Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic ed. by Victor Donyo (review)

Studies in American Fiction253 corruption, and to furnish a "home" of loving normality to help men retain their sanity. Symbols of spiritual respite, they also provided a sense of reality, helping the man "create order out of the jumble of ideas in his own mind" (p. 129). Finally, Harris pulls all this together by examining Twain's interest in other states of consciousness, from dreams to his oft-repeated assertion that his books wrote themselves, or were written by another part of his psyche, a creative self separate from his ordinary self. Here the author examines some of the "dream" stories, many of which deal with escaping temporality. But, Harris concludes, "for all his philosophical pretentions, Twain's emotional quest was to escape anxiety, guilt, and loneliness rather than to explain them. These images yield a landscape of repose both for the narrators and for the author who has created them, a landscape at once removed from human time and preserved in it through the power of the written word" (p. 157). Some of these ideas may not be entirely new to some readers, but the particular virtue of this book, it seems to me, is the felicitousness of their expression. Harris writes very well and, in addition, her imaginativeness gives to her interpretations an interest and liveliness often missing from such studies. It is a cogent work; it brings to its subject an obvious affection; its arguments are well worked out and buttressed with profuse quotations from a wide range of Twain's books, letters, essays, and manuscripts. Some parts may be more convincing than others, but on the whole the book offers significant insights into many aspects of Mark Twain's work. Northeastern UniversityPaul C. Wermuth Donyo, Victor, ed., Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic. Foreword by Leslie Fiedler. Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1983. 450 pp. Cloth: $24.95. Victor Donyo observes that his volume of selections "should convince specialists in American Literature that Mark Twain was ... a skeptic for most of his lifetime" (p. 1). Myself, I am skeptical, skeptical that they or we need convincing. "For the general reader this volume should provide an introduction to Mark Twain's philosophy of life" (p. 1). It would be more accurate to describe this collection as representing one side of Mark Twain's often contradictory thinking. That there was another side, even during his last years, was made clear by John Tuckey in his 1970 essay in American Literature, "Mark Twain's Later Dialogue: The 'Me' and the Machine." Donyo gives us generous and well-chosen selections from his author, early and late, including pieces of the very familiar—The Innocents Abroad, Roughing it, Huckleberry Finn—and the less familiar. The most valuable selections are no doubt those from previously unpublished "Autobiographical Dictations" of June 20 and 22, 1906, though it would have helped if the editor had recognized that Mark Twain mistakenly called the doctrine of the Virgin Birth by the name of the Immaculate Conception. Here we have the old man fulminating, "ours is by long odds the worst God that the ingenuity of man has begotten from his insane imagination . . ." (p. 447). The Christianity of his day was not, he judged, so bad, relatively speaking: "It is still a hundred times better than the Christianity of the Bible, with its prodigious crime—the invention of Hell" (p. 446). What is to me most troublesome about this volume is that one gets no serious answers to the most important questions one might ask about Mark Twain's skepticism. The 254Reviews sources of the skepticism are insufficiently examined. The important contributions of Stanley Brodwin, Alexander Jones, or Sherwood Cummings, for example, appear to have been overlooked or disregarded. Donyo does not take up the complex and fascinating problem of analyzing the author's identification as a subscription-book author and humorist as it came into conflict with his growing skepticism. Most of all, one wants to be able to observe the author's developing philosophy. But neither Donyo nor his sections are informative. Except for five pages from What is Man? the valuable collection edited by Paul Baender and published in 1973 is ignored: What is...