REVIEWS

Critical Approaches to Mark Twain’s Short Stories. Edited by Elizabeth McMahan. Port Washington, New York: Kennikat Press, 1981. 147 pp. $15.00.

As the editor says in her preface, "This collection of criticism makes easily accessible the insights of a number of scholars who can help to further our appreciation of Twain’s artful short works." Each of the nine chapters is introduced by a brief biographical and critical note by McMahan, and following the first chapter—a general consideration on "How Mark Twain Writes"—each is titled by the name of the Twain work it concerns. In addition to McMahan’ s brief introductions, there are thirty-three selections in the book, including three by Twain, two from an unpublished dissertation, and the balance from scholarly books and articles. After the first chapter, "the arrangement is chronological: first, in sections according to the publication dates of the individual stories; then, within these sections according to the publication date of each essay."

Most of the works treated are readily available in popular anthologies; all but one of them, the editor points out, are included in Charles Neider’s The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain. This ready availability was one of the criteria for selections; apparently the other main criteria were suitability for teaching, genre, and literary quality. Among these, I am least comfortable with the genre criterion. "Short Story" is never given a proper working definition, and its application affords no reason why a framed-tale like "The Notorious Jumping Frog" and the long narrative "The Mysterious Stranger both qualify, while any number of Twain’s other short works do not. There is room for questioning the other criteria also, and McMahan does not explain in detail her reasons for any of these. Still, the book does fulfill her primary intention of supplying an overview of the criticism on a number of Twain’s best known shorter works: "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," "A True Story," "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note," "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg," "The $30,000 Bequest," "Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven," and "The Mysterious Stranger."

The amount of critical attention a given Twain selection has received was also a major criterion of selection: "Many of the stories in Neider’s collection," says McMahan, "make good reading but are not suitable for teaching and have received so little critical attention

that no references to them have been included in this volume." While I wish she had tried to define and explain what she means by suitability for teaching, I am not as bothered by this omission as I am by her decision to omit the footnotes which originally appeared with the critical selections she reprints.

"Whenever the notes contain crucial information, this material has been included in brackets within the text," says McMahan. I found many places, however, where her definition of "crucial" and my own did not coincide. For example, in George Feinstein’s essay, "Mark Twain’s Idea of Story Structure," there is frequent quotation from primary sources that are not identified in the text; the notes to this article in its original printing—American Literature (1946)—supply the reader with a short bibliography of primary sources on Twain’s theory of composition. While it is true, as McMahan points out, that readers can find such references by consulting the original sources, this volume’s handiness, the efficiency the user gains by its compactness and selective focus, is decreased markedly by the omission of the original notes.

There is a selected bibliography included at the end of the book, but it does not include all the sources cited in the critical articles. Sources are listed under headings for each Twain story treated, and given such an arrangement, it is clear that for some stories, the list is rather thin. Under "The £1,000,000 Bank-Note," for example, there are two entries which offer only two pages on this work.

Several authoritative and widely-known works provide McMahan with the bulk of her critical extracts. Most prominent among these are Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain: American Prophet (four selections); Gladys Bellamy, Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, and William Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain (three selections each). While McMahan has skillfully chosen different critical pieces so that they address different critical concerns and offer a variety of perspectives, there is occasionally some overlap and repetition.

The text in some ways resembles a "casebook" designed for a class that is writing critical papers on Twain’s short stories. It could certainly be used in this manner, though the absence of the original footnotes damages its utility, and the price is rather high for such use. Since most of the original sources reprinted here are available in any reasonably well-stocked college library, the book’s portability and special focus on the short story remain its chief assets.

Ben Franklin Laughing: Anecdotes from Original Sources by and about Ben Franklin. Edited by P. M. Zall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. 204 pp.

No other founding father has seemed so many different persons to so many people as has Benjamin Franklin. A talented artificer of several of these images, Franklin has sometimes appeared a cross between a national enigma and a chameleon. He has obligingly taken on the shape and color each generation needed most to see, and has metamorphosed, as each required, from plucky inventor to ingenious politician, to stunningly effective diplomat, to successful lover, to salacious wit. The Franklin one chooses to emphasize probably says as much about one’s self and one’s generation as about the man. The present decade seems quite comfortable with a Franklinian ambivalence. Thus scholars of the 1980s are likely to enjoy both laughing at and laughing with the great Doctor Franklin. If so, they will certainly enjoy this recent volume of Frankliniana.

Ben Franklin Laughing is itself a curiously improbable collection, for it combines exceptionally useful scholarly paraphernalia with delightful humor. The book supplies the same kind of wit and charm as its primary subject did. But it also holds up its sleeve the same trump Franklin kept up his: an unstrained competence to do what needs most to be done in the easiest, fastest, most convenient way. The book is easy to dip in and out of, yet is as hard to stay away from as a dish of peanuts. It has an equal appeal for the collector of American humor, the student of Franklin, the analyst of folk tales, and the lover of a good story.

First, a word about the multi-purpose organization of the volume. The primary two-part division falls between anecdotes Franklin told and ones told about him. While the latter make smoother reading, they quickly seem bland beside the former. For whereas tone, mood and point are always open to surprising twists and ironic doublings when the ingenious Benjamin is tailoring a tale to fit an occasion, the Franklin portrayed in others’ anecdotes about him seems more predictable. He’s most often the controlled but twinkled-eyed, basically balanced and generous producer of bon mots. His lines are normally quiet but to the point. He begins to seem a mechanical jokester.

Exceptions to anecdotal fondness for Franklin do, of course, exist. Zall takes one reference from the Diaries of Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie (published in two volumes, 1928), in which the British Minister to America mentions, shortly after Franklin’s death, that official circles "universally detested" him. Those revolving

around John Adams considered Franklin cunning rather than shrewd, and suspected him of an incestuous relationship with his daughter, to whom he had left the bulk of his fortune. After such surprising judgments are duly noted, however, the Franklin most people describe seems almost as predictable as Santa Claus. His personal potential is certainly more limited than the man who speaks from his own seemingly endless fund of adjustable stories.

That tale-spinner’s editor, P. M. Zall, displays a sophisticated awareness of the challenges of his editorial task. As he points out in the introduction, anecdotes are much like folk tales: reshaped in each retelling to convey not just an event, but also what that particular event means to the teller. Thus anecdotes inculcate folk wisdom as well as specific information; they are shaped by each succeeding generation. Within Zall’s two main sections, anecdotes are arranged chronologically, in terms of when they first appeared in letters, memoirs, newspapers, and the like. When several versions of the same anecdote exist, Zall prints the one which appeared first.

Besides the commonsensical division of anecdotes by class, and the logical, chronological arrangement of them within each section, Zall also provides an extremely helpful (if bizarre) initial table of contents by topic. The anecdotes are thus listed at the beginning by such headings as Aging, Children, Extravagance, Religion, Revolution, and so on. A much more specific index of alphabetized subjects appears at the end, as well as a chronological index and an index of reporters and repositories. Further, within the text, helpful but unobtrusive, inset information immediately follows each anecdote, concerning its source and history of reappearances. Thus, in an attractive and useful format, Zall provides many scholarly tools without detracting from his primary materials.

But a collection of Franklinian anecdotes must also take into account, as Zall does, the extent to which Franklin deliberately set about manufacturing his own public personae. For example, Zall reminds us, Franklin assiduously cultivated his image as the great womanizer at that time in his life—his 70’s—when he was severely incapacitated by gout, kidney stones, and prostatitis, and often almost totally immobilized. That Franklin was successful in disseminating this image, as in other enterprises, is perhaps best indicated by the appearance in 1932 of A. S. W. Rosenbach’s All-Embracing Doctor Franklin, a book which punningly declares its subject to be "America’s upstanding genius."

Finally, of course, the Franklin persona and the Franklin stories one enjoys best are two strong indicators of one’s own personality.

For what it’s worth, then, the following, written by Franklin, is my favorite from Zall’s plentiful store:

Judges in their Decisions often use Precedents. I have somewhere met with one that is what the Lawyers call a Case in Point. The Church People and the Puritans in a Country Town, had once a bitter Contention concerning the Erecting of a Maypole, which the former desir’d and the latter oppos’d. Each Party endeavour’d to strengthen itself by obtaining the Authority of the Mayor, directing or forbidding a Maypole. He heard their Altercation with great Patience, and then gravely determin’d thus; You that are for having no Maypole shall have no Maypole; and you that are for having a Maypole shall have a Maypole. Get about your Business and let me hear no more of this Quarrel. So methinks Lord Maresehal might say: You that are for no more Damnation than is proportion’d to your Offenses, have my Consent that it may be so: And you that are for being damn’d eternally, G-d eternally d--n you all, and let me hear no more of your Disputes.

