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
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.
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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: \thinkers 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. ”
马克 &S226;吐温——美国的一面镜子 ( 节选 ) 第九课
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。
印刷工、领航员、邦联游击队员、淘金者、耽于幻想的乐天派、语言尖刻的讽
刺家：马克 &S226;吐温原名塞缪尔 &S226;朗赫恩 &S226;克莱门斯，他一生之中有超 过三分之一的时间浪迹美国各地，体验着美国的新生活，尔后便以作家和演说家的 身分将他所感受到的这一切介绍给全世界。他的笔名取自他在蒸汽船上做工时听到 的报告水深为两口寻 (12 英尺 ) ——意即可以通航的信号语。他的作品中有二十几 部至今仍在印行，其外文译本仍在世界各地拥有读者，由此可见他的享誉程度。
在马克 &S226;吐温青年时代，美国的地理中心是密西西比河流域，而密西西比河是这个年轻国家中部的交通大动脉。龙骨船、平底船和大木筏载运着最重要的商品。木材、玉米、烟草、小麦和皮货通过这些运载工具顺流而下，运送到河口三角
洲地区，而砂糖、糖浆、棉花和威士忌酒等货物则被运送到北方。在 19 世纪 50 年代，西部领土开发高潮到来之前，辽阔的密西西比河流域占美国已开发领土的四分 之三。
1857 年，少年马克 &S226;吐温作为蒸汽船上的一名小领航员踏人了这片天地。在这个新的工作岗位上，他接触到的是各式各样的人物，看到的是一个多姿多彩的大干世界。他完全地投身到这种生活之中，经常在操舵室里听着人们谈论民间争斗、海盗抢劫、私刑案件、游医卖药以及河边的一些化外民居的故事。所有这一切，连同他那像留声机般准确可靠的记忆所吸收的丰富多彩的语言，后来都有机会在他的作品中得以再现。
蒸汽船的甲板上不仅挤满了富有开拓精神的人们，而且也载着一些娼妓、赌棍
和歹徒等社会渣滓。从所有这些形形色色的人身上，马克 &S226;吐温敏锐地认识了人类，认识了人们的言与行之间的差距。他在蒸汽船上工作的四年半时间是他真正
接受教育的开端，而且也是最具有深远意义的教育。到了晚年，马克 &S226;吐温还声言是密西西比河使他了解了各种各样的人的本性。这种生活体验对他的全部创作 都起了促进作用，然而他描写得最为成功的还是那些密西西比河上的人物。
随着铁路运输的发展，社会上对汽船领航员的需求日渐减少，而内战的爆发又阻碍了商业贸易的发展。这时，马克 &S226;吐温便离开了密西西比河流域。他在南方邦联游击队的一支杂牌队伍里当了两个星期的兵。那支队伍想方设法避免与敌军
交战。在确信“我比发明撤退的人更精通撤退”之后，马克 &S226;吐温离开了那支队伍。
他乘驿站马车来到西部，在内华达州的华苏地区受到当时正流行的淘金热的诱惑。同那只有既幸运而又锲而不舍的追求者才能取得的巨大财富三心二意地打了八个月交道之后，他遭到了失败。在破产和灰心之余，他接受了为弗吉尼亚市《领土开发报》当记者的工作，这一行动将获得文学界永久的感激。
自从他因淘金失败而感到心灰意冷之后，马克 &S226;吐温便开始努力博取作为一名报社记者和幽默作家的地区性声望。从事新闻报道工作当然不能使他像淘金成
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