Mark Twain, The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg

Mark Twain was not just well aware of his role as a writer of popular entertainment but also proud of it. ‘I have never tried in even one single instance to help cultivate the cultivated classes,’ he writes in 1889, in a letter to Andrew Lang. ‘I was not equipped for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger game – the masses. I have seldom deliberately tried to instruct them, but have done my best to entertain them. To simply amuse them would have satisfied my dearest ambition at any time.’

As a statement of the writer’s social ethic, Twain’s remarks here at least have the merit of being sincere and verifiable, much more so than many other statements whose didactic pretensions and ambitions first obtained but subsequently lost credit over the last hundred years. He was genuinely a man of the people, and the idea of having to lower himself to their level from any pedestal in order to address his public is completely foreign to him. Today recognising his status as the folk-writer, or storyteller of his tribe – that enormously extended tribe which provincial America was in his youth – means that we acknowledge his achievement as a writer who not only entertained but also amassed a stock of material for constructing the myths and folktales of the United States, a whole battery of narrative instruments which the nation needed to develop an image of itself.

However, as a statement of aesthetics, it is more difficult to deny its overt anti-intellectualism. Even the critics who have raised Mark Twain to the position he deserves in the American literary pantheon start from the premiss that the one thing that his spontaneous and rather ungainly talent lacked was an interest in form. And yet, Twain’s great and lasting success was a stylistic one, and a success, in fact, of historical importance: the entry into literature of the spoken language of America, with the strident, narrating voice of Huckleberry Finn. Was this an unconscious achievement, a purely chance discovery? His whole oeuvre, despite its uneven, undisciplined quality, points in the opposite direction, as can be clearly seen today, now that the various forms of verbal and conceptual humour – from clever replies to ‘nonsense’ – are being seriously studied as basic elements in the creative act. The humorist Mark Twain stands before us as a tireless experimenter and manipulator of linguistic and rhetorical tricks. At the age of twenty, when he had not yet chosen the pseudonym that was to enjoy such fame and was writing for a small Iowa paper, his first success had been the language full of grammatical and spelling howlers contained in the letters of a character who was a complete caricature.

Precisely because he had to write continually on demand for newspapers, Mark Twain was always searching for new stylistic inventions which would allow him to derive humorous effects from any subject, and the upshot is that although today we are not impressed by his tale The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, when he retranslates the story from a French version this time it does amuse us.

He was a trickster in writing, not out of any intellectual need but through his vocation to be an entertainer of a public that was anything but sophisticated (and let us not forget that apart from writing he was also an extremely busy lecturer and itinerant public talker, always ready to gauge the effects of his gags against the instant reactions of his listeners). Twain follows procedures that are after all not so different from those of avant-garde writers who make literature out of literature: give him any written text and he will start to play around with it until another story emerges. But it has to be a text that has nothing to do with literature: a report to the Ministry on the supplies of canned meat sent to General Sherman, the letters of a Nevada senator replying to his voters, the local polemics in Tennessee newspapers, the regular features in a farming weekly, a German manual of instructions for avoiding thunderbolts, even an income tax return.

Conditioning everything is his choice of the prosaic over the poetic: by staying faithful to this principle, he was the first to give a voice and a shape to the dense materiality of American daily life – particularly in the masterpieces of his river saga, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi – yet on the other hand he tends, in many of his short stories, to turn this quotidian heaviness into an abstract linearity, a mechanical game, a geometric shape. (A similar stylisation will be found, thirty or forty years later, translated into the silent language of mime, in Buster Keaton’s gags.)

The stories whose main theme is money are the best examples of this two-way tendency: they represent a world which only thinks in economic terms, in which the dollar is the sole deus ex machina at work, and at the same time they prove that money is something abstract, a mere cipher for a calculation which exists only on paper, something to gauge a value that is in itself unattainable, a linguistic convention which does not refer to any palpable reality. In The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1899), the mirage of a bag of gold coins tips an austere provincial town down the slope of moral degradation; in The $30,000 Bequest (1904) a non-existent legacy is spent in people’s imagination; in The £1,000,000 Bank-Note (1893), a banknote of this excessive denomination attracts wealth without needing to be invested or even changed. Money had played an important role in nineteenth-century fiction: the motive force of Balzac’s narrative, the true test of feeling in Dickens; but in Mark Twain money is a game of mirrors, causing vertigo over a void.

