The American: With 'Mark Twain,' Ken Burns captures pathos of the man behind the humorist

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Ken Burns loves flawed heroes. There was never a more spectacular specimen than author Mark Twain, and that's what makes Burns' documentary on Twain one of the filmmaker's best works.

Burns has made a prodigiously successful career out of resurrecting the American past for present eyes, documenting war ("The Civil War"), American music ("Jazz") and sport ("Baseball"). In between, in his "American Lives" series, he's chosen individuals to put under his cinematic microscope.

They have been men with great strengths and weaknesses: Thomas Jefferson, the Founding Father/slave owner; the Southern demagogue Huey P. Long; the obsessive, self-promoting architect Frank Lloyd Wright. And now Twain, a man whose personal triumphs were perpetually shadowed by private tragedy, much of it, the self-lacerating Twain believed, brought about by himself.

Burns' two-part series on Twain premieres at 8 tonight on KCTS-TV and continues tomorrow in the same time slot.

It's more successful than some Burns epics, which have tended to mythologize their subjects. The author himself, a man who never let anyone get away with anything, is a primary narrator. Several well-spoken commentators come along for the ride, including playwright Arthur Miller, novelists William Styron and Russell Banks, Twain biographer Ron Powers and Jocelyn Chadwick, a Twain scholar, Harvard professor and African American well-fitted to answer the charge that Twain was a racist for reproducing the way whites talked about blacks in the 1800s.

"Mark Twain" begins on Nov. 30, 1835, with Samuel Langhorne Clemens' birth in a two-room Missouri shack, as Halley's comet streaked across the sky (he would die 75 years later on an evening when the comet had returned). The family soon moved to Hannibal, Mo., a Mississippi River town.

Clemens ("Mark Twain" became his pen name) befriended Tom Blankenship, son of the town drunk, who would later morph into the boy hero of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." A black slave named Uncle David thrilled the town children with ghost stories, tales spun into the spirit lore later dispensed by the runaway slave Jim in "Huckleberry Finn."

Twain's early days were full of life. He dropped out of school and became an itinerant typesetter, developing a tactile appreciation for "just the right word." He apprenticed himself to a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River and submerged himself in the river's life and lore.

But the river also delivered Twain his first heartbreak: His beloved brother Henry, lured onto the river by his brother's enthusiasm, died painfully from burns when a boat's boiler exploded. Twain blamed himself.

Clemens became a riverboat pilot, a challenging, independent, well-paying job he compared to being "a king without a keeper." The name "Mark Twain" is river-speak for the measurement of two fathoms deep, the place where water becomes deep and safe enough for navigation — or becomes too dangerous to enter.

After Twain's brother Orion was appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory by President Lincoln, the young man determined to "light out for the Territory." He took up an exuberant career as a newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco.

After he was fired from a newspaper job, the writer went mining and penned a story about a miner with a talented jumping frog. Published on the East Coast, it was a sensation. It spawned his national reputation as a writer and later a lecturer, as he mesmerized audiences with his powers of description and deadpan humor.

'All right, then, I'll GO to hell'

By his early 30s, Twain met and married his beloved wife, Olivia Langdon. Their first baby died. Twain again blamed himself for chilling the baby on an outing. But three daughters came along, and Twain penned one successful book after another: "The Gilded Age" and "Tom Sawyer," a sunny, suspenseful evocation of his Hannibal childhood.

Then came Twain's consummate work: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Burns slowly builds the context for the tale — Twain's abhorrence of slavery and racism, his shock at hearing the story of a family cook, Mary Ann Cord, who told him how, as a slave, every one of her seven children was torn from her and sold.

Twain had trouble with "Huckleberry Finn." He began the book as a lighthearted sequel to "Tom Sawyer." But as the tale of the town rapscallion and the runaway slave evolved, it became a mirror of the nation's struggle over slavery and its legacy of racism.

The pivotal moment in the documentary is its summary of the importance of "Huckleberry Finn." Scholar Hamlin Hill notes how Twain set free the language of Americans from stilted, 19th-century convention; Twain let Huck, "a vulgar, uneducated river rat, tell his story without an apology of any sort," says Hill.

But Burns, who has had a careerlong preoccupation with issues of race, sees in "Huckleberry Finn" no less than a moral turning point for American readers, as the simple river rat confronted them with the immorality of racism. Chadwick shows how Twain walks Huck down the path of unlearning racism, as he realizes Jim is a man, not a commodity.

The film pinpoints one of the most significant scenes in American literature, when Huck writes a letter to Jim's owner telling her where the slave is hiding and then struggles with himself over what to do with it:

"I was a-trembling because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

" 'All right, then, I'll go to hell, and I tore it up.' "

After the publication of "Huckleberry Finn," the wealthy Twain pronounced himself "out of the woods." Part two of Burns' documentary shows what a fate-tempting statement that was.

'The hot, dark years'

Twain's extravagant spending led to his decision to tour to get himself out of debt. The resulting strains on his family contributed, he believed, to his separation or estrangement from his children and the death of his beloved wife from a combination of heart problems and asthma.

He was caustically bitter toward God: "There is no God and no universe; ... there is only empty space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless and indestructible Thought. And ... I am that thought."

The film follows the rest of what narrator Keith David calls "the hot, dark years" of Twain's later life. The affections of the bourgeois Sam Clemens have been stripped away, leaving a white-suited celebrity icon named Mark Twain, a beloved national raconteur hiding a bruised soul. He loved the limelight: "I am not an American, I am the American," he said. He also nailed the heart of his enduring appeal: "The source of humor," Twain said, "is not laughter, but sorrow."

One is left at the end of "Mark Twain" with a powerful sadness, mixed with awe that a man's work could live so far beyond him — viewers will no doubt return to "Huckleberry Finn" for evidence of that fact.

As Twain himself noted of his greatest gift: "Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever."

"Mark Twain"


A Ken Burns documentary. Part I, 8 tonight; Part II, 8 tomorrow night, KCTS.