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http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/071598author-twain.html
By GLENN COLLINS
[H] ere now in the high noon of fence-whitewashing
season, when sivilized people like Becky Thatcher
and Aunt Polly might seek refuge in the shade of a
porch, comes the latest Imax adventure. It's a colorful,
noisy, globe-trotting three-dimensional celebration of
-- Mark Twain?
Yes, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who adopted the pen name
Mark Twain, will take his place on the eight-story-tall
screen, superseding the flicker of previous Imax
extravaganzas that have portrayed the quest for the
summit of Everest, the hunt for the Titanic and the
pedal-stomping proclivities of professional race car
drivers.
Indeed, the premiere of the film, "Mark Twain's America
in 3-D," on Friday in Manhattan is a testament to the
continuing mass appeal of the cynosure of Hannibal, Mo.
Improbably, 88 years after his death and 122 years after
the publication of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,"
America is sustaining a Twain boom that betrays no sign
of abating.
"His popularity is growing," said Shelley Fisher
Fishkin, professor of American studies and English at
the University of Texas at Austin, the editor of the
29-volume "The Oxford Mark Twain" (1996). "Twain
scholarship is increasing, articles are coming out by
the dozens, there are new films in the works, and Twain
is the subject of exchanges on the Internet."
Researchers say the Twain phenomenon -- fueled by the
author's wicked wit, enduring seductiveness and flat-out
subversiveness -- keeps captivating audiences in each
new generation. Twain himself put it this way: "My books
are water; those of the great geniuses are wine.
Everybody drinks water."
Nonetheless, said Justin Kaplan, a Twain biographer: "It
is too easy to sentimentalize him as the foxy grandpa of
American letters, the author of wholesome books for the
young.
Twain was a man with an [Image]
extremely dark imagination and a University of
low threshold of annoyance." Mr. California-Riverside,
Kaplan won the Pulitzer Prize California Museum of
and the National Book Award for Photography
his study, "Mr. Clemens and Mark
Twain." Mark Twain, in an
image produced from a
To some scholars, the 20th 19th-century
century bears the mark of Twain. stereopticon negative
They see the current nostalgic and used in ''Mark
hoopla over this Victorian as an Twain's America in
emblem of the intense millennial 3-D.''
preoccupation with the 19th -----------------------
century.
But though that era has been idealized as the golden age
of invention, exploration, colonization and the mass
industry that fueled a pivotally unifying civil war,
Twain grappled with many of the messy issues that still
torment the fin-de-siècle American psyche.
"As the millennium approaches," Dr. Fishkin said,
"scholars are looking back a century ago and seeing
Twain as a truth-teller. There is virtually no issue on
the horizon right now that Twain didn't deal with then,
in his work." The roster includes animal rights, the
impact of technology, the tension between heredity and
environment, the boundaries of gender and the
interracial debate.
A century and a half after the famously riverine Twain
worked as a printer's apprentice in Hannibal, he has
Java-star status on the Internet. For example, the Mark
Twain Forum (reachable through many search engines)
provides information of interest to Twainians, as
Clemens buffs call themselves.
It offers links to dozens of Twain sites including the
Mining Company Guide, which posts the latest Twain
flashes, like the movement in Manila to celebrate
Philippine-American Friendship Day by building a Mark
Twain monument, or the popularity of juvenile
horse-riding in a Japanese amusement park called the Tom
Sawyer Bokuju.
There are also Internet bulletins about the latest
attempts to banish "Huckleberry Finn" from bookstores
and library shelves, including the recent move by the
Pennsylvania State Conference of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People to
remove the novel from required-reading lists in the
state's schools.
Often Showing Up As Himself in Fiction
The public television station WGBH in Boston is
preparing a documentary on "Huckleberry Finn," and Ken
Burns -- of baseball, Lewis and Clark and Civil War fame
-- is working on a two-part Twain documentary to appear
on PBS in 2001; even a Hollywood producer is approaching
Twain scholars for advice on an animated Twain movie.
So powerful is the Twain presence that contemporary
writers have made him a character in their fiction. They
include Gore Vidal, in his novel "1876"; Joyce Carol
Oates in her novel "A Bloodsmoor Romance"; the
"Riverworld" series by the science fiction author Philip
Jose Farmer, and the Mark Twain mysteries of Peter J.
Heck, author of "Death on the Mississippi."
And not only was Twain a character in "Bonanza" and
"Cheers," but also a time-travel episode was built about
Twain on "Star Trek: The Next Generation."
"Twain has more marquee value than ever," said Mark
Katz, a vice president of Sony Pictures Classics, which
is distributing the Imax film and is a co-producer.
Old Photographs, New Techniques
The Imax documentary -- which is told in Twain's words
and reaches across two centuries, as did Twain's life --
will make its debut on Friday at Sony Theaters Lincoln
Square; it will be playing on 10 large-format screens
across the country by the end of the year. The film
interweaves the life and times of Twain, as depicted in
black-and-white archival photographs, with full-color
portrayals of the lives of current-day enthusiasts who
revel in the 19th-century Zeitgeist and seek to recreate
it.
