Van Wyck Brooks. The Ordeal of Mark Twain. 1922; Project Gutenberg, 27 Feb. 2013. E-book.

Van Wyck Brooks was a well-known critic a hundred years ago. If The Ordeal of Mark Twain is any indication, he was an early adopter of applying Freudian psychology to literature. This book is basically a psychological analysis of Mark Twain—loosely based on his writings with great dependence on biographers and correspondents.

The reason we read this book, though, is that it came out in 1922, and Boats Against the Current tells us that this book influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald while he was writing The Great Gatsby. From what Brooks wrote about Twain, he would probably take a similar approach to Fitzgerald—at least to a point.

The Ordeal of Mark Twain could have been a thesis paper or literary critique of perhaps fifty pages. To extend it to book length means that there is a lot of repetition.

In so many words Brooks tells us that Mark Twain was an atheist and personally cynical about American politics and institutions, but he was also a people-pleaser. He promised his mother that he would remain faithful to his Calvinist upbringing, so he would be a member of the Presbyterian Church for most of his life. According to Brooks, he deferred to his wife upper-class Olivia in his dress, behavior, and even in his word choices when writing.

Brooks believes that Twain’s literary potential was never achieved because he wrote for commercial purposes. His critiques were nearly always oblique—humorous observations of immature boys, or settings in distant places or times like the England of Henry VIII and King Arthur or the France of Joan of Arc. Brooks believes that nearly all Twain’s writing is done with his mother in mind (think of Aunt Polly). Occasionally some of his later writing might have a woman who resembled Olivia.

This, says Brooks, was Twain’s ordeal. He was a “modern” thinker. He trusted science over religion. Most of his investments—many of which turned sour—were based on new technology which he thought would revolutionize various businesses. Indeed, Brooks would tell us that Twain’s admiration of men like Andrew Carnegie proved that he was trying to secure his place in society. He sometimes suggested sympathy for the workingman in private musings, but he comes across as “establishment.”

This reviewer wonders, though, didn’t Twain help Grant write his memoirs shortly before the General and President died because he actually admired him? Not simply because he had become establishment? (Actually, both men’s origins on the Mississippi River were similar, just on different riverbanks.)

The final sentences of The Ordeal of Mark Twain say that, to use modern terms, Twain was a sellout. His works, the author claims, lack the literary quality they could have become because he was afraid to reveal how he really felt or believed. The book ends with the following exhortation:

Read, writers of America, the driven, disenchanted, anxious faces of your sensitive countrymen; remember the splendid parts your confreres have played in the human drama of other times and other peoples, and ask yourselves whether the hour has not come to put away childish things and walk the stage as poets do.

This is where, it seems, Fitzgerald comes in. From all accounts, Fitzgerald was as doting over Zelda as Twain was over Olivia, perhaps even more so. We noted how a friend of his wrote Zelda was “the role model for all the female characters in his novels…” However, it also is clear that Fitzgerald did not write to please her. Tanner shows us that Daisy is a Judas—Brooks would assert that Olivia would not have tolerated that. Indeed, Zelda may not have been too thrilled.

In Fitzgerald’s life there also may have been an influential moral figure like Twain’s mother. In his case it was Father Sigourney Fay, to whom his first novel This Side of Paradise is dedicated, and who appears in the story as Monsignor Darcy.

On the other hand, Fitzgerald could truly identify with part of Twain’s ordeal: Both men had to prove their worth to win the hand of a woman who was from high society, whether Olivia Langdon or Zelda Sayre.

Brooks was especially critical of Twain’s fatalism. Time and again he quotes Twain saying, in effect, that there is no such thing as free will, that we are all merely products of our environment. Brooks attributes this to a kind of Calvinism that says everything is preordained. The fact that Twain appeared skeptical about God but remained Presbyterian illustrates to Brooks his overall social passivity and an intellectual assent to fatalism.

In that sense, too, Fitzgerald heeded Brooks’ call. Although he would express regrets and unease of conscience from time to time, Fitzgerald left his religion behind, except perhaps as symbols the way Joyce did in his stories. Yes, Fitzgerald was aware of Christianity as some kind of ideal as we can see in the New Testament burlesque in The Great Gatsby, but he did not believe, and he lived as if he truly didn’t. In that sense he broke from Twain, who may not have believed but lived as though he did.

Like Twain, Fitzgerald was conscious of his audience and had a need to make money to keep an upper-class wife in the lifestyle to which she was accustomed. But Fitzgerald would claim that he was honest and more direct. He also dealt more directly with adult themes, “putting away” the things of his youth. (See I Corinthians 13:11 KJV) If there is a recurring theme in his writing besides “the very rich…are different from you and me,” it is the loss of innocence that comes as we grow up. Perhaps we do “put away childish things,” but are we any better for it?

Brooks also criticizes Twain’s humor. Like many comedians, Twain always feared that his writing and public speaking jokes would fall flat, that no one would laugh. The Freudian Brooks claims that the humor was kind of mask, to keep people from seeing what he really believed.

Yet when we read Twain’s two best-known books, we can see that Twain criticizes both American society and its Christian religion through his two most famous characters, youthful as they may be. Tom Sawyer’s famous whitewashing episode slyly jests at people who get rich off the work of others. Tom rails against Sunday School, and Tom appearing at his own funeral is a burlesque of Christ’s death and resurrection.

Similarly, Huck Finn says that he would rather go to hell than let escaped slave Jim be captured. That certainly challenges racial attitudes that many Americans have had. It also is noting that people will use Biblical language to justify all kinds of injustices. And yet Brooks believes that Twain held back?

Yes, there is enough humor in both stories that we can laugh. Yes, both Tom and Huck are boys. So are the main characters in most of his other popular works: The Prince and the Pauper, Puddinhead Wilson, Joan of Arc, even the nonfiction Life on the Mississippi.

Still, to this twenty-first century writer, the satire and critique come through. One might even argue that the fact that Twain pulled off such things shows us that Brooks missed it. Either America was not as straitlaced as Brooks would have us believe, or Twain was more skilled than, say, later social critics like Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis—writers who are far less subtle and, therefore, mostly less successful than Twain in both artistry and popularity.