Traveling today, I would like to continue what Chris Flannery has started in his posts on Mark Twain for us. I want to return to Mark Twain from the perspective afforded by the end of his career and the man who who taught me Mark Twain in college.
“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is one of Mark Twain’s late bursts of indignation against American imperialism. It seems to derive from a speech Twain gave to the Anti-Imperialist League in 1901. It was originally published in the North American Review that year. Justin Kaplan included the piece in the 1967 compilation Great Short Works of Mark Twain.
It’s not great, but it is short. It’s not funny either. Like so much of late Mark Twain, it’s suffused with high-minded conscience.
Reading it brought to mind the great Dartmouth English teacher James Cox (photo at right). Professor Cox was the funniest lecturer I have ever heard. I thought he was funnier than any comedian I had ever seen. He embodied the spirit of Mark Twain. Reader’s Digest used to run a monthly column under the heading The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met. He was that kind of teacher.
The American Literature section of the MLA awarded Professor Cox the Hubbell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in 1997. The speeches given on the occasion — John Seelye’s and Professor Cox’s — are posted here.
The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine published a brief profile of him by former former student Tom Maremaa in 2009. Another former student, Alan Greenblatt, hailed his remarkable life for NPR after his death in 2012. Greenblatt recalled: “I once actually had a girlfriend break up with me after attending one of his lectures. She said she realized that she’d never really heard me laugh before.”
Reading “To The Person Sitting in Darkness” reminded me of Professor Cox’s classroom take on Huckleberry Finn. He argued that the moment when Huck declares “All right then, I’ll go to hell” — what most readers understand to be Huck’s moment of greatness — is the book’s low point. According to Professor Cox, it represents the torments of Huck’s conscience. Humor and the river are the realm of pleasure; conscience is the realm of suppression. Professor Cox had a contrarian Freudian interpretation of an aspect of Mark Twain that has stayed with me.
In his biography of Samuel Clemens, Justin Kaplan writes that Mark Twain encountered a storm of abuse over “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” Far from backing down, however, Mark Twain pressed the attack in a second article, “To My Missionary Critics.” The aftermath described by Kaplan has an interesting twist or two with a slightly modern feel:
That October he and [William Dean] Howells came to Yale to receive honorary degrees. Theodore Roosevelt stood apart at the ceremony; since the assassination of McKinley he had been forbidden to mix in crowds or shake hands. As a long ovation went up for Clemens, Roosevelt declared privately, “When I hear what Mark Twain and others have said in criticism of the missionaries, I feel like skinning them alive.” But Mark Twain was the students’ hero. After the exercise, when he was touring the campus, a crowd of them gave the college cheer and roared out his name. He took off his hat and bowed.
Now that is funny. At least it made me laugh. It also made me wonder how Mark Twain would be greeted by Yale students nowadays. That’s not funny!
Professor Cox titled his book on Mark Twain Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor. What about the fate of Huckleberry Finn? The progressive superego has intervened to suppress it on high school reading lists. That’s not funny either.
Professor Cox devotes 30 pages of his book on Mark Twain to Huckleberry Finn. Here is a little of what he had to say that I remember from class with him. He asks: “What then is the rebellion of Huckleberry Finn?” He answers:
What is it but an attack upon the conscience? The conscience, after all is said and done, is the real tyrant in the book. It is the relentless force which pursues Huckleberry Finn; it is the tyrant from which he seeks freedom. And it is not only social conscience which threatens Huck, but any conscience. The social conscience, represented in the book by the slaveholding of the Old South, is easily seen and exposed. It is the false conscience. But what of the true conscience the reader wishes to project upon Huck and which Huck himself is at last on the threshold of accepting? It, too, is finally false.
A little later he writes:
Comfort and satisfaction are the value terms in Huckleberry Finn. Freedom for Huck is not realized in terms of political liberty but in terms of pleasure. Thus his famous pronouncement on the raft: “Other places feel so cramped and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and comfortable on a raft.”
Here Professor Cox dropped a footnote:
The conscience, on the other hand, is the source of discomfort. As Huck says, ‘…it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. If I had a yeller dog that didn’t know no more than a person’s conscience does I would pison him.”
That’s “pison” as in “poison” — don’t spellcheck me, bro!
Ron Chernow is of course the author of the big new biography of Mark Twain. Chernow has provided the occasion for Chris Flannery’s current meditations on MT, as well as my own here. Chernow has been out talking about MT and promoting the book in numerous interviews.
At about 10:00 of the Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend interview below, Chernow takes up the subject of late Mark Twain. He says he had become the conscience of the nation. Neither Conan nor Chernow notes the one thing the cited works have in common: they aren’t funny! They finally get around to that point in their own way at 35:00 and later as well. Their discussion serves as a good counterpoint to Professor Cox while persuading me that Cox was on to something. Chernow praises Conan’s speech accepting the 2025 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. Conan’s speech is to the same high-minded effect. You can find his remarks here.
At about 44:00 of the Gilder-Lerhrman Institute interview below, Chernow takes up the subject of MT’s anti-imperialist writings. The second half of the interview in particular, including Chernow’s discussion of Huck Finn and Percival Everett’s James, is a rewarding treat.
