for your comment and consideration...

Lionel Rolfe (calclass@wavenet.com)
Fri, 21 Jun 1996 22:49:50 -0800

CALIFORNIA CLASSICS BOOKS
213/413-8400

For Mark Twain Scholars:

June 21, 1996

SERIOUS CHARGES AGAINST
UC BERKELEY MARK TWAIN PAPERS PROJECT

Contact: Lionel Rolfe, (213) 413-8400, Fax (213) 483-3524 or e-mail,
calclass@wavenet.com.

California Classic's author Nigey Lennon (we just published her BEING
FRANK: My Time with Frank Zappa) charges the Mark Twain Papers at UC
Berkeley with some serious and even scandalous charges in this article just
published in today's The Metro (San Jose). Nigey is the author of THE
SAGEBRUSH BOHEMIAN: Mark Twain in California (Marlowe and Co.
).This article is available for your comment, or can be reprinted for an
appropriate reprint fee.

Mark Twain: The American Autodidact versus the Academic Axes; or,
Roughing It
at the Mark Twain Papers

By Nigey Lennon

When it appeared in 1872, Mark Twain's Roughing It shocked East Coast
readers with its crude but engaging firsthand description of life on the
American frontier. And now, 124 years after its publication, it is still
creating
similar alarms in the genteel world of academia, as my own experience
indicates.
The saga began in 1981, when I received a contract from Chronicle Books of
San Francisco to write a book about Mark Twain in California. I was then, as
I am now, what Oakland author Ishmael Reed has referred to as a
"freelance pallbearer," an independent writer with an interest in Western
American history and literature, among other things.
I have been more or less earning a living by scribbling since I was 16, after
being expelled from high school in Manhattan Beach, California for
smoking on campus. As was the case with Mark Twain, the world of
literature was my university, and I discovered Twain's writing, via "The
Innocents Abroad," when I was living in London in 1973.
Twain arrived in the Nevada Territory with his brother Orion Clemens,
who had just been appointed secretary to Territorial Governor James Nye,
in 1861. In the intervening decade, Twain would call the Western frontier
his home, from the mining camps of Aurora, Angels Camp and Virginia
City to the Barbary Coast of San Francisco.
During this decade, he would struggle up the ladder of occupations, going
from hardscrabble miner to mining speculator, from newspaper reporter to
contributor to literary journals to travel correspondent, from public speaker
to the role of "Moralist of the Main" (this tongue-in-cheek designation
having been bestowed on Twain by his fellow bohemian scribblers at San
Francisco's Golden Era literary newspaper-a half-serious jab at Twain's
struggle to combine humor and morality in his comical essays).
When he arrived in the West, Twain was a 26-year-old drifter whose
lucrative profession of steamboat pilot had evaporated due to the blockade
of the Mississippi River by Union forces at the start of the Civil War. When
he left the West for good, nine years later, he was a writer with a
burgeoning
national reputation and a writing style that would change little in the
ensuing years.
The West had taken a greenling from Missouri and in 10 years of hard
usage had reforged him in its image, giving him a vigorous
vernacular-ideologically as well as linguistically-and a world of new ideas
that he would explore for the rest of his life.
Clearly, Mark Twain would never have become the man or the writer he
became if he had been born into a moneyed family and sent to an Eastern
university. And in fact Twain acknowledged his populist stance in the
preface to Roughing It (his third book, after The Celebrated Jumping Frog of
Calaveras County and Other Sketches and The Innocents Abroad,
respectively): "This book is merely a personal narrative, not a pretentious
history or a philosophical dissertation."
In researching my book, I drew heavily on Roughing It and on the sections
of Twain's Autobiography that touched on his Western years. But when I
turned to secondary sources, I noticed something which at first I didn't
understand: the fact that no one seemed to have seen fit to describe Twain's
Western decade as formative.
Several authors had written books on the subject, and there were
numerous articles, monographs, theses and papers on various details of
that period of Twain's life, but nowhere was there any suggestion that
Twain's Western sojourn had been anything but a relatively unimportant
prelude to his "real" life in the East. In Roughing It, however, Twain
himself had credited the West with giving him both his lifelong
occupations: writer and public lecturer. He had even adopted his famous