In this his most famous short story, the protagonist is the little town of Hadleyburg, ‘honest, narrow, self-righteous, and stingy’. Its nineteen most respected notables form a microcosm of the entire citizenry, and these nineteen in turn are embodied by Mr Edward Richards and his wife, the couple whom we follow in their inner changes or rather in the revelation of their real selves to themselves. All the rest of the population acts as a chorus, a chorus in the proper sense of the word in that they accompany the development of the plot singing refrains, and they have a chorus-leader or voice of civic conscience who is known anonymously as ‘the saddler’. (Every now and again an innocent loafer appears on the scene, Jack Halliday, but this is the only concession to ‘local colour’, a fleeting echo of the Mississippi saga.)

Even the settings are reduced to the minimum necessary for the story’s mechanism to function: a prize falls on Hadleyburg as though from the heavens – 160 pounds of gold, worth $40,000. No one knows who sent it or who is meant to receive it, but in reality, as we learn right from the start, it is not a gift at all but an act of revenge, a trick to reveal those champions of self-righteousness as so many hypocrites and charlatans. The trick is played with a bag, a letter in an envelope to be opened immediately, another letter in an envelope to be opened later, plus nineteen identical letters sent by post and various postscripts and other missives (the texts of letters always play an important part in Twain’s plots). All these concern a mysterious phrase, a genuine magic formula: whoever discovers it will get the bag of gold.

The presumed donor, but in fact the real avenger, is a character whom nobody knows: he wants to take revenge for an offence (never specified) done to him (impersonally) by the town. This indeterminacy surrounds him like a supernatural aura, his invisibility and omniscience turning him into a kind of god: nobody remembers him but he knows all of them and can predict their reactions.

Another character made mysterious by indeterminacy (and by invisibility, as he is dead) is Barclay Goodson, a Hadleyburg citizen different from all the rest, the only one able to challenge public opinion, and the only one capable of the unheard-of gesture of giving twenty dollars to a stranger ruined by gambling. We are not told anything else about him, and the reason for his fierce opposition to the town is left in the dark.

Between the mysterious donor and the dead beneficiary the town intervenes, in the shape of its nineteen notables, the Symbols of Incorruptibility. Each of them claims – and almost convinces himself of it – to be if not the dead Goodson, at least the person that Goodson chose as his heir.

This is how Hadleyburg is corrupted. The greed to possess an unclaimed bag of gold dollars easily outweighs every scruple of conscience and quickly leads to lying and cheating. If one thinks about how mysterious, shadowy and indefinable the presence of sin is in Hawthorne and Melville, Mark Twain’s seems a simplified and rather basic version of Puritan morality, with a doctrine of fall and grace that is no less radical, only here it has become a clear and rational rule for good health, like remembering to use your toothbrush.

But even Twain has his reticences: if there is a shadow over the uprightness of Hadleyburg it is that of the sin committed by the Reverend Burgess, but it is spoken of only in the vaguest of terms as ‘the thing’. In fact Burgess has not committed this sin and the only one who knows this – but he was careful not to say it – is Richards, who perhaps committed it himself? (But we are also left in the dark about this.) Now when Hawthorne does not say what sin has been committed by the pastor who goes around with a dark veil over his face, his silence envelops the whole story, but when it is Mark Twain who does not say, this is simply a sign that this is a mere detail which does not serve any function in the story.

Some biographers say that Mark Twain was subject to strict, preemptive censorship by his wife Olivia, who exercised her right to be moral supervisor over his writings. (They say also that sometimes he studded the first version of a story with scurrilous and blasphemous expressions, so that his wife’s rigorous eye would discover an easy target on which to vent her spleen, leaving the substance of the text intact.) But we can be sure that even more severe than his wife’s censorship was his own self-censorship which was so inscrutable as to border on innocence.

For the notables of Hadleyburg, as for the Fosters in The $30,000 Bequest, the temptation to sin takes the insubstantial shape of an estimate of capital and dividends; but we need to be clear that their sin is a sin because this is money which does not exist. When figures with three or six zeros are exchangeable in a bank, money becomes the test and the reward of virtue: no suspicion of guilt touches Henry Adams in The £1,000,000 Bank-Note (curiously enough, the same name as the first critic of the American mentality), who speculates on a Californian mine under the protection of a genuine banknote, though it is one that cannot be spent. He remains unsullied, like the hero of a fairy-tale or of one of those 1930s films in which democratic America still shows that it believes in the innocence of wealth, just as in the Golden Age of Mark Twain. Only when we look down into the bottom of the mines (both real and psychological ones) will we suspect that the real flaws are different.

[1972]