Cosmopolitan Twain (review)

In Pudd'nhead Wilson, Mark Twain correctly called race a "fiction of law and custom." But it's a lie with legs. The oppression and privileges meted out according to this lie are real, so in a social sense, race is as real as any other idea that has consequences. Analogously, our dichotomized sense of the differences between rural and urban is merely legal and customary. American rhetoric relies on the idea of an extreme division by assuming that the way people make a living in these two kinds of places is radically different. In the U.S. at least, that is not true. America's rural areas depend on the market as much as cities do—maybe more. Farmers use complex petroleum-and electricity-powered machines; their production depends on seeds and chemicals that are industrial products turned out by the university-industry invention nexus; they transport their goods to national and international markets; they require massive governmental subsidies in supply (water, information, and transportation infrastructures, price guarantees, etc.) and demand (international trade promotion, trade treaties, etc.); their labor force has always been international—I could go on.

Yet the idea of the independent yeoman farmer of Jefferson's agrarian utopia persists. Though Jefferson himself could not have been much more cosmopolitan, his vision of rural simplicity and independence as morally superior to the corrupt and corrupting city persists. The idea is enshrined in the Constitution in the makeup of the Senate and in the Electoral College, giving rural "red-state" Americans outsized political power. The opposition of country and city is another lie with legs.

Inasmuch as Mark Twain is often held up as an icon of rural America, as the product of a fundamentally rural nation, Cosmopolitan Twain is a welcome and important corrective. As Ryan puts it in the introduction, Twain's "urban legacy has, nevertheless, often been elided by Twain critics, who favor instead Twain's rural origins and his mythologizing of them." With the exception of the essay by Michael Kiskis, which speaks of Twain's rural retreat at Quarry Farm, these studies show Twain in cities and the influences his urban experiences had on his outlook and his writing.

Ryan aptly calls this collection "an initial foray into the topic of Twain's cosmopolitanism," in part because the definition of cosmopolitanism is so vaguely wide-ranging. Her introduction and Bruce Michelson's essay illuminate this problem of definition nicely, laying out possibilities ranging from an ecumenical humanitarianism to an elitist connoisseurship. Both require a sense of distance and alienation, the topic Michelson explicitly discusses. Most of the essays discuss Twain's cosmopolitan humanitarianism; Kerry Driscoll's fascinating article on the Clemens family's European travel as shopping spree shows the connoisseurship, as well as the class anxiety attending consumerism. All to some degree note the alienation, which in some ways proved artistically fruitful, in others emotionally destructive.

While on the whole the volume serves as a bracing "corrective to the dominant perception of Mark Twain" it suffers from two connected weaknesses. First, there's a fair amount of old work repackaged. Two of the eight essays are reprints, and two others rely so heavily on older book-length studies that it's hard to see what new perspective they provide. At any rate, the eight essays don't seem to build toward a coherent picture. Thus this repetition is both cause and consequence of the larger problem identified by both Ryan and Michelson: how do we define cosmopolitanism? For the most part, this book's structure implies that city life creates a cosmopolitan sensibility. All one must do, then, is discuss Twain's time in cities to see the impact on his sensibility. As a starting strategy it makes sense, but what is a city? Is it a function of population? Economics? Transience? Trade? Without really defining what constitutes the urban and why it is directly tied to the cosmopolitan, James Caron can contrast the city of San Francisco to "the hinterlands of...