moniker in Virginia City, Nev. So why was there such a universal blind
spot in recognizing the West as the birthplace of Mark Twain, literally and
figuratively?
Initially I attributed this oversight to regional bias, since a large percentage
of the authors writing about Twain were East Coast-based. As a
California writer, I had learned early on the futility of proposing any book
with a West Coast theme, however slight or general, to an Eastern
publisher;
such topics were usually rejected by the mainline New York publishing
houses as being too "regional," even though the same publishers had no
doubts about the universality of, say, detailed histories of New York's
Lower East Side.
But I soon realized that this theory did not explain the reticence of Western
researchers to claim Twain as one of "us." Writers such as Ivan Benson, a
UCLA professor who had written a small book on Twain in the West in the
1930s, and Effie Mona Mack, a Nevada writer whose Mark Twain in
Nevada was published by Scribner's in 1946, seemed to have no overview
of the significance of Twain's Western years. Later Western writers were no
better.
Only Franklin Walker, author of San Francisco's Literary Frontier, a
landmark survey of California literary history, seemed able to discern the
parallels between Twain's development as a writer with his life in
California and Nevada, but even Walker stopped short of making a
conclusive statement that Twain was a Western writer.
I developed a clearer understanding of the politics of the situation when I
attempted to gain access to the large collection of Twain manuscripts,
letters and documents at UC-Berkeley's Bancroft Library. I assumed that a
person with a book contract on the subject in question merely had to call
the
Mark Twain Papers project office and politely request an appointment to
inspect the archive. I was summarily enlightened.
My initial call was taken by an underling who claimed my request would
be forwarded to the appropriate authority. When there was no response
after two weeks, I called again. This time I evidently reached a slightly
higher level clerk, who inquired into my academic background. I told the
truth and said that I had no university encumbrances. The clerk, with an
audible smile in his voice, quickly informed me that I probably wouldn't be
allowed access to the collection unless I could provide a "legitimate" letter
of reference from someone who did have academic connections. It was
obvious that he thought he'd never hear from me again.
I had no trouble getting a good friend who was head of the special
collections department at the Cal State Long Beach library to write me a
recommendation. Having a more seasoned view of the situation than I
had, he sent his letter, not to the Mark Twain Papers, but to a
special-collections
librarian in UC-Berkeley's Californiana department who evidently had
seniority over the toilers at the Mark Twain Papers project. The difference
in reception was dramatic. Within two days, I received a letter from a fellow
named Robert Pack Browning at the MTP, granting me official leave to
conduct research at the collection.
I spent a week in Berkeley, working from 8:30am to 5pm in a rather
cramped little back room at the Mark Twain Papers offices. There were
other, more spacious, places in that section of the library where I could have
worked
just as well, but I suppose I was viewed with some condescension by the
staff, who probably weren't used to 26-year-old freelance pallbearers
examining the holy relics with their battered cowboy boots propped up on
the
table.
Still, I behaved myself, and addressed everyone politely, and didn't
complain when the clerks confiscated my fountain pen because it had a
sharp nib, or even when they insisted on inspecting my pockets for the
family silverware every time I left the premises.
Following an additional two weeks of research at the Mark Twain Papers
just before the book was published, Mark Twain in California appeared in
1982 and went out of print a couple of years later, for the usual reasons. I
took my original research and amplified it into an expanded book, The
Sagebrush Bohemian, which was published by Paragon House in 1991 and
is still in print today.
All this pleasant reminiscing is to lead up to the fact that I recently
received a copy of the Mark Twain Papers' latest publication, an annotated
edition of Roughing It. The MTP previously published an academic
hardcover edition in 1993, but the present paperback is intended for a more
general audience.
I picked it up and began leafing through the front matter. Something about
Harriet Elinor Smith's foreword seemed strangely familiar: "It was in the
