Why Not the Simple Mark Twain?
HANSER, RICHARD
WRITERS and WRITING Why Not the Simple Mark Twain? Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor. By Kenneth S. Lynn. Little, Brown. 300 pp. $5.00. Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author of the NBC Documentary,...
...burn their notes and retire...
...Lynn indulges in it freely...
...Lynn concedes that the resemblances are "perhaps superficial," but takes the trouble to trot them out just the same...
...In the circumstances they must, as a matter of elementary self-preservation, lay down their customary smoke screens and invent obscurities and complications which they can then proceed to unravel and interpret...
...His little volume comes burdened with a staggering load of pedagogic acknowledgments and salutes—to Edmund Wilson and Harrv Levin and Leslie Fiedler and Kenneth Murdock and Erich Auerbach and Walter Jackson Bate and Perry Miller and the American Council of Learned Societies and the Harvard Foundation for Advanced Study and Research, among others...
...The puzzle is why he was attracted to the subject to begin with...
...persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot...
...He sees an "unmistakable" connection between the stagecoach which Twain rode to Nevada Territory and the raft on which Huck went down the Mississippi...
...But Lynn thinks otherwise...
...He thinks that Twain wrote a kind of hieroglyphic or code which means something other than it plainly appears to mean, and has to be deciphered and unriddled by an expert...
...Twain has always been a problem for the drearier sort of critic and professor...
...It is mere make-work, sheer academic featherbedding, and it abounds in the literature on Twain...
...Kenneth S. Lynn of Harvard University operates in this dismal tradition...
...He knows better, and assures us with the utmost confidence, and no evidence, that "Huck's outlaw Pap is a nightmare version of Twain's hardhearted father...
...So deafening an academic fanfare for so slight a work recalls the remark by a certain well-known humorist: "Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid...
...Even Constance Rourke, in her valuable American Humor, writes with a chilly, schoolmarmish air which makes it hard to imagine her laughing very loud at anythng...
...Lynn reads a deep political significance, which none before him has seen, into the fact that the celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County was named Daniel Webster...
...The trip on the raft, in fact, was not a trip on a raft at all, but a "Mosaic drama of liberation" and also, when you ??m...
...These labored absurdities, a few among many, have been selected at random, but they serve to suggest the content and quality of the book which is as sere and juiceless on American humor in general as it is on Mark Twain in particular...
...Forced to acknowledge his towering stature in American letters, they cannot seem to forgive him his lack of that murkiness and ambiguity which they are accustomed to associate with literary genius and without which they might as well pack up their textbooks...
...It was said of Twain when he was alive that he "wrote the purest English of any modern writer," and the wonderful clarity of his style remains one of the major joys of reading him...
...Reviewed by Richard Hanser Author of the NBC Documentary, "Mark Twain's America" A TONE-DEAF music teacher is a joke and a color-blind art critic an absurdity, but humorless writers on humor are common...
...There is also some sort of relation between Huckleberry Finn and, of all things, Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon...
...The land over which the stagecoach traveled was "as level as a calm sea," which makes the link obvious, of course...
...By Order of the Author...
...persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished...
...That seems plain enough, clear enough...
...It is first-hand testimony from the person best qualified to speak on the subject, but it doesn't fool Lynn for a minute...
...He has a superstition that he means something, but it misses me altogether.' "Tf there ever was a man who said what he meant, in the fewest number of words, it was Mark Twain...
...Once when he came upon something of the sort he said: " 'I wish I could understand what in the nation that man is driving at...
...I think so because of my knowledge of him and because of his knowledge of himself...
...If the ordinary reader, without the intervention of seer or savant, can discover and savor the full meaning of what a genius has written, what will become of critics and professors...
...This is a Mark Twain year, the 50th anniversary of his death, which coincides with an already extensive revival of interest in the man and his work...
...Though Albert Bigelow Paine is not a final authority, one turns with relief from this sort of thing to his sane and unclouded estimates of Twain and his work: "Any attempt to discover hidden, subtle psychology in the writings of Mark Twain I think must be an effort far afield...
...He has accomplished the bewildering feat of writing 288 pages on Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor without once making an entertaining remark, citing an amusing line or quoting a witty observation, and he gives every indication that he could go on for another thousand pages on the same subject and keep his record intact...
...A reader has the right to hope that in a book on humor a little of it will rub off on even the dullest commentator, but Lynn remains immaculate from first to last...
...At the start of Huckleberry Finn he posted the following notice: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted...
...One turns with special relief from Lynn's Mosaic liberations and seagoing stagecoaches to Mark Twain himself, the final criterion for judging the works of Mark Twain...
...He seems to have had a premonition that one day the pedants and professors would be at him, and he did his best in his own way to warn them off from his greatest work...
...He obviously has no flair for humor and apparently no interest in it as such...
...Along with the more salutary effects of such a revival, a certain amount of the usual scholarly sludge is, one supposes, inevitable...
...We have had to wait all these years for Lynn to supply the key to Twain's manifold obscurities, which we didn't know were there to begin with...
...For example, Mark Twain wrote of his father that he was "a refined and kindly gentleman . . . a sternly just and upright man," who punished his son only twice in this life, "and then not heavily...
...In the unveiling of the mysteries, however, Twain and his humor and everything that we have come to value in him vanish into the analytical fog...
...and it is hard to imagine him laughing at all...
...to examine it more closely, a search by Huck for a father...
...Sigmund Freud wrestling with the wit of Heinrich Heine is a hippopotamus in pursuit of a hummingbird, and Henri Berg-son assumes that laughter is something to be pinned on a board and dissected like a frog in a biology class...
Vol. 43 • March 1960 • No. 12
