“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense,” wrote Mark Twain in an age before irreverence became a hanging, or at least exiling, offense.
Perhaps the more apt aphorism today belongs to Edward Abbey: “The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.” (The distrust of half-wit, I suppose, is the beginning of a TV critic.)
Mark Twain would be hopelessly out of favor with both wings of the modern duopoly. Militaristic Republicans would scorn Twain for his skepticism of empire and mockery of world-saving cant. (He was a supporter of the Anti-Imperialist League and proposed that the stars and stripes be replaced by the skull and crossbones.) Welfare-state Democrats would choke on such bilious Twainisms as “a maxim of mine is that whenever a man preferred being fed by any other man to starving in independence he ought to be shot.”
Happily, Upstate New York registers as among the most politically tolerant sections of the country, so Twain and his works remain an uncanceled presence up here in God’s country. The Twain industry is centered in his boyhood home of Hannibal, Missouri, of course, but Upstate cities Elmira and Buffalo played significant roles in the life of the writer christened Samuel Clemens.
Folks leave cigars, not spittle, on Mark Twain’s grave in Elmira, hometown of his devoted wife Livy, not to mention the news-reading fabulist Brian Williams and designer of gangbanger garb Tommy Hilfiger. Twain wrote his tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in Elmira — his octagonal writing hut is open for inspection on the attractive campus of Elmira College — but my subject is Buffalo, whose downtown public library boasts a Mark Twain Room whose star attraction is the original handwritten manuscript of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Twain/Clemens called the Queen City home from August 1869 till March 1871 because Jervis Langdon, his coal monopolist future father-in-law, set him up as part-owner and coeditor of the Buffalo Express.
Twain biographers typically dismiss these eighteen months as gelid and miserable, though they were nothing if not eventful: the author married Livy Langdon; was gifted a Second Empire-style mansion on Delaware Avenue, Buffalo’s “Millionaires Row,” by Livy’s father; enjoyed bestsellerdom with The Innocents Abroad; and roughed out the book that became Roughing It.