Volume 43, Number 9 · May 23, 1996
Twain on the Grand Tour
By Gore Vidal
Both Mark Twain and his inventor, Samuel Clemens, continue to give trouble to those guardians of the national mythology to which Twain added so much in his day, often deliberately. The Freudians are still on his case even though Dr. Freud and his followers are themselves somewhat occluded these days. Yet as recently as 1991, an academic critic[1] tells us that Clemens was sexually infantile, burntout at fifty (if not before), and given to pederastic reveries about little girls, all the while exhibiting an unnatural interest in outhouse humor and other excremental vilenesses. It is hard to believe that at century's end, academics of this degraded sort are still doing business, as Twain would put it, at the same old stand.
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