The Ghosts of Mark Twain uses the conceit of “the ghost” to explore two historical figures in  Twain’s life, his father John Marshall Clemens and the enslaved Daniel Quarles, who labored on the farm of Twain’s uncle; and two fictional characters, “Jim,” from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the fictional persona of “Mark Twain,” the character who haunted the life of Sam Clemens.  At the end of the first chapter, “The Ghost of John Marshall Clemens,”  I examine an excised passage from the Morgan Museum Manuscript of Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which Twain tells the story of a propertied, White slave owner, Percy Driscoll, who makes a difficult journey to collect a debt from a White farmer. When he arrives, he finds that the man is unable to repay him, so he forgives the debt, and in a letter to his wife, he congratulates himself for his generosity. He also describes selling the slave who accompanied him so that his losses would be mitigated. In the manuscript, Twain writes:

It was totally impossible for him to deal ungently with a white person who appealed to him for a grace—even a costly one. But he & his ancestors had always been slave-holders, & habit & heredity had made it impossible for him to realize that a negro was a human being. By name he was that, but it was only a phrase; in reality it meant no more than it would mean if one should call a horse a human being. (64)

It's a stunning indictment by Twain of a White man whose moral relativism and avarice combine in a moment of grotesque inhumanity. It’s also a fictional rendering of his own father’s cruelty. Like the character from the novel, John Marshall Clemens also wrote home to his wife, sharing his generosity toward a White debtor, while also describing his sale of a family slave, “Charley.” As an adult, Twain reads this letter, and he reflects on how “Charley” was eternally exiled “from his home, and his mother, and his friends” sold off by Twain’s father “as if he had been an ox.” 

Twain represents his father in the character of Percy Driscoll, and he impeaches him for his callous, self-righteous inhumanity. And then he cuts the episode from the novel.  On page 69 of The Ghosts of Mark Twain, the reader can see an image from the Morgan Manuscript. Twain cuts a large X across Tom’s revenge story and Driscoll’s violation of the “humble Black family.” It is as much a critical crossroads as it is an editing tool: it marks the spot of Twain’s ambivalence to a history he wants at once to expose and to repress; it both resurrects and buries the memory of his father’s betrayals and the shame he feels about them. More broadly, perhaps, the X highlights erasures that make possible the sleepy conscience of an American culture that—like Mark Twain—would prefer not to remember what it can’t forget.

As Twain’s popularity soared in the final decade of his life, the commodity of “Mark Twain” began to obscure him as a satirist and an artist. And when Twain attempted to sharpen or shift his public image—which didn’t happen often—the public rejected those attempts. Twain died in 1910, and seven years later H. L. Mencken—journalist, essayist, and critic—scorns “the usual polite flubdub” about Mark Twain, “that he was the harmless fireside jester, the mellow Chautauquan, the amiable old grandpa of letters.” Mencken predicts that before long Mark Twain would be recognized as “a destructive satirist of the utmost pungency and relentlessness, and the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion, whether social, political, or religious.”  A visit to Disney World or Hannibal—where Twain “flubdub” is sold in bulk—proves that we’re still waiting for Mencken’s prediction to come true. 

Certainly, one goal of this book is to expose the generational effort to maintain this anodyne image of Twain. In order to sustain those platitudes and delusions—and the “blinding whiteness” associated with him—American readers have engaged in a kind of cultural bleaching of Mark Twain. A close examination of his compositional process, where Twain struggled with some of his most complicated reflections on race and masculinity, reveals a far more compelling figure than the gift-shop version familiar to most Americans. While there are moments where my critique of Twain is sharp, I also find a poignancy in his flaws and a deep humanism in his efforts to move beyond them. Other writers in other disciplines—political science, philosophy, psychology, and art—have explored with great breadth and insight the meaning of “the ghost” in American culture. My interest, however, is in Mark Twain and the various ways in which the idea of “the ghost” manifests in his work and his life: as an image of grief, a trope that represents personal and historic trauma, and finally as a metaphor for the stories he longs to tell but can’t or won’t. My hope is to locate in the struggles of this “destructive satirist,” and in the literary wreckage he sometimes left behind, an uncanny image of American culture—from the nineteenth century to the present moment—as it wrestles with histories it continues to deny. In other words, Twain’s ghosts are our ghosts as well.