Mark Twain's Literary Resources: A Reconstruction of His Library and Reading, Volume One by Alan Gribben (review)

By the time this review appears, Volumes 2 and 3 of Alan Gribben's Mark Twain's Literary Resources will be out and available, and the scope of his achievement, a project spanning half a century, will be self-evident to anyone who looks into Mark Twain's life, work, and cultural adventures with any measure of seriousness. Meticulously gathered and vetted, these two volumes will be an annotated catalog of hundreds of books and other published materials that Sam Clemens and his immediate family owned, borrowed, wrote about, spoke about, or otherwise engaged over the course of his lifetime. When copies formerly in their possession have been located and made accessible, Gribben has scoured them for marginalia and other signs of personal attention and thoughtful response. With no coercive arguments, but rather with an overwhelming compilation of facts, Mark Twain's Literary Resources demonstrates that Clemens read capaciously, that he delved with passionate attention into European and American history, into contemporary science (including belle époque explorations of the mind), Western philosophy, and imaginative literature from ancient Greece and the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Romantics, and his British and American contemporaries. What we have, thanks to Gribben's project, is definitive rebuttal of an idea promulgated by several of Mark Twain's peers and friends (famously including William Dean Howells), and also promoted at times by Sam himself, that this Lincoln of Our Literature had only a slapdash background in letters and culture, and only limited patience with intellectually and aesthetically challenging texts and ideas.

Gribben's preface and introduction offer a lively summary of key discoveries by himself and others, including the decades that have passed since he completed his multivolume dissertation, Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, at Berkeley in 1974. Many of these breakthroughs were the result of Gribben's own detective work; others involved a big dose of luck. The most dramatic of these, recounted in the introduction, was one afternoon in 1970 when a much younger Gribben, arriving at the Rice Lake, Wisconsin, home of a frail and elderly woman whom he had identified as a niece of Katy Leary (longtime member of the Clemens household staff), found several sacks of old books sitting on her front porch awaiting pickup by a local charity. Riffling through them on the spot (with her permission) and finding annotations in Sam's handwriting everywhere, Gribben rushed to a local public phone booth to make arrangements for preventing their disappearance into jumble-sale oblivion. From more recent years, there are accounts of his tracking work with records from auction sales, and of sudden eruptions of Clemens-owned volumes out of the darkness of private collections and into the safekeeping of the Mark Twain House in Hartford and the Center for Mark Twain Studies in Elmira. Gribben also offers cautionary tales of his occasional bouts with the bogus, of running across period editions with counterfeit Mark Twain signatures and marginalia, sometimes offered at stiff prices as the real thing to libraries and collectors.

Of the twenty-six chapters here, several are either reprinted or refreshed variants of essays that Gribben has published over the years in American Quarterly, American Literary Realism, Studies in American Humor, and Resources for American Literary Study. Gathered here, they interconnect effectively, and they provide detailed and convincing guidance as to how and why this reconstruction matters. Standouts in this array include a documented exploration of Clemens's sustained interest in phrenology and the nature and wellsprings of temperament and consciousness. Careful not to insinuate (as others have done without firm evidence) that Sam's sojourn in Vienna and his familiarity with the work of William James, James Mark Baldwin, and "Herbartian psychology" all connect him plausibly with the circle of Sigmund Freud, Gribben documents that Sam's attention to these rapidly evolving disciplines was indeed serious, and...