Mark Twain, American Humorist

ben click is a professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, director of the Writing and Speaking Center, and director of the Twain Lecture Series on American Humor Culture. With Larry Howe and Jim Caron, he coedited and contributed to Refocusing Chaplin: A Screen Icon in Critical Contexts (Scarecrow, 2013). His current research explores the rhetorical effects of silence in the works of Mark Twain. He is also working on a book that examines humor as a rhetorical strategy in environmental writing, a genre that is sometimes seen as taking itself too seriously. Mark Twain, American Humorist Tracy Wuster. Columbia: U of Missouri P, 2016. 472 pp. $60.00, cloth. Reviewed by Bruce Michelson, Univesity of Illinois For Tracy Wuster’s important and vigorously researched book, is there anything to second-guess? The title, maybe: with big-deal words abundant on spines Reviews 247 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/mark-twain/article-pdf/15/1/247/1344535/marktwaij_15_1_247.pdf by guest on 05 February 2022 and Youth has more than advanced Stone’s pioneering work—it serves as a near-perfect distillation of information and analyses that would be difficult to glean in any other way. Twain scholars will find this collection of essays refreshing for its ability to effectively use the abundance of primary sources, new biographical information, and the immense critical attention given to Twain that was unavailable to Stone over fifty years ago. To conclude, I call attention to two other aspects of the book that reflect the attention and care the editors have given to this valuable contribution to Twain scholarship. In addition to the scholarly generosity this volume engenders, Mac Donnell and Rasmussen will be donating the book’s royalties equally among the four centers of Twain scholarship. And finally, on the cover of the book is an image of young Sam looking at the Mississippi from one of the bluffs high above Hannibal. It was drawn by Edmund Franklin Ward for the serialization of Albert Bigelow Paine’s “The Boys’ Life of Mark Twain.” Kent Rasmussen has painstakingly added color to the image, which originally appeared in black and white in the November 1915 issue of St. Nicholas. Just as he has brought color to this image of Hannibal’s most famous citizen, so, too, have he and coeditor Kevin Mac Donnell carefully brought color to the Stone’s original landmark work on Twain and youth. quality humor . . . was not a category with definite boundaries but a contested territory that critics were continually shaping, as new authors and works entered into the marketplace and as new friendships and enmities formed. Paradoxically, in the effort to settle on a single, stable meaning of Mark Twain, scholars seem to drift further from the most fruitful part of criticism—the tension of debate. This book is an attempt to recover the contested terrain of critical discussion, to understand what it meant for Mark Twain to be a humorist in his own time, and to explore what “humor” signified and encompassed for different audiences of the Gilded Age. (5) Recovering this contested terrain required prodigious homework, and Wuster has cut no corners in accomplishing it, exploring around two hundred different newspapers and periodicals on both sides of the Atlantic from much of the nineteenth century, covering a time period from before Mark Twain’s first appearances in print into the final years of his career. Confirming Daniel Wickberg’s assertion that in the United States “humorist” did not come into general use as a description for “the self-conscious creator of a product called ‘humor’” until around the time that Clemens reached maturity (13); and building also on a familiar and useful construct from Richard Brodhead, Wuster sees Mark Twain’s work as participating “in a number of distinct but overlapping cultures of letters in which writing, reading, and laughing took on different and often contested meanings” (19). 248 REVIEWs Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/mark-twain/article-pdf/15/1/247/1344535/marktwaij_15_1_247.pdf by guest on 05 February 2022 of Mark Twain monographs—ordeal, fate, sanctified, heretical, fool, singular, devil, and so on—Wuster’s choice might seem perversely demure, another lowspeed analysis of whatever makes Mark Twain funny. That’s certainly not what unfolds here. Bulletproof, Wuster’s core findings make a real difference to our understanding of how Mark Twain and American humor came of age. Among the many insights here: “humor” and “humorist,” as literary and cultural categories, were very much in contention when Clemens became an international presence after the Civil War, as the Southwestern humor legacy had not established any stable or broadly recognized answer about the values and varieties of American comic writing; moreover, the continuing turmoil about such matters was not over “a simple distinction between ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow,’ but instead a dynamic series of debates in which different critics attempted to shape the relative value of humorists through often inconsistent arguments” (3). Within that broader controversy: Reviews 249 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/mark-twain/article-pdf/15/1/247/1344535/marktwaij_15_1_247.pdf by guest on 05 February 2022 In a stronger position to advocate for hierarchies, critics in England did take an early lead in sorting things out, establishing what Wuster calls a “standard of quality, literary humor down to the humor of clowns and minstrels” (27). Quite soon after the Atlantic Monthly began publication in 1857, however, this new journal achieved national clout, thanks in good part to the Brahmin prestige of writers originally and conspicuously connected with it—Lowell, Stowe, Longfellow, Holmes, and so on. The welcome extended by the Atlantic to varieties of comic discourse, showcasing humor as writing that could rise above localized vulgarity and joke-bag diversions, is described by Wuster as one of several decisive developments, boosting the prestige and fortunes of Mark Twain and a handful of other humorists who won space and favor in the Atlantic’s pages, and opening the way for “humor”—some of it, anyway—as a worthy presence in American literary life. Though its editors espoused clear and consistent moral intentions, summarized by Wuster as “the improvement of American society