While Mark Twain & The Russians is an artifact from the cultural front of the Cold War, garnering considerable press and public attention in the years surrounding its publication, it fell out of print soon thereafter and is now a relatively obscure text. With the permission of the author’s daughter, Susan M. Neider, the Center For Mark Twain Studies is publishing this digital edition, prepared and annotated by scholar-in-residence, Matt Seybold. Seybold is also authoring series of supplementary essays, “The Twain Doctrine,” which explore ongoing disputes over Twain’s legacy between the United States and Russia, as well as the afterlife of official Cold War accounts of Twain’s life, work, and legacy.
Introduction
On August 18, 1959, the Moscow Literary Gazette, known in the Soviet Union as Literaturnaya Gazeta, published a criticism of my edition of The Autobiography of Mark Twain. This criticism came to my attention in the fourth week of September. The gist of it was that America had an official line on Mark Twain, that the nation tries to suppress or forget him, that his editors have followed the line carefully, and that I have been the worst offender in this respect.
Since I had been dealing with materials in my own language and had had access to the original manuscripts and typescripts, and since my volume had enjoyed a certain critical success in my own country (all these facts were available to the Russian critic), it seemed to me that the writer’s self-confidence was presumptuous.1 Still, I was encountering the official Soviet literary line regarding America (the Literary Gazette is the official newspaper of the Union of Writers in the U.S.S.R.) and so I was not entirely surprised by the content of the criticism or by its harsh and self-righteous tone. 2
Being uncertain what it cost to send an airmail letter to Moscow, I had to experience the embarrassment of taking my letter to the post office (I had to go there anyway), where I hoped that the clerk would not notice the name on the envelope. He did notice it, however. “What? Khrushchev? Are you crazy?” he exclaimed. I couldn’t blame him.
The Literary Gazette published my reply in its issue of December 12th, together with new criticism by its correspondent, the new criticism being almost twice the length of my reply. Again the controversy made news in the United States. The second criticism was notably different from the first. Its tone could almost be described as reasonable. Far from being impersonal, the article was couched in the form of an open letter to me. I promptly airmailed a reply to the second criticism and exactly eight weeks later received an airmail reply from the foreign editor of the Literary Gazette with the following explanation: “It seems that you and Mr. Bereznitsky expressed your views about Mark Twain and his works in full. That is why we do not consider it necessary to continue this discussion any longer.”
Because of the interest which the controversy has aroused in the United States and because the documents in the case have not been seen here, it seems worth making them available to the public, particularly when Mark Twain is enjoying a revival in popularity at home.10 The timing is especially apt, for 1960 contains two significant dates in the history of Mark Twain literature: the 50th anniversary of his death (April 21) and the 125th anniversary of his birth (November 30).
These recent criticisms in the Literary Gazette are of course not isolated ones, nor are they new. The attacks follow an old Soviet line on Mark Twain, which consists in general of this: Mark Twain is of primary significance as a social and political observer; his objects of attack are chiefly aspects of the American scene; and the United States officially and unofficially suppresses or distorts his attacks against itself. This notion of America’s being a monolithic structure, with control stemming from the top, naturally strikes most Americans as a curious one.
Mark Twain is of course primarily a humorist. 12 If he had never possessed his humorous gift, if he had only written his social criticisms, he would not now be read by millions of Russian readers and it would be useless for Soviet literary spokesmen to point to him as the great critic of democratic morals. He is also of course primarily a writer of fiction. It was through these two great gifts that he made the reputation which is so well sustained fifty years after his death. His American readers on the whole have no difficulty comprehending this simple fact, and I like to think that most Russian readers have the same common sense, that they read him basically not for the lessons he teaches of the inherent “evils” of the nation across the Iron Curtain but because he enlarges their lives imaginatively through a flow of pleasure. Great humor, after all, being so rare, is a very exportable commodity. When blended with wisdom and humanitarianism it is irresistible.
