For me, Tom Swenson's comments on Twain's "mass of contradictions" caught
the matter perfectly.  I wasn't aware that Twain had called himself "THE
American," but he certainly strikes me as the quintessentially American
writer and personality.

Along that line, it seems to me that the American reader best responds to
him by very honestly facing her or his own deepest cultural contradictions.
To touch on only a few:

--Twain is the self-effacing Huck and the grand-standing Tom or Connecticut
Yankee.  There is the real modesty of a man who saw himself as never quite
"a REAL novelist" vs. the endless ways he was a show off, a man who gloried
in his celebrity.
--He despised and adored mechanical progress.  (He is every American
snarling at his own car, computer, etc... He is me knowing what an idiot I
am when I let myself be convinced that I "have" to buy the very latest piece
of crap.)
--He despised the same garish, expensive clutter with which he surrounded
himself--drowning in all the pricy material crap that he so busily gathered.
--He often venerated the same "high culture" that never fit him comfortably.
Under all the comic exaggerations of his essays on Wagner (etc.) there is
the quieter voice of the man who wished (and also did not wish) that he was
more comfortable with the so-called fine arts.   Thus his occasional painful
efforts to write "philosophically."  Thus his heavily researched inferior
efforts like Joan of Arc.  (In that regard, he is every American who thinks
he "should" like classical music or go to museums more often.)
--And of course the ambivalence about money, "greed," etc. that started this
discussion.  I have, I fear, a little difficulty believing that those forum
members who condemn his greed don't have even the slightest yearning for a
few thousand more in their own bank accounts and investments.  Again:  I
think we read and love him best by facing our own contradictions.

To digress on that one, many of you will recall an essay of a few years ago
called something like "The Unbearable Ugliness of Saabs."  The writer's
point was that intellectuals wish to see themselves as people who don't
spend ostentatiously, and certainly not on the same gewgaws that average
people dote on.  Therefore successful professors  won't flaunt (say) sports
cars.  But of course they DO want to be damned sure people  know that they
are successful.  Thus they ride around in dowdy over-priced  cars.......  To
read Twain best, I think, is to acknowledge that kind of muddle of values in
one's self.

...I'm sure others in the group could add to the above list of
contradictions.

At his best, Mark Twain also had the courage of his confusions:  A
willingness to face his own contradictions that so many of us sadly lack.
Thus the simple brilliance of so many Twain lines like "I don't believe in
Hell, but I'm afraid of it."

Mark Coburn