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Home , A Tramp Abroad, Following the Equator, Luck (short story), Mark Twain, The American Claimant

The Importance of Author(s): Alan Gribben Source: American Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 1, Special Issue: American Humor (Spring, 1985), pp. 30-49 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2712761 . Accessed: 05/05/2011 11:10

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http://www.jstor.org THE IMPORTANCE OF MARK TWAIN

ALANGRIBBEN Universityof Texas,Austin

MARK TWAIN IS THE ONLY WE HAVE RECOGNIZED AS AN AUTHOR OF IM- mortalAmerican prose after having branded him a "."When in 1956 FloydStovall explained the selectionprocess that included Mark Twain (along withPoe, Emerson,Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman, and James) among theeight authors who deserved landmark bibliographical essays sponsored by the AmericanLiterature Group of the Modern Language Association, he could assume that"doubtless most readers will agreethat at thistime and forthe purposes of thisvolume they are themost important American ." If one adds two figuresconsidered and then omitted-Howells and Dickinson-Twain's uniqueness is stillevident. As a consequenceof thisreputation for humor, Twain's literary accomplishmentswere never taken for granted; in the beginning Howells, ,William Lyon Phelps, and others had to insist upon Twain's stature as a majorAmerican . Yet evenduring Samuel Clemens's lifetime, encourag- ing signsof his risingstatus began to appear. In an era whenuniversities bestowed honorary degrees less freelythan some perhapsdo today,three schools conferred doctorates on Clemens;the first of these, Yale Universityin 1901, produceda richlysymbolic event: there sat Samuel Clemens,self-educated, a productof a rough-and-tumbleborder state and the strike-it-richFar West,receiving the highest distinction awarded by a university whosecurriculum had seemedconservative to thecolonial poet John Trumbull. The culturalrevolution betokened by this ceremonywas probablyno more apprehendedby thosein attendancethan was the equallysuggestive fact that Clemenshad feltcompelled to makehis adoptivehome the New Englandcity whereTrumbull and the Wits had flourished. Inasmuch as Twainhad foundConnecticut-and the western regions where he hadresided previously-to be suitablesettings for his literature,the American literary independence, now completedattained, was merelybeing solemnized at thisYale proceeding,as it

'EightAmerican Authors: A Reviewof Research and Criticism,ed. FloydStovall (New York:W.W. Norton,1956), vi. The Importanceof Mark Twain 31

laterwould be in similarceremonies at theUniversity of (1902) and at OxfordUniversity (1907).2 Othertributes arrived as well. ProfessorRichard Burton declared in 1904 that Clemenswas the "one livingwriter of indisputablegenius" in the .That same year Clemens was amongthe first seven individuals selected by secretballot for membership in theAmerican Academy of Artsand Letters.The othersix honorees-includingauthors ,Edmund Clarence Stedman,and JohnHay-have neveragain been accordedthat degree of public esteem,nor have mostof thosewhom these seven people thenelected, such as ThomasBailey Aldrich and CharlesEliot Norton.3In 1899, BranderMatthews hadclassed Twain with Cervantes and Moliere, and this sort of accolade, over the objectionsof certaindissenters in each succeedingdecade, has gained many adherents.During Clemens's lifetime, Matthew Arnold, John Nichol, and Henry Jameswere amongthe skepticsregarding his mountingreputation, but their reservationswere balanced by the enthusiasm of commentators like ,who in 1908 called MarkTwain "our greatestwriter of fiction,"and Howells,who termedhim, memorably, the Lincoln of ourliterature. As JayB. Hubbellhas noted,Adventures of HuckleberryFinn and Twain's otherworks foundadmirers as eminentas RobertLouis Stevenson,Thomas Hardy, Andrew Lang, and GeorgeBernard Shaw.4 Nevertheless,Mark Twain's literary stature has suffered,from time to time, because of his predilectionfor comic forms. In 1920, mostnotably, Van Wyck Brooksled his historicattack on Twain'scredentials and achievements,though ensuingtestimonials from authors, , teachers, and readers elevated Twain to a toweringposition among the masters of Americanliterature. In thecategory of humor,indeed, his supremacy today is essentiallyunassailable, yet Jay B. Hubbell correctlyobserves that

forthe literary Mark Twain poses two special problems.First, he was a great humorist,and Brooks and other critics with little taste for humor have had great difficulty in assessingthe value of his books. In thesecond place, MarkTwain was and stillis enormouslypopular, and thisdisturbs the modern critics who seemto valueonly those writerswhom they regard as alienatedfrom society. This . . . is a mainreason why they havemade so muchof his pessimism.'

2Morethan fifty years ago VernonLouis Parringtondiscerned Twain's importance in thisregard: "Here at lastwas . . . a nativewriter thinking his own thoughts,using his own eyes, speakinghis owndialect-everything European fallen away, the last shred of feudal culture gone, local andwestern yetcontinental. . . . Yet in spiteof a rarevein of humor, . . . he made his way slowlyto polite recognition.For yearshe was regardedby authoritativecritics as littlemore than a buffoon,an extravagantfun-maker with a broadstreak of westerncoarseness." See The Beginningsof Critical Realismin America,1860-1920 (New York:Harcourt, Brace and World,1930), 86. 3LarzerZiff discusses some of the ironies of this election ceremony in The American 1890's: Lifeand Timesof a Lost Generation(New York:Viking Press, 1966), 345-47. 4JayB. Hubbell,Who Are theMajor Writers?A Studyof the Changing Literary Canon (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ.Press, 1972), 144. 5Ibid., 144. 32 AmericanQuarterly

For thosewho harborambivalent feelings about Twain's mass popularityin theUnited States, then and now, a redeemingvirtue is Twain'sapparent vitalness toAmerican writers. Demonstrably he bequeathedto thetwentieth century a style of prosethat speaks to us almostcontemporarily, less impededby outmoded linguisticlocutions than that of any other humorist-or of virtually any writer, for thatmatter-of his day. His flexiblevoice even now comes through as vibrantlyas thoughhe weredictating those autobiographical recollections to us insteadof to AlbertBigelow Paine and thestenographer Miss Hobby.That modulated voice emergedeffectively in his worksagain and again, untileventually he came to believethat this narrative device alone was everythingliterature was about,that he coulddispense with setting, dialect, manners, character development, even plot. He wouldprogressively experiment with eliminating these other elements, one by one, in storieslike "The Man That CorruptedHadleyburg" (1899) and "The $30,000Bequest" (1904), culminatinginthe enchanting talk of his Autobiograph- ical Dictations,often faulted for their formlessness, but which can bestbe viewed as a reversionto Twain's earliest, favored form-a seriesof newspaper-type topical sketchesand occasionalcolumns, each perfectlyintact and self-contained. Yet in spiteof the distinctive "oral" stylethat Twain developed for his prose, he has neverbeen the target of parodies like those that have mimicked the rhetoric of Poe, Cooper,Whitman, James, Crane, Hemingway, and Faulkner.Like these writers,Twain can momentarilyseem windy, excitable, or pompous.Yet in the main,he succeededin findinga sense of balance,forging a flexiblestyle that conveyssubtlety and densityof meaningas well as the disarmingfluidity of ordinaryconversational speech. One ofthe less memorableof Twain's paragraphs inthe least admired of his travel narratives, (1897), can still illustratethe suppleness of his delivery:

