The Importance of Mark Twain 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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. 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The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org THE IMPORTANCE OF MARK TWAIN ALANGRIBBEN Universityof Texas,Austin MARK TWAIN IS THE ONLY WRITER WE HAVE RECOGNIZED AS AN AUTHOR OF IM- mortalAmerican prose after having branded him a "humorist."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 writers." 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, Brander Matthews,William Lyon Phelps, and others had to insist upon Twain's stature as a majorAmerican novelist. 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 Connecticut 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 Missouri(1902) and at OxfordUniversity (1907).2 Othertributes arrived as well. ProfessorRichard Burton declared in 1904 that Clemenswas the "one livingwriter of indisputablegenius" in the United States.That same year Clemens was amongthe first seven individuals selected by secretballot for membership in theAmerican Academy of Artsand Letters.The othersix honorees-includingauthors William Dean Howells,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 Joel Chandler Harris,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, critics, 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 critic 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, Following the Equator (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 got there, 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