The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [5]
Although he and Warner traded off every two or three chapters, and Warner supplied a few characters as well as his knowledge of the surveyor’s art, the novel belongs mostly to the westerner. (For those interested in comparing their styles, Mark Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, then 24–25, 27–28, 30, 32–34, 36–37, 42–43, 45, 51–53, 57, and 59–62. Warner wrote 12–23, 26, 29, 31, 38–41, 44, 46–48, 50, 54–55, 58, and 63. The two men contributed equally to 35, 49, and 56.) Warner supplied many distinctive elements (including a lot of Victorian sermonizing), but well-drawn characters, narrative dynamism, and crackling dialogue were not among them. Charles Warner was a conventionally competent nineteenth-century prose writer. Mark Twain was at work creating the prose style of the century to follow.
Here is Warner doing what he did best: discoursing about the world; in this instance, upon the soul of Woman.
What capacities she has of purity, tenderness, goodness; what capacities of vileness, bitterness and evil. Nature must needs be lavish with the mother and creator of men, and centre in her all the possibilities of life. And a few critical years can decide whether her life is to be full of sweetness and light, whether she is to be the vestal of a holy temple, or whether she will be the fallen priestess of a desecrated shrine. (p. 131)
Here is Mark Twain doing what he did best: immersing his senses in the world about him, and letting it speak for itself upon the page.
“Let me help you, Washington—Lafayette pass this plate to Washington— ah, well, well, my boy, things are looking pretty bright, now, I tell you. Speculation—my! the whole atmosphere’s full of money. I wouldn’t take three fortunes for one little operation I’ve got on hand now—have anything from the casters? No? Well, you’re right, you’re right. Some people like mustard with turnips, but—now there was Baron Poniatowski—Lord, but that man did know how to live! . . . The Baron used to say, ‘Take mustard, Sellers, try the mustard,—a man can’t know what turnips are in perfection without mustard,’ . . . Yes indeed, Washington, I’ve got one little operation on hand that—take some more water—help yourself, won’t you?—help yourself, there’s plenty of it.—You’ll find it pretty good, I guess.” (pp. 79–80)
There it all is—the essence of The Gilded Age, packed into one readout from the mind of Colonel Sellers: money obsession, posturing, cunning, velocity of thought and speech, duplicity as a form of etiquette. Here, Mark Twain is combining personal memory, his gift for dialect, and what Ward Just has called his “imaginative reportage”: his blazing curiosity about how things work. The Hawkins family and their migration are closely modeled on Marshall and Jane Clemens, Sam’s parents. The Falstaffian Sellers was drawn from James Lampton, a colorful cousin of Jane’s, who once fed young Sam a turnip-and-water dinner while bloviating about grandiose schemes. Mark Twain artfully replicates that dinner, while investing Lampton/Sellers with all he has learned about the American Flim-Flam Man and his embrace of opportunism, Washington-style. Sellers and his co-creations also take the reader on a tour of (among other things) federal legislative process, power politics, railroad operation, financial systems, riverboat navigation, influence peddling, the subtle codes of Washington social/sexual etiquette, and land speculation.
The Gilded Age fascinates largely as it showcases this developing power of Mark Twain’s observational genius and his blossoming comprehension of the larger uses to which it can be applied. Thus, The Gilded Age is best enjoyed as the journey-in-progress of America’s most illustrious author—oh, and also as thinly disguised nonfiction, which, after all, is the ultimate reward of any Washington novel.
RON POWERS, a Pulitzer Prize–winning author and native of Hannibal, Missouri, has written thirteen books,