The Long March in Mark Twain Studies

True Williams. THE AUTHOR'S MEMORIES. 1880. Frontispiece to the first edition of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad.

We have come a far piece from William Dean Howells's My Mark Twain (1910), through the desert, in the mountains, sometimes attacked by snide easterners, and we got to Louis Budd's Our Mark Twain (1983), that first resting place. Some revision here of the Old Man's standing, yet finally Budd celebrates Mark Twain, toasts him with that exculpatory description, "rounded uniqueness," so the march has come on (xv). John Bird's Mark Twain and Metaphor ends with this very phrase, "rounded uniqueness." He is trying to think of the new critical metaphor that reads Mark Twain in the twenty-first century. He comes back to Budd's phrase. "There is a new metaphor," Bird concludes, "one we can build on in interesting and fruitful ways" (216).

I think not. Celebration is a problem in Mark Twain studies. The three books under review, Bird's Mark Twain and Metaphor, Forrest G. Robinson's The Author-Cat: Clemens's Life in Fiction, and Tom Quirk's Mark Twain and Human Nature, are written by grizzled veterans long on the march, so you might warily anticipate a certain laudatory note, expect to come upon, in some sentence, a celebration of the Old Man's "rounded uniqueness." It happens but differently; Robinson the coolest, Bird effusive, Quirk pure Mark Twain whiskey, philosophizing, epigrammatic, comradely, often talking to the ghosts of Henry Nash Smith, Walter Blair, and Bernard De Voto. Our Mark Twain. Mark Twain studies has rallied to this cause. Such a possessive title—so assertive, a banner, a flag. Also it is a toast.

Quirk thoroughly traces the evolution of Mark Twain's notion of human nature, interestingly refers us to William James and John Dewey, who similarly ponder human nature, James as Mark Twain's contemporary. Quirk reads the philosophy and science Mark Twain read. We learn the importance of Adolphe Quetelet's social science. We go decade by decade in Mark Twain's work discerning and evaluating human nature as it appears in the relevant text and must therefore read a long finish on the Old Man's last period. Quirk knows what is coming and manfully goes into it with appropriate wisecracks. "The American Claimant (1892) and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) … have not yet attained the obscurity they deserve" (197). What Is Man? (1898) is "unremarkable" and "dreary reading." It is supposed to be a dialogue but is actually a monologue. "The familiar concepts and terms are all there—the emphatic conclusion that man is an automaton whose fundamental desires are selfish; that all ideas come from the outside and that the master impulse, or conscience, is nothing more than a 'hunger for self-approval'" (242). Mark Twain's mechanist/materialist notion of human nature has hold of him at the end of the century, and it runs his intellectual and imaginative life. Quirk shows us swerves and alterations in Mark Twain's thinking in the 1880s and '90s but not much in the way of substantive change or interesting deviation. Turn of the century, it is, pretty much, the same rant, the same pessimism, that figures in all this work. Mark Twain's notion of human nature is an idée fixe. It is also, as Quirk and others have shown, an alibi, a way of escaping the summons of conscience.

Quirk's ending is a weird scramble. Having spent a long section detailing the miseries of Mark Twain's late texts, showing us a Mark Twain in ruins, a Mark Twain very much out of humor, sour, hateful, Quirk has now to regain Our Mark Twain...