The Inventions of Mark Twain by John Lauber, and: Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years by Margaret Sanborn (review)

152 Western American Literature The Inventions of Mark Twain. ByJohnLauber. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990. 340 pages, $22.95.) Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years. A Biography. By Margaret Sanborn. (New York: Doubleday, 1990. 508 pages, $24.95.) The Inventions of Mark Twain offers a detailed chronicle of Twain’s life, especially during the 1880s;unfortunately, Lauber diminishes the value ofsuch detail with a great deal of superficial commentary. In his long account of Twain’s publishing venture with U.S. Grant, the biographer attributes the venture’s success to the fact that “Mark Twain was not an author like other authors; Grant was not a general like other generals. The public recognized that. . . .” Similarly, we are invited to appreciate the significance of Twain’s experience as a riverboat pilot in terms of the banal hypothesis that, “If Sam Clemens had never become a pilot... he might still have written Tom Sawyer, but not Huckleberry Finn.” There are even moments when Lauber peddles such obtuseness with what seems to be conscious conviction, as when he chal­ lenges those “Biographers [who] have argued that Mark Twain’s apparently obsessive interest in impersonators . . . arose from his own sense of playing a role . . .”:according to Lauber, it ismerely that “impersonations . .. have been the stuff of comedy from its beginnings.” Lauber’s critical disengagement is most disappointing when it comes to Mark Twain’s “inventions,” the book’s purported focus. He applies the word “invention” facilely to everything Twain made up, including novels, machines, and “lies” about his complicity in family tragedies. For Lauber, these diverse inventions are all just somany tokens of Twain’sboundless creativity. Undeni­ ably, Twain was capable of extraordinary creativity; but he was also a writer whose “borrowing” from the work of others not infrequently verged on impro­ priety (Twain once planned a book on South Africa’s diamond fields that was to be based entirely on the notes of a proxy-traveler!). Twain’s creative process was clearly more complicated than Lauber would lead us to believe. For all of Lauber’s careful research, Inventions delivers little besides a series of common impressions concerning Twain. Drawing widely on the humorist’s early notebooks and correspondence, Margaret Sanborn’s Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years describes Twain’s life from birth to marriage. Like Lauber, Sanborn does not offer a carefully developed critical perspective on her material, which is to say, her work too consists largely of impressions; but Sanborn’s impressions are both vivid and engaging. While this effect derives partly from the intrinsic interest of Twain’s bachelor years with their high adventure, Sanborn is to be credited for capital­ izing on that interest. Rather than blunting her detailed account of Twain’s life with flat-footed commentary, she draws on a broad range of general back­ ground material, including works on American costume and regional history, to give that account a suggestive context. Her attention to the physical and cultural environment of Twain’s youth, for instance, allows us to imagine the formation of his very sensorium, the matrix for the more refined, literary sensi­ bilities that he would later develop. Such contectualizing also lends The Bache- Reviews 153 lor Years considerable interest for readers who are concerned with social and cultural history, especially that of the western United States. Even readers already well acquainted with Twain’s early years will find several parts of Sanborn’s book illuminating, especially those dealing with the difficult living conditions Twain knew as a youth; Twain’s lively, sometimes even imposing, mother, Jane Lampton; and the humorist’s work as a reporter at the Nevada legislature. The biographer also vividly recreates Twain’s early lectures. Finally, Sanborn’s entire account is informed by a keen sense of both the witting and unwitting humor of Twain’slife. BRIAN COLLINS University of California, Santa Cruz The Duplicating Imagination: Twain and the Twain Papers. By Maria Ornella Marotti. (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. 198 pages, $24.95.) In The Duplicating Imagination Maria Marotti applies an eclecticmix of literary criticism to published works from the Mark Twain Papers: Satires and Burlesques, Fables of Man, Which Was the Dream?, and The Mysterious Stranger...