West that Clemens found and eventually accepted his vocation as a
humorist."
Well, that was mincing words slightly, but the idea was the same.
Then I turned to the back and started going over the annotations. A
surprising amount of the background detail pertaining to Twain's years in
San Francisco could only have come from my books. I was especially struck
by the details of Twain's "Wide West Mine" story as recounted in the
annotations. I had spent the two weeks just prior to the publication of my
the original book, in 1981, going over every document I could find
pertaining to the facts surrounding Twain's supposed claim, with his friend
Calvin Higbie, on an outcropping of the Wide West mine in Aurora.
After a fortnight's work, it seemed evident that the story, as recounted by
Twain in Roughing It, was greatly distorted. There was no record indicating
that Twain, or Higbie either, for that matter, had ever filed a claim on any
spur or extension of the Wide West. I wrote up my findings and left them
with the Mark Twain Papers, in case someone might be able to use them
someday.
Well, someone was able to use them all right, only in the intervening
years, they'd evidently forgotten where they came from. All my research
was intact in the annotations to Roughing It, but my name or publications
were nowhere to be found in the bibliography.
When I asked some "recovering academic" friends of mine why they
thought this omission had occurred, the consensus (consensus is extremely
important in academia) was something like this ("And this is definitely off
the record!"): because I was a "civilian," I was considered fair game. Had I
been doing graduate or post-graduate work at the Mark Twain Papers, I
would have received slightly more credit for my contributions; but since I
am merely a published writer and not an academic, I was viewed as a
barbarian by the
gatekeepers, hence their lack of courtesy in identifying my work.
I suppose I shouldn't complain when Twain himself has received even
shabbier treatment at the hands of his academic keepers. Mark Twain has
never been understood by the academic world, primarily because he was an
autodidact. He was also outspoken against much of the genteel literary
tradition with which many academics identify. This quality certainly had its
roots in his origins as a Western writer-origins which, for complex
historical reasons, the academic world have often found distasteful.
In 1911, the philosopher George Santayana, speaking before the
Philosophical Union of the University of California on "The Genteel
Tradition in American Philosophy," made the following observation about
the polarization of American intellectual life: "One half of the American
mind, that not occupied intensely in practical affairs, has remained ...
slightly becalmed," while meanwhile "the other half of the mind was
leaping down a sort of Niagara Rapids."
He concluded, "The one is the sphere of the American man; the other, at
least predominantly, of the American woman. The one is all aggressive
enterprise; the other is all genteel tradition." Santayana then posed the
question: "Have there been ... any successful efforts to express something
worth expressing behind its back? ... I might mention the humorists, of
whom you here in California have had your share."
Santayana could very well have been summing up the East/West schism
in the academic viewpoint, substituting only "Western" for the male
component and "Eastern" for the female opposite. "Humorists" were
Western, like Josh Billings and Artemus Ward-alkali dust-covered yarn
spinners with coarse vocabularies and ephemeral popularity but certainly
no lasting merit in the literary pantheon. Mark Twain, "the Bohemian
from the sagebrush," as he was known in the 1860s, fit this image neatly in
the eyes of the terminally genteel. After all, he had acquired his craft in the
cubbyholes of frontier newspapers rather than in Ivy League universities or
New England literary salons.
At a time when "polite" literature required legs to be referred to as
"limbs," Twain's writing exhibited what Bret Harte described, with an
exquisite shudder, as a "rather broad and Panurge-like" style of expression.
This style derived from the vigorous vernacular of mining camps, stage
stations and the Barbary Coast-the language of the frontier.
It might seem absurd to state that Santayana's Victorian
philosophical-literary schizophrenia is still prevalent today in intellectual
circles, yet all one need do is consider the ongoing controversy surrounding
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (recently published in a new,
expanded edition) to determine that Twain, the 19th-century author,
