REVIEWS

Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne and Mark Twain in the Holy Land. By Franklin Walker. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1974. $9.95.

Professor Walker, long known for his biography of Frank Norris and his literary histories of California, has provided a rather lively account of three American innocents in the Near East. Although some of this material is familiar to students of American literature, especially in the case of Twain, it is interesting and somewhat valuable to have an account which allows the reader to consider three contrasting responses to an area of the world largely known in the middle of the nineteenth century through less-than-scholarly biblical studies. The Levant was not often included in the usual itinerary of the American tourist, and conditions made travel something of a test of endurance. In his opening chapter, Walker has extensively sketched these conditions, often in graphic terms.

When John Ross Browne visited this area in 1851, he was scarcely a familiar figure in American letters. He had published his Etchings of a Whaling Cruise, with Notes of a Sojourn on the Isle of Zanzibar (one of the books used by Melville in Moby Dick) in 1846 and had worked as a journalist in Washington and elsewhere. His good fortune in being selected as reporter of the California constitutional convention had provided him with the funds for the trip in 1851, a trip which was the fulfillment of a long-standing ambition. Professor Walker has very wisely chosen to sketch in rather full detail the career of Browne, thus providing biographical information which is less familiar to the reader than in the case of Twain and Melville.

The literary fruit of Browne’s experiences is his Yusef; or, The Journey of the Frangi: A Crusade in the East (1853). Walker devotes a chapter to this work and restricts himself primarily to a general descriptive approach, perhaps the best method for handling a work of such relatively minor literary significance. Walker is particularly good, however, at analyzing the various techniques of Old Southwest humor which Browne employs in the "lighthearted" book.

The pattern of Irreverent Pilgrims is thus established in the treatment of Browne—a chapter of biographical material followed by one on the work under consideration (Melville’s Clarel and Twain’s Innocents Abroad). This arrangement is somewhat artificial, but not excessively so.

The biographical chapters on Melville and Twain are less valuable

than the one on Browne. In view of the ready availability of this material elsewhere, one could argue that such sketches are unnecessary. On the other hand, however, the particular concerns of the study require a specific familiarity with the Holy Land experiences of the three writers, and this Walker has provided. The Melville or Twain specialist will find little that is new here. For Melville, Professor Walker has used the standard sources—Howard, Arvin, and Leyda—and for Twain—Paine, Ferguson, Ridout, Ganzel’s study of the Quaker City voyage, and McKeithan’s valuable collection of Twain’s correspondence.

The discussion of Clarel is, as Walker concedes, not an attempt to engage in any new interpretations or study of the "prosody, structure, and thought" of Melville’s seldom-read work. Instead, Walker confines his discussion to the uses to which Melville put his Holy Land experiences and his reactions to them. There is little attempt to describe here the artistic process which intervened between experience and poem.

The treatment of Innocents Abroad is fresher and more rewarding, partly, no doubt, because of the nature of Twain’s humor. Walker shows at length how Twain transformed the raw materials of the Quaker City voyage into his first major book. Professor Walker’s obvious enthusiasm for his subject here is revealed in his approach to Twain. He is particularly helpful in showing how Twain revised materials, originally intended for newspaper publication, into a work with some unity and structure.

Irreverent Pilgrims provides another sustained look at its subject. One could wish that Walker had drawn more conclusions about the similarities or dissimilarities of these three American pilgrims, although some suggestions are thrown out at the end. The book has extensive notes, but annoyingly lacks an index.

Melville and the Art of Burlesque. By Joseph Flibbert. Amsterdam: Rodopi N.V., 1974. 163 pp. $12.00 (paper).

The tendency among literary historians to link Melville with Hawthorne rather than with Mark Twain is in many ways both understandable and justifiable. Hawthorne and Melville were close friends during the year and a half between the publication of The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, and, along with Poe, the two seem natural allies as "dark" Romanticists whose skeptical and tragic vision sets them apart from the transcendental optimism of Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman. Such formulations, however, have been increasingly recognized as misleading for a variety of reasons. In the case of Poe and Melville, one of those reasons lies in the comic imagination that exists not separate from, but intimately related to, the darker elements of skepticism and tragedy. When Melville vowed that Moby-Dick was a "wicked book," he may have meant, among other things, that it was wickedly funny. By the same token, the fact that The Scarlet Letter, for all its brilliance, is to many readers the lesser masterpiece may in part be traceable to the problem that worried Hawthorne himself: his inability to relieve its somber intensity with any cheering light—his inability to achieve that synthesis of the comic and tragic visions which gives Moby Dick so much of its Shakespearean range and depth. If Ahab lacks the low enjoying power, Ishmael has it in abundance, and without either of these characters the book quite simply could not exist.

