To the Editor:

Cynthia Ozick’s often enlightening article . . . , “Mark Twain and the Jews” [May], might have been less superficial and more factually accurate had she read my recent book, “Our Famous Guest”: Mark Twain in Vienna (University of Georgia Press, 1992), or even if she had perused my entries on the subject in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia (J.R. LeMaster and James D. Wilson, eds., Garland Publishing, 1993), or the Fall 1985 issue of The Mark Twain Journal containing my discoveries about Twain’s essay “Concerning the Jews,” along with Sholom J. Kahn’s excellent piece on Twain’s philo-Semitism.

Had she done so she would have learned, for example, that “Concerning the Jews,” arguably Mark Twain’s most cogently organized polemical essay (or “meditation,” as she calls it), has less to do with the Dreyfus Affair or the November 1897 language-war in the imperial Austrian parliament that precipitated . . . widespread anti-Semitic riots than with personal attacks on Twain himself in the Viennese anti-Semitic press during his residence there from September 27, 1897 until May 26, 1899.

It is true, as Miss Ozick observes, that Mark Twain was outraged by the anti-Semitic travesty on justice of both the first and second Dreyfus trials, to which he refers in “Concerning the Jews,” and yet more bitterly in his satirical spoof, “From the ‘London Times’ of 1904.” But the queries from an American Jewish lawyer about his report on the Austrian parliament, “Stirring Times in Austria,” which provide Twain his rationale and organizing principle for “Concerning the Jews,” are probably fictitious. Or at least the interlocutor himself may be but a fictive device.

Attacks on “der Jude Mark Twain” in such Viennese dailies as Reichspost, Deutsches Volksblatt, Deutsche Zeitung, and Das Vaterland and in the scurrilously anti-Semitic “humor” weekly Kikeriki! began within weeks of the Clemens family’s arrival in the Habsburg capital and continued with increasing viciousness throughout their twenty-month sojourn.

The reasons for these attacks are threefold: Twain’s closest friends and associates in Vienna were either Jewish journalists like Ferdinand Gross, Siegmund Schlesinger, and Theodor Herzl (Herzl had interviewed Twain in Paris in 1895; see his “Mark Twain and the British Ladies,” reprinted in COMMENTARY, September 1959) or philo-Semites like the feuilletonist Eduard Pötzl (Twain’s closest Viennese friend) and Princess Pauline Metternich and her circle; the assumption that, because the writer’s real first name was Samuel—a name never given an Austrian Gentile—he must be Jewish himself; and finally Twain’s ill-timed comical speech auf deutsch ridiculing the German language . . . to the philo-Semitic press club Concordia. . . .

Twain made no public comment on these press attacks, but “Concerning the Jews,” which seems to have had a gestation period in his unpublished notebook for several months in 1897-98, was completed between July 19 and 26, 1898. . . . It is possible to date the essay’s completion almost precisely because of the reference in the coda to a destructive tornado that traversed Vienna’s Central Cemetery on the night of July 16, 1898 but left the Jewish section of the cemetery undamaged.

To be sure, Twain made some factual errors in this essay. His statistics about the number of Jews in the Austro-Hungarian empire are grossly inaccurate, as are the foolish assertions for which he later apologized that Jews were reluctant soldiers in the armies of their adopted countries. Although his analysis of the root causes of anti-Semitism, his oblique sneer at Zionism, and his proposal of assimilation and political activism as remedies may be offensive to many and at least debatable, there is no question that this essay is well-intended and that it exculpates the writer from any taint of racism or prejudice at this stage of his life. He writes quite accurately. “I am quite sure that (bar one) I have no race prejudices. . . . All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me: he can’t be any worse.” The one he admits to (“bar one”) we know was the French, for whom he had an almost pathological lifetime distrust and dislike that was exacerbated by the Dreyfus case.

Twain accurately predicted in a letter to his financial adviser in New York, Henry Huttleston Rogers, that this essay, which he called his “gem of the ocean,” would please “neither Jew nor Christian.” Nevertheless, the immediate Jewish reaction was not all negative, as Miss Ozick suggests in her quotation from the London Jewish Chronicle (“Of all such advocates, we can but say, ‘Heaven save us from our friends.’ ”). Several Jewish publications in this country reviewed Twain’s essay more favorably. Nor is Twain’s essay considered “charmingly philo-Semitic,” as Miss Ozick insists, “mainly by those who have never read it.” No less an authority on both Mark Twain and anti-Semitism than Sholom J. Kahn of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has interpreted the essay in this manner. And Sigmund Freud, Vienna’s number-one Mark Twain fan during and after the American writer’s sojourn there, recalled the essay’s “partisanship from someone who was not a Jew” . . . in “A Comment on Anti-Semitism,” an article Freud wrote in the last year of his life. . . .

