The General and the Maid: Mark Twain On Ulysses S. Grant and Joan of Arc
Arizona Quarterly, The › Vol. 61 Nbr. 1, April 2005
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Summary
Robinson believes that Mark Twain's moral unease with what he remembered of the Civil War gave rise to competing impulses to tell and to untell the damaging truth of his campaign that failed. He cites that "The Private History" expresses that division of feeling by admitting, on one side, that its author had indeed abandoned the war, but, on the other, by offering that admission in terms that argue for the essential innocence of the deed.
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Extract
The General and the Maid: Mark Twain On Ulysses S. Grant and Joan of Arc
MARK TWAIN'S MOST DELIBERATE and sustained attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about his own life is preserved in the nearly 250 autobiographical dictations that he competed with a stenographer between 1906 and 1909. In order to encourage complete veracity, Twain decided from the outset that the dictations would be set aside for posthumous publication. Despite such good intentions, however, the Autobiography that resulted is singularly tame and unrevealing, most especially about its subject's interior life. This truth was not lost on the earnest but frustrated penitent. "I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for nine months," he observed on April 6, 1906; "I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents of my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet."1 "As to veracity," he told William Dean Howells, the autobiography "was a failure" (Howells 316).
Twain thus found in practice that the conscious commitment to personal candor worked paradoxically to produce its exact opposite. It is a kindred paradox that he came closest to revealing the truth about himself in his travel and fiction writing, when the pressure to tell the personal truth was much reduced. Indeed, it was precisely because he assumed that he could not open himself in fiction that he so frequently-and without knowing it-did so. It is this inadvertently revealing autobiography-the candid self-revelations that always eluded him when he set out on purpose to unveil them, but that turned up, often obliquely, when the censors were off guard-that concerns me here.Like most people, I suspect, but only more so, the Lincoln of our Literature felt compelled to confess what he perceived to be his sins even as he answered...See the full content of this document
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