How can we go on seeing Twain as “the quintessential American” once we know that he had echoed Johnson’s comment that “patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”? How can we see him as about “deep friendship and loyalty” when he conceived intense enmities for so many of his closest associates? It turns out that the Twain we had known was, as the New York Times put it, a “scrubbed and sanitized version,” and here in the autobiography was the truth. Similarly the Daily Telegraph assured its readers that the autobiography was “likely to shatter the myth that America’s great writer and humorist was a cheerful old man.”There was a myth that he was a "cheerful old man"? Really? Because I don't see how anybody who read anything Twain wrote in his later years could mistake his disposition as cheery. Even the Autobiography we've had up to the most recent release makes it pretty clear he was anything but cheerful those last years. The dark streak in his personality is evident early. Tragedy hounded Twain throughout his life. His younger brother Henry died in 1858 working on steamboat, a job Twain had encouraged him to take. His son Langdon died before turning two. He lived to see the wife and three daughters he adored all die, sending him into a well-documented depression. His anti-imperialist writings clearly show his deep and abiding disgust for the depths of evil to which humanity so regularly sinks. No, I really don't think there are many people even passing familiar with his writing, or even his aphorisms, that thought Twain was a jolly in the end.
Twain's disgust, depression, and despair do nothing to change the fact that he was quintessentially American. If being derisive of ignorant and hypocritical patriotism, and condemning barbaric cruelty are un-American traits, then the problem is with what you think it means to be American, not with Twain.
Mr. Stonely, the author of the linked post, is a Twain Scholar and editor of one edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer so I have to assume he is well aware of all the above and perhaps taking on a straw man for dramatic effect. As for challenging the idea we can reconcile Twain's "dark side" with the quintessential American-ness, I trust he's doing so to be provocative, otherwise I suspect he's just bogged down in some brand of jingoist, reactionary politics.