Washington Irving. By Mary Weatherspoon Bowden. Boston: Twayne, 1981. 201 pp.

The reader prone to judge a book by its cover might expect this volume to be little more than a useful synthesis of previous scholarship and criticism, a restatement of accepted consensus. But this is hardly the case. The author’s approach to her subject is decidedly original, a fact that accounts not only for her book’s strengths but also its weaknesses.

It is Bowden’s contention that Irving was "throughout his life a staunch Jeffersonian"—a bold assertion that would no doubt have shocked V. L. Parrington. Indeed, it seems not a little perplexing to this reviewer, who must admit a sentimental fondness for such a notion but who longs nevertheless for more substantiation than Bowden provides. She is commendably sympathetic toward her subject’ s life and work, but if she would have us accept her revisionist Irving, a more systematic refutation of the opinions of Stanley Williams and others is in order. It is not enough to accuse Williams—as she does in an annotation in the appended bibliography—of a "hatred" for Irving, though admittedly Williams was not always the most responsive reader of Irving’s work. We need more documentation to support Bowden’s assumptions, in lieu of which her effort

to play down Irving’s spoof of Jefferson in the Knickerbocker History and her tendency to gloss over his break with Van Buren and the Democrats in 1840 seem a bit capricious.

This is not to suggest that the author is incapable of impressive scholarship or that her book does not have its share of persuasive insights. Quite the contrary is true. Her discussion of the Oldstyle letters and Salmagundi reveals an enviable acquaintance with the New York social and political milieu in question. Her explication of Irving’ s allusions to historical figures in these early works, and in The History of New York, is for the most part convincing, and it certainly serves to ground Irving’s humor in a definite time and place and to restore something of the spirit in which Irving’s satirical portraits were originally conceived. Likewise, her reading of the first American edition of The Sketch Book on its own terms (apart from the later revisions that substantially modified it) is a skillful exercise in reconstructing the work’s significance at the time of publication, and Bowden is unquestionably right when she asserts at the inception of her study that Irving was not primarily a short-story writer but a "composer of books" in which the meaning of the whole exceeds the mere sum of its parts.

But while much of what is best about Bowden’ s treatment of Irving stems from her acute feel for historicity, this same quality accounts for many of her book’s flaws as well. Gradually, the author’s preoccupation with reading Irving’s texts in the light of contemporaneous events itself takes on something of the nature of a Salmagundian "whim-wham." For example, she sees a much more serious purpose underlying the Knickerbocker History than previous commentators have acknowledged when she suggests that it is on one level an eloquent argument for a strong national defense. Surely such a claim is not a necessary precondition for taking Irving’s humor seriously; it seems gratuitous. And are we really to suppose that Irving continued to allude compulsively to Aaron Burr and DeWitt Clinton once he left America? Is "Wolfert Webber" in fact about the pitfalls of monarchical government, and is the protagonist of that story little more than a caricature of the feckless George IV? Bowden’ s determination to read Irving’s Legends of the Conquest of Spain as an attack on Calhoun is likewise less than convincing, as is her speculation to the effect that Mahomet may have been intended in part as veiled plea for tolerance toward Mormons. Even when the author cannot point to a specific historical figure as the "original" of a given Irving character, she is apt to suppose that such an unidentified prototype existed nonetheless. Indeed, on occasion Bowden even

suggests that certain events in Irving’s works accurately prophesy historical developments that came about after the work in question was written and published. From Bowden’s perspective, it would appear that Irving was not only a tireless chronicler of the world political scene of his own time, but a futuristic seer as well.

Many previous students of Irving have erred in dismissing him as a fanciful dilettante inhabiting a private world of imagination and whimsy, though his public life and his writings clearly testify to the contrary. Bowden’s book, aimed at countering this impression, errs by going too far in the opposite direction, arguing for the overriding political significance of Irving’s writing at the expense of a consideration of its demonstrable art. If I may be allowed to assume the prophet’s mantle for a moment myself, I will predict that the unwary undergraduate who comes to this book for an introduction to Irving will take away with him a good deal of misdirection. Caveat emptor!