From the way the official Soviet critics sometimes speak of him, one might imagine that if he were alive today he would be delighted to take up permanent resident in Moscow. If he were unpredictable enough to do such a thing he would soon complain of the quality of the borsht there. It is not the sort of borsht they served up in Missouri or Nevada or California in his day – or even in Connecticut and New York. And he would be instructed forcefully that criticizing Moscow borsht is strictly forbidden in the Soviet Union – a lesson which Boris Pasternak recently learned to his sorrow. 13
Mark Twain is useful to the Soviet spokesmen – and to most Americans as well – as a critic of certain aspects of American life. What the spokesmen fail to acknowledge is that his criticism of America was a department of a larger criticism, his criticism of man, and that under the heading he would now be criticizing the Russian form of government as well as various lapses in the American way of life.
The fact is of course that Americans are better prepared to admire and value self-criticism than the citizens of a nation which still remains an autocracy. Democracy for all its shortcomings prizes self-criticism as it cannot be prized in an autocracy, inasmuch as democracy flourishes under self-criticism, whereas an autocracy dies by it.
Charles Neider
New York
January 23, 1960
POSTSCRIPT
On returning home from Bermuda on March 18, I found in my mail a curious item. It was a humorous appendage to my little affair with the Literary Gazette and assumed the form of a treasurer’s check for $49 drawn on the Morgan Guaranty Trust Company of New York by order of the Bank for Foreign Trade of the U.S.S.R. in Moscow. Under the amount of the check there was an explanation: “B/O Redaktzia Literaturnoi Gazety – Author’s Fee.” Both The New York Times and The New York Herald Tribune published stories about this check on March 20, for it was well known that literary dollars rarely leave the Soviet Union.
I made the following statement to The New York Times: “It is an interesting experience to be paid for defending myself against an attack, and for attacking a critic of the Literary Gazette. In the United States it is not the custom to pay for letters to the editor. Whether it is the custom to do so in the Soviet Union I do not know, but I heartily approve of the practice in this instance. I appreciate the desire of the Literary Gazette to show its good will toward me as a representative of American writers and editors in this cultural exchange.”
As the newspapers reported, I shall spend the $49 on paperback editions of works of contemporary writers whom I think Russians are not too familiar with, and shall send the books to the Literary Gazette.14
C. N.
New York
March 20, 1960
Mark Twain on the Bed of Procrustes
From Literaturnaya Gazeta, Moscow, August 18, 1959, pg. 4
Still, that initial forgetfulness expresses fairly accurately the relationship of official America to its greatest writer. They try to forget him. And if they have to take notice of him anyway, then in that case everything possible is done to crop the great writer’s hair, to deflower the blazing and furious colors of his satire, to eat away to socially unmasking resonance of Twain’s work and, in the last analysis, to make him up as a benevolent and simple-minded scoffer. The new edition of the Autobiography is the logical fruit of these efforts at literary hairdressing. 15
But when you open “the present volume” and begin to familiarize yourself with its contents, it becomes clear that both the thunderous advertising preceding its appearance and the come-on information supplied by the dust jacket – all that is no more that a beautifully daubed-up lapel.
Unlike his two predecessors, the editor of the new edition, Charles Neider, tried to observe the principle of the chronological sequence of events in his disposition of materials. But the trouble is that the really autobiographical element occupies a rather minor place in Twain’s notes. To put all the wealth of their content into the Procrustean bed of chronological sequence is a task of incredible difficulty.
Procrustes, as is well known, either stretched his victim to the desired length or else cut off those parts of the body which seemed superfluous to him. Charles Neider uses both methods. On the one hand, he actually introduces into the volume he edited several items which had no place in previous editions. On the other hand, he excludes from it a large part of the material which went into the editions of 1924 and especially of 1940; moreover, the principle upon which he bases his selections is so interesting that it is fitting to discuss it more fully.
was self-consciously focused on Twain’s relatively radical and sometimes
invective-laden political commentaries.
As to previously unpublished materials, Neider resolved to introduce into his edition Twain’s meditations on baldness, on the value of hair-washing, on beginning writers, on phrenology, on honorary degrees, etc. It is naturally hard to say anything against the inclusion of these notes in The Autobiography of Mark Twain. But it is no less hard to come to terms with the idea that these few, inoffensive trifles are called upon to replace the brilliant, angry pages of the original, unprocessed Twain, which are many times superior to them in scope and significance. It is plain that the bitter prophecy which Twain made in the midst of work on his Autobiography in a letter to William Dean Howells is coming true:
“Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter which get my heirs burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006 – which I judge they won’t. There’ll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited.”
Samuel L. Clemens to William Dean Howells on June 17, 1906
An anecdote. Fine and dandy. And though this anecdote is far from young, it grows none the less sad for that, none the less exacerbating to the memory of the greatest American writer.
Y. Bereznitsky
(Translated by Robert L. Belknap) 19
“We Are Not Committing Crimes Against Mark Twain”
from Literaturnaya Gazeta, December 12, 1959, p. 4
On August 18th the Literary Gazette published a rather severe criticism of the so-called American attitude toward Mark Twain, as well as my editing of the recently published Autobiography of Mark Twain. I should like to have a few words about this criticism, which was signed by Y. Bereznitsky.
The article also charged that my predecessors as editors of Mark Twain’s Autobiography took “precautions” through “stifling editorial comments,” as well as other means, to follow the “official” line. Yet it carefully failed to state what every student of Mark Twain knows. The first editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s friend and literary executor, slavishly followed Twain’s requests in the matter of the Autobiography and by no means undertook “stifling editorial comments.” On the other hand Bernard DeVoto, the second editor, broke Twain’s own injunctions in publishing his edition, and did so at the request of and with the approval of the Mark Twain Estate. I too broke Twain’s injunctions as expressed in his manuscripts. And so if anyone is to blame in the slowness with which the Autobiography has been made public it is Mark Twain himself, who wanted it that way. 25 The article also failed to state that far from suppressing anything, DeVoto freely published Mark Twain’s “political” utterances of some thirty-five years previous: the attacks on Theodore Roosevelt, General Wood, Senator Clark, and others.
And now I must speak about my own edition. Mr. Bereznitsky wrote: “In 1959 Charles Neider found the precautions of his predecessors insufficient, and he decided without superfluous ceremony to ‘shut Twain’s trap,’ blotting out from his edition all the notes mentioned above. This is a supreme example of scholarly ill faith and of that very political tendentiousness whose pretended absence certain American men of letters so love to boast on occasion.” Yet the writer carefully failed to state that my position was made clear in my introduction and that it was simply this:
My intention was to make a volume designed for the general reader, not the scholar, a volume culled from the autobiographical manuscript as a whole, published as well as unpublished parts (for there were still sections unpublished). It was my hope to unburden the excellent parts of the work from the dated, dull, trivial, and journalese sections of the work. And finally I hoped to concentrate less on opinion and second-hand reflection and more on the truly autobiographical, the more purely literary and the more characteristically humorous material. 26 For me Mark Twain is essentially a great fabulist and not a great maker of political utterances. The reason that I omitted his attacks on the politicians was that I found them dull and dated. Beside, anyone who cared to look them up could easily do so by referring to the earlier editions, as well as to various editions of his works. What is more, I listed for my readers the contents of the previous editions, so that ready comparisons could be made and my own omissions noted. 27
In my edition I included 30,000 to 40,000 words previously unpublished. Mr. Bereznitsky made light of these, yet they are more characteristically Mark Twain than his political utterances; and the fact is that through my efforts they are now disseminated among a wide public and not lying in the drawers of a library where only specialists might see them. 28
Finally, Mr. Bereznitsky wrote: “It is plain that the bitter prophecy which Twain made in the midst of work on his Autobiography in a letter to William Dean Howells is coming true.” And then he quoted from the letter. I should like to quote the letter again, for to do so is relevant to an illumination of Mr. Bereznitsky’s critical methods.
“Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter which get my heirs burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006 – which I judge they won’t. There’ll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited.”
Samuel L. Clemens to William Dean Howells on June 17, 1906
Now this letter referred to the first of five chapters which Twain dictated on the subject of religion. On the title pages of two of the chapters is a penned note in his hand: “Not to be exposed to any eye until the edition of A.D. 2406. S.L.C.” The meaning is clear. Writing to Howells, Twain dared his heirs and assigns to print the chapters a century hence. But on his own manuscripts he specifically prohibited his heirs and assigns from published the chapters until five centuries hence.
The chapters Neider refers to appear in the second volume (pgs. 128-132) of the unabridged Autobiography published by the Mark Twain Papers & Project in 2013. We publish this image of the annotated typescript with their permission.
Charles Neider
The Question Is Significantly More Profound
A Letter To Charles Neider
From Literaturnaya Gazeta, Moscow, December 12, 1959, p. 4
Sir, the editor of the Literary Gazette has acquainted me with the letter in which you express disagreement with the content of my article, “Mark Twain on the Bed of Procrustes.” I consider it my duty to answer you.
You doubtless know that the best and the most popular of Mark Twain’s works, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was more than once fully subjected to “official” persecutions and bans.31I take the liberty of referring to your colleague, one of the greatest contemporary American critics, Lionel Trilling. In his introduction to the regular edition of the renowned novel, which appeared under his editorship in 1948, Trilling wrote:
“Huckleberry Finn was once barred from certain liberties and schools for its alleged subversion of morality. The authorities had in mind the book’s endemic lying, the petty thefts, the denigrations of respectability and religion, the bad language and the bad grammar. We smile at that excessive care…”
Introduction to Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Rinehart, 1948)
It is true that you could smile and say that all these facts took place before the “outburst” you mentioned and that it is not worth while waving dead cats around, leaving Tom and Huck to occupy themselves with that. But right before me is the September issue of the English journal Books & Bookmen. It appeared six months after the publication of your book and it is apparently already in the period of the “outburst.” On the thirty-second page under the general heading, “Banned,” to my sincere sorrow, I saw the name of Twain’s masterpiece in the strange company of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the works of Henry Miller. Poor Huck, again (for the how-manyth time!), had not been permitted in the New York schools.
The basis of your objections, as I recall, involved in your eyes an insufficiently respectful attitude on my part toward the work which performed by you as editor of the third edition of The Autobiography of Mark Twain. No, you did great work – I would even say difficult work – as far as you are concerned. You quite successfully coped with this work as you wanted to. In your edition Twain actually appears as you are trying to present him. And you are trying to present him as a “great fabulist” (from your letter) or a master of “anecdote” (from your Introduction). But is the real Twain like that? Let us try to remember what he himself said about this. This citation is doubtless well known to you. I am taking it from your edition of his Autobiography:
“…within the compass of these forty years wherein I have been playing professional humorist before the public, I have had for company seventy-eight other American humorists…Why have they perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive…I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor.”
from Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume II (pgs. 152-153) composed on July 31, 1906. Both the italics and the ellipses are introduced into the passage by Yan Bereznitsky.
The sermons about which Twain writes are just what constitute the social content of his work. This content is inseparable from the humor, just as the humor is inseparable from it. And you cut Twain’s work in two and call the part which you don’t like “dated, dull, and trivial.” Yes, in your Introduction you listed just what you left out. “From the published parts I have omitted such matter as the…Morris incident…elongated remarks on Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, the plutocracy, and so on.” If it were only a matter of remarks (or “attacks” as you call them in your letter) it might really not be worth building up a case. But in these “remarks” or “attacks” are expressed Twain’s feelings, thoughts, interests; and this all helps re-establish the writer’s countenance, a goal, which from my point of view, should also be sought by the autobiography of a great writer.