In Englandany person below the heir who is caughtwith a rabbitin his possession must satisfactorilyexplain how it gotthere, or he willsuffer fine and imprisonment,together withextinction of his peerage; in Bluff[,New Zealand], the cat found with a rabbitin its possessiondoes nothave to explain-everybodylooks the other way; the person caught noticingwould suffer fine and imprisonment,with extinction of peerage.This is a sure wayto underminethe moral fabric of a cat. Thirtyyears from now therewill notbe a moralcat in New Zealand.Some think there is nonethere now. . . . All governmentsare moreor less short-sighted:in England they fine the poacher, whereas he oughtto be banishedto New Zealand. New Zealand wouldpay his way,and give himwages.6

Hyperbole,anthropomorphism, theoccasional idiomatic expression, and a jab at Englishlaw are evident in passages like this one. However, its ultimate effectiveness stemsfrom the impression itdelivers of a likablepersona's actual speech, daringl)

6MarkTwain, Following the Equator (Hartford, Conn.: AmericanPublishing, 1897), 285-86. The Importanceof Mark Twain 33 punctuatedwith semicolons and structuredaround parallel phrases, then artfully frozenin print. Such paragraphs do notsimply fool us, as Hemingway'sdialogues andmonologues succeed in doing, into erroneously supposing that people actually speakEnglish that way (most excerpts from Hemingway's and short stories soundwooden and clumsy when read aloud, despite the verisimilitude they appear toexude on thepage). In Twain'scase, themajority of his tales and essays can be read orallywithout embarrassment to the reader;people may not talkin such carefullycrafted units of punctuationand equipoise,but the rhythms and diction are harmoniouslysuited to thecontext and subjectmatter. Manyof MarkTwain's verbal effects, of course,depended upon his skillin creatingthe formof addressfor one dominantspeaker. Twain tinkeredwith vernacularapproaches over and overagain, often finding his way to workable combinationsof storyand tone, and once managing to inventa boy's monologue thatensured his place in all studiesof fictionalnarrative. He always had an affectionfor this "aural" elementin literaryworks, rehearsing oral readings of RobertBrowning's verse monologues and RudyardKipling's ballads; his own fictionfeatured loquacious figures like Simon Wheeler, Uncle Mumford, Colonel Sellers,and even King Leopold. In A TrampAbroad (1880), thecomic model for travelerslike Paul Theroux,which helps themchuckle at inconveniencesand teachesthem to acknowledgeand cherishtheir inescapable attitudes of cultural superiority,the narrator gives the impression of an oral manner.To fullysavor Twain'sjoke in chaptertwenty-five of thatwork, however, a readerneeds to reviewa typicalaccount of chamois-hunting that appeared in Twain's day; then the subversivenature of Twain's assaulton whatHenry Nash Smithhas variously termed"genteel bombast," "bookish phrases," "cliches of refinement and ideality,"and "decadent high cultureof the nineteenthcentury" also comesinto focus.7 The following description appeared in a Philadelphiaperiodical a littlemore than a decadebefore Twain wrote A TrampAbroad; I quoteonly a few sentences:

The mostcourageous inhabitants of theAlps takea particularpleasure in lookingfor andkilling the chamois in the wilds of the highest mountains. Great courage, presence of mindand perseveranceis wantedin chamoishunting. With the thick-soled shoes, the iron-tippedstick, the pointed hat, ornamented with a chamoisbeard, and thedouble- barrelrifle, the hunterstarts in the evening... to surprisethe chamois at their pasturages.... Oftenthick fogs come up, so thathe can see buta fewfeet ahead; or a furioustempest breaks out, that threatens to precipitate the hunter into the abyss. It is no wonderthat chamois-hunters lose their lives in falling down a gapin the ice, or a precipice; and, nevertheless,other inhabitants of theAlps undertakethis dangerous chase.8

7HenryNash Smith,Mark Twain: The Developmentof a Writer(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press/BelknapPress, 1962), 16, 17, 41; Smith,Democracy and theNovel: PopularResistance to Classic AmericanWriters (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), 119. 8"ChamoisHunting in theAlps" [anonymous],Saturday Night [Philadelphial, 7 Dec. 1867, 7. 34 AmericanQuarterly

Twain's version of these heroics in A TrampAbroad, a book thatis currently undervaluedand oftenout of print,comically expatiates on thevermin that infested his Swiss hotels:

A greatdeal ofromantic nonsense has beenwritten about the Swiss chamoisand the perilsof huntingit, whereasthe truth is thateven womenand childrenhunt it, and fearlessly;indeed, everybody hunts it; the hunting is goingon all thetime, day and night, in bed and outof it. It is poeticfoolishness to huntit witha gun;very few people do that.. . . Theromancers always dress up the chamois hunter in a fancifuland picturesque costume,whereas the best way to hunt this game is todo itwithout any costume at all. The creatureis a humbugin every way, and everything which has been written about it is sentimentalexaggeration. It was no pleasureto me to findthe chamois out, for he had beenone ofmy pet illusions; all ofmy life it had been my dream to see himin hisnative wildssome day, and engage in the adventurous sport of chasing him from cliff to cliff. It is nopleasure to me to expose him, now, and destroy the reader's delight in him and respect forhim, but still it mustbe done.9

His astonishingseries of paired opposites in this passage, his scoffingattack on stilted"romantic nonsense," his undeterredinsistence upon a mistakenidentifi- cation, his confusionof mightyexploits witheveryday nuisances-we recognize these as hallmarksof Twain's comic pose. They enabled him to exploit European guides, Turkishcoffee, and Turkishbaths (InnocentsAbroad); -travel, AmericanIndians, and horse-auctions(); river-piloting,, and Indian legends (), and countless othermaterials that otherwriters seldom turnedto theiradvantage. Yet in termsof mosttechniques that Twain employed,he was exemplaryrather than unprecedented.Certainly "The Celebrated JumpingFrog" (1865), with its easily distractedmonologist and his anecdote about the illness of Parson Walker's wife ("'it seemed as if theywarn't going to save her"), is reminiscent of the Widow Bedott's ramblingaccounts of herfamily and neighbors,especially the recollectionsof her deceased husband Hezekiah:

Whyits an onaccountablefact that when that man died he hadentseen a well dayin fifteenyear, though when he was married and for five or six year after I shouldent desire to see a ruggederman than what he was. Butthe time I'm speakin'of he'd been out o' health nighupon ten year, and 0 dearsakes! how he had alteredsince the first time I eversee him!That was to a quiltin'to SquireSmith's a spellafore Sally was married.I'd no idee thenthat Sal Smithwas a gwineto be marriedto Sam Pendergrass.She'd ben keepin' companywith Mose Hewlitt,for better'n a year,and every body said thatwas a settled thing,and lo and behold!all of a suddingshe up and tookSam Pendergrass.'0

9MarkTwain, A TrampAbroad, Author's National Ed., 2 vols. (New York: and Brothers, 1907), 1, 245-46. "FrancesMiriam Whitcher, The WidowBedott Papers (1856), rpt. in WalterBlair's Native AmericanHumor (1937; rpt.New York:Chandler, 1960), 271-72. The Importanceof Mark Twain 35

In thishodpodge of gossipy details about health, marriage, and friendship, with its chatty,countrified speech and the earnest, candid tone of address, we arealready close to thePike County dialect of garrulousSimon Wheeler's yarn, and also to JimBlaine's extravagant efforts to narratethe story of hisgrandfather's old ram:

Seth Green was prob'lythe pick of the flock; he marrieda Wilkerson-Sarah Wilkerson-goodcretur, she was-one ofthe likeliest heifers that was everraised in old Stoddard,everybody said that knowed her. She couldheft a bar'lof flour as easyas I can flirta flapjack.And spin? Don't mentionit! Independent?Humph! When Sile Hawkins come a-browsingaround her, she let himknow that for all his tinhe couldn'ttrot in harnessalongside of her."

