Bruce Michelson - Mark Twain on the Loose: A Comic Writer and the American Self

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title	:	Mark Twain On the Loose : A Comic Writer and the American Self
author	:	Michelson, Bruce.
publisher	:	University of Massachusetts Press
isbn10 | asin	:	087023966X
print isbn13	:	9780870239663
ebook isbn13	:	9780585083926
language	:	English
subject	Twain, Mark,--1835-1910--Knowledge--America, National characteristics, American, in literature, Humorous stories, American--History and criticism, Group identity in literature, Comic, The, in literature, Self in literature.
publication date	:	1995
lcc	:	PS1342.A54M53 1995eb
ddc	:	818/.409
subject	:	Twain, Mark,--1835-1910--Knowledge--America, National characteristics, American, in literature, Humorous stories, American--History and criticism, Group identity in literature, Comic, The, in literature, Self in literature.

Page iii Mark Twain on the Loose A Comic Writer and the American Self Bruce Michelson UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS PRESS Amherst

Page iv Copyright 1995 by The University of Massachusetts Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America LC 94-37579 ISBN 0-87023-966-x (cloth); 967-8 (pbk.) Designed by Mary Mendell Set in New Baskerville Printed and bound by Thomson-Shore, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Michelson, Bruce, 1948 Mark Twain on the loose : a comic writer and the American self / Bruce Michelson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87023-966-x.ISBN 0-87023-967-8 (pbk.) 1. Twain, Mark, 18351910KnowledgeAmerica. 2. National characteristics, American, in literature. 3. Humorous stories, AmericanHistory and criticism. 4. Group identity in literature. 5. Comic, The, in literature. 6. Self in literature. I. Title. PS1342.A54M53 1995 818'.409dc2094-37579CIP British Library Cataloguing in Publication data are available.

Page v For June and Helen

Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix 1 Mark Twain and the Escape from Sense 1 2 Fool's Paradise 39 3 The Quarrel With Romance 95 4 The Wilderness of Ideas 173 Notes 231 Works Cited 257 Index 265

Page ix Acknowledgments This book owes much to the informed, compassionate company in the University of Illinois English department. My colleagues Nina Baym, Frank Hodgins, Robert Dale Parker, and Don Florence have read and improved many pages; Richard Wheeler, Michael Brub, Janet Lyon, Jim Hurt, Richard Powers, and Zohreh Sullivan have tried to school me in an art they know, of blending fresh thoughts with gentle humanity and good sense. At the university library, Bill Brockman and Josephine Kibbee have been patient and skillful detectives, as has Will Goodwin at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. At the Buffalo and Erie County Library, Joanna Woyshner was a valuable guide in a prowl through crucial archives. The Mark Twain Circle has been a blessing, and two of its stars, Victor A. Doyno and Jeffrey Steinbrink, have robbed time from their own work to wade through long stretches of this book and make them stronger. A mentor and old friend, Harold Simonson, provided a sharp eye and much moral support. Craig Fischer, a young scholar with breathtaking knowledge of American cultures high and otherwise, has helped greatly in preparing the text. In different form, portions of Chapters 2 and 3 have appeared in the Dutch Quarterly Review and the New England Quarterly, and I am grateful for permission to expand and redevelop them here. The three smart, fierce people I keep house with, Theresa, Hope, and Sarah Michelson, provide the joy and the wisdom by which anything worth doing gets done.

Page 1 Chapter 1 Mark Twain and the Escape from Sense Bigger than life, allover white, and caught this time in molded paper, Mark Twain gazes soulfully through the glass front of a pizzeria named for him in a New Orleans suburb. Facing east, he has a lordly view of the afternoon commuter traffic parading from town. Unhappy drivers can squeeze compassion from his look: all-occasion sympathy from everybody's old friend. Because Mark Twain's connections to pizza remain doubtful, this particular effigy of him might amuse novices on this parkway. But it cannot astound. Even in high times of cultural illiteracy, most Americans over the age of twelve seem to know and like the face, the name, and their connectability to all sorts of national mischief.1 Sweetly, the Face peers down from billboards for banks, hotels, restaurants, and whole towns; in popular magazines it hawks power-boats, bourbon, and pricey excursions. Eighty years dead, Mark Twain regularly turns up as a vigorous and sympathetic character in novels by somebody else, and does guest appearances in Hollywood fantasies, sometimes about starships and space-time adventure. In fact no other American writer is drafted so often into other people's dreams and far-fetched tales. He is acted, cartooned, cast in bronze and "Clayamated"; Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald, and the press-courting Hemingway combined have never held the national spotlight so well. And if the Face has reigned through most of this century, then the Name stays a cultural mantra. In the newspapers, Mark Twain holds on as a most-favored quotable pundit on politics, society, theology, morals, and the weather; if his own actual words will not quite suffice, then other smart words are thought up and credited

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