2021年1月23日发(作者：支应遴)
2009-05-03 21:00
高级英语
Lesson 9. Mark Twain ---Mirror of America
Noel Grove

Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic
cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of
freedom and adventure. In-deed, this nation's best-loved author was
every bit as ad- venturous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone
has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well
–
one who grew cynical,
bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a
man who became obsessed with the frailties of the human race, who saw
clearly ahead a black wall of night.


Tramp printer, river pilot , Confederate guerrilla, prospector,
starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: The man who became Mark Twain
was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for
more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience
before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his
pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms
(12 feet) of water -- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by
the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and
translations are still read around the world.


The geographic core, in Twain's early years, was the great valley of
the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young
nation's heart. Keelboats
，
flatboats , and large rafts carried the
first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved
downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses , cotton, and whiskey
traveled north. In the 1850's, before the climax of westward expansion,
the vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled United States.


Young Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a
steamboat. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession
was rich and varied a cosmos . He participated abundantly in this life,
listening to pilothouse talk of feuds , piracies, lynchings ,medicine
shows, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books,
together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that
seemed phonographic


Steamboat decks teemed not only with the main current of pioneering
humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From
them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the
difference between what people claim to be and what they really are. His
four and a half year s in the steamboat trade marked the real beginning
of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twain
acknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type
of human nature. Those acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing,
but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the people a-long the
great stream.


When railroads began drying up the demand for steam-boat pilots and
the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He
tried soldiering for two weeks with a motleyband of Confederate
guerrillas who diligently avoided contact with the enemy. Twain quit
after deciding,
invented retreating.


He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and
silver fever in Nevada's Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with
the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and was
rebuffed . Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter with the
Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, to literature's enduring gratitude.


From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began
digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist.
The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting
trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his
pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the
Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco,
then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.


Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but
he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he
wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as
mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the
goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-
country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to
trend setting on the West Coast.
–
for
all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained slothsstayed at home... It was
that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding
enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring
and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this
day
–
and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as
usual, and says 'Well, that is California all over. '


In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook.
Scattered among notationsabout the weather and the tedious mining-camp
meals lies an entry noting a story he had heard that day
–
an entry
that would determine his course forever:
–
bet stranger $$50
–
stranger had no frog, and C. got him one
–
in
the meantime stranger filled C. 's frog full of shot and he couldn't
jump. The stranger's frog won.
story was printed in newspapers across the United States and became
known as
national reputation was now well established as
the Pacific slope.


Two year s later the opportunity came for him to take a distinctly
American look at the Old World. In New York City the steamship Quaker
City prepared to sail on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land.
For the first time, a sizablegroup of United States citizens planned to
journey as tourists -- a milestone , of sorts, in a country's
development. Twain was assigned to accompany them, as correspondent
工
for a California newspaper. If readers expected the usual glowing
travelogue , they were sorely surprised.


Unimpressed by the Sultan of
Turkey, for example, he reported, “...
one could set a trap anywhere and catch a dozen abler men in a night.”
Casually he debunked revered artists and art treasures, and took unholy
verbalshots at the Holy Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing
his articles. America laughed with him. Upon his return to the States
the book version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, became an instant
best-seller.


At the age of 36 Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His best
books were published while he lived there.


As early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story about the
boyhood adventures of a lad he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he
changed the name to Tom, and began shaping his adventures into a stage
play. Not until 1874 did the story begin developing in ear nest. After
publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly became a classic tale of
American boyhood. Tom's mischievousdaring, ingenuity , and the sweet
innocence of his affection for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be
studied in American schools to-day as is the Declaration of Independence.


Mark Twain's own declaration of independence came from another
character. Six chapters into Tom Sawyer, he drags in
pariah of the village, Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard.
Fleeing a respectable life with the puritanical Widow Douglas, Huck
protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer:
it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me ... The widder eats by a bell; she
goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell
–
everything's so awful
reg'lar a body can't stand it.


Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life
of his own, in a book often consider ed the best ever written about
Americans. His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave
presents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.


On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the
ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often
deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamorfor
success.


Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American
ambition when he said:
we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally
and renew our edges.


Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved
ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry,
killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19
months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis , Mrs.
Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter.,
Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub .


Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The
moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now
the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U. S.
military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a
volcanic, crater . In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop
his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make
a better world.


The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end.
Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing
sense of despair on men's final release from earthly struggles:
they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they
achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a
foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed
–
a
world which will lament them a day and for-
get them forever.”

第九课

马克
&S226;
吐温——美国的一面镜子
(
节选
)

诺埃尔
&S226;
格罗夫


在大多数美国人 的心目中，马克
&S226;
吐温是位伟大作家，他描写了哈克
&S226;
费
恩永恒的童年时代中充满诗情画意的旅程和汤姆
&S226;
索亚在漫长的夏日里自 由自
在历险探奇的故事。的确，这位美国最受人喜爱的作家的探索精神、爱国热情、浪
漫气质及 幽默笔调都达到了登峰造极的程度。但我发现还有另一个不同的马克
&S226;
吐温——一个 由于深受人生悲剧的打击而变得愤世嫉俗、尖酸刻薄的马克
&S226;
吐温，一个为人类品质 上的弱点而忧心忡忡、明显地看到前途是一片黑暗的
人。