The comic plight,on theother hand, of theunwilling listener, trapped into hearingdetails about which he simplyhas no interestand graduallyenmeshed in thespreading web of factand anecdote,proved a freshif reliable predicament in Twain'sfiction. In itsdrollest variants he dramatizesthe captive hearer's torture withtender solicitude. The offendedgenteel narrator who "frames"the Simon Wheelerstory of "The CelebratedJumping Frog" indignantlyconstrues the tale as an attempt"to bore me to deathwith some exasperatingreminiscence . . .as longand as tediousas itshould be uselessto me," andhis fate is sharedby theMark Twain character in "AboutBarbers" (1871), who emphasizesthat he merelywants a quickshave so thathe can catch a noontimetrain, then sits in agony whilethe loose-tongued barber, the prototype for Ring Lardner's dense barber in "Haircut," "latheredone side of my face thoroughly,and was about to latherthe other, when a dog-fightattracted his attention, and he ranto the window andstayed and saw itout, losing two shillings on theresult in betswith the other barbers,a thingwhich gave me greatsatisfaction." That last comment suggests howmuch Twain comes to detestthis prating person who, as itturns out, owns a dog himself,and "strungout an accountof the achievementsof a six-ounce blackand tan terrier of his till I heardthe whistles blow for noon, and knew I was fiveminutes too late forthe train. . . . The barberfell down and died of apoplexy twohours later. I am waitingover a dayfor my revenge-I am goingto attendhis funeral."'2In chaptertwenty-six of A TrampAbroad, the situation humorously evokesthe harangue that Coleridge's Wedding Guest endures: the Washington correspondentRiley pushes a captive"against an ironfence, buttonholed him, fastenedhim with his eye, like the ancient mariner," and proceeded to unfold the storyof a governmentclaim-seeker in theera of AndrewJackson.'3 This habitualgambit of depictingthe talkative narrator's audience as victim,

"MarkTwain, Roughing It, ed. FranklinP. Rogersand Paul Baender,The Worksof MarkTwain Series(Berkeley: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1972), 345. '2MarkTwain, "About Barbers," in Mark Twain'sSketches, New and Old (Hartford,Conn.: AmericanPublishing, 1875), 259-61. '3Twain,A TrampAbroad, I, 270. 36 AmericanQuarterly thuscompelling the reader to reflect that he toohas beentaken advantage of (even thoughhe has enjoyedthe tale), represents one of thecomprehensive uses Twain made of the vernacularvoices he fashioned.Why he succeededat thismore lastinglyand appealinglythan his contemporaryhumorists is stilla matterfor discussion.In a slightlydifferent connection, Ernest Earnest ascribes Twain's originalityof style to the publishing practice for which he was criticizedin his own day, and thisexplanation possibly has relevancehere: "One reasonthat Mark Twain had been able to breaknew groundin the use of colloquialAmerican Englishwas thathe publishedhis books in thesubscription press, that is through publisherswhose salesmen took orders from door to door. He didthis not in order toescape the restrictions ofconservative editors but simply because he thoughthe could make more money. . . . The unsophisticatedpublic who patronized the subscriptionpublishers was less squeamishthan the Anglophile editors, critics, and professorsof literature."Henry Nash Smithadds: "This [subscription method]was probablya wisedecision. It was a wayfor the writer to freehimself fromthe dominantliterary conventions. . . . He was forcedto inventa new form and a new stylein whichto expresshimself.' 4 It is truethat Mark Twain was one of thefew to availhimself of the awesomesales apparatusof the subscription-canvassing method. Yet this in itself cannotentirely account for why 's cleverfables and stories-eventhe marvelous"Dubley, '89," thatamusing account of an alumnus'sinappropriate speechat a dinnerof theBeverly alumni-are practicallyforgotten today, along withthe humorous productions of scoresof otherliterary comedians like Petro- leumV. Nasbyand Robert J. Burdette, while Twain reigns paramount in the field of Americancomedy. George Ade and theothers primarily wrote their materials forspecific newspapers (and newspapersyndicates)-the Chicago Record, the Toledo Blade, and theBurlington Daily Hawk Eye-as Twaindid at thecom- mencementof his writingcareer, an arrangementhe was eventuallyable to abandon.When the newspaper wits collected their disparate columns for a pub- lisher,the resulting book oftenrelied on repetitiousdevices and lackedgenuine coherenceand development.Bill Nye's FortyLiars, and OtherLies (1882), for example,is certainlyentertaining in its way. Taking biased aim at Mormons,Ute andSioux Indians, Chinese, newspaper editors, bandits, and the assassin Guiteau, Nye employsunderstatement and malapropismto advantage.The prefacecon- cedes: "There is a tacit admission . . . by the author that some little trifling falsehoodsmay have crept into the work, owing to thehurry and rush of prepara- tion.. . . I hopethere will be no ill-feelingon thepart of those who are mentioned personally. . . , and who are still alive, and comparativelyvigorous." A dog

'4ErnestEarnest, The Single Vision: The Alienation ofAmerican Intellectuals (New York:New York Univ.Press, 1970), 48-49; Smith,Democracy and theNovel, 107. The Importanceof Mark Twain 37

storyin thebook, "Entomologist,"divertingly relates for children the adven- turesof a Thurberiandog that ate fifteen feet of a lariat,obliging his master to buy thatarticle; the dog finally dies after devouring some soft plaster of Paris, leaving a plastercast of himself("interior view") and promptingthe epitaph,"He bit offmore than he could chew." Nye's remarkabout fashion-plate plug hats is entirelyworthy of Twain'sexaggerations: "In formeryears they used to hanga manwho wore a plughat west of the Missouri, but after awhile they found that it was a morecruel and horrible punishment to lethim wear it, and chase it over the foot-hillswhen the frolicsome breeze caught it up andtoyed with it, and lammed it againstthe broad brow of Laramie Peak." All thesame, the miscellaneous nature of FortyLiars, despiteits westernflavor of tall tales and "lies," suggeststhe drawbacksof manysuch publications.'5 The factis, the majorityof Americanhumorists-as Joel Chandler Harris provedwith Sister Jane (1896) andGabriel Tolliver (I1902)-were better equipped forthe squib, the sketch, the story, or a heterogeneouscollection of anecdotes and yamsrather than extended fictional inventions of satireand plot. 16 Fortunatelyfor Twain,he experimentedintrepidly with numerous genres, moving from the hoax and burlesqueto the travelsketch, the shortstory, the polemicalessay, the monologue,and thenovel; he was capable, as it turnedout, of adequately(if haltingly)converting his talentsfor the purpose of lengthierefforts that needed greatercontrol of form. In addition,he wrotevoluminously; any minor author of thenineteenth century whose literary estate could successfullylay claimto even one tenthof Twain'swritings would instantly be grantednew respect and would dulybe insertedin classroomtextbooks. Our contemporaryfascination with The MysteriousStranger (1916), "" (1923), and otherfiction and essays fromMark Twain's later phase-a departurefrom the taste of anthologyeditors of previous generations- indicatesthat modem readers admire Twain's courage in registering his moods and approveof the factthat his religiousbeliefs, social philosophies,and literary techniquesmust be studiedin termsof different"periods" of his outlook.As a consequence,he seems engaginglyhonest and complex.The truthis, his late polemicsand diatribes have accorded with the temper of our recent angry decades. Thereis an ironyhere, because, to takeone instance,Samuel Clemens could not bringhimself to copyright his favorite philosophical treatise What Is Man? (written