refuses to die-and neither does the hypocritical gentility handed down by
the thin-lipped New England bluestockings Santayana was referring to.
In an article in the January 1996 Harper's magazine titled "Say It Ain't So,
Huck," author Jane Smiley revealed herself to be a card-carrying member of
that club. Having just re-read Huck Finn, Smiley closes the book, stunned.
"Yes, stunned," she says. "Not, by any means, by the artistry of the book but
by the notion that this is the novel all American literature grows out of,
that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel."
Smiley-known for her bestselling humorous novel about academic life,
Moo-attributes the wide acceptance of Huck Finn to the cheerleading squad
of
what she calls "the Propaganda Era," 1948-1955: Lionel Trilling, Leslie
Fiedler, T.S. Eliot, Joseph Wood Krutch et al. It was, she infers, strictly a
boys' club, which explains why somebody like Hemingway would make his
comment that all American literature grows out of one book, or the first
two-thirds of it anyway.
These guys, Smiley fumes, were evidently too busy shooting Niagara Falls
in a barrel to notice that Huck Finn is sloppily written, morally ambiguous
and far less noteworthy than Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.
"There goes Uncle Tom's Cabin, there goes Edith Wharton, there goes
domestic life as a subject, there go almost all the best-selling novelists of the
19th century and their readers, who were mostly women," she says bitterly
in castigating this male bastion of critics and their stranglehold on literary
opinion. (She couldn't fit Santayana's cliche more neatly if she'd lifted it
directly.)
While the sincerity of Uncle Tom's Cabin certainly cannot be denied, there
is of course a reason why it (and other books like it that fail to stand the
transition from one era to another) is not read today, while Huck Finn is.
Stowe's novel is a melodramatic tract. In it, there are no characters with
the moral shading of Huck or Jim, only "good guys" (the slaves) and "bad
guys" (their masters.)
In a sense, Uncle Tom's Cabin is ideologically much easier for present-day
politically correct readers to grasp, because it presents a (no pun intended)
black-and-white view of the moral issues facing Civil War-era society. By
contrast, Huck Finn's ethical dilemmas provide no neat solutions to that
era's complex sociopolitical conflicts. But the wooden, polemical style of
Uncle Tom's Cabin is so mired in Victorian convention that it may as well
be in another language; Huck Finn, on the other hand, because its narrator
is an illiterate, slangy, white-trash no-account, ironically remains clearly
understandable today.
>
Ideologically hidebound traditionalists have always had trouble with Mark
Twain, mistaking his idiomatic language for vulgarity and his depiction of
things as they are as morally reprehensible. Smiley dismisses Twain as an
unruly little boy, a complaint that peculiarly echoes the views of the
good-old-boys club she despises.
She concludes her essay: "If 'great' literature has any purpose, it is to
help us face up to our responsibilities instead of enabling us to avoid them
once again by lighting out for the territory."
Evidently, Smiley was unfamiliar with Twain's great moral and political
essays, such as "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" and "King Leopold's
Soliloquy"-or any of his writing after about 1895, for that matter. No writer
ever spent more time grappling with the moral bankruptcy of his age than
did Mark Twain in the last days of his life.
But then, it has always been easier for revisionist critics and commentators
to deal with Twain's universal and dangerous radicalism by dealing with
him piecemeal as a humorist, as a writer of children's books, as a
good-natured rustic describing long-gone days of steamboating on the
Mississippi or as a white-haired crank in a white suit on a Connecticut
verandah.
It probably comes as no surprise that Twain's worst enemies, in various
guises, have come from the halls of academia. More discerning minds than
Smiley have attacked Twain with the brickbats of revisionist biographies,
editorial butchery and politically motivated censorship. Two blatant
examples come immediately to mind; that of Charles Neider's version of
Twain's Autobiography, and Justin Kaplan's 1966 biography Mr. Clemens
and Mark Twain.
Twain's original Autobiography, published in two volumes in 1924, was a
rambling mass of anecdotes, dictated rather than written out by the author
in the final years of his life. In the course of imposing a pattern on the
formless work, Neider, in 1959, reduced the two volumes to one, cutting
