huck and the runaway slave Jim. This lack of training may have benefited his literary production, but it caused major problems for his other great passion: making money.

Even though Twain was earning more money than any previous American author, he was caught up in the mania for speculation and new technologies - Huckleberry Finn was reputedly the first work to be typewritten. Twain unwisely invested in a printing company which claimed to have a patent for a new typesetting procedure which could mechanically set and space whole words, and when it failed, his debts stood at a staggering $4.9m in today's terms.

Throughout his career he had excoriated Walter Scott (even holding him almost single-handedly responsible for the Civil War), but now he was in the same boat as his bte noire. Twain's publishing company, after an initial success with ex-President Grant's Memoirs, made blunder after blunder, and the last 20 years of Twain's life were ruined by financial uncertainty and private grief.

His wife predeceased him; his daughter Susy died, insane, at 24; his daughter Jean at 26. The humour of his later works - such as A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - is laced with bitterness. If there is a redeeming feature to these years, over and above the work, it is the conversion of Twain to being a radical anti-imperialist. "I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land," he said. Throughout, Powers subtly flags up the contemporary echoes of 19th-century debates.

Powers skilfully demonstrates how much more there is to Twain and Clemens than Tom and Huck: yet Tom and Huck remain his most enduring legacy. Denounced initially by conservatives for promoting misbehaviour, then latterly by liberals for the depiction of 'Nigger' Jim, the books, for all their haphazard construction and uneasy combination of slapstick and profound moral meditation, are classics. Twain aimed to transcend his own prejudices, even as he preserved, in perpetuity, a prejudiced society.

"Persons attempting to find a Moral in it will be banished," he announced. Few have heeded the warning. Hemingway captures some of the contrary reaction to Huckleberry Finn: it is the beginning of a national literature, but the end - where Tom and Huck conspire to free Jim, as they simultaneously humiliate him - is "just cheating". They are problematic books, made more so by Twain's expedient resurrection of the characters for the lesser though nonetheless entertaining sequels, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective.

It seems tragic that Twain never persevered with a manuscript idea in which he considered what might have become of his eternal boys: a 60-year-old Huck, crazy, believing himself a child again; Tom, disillusioned after his world tour, made aware that "all that was beautiful is under the mould".

Irascible, petulant, charming, demanding, gregarious, talented, lazy: Powers riffs nicely on the similarities between Twain and present-day rock stars (right down to trashing hotel rooms). Democracy, gadgetry, capitalism and superstardom coalesced in the person of Twain, just as they came to be seen as the defining characteristics of his country.

His career enshrines a peculiarly American myth: the local boy, rising to the highest (literary) office in the land, blowing it, and then working off his debt. With Twain, America gained a recognisable literary voice and form, just as it started on its path to superpower status.

Stuart Kelly is author of The Book Of Lost Books