Twain’s Hadleyburgers: Us?

             I was thinking, “Oh, yuck, these self-righteous citizens of Hadleyburg.” I read on and started recognizing people I know, recognizing, gulp, myself.  Samuel L. Clemens as Mark Twain yet again reminds his readers who we are, from whom we have come. We come from Hadleyburg.

            The more I read Twain’s work, the more he grabs me by the earlobe. And twists. He is funny, brilliant, avuncular, outrageous. He makes fun of his contemporaries, to their faces, and blithely writes on, undaunted by potential wrath. I have read that to be a good writer, you have to be honest. Dammit. It’s hard to write honestly, revealingly, exposingly.

In “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” (1899), Twain points out the secret dishonesties of Hadleyburg’s self-congratulatory folk. They pride themselves on absolute rectitude, but because they are people, they cannot live up to their standards.  I can resist everything but temptation applies. Ah ha. When a disgruntled stranger introduces an irresistibly accessible sack of gold, the town betrays the high expectations it has developed for itself. Every Hadleyburger succumbs to cheating his/her neighbor in one hideous way or other.

Young woman

They are us. But is Hadleyburg worse because it originally sets itself up as flawless? 

            Twain gets us. I have heard that especially after his favorite child, Suzy, died suddenly when she was 24, Clemens grew ever less fond of organized religion, if he had ever approved of it in the first place. But “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is more than an expose about hypocrisies; it exposes the target everyone misses. We want to be good; we expect to be; we make a bulls-eye of goodness; but we miss. We have to: we are human. People are interesting.