The Portable Mark Twain Read Online Free Page B

eventually lost around $50,000.
    These are merely instances, but they indicate, in Clemens, a tendency that was abroad in the land. Get-rich-quick schemes, grand aspirations, exploitation, and corporate and government corruption abounded after the Civil War. Twain dramatized the passion for instant wealth in such tales as “The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract” (1870), “The £1,000,000 Bank Note” (1893), “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), and “The $30,000 Bequest” (1904). Twain and Charles Dudley Warner wrote a novel naming the era The Gilded Age (1873), but the literary historian Vernon Parrington might have come closer to the spirit of the times when he called it “The Great Barbecue”: “A huge barbecue was spread to which all presumably were invited. Not quite all, to be sure; inconspicuous persons, those who were at home on the farm or at work in the mills and offices, were overlooked; a good many indeed out of the total number of the American people. But all the important persons, leading bankers and promoters and business men, received invitations. There wasn’t room for everybody and these were presumed to represent the whole. It was a splendid feast.”
    The Gilded Age is political and social satire, but the character of Colonel Beriah Sellers outshines the invective and is finally more interesting than the convoluted plot of the novel. He is, at any rate, something more than a mere satirical device and better illustrates the impulses behind the venality of a certain kind of American than do Twain’s tales and sketches that explore this theme. Sellers is an altogether memorable creation—part visionary and part windbag; at once calculating and naïve. He is a quixotic braggart, but capable of quickly improvising explanations for events that might permit him some scrap of dignity. He is compromised in his material condition but rich in the affection of his wife and children. “Good gracious, it’s the country to pile up wealth!” he proudly exclaims, but he dines on turnips and water and heats the room with a tallow candle. Sellers is a major stockholder in the soap bubbles of his effervescent imagination and charitably disposed to let others in on the ground floor of his next big deal. There is something majestically helpless about the man that simultaneously commands our sympathy and provokes our laughter.
    Clemens based the character of Colonel Sellers on the personality of his mother’s cousin, James Lampton, but there was a portion of himself in the figure as well. Clemens’s imagination, when it was functioning well, was at once projective and assimilative, which is to say it was a compound of keen observation (of mannerisms, colloquial idiom, gesture, and the like) and a genuine identification with the created character. In his “Autobiography,” he emphasized only half of this equation: “Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.” Samuel Clemens, unique in himself, acknowledged that he was representative, too—representative of material ambition and the desire to be accepted into a social order he had some doubts about, but also of a certain native social and cultural uncertainty vying with an equally native pride and vernacular boisterousness.
    It was audacious, and risky, to announce, as he did in the Preface to The Innocents Abroad (1869), that the purpose of his book was “to suggest to the reader how he would see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretence of