Knave, Fool, and Genius: Tue Confidence Man as He Appears in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. By Susan Kuhlmann. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1973. x, 142 pp. $7.95.

In Knave, Fool, and Genius Susan Kuhlmann suggests that the figure who stalked out of the brush as Davy Crockett, Simon Suggs, or similar Southwestern sharpsters did not return to it when frontier humor faded, but instead stalked his way through various works by major authors of the mid-nineteenth-century and thereafter, changing habitat and approach but continuing "systematically and deliberately to seek the confidence of another or others" to abuse it for financial gain. Waiving chronology in order to study characters related in type or treatment, Professor Kuhlmann undertakes to follow this shifting figuie "from his most artlessly artful days to his advent as a character with the broadest moral and philosophical suggestions for what is untrustworthy in his native land." And in general she tracks his course with some success.

In Section I, "Exploring the Territory," Kuhlmann treats the confidence man’s appearance in humorous regional writing of the South and West. Beginning (somewhat surprisingly) with Cooper’s Natty Bumppo, she considers Davy Crockett, Longstreet’s Ned Brace, and Hooper’s Simon Suggs, Bret Harte’s con men and women, and various Twain figures before centering on those "self-consciously artistic frauds," the King and Duke in Huckleberry Finn and Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee, who exemplify the role of language in hoaxing. Linking biographical facts to fiction, she explores the connections between the King (as printer) and the Duke (as platform performer) with their creator, who likewise loved display and gaudy rhetoric. In Section II, "Inveigling the Spirit," she emphasized games which, while played for money, centrally exploit emotional, esthetic, or spiritual needs, and explores the con man’s philosophical and allegorical dimensions. After studying proponents of false supernaturalism in works by Hawthorne, Howells, and Twain, she examines confidence men and women in Henry James’s "Four Meetings," Portrait of a Lady, and The Wings of the Dove. Here innocence becomes the chief American weakness, and the cultural resources of Europe replace the natural resources of the frontier as the spheres of extended opportunity where tricksters flourish but do not succeed to the degree that their frontier predecessors do because their victims’ goodness "defeats the sin by pardoning the sinner." The chapter on Melville shifts the scene back to mid-century America, where an atmosphere of speculation and financial trickery feeds a sense of social corruption and a diminished trust in man’s benevolence to produce the pessimism of The Confidence Man, which mirrors Melville’s ambivalence toward the union of predatory drives and gracious sociability in his "man-charmer." Though Kuhlmann offers a detailed reading of the book, this chapter is occasionally frustrating in its

interruption of major points to move hack and forth between Melville’s earlier and later fiction. One wishes, too, that it established firmer links with the Southwestern writers who were in certain ways Melville’s forerunners in the humor of this and other of his books.

In the fine concluding chapter Kuhlmann sees the confidence man as an emblem of "the fictive Imagination employed as a ‘useful art’ " in an America which valued inventiveness more in industry than in other spheres. Offering a nineteenth-century slant on life, he cannot flourish in our time, where the individual becomes "the last refuge of integrity" against manipulation by large-scale organizations in a society which, we increasingly feel, has succeeded in conning us.

Only a few flaws mar this clear and streamlined study. Unlike later chapters, the preface needlessly obfuscates issues, especially in its puzzling insistence that this is a work of "reconstituted fiction" rather than the "reconstituted reality" of the literary historian, when actually Professor Kuhlmann fruitfully places authors and works within a cultural and biographical as well as a critical context. By contrast, other main points are almost too obvious—such as the oft reiterated and surely unexceptionable claim that the confidence man becomes an instrument of social criticism when his victims invite manipulation through their weakness, stupidity, or corruption. Issue might also be taken with aspects of the first chapter, which unduly stresses Natty Bumppo as an ancestor of the confidence man and tends to neglect the Important role of the Yankee peddler, who in works like John Neal’s Down-Easters and William Gilmore Simms’s Guy Rivers made an honorable (or dishonorable) contribution to American fiction. Moreover, despite the valuable analyses in Section II, it perhaps unavoidably lacks the unity of material and attitude in Section 1, which gains from focusing on works treating similar regions and using similar techniques. Finally, the parallel Kuhlmann tries to maintain between the art of the confidence man and that of his creators seems peripheral until the last chapter—where, however, it functions well.

Nonetheless, the book has many praiseworthy features. Its wide reading is lightly carried; its analyses are never dull; its presentation is lively and succinct. Whether or not we accept them, it offers new perspectives on major authors by connecting them, through the confidence man’s pervasive presence, with minor writers not usually placed so squarely in their company.

It is difficult to find critics of contemporary novels who do more than slip over the comic elements with stock phrases. Practically everyone is ready to insist on the importance of comedy to our contemporary vision,

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but few really illustrate just how that comedy specifically operates within a sizeable body of fiction. Thus Cohen’s focus on the literary aspects of comedy in a major modern American novelist’s work is a welcome contribution.

Saul Bellow’s Enigmatic Laughter is a well ordered, careful, and measured study of the comic nature of Saul Bellow’s major novels. Cohen’s interpretations of Bellow’s themes are neither surprising nor new; but in her discussion of comedy Cohen is brilliant. Her design is easy to follow; she has a chapter for each work (excluding his play The Last Analysis and his short story collection Mosby’s Memoirs) and an introduction and conclusion which stay very close to her specific analyses of characters and comedy within Bellow’s corpus. The book is tightly-woven; each chapter focuses closely on the protagonist of the primary work being considered, and