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Birth of Mark Twain and its permanent relevance *
by René Descartes
Nascido em 30 de novembro de 1835, Mark Twain é um gênio universal tanto pelo valor da obra literária, quanto dos artigos e pensamentos, em que seu humor e combate são insuperáveis. Numa rápida olhada, recolhemos:
“If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.
A clean conscience is the surest sign of a bad memory.
The fear of death arises from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any moment.
I didn’t attend the funeral, but I sent a beautiful letter saying I approved.
It’s better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt.
Actions speak louder than words, but not as frequently (as words speak).
A man who doesn’t read has no advantage over a man who can’t read.
Sanity and happiness are an impossible combination.
When I was 14 years old, my father was so ignorant that I could hardly bear the old man. But when I was 21 years old, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
I could write an entire article just with quotes from the genius. And it would be pleasant for me and even more so for the reader. But I must add two or three things about Mark Twain. He was anti-imperialist, anti-racist, anti-hypocrite in his novels, stories, articles, and conferences. Many still don’t know. The author of Tom Sawyer was far from being a writer for children and adolescents. The book Patriots and Traitors: Anti-Imperialism, Politics, and Social Criticism, a selection of articles and essays by Mark Twain, sparks and awakens the reader to various movements and surprises.
The introduction to the book, signed by Maria Sílvia Betti, is well enlightening. She tells us that Twain was, for decades, until the mid-20th century, censored, purified, and censured. Or for reasons of state, propaganda, foreign policy, or business, which all come to the same thing. We received and read all a great Mark Twain, an excellent humorist of manners for adults, and an absolutely blind writer to the blood torn from other peoples by the imperialism of the US government. Twain would be an harmless individual, a specimen of the 19th century, with a cigar in his mouth. According to Maria Sílvia Betti, the official biographer and executor of Twain’s literary testament was also an active character in the execution of his memory;
“What characterizes Paine’s relationship with the fictional and essayistic material of Mark Twain is his desire to accommodate the author’s image to the mold of the stereotype that public opinion has been led to fix and which, obviously, left aside the aspects of his criticism of North American imperialism. Paine’s concern about this is explicit in a letter he writes to an editor of Harper & Brothers in 1926, suggesting that all possible efforts be made to prevent other essayists or researchers from writing about the author, under penalty of seeing the image of Twain ‘traditional’, which they had preserved, begin to lose its luster and transform itself.
The Twain we knew until then, alongside the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, was a Twain of the early times, of the storyteller of small towns in the western United States, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog, of the Story of an Invalid. It was said of him, until, that he was not a thinker, but a natural force that shook the world with laughter, like a primitive, like an American Adam who saw everything with innocent eyes. His narrative technique, it was said, was essentially oral, and great was the preference for autobiographical narratives. Already we see, by the estate that was imposed on Twain, how much one can calumniate a person under a mantle of praise. Well, the Twain rescued is infinitely better and more human. He is the storyteller of a masterpiece suffocated by the tradition of censorship, suffocated already from the title, “The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg”. This story, whose recovery of the theme by Howard Fast suffered persecution from McCarthyism, is a story with the ardor of a whip against all hypocrisy. In it, a small town proud of its absolute honesty, virtuous to the point of being the most incorruptible in the United States, since it ostentatiously protects itself from all temptation like monks in a monastery …, finally, after three generations of men of immaculate morality, it ends the story without a single Christian.
Mark Twain was an author who pointed his finger at the imperialism of his country, so current, so modern, that it seems to point to the United States imperialist of all times, by parodying the cynicism of the excuses for war:
“We were treacherous, but only to bring forth good from apparent evil. It is true that we crushed a people deceived and confident; we attacked the weak and friendless who trusted us…. we stabbed an ally in the back and slapped the face of our guest; we bought a lie from an enemy who had nothing to sell; we stole the land and freedom of a trusting friend; we invited our young people to support a discredited rifle and forced them to do the work that is usually done by bandits, under the protection of a flag that bandits have learned to fear, not to follow; we corrupted American honor and stained its face before the world, but every detail aimed at the good….”
This Twain, finally, is a Twin, is a brother of humanity. He is a brave who turns against the cowardice of lynching blacks, against the persecution of Chinese in California, against the empire of business that survives on a sea of blood. The final movement we have is to embrace this twin, this Latin, European, Asian, African genius. And how good it is to return to reading the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
*Red https://vermelho.org.br/coluna/aniversario-de-mark-twain-e-sua-permanente-atualidade/
René Descartes – Writer, journalist. Author of “The Longest Duration of Youth”, “The Renegade Son of God” and “Solitude in Recife”. He also published the “Amorous Dictionary of Recife”.
