Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics: Letters to the Editor by Mark Twain (review)

“The commercial appeal of Twain never subsides,” said Gary Scharnhorst in an interview four years ago. “Any book with ‘Twain’ in the title is sure to sell” (“Scharnhorst Reveals Mark Twain,” http://www.unm.edu/). He may be right. In 2010 the University of California Press had a hit with the first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain. Running 736 pages and containing some of Twain’s most unruly prose, the book debuted at number two on the New York Times Hardcover Nonfiction Best-Seller list. Scharnhorst himself has been known to prospect the deep lodes of the Twain archive. He has edited two volumes of Twain’s interviews as well as the engrossing Twain in His Own Time, which offers 94 recollections of the author by those who knew him. Scharnhorst’s latest edited volume, Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics, taps another new vein, turning up 101 little-known “letters to the editor” written by Twain between 1866 and 1910.

Published (or intended to be published) in newspapers, these letters vary widely in form and content, from a two-sentence endorsement of Chester A. Arthur’s presidency to a historical ethnography of Hawaii. Clearly the “l etter to the editor” was a more capacious genre in the nineteenth century than it is now. Today’s instances of the form are typically brief, confined to their own small section, and devoted to praising or criticizing a previously published article. During Twain’s lifetime, letters to the editor took up more space in periodicals, especially in local newspapers. Often written by appointed correspondents, these pieces were rooted in the epistolary tradition, adopting a personal tone and describing recent events in the writer’s locale. Sometimes they served as a primary source of news; other times they commented on the news in the style of a modern op-ed.

The flexibility of the letter-to-the-editor genre suited Twain’s diverse talents. Early in Mark Twain on Potholes and Politics he berates a police chief, opines facetiously on female suffrage, responds to those opinions in the voice of a fictitious “Mrs. Mark Twain,” advertises his lectures, lampoons his stint as the private secretary of a U.S. senator, and generally pokes fun at everyone and everything—most of all himself. Self-deprecation counterbalances his mockery of others. In a note announcing the postponement of a lecture, Twain explains that his agent has fallen sick: “I will give him a chance, though—I will not read the lecture to him any more” (32). The later missives tend to be shorter and more straight-faced, but they continue to show Twain’s lifelong aversion to perfunctory language. In response to an invitation, he begins by claiming that “circumstances over which I have no control debar me from being present at the supper and social meeting” (119). He then devotes a full paragraph to a sarcastic appreciation of the phrase “circumstances over which I have no control.” He could not, it seems, allow himself a moment of banality.

Charming as it is, this RSVP may not belong in Scharnhorst’s collection, as it appears to be addressed not to an editor but rather to an organization called the Berkshire Local Editors and Reporters. Scharnhorst also includes several unsent or unpublished items, as well as one that, by his own admission, is “not technically a letter to an editor” (171). It is unclear, then, why he skips Twain’s prolific years as a bona fide newspaper correspondent in the West. Between 1853 and 1855 Twain published several letters in the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal, then edited by his older brother Orion. A decade later, after beginning his writing career in earnest, Twain served as the Virginia City correspondent of the San Francisco Daily Morning Call, sending ten letters from the Nevada Territory to the “Editors Call” between 1863 and 1864. These lively exemplars of the young Twain...