But while the pervasiveness of the comic spirit separates Melville from Hawthorne, it draws him closer to Mark Twain. Chronologically, he stands about half-way between the two (Hawthorne is fourteen years older, Twain sixteen years younger), and the careers of the two younger men bear some seldom-noted resemblances. Both were deeply affected by the early deaths of their fathers (Melville was twelve, Twain eleven), after which both turned to odd jobs and ultimately to the adventures that led to their early popularity as writers of humorous autobiographical travelogues and exuberant satire. Both were torn between the demands of popularity and the ambition to write for a more discriminating audience, and each achieved a masterpiece at midcareer, followed by books that mixed comedy and tragedy with social and religious satire of increasing bitterness. Although such a catalogue of resemblances ignores a host of differences, it may serve as a basis for supposing that studies of Melville’s comic sense are onto something important. Thus Joseph Flibbert joins a number of earlier critics—chiefly Constance Rourke, Richard Chase, Daniel Hoffman, Edward H. Rosenberry,

and Ray B. Browne—who have attended to Melville’s adaptations of older comic techniques as well as contemporary patterns of native American humor and folklore.

Flibbert’s awareness of his predecessors is expressed not only in his footnotes but also in his introductory half-page of "Acknowledgements," which I trust is intended as a burlesque of that ubiquitous weakness of Melvillians for voyage tropes and nautical lingo—a highly infectious disease spread in part by that Melville Society, which, among other harmless sillinesses, announces its cocktail hour as a "drum-roll to grog." Flibbert refers to previous critics as ‘‘mariners,’’ reports on his ‘‘gain’’ with one critic ‘‘in mid—sea,’’ and expresses gratitude to another for the loan of a quadrant. After further comments about plotting the course, manning the bridge, being blown off course, and extracting oil from blubber, Flibbert makes the customary gesture to his wife, who "supervised the galley," thereby managing, it would seem, simultaneously to read proof and to cook the whale-steaks for dinner—a neat trick if you can do it.

Thereafter, Flibbert settles down to the serious business of discussing Melville’s burlesque humor, for at its best Melville’s humor is deeply serious, closely related to his central preoccupation with knowledge and truth. After a chapter on Typee and Omoo, occasionally insightful but as a whole somewhat perfunctory, Flibbert moves on to a longer and more provocative consideration of Mardi, building on Perry Miller’s earlier discussion of Melville’s position in the crossfire of literary burlesque in New York of the 1840s. From this atmosphere, and from the inescapable presence of P. T. Barnum, Melville imbibed the sense of literary high-jinks that led first to his burlesques of Zachary Taylor in Yankee Doodle (1847) and then to the extravagant playfulness of Mardi. Flibbert reads Mardi as an intentional burlesque from beginning to end, thus challenging the conventional view that Melville changed his conception of the narrative as he wrote it, and that he took seriously Taji’ s romantic idyll with Yillah. The argument is surprisingly persuasive. Here (and later) Flibbert is especially enlightening on Melville’s running quarrel with his reviewers, whose cavils at Typee and Omoo were subtly and repeatedly mocked in Mardi.

Passing over Redburn and White-Jacket on the grounds (perhaps questionable) that the discussion would be repetitive, Flibbert devotes successive chapters to Moby-Dick and Pierre, and a final one to Israel Potter and The Confidence-Man. On Moby-Dick, despite some incidental insights, he is fairly close to previous interpretations

of Ishmael’s comic sensibility, and in order to sustain the emphasis on burlesque he is forced to ignore the presence of Ahab almost totally. He is better, if still not wholly original, on Pierre and The Confidence-Man, where he finds Melville intensifying his quarrel with his readership, mocking both his own earlier truth-telling ambitions and the audience that was too shallow and complacent to listen.

The closeness of Flibbert’s argument to my own view of Melville’s fiction after Moby-Dick makes me strongly sympathetic toward his interpretation. Yet I also have some reservations, especially about his approach to Pierre. Flibbert makes a valiant attempt to read that novel as (like Mardi) a consistent burlesque, whose apparent flaws are part of an intentional pattern of parody and satire. This view, however, does not sufficiently account for the novel’s wide variations in tone and esthetic distance. A consistent burlesque must depend on a high degree of conscious artistic control—a degree which, in my view, Melville does not consistently maintain and Flibbert does not successfully demonstrate. The turmoil in Melville’s inner life during the period simply did not permit so systematic an application of his wayward creative energy. More specifically, I am not convinced by Flibbert’ s argument that Pierre’s relationship with his mother is intended as a burlesque of Melville’s relationship with his reading public. Rather, the two relationships spring from the same roots in Melville’s psychic life, both of them reflecting his rebellion against complacency and convention.

Other problems are more routine. For all his alertness to Melville’s humor, Flibbert takes seriously Ishmael’s preposterous interpretation of the "boggy, soggy, squitchy" painting in the Spouter Inn as a whale impaling itself on the masts of a ship—an interpretation clearly meant as a joke. More important, although Flibbert acknowledges most of the pertinent earlier scholarship, he is not as inclusive as he should be. Especially unaccountable is his failure to mention the major studies by Lawrance Thompson and Edgar A. Dryden, which bear on his subject in fundamental ways. Nor has he been particularly well served by his publisher. Typographical errors are fairly numerous, and one long block quotation (p. 128) is confusingly printed as part of the text instead of being set in reduced type. For so slipshod a piece of bookmaking—and for a paperback, no less—twelve dollars seems a mite steep.

Still, this is a crisply written and cogently argued study of a subject

more important than it may at first seem. It deserves the attention of anyone interested in Melville or in the varieties of American literary humor.

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The Frontier Humorists: Critical Views. Edited by M. Thomas Inge. Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books. 1975. ix, 331 pp. $15.00.

Professor Inge has done a real service for students of American literature by bringing together in one volume twenty well chosen critical and historical studies of various facets of Old Southwest humor. These studies were published over a long period of time, and since several of them originally appeared in less well known scholarly journals, they have heretofore been inaccessible.

After a helpful introduction, Inge divides the book into five sections. The first consists of three explorations of the whole tradition, the second of nine studies of individual humorists, the third of three analyses of folk figures, and the fourth of five examinations of the impact of the humorists on American fiction. The fifth section is a very comprehensive and useful bibliography of frontier humor compiled by Charles E. Davis and Martha B. Hudson.

In his introduction Inge discusses, among other topics, the conditions which encouraged the genesis and development of Southwestern humor, the kinds of characters and subject matter found in the humor, the contribution of the school to the rise of realism in American fiction, and its influence on European writers. Finally, he assesses the extent of its effect on the work of Mark Twain and William Faulkner and on modern fiction in general.

Two of the critical pieces in the first section are taken from Walter Blair’s Native American Humor (1800-1900) and Franklin J. Meine’ s Tall Tales of the Southwest. Since both are well known, seminal studies, they require no comment here. John Donald Wade’s "Southern Humor," published in 1934, is probably not so well known. Wade, who examines the historical background and social matrix of the school, defines the unique quality of southern humor and demonstrates that its influence lingered on into the 1930s.

The second section, comprised of nine essays on individual authors and works, opens with Poe’s 1836 sympathetic review of Augustus B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes in the Southern Literary Messenger. In the second essay Wade discusses Longstreet as humorist, satirist, educator, and Methodist minister. Georgia Scenes, he asserts, is one of the earliest examples of realism in American fiction. The next essay is a critical study by Walter Blair of "The Big Bear of Arkansas" in which he analyzes T. B. Thorpe’s expert use of the framework technique in this classic tale. The following four pieces, written by Donald Day, Brom Weber, Edmund

Wilson, and Milton Rickels, are concerned with George Washington Harris and his Sut Lovingood yarns. Day, Weber, and Rickels praise the quality of Harris’s humor, noting the variety of his characters, his effective use of the framework technique, and the richness of his style. In his essay, however, Edmund Wilson, except for expressing admiration for Harris’s imaginative language, takes an opposite point of view. Sut, he says, is "a peasant squatting in his own filth" and Harris’s is "by far the most repellent book of any real merit in America." Sut was clearly not to Edmund Wilson’s taste. In the next essay Eugene Current-Garcia, writing in 1952, asks for a reappraisal of the work of Joseph G. Baldwin. It is true, he says, that because Baldwin neglected his humorous writing to pursue a brilliant career as a jurist, he never lived up to his early promise. He believes, however, that Baldwin’s humor deserves more recognition than it has received. In the last essay in this section, James H. Penrod, writing on Hardin Taliaferro, argues that this North Carolina folk humorist has been unfairly neglected.

Three essays make up the third section of the book, entitled "Folk Figures." In "Mike Hooter—The Making of a Myth" John Q. Anderson illustrates the myth-making process by tracing the transformation of Mike Hooter from real Mississippi hunter and preacher to legendary hero. In the second essay James Atkins Shackford presents a convincing explanation of how David Crockett became a legendary figure and why he remains one. George Kummer in the third essay records the results of his attempt to track down the author of "The Harp of a Thousand Strings," a famous and enduring burlesque of the type of sermon preached by Hardshell Baptist preachers on the frontier.

Five substantial essays dealing with the impact of frontier humor on American fiction constitute the fourth section. In an excerpt from his book on Mark Twain’s humor, Pascal Covici, Jr., argues convincingly that although Twain’s humor undoubtedly owes something to that school, it transcends the tradition. Most of the frontier humorists, he points out, were outsiders who considered themselves gentlemen, and they generally satirized what they saw as the conscious and deliberate affectations of the frontiersman. But Twain, although he used the surface realism of the earlier humorists, went far beyond the exposure of affectation and laid bare the frightening irrationality that underlies much human behavior. It is Covici’ s thesis, too, that in his use of poker-talk and poker-face in presenting the American western character as he faced the East or Europe, Twain owed a considerable debt to frontier humor. In the second

essay Carvel Collins discusses Faulkner’s debt to the tradition. It is Collins’s belief that while Faulkner’s fiction does have the unmistakable flavor of the older humorists, it is impossible to determine how much he was influenced by their work and how much he learned of the tradition by living in Mississippi. But despite the similarities, it is Collins’s contention that basically Faulkner’s work is quite different from that of the earlier writers in "both purpose and method." In the next essay M. Thomas Inge also discusses the possible influence of the frontier humorists, particularly Harris, on Faulkner, and he comes to essentially the same conclusion as Collins. Although he sees a number of similarities between the humor of Faulkner and that of the earlier writers, Inge believes that Faulkner’ s artistic intent is far more serious than that of Harris and the other humorists. Next, Randall Stewart examines historically and critically the tidewater and frontier traditions in southern literature and expresses the view that Faulkner was influenced by both. In the final essay in the volume, Willard Thorp discusses the probable influence of frontier humor on such widely different southern writers as Mary Murfree, Flannery O’Connor, Truman Capote, Erskine Caldwell, and Carson McCullers.

Although one might argue with Professor Inge about the inclusion of some of the selections and the exclusion of other studies, the collection is well balanced and well organized. It includes some of the best scholarly work on the frontier humorists, and it illustrates the variety of approaches and viewpoints which scholars have taken in studying and evaluating them.

Henry James and the Comic Form. By Ronald Wallace. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press. 202 pp. $9.50.

In this provocative study, Ronald Wallace claims that Henry James is predominantly, though not exclusively, an artist of high comedy. He offers convincing analyses to substantiate that contention and shows how James’s "comic form" owes much to "serious high-comic artists like Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Molière." Wallace goes beyond Richard Poirier’ s pioneering work, The Comic Sense of Henry James, in dealing extensively with his subject’s later novels and in defining James’s comic sense more clearly—as "a Meredithian comic spirit which sees life as precariously balanced upon the brink of a disaster which it transcends" and "is primarily based on a conception of character." Seeing James’s major characters as descendants of the eiron—the self-deprecating figure—or the alazon—the impostor—Wallace comes up with some interpretations that are fresh, intriguing, and likely to provoke controversy among James experts. For example, though "never as flatly comic as the ‘fools’ who surround them, Christopher Newman, Isabel Archer, Basil Ransom, Olive Chancellor, and the narrator of The Sacred Fount all share an egotism which relates them to the tradition of the self—deceived protagonist;’’ they suffer from the ‘‘faulty vision" which is "a recurring theme of Henry James’s art." This judgment is supported most effectively in the analysis of Newman, least so in the discussion of Archer, who, says Wallace, "in her pride and ignorance, becomes almost demonic toward the end."

An "Introduction" in which Wallace defines the comic spirit as, among other things, "man’s weapon against chaos and absurdity and as an attitude which borders on tragedy," is followed by two chapters on "The Jamesian Character." A subsequent chapter on "The Jamesian Plot" finds two basic plot patterns in comedy: "a movement which makes all the actions of a character work against himself," and "the integration of a character into society or the formation of a new society around the character." Wallace feels that James’s use of these plot patterns pervades his international novels of manners and lends itself also to parody (a hitherto neglected aspect of James’s fiction), as well as to social satire. An all too brief section, "Notes on Style," is succeeded by "The Major Phase," a reinterpretation of The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl as rewarding as it is unconventional; Lambert Strether is seen as attaining a "new moral awareness" at the end but as "unable to form a new society around that awareness," whereas Maggie Verver’ s self-knowledge remains static "but she does manage to create a harmonious society

despite her lack of awareness." Unfortunately, The Wings of the Dove is ignored.

In "Conclusion," Wallace emphasizes, without using the key term, that his approach is the study of a genre: find and define the genre of a work and understanding of that work will follow. "For instance, when the reader perceives that The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl are basically comic in form, he perceives that neither Strether nor Maggie can be wholly praised or condemned." An "Appendix" on "Comedy in the Artist Tales" is Wallace’s largely successful attempt to correct the overly biographical approach of certain critics to these tales and to show that "if the tales seem tragic in shape, they are also obviously comic in style and tone." The book as a whole is reinforced by ample notes and by a "Selected Bibliography."

Wallace’s work will be of most use to James buffs; its value to those outside that esoteric sodality will be somewhat limited by the absence, from his scholarly yet readable treatise, of commentary on Daisy Miller and The Turn of the Screw—two exploits in genre probably assigned in more American literature classes than any other lessons of the master. One would have liked especially to see Wallace examine The Turn of the Screw as a parody, at least in part, of the gothic tradition.

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