Troubles with Mark Twain: Some Considerations on Consistency

TROUBLES WITH MARK TWAIN: SOME CONSIDERATIONS ON CONSISTENCY Lewis Leary" Bibliography has so burgeoned among us, leaping boundaries under the guidance of its masters and providing avocational adventures to almost everyone else, that I am emboldened briefly to rush toward territories where angelic forces among us have not feared to tread. I am not, that is to say, going to speak about the only area of bibliography in which I can plead a measure of competence, for as bibliographer, if bibliographer, I have toiled principally with enumeration, in academic housekeeping, in making lists of who has said what about whom, in no sense an exhausting, though an inexhaustible, labor which brings some rewards in gratitude, but which brings brickbats also from those whose offerings have been spurned or overlooked. Time-consuming and requiring in its measure of exactitude, it is work which, however, can be done when one is too tired or too befumed (one among us has dismissed it as hangover or morning-after work) to be anything except careful. What small thinking it requires moves within limits carefully established in routines approved by tradition and appropriate usage. Critical judgment can be set aside. Informed creativity plays a small part indeed; in fact, if unleashed, can be disruptively misleading. This is not to suggest a paradigm so early in what I have to say, for I hope that I shall be able to make it clear that my intention is quite the opposite, though not all the way opposite, for walking the tightrope of regulation requires certain inbred skill and can be exhilarating, unless one missteps or stumbles: then the fall may be disastrous. Nor do I mean to suggest that enumerative bibliography does not have its own perils, most of them resulting from the bibliographer's failure to do his housework properly. Thomas Tenney, whose large annotated guide to secondary materials on Mark Twain is soon to appear, has done what every good student should do; he has pulled his old professor up short by pointing out to him his, the old professor's, manifest shortcomings. 'Lewis Leary, William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at The University of North Carolina at Chapel I IiIl, is author or editor of four books on Mark Twain and is Chairman of the Editorial Board of the CEAA approved edition of The Writings of Washington Irving; his Soundings: Some Early American Writers will appear next fall from the University of Georgia Press. 90Lewis Leary Through his generosity and to my chagrin, I have belatedly discovered that in my first large gathering of writings about Mark Twain I had included an article by Elizabeth P. Walsh in the Catholic World entitled "A Connecticut Yankee in Our Lady's Court" which was not about Mark Twain at all, but about Ms. Walsh's father, a Hartford man who had long been a contributor to religious periodicals. Nor did time or experience do much to reform me, for in the extension of that listing you will find reference to a fine piece by Vernon Carstenson in the Pacific Northwest Quarterly on "The West That Mark Twain Did Not See," which simply describes a territory which, if Mark Twain had known, he might have written well about. Each of these items was listed with technical impeccability, to the last approved jot and tittle. What I had not taken pains to discover was what they were talking about. On these, I have been caught out, and rightly so. But no one to my knowledge has pointed to another more whimsical error, one which pleases but nonetheless nonplusses me, concerning a pagan piece which praises the Playboy philosophy and nominates Hugh M. Hefner as "Guardian of the Faith." And this piece somehow, I suspect through some pixey impulse on the part of a pert assistant, found itself listed among more pious pieces under the subject heading of Religion. So it goes! For there are pitfalls, even in enumerative bibliography and small decisions which must be made concerning it. But this may be said of it, as someone is said to have once said of an allied subject: "It is like turning over in bed. It takes you...