Mark Twain: A Man for All Regions

Abstract

MARK TWAIN: A MAN FOR ALL REGIONS Leland Krauth University of Colorado During the centennial celebration of Huckleberry Finn, it seems appropriate to examine some of the ways in which Mark Twain is studied. In his 1974 assessment of Twain scholarship, Hamlin Hill posed the provocative question "Who Killed Mark Twain?" and his tacit answer was the unimaginative, dust-dry, fact-bound scholarship associated chiefly but not exclusively with the Iowa and California centers for the Mark Twain Papers.1 To borrow a famous line, Hill's report of Twain's death was exaggerated. By 1980 Alan Gribben could review no fewer than forty-nine studies devoted wholly or partially to Twain. His conclusion was that a decade of criticism had removed the mask from Mark Twain, revealing the essential lineaments of the man and artist, yet at the same time unveiling new features for futher scrutiny.2 Rather than retrace the work of Hill and Gribben, not to mention the annual evaluations provided now in American Literary Scholarship by Louis J. Budd, and before him for seven years by Hill himself, it seems prudent to consider just one dimension of Mark Twain study: the regional approach. The rather staggering fact is that four different regions have laid claim to Mark Twain. This surely makes him unique in America's literary culture and calls for some attention. A complete survey of regional studies is impossible, but even a selective review of some seminal works should create a kind of composite profile of each region's Mark Twain. And these sectional perspectives not only put Twain into focus but also prompt some questions about the very lens through which this most American of American authors is sighted. Twain himself set the stage for the regional study of his work by insisting upon the power of place to shape the writer who would record his native country, as Twain did so indelibly in Huckleberry Finn. In a somewhat cantankerous and decidedly chauvinistic essay published in the North American Review in 1895, he explained the making of an American artist this way: . . . absorption; years and years of unconscious absorption; years and years of intercourse with the life concerned; of living it, indeed; sharing personally in its shames and prides, its joys and griefs, its loves and hates, its prosperities and reverses, its shows and shabbinesses , its deep patriotisms, its whirlwinds of political passion, its adorations—of flag, and heroic dead, and the glory of the national 240Leland Krauth Apparently agreeing that absorption of local life is the empowering force for the writer, regional studies of Twain try to explain the decisive tie between his home place and his writings. The South in particular has been especially certain that Twain is its native son. In three separate studies, The Writer in the South, William Elliot Shoots a Bear, and The American South, Louis D. Rubin, Jr., has sketched out a range of interests, tastes, and attitudes that defines the Southern Mark Twain.4 He stresses in particular an awareness of status and the effort to maintain it, a concomitant attention to honor in both genuine and bogus forms, and a guilt-ridden conscience. While these things tie him to the South, Rubin acknowledges that Twain was emotionally dislodged from the region but argues that dissociation from the old community is itself characteristic of the Southern writer. For Arlin Turner, in "Mark Twain and the South: An Affair of Love and Anger," the Southern Mark Twain is the man shaped by an idyllic landscape, an aristocracy, the peculiar institution of slavery with its foundation in racism, and such violent mores as dueling, feuding, and lynching.5 Like Rubin, Turner sees Twain as a restive Southerner who alternates erratically between nostalgia and disgust for his homeland. Turner suggests that the key to Twain's stance toward the South in any work is his inclination to view it either through the haze of memory or the clear light of his current awareness. Two other Southern Mark Twains are very much in evidence. The first, a familiar portrait of the regional artist, is Kenneth S. Lynn's hightoned painting of Mark Twain as Southwestern Humorist in Mark Twain...