Book Review
The Heart
in Twain
Mark Twain and the Spiritual Crisis
of His Age by Harold K. Bush, Jr.
University of Alabama Press, 2007
(352 pages, $47.50, hardcover)
reviewed by Franklin Freeman
God “gives you a wife and children whom you adore, only that through the spectacle of the wanton shames and miseries which He will inflict upon them He may tear the palpitating heart out of your breast and slap you in the face with it.”
So wrote Mark Twain, but nevertheless, writes Harold Bush, “there is abundant evidence of Twain’s strong religious proclivities throughout his life. . . . It even makes sense to summarize America’s most famous author in the same way that he once summarized himself—as ‘a moralist in disguise.’”
Twain did shake his fist at God, but there is a lot more to the story. Besides giving evidence for the obvious point that a man who shakes his fist at God must still believe in God, Bush shows, in this “cultural biography of Mark Twain’s religious ethos,” how very much involved Twain was with the religious thought of his time.
The Religious Twain
In his correspondence with his pastor and best friend, Joe Twichell, Twichell’s notes, and Twain’s notebooks and published works, we see a man both reverent and irreverent by turn, who seeks understanding and truth, and who, though never becoming an orthodox Christian, attended an orthodox church (Twichell’s) for most of his later life, chose to live in a social milieu that stood for a liberal (in a social, not doctrinal, sense), intellectual, and manly Christianity, and was generous with time and money to such causes as the Chinese Educational Mission. His church’s records show “not only that Twain often donated money for many causes, including foreign missions, but also that he frequently gave more than anyone else.”
He also frequently discussed theology with Twichell, pastor of Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford, and with the Monday Evening Club, to which both belonged. In 1902, after carefully reading Jonathan Edwards’s Freedom of the Will, he wrote an “elaborate critique,” which, Bush says, shows his “powerful theological sensibilities . . . capable of making careful and complicated distinctions.”
Because of what Bush calls Twain’s “extreme deism,” he was “unable to embrace the paradoxical nature of this controversy” over the nature of the will.
Twain was left to maintain a [in Twichell’s words] “flat necessitarianism” and accept the moral implications of that position: that ultimately mankind is not responsible for his sins, so God must be. Still he often suffered utter despair in the face of what he perceived to be his own guilt.
Bush, an associate professor of English at Saint Louis University (and contributor to Touchstone), explains this and more abundant evidence throughout seven chapters, each focusing on one aspect of Twain’s life: his roots in Missouri; his wife’s “Victorian Home”; his friendship with Joe Twichell; his liberal faith in what was called the Social Gospel; his views on the Civil War; his preoccupation in later years with the figure of Adam; and his profound grief at the loss of his daughter Susy, and his wife Livy.
Franklin Freeman is a freelance writer living in Saco, Maine, with his wife and four children.
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