Still, on this issue you maintain another point of view: “I hoped to concentrate less on opinion and second-hand recollection and more on the truly autobiographical, the more purely literary and the more characteristically humorous material.” In short, only events interest you. Although you scorn “opinion,” I shall take the liberty of reminding you of Twain’s opinion on a question which interests you, which he expressed in the same Autobiography. I must cite this passage from Paine’s edition of 1924, since it is omitted from your edition. Speaking of the Morris incident (she tried to have an audience with the President and was driven from the White House and was treated coarsely by the police), Twain continues:
“There you have the facts. It is as I have said – for a number of days they have occupied almost the entire attention of the American nation…It is this sort of thing which makes the right material for an autobiography.” (You considered this material unfit for an autobiography. Y.B.) “[A man’s] life consists of his feelings and his interests, with here and there an incident apparently big or little to hang the feelings on.”
from Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I (pgs. 258-259) composed January 10, 1906.
I think you understand why I have offered this extensive quotation. Twain’s political writings (it is hard for me to understand why you put the word “political” in quotation marks in your letter) are interesting not only because in them he “preaches,” “proclaims,” but also because they express his “feelings and his interests.” Remember the words with which he begins his story of the annihilation by General Wood in the Philippines of six hundred men, women, and children of the Moro tribe (of course this passage is omitted from your edition):
“We will stop talking about my schoolmates of sixty years ago, for the present, and return to them later. They strongly interest me, and I am not going to leave them along permanently. Strong as that interest is, it is for the moment pushed out of the way by an incident of today, which is still stronger.”
from Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume I (pg. 403) composed March 12, 1906.
The composers of numerous “digests” which offer David Copperfield and Anna Karenina in a form fit for “digestion” are sick with the same disease: they consider that only the bare bones of events are fit to interest the simple reader, and the “feelings and interests” which are “based” upon them are not in his power to digest. 38 But it seems to me that the logical inconsistency of that part of your letter would strike even “a simple writer”; throwing light on my “critical methods,” you refer to Twain’s “demands” and “prohibitions.” You claim credit for yourself and DeVoto for having “deliberately broken the great writer’s injunctions,” and right next to this, when it is a question of “the slowness with which the Autobiography has been made public,” or of still unpublished chapters, you again refer to these same “demands” and “prohibitions.” After all, if in some cases you break Twain’s injunctions, it is hardly worth while to take refuge in it. 39
In conclusion, I would like to make it known to you that of those thirty or forty thousand words which you first included in your edition, and toward which in your words I “behaved scornfully” (on what basis you reached that conclusion is a riddle to me), a significant part was published in our press (in the magazine Crocodile, with an edition of 1,200,000 copies, and in the Estonian newspaper, Hammer & Sickle) even before the appearance of your book, on the basis of the preliminary publication in Harper’s Magazine.43 I mention this to show you how great is our interest in the work of Mark Twain, what joy every new publication of his text furnishes us, how dear to us are all the manifestations of his genius, and what incomprehension and protest is called from us by any attempt to narrow and present in an impoverished light his wonderful and many-faceted countenance.
I hope that the circumstance that I address this letter directly to you, and not through President Eisenhower, will not be taken by anyone as a display of my disrespect toward him, but merely as a reluctance to have recourse for the solution of unofficial literary disputes to the intermediation of highly placed official figures.
Sincerely yours,
Yan Bereznitsky
(Translated by Robert L. Belknap)
[ Reply ]
Airmailed to Literaturnaya Gazeta, Moscow, from New York, December 21, 1959. Publication declined.
Mr. Bereznitsky’s chief argument in his criticism of August 18th was that I omitted in my edition of Mark Twain’s Autobiography parts which he, Mr. Bereznitsky, would like to see included; and that I did so in response either to an “official” line or to an “official” climate. Of course theoretically it is preferable to publish the whole of the Autobiography in one comprehensive edition, but what is theoretically desirable is not always practical in a practical world, as Mr. Bereznitsky will no doubt admit. I am delighted to see in Mr. Bereznitsky’s second criticism, of December 12th, a tacit admission that no official point of view regarding Mark Twain exists in America; also I am delighted to find that he recognizes the existence of a multitude of literary viewpoints in the United States.
