Introduction Mark Twain at the Turn-of-the-Century: 1890-1910

Abstract

SHELLEY FISHER FISHKIN & FORREST G. ROBINSON Introduction Mark Twain at the Turn-of-the-Century: 1890-1910 The essays collected here were presented at a conference jointly sponsored by Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, in May 2004. The conference was designed as a forum for the discussion by leading scholars of a relatively neglected period in Mark Twain's life and work. Heated debate about the quality of the writer's later life has been ongoing since the days of Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard DeVoto, but without producing anything approaching consensus among students in the field. Most recently, Karen Lystra has advanced what she describes as "an entirely new picture of Twain's final years" (x). Among the principal defects of the old picture —most especially as it is embodied for Lystra in Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool—is the image of an aging writer crippled by rage and bitterness against God and man. "Much of the last decade of his life," Hill argues, "Mark Twain "lived in hell" (xvii). Lystra is surely correct to challenge what she calls "the myth of Twain's sustained geriatric despair " (62), for there is evidence that the humorist enjoyed intervals of energy and pleasure in his final decade of life. But it is equally clear that when he expressed himself most freely and honestly—in What is Man?, The Mysterious Stranger, the so-called "Dream Writings," the social criticism , and in letters, diaries, and autobiographical dictations—Twain was never far from contempt for humans, anger at God, and anguished self-loathing. The picture, in short, is decidedly mixed, and no single narrative has as yet captured its full complexity.1 Arizona Quarterly Volume 61, Number i, Spring 2005 Copyright © 2005 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004?610 2 Shelley Fisher Fishkin & Forrest G . Robinson If the jury is still out on the life, then it is not even fully selected in the matter of the work. The highly polarized failure of consensus on the quality of Twain's later years is to some degree responsible for the relative lack of critical attention to the writing of the same period. The perception of disarray in the life has fostered a kind of reflex diminishment of the work. Nor has it helped that much of the writing published in Twain's late years was occasional, ephemeral, and written hastily for profit. To be sure, in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Following the Equator, and in a large handful of political and social essays—among them "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It," "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," "To My Missionary Critics," and "King Leopold's Soliloquy"—Twain inveighs eloquently against racism, lynching, anti-Semitism, American and European colonialism, and the predatory greed of expanding global capitalism.2 But much else remained unpublished, either because it was unfinished , or because it revealed more about the author's interior life than he cared to share, or both. We refer here to the nearly 250 autobiographical dictations completed between 1906 and 1909,3 "Tom Sawyer 's Conspiracy," "The Secret History of Eddypus," "My Platonic Sweetheart," "Refuge of the Derelicts," What Js Man?, the several "Dream Writings," and the collection of cognate narratives known as The Mysterious Stranger. With the exception of What Is Man?, all of these works are unfinished, and all were unpublished in Mark Twain's lifetime. Yet they are wildly imaginative, formally innovative, often bizarre, sometimes obscure, but almost invariably important windows on their creator's interior life. We have neglected them in part because Twain himself seemed to, and in part because they present various and formidable obstacles to comprehension. But thanks to the work of a small, enterprising group of scholars, we have begun to catch a glimpse of the broad critical and biographical significance of this late work.4 This volume is the expression of an impulse both to open up new perspectives, and to stimulate further scholarship, on Twain's later life and work. We would like to advance the study of this neglected period in the same way that Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture...