Friends-- Hope this solves the transmission problem. Once again, any comments or observations are welcome, and please if you are going to quote it in any form, the copyright is held by the Hartford Advocate. Hard copies of the article are available by requesting a back issue, March 27, 1997, for $3.50 each (to cover mailng costs) from: Hartford Advocate, 100 Constitution Plaza, Hartford, Conn. 06103. Thanks. Kathy O'Connell Staff writer Will the Twain Ever Meet? Scholars disagree over the life and times of Sam Clemens and still his work endures By Kathy O'Connell [DROPCAP]Samuel Langhorne Clemens and Mark Twain. The two are, it can be argued, not the same. But this writer and his alter ego are the literary equivalent of television. Like a TV set in a bar that is always on, Twain is always with us. Even Twain scholars readily admit that Clemens' greatest book, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is second-rate measured against the best work of, say, Henry James. But James sparks no such passions or controversies; James has never made an appearance on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Twain alone among American writers best embodies every one of our national contradictions, from our love-hate relationship with celebrity to our determination to hang on to both our innocence and idealism. That helps explain why, 162 years after his birth and 87 after his death, Samuel Clemens and his alter ego are still as hot a publishing ticket as anything that might turn up on Oprah Winfrey's book club. Maybe hotter. For starters, there's the Oxford Mark Twain, a meticulously re-created and massive 29-volume collection of his writings edited by Twain scholar Shelley Fisher Fishkin. Then there's Fishkin's own book, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, published last month, also by Oxford University Press. Finally there's the problematic Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens by Andrew Hoffman, the first major biography of the writer since Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain in 1966. Fishkin's new book probes the histories of the African-American communities in Hannibal, Mo, Elmira, N.Y. and Hartford. She uses them to argue that the evolution of Clemens' views on racism was as farsighted as it was radical, given his background and the times. Hoffman, on the other hand, chooses not to view Clemens in context. Instead, he uses late 20th century standards to reassess not just Clemens and Twain, but a third persona, S.L. Clemens, "a humble and rather conservative inhabitant of America's social and cultural elite." The divergent results are at once enlightening, sobering and prickly-not unlike the recent day-long exchange of opinions at the March 8 Spring Twain Symposium, sponsored by the Mark Twain House. The looseness of the title, Mark Twain: A Legacy in Writing, was to effectively celebrate the publication of the Oxford Twain, but the focus was the endless debate over interpreting Twain. Should we read him in the context of his times or of ours and are the two eras really so different? The acuity of Clemens' vision hints that they're not. As editor of the series, Fishkin managed a rare coup in getting popular writers to produce introductions. Having Judith Martin-Miss Manners to you-reassess The Prince and the Pauper as a lesson on etiquette may rankle some scholars, but when you think about it, it makes sense. You can surround Mark Twain with pedants, but Twain's utter lack of artistic pretension shines through like Halley's Comet. "Twain often strikes us as more a creature of our times than his," Fishkin told symposium participants. "He appreciated the importance and complexity of mass tourism and public relations, fields that would come into their own in the 20th century, but which were fledgling enterprises in the 19th. He explored the liberating potential of humor, and he probed the dynamics of friendship, of parenting and of marriage. He narrowed the gap between 'popular' and 'high' culture, and he meditated on the enigma of personal and national identity." A statement like that in Andrew Hoffman's hands, however, becomes a flaw rather than an asset. Hoffman, primarily a novelist and currently a visiting scholar at Brown University, suggests over and over in his lavishly-footnoted 572-page biography that Clemens' creation of both Mark Twain and S.L. Clemens was the work of a man driven by contradictions. He craved fame even as he distrusted it, yearned for bourgeoisie respectability even as he mocked it and perhaps most of all sought literary cachet even though his distinctive style broke every single accepted rule for "great" literature. His greatest sin in Hoffman's eyes seems to be that Clemens invented celebrity culture a good century before it became our pervasive, TV-driven national obsession. He was, according to Hoffman, a tireless self-promoter who sometimes entertained questionable practices to sell his books and who very specifically cultivated several images that had little or no rooting in Sam Clemens the man. The Twain the public saw had a cultivated rawness and an equally rough charm-acerbic but accessibly folksy. He was nothing at all, Hoffman argues without subtlety, like the brooding, driven and deeply insecure man who created him. That view rubs more than a few Twainiacs, scholarly and otherwise, the wrong way. So did the "bomb" Hoffman dropped at Elmira in 1993. Before a group of scholars assembled at Twain's summer home, Hoffman announced his belief that while a young man in the West, Clemens might have had a series of homosexual affairs. Some of that lingers in Inventing Mark Twain, but it's treated so tentatively it comes close to being irrelevant. "Fantasy in Clemens and Twain is such an arresting force it can trap the unwary and Andy may have been trapped by a beast," says David Sloane, a Twain scholar at the University of New Haven. He adds that it was once assumed in literary studies that all of a writer's work proceeded directly from his or her own life. "So therefore, Samuel Langhorne Clemens must be Mark Twain," Sloane adds. "But is Clint Eastwood Dirty Harry?" Writes Hoffman in his introduction: "We will never know the complete truth about Mark Twain, because he changes shape as we study him. A fool, a tyrant, a philosopher, a humorist, an unschooled literary genius, a friend to revolution, a confidant of presidents and industrialists, an insatiable and sophisticated reader of history, a glad-hander, a sham, a self-destructive narcissist. Each of these epithets describe Mark Twain; their contradictions create a persona that is at once both larger and smaller than a real person." In Lighting Out for the Territory, Fishkin also explores Twain's persona. She documents how Twain's iconographic countenance was used to sell everything from "White & Fancy Goods" (for a store in New London, no less) to Bass Ale (Clemens preferred Scotch) even while he was alive. She also recounts how certain Twain stories-most notably The Prince and the Pauper, "The L1,000,000 Bank-Note" and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court-have fared in assorted reincarnations. Fishkin, however, makes a convincing argument that Twain's persona was anything but small, especially the way it still creeps in and takes over debates about race and national identity. "His fictions brilliantly illuminated the world in which he lived and the world we inherited, changing it-and us-in the process." Mere celebrities don't do that. They engage us for a while and we grow tired of them and move on to the Next Big Thing. So far, no one seems weary of discussing who Sam Clemens really was and what Mark Twain was trying to say to us. There is something contemporary about his work even now. But, as Sloane and others debated at the symposium, it is precisely the extent of that fame that has allowed Twain's image and influence to be plumbed with such varying results. Writer Susan Harris, whose The Courtship of Olivia Langdon and Mark Twain has just been published by Cambridge University Press, said at the symposium, "I'm always disturbed by those who try to bring [Clemens] out of his time. He was a man of his times, but at the same time, he wanted to get outside them, and he did." Maybe Harris is more right than she realizes. The personas he created for himself, as well as the real man at the center of them, allowed Samuel Clemens his own version of the time travel he had Hank Morgan embark on in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Except unlike Morgan, who moved backwards to Camelot, Mark Twain looks ahead, giving us a clearer sense of who we are, where we come from and where we're going. Ultimately, how we interpret his work and what we think about his life probably says more about us than it does about either Clemens or Twain.