Mark Twain is hardly to blame for the attempt by an American Nazi during the 1930’s to distort the meaning of “Concerning the Jews,” ripping passages from their contexts to make it appear an unfriendly if not downright anti-Semitic tract. Bernard DeVoto, then the literary executor of the Mark Twain estate, quickly refuted and scotched such diabolical misuse. The episode provides a cautionary tale for those who interpret Mark Twain’s works in light of their own intellectual milieu and agenda. Miss Ozick faults Twain, for instance, for not having taken account of the plight of Galician and Russian Jews at the end of the last century, forgetting the fact that he was writing out of his own experiences of anti-Semitism in Vienna and had had no first-hand experience with anything in Europe east of Budapest, where he spent a week in March 1899. . . .

The most commendable aspect of Miss Ozick’s article has nothing to do with the subject announced in her title but with her linkage of the short story, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” certainly one of Mark Twain’s very best, with other things he wrote during his Viennese sojourn and with what he witnessed there. She is particularly incisive in her delineation of the parallels between what happens in the town-hall assembly in the story and what Twain had already described in “Stirring Times in Austria.” . . .

Altogether Mark Twain wrote all or part of over 30 works in various forms and lengths during his twenty months in Vienna—the last great surge of creativity in his long, widely diverse career. Many of the pieces he wrote between 1897 and 1899 were not published until the 1960’s, and then only in scholarly editions that did not reach the general reading public. Some are still in unpublished manuscripts in the Mark Twain Papers in the Bancroft Library of the University of California at Berkeley. These late works deserve to be more widely read than they have been, and Cynthia Ozick has performed a valuable service in bringing some of them to the attention of COMMENTARY’s readers, perhaps for the first time.

Carl Dolmetsch
College of William and Mary
Williamsburg, Virginia

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To the Editor:

What a pleasure to read Cynthia Ozick’s “Mark Twain and the Jews.” Miss Ozick wields a mighty pen, and her critical essays are always brilliant, learned, profound, and touch eloquently on central issues.

Properly, she focuses on Mark Twain’s stay in Vienna . . . and spells out some of the myriad ways in which his Austrian writings foreshadowed (“prophesied”) 20th-century tensions and catastrophes. She is right on target when she emphasizes problems of language, cultural “myths,” the Dreyfus Affair, psychological complexities, and so forth. Having ventured into a jungle of controversies, she has succeeded in coping very well.

Of course, in a magazine like COMMENTARY an academic bibliography would not have been appropriate. I trust, therefore, that a few footnotes from Mark Twain scholarship . . . might be welcome in a letter, and not seem pedantic. . . .

Miss Ozick’s “ordinary” job of reading (as she phrases it) is really quite extraordinary, and touches on many debated areas. For example, she wrestles capably with the problem of “the Man” in Twain’s story, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” emphasizing his “humanity”—but finally accepting him “probably” as “the devil.” . . .

In my book, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger: A Study of the Manuscript Texts (1978), I argue at length for two distinct contexts and texts. In Vienna, Mark Twain began the never-completed “Chronicle of Young Satan”—where Dream (“Traum”) tells the boys he is an unfallen angel (the Devil, he says is his uncle)—though we may or may not believe him. He later completed “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” whose protagonist remains ambiguous till the end, but is clearly (I think) to be understood as an angel figure. And all these can be related to remarkable notes for an unwritten satire, “The Devil’s Sunday School.” In any case, the entire subject is very subtle and complex.

Similarly, “Concerning the Jews” has been read both philo-Semitically and anti-Semitcally. Twain was well aware of the dangerous waters he had entered; and that, precisely, is why it is such a profound work. In a critical essay on the subject, I argued that it should be understood, with all its ambivalences, as a piece of witty satire.

One could go on at length with such annotations, but I must be content here to address briefly one large (and elusive) problem: estimates of Twain’s culture and character. (Carl Dolmetsch’s book, “Our Famous Guest,” is especially good in these areas.) Twain was certainly a man full of contradictions: self-critical (as in the late statement about “malignity” quoted by Miss Ozick); ironical (as in the famous maxims); tactful (when he wanted to be) but sometimes given to temper tantrums (the art of “cursing”); honest to a fault (but also the author of “On the Decay of the Art of Lying”); etc. Recently published volumes of The Mark Twain Papers document in detail these and related aspects of his poorly understood “final phase” (the last two decades), on which I have concentrated most of my attention. . . . After all, it was Twain who wrote both Pudd’nhead Wilson and Joan of Arc.

It is all too easy to select some aspects of his amazing complexity and so “create” a Clemens-Mark-Twain of one’s own . . . Miss Ozick finds Twain, not without some justification, a “belligerent village atheist”; however, I think in those last years he had become a very sophisticated “man of the world” (see his remarkable essay, “Is Shakespeare Dead?,” 1909). But Miss Ozick’s sense of justice here is admirable: “Perhaps it would be fairer to suppose that he lacked the disposition for disciplined caution.”

Having lived with “Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain” for many years, I feel certain of at least two things: his heart, as we say, was in the right place; and he was a splendid artist. One of America’s best, right up there with Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, Emerson, Thoreau, Faulkner, and the like. A great satirist, but never (really) “malicious.” Our representative American folk artist and patriot. As I once tried to show, a sort of American “Rabelais.”

I fear, however, that in the last two pages of her closely organized essay Miss Ozick becomes selective in an unfortunate way. I do not disagree with most of her facts and quotations, but rather with her estimates relating to “malignity.” For a well-balanced (not sentimentalized) treatment of Twain, see such books as Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain: God’s Fool (1973) and Everett Emerson’s The Authentic Mark Twain (1984).

Sholom J. Kahn
Hebrew University
Jerusalem, Israel

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Cynthia Ozick writes:

Carl Dolmetsch softens into some welcome generosity at the close of his letter, and for that I am grateful; but he begins by charging me with factual inaccuracy—a charge he nowhere supports—and with superficiality, a reproof I have not often earned. I do not believe I have earned it now, thanks in part to Mr. Dolmetsch’s own scholarship. He is mistaken in supposing that I have ignored his labors. I have, in fact, considerably profited from them.

He accuses me, for instance, of omitting mention of the attacks on Mark Twain in Vienna’s anti-Semitic press. I certainly did speak of these (“the noisome anti-Semitic press,” I wrote, “vulgarly denounced Mark Twain either as a Jew-lover or as himself a secret Jew”), and my source was precisely Mr. Dolmetsch’s own articles in The Mark Twain Encyclopedia (“Jews,” pp. 413-15; “Austria [Austria-Hungary],” pp. 49-53). It appears that Mr. Dolmetsch, in erroneously reprimanding me for not having read his work, was so intent on the reprimand that he missed noting in my essay the several points he had himself supplied.

Of course, if my essay had been a scholarly article in an academic journal rather than a purely belletristic exploration, the presence of footnotes would have spared him this embarrassment: he would have seen himself cited and would perhaps have been able to recognize his own richly informative influences.

As to Mr. Dolmetsch’s speculation that a letter in Mark Twain’s “Concerning the Jews” may have been an authorial invention (a speculation appearing also in one of his encyclopedia articles; indeed, his letter is very nearly a reprise of these): it is of no import to the common reader, and surely not to any substantive discussion of contents. Nor is the absence in my essay of any report of Mr. Dolmetsch’s personal guesswork in any way equivalent to “factual inaccuracy.”

Mr. Dolmetsch quarrels with my comment that “Concerning the Jews” is “remembered (perhaps mainly by those who have never read it) as charmingly philo-Semitic,” and repeats the celebrated witticism my essay emphatically included: “All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” That is the famous sentence quoted everywhere; what is not so well-known is the infamous further matter in “Concerning the Jews,” one of those late works that Mr. Dolmetsch believes “deserves to be more widely read than they have been.” In short, the issue is, so to speak, one of cultural synecdoche—the part standing for the whole; and the whole is generally unread. It was that unread further matter I sought to call attention to—not to malign the humanity of Mark Twain, but to render more complete his popular reputation on the subject of Jews.

If there is unpleasantness in this fuller portrait, Mr. Dolmetsch himself does not flinch from acknowledging it. “Nevertheless,” he has written,

despite a confined knowledge of the Torah (in its King James Version of the Old Testament), [Twain] apparently remained uninformed about the Talmud, Jewish theology, liturgy, and religious practices, and even about Jewish life (especially ghetto and shtetl life) itself. He seems, moreover, to have accepted several ancient myths: of Jewish wealth, which confirmed his view that economic envy rather than Christian doctrine was the root cause of latter-day prejudice against Jews; of a Jewish propensity for cheating and shady dealing; and, until he was disabused, of the Jew’s reluctance to bear arms for his adopted country. A firm assimilationist, he was unsympathetic, even derisive, toward Theodor Herzl’s Zionism (The Mark Twain Encyclopedia, 1993, p. 413).

Since Mr. Dolmetsch clearly recoils from these unsavory notions as much as I do, why, then, does he wish to make light of my own negative responses to these canards, and how, in the face of such material, can he claim that a piece of writing offering anti-Semitic nonsense as truthful history “exculpates the writer from any taint of racism or prejudice at this stage of his life”? And yes, if the American Nazi movement made use of these anti-Semitic passages, their author bears some culpability—not, it goes without saying, for having his words pinched by thugs, but assuredly for voluntarily attaching an honorable literary name to old poisons. The only “cautionary tale” to be found is that a little bit of anti-Semitism has the (often unforeseen) capacity to go a long way.