"EdgarW. Nye,Forty Liars, and OtherLies (Chicago:Belford, Clark, 1882), 6, 199, 223. '6DavidE. E. Sloane notes,for example, that "after the Civil War,[Orpheus C.] Kerr,like the others,tried to writesustained fiction. The handfulof novels he producedwere only modestly successful."When the famous Artemus Ward died, Ward"had notattempted sustained fiction in anyform, and the possibilities of American humor in that area remained untapped until the successes of MarkTwain." See MarkTwain as a LiteraryComedian (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979), 24, 44. 38 AmericanQuarterly in 1898,published in 1906) inhis own name, let alone sign the title page.17 It was notthat any real harmcould come to thedistinguished author expressing these deterministicviews abouthuman conduct-rather, his misgivingsinvolved the insecurityhe oftendisplayed about the public image he hadcreated, that venerated MarkTwain persona he hadprojected skillfully and infalliblyfor so manyyears. Clemensthe man was at odds withTwain the image in theirfinal years, and this tensionbetween the private and the public figure, his tragicand comicqualities, has becomethe dominant issue in MarkTwain commentary ever since. Alice Hegan Rice was shockedand embarrassedin August,1909, whenshe visited RichardWatson Gilder and listenedto Clemenslambasting the orderof the universe;later she wrote,"I havean amusingrecollection of Mr. Gilderleading meprotectingly into the house on one ofthose occasions, and whispering, 'Don't listento thatblasphemous and unhappyold man!""18 Yet thedisgust of Twain's associateswent beyond the pall he could cast on a dinnerparty. They and his audienceat largewanted America's foremost humorist to concludehis lifewith goodcheer-to inspireall ofus in ourtrudging circumstances, to setan example forthe properly humorous departure from mortal existence. No doubtthey hoped foran upbeatexit such as (thesupposedly carefree, but actually crusty) William Saroyantried to supply in 1981when he telephonedthe to report, onlyslightly in advance,his own demise; with cheeky aplomb, the author of The Timeof Our Life expressed nonchalant curiosity about the sequence of sensations he was soon to undergo. MarkTwain's mask trembled a bittoward the end, and he was notuniformly capableof jocular pronouncements. Yet he had theconsolation of knowingthat he had outstrippedhis competitorsin thefield of comedy,had indeedset a new recordof longevityfor his masspopularity. When he came to assess thereasons behindthis phenomenal success, he would attributeit to the impatiencewith humanfoibles that he manifestedmore and moreobsessively after 1895. His definitiveexplanation dates from 1906, whenTwain dictated a screedabout his fellowhumorists that has become well knownto literaryhistorians. Glancing throughthe contentsof an anthologyof Americanhumor that he had helped compilenearly twenty years earlier, Mark Twain's Library of Humor,'9 he con- cluded on July13, 1906, thatthe book was now "a cemetery"and gloated about his own survivalin contrastto the literaryexpiration of his many contemporaries:

"Privatesecretary Isabel V. Lyonrecorded on 9 May 1906: "It was thisday thatMr. Clemens gavethe Gospel Ms. to Mr.Frank Doubleday to taketo startin on thepublishing of 250 copiesto be printedon theDeVinne press; not to be publishedin Mr. Clemens's name, not even to be copyrightedin hisname." See Lyon'sjournal in the Humanities Research Center, Univ. of Texas at Austin; text quoted fromLaurie Lentz's "Mark Twainin 1906: An Editionof SelectedExtracts from Isabel V. Lyon's Journal,"Resources for American Literary Study, 11 (Spring1981), 31. "Alice HeganRice, TheInky Way (New York:Appleton-Century, 1940), 80. '9MarkTwain's Library of Humor, ed. SamuelL. Clemens[also WilliamDean Howellsand Charles HopkinsClark] (New York:Charles L. Webster,1888). The Importanceof Mark Twain 39

I havehad for company seventy-eight other American humorists. Each and every one rosein my time, became conspicuous and popular, and by and by vanished. . . . Thereis probablynot a youthof fifteenyears of age in thecountry whose eye wouldlight with recognitionat themention of anyone of theseventy-eight names.

Alludingto Nasby,Ward, Strauss, Derby, Burdette, Perkins, Kerr, O'Brien, Billings,and the DanburyNews Man, he observedthat their "writings and sayingswere once in everybody'smouth but are now heard of no moreand are no longermentioned." Then he madethe oft-quoted assertion that (in his opinion) accountedfor his endurance:

Whyhave they perished? Because they were merely humorists. . . . Oftenit is merely an oddtrick of speech and of spelling, as inthe case ofWard and Billings and Nasby . and presentlythe fashionpasses and the fame along withit. . . Humormust not professedlyteach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do bothif it would live forever.By forever,I mean thirty years.... I havealways preached. That is thereason thatI havelasted thirty years. . . . I was notwriting the sermon for the sake of the humor. I shouldhave written the sermon just the same. . . . I am sayingthese vain things in this frankway becauseI am a dead personspeaking from the grave.11

Like muchof Twain's autobiography,this is compellingand revelatoryand quotable;for one thing, it recalls his declaration made forty years earlier (in a letter writtenfrom San Franciscoto Orion and Mollie Clemens on October19, 1865)that he had contemplatedthe prospectof becominga preacher,but, lacking"the necessarystock in trade-i.e., religion,"had yieldedto "a 'call' to literature, of a low order-i.e., humorous."'Yet thestatement of 1906 is notaltogether as trueas its currencytoday would imply.The volumeto whichTwain adverts containsspecimens from forty-six authors, not seventy-eight.This is a minor matter,however; without question the book collected most of thehumorists who wereknown by the 1 880s, andTwain mentally added others who had appeared on the scene in the succeedingdecades. More significantis the overlookedfact thathumorists like Petroleum V. Nasby,Josh Billings, and evenArtemus Ward wereundeniably-and frequently-serious in theirwritings. Whether criticizing draft-dodgersor ridiculinghuman avarice, they were scarcelythe "phunny phellows"whom Mark Twain caricatures here. Moreover, Professor Brom Weber and othershave pointedout thatthe Civil War humoristswho electedto don "dialectal [sic] masks of semiliterates,"depending on "quasi-phonetic misspelling,or eye dialect as itis termedby linguists," were inventive forerunners of realismbecause of thisconvention of "orthographicrearrangement."22

20MarkTwain in Eruption, ed. BernardDeVoto (New York:Harper and Brothers,1940), 201-03. 2'Quotedin JustinKaplan's Mr. Clemensand Mark Twain:A Biography(New York:Simon and Schuster,1966), 14. 22See,for instance, Brom Weber, "The Misspellers,"in The ComicImagination in ,ed. Louis D. Rubin,Jr. (New Brunswick,N.J.: RutgersUniv. Press, 1973), 128-35. 40 AmericanQuarterly