the
original by more than half.
It is interesting to contemplate the nature of the material cut. In the
original, Twain alternates straightforward biographical detail with what in
essence are speeches about the volatile political scene in 1906-7, when he
was dictating his memoirs. These random observations include scathing
commentaries on imperialism, expressions of sympathy for the Russian
revolution of 1905, his horror at the emergence of large-scale conglomerates
like Standard Oil, his recognition of the necessity for labor unions (one of
the best chapters in his Life on the Mississippi was about the Pilots
Benevolent Association), and numerous other subjects deemed unfit for
popular consumption in the "I Like Ike" era.
The Neiderized Twain Autobiography, by contrast, could have been the
memoir of almost any late 19th-century popular author. It's an orderly
procession of reminiscences about "old times on the Mississippi," good old
days in Hannibal, the decorous life of a New England man of letters in
Hartford, family life, quaint amusements and eccentric pastimes-and not a
shred of radical sentiment beyond the "liberty, equality, and Fourth of July"
variety.
You can't make a dead man lie, maybe, but you can certainly make him
misrepresent the truth, if you're slick enough.
Kaplan's literary offenses were worse. In Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, he
turned a masterful writing style to the task of deconstructing Twain in a
manner Smiley would have approved of-presenting him as an immature
and self-centered gold-digger who sniffed out pay dirt in the literary circles
of Connecticut, and who lay siege to his future wife Olivia Langdon in
order to gain entry into that charmed circle.
In actuality, Twain harbored no illusions about the Eastern literary
establishment or what it represented; he merely recognized the simple fact
that, if he wished to establish any lasting reputation as an author, he
needed to be where the publishers were. Is it possible it be that Kaplan,
with his background as an East Coast academic, was projecting his own
obsessions onto Twain?
One might smile at the thought that Kaplan was, however unconsciously,
imputing the sophisticated guile of a professorial seeker after tenure to a
man who never completed the third grade. Kaplan (although his
psychological dissection of his subject showed more elegant execution than
had the crude Freudianism of his predecessors such as Van Wyck Brooks or
Bernard DeVoto), however, was merely the most artful of a long line of
academic axemen for whom Twain's autodidactism represented a most
annoying intellectual carbuncle.
The significance of Kaplan's moral-critical approach to Twain and his
writing was that, in reducing him to a mess of neuroses, it provided three
successive decades of biographers with a blueprint for their character
assassinations.
The fact that the man who was one of the greatest writers who ever lived
had never experienced any involvement in academic matters, nor any
desire to do so, nor yet any respect for such institutions, presented these
upholders of the genteel tradition with an agonizing moral quandary. To
give him his due would be to deny all they stood for (and in some notable
cases, to endanger their tenure track); yet since everyone knew Twain was a
great writer even though they may not have read any of his work besides
Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, it would not reflect well on their intellectual
perspicacity (or their standing in the academic hierarchy) if they were to
dismiss him too precipitously.
But to this end, some of the greatest academic minds of our time (not to
mention the others) have devoted their sabbaticals to ripping apart Mark
Twain. His barbarian Westernness has been sandpapered and polished until
he has become a socially acceptable object, an eccentric old gent in a
white suit on a Connecticut verandah.
His youthful virility has been replaced with the caricature of a dotty (some
insinuate an impotent) old pedophile. His political incisiveness has been
reduced to the homespun "philosophizin' "of a former steamboat pilot.
His insight into the human condition has been boiled and retorted and
spewed back out as the milk-and-mush nostalgia of a ninth-rate children's
writer.
Yet despite the onslaught of academic axes, the damned old buzzard refuses
to die-much, one senses, to the annoyance of his institutional keepers.
#
Nigey Lennon is the author of two books on Mark Twain, the most recent
of
which is The Sagebrush Bohemian: Mark Twain in California (Marlowe
and Co.). Her current book is Being Frank: My Time With Frank Zappa
(California
Classics Books).