The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California by Nigey Lennon, and: Getting to be Mark Twain by Jeffrey Steinbrink (review)

Reviews 149 Heidtmann reclaims Eiseley by sensitive treatment and a kind of poetic under­ standing of his subject: if the man Eiseley requires our patience we gain immensely from a study of the writer. In confronting his angst, mostly the result of childhood traumas, Eiseley mythologized himself; his writings are the means by which he came to imagina­ tive terms with his experiences, and Heidtmann’s book helps us to see how extravagantly Eiseley did so—by rejecting the modern world in his writing and yearning in printfor elemental, mythic, cosmic consolations. IfEiseley distorted truth and manipulated reality in his own interests, we also come to understand him here as a man who did so because his need was so extravagant. Readers of Eiseley are fortunate in having these two books by Christianson and Heidtmann at nearly the same time, for they give us both sides of a paradoxical man. No doubt the secrets to a full understanding ofEiseley are lost in his childhood—and we are not likely to recover them. But these books help us to balance Eiseley’s questionable public responses to experience with those heroic acts of the imagination which transformed his personal anxieties into art. JOSEPH J. WYDEVEN Bellevue College The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California. By Nigey Lennon. (New York: Paragon House, 1990. 203 pages, $19.95.) Getting to beMark Twain. ByJeffrey Steinbrink. (Berkeley: University of Califor­ nia Press, 1991. 221 pages, $22.50.) Two periods of Samuel Clemens’ life continue to challenge literary critics and biographers: the pre-RoughingIt years during which Clemens adopted and shaped his literary personality Mark Twain and the post-bankruptcy years dur­ ing which Clemens shifted from writer of books to public personality and sage. Lennon and Steinbrink focus on the formative years for their search for Mark Twain. Steinbrink’s study is by far the more responsible and the more valuable. Lennon describes her study as an answer to critics who have ignored or misrepresented Mark Twain’s western experiences. She states her case in her preface, but she stumbles as she seems to set aside (or be unfamiliar with) the work of Dixon Wcctcr and Henry Nash Smith, both of whom argued for an appreciation of Sam Clemens’youth and an understanding of the evolution of Mark Twain as a literary persona. One telling error is Lennon’s confusion over Bernard DeVoto’s Mark Twain’sAmerica&nd Mark Twain inEruption (she mistak­ enly refers to the latter as DeVoto’sanswer to Van Wyck Brooks).This error sets 150 WesternAmerican Literature the stage for her breezy indictment ofprevious Twain studies and her simplifica­ tion of the personal and professional dilemmas Clemens faced as he worked to find and then tune his storytelling voice. Admittedly, Lennon is right to draw our attention back to Clemens’ early success in frontier journalism. Her account of his immersion in western and west coast bohemianism also focuses our attention on the environment that nurtured his creativity; however, her conclusion that Mark Twain was fully evolved with the publication of Innocents Abroad discounts much of what we know of Clemens’ evolution as a writer. She moves further afield when she speculates about Clemens’ sexual escapades and hypothesizes that his death at 75 was likely caused by cardiovascular syphilis (her proof seems to be that there is no evidence to the contrary). On the other hand, deliberate accumulation of evidence and logical con­ nection highlight Steinbrink’s analysis of Clemens’personal and literary devel­ opment. Here we have an in-depth and well developed analysis of Clemens’ restless attempts to find a wife and a profession. These are not unrelated. From 1868 to 1871 Clemens struggled through ambivalent feelings aboutjournalism and newspaper ownership and the urge to be known as aserious writer ofbooks. That struggle was simultaneous with his courtship of Olivia Langdon. In fact, Jervis Langdon’s financial backing tied home and profession together in a way that both soothed and chafed as Clemens experimented with publishing, lectur­ ing, magazine work, and book writing. Langdon’s death seems to have opened the way for Clemens’ development as a writer. Steinbrink’s discussion of Clemens’ conflicts is insightful. Most importantly, Steinbrink focuses on Clemens’ struggle...