“Corn-Pone Opinions” Revisited: An Argument Against the Conflated Text

In Joe B. Fulton’s article, “The Lost Manuscript Conclusion to Mark Twain’s ‘Corn-Pone Opinions’: An Editorial History and an Edition of the Restored Text,” published in the spring 2005 issue of American Literary Realism, Fulton asserts that “the only authoritative text of ‘Corn-Pone Opinions’ is the one that follows, a version that restores all of the cuts made from the original manuscript for which there was no clear authorial warrant.”¹ In an interview with reporter Mike Anderson for the Waco Tribune-Herald in January 2004, Fulton claimed to have discovered “a small bundle of papers in a dusty drawer” while conducting research at the Mark Twain Papers and Project at the University of California at Berkeley. According to Anderson, while reading through these papers, Fulton “realized it sounded similar to the theme of the Twain essay ‘Corn-Pone Opinions.’”² This essay was first published by Albert Bigelow Paine in Europe and Elsewhere in 1923, and reprinted in a new text by Paul Baender in What Is Man? in 1973. Fulton’s discovery is comprised of six leaves of stationery. The first two leaves have three newspaper clippings attached; the other four are leaves of manuscript in Samuel Clemens’ hand with the title “Moral and Intellectual Man” written in pencil by another hand at the top center of the first manuscript leaf. For the sake of easy reference, these leaves will be referred to hereafter as the “Moral and Intellectual Man” (MIM) manuscript. Fulton asserts that MIM is not a discrete essay, but actually is the lost ending of “Corn-Pone Opinions” (CPO) which Greg Camfield has called Mark Twain’s “homiletic about manners.”³ Fulton conjectures that sometime after Mark Twain’s death, MIM was separated from CPO, likely by Paine. Fulton lays out a lengthy case for this assertion and ultimately presents the text of what he believes to be the real CPO, complete with the lost ending. Fulton’s work, though, to echo his own assessment of CPO, seems “incomplete to me.”⁴

By calling his text an “authoritative text,” Fulton raises a red flag for today’s textual editors. However, even if the more palatable term, “critical text,” had been chosen, Fulton’s conflated text still must be placed under the scholarly microscope. Based on a close examination of Fulton’s conflated text of CPO and MIM and the original manuscripts on which it is based, it is clear that the conflated version is not a critical text. This conclusion is supported, first and foremost, by several transcription errors in the conflated text published in the spring 2005 issue of ALR, which will be explained below. Furthermore, from a strictly editorial perspective, the new text is compromised by a series of questionable choices Fulton made about what to include in the text, as well as by the lack of explanation for those choices. Finally, though Fulton presents a great deal of evidence to support his choice to attach MIM to CPO, in the end the decision to do so seems unjustified. First, let’s take a brief look at the basic transcription errors that render Fulton’s conflated text insufficient to be adopted as a critical text. Then we may turn our attention to an analysis of the decision to join the two manuscripts.

At the most basic level, Fulton’s conflated CPO is insufficient as a critical text because of three typographical errors. The table below outlines these errors. Page and line numbers are drawn from Fulton’s text as published in ALR. Readings from the manuscript of CPO are in the third column, and the erroneous readings from the Fulton text are reproduced in the fourth.

Page	Line	Manuscript	Fulton
250	12	pretence—he	pretence—he
251	12	outside influences	outside influence
251	23	accepts it now,	accepts now,

There are two additional curiosities that warrant consideration. First, in his text, Fulton makes a blanket, silent emendation to CPO that is not reflected in MIM, but he offers no explanation for the inconsistency. As Baender chose to do when he presented CPO in 1973...