through the creation of a quality American canon of letters” (123), Wuster’s immersion in its published content, from early numbers through the entire arc of Clemens’s affiliation with it, challenges an impression that the Atlantic in the Gilded Age privileged one region and social stratum, the elites of eastern New England. Not so: especially in years when the young Ohioan William Dean Howells was at its helm (1871–81) followed by Thomas Bailey Aldrich for almost a decade after, this journal did reach out energetically for new voices farther off. To bring these decades of controversy and evolution into a negotiable narrative, Wuster pays heightened attention to a handful of other episodes: moments of change, twists of fate, and the action of other major players. Centering on two contemporaries who broke trail for Mark Twain in his rise from outback wild humorist to respect-worthy writer and author, Wuster follows Artemus Ward’s breakthrough season with London critics and audiences, especially during his seven-week tour of England in 1866–67, shortly before his death there at the age of thirty-two. When Mark Twain went out on the lecture circuit in the United States soon after, he worked eulogies about Ward into his own performance, associating the living man on the platform with the one in the obituaries. Not long after, Bret Harte made a twofold difference for Mark Twain’s good: the Atlantic’s unprecedented arrangement with Harte in 1871, for twelve stories, one per month, at an annual stipend of $10,000, signified that big money and high-status publication could actually come together, a career-making dream for comic writers in the United States. And looking into Harte’s relatively brief stint in the limelight in the years after that breakthrough, Wuster unpacks 250 REVIEWs Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/mark-twain/article-pdf/15/1/247/1344535/marktwaij_15_1_247.pdf by guest on 05 February 2022 the “American Humor” lecture that Harte featured on the lyceum circuit in 1874–75, a lecture with remarkable historical substance and critical insight, countenancing oral traditions and African American roots, and assessing and praising an array of current and recent practitioners, with Mark Twain singled out, toward the end, as the one at the top. Clemens’s subsequent, venomous campaigns against Harte’s own repute never took this unsolicited public homage into account. And then there was the Gilded Age spin-off success of The Adventures of Colonel Sellers, the stage play that Clemens bought the rights to from its actual author, a San Francisco theater critic. Trimming Charles Dudley Warner out of any share in the profits—a maneuver that contributed to their estrangement—Clemens promoted what proved to be an extended and celebrated run in New York City, with the Mark Twain name conspicuously upon it. Another bit of luck from this same formative era: while he was reaching national and international audiences with sketches and stories and books and stage performances, Mark Twain’s humor was also attracting an advantageous sort of high-profile opposition. Though Josiah Holland (1819–1881), a prolific novelist and a popular poet, was busy at the Springfield Republican for almost a quarter of a century, and at Scribner’s Monthly for more than a decade beginning in 1870 (where Holland was the founding editor), his numerous cadenzas of prudery, in print and also at the auditorium lectern, made him a ripe target for caricature even in his own day. Doctrinaire and relentlessly earnest, doling out mirthless “jeremiads on the decline of popular culture and other forms of culture” (194), and berating everything from “literary triflers” to advocates for the rights of women, Holland never rose to full Howellsian rank as an arbiter of American morality and literary taste; and like an off-brand scold on a Fox News talk show, he could be ridiculed without much risk. Overseas, meanwhile, there were other fortunate developments for Clemens and implicitly for other comic writers seeking respectability and serious attention. Sam’s migration from Hotten to Routledge as his publisher in Great Britain, and thereafter to the august firm of Chatto and Windus, were both major steps in the right direction; Wuster also follows the prestige trail to France, where Thérèse Bentzon (Marie-Thérèse Blanc) wrote about his work affectionately and at length in the influential Revue des deux mondes in 1872. The story told here is much richer than this summary can convey, however; and through these gales of debate and roiled waters of aesthetic and moral uncertainty, Wuster keeps a steady course without drowning his history in detail or losing his way. With recourse to extensive and admirable endnotes, his main-text narrative unfolds without sacrifice of contexts and sidelights, bruce michelson, Professor Emeritus of American Literature at the University of Illinois, is the author of Mark Twain on the Loose and Printer’s Devil: Mark Twain and the American Publishing Revolution, among other works. His most recent volume is a translation of George Clemenceau’s writings on Claude Monet and the fine arts. Reviews 251 Downloaded from http://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/psup/mark-twain/article-pdf/15/1/247/1344535/marktwaij_15_1_247.pdf by guest on 05 February 2022 and though the book’s font size shrinks in the closing seventy pages, the vigor and substance of Wuster’s exposition hold firm; and readers of Mark Twain, American Humorist will learn much, and with pleasure, from reading them through. The third endnote for his opening chapter, for instance, provides a detailed collation of how American imaginative writers fared in British journals from the 1820s until the Civil War; for Chapter 3, the notes on Howells include not only a box score of his reviews for the Atlantic but also a thoughtful sorting out of what kinds of prose he wrote about; and though the annotations on Josiah Holland may offer much more on his career, his literary output, and his reputation among his peers than most people may want to know, it’s all here, a full account of this key figure on the other side. Mark Twain: American Humorist is a book where the scholarship runs deep, where the prose is unfailingly clear, poised, modest, and engaging, and where the findings are of real consequence to the study of Mark Twain, of American wit and humor, and of our literary and cultural history.