Its producers see the $6 million Twain film, the first
Imax biography, as something of a breakthrough in the
evolution of a new entertainment medium. Imax -- which,
like its predecessor Cinerama, never saw a roller
coaster it didn't want to film -- is still dismissed by
some as a novelty medium. "But we think of the format as
an alternative cinematic art form that is undergoing a
maturation process," Mr. Katz said.
Stephen Low, the 3-D film's 47-year-old director, says
the documentary allows theatergoers "to look into the
eyes of their ancestors and wonder what they were like;
these are not actors, and this is not fiction."
Indeed, the 1998 film is based on an extraordinary
19th-century trove of three-dimensional stereopticon
negatives from the collection at the University of
California-Riverside, California Museum of Photography,
many of which present Twain himself, in all his fierce
attention, as if he were poised to speak.
The film has been enhanced with archival two-dimensional
photographs of the era that have been digitally
converted into three-dimensional images. This is
believed to be the first time such images have been used
on the big screen.
The film appears even as Twain buffs are girding for a
summerlong binge of Clemensiana. For example, this
weekend the city of Hartford will hold its annual Mark
Twain Days festival, with, naturally, cane-pole fishing
events, and frog-jumping and fence-painting contests
sponsored by the Mark Twain House there.
Thus far the most high-profile Twain bash of the season
was mounted on Monday night at the Players, the New York
City club that Twain helped found in 1888 and where he
lived in 1904. (His pool cue is enshrined in the
billiard room.) At a Victorian fund-raiser, 200 guests
saw the Imax film, then consumed 19th-century food and
were serenaded by banjo, tuba and trombone.
"I never pass up an opportunity to attend an event in my
honor," said Mr. Twain himself, greeting the guests in a
splendid white suit. When pressed, he allowed that he
might be masquerading as an actor by the name Munro
Bonnell.
The real Twain "would unleash his barbs at the slightest
provocation" at considerable risk to his reputation,
said Mr. Kaplan, the biographer. Twain had reason to be
provoked, having lost much of his money to unprescient
investments, and most of his family to illness. That
included his daughter Jean, who died at 29, during an
epileptic fit on Christmas Eve. Twain died three months
later, in the year of the return of Halley's Comet,
1910: he had been born 75 years before, in 1835, during
the year of the comet's previous appearance.
From the Riverboat To the Automobile
The new documentary portrays Twain as a quintessentially
American presence whose life marked the milestones of
the 19th century. Twain's arc spanned the era of the
riverboat on the Mississippi to that of the motorcar on
Fifth Avenue. He fought in the Civil War (briefly, for
the South), became wealthy and famous, lost most of his
fortune and lived until the era of powered flight.
To be sure, Twain is still a world-class
controversy-magnet, not only for the way he refers to
blacks in "Huckleberry Finn," but also for his portrayal
of female characters.
Some black academics, including Julius Lester, a
professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst,
have adamantly proclaimed Twain's racism, and feminists
have charged that his sexism was epitomized by shallow
portrayals of women.
The novelist Jane Smiley has attributed Twain's grand
reputation to the hype generated by a small group of
literary critics who canonized "white, Protestant,
middle-class male authors."
Other black scholars, like David L. Smith, a professor
of English at Williams College, have pointed out that
Twain portrayed the interracial friendship of Huck and
Jim positively and indicted the ethical myopia of white
characters who claimed to be moral while condoning a
racist system of law and custom.
"His greatest works have relatively limited roles for
female characters, but some of Twain's lesser-known
works show a greater range," contended Dr. Fishkin,
whose most recent book, "Lighting Out for the Territory"
(1997), explores these controversies. "Calling him a
sexist or a racist is selling him very short. He was
neither."
Views of Progress And Its Dark Side
Though Twain once said that "the 20th century is a
stranger to me," some see the author's sensibility as
especially modern because "he was conflicted, divided,
ironic and not at peace with himself," Mr. Kaplan said.
A century before cyberphiles rushed to buy Windows 98,
Twain was clearly an early adopter, intrigued by the
cutting-edge technologies that produced cash registers,
typewriters and photography. He claimed to be the first
author in the world to apply a typing machine to
literature and proclaimed himself the first book author
to use phonographic dictation (for "The American
Claimant").
In that 1892 book, he posited a wild-eyed inventor who
dreamed up ideas that prefigured the fax machine, the
photocopier and DNA cloning. But Twain also wrote about
the dark side of progress, envisioning, for example, a
technological dystopia in "A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court."
Not the least of Twain's accomplishments was that he was
"wildly funny," Mr. Kaplan said. "This was a man who
worshiped laughter as a weapon. Twain was not afraid of
hurting."
Indeed, "we need Twain now," Mr. Kaplan added with a
laugh. "Imagine the kind of satiric and logical
intelligence he would apply to the whole Kenneth
Starr-Monica Lewinsky business. Twain would be having a
ball."
Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company
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