Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer (review)

REVIEWS Macnaughton, William B. Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer. Columbia : Univ. of Missouri Press, 1979. 254 pp. Cloth: $16.50. Mark Twain scholars get along well, much better than those grouped around one or two other major figures, judging from rumor. This amity certainly does not rest on a consensus about Mark Twain's final years, though William R. Macnaughton is right in thinking that his book takes a minority position. Also, risking the disfavor of critics who like bold patterns and tragic extremes heightened by ambivalences or paradox, it does not even present the end of Mark Twain's career as anticlimax. It soberly examines his writings after Following the Equator, a group Macnaughton finds slighted except by those scholars emphasizing social-cultural issues or those critics whose key word is "despair" or "obsession ." He stays alert for "complex states of mind" while he does in fact comment insightfully on Mark Twain's weakness for deriving his moral judgments from polar attitudes of innocence or experience (p. 130). Experience but not pessimism: Macnaughton protests that the latter term implies a "continuous state of being" while the "essence of the Clemens identity" was "mobility" or fluidity (p. 33). He proposes to chart this mobility through an orderly analysis of the professional writer that Samuel L. Clemens considered himself to be. Partly because Macnaughton sees the work of 1897 to 1900 as neglected in favor of biography, he starts out with a patient discussion of "Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy." Still, his first break with going wisdom argues that "Which Was the Dream?" reveals not a compulsive despair but a floundering attempt to produce another long book, perhaps good for sale by subscription—a practical motive lying also behind the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts. "Which Was the Dream?" furthermore reveals, more of us will agree, inability to make a few characters interact convincingly in depth. For "What Is Man?" we are offered the attractive thesis that instead of a sophomoric determinism, it had from the first to last draft the controlling purpose "to make human pride look ridiculous." When Mark Twain's speeches after 1900 at civic and charity functions are counted up, it is reasonable to conclude he saw himself still as a functioning intellect from whom the public expected solid yet entertaining books. Macnaughton finds the "Schoolhouse Hill" version of the "Mysterious Stranger" veined with comedy though he does not get so carried away as to call it, or any item from these years, a lost masterpiece. Nor does his emphasis on literary qualities keep him from giving full credit to Mark Twain's outburst of topical polemics after 1900. Macnaughton is so cogent on the political essays as to lead me to question his implication that Mark Twain's career ended in defeat because he could not round off another book-length project. In other words, was he not always best in shorter pieces? Likewise, Macnaughton sets such a model of judiciousness that he encourages me to balk at his verdict that "A Double-Barreled Detective Story" is a burlesque of the genre; some Poe scholars have already overworked the approach that whenever the master is thoroughly bad he must be spoofing. To be sure, Macnaughton is no apologist, as his kindly yet rigorous dissection of the brief against Christian Science proves again. Never straining for éclat either, he ignores some eminent critics in deciding that the autobiographical dictations are too self-indulgent to bother about. His conclusion that on the average, nevertheless, Mark Twain's work between 1897 and 1910 matched the quality of any earlier period cannot be proved or disproved; that is why some undergraduates from the sciences dread their required courses in literature. 108Reviews It will be interesting to see whether Macnaughton's study changes the balance of opinion. Already in his camp, I will not pose as a convert like those lifelong Christians who step forward for Billy Graham's harvests. Nobody will, or at least should, deny that Mark Twain's Last Years as a Writer is based on a mastery of the primary and secondary materials. Also, it is civilized, disagreeing without quarreling and innovating without trumpeting. Unfortunately it went...