It is also not reasonable, I think, to be too indulgent toward Mark Twain’s “not having taken account of the plight of Galician and Russian Jews at the end of the century” on the ground that he “had no firsthand experience with anything in Europe east of Budapest.” Here Mr. Dolmetsch’s intimation that I stand “among those who would interpret Mark Twain’s works in light of their own intellectual milieu and agenda” is strikingly unfounded. In Mark Twain, after all, we have a supremely sophisticated and many-layered modern mind with access to newspapers, world events, the psychology of societies. And when Mark Twain did turn to his immediate (American) experience, what he reported seeing was storekeepers, not Rothschilds; yet the direct evidence of his own eyes did him no good and had no instructive value in the face of the ingrained mythology of the Rich Jew.

While I am glad to credit Mr. Dolmetsch with providing me with certain interesting data—especially in view of his failure to recognize his own contributions—it remains only to be said that an independent reader of literary works trusts less to the accumulation of data than to the sympathetic imagination. But no intuition is viable without a foundation in fact. Mr. Dolmetsch is right to emphasize his dedication to the minutiae of scholarship, and I hope he will concede that I have not betrayed his credo.

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I had already written the above pained paragraphs when Sholom J. Kahn’s wholly kind-hearted letter was set before me. (A Tale, one might put it, of Two Scholars.) Mr. Kahn’s acknowledgment that “in a magazine like COMMENTARY an academic bibliography would not have been appropriate” is relieving. The works both he and Mr. Dolmetsch allude to, including their own, should stimulate readers to further inquiry (and pleasure) in the study of Mark Twain’s life and letters. As for myself, I look forward to the corrective balance Mr. Kahn promises in the volumes mentioned in his final paragraph.

I admit to deep puzzlement, however, in the face of his suggestion that “Concerning the Jews” might be “understood, with all its ambivalences, as a piece of witty satire.” Well, in part yes: the notion, for instance, that the Jews have been “money-getters” ever since Joseph in Egypt “took a nation’s money all away, to the last penny” is so breathtakingly preposterous an improvisation that it might stand as a spoof of the senseless theories spun out by the anti-Semitic imagination. But then how are we to regard the warmly positive parts of the same essay? When Mark Twain summarizes “the very quintessentials of good citizenship” and attributes them to Jews (“quiet, peaceable, industrious, unaddicted to high crime and brutal dispositions,” etc.), favorably commenting also on Jewish family life and Jewish charitableness, are we to suppose that this too emerges from a satiric spirit? It strikes me as unlikely that a consummate artist such as Mark Twain would be capable of constructing an essay so lopsided in form that earnestness (the good parts, presumably) would be contradicted by the sudden introduction of travesty. And if it were indeed the writer’s intent to slide from truthfulness into burlesque, would he not give some internal sign?

And while Mr. Kahn reminds us of Mark Twain’s amazing range—“After all,” he writes, “it was Twain who authored both Pudd’nhead Wilson and Joan of Arc”—is there not some relevance here in noting that the differing moods and modes of these books are not intermingled in the selfsame manuscript? Moreover, Mr. Dolmetsch informs us that Mark Twain, speaking of “Concerning the Jews,” “predicted . . . that ‘neither Jew nor Christian will approve of it.’” Doesn’t this suggest that he expected Christian bigots to be annoyed by the favorable statements, and defensive Jews to resent the nasty ones? And doesn’t it also suggest that he regarded the essay’s positive and negative descriptions as equally true?

“One of America’s best,” Mr. Kahn concludes with charming brio, and no one would think of disputing him. Who does not love Mark Twain? That may be why, in preparing to issue, next year, a facsimile edition of a 1900 “complete” Mark Twain, Oxford University Press determined to ask contemporary novelists to write the introductions—writers who are not professional scholars. Mark Twain, Mr. Kahn will surely agree, belongs first of all to the readers who read not primarily for study, but mainly for delight. (Mr. Kahn is clearly attached both to the study and to the delight.)

Yet in encountering even the greatest and most cherished figures of our literature (from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Dickens to T.S. Eliot), it is the melancholy experience of readers of all temperaments to fall on occasion into sighs of disappointment with regard to unexpected outcroppings of anti-Semitism. Concerning “Concerning the Jews,” I fear one can only murmur, “Et tu, Mark Twain?” Even you?

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Note

In Robert Kagan’s article, “A Retreat From Power?” (July), we inadvertently neglected to cite the source of a number of quotations from an essay by Peter W. Rodman. That essay, “Points of Order,” appeared in National Review (May 1, 1995).—Ed.