The Satirist Who Clowns: Mark Twain’s Performance at the Whittier Birthday Celebration

Abstract

The Satirist Who Clowns: Mark Twain’s Performance at the Whittier Birthday Celebration James E. Caron In December 1877, Sam Clemens participated in the public celebration of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday staged by the publisher of The Atlantic Monthly. The story he told as part of the parade of after-dinner encomiums has been stigmatized by William Dean Howells as “that hideous mistake of poor Clemens” (qtd. in Smith, “Mistake” 162), and the memory of it for Clemens was apparently so fraught with anxiety and uncertainty about the propriety of telling the tale that Richard Lowry has referred to it as a primal scene of Mark Twain criticism (24). Indeed, most analyses of the speech and its aftermath investigate the personal stakes for Sam Clemens, and Lowry’s comment channels the psychoanalytical undercurrent in many of them. The other focal point for analysis has been what Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech implies for American culture, an emphasis initiated by Bernard DeVoto and then amplified by Henry Nash Smith. This essay will show that these disparate focal points name two sides of the same performance of satire rather than advance competing interpretations. I will not ignore the personal side of the inquiry into possible meanings of Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech, but rather than investigate the event as a primal scene that generates a personal story of identity crisis, I will stress the symbolism of cultural processes that enable a narrative of literary history. The speech and reactions to it function as a drama that symbolically enacted American literary culture in 1877. Moreover, the tensions that defined the drama subsequently generated a particular narrative about American literary history. Conceptualized as a cultural primal scene, the Whittier birthday event therefore provides the historical narrative’s rationale and presents to literary critics and historians a tangle of motivations for the principal actors in the drama. For Clemens as well as for the honored guests, a personal level existed in the drama that was nevertheless charged with cultural meaning: Whittier and the other honored guests were both individual men and cultural icons, but so was Clemens an [End Page 433] individual while his literary alter ego, Mark Twain, also stood iconic before the crowd. Certainly, the literati audience reacted to the event at the personal and cultural levels, as did contemporary newspaper editors in Boston and elsewhere. For William Dean Howells and Henry Houghton, respectively editor and publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, personal and cultural levels existed as well, but so too did a commercial aspect. For subsequent generations of literary critics, the event continues to register as a cultural benchmark. Together these groups represent a complicated layering of audiences for the symbolic drama of the primal scene. Thus they necessarily participate in the drama’s recurring cultural performance. The personal level of the event signifies the obvious and yet easily overlooked social interaction among putative equals expected at a festive dinner, that is, the manners expressing and customs regulating the participants’ behaviors in that interaction. Though the story Mark Twain tells travesties this personal quality of politeness and dignity, Clemens carefully constructed the text to separate actual men from fictional characters. Nevertheless, some in the audience, including Howells, misread travesty as personal insult. Howells’s misreading has decisively shaped all subsequent narratives about the event, which points to the pivotal supporting role that friend and editor Howells played in the symbolic drama while Clemens as Mark Twain played the lead role of a satiric clown. In this role, Mark Twain displayed his own foolishness in order to show his audience theirs. As the clown of the drama, Mark Twain embodies symbolic indeterminacy of a kind and on a scale that the settled narrative of Bostonian cultural superiority could not incorporate. The tale Mark Twain performed as a recalled memory triggered this disruption. Operating in the subjunctive mood of “What if?,” the tale imagines an alternative cultural narrative that outraged and scandalized a literary world that thought it still held sway as the country’s cultural pole star. As symbolic drama, the Whittier birthday speech disclosed what was at stake culturally: the role of the satirist in nineteenth-century American...