Mr. Bereznitsky’s complaint now consists of the fact that I did the job differently from the way he would have done it. If it is any comfort to him, I also did the job differently from the way other Mark Twain scholars – American ones – would have done it.44 Mr. Bereznitsky would naturally like me to see the matter in his way, and to handle it in his way. But because of different circumstances I see it differently. These circumstances are both linguistic and aesthetic, and I should like to say a few words concerning them.
Mr. Bereznitsky arrives at the conclusion, somewhat to my astonishment, that it is only “events” which interest me in Mark Twain’s Autobiography. This is certainly news to me, for events are perhaps what I am least interested in in the Autobiography. In the first place the “events” as Mark Twain states them are not always accurate; in the second place Albert Bigelow Paine, in his three-volume biography of Twain, takes care of the “events” quite well. What I am interested in primarily are psychology, humor, emotions, reflections and reminiscences – all those matters which cannot easily be referred to as didactic – and I am interested in these because it happens that when he is dealing with them Mark Twain is at his best as a stylist and creator.
Despite these fact, Mr. Bereznitsky is unfortunately in error to think that I knowingly slight the didactic side of Mark Twain or wilfully underestimate the social content of his work. If DeVoto had not published his 1940 volume, if the materials in it had been lying in their pristine state awaiting an editor, I would have been delighted to publish them; I would have seized on them as valuable documents of a great writer. But DeVoto had published them – less than twenty years previously; his book had been widely distributed; and I could not see the wisdom, under the circumstances, of repeating so soon after their publication material which does not strike me as being central to an autobiography. As I understood it, my function as an editor was to make publicly available as much of the unpublished Autobiography as possible, as well as to select the finest sections of it (from the aesthetic, not the social view) and arrange them all in chronological order. I worked in the belief, which I still possess, that the material contained the possibility of an American classic, and I aimed at nothing less than a classic standard and form.
In our discussion it is well to remember that I regard an autobiography as capable of being a work of art, and that I come to it with certain aesthetic expectation, even requirements. It is true that I read autobiographies for other reasons also, especially if they are in translation: I want to know something about the person and his period. But in my own language I make demands which I do not make of works in translation. There is the whole question of language to be considered, and beyond that of style, beauty, and form. The didactic Mark Twain, particularly the journalistic and didactic Mark Twain, frankly seems to me too often strident, or flat, or humorless – I am speaking chiefly of language. (I have no way of knowing how such passages come through in Russian translation.)
I suspect that many authors enjoy an undeserved rank in translation, and that this rule works generally in inverse proportion to the original beauty, depending of course to some extent on the talent of the translator. Great stylists can seem empty in translation, whereas third-rate writers can seem quite grand. For me – and there are many novelists and critics in America with the same orientation – there is a beauty of language, a nobility or harshness of language, which is closely bound to great work and that is inseparable from it.45 A thought or an emotion or a bit of psychology does not exist in itself but through and with the language which it forms and which forms it. The aesthetic element for me is a primary one when it comes to literature. I am content to believe that it is the first function and value of the artist to perceive and to create works of beauty – that is what he specializes in, from my view. There are few first-rate scientists who are also first-rate political thinkers or economists; and I believe that there are few literary artists who are such. I do not think the less of Mark Twain for his didactic works; I admire him for them. But just as his didactic works do not heighten for me the greatness of a book like Huckleberry Finn, so it is that the didactic parts of his Autobiography do not for me heighten the more psychological, humorous, and nostalgic parts.
