Mark Twain, A Literary Life (review)

Everett Emerson’s primary aim, he says, is to locate Mark Twain’s works in their biographical contexts—Clemens’s chronic or immediate problems and his resources for handling them, his hard knocks and his buoyancies. This focus is admirably managed where one most wants it to be, in a treatment of Huck Finn that is one of the more comprehensive depictions of Huck as enactor of values Mark Twain would not surrender in the 1880s or thereafter, among them “freedom, self-indulgence, the pleasure principle, laziness, skepticism” (141). Emerson also convincingly cites pressures that drove Mark Twain to opportunisms, to write what might sell under varying circumstances.

The faults of the book are minor. Emerson thanks a colleague who caught a “shocking number of mistakes” (xii), though some escaped notice—such as Emerson’s “‘Confederate roads’” for the correct semiliterate “‘Confedrit x Roads,’” “‘x Roads’” meaning crossroads in Petroleum v. Nasby (5); and “while” for “which” (131). Emerson attributes a Baetzhold article to me (351) and attributes to Tuckey’s Fables of Man an item I edited for the Iowa-California volume What is Man? in 1973 (222, 333). These are all housekeeping oversights. The only lapse of any consequence I have noticed is Emerson’s apparent unawareness of the manuscript facsimile of Tom Sawyer, issued as two-volume boxed sets in 1982 by University Publications of America. By merely looking at the facsimile, Emerson might have confirmed once and for all that Mark Twain began Tom Sawyer no later than early January 1873, that he decided through simple revisions to omit Huck’s mother from that novel and from any sequel set in a later fictive time, and that he evidently already had such a continuation in mind (see MS 23 and MS 611).

Some imbalances in Emerson’s book represent a preoccupation with Clemens’s smoking; others indicate a somewhat loose integration of the financial matters. When Emerson mentions Clemens’s smoking, he often goes on about the harm “second-hand smoke” must have done to Livy, leading to her fatal infarction. If Emerson were a physician, he would know not to be dogmatic about such inferences with regard to any particular person, much less someone dead for nearly a century. As for the economics motif, this can seem an independent and bathetic factor, as at a climactic moment: “Clemens died, talking at the last of dual personality, Jekyll and Hyde. The value of his estate was just less than half a million dollars” (299)—as if to say, he died and he owned expensive clothing. But again, Emerson’s Mark Twain, A Literary Life contains throughout fine scholarship and interpretation.