The Immaculate Bartender
If this were a real essay, it would have citations and shit. But it's not, so it doesn't. GIYF.
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Several years ago as I was doing some research for another site, I came across this article published in a literary magazine called The Virginia Quarterly Review. It was written by a… person… named Emily Auerbach, and it… discusses… a fragmentary Austen-centered manuscript Mark Twain left unfinished and unpublished when he died. The manuscript is, unsurprisingly, more or less a treatise on Twain’s loathing for Austen (whose name, incidentally, Twain occasionally misspelled). It’s very interesting, if not particularly illuminating, and it physically represents the problem Twain had with Austen’s work — he found it so completely intolerable that he could never finish reading any of it.
To be honest, the article itself is not without its own rage-making flaws. Emily is dumber than rocks, and her thought process is terrifyingly unsophisticated; she accuses Twain of "posing" in her thesis statement, she suggests that Dave Barry and Andy Rooney — Andy Rooney! For Christ’s sake! — are misogynists because they dislike Austen’s terrible books, she makes a baffling case for Austen's alleged feminism which is entirely composed of logic-defying leaps of faith and which nearly inspired me to slap on a corset and feign the vapors, she never manages to penetrate the famous image of Twain's (or, for that matter, Austen's) carefully-cultivated literary celebrity, and appallingly she seems to suggest that Huckleberry Finn's voice is an accurate depiction of Twain's unfiltered self, as opposed to a means of characterization, a literary conceit, or a narrative device — but the article is worth skimming quickly, very very quickly, for the Twain quotes.
I can’t pretend to know exactly what Twain is talking about. By the time I was old enough to drink, the role of 'bartender' had largely been adopted by white middle-class idiots who’d taken lots of expensive and ridiculous drink-mixing classes. Bars, and the aggressive consumption of alcohol, have lost the pallor of mortal sin; I’m sure Twain would barely recognize a modern pub if he wandered into one today*. Twain's work as a critic is usually characterized by its fountains of everlasting vitriol, but in this case time has (unfortunately) adulterated the caustic eloquence of his argument. Then again, Twain never formally finished the essay — who's to say he wouldn't have devised some more durable and damaging comparison, given the space and inclination?
But I think this is, in fact, beside the point. Twain certainly recorded enough of his opinion to invite legitimate scrutiny. Reading over his remarks — especially this one:"[Austen] makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see" — I get the feeling that Twain's problems with Austen weren't as simple-minded as the expression of an anti-Presbyterian animus which Auerbach attributes to him. Twain did indeed despise propriety, famously and repeatedly characterizing it as a cage into which the weak and undefended are remorselessly driven by a vile, vapid, tradition-blighted American Republic; but, for someone like Twain**, who loathed the effete pretensions of upper-class society, and most especially the effete pretensions of upper-class European society, being asked to care about the weaselly, subhuman creatures that populate Austen's books would’ve almost been an insult — an insult surpassed only by the implication that their dreadful infantile pantomimes were somehow touching love stories.
Twain knew from love stories. Love was his artistic goal, as well as his personal nemesis. As an American citizen (one of the burdens Twain bore most proudly), everything in Twain's acquaintance was touched by the ruinous, far-reaching cataclysm of slavery and the awful, violent war that ended it. As a husband, friend, and father, he lost all but one member of his deeply adored family to estrangement and death. As an author, Twain wrote almost exclusively about the malignant depredations of love in a world that loves nothing; his masterwork, Huckleberry Finn, suggests that human love, when wholly felt, usurps the grace, the wrath, and even the law of God***. How offensive it must've been to him, then, to be asked to worry about the marriage prospects of a fake story-tool that only transparently resembles a human woman, clothed in a simulation of femininity, whose primary practical concern in life is distinguishing herself from her sister-wraiths so that she can attach herself, lamprey-like, to a rich, handsome man.
Of course, I’m not suggesting that real women, now or then, bear any meaningful resemblance to the creatures Austen concocted — and that’s my point! In Austen’s day, women were forced to thrive as best they could amid the dreadful androcentric conditions she portrayed in her novels, but that’s no reason either to celebrate the unfortunate circumstances as a form of dramatic tension, or to hold up the ravaged victims as heroes. It’s macabre and dishonest. And in her studied avoidance of that dearly obvious fact, Austen's fiction is complete and thorough artifice. That isn't entirely her fault, of course; the decorum-enhanced bubble of the English Regency sat atop the miseries of the early 19th century like a lovely feathered fascinator on the head of a depressed and starving spinster. Austen's books are only one part of a cosmic cultural falsehood. But, choosing to repeat those destructive lies instead of attempting to fabricate some truth is Austen's real crime as an author. I think that, had she concerned herself in any measure with even a partially-accurate depiction of genuine, organic love — love which could inform a female reader’s connection to reality rather than attempting to divorce her from it completely — Twain might’ve still managed to find a place in his heart for all her sadly overextended novelfuls of monstrously awful prose.
Which is, in my opinion, the only weak point in Twain's argument: He despises Austen's insipidity, but Austen freely (if coyly) acknowledges that most of her characters are imbeciles whose lives are unworthy of serious consideration by important people. Her primary flaw is that she writes about them anyway, pointlessly and at length, in the ultimate endeavor of saying absolutely nothing whatever. In great detail. Over and over. Using more commas in one location than could be considered advantageous to mental health. Someone should've told her that, if there is no adequately worthwhile event around which a story can be fitted, no one for it to describe, and no one in all the world trivial-minded enough to truly identify with its terminal moral, then there actually isn’t any story to be told at all. It’s safe to put the pen down, Jane, I think Twain might’ve told her, in one of his less black-hearted moods. The page will be just as empty when you’ve finished as it was when you started.
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* Randomly enough, I actually lived with one of these bartender-artisans in an apartment once. Really! It was a truly horrible experience, but unfortunately it failed to be representatively immoral. I still have nightmares about flying bottles and mangotinis, though.
** Twain went to a lot of trouble to look fancy in public, especially after he married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a minor coal baron. Additionally, Twain was certainly a manipulative writer, he was sometimes a prejudiced thinker, and he was also the kind of public relations-obsessed celebrity upon whom modern media dynasties are built. I’m not sure that alters his perspective on congenital wealth in any material way, although it might make him a fairly impressive hypocrite.
*** Never forget that the Christian Bible (when regarded as anything but historical literature) condones and endorses slavery, as well as murder, misogyny, and genocide — among many other crimes — and that it has fueled the fires of everyday evil from the moment of its publication in the 15th century all the way through the Third Reich and up to, for example, the passage of Proposition 8. Just a thought.