Perhaps I should put the matter in another way. If, as it sometimes happens, the didactic parts are as fine stylistically as the others, then I accept them with the same whole-hearted delight as I accept the others. It seems to me that style, like a gesture or a facial expression, is a key to the profundity of a man’s beliefs and emotions. If a writer like Dreiser is not capable of a great style that is another matter, of course; one judges him by his own scale – I am speaking always of the original language. Mark Twain is capable of a great style and I have selected those passages of his Autobiography which I believe show him at his pitch of true stylistic greatness, which always turns out to be something larger than mere “style” as one might casually think of style – style the envelope rather than the true voice.
Among the finest didactic chapters of the Autobiography are the five chapters on religion which my book unfortunately did not include, and which still await the first light of publication. It was painful to me to have to exclude them, but Mr. Bereznitsky will recall that in my Introduction I placed the responsibility for their exclusion where it rightfully belongs, on Mark Twain’s daughter. She had the legal right to keep them from being published, a right her father conferred to her in his will, and no person or agency in America can force her to publish them. I said in my Introduction that unlike DeVoto I do not assume responsibility for all of the omissions. It was therefore incorrect of Mr. Bereznitsky to accuse my of inconsistency: of “boasting” of having broken Mark Twain’s injunctions on the one hand, while using those same injunctions as a defense. For my part, at this late date I would have broken every injunction, in the honest belief that that is what Mark Twain would also have done. Anyhow, it is Mr. Bereznitsky who is inconsistent, for I was making not a personal but a public point: I was saying that it is Mark Twain’s injunctions, followed in some instances, not followed in others, which account for the slowness with which the Autobiography has appeared, and not the “official” American line which Mr. Bereznitsky originally imagined to exist.
As for his comparison of my edition with digests of such books as David Copperfield and Anna Karenina, let me point out that this is hardly and accurate or fruitful comparison. These books are novels, not works of nonfiction; they were published during their authors’ lifetime and under their authors’ supervision; and they are both finished works. In the Introduction to my edition I stated my belief that Mark Twain, had he lived longer, would have worked over the materials in his Autobiography – I stress the fact that they are materials and not the finished product – until he had obtained a book which was unified and controlled. It seems to me pointless to accuse me of belonging to the “digest” school of editors when I am after all dealing not with a finished product but with more or less raw material for such a product. A better comparison would be, say, the voluminous diaries of Tolstoy.
I would not like to leave the impression, however, that I am constantly in disagreement with Mr. Bereznitsky. Together with him I deplore the banning of Huckleberry Finn and any other of Mark Twain’s books from the public schools of New York City; the silly comments by a former Congressman on matter he was not competent to judge, however inconspicuous that Congressman may have been in public life (as Shannon apparently was); the comments of the overconspicuous Senator McCarthy (who, by the way, before his death was the subject of a resolution of censure in the United States Senate, and the consequent object of ostracism, as a result of his notorious behavior); and similar instances of literary and cultural stupidity or blindness.
That the question of translation is a complex and difficult one is brought home to me as a result of our exchange of opinions. In response to Mr. Bereznitsky’s charge that “official” America tries to “forget” Mark Twain, I said, “I find it difficult to read this without a wry smile.” How sad it is that a mistranslation should have hurt his feelings. My “wry smile” became a “grimace of loathing.” A wry smile – at least my wry smile, dear sirs – has not loathing in it and no grimace. It contains irony, but often also a certain sympathy. And my remarks that Mr. Bereznitsky “makes light of” the 30,000 to 40,000 words of the Autobiography which I published for the first time became in translation “behaves with scorn.” Again I am saddened, for I am sure that Mr. Bereznitsky was not scornful. “Makes light of” was my way of describing what he said about the new parts – “few, inoffensive trifle” is what he called them. It would be so much easier for this exchange if we were both using the same language, which for obvious reasons we cannot do.
In closing this communication I should like to say how happy I am to note the change in Mr. Bereznitsky’s tone between his first and his second criticisms. They tone of the first was harsh and accusatory; the tone of the second show as genuine effort to comprehend my point of view, and is not only friendly but at one point even highly complimentary. If we can understand each other better through this exchange of opinions – and I am sure we will – the exchange will have had some value beyond its immediate subject.
Charles Neider
