Mark Twain Under Fire: Reception and Reputation, Criticism and Controversy, 1851–2015 by Joe B. Fulton (review)

Here was an inevitably tantalizing topic for someone to tackle sooner or later, inasmuch as Mark Twain was continually embroiled in feuds and controversies—both public and private—throughout his life. His well-known vendetta against Bret Harte represented only a fraction of his lifetime animosities and controversies. Twain bequeathed, along with his income and fame, a commensurate legacy of incessant furor to his daughter and literary executor, and since his death all subsequent editors, publishers, and commentators have swum in hot water nearly as often as the author managed to do.

Joe B. Fulton starts with the earliest literary quarrels in which Samuel L. Clemens was involved and brings the dramas down to the present day. One encounters in Mark Twain Under Fire the expected treatments of Twain’s spoof of a fund-raising ball sponsored by the Sanitary Fund during the Civil War that caused him to leave the Nevada Territory as well as his disastrous Whittier Birthday Dinner speech in Boston in 1877 and the polemical writings of his last decade. All of this is handled in Fulton’s first chapter; four succeeding chapters then take up post-1910 imbroglios. The Van Wyck Brooks-Bernard De Voto disagreements are of course rehashed. The Cold War debates over Twain’s reputation are accorded several pages—to the detriment of Maxwell Geismar and (especially) Philip Foner. In dealing with the biographies, critical studies, and editions that escalated into an academic industry, Fulton sits in refreshing if sometimes stern judgment. He explains that his book will be “a corrective in some cases” by “separating the perishable from the imperishable, the sham from the genuine article.” Contrasting interpretations in any field of study can shed useful light on ambiguous subjects, but Fulton goes further than sketching the conflicts; repeatedly he weighs the differing arguments and pronounces a winner. Laura Skandera Trombley’s and Karen Lystra’s contradictory views of Twain’s former secretary Isabel V. Lyon (whom Twain later denounced) are ably discussed, and Fulton finds himself more persuaded by Lystra’s anti-Lyon interpretation (though he points out that Skandera-Trombley had earlier enhanced our appreciation for Olivia Langdon Clemens’s contributions to Twain’s career). Dozens of comparable clashes in scholarly opinions about Twain are taken up and adjudicated.

In a manner that calls to mind the hacking of embarrassing DNC emails during the 2016 presidential campaign (but which in this case simply involved exchanges of typewritten letters), Chapter 4 includes merciless coverage of a series of disputes that arose after the unexpected death in 1979 of Frederick Anderson, the editor of the Mark Twain Papers from 1964 and the General Editor of the Mark Twain Project that was issuing editions of Twain’s published and unpublished writings. In the early 1980s several academics objected to the Project’s transition away from retaining Mark Twain experts who had published relevant scholarly studies to write the introductions and notes for the volumes in favor of employing the Project’s own research editors, a number of them former graduate students at U.C. Berkeley, to take over those responsibilities. Eventually these divisive matters were laid aside by people of good will, but apparently someone collected the heated correspondence and donated the bundle to the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira College, making it accessible to Fulton. Twain would have relished the charges and countercharges in these letters, for they tell an age-old story of quarrels among former friends, bitter territorial claims, and incidents of petty vindictiveness. Because Fulton apparently never consulted any still-living participants in these events (including this reviewer), a few incendiary records escaped his notice—most notably John C. Gerber’s rueful recollection of how the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley eventually pried loose the textual work on Mark Twain’s works from the Iowa Center for Textual Studies at Iowa City, recounted in part as a “horror...