Then, too, Twain's own writingsfrequently can be shownto have lackedthe moraldidacticism that he citesas purportedlyessential for durability. Few of his earlytales and sketchesdisplay examples of such "preaching."How much seriousnessare we supposedto discern,for example, in his sketchtitled "The Late BenjaminFranklin" (1870), in whichthe narrator complains that Franklin's maximabout "early to bed and earlyto rise" broughton his "presentstate of generaldebility"? "My parentsused to have me up beforenine o'clock in themorning sometimes when I was a boy,he avers."If theyhad letme take my naturalrest where would I have been now? Keepingstore, no doubt,and respectedby all." In thesame sketchhe scoffsbecause Franklin"was always proudof tellinghow he enteredPhiladelphia for the firsttime, with nothing in theworld but two shillings in hispocket and fourrolls of bread under his arm. But really,when you come to examineit critically,it was nothing.Anybody could have done it.' '23 It is similarlydifficult to detectthe "sermon" in "The Celebrated JumpingFrog," " Wolfe and the Tom-Cats," "Jim Blaine and His Grandfather'sOld Ram," "An Encounterwith an Interviewer,""Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn," and dozensof othertales. Thefact is, MarkTwain was thinking in 1906mainly of the literary works he had beenpublishing at thattime. Perhaps he also had in mindthe strident indictments thatappeared in Following the Equator (1897). He hadomitted humor to a dismal extentin "A Dog's Tale" (1903), "The Czar's Soliloquy" (1905), and Whatis Man? (whichwould be circulatedin August1906). Yet formany years mostcritics have taken Twain's self-analysis at face-value,principally because of his prestigiousranking in Americanhumor; he is unquestionablypreeminent amongthe humorists whom he namesand dismisses. Also, thefervent tone of his professeddedication to "preaching"allays the inclinationto look behindhis words.Finally, and mostimportant, Twain is conceptualizedby teachersand criticsprimarily in termsof the single of his that they most teach and study, Adventuresof HuckleberryFinn (1885).There Mark Twain did seem to be inculcatinglessons about human nature and social behavior; we readerscome away fromthat book feelingthat we have learneda good deal morethan Huck has concerningour fellowhuman beings, their gullibility, their greed, and their strivingsfor fellowship and self-respect. The prominenceof this novel has colored ourresponses to Twain's appraisal of himself in 1906,and the latter credo does not meritthe acceptance it has gained.After all, he madethese sweeping generaliza- tionsabout every American humorist he knew,and aboutthe entirety of his own humor-andthese opinions are simply the fond wishes of an elderlyauthor rather thanhistorical truth. Twain'sreflections, however, do raisequestions that have engrossed scholars for a numberof years. For the most part, those who have given thought to these topics

23MarkTwain, "The Late BenjaminFranklin," in MarkTwain's Sketches, New and Old, 277. TheImportance of Mark Twain 41 have agreedthat Twain is superiorto his brethren,being possibly the leading humoristwhom the United States has producedin anycentury; but they point out thathis favoriteploys-understatement, black dialect, exaggeration, burlesque, incongruity,deadpan vernacular, and others-wereused by his contemporaries and thosewho preceded them. James M. Cox declaresof A.B. Longstreet,J.J. Hooper,J.G. Baldwin,T.B. Thorpe, Lewis, and G.W. Harris: "All thesehumorists might have been forgottenhad not Mark Twain, whose whole geniuswas rootedin the [Southern]tradition, made his way into the dominantculture." M. ThomasInge adds: "The importanceof thework of the groupof writersknown as the SouthwesternHumorists to the mainstreamof Americanliterature received only slight critical recognition until it was observed thatit furnished a literary background for and influencedmuch of the writings of MarkTwain."24 Indeed, these early Southern humorists' fiction is virtuallyas inaccessibleand baffling to mostAmerican readers today as an unglossedpage of Shakespeare'shistory plays; the dialects, folkways, costumes, oaths, drinks, and rompsof Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, and other rustic characters seem as strange andintimidating tomany present-day students as thespeech and behavior of Prince Hal and Falstaff.25Still, ephemeral Southern materials had theirplace in Mark Twain'sdevelopment; ithas often been pointed out, for example, that Twain's first famousstory about the jumping frog was formerlyan oral anecdotein theOld Southwesterntradition of humor,that its "frame" narratorbore resemblances tothe gentlemen who introduced stories by Thorpe, Longstreet, and others, and that itsdialect rests on perhapsforty years of writtendialect humor.26 Mark Twain also formedpart of an even largertradition, that of "rural humor,"in thecompany of JosiahAllen's wife (Marietta Holley), the Danbury News Man (JamesBailey), RobertBurdette, Bill Nye (Edgar W. Nye), Max Adeler(Charles Heber Clark), M. Quad (CharlesB. Lewis), andPeck's Bad Boy (George WilburPeck). C. CarrollHollis, admittingthat "there is no. . . Rabelais,no Cervantes,. . . exceptfor Mark Twain" among the rural comedians, asks, "Why is it thenthat Clemens is rememberedand Nye and the others forgotten?"He answersthat, among other advantages, Mark Twain's subjects did not date so quickly.This pointespecially is worthnoting. Lewis Leary has remarkedthat much of Oliver WendellHolmes's "humoris so topicalthat, unlikehis one-horseshay, it failedeven to outliveits century,"and Louis B. Wrighthas stressedsomething that we all knowintuitively: "Humor is a very

24JamesM. Cox, "Humorof theOld Southwest,"in Rubin,ed., The ComicImagination, 112; M. ThomasInge, ed., TheFrontier Humorists: Critical Views (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1975), 266. 251nfact, there has beena recentattempt to salvage selected nineteenth-century humorous stories by preparing"modernized texts," in The Mirthof a Nation:America's Great Dialect Humor,ed. WalterBlair and RavenI. McDavid, Jr.(Minneapolis: Univ. of MinnesotaPress, 1983). 26See,for instance, Kenneth S. Lynn,ed., TheComic Tradition in America: An Anthology (London: VictorGollancz, 1958), 335. 42 AmericanQuarterly perishablecommodity."27 Mark Twain, however, seems funny without any foot- notessupplying the historical, political, and literarycontexts (as CharlesNeider has repeatedlydemonstrated with his scissors-and-pasteeditions of Twain's writ- ings).Human responses remain the same, even when customs alter; the sexually embarrassedpurchaser of kid glovesin ("I was hot,vexed, confused, butstill happy; but I hatedthe other boys for taking such an absorbinginterest in the proceedings")is everamusing for his mortificationwhenever we readersopen chapterseven of The InnocentsAbroad (1869). Beyonderotic innuendoes, this narratorfully typifies the American reaction to all thatis foreign,complicated, and assuredlyelegant. Equallytimeless is theanecdote in RoughingIt aboutthe liar named Markiss whomMark Twain met on theisland of Maui, a mancompulsively determined to top everyconversationalist's story with the tale of his own smokingchimney, hugetree, fast horse, parsimonious employer, until he acquiressuch a reputation formendacity that a coroner'sjury refusesto believe Markiss'shandwritten suicidenote, despite every evidence that he has hangedhimself, and returns a verdictof "death 'by thehands of some personor personsunknown."' This lyingcharacter ruins Mark Twain's stay on theisland, he wouldhave us suppose, and indeedevery such encounter,abroad or at home, illustrateshow easily Americannaivete can be takenadvantage of; but his narrator is invariablygrateful forthe educatingexperience. In ,to pick an example,he luxuriates inthe abundance of edible fruits-oranges, pineapples, bananas, mangoes, guavas, melons:

Thenthere is thetamarind. I thought tamarinds were made to eat, but that was probably notthe idea. I ateseveral, and it seemed to me thatthey were rather sour that year. They pursedup mylips, till they resembled the stem-end of a tomato,and I had to takemy sustenancethrough a quill fortwenty-four hours. They sharpened my teeth till I could haveshaved with them, and gavethem a "wireedge" thatI was afraidwould stay; but a citizensaid "no, it will come offwhen the enamel does" -which was comforting, atany rate. I found,afterward, that only strangers eat tamarinds-but they only eat them once.28

By meansof such strategems, Mark Twain shouldered his way to the forefront of literarycomedians, emerging from the mainbody of thosewriters boldly and permanently.Yet reasonscan be foundelsewhere than in his powersof absolute originality.He faredbetter than the rest by moreskillfully blending and utilizing therange of techniquesthat they were already employing. Twain's writings, not

27C. CarrollHollis, "Rural Humorof the Late NineteenthCentury," Lewis Leary, "Wash- ingtonIrving," and Louis B. Wright,"Human Comedyin EarlyAmerica," in Rubin,ed., The ComicImagination, 170, 174, 176, 116, 21. 28Twain,Roughing It, 407. The Importance of Mark Twain 43 theirs,have become the essential grammar for American comic devices such as the deadpanstyle and ironicunderstatement. What,then, besides Mark Twain's mastery of a newdimension in oral-sounding prose,constitute his chiefinnovations? First and foremost,Leland Krauth seems correctin singling out the way Twain altered one of the tactics of Old Southwestern humor:"he changedthe frame,that structural division between the conven- tionalgentleman narrator and his vulgar heroes which created a separationbetween theauthor's world of order,reason, and morality, and the actor's life of disorder, violence,and amorality.Twain eliminated this division."29 Krauth is referringto the vernacularvoice of HuckleberryFinn, but HenryNash Smithgives this deductiona widerapplication:

The straightcharacter speaks in correct,even pedanticor pompouslanguage which contrastsvividly with the incorrect but highly colored speech of the backwoods character. In MarkTwain's best writing (including of course Adventures of Finn) the vernacularspokesman takes over the narrative entirely; the straight character disappears and althoughhis presencecan stillbe feltbehind the scenes or beneaththe surface, the speechof thevernacular character becomes the only available narrative medium.30

Twaintried out composite"voices" in some of his earlynewspaper sketches; in a piece titled"The Receptionat the President's"(1870), forinstance, his personais a volubleWashington visitor from the sagebrush who, intent upon describingdesert scenes and personagesto PresidentUlysses S. , impedesa statelyprocession at theWhite House (anothercase of a storyteller's descentupon a corneredlistener). Growing indignant when angry people in the line begin pressingagainst him frombehind, the desertdenizen whirls and confrontsa hapless man at hisrear who is beingcrushed by the growling mob; in high-toned,stuffy diction he reprimandsthe innocent, unoffending fellow: "My friend,your conduct grieves me to the heart. A dozentimes at least your unseemly crowdinghas seriouslyinterfered with the conversation I am holdingwith the President,and if the thing occurs again I shalltake my hat and leave the premises." Yet it is the meek-lookingman, amazed at such effrontery,who retortswith authenticcolloquial speech: "I wishto themischief you would!Where did you comefrom anyway, that you've got the unutterable cheek to spreadyourself here andkeep fifteen hundred people standing waiting half an hourto shake hands with thePresident?"'" Later, of course, Twain's creations like Hank Morgan would be

29LelandKrauth, "Mark Twain:The Victorianof SouthwesternHumor," American Literature, 54 (1982), 377. 30Smith,Democracy and theNovel, 108. See also KennethS. Lynn,Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor(Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), 148. 3'Mark Twain, "The Receptionat the President's,"rpt. in Mark Twain:Life as I Find It, ed. CharlesNeider (Garden City, N.Y.: HanoverHouse, 1961), 118. 44 AmericanQuarterly able to speakan animated,slangy brand of Englishwhile expressing some of the author'sintellectual beliefs. This evolution was a significantaccomplishment for Americanhumor, and in the process Mark Twain capably modified the Old South- ern traditionof regional"dialect" untilits tone, smoothedand tempered, became "vernacular"instead.32 For thesecontributions alone, his worksmerit special attention.Yet theyhave othercharacteristics that have ensuredtheir importanceto a laterage. One of thesetraits is thetremendous range of MarkTwain's literary produc- tions.During a careerspanning half a century,he triedhis handat numerous categoriesand subgenresof literature,including detective fiction, scatology, maxims,, and politicalpamphlets. The diversityof his enormous canonwould have had little lasting effect if these experiments had lacked quality. Everyscholar of humor(vainly) makes the point that Twain borrowed nearly everydevice or trickthat our textbooksnow gliblygive him the creditfor inventing,but such quibbles have had no impacton Twain'spopularity. College studentsare aware of the river raftsmen's boasts, if familiar with such folklore at all, throughthe discarded chapter from that became the nucleus of chapterthree in Lifeon theMississippi (1883), withits bragging by Bob and theChild of Calamity:

Look at me! I takenineteen alligators and a bar'l of whiskeyfor breakfast when I'm in robusthealth, and a bushelof rattlesnakesand a dead body whenI'm ailing! ... Whoo-oop!Stand back and give me room according to my strength! Blood's mynatural drink,and thewail of thedying is musicto myear!33

A dozen humoristsand local colorists,preceded by anonymousnewspaper and magazinesketch-writers, had reportedthese ritualistic face-offs in comparable detailbefore. Yet Mark Twain incorporated them into books, books that sold well by subscription.What is more,he graduallyassembled these books into a corpus thatchronicles a narrator'sadventures in fourdiverse regions of the United States and severalparts of . Thus the individualincidents and passages gain magnitudeby theirinclusion in an epic accountof lifein thenineteenth century, likethe prodigious record of Englishexistence that Charles Dickens left behind. Too, itmust be saidthat this American, more than most of his fellow humorists, acceptedchallenges and took risksto overcomecircumstances. Imagine Sam Clemensstaying behind as a small-townMissouri newspaper editor. Impossible. It is even difficultto envisionhim as a longtimeSan Franciscocolumnist like AmbroseBierce. That role simply does not fit our idea of his restless temperament.

32Seeesp. JamesM. Cox, MarkTwain: The Fate ofHumor (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1966), 167. 33MarkTwain, Life on theMississippi (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1883), 47. The Importanceof Mark Twain 45

In Hannibalhis family's poverty saved him from setting down roots, and imbued himwith the aggrandizing wanderlust that helped him contribute an elan to our nationalscene. Through his travels, he cameto embody an intrinsicallyAmerican characteristic:refusing to be impressedwhen expected to be-particularlywhen usheredinto the presenceof so-called "culture." No one at the time fully apprehendedhis feat in bridging the West by vanquishing the codes of the East, and doingso moreeffectively than , as it turnedout. Bornin Missouri, schooledin thecolorful regions of Nevadaand California,Twain went east to masterthe necessary economic and literaryformulas. Americans rewarded this venturesomenessby adoptinghim as a unifyinglegend for the nation as a whole. Thegenerations of humorists who succeeded Mark Twain were largely college- educated,and theyhad oftenserved on the staffsof college humormagazines ratherthan local newspapers-peoplelike and Heywood Broun (Harvard),George Ade (Purdue),Alexander Woollcott (Hamilton), Donald Ogden Stewartand ClarenceDay (Yale), JohnKendrick Bangs (ColumbiaCollege), JamesThurber (Ohio State),Max Shulman(Minnesota), Frank Sullivan and E.B. White(Cornell), and S.J. Perelman(Brown). University training inevitably led Americanhumor away from the rural or homelystyles of ArtemusWard, Petro- leumV. Nasby,Orpheus C. Kerr,Josh Billings, Bill Nye,and Robert J. Burdette, thoughsome exceptions (like Finley Peter Dunne, Damon Runyon, , and H. Allen Smith)survived and flourishedwithout the benefitsof higher educationor ostensiblysophisticated styles. Robert Benchley, however, makes a superbexample of the emerging mode that would become dominant, and some of hiswritings show an affinitywith Twain's. There is a Twain-liketone to Benchley's "Ladies Wild," a waggishinvective against parlor card games (or, forthat matter,any games except regular poker): "I becamethe spoil-sport of theparty again,and once or twiceI caughtthem trying to slip thedeal pastme, as if by mistake. . . . They had finallygot it down to a game whereeverything was wild but theblack nines, and everyone was tryingfor 'low.' "i4 ProfessorNorris W. Yates notesthat

themost important feature of Benchley'shumor was a character-typewhich may be labeled the "Little Man." In the nineteenthcentury, John Phoenix, Charles Heber Clark,and others sometimes depicted gentle, bewildered fumblers trying unsuccessfully to cope withan environmenttoo big and too complexfor them.35

Mark Twain's mostanalogous story in thisvein is titled"Playing Courier"

34RobertBenchley, "Ladies Wild," in A Carnivalof Modern Humor, ed. P. G. Wodehouseand ScottMeredith (New York:Delcorte Press, 1967), 16; previouslypublished in The Benchley Roundup, ed. NathanielBenchley (New York:Harper and Row, 1938). 35NorrisW. Yates,Robert Benchley, TUAS No. 138 (New York:Twayne, 1968), 18-21, also 25. ProfessorYates's book suppliesa listof thecollege-educated humorists whom Benchley knew. 46 AmericanQuarterly

(1891). Attemptingto arrangeall of thedetails for his family'stravel between Genevaand Bayreuth, the narrator stubbornly refuses to employ a courierto assist him.A seriesof mishaps plagues his efforts, capped finally by his stupid purchase of lotterytickets under the impressionthat he is buyingrailway tickets. "I affectedto be greatlyamused; it is all onecan do insuch circumstances; itis all one can do, and yetthere is no valuein it; it deceivesnobody, and you can see that everybodyaround pities you and is ashamedof you." Whenhis family learns that he has additionallylost both their baggage and their hotel rooms, they are openly dismayed.

Theywould skip over a thousandcreditable features to remark upon and reiterate and fuss aboutjust one fact, . . .-the factthat I electedmyself courier in , and put in work enoughto carrya circusto Jerusalem,and yetnever even got my gang out of town.I finallysaid I didn'twish to hearany more about the subject, it mademe tired.36

Few otherauthors besides James Thurber have employed this sort of understate- mentso efficaciouslyin behalfof the "LittleMan." It is conceivable,if SamuelClemens had somehowlived two decades longer, thathe mighthave joined the set of writersassociated with magazine-Benchley,White, Sullivan, Thurber, John O'Hara, DorothyParker (and later,Corey Ford, S.J. Perelman,A.J. Liebling,and theothers). Would Twainhave become a reveredmember of the Algonquin Hotel crowd, slicing away withscalpel-like wit while seated with George Kaufman at thefamous Round Table? Wouldhe have appearedin thepages of the same magazinethat today carriesWoody Allen's casuals? Quite likely, for Mark Twain was everalert to the windsof comedicchange. Mark Twain became, after all, "Mark Twain"; his legendgrew, at his encouragement, and he grewalong with it as manand writer. It is exceedinglydifficult to live withinthe confines of expectationsharbored by one'spublic; stage and screen personalities and even like , Jr.,and Norman Mailer, whose private lives are spotlighted relentlessly, can tire of theirown aura. Yet Clemensadapted to thisexcruciating role, thrived in it, and died in the processof addingnew dimensionsto it. This is an astounding achievement,one that has notyet been adequately appreciated by his biographers. 37 Theearly hunger for renown by a river-villageyouth cannot account for the energy thatthe mature Clemens lavished in shoringup his publicimage; it is easy to understandwhy so many sentimentalcommentators have gushed about the "original" characterwhom he leftbehind for future ages. As his imagecame intofocus, Mark Twain knew by instinct what Americans wanted and needed in the wayof mythic figures, and he providedone thatwill evidently last as longas our

36MarkTwain, "PlayingCourier," collected in The AmericanClaimant and OtherStories and Sketches(New York:Harper and Brothers,1898), 505-08. 37However,Louis J. Budd's recentbook, Our MarkTwain: The Making of His PublicPersonality (:Univ. of PennsylvaniaPress, 1983), beginsto addressthis fascinating topic. The Importanceof Mark Twain 47 country.38No one else had thediplomacy, talent, audacity, or thedesire requisite to leave behindthat majestic, white-maned, ingratiating image in ourcollective mind.For moststudents and manyteachers, Mark Twain embodieswhat is memorableand noteworthyabout the post-Civil War decades of literaryrealism and our nationalexperience. Thinkingabout Twain's importance to American literature and humor, one finds italmost impossible to disagree with commonplaces of literary history that seem in littledanger of being overturned. Mark Twain did signalthe end of the American Romanticera, as surveyworks and textbooksannounce routinely.39 Although MarkTwain's collected literary criticism has yet to appear as a volumein the Mark TwainPapers Series, a fewof his animadversions against , Sir Walter Scott,George Meredith, and othershave made known his jocular attitude about criticalprinciples and his devotionto realisticprecepts of hisown time. Unfairly butmagnificently malicious, and as famousas Hemingway'seulogy to Huckle- berryFinn in ,Twain's "FenimoreCooper's Literary Offences"has become a stapleof anthologies and actually helps students sense the buriedresentment against preceding Romantic writers that partially motivated Twainand other realist authors. In pieceslike this one andin the marginalia in his copies of Bret Harte's works("One of those brutalCalifornia stage-drivers couldnot be politeto a passenger,-& notone ofthe guild ever 'sir'd' anybody," he groused),40Twain revealed himself as a close observerof detail,nuance, and diction-openingthe way for less stuffyapproaches to essays in literary criticism. He is undoubtedlyone ofthe chief inspirations for the small but welcome band of academicwits-among them, Hamlin Hill, JamesM. Cox, JohnGerber, Jesse Bier,Louis D. Rubin,Jr., Leslie Fiedler(Samuel Clemens Professor of English at SUNY-Buffalo),and John Seelye-who inthe 1970s and 1980scould be enter- tainingin theirown rightwhen reading conference papers or writingreviews and articlesabout American humor. Mark Twain's tone enabled them to realize thatunbroken solemnity in discussinghumor is simplyasking for a pie in the face, or is at least invitinganother Woody Allen lampoonin theNew Yorker aboutthe hilarious obtuseness of pompousprofessors. MarkTwain's aggregate influence is immeasurable,but we knowat least that his

38In1981, in recognitionof thisfact, the University of Alabamasponsored a nationalsymposium titled"The Mythologizingof MarkTwain"; thepapers delivered there (eight of thempublished by theUniv. of Alabama Press in 1984as TheMythologizing ofMark Twain) examined various features of Twain'sincredibly resilient legend. 39LarsAhnebrink declares, typically, that "an obvious mainfestationthat the old school was vanishingand a newera was aboutto dawn was exhibitedin theparodies and attacks that Mark Twain aimedat ." See TheBeginnings of Naturalism in American Fiction, in Essays and Studies on AmericanLanguage and Literature,ed. S. B. Liljegren,No. 9 (New York:Russell and Russell, 1961), 127. "'BretHarte's The ofRoaring Camp, and OtherSketches (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1870). SydneyJ. Krausediscusses this marginalia in Mark Twain as Critic(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1967), 202-20. 48 AmericanQuarterly booksappeared on thelibrary shelves of some the most talented younger writers of hisperiod- and Hamlin Garland, for instance.4' Jay Hubbell notes thatTwain's influenceon writersof fiction"is greaterthan that of any other Americanwriter except Henry James.' '42 Scholarshave discernedthe impact of MarkTwain on theworks of ErnestHemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe,F. ScottFitzgerald, and WilliamFaulkner.43 If MarkTwain had neverexisted, if young Sam Clemenshad succumbedto an earlyillness, as his familyexpected, or had he drownedin theMississippi River, like severalof his boyhoodchums, then something in our literaturewould be tangiblymissing, and we wouldknow it. Whatwe professorsand studentsand readerswould find lacking would be ourlinkage point with the nineteenth century, especiallywith its humor, in theform of an actualman whom we can admireand feelaffection toward. Mark Twain is oneof our few symbolic means of maintaining the crucialcontinuity between our past culturalheritage and our present-day attitudes.He is a referencefigure for all ofus, citizen-readersand artist-comedians, markingthe common denominator of what we wantto perceive to be theAmerican character.As a publicspeaker and lecturer, indeed, Mark Twain was verypossibly ourlast performing humorist who presented himself as a "general"personage- neitheran easternernor exactly a westerner,the embodiment instead of the entire sum of nationalregionalism, all partsequal, none predominating.This "ge- neric" persona,so differentfrom Will Rogers'slariat-twirling actor, is equally remotefrom the ethnic shtick of WoodyAllen and RichardPryor or theurban neurosisof Joan Rivers and David Brenner.He has no direct,obvious successors, onlyhis impersonators;the humor of our contemporary nightclubs is fragmented -andtypecast. The foeof humbug,explicitly rebelling against outworn Romantic formsand themes, he detestedhigh airs and smugcomplacency-putting him in theprogression that has led tothe stand-up insults of W.C. Fieldsas wellas Lenny Bruce. Learningfrom Artemus Ward and others,Twain mastered discriminative les- sons of theatricalityand publicity.Among other feats, he contrivedhis public

4"Ahnebrink,The Beginningsof Naturalism, 103, 144. 42Hubbell,Who Are theMajor Writers?,144. 43ForHemingway, see RichardBridgman, The Colloquial Stylein America(New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1966), 129-30, 196-97, 202, 219, 227; and Jesse Bier, "A Note on Twain and Hemingway,"Midwest Quarterly, 21 (1980), 261-65, the latterof whichcompares the styleof HuckleberryFinn and TheSun Also Rises; amongothers, see forAnderson, Richard Bridgman, The Colloquial Stylein America,152-55, 159-60; G. Thomas Tanselle, "Anderson,Annotated by Brooks,"Notes and Queries(London), 213 (Feb. 1968), 60-61; SherwoodAnderson's Memoirs: A CriticalEdition, ed. Ray Lewis White(Chapel Hill: Univ.of NorthCarolina, 1970), 342; forWolfe, PereyH. Boynton,America in Contemporary Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1940), 220-2 1; forFitzgerald, Robert Sklar, F. ScottFitzgerald: The Last Laocoon (New York:Oxford Univ. Press, 1967);for Faulkner, Jesse Bier, The Rise and Fall ofAmerican Humor (New York:Holt, Rinehart and Winston,1968), 105, 138, 352. The Importanceof Mark Twain 49 personaso as to conveythe impression of (feigned)laziness, lack of erudition, easy success.If thecurrent generation of nonreadingAmericans is less familiar thantheir literate predecessors with the qualities of his lesserworks, and some- timeseven with his greatestnovels, at leasthe is oftenquoted from pulpits, in newspapercolumns, and at lecturns. He hasgained favor with academicians while retaininghis hold on thetaste of the ordinary reader, something that Poe's fiction accomplishedbut 0. Henry'sfailed to bringoff. MarkTwain endures because he is greaterthan any of his possibleclassifi- cations-crackerbarrelphilosopher, literary comedian, world traveler, realist, Naturalist,hoaxer, novelist, vernacular humorist, after-dinner speaker-with whichhe mightbe labeled. He did practicallyeverything that was expected of a manof lettersin his age, and he generallyacquitted himself well in every department.He gave his countrymenpride in themselves,their humor, their literature.And he elevatedthe station of his calling: among Twain's achievements, oneof his grandest was his success in making literary humor seem like a respectable profession.His wealth,his Nook Farmhome, his fraternalrelations with the in- fluentialand the lionized-these and othersigns of statuslaid a benediction on hiscareer so lastingthat all subsequentauthors of comic sketches, stories, and novelsowe hima largedebt. He rescuedthe funnyman from the smudged-print pagesof Billings, Phoenix, and Nasby and restored him to the honored tradition of BenjaminFranklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and . Moreover, Twain mixedseriousness and comedyso subtlyin workslike A Connecticut Yankeein KingArthur's Court that he himselfdid not alwaysunderstand his initialintentions, and he thuseducated publishers and reviewersand readers aboutthe deeper possibilities of humor,preparing American audiences for John Cheever,Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Thomas Berger, John Barth, and others. Americanliterature would have flourished without Mark Twain's contributions. Yet itwould be stuffier,less colorful,less redolentof the river and the West, less alluring.He hasgiven us, alongwith rich impressions of life on rafts,, , railroadcars, and ocean ships, a reassurancethat we are not travelinginto some black hole of the future,that we have a renewableand accessiblepast that guarantees a sane and attainable future. By findingamusement inthe writings and speeches of one Americanfigure of the nineteenth century, we assuagedisturbing anxieties about our historical and culturalisolation when we contemplatewith misgivings the dawning age ofcomputer technology, biological engineering,and galactictransportation. If we can palpablytouch the pilot'swheel with Mark Twain, then our gripon the spaceshipcontrols of the twenty-firstcentury feels surer as we extendour capacity to shuttlea supplyof humorinto the farther reaches of humanhistory.