Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872–1873 ed. by Lin Salamo, Harriet Elinor Smith, and: Mark Twain by Peter Messent

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 4 2 9 Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5, 1872-1873. Edited by Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. 939 pages, $60.00. Mark Twain. By Peter Messent. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. 235 pages, $29.95. Reviewed by Gary Scharnhorst University of New Mexico W. D. Howells called him “the Lincoln of our literature,” a comparison which evokes his common western origin with Honest Abe. Simply put, no other American writer with the possible exception of Ernest Hemingway enjoys so privileged a critical and popular reputation as Mark Twain. Whether his celebrity is measured in column-inches of citations in the MLA Bibliography or the frequency with which his words and image are appropriated by Madison Avenue, Twain often seems to bubble to the sur­ face of public consciousness. Fortunately, in the midst of a canon reforma­ tion whose most radical protestants proclaim the “death of the author,” most Twain scholarship remains historically and biographically contextualized (and so, in my opinion, it is reasonably assessable). For better or worse (the former, I believe), the ostensible “cult of personality” that surrounds Twain prevents his disappearance down the poststructuralist rabbit hole. I daresay that more ink has been spilled over his life and writings than any other nineteenth-century American author, and he seems to many of us as familiar as an eccentric neighbor. Not that we know all our neighbors as well as we should. The fifth volume in the definitive edition of Twain’s correspondence contains 309 letters, well over half of them never before published, all of them thoroughly annotated. A model of documentary editing, the volume opens with Twain on a lecture tour in the Midwest in January 1872 and closes after he has delivered a series of lectures in London in December 1873. This truest type of biogra­ phy describes in inimitable detail the prosperity he enjoyed in the wake of the sales success of Roughing It, his repeated visits to England to work on a travel book he eventually abandoned, the birth of his daughter Susy and the death of his son Langdon, his collaboration with his Hartford neighbor Charles Dudley Warner on their novel The Gilded Age, and his oft-vexed asso­ ciations with such figures as Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune; Bret Harte, his old friend from California and erstwhile literary rival; Howells, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly; and Kate Field, a popular lecturer and journalist. Editors Salamo and Smith append genealogical charts of the Clemens and Langdon families, transcriptions of the journals Twain kept during his 1872 trip to England and of the contracts he signed with publishers during these years, as well as a veritable family album of photographs and a sheaf of eleven newly discovered letters written between 1865 and 1871. 4 3 0 W A L 3 3 ( 4 ) W INTER 1 9 9 9 To be sure, there are no bombshells here, nothing that fundamentally alters our view of Twain’s career, though the annotations alone should be grist for a few dissertations. For example, Twain’s brief letter to Elisha Bliss, the president of the American Publishing Company, dated November 5, 1873, which consists of little more than the names of people he wished to receive copies of The Gilded Age, is followed by over seven pages of notes. Only in one minor respect would I fault the documentation: the “F. B. P.” whose column Twain mentions in a letter to the editor of the Boston Literary World in December 1872, who is otherwise unidentified, was undoubtedly the Boston librarian Frederick Beecher Perkins, best-known today (if at all) as the father of Charlotte Perkins Gilman. One of the joys of teaching literature—I assert without apology— is that we get to read other people’s mail, occasionally even letters that are explicitly proscribed. “Please don’t let a word of this letter get into print— these things are from private conversations &. the footprints must be all covered up carefully before they see the light,” Twain wrote Mary Mason Fairbanks from London in November 1872 (206). If there are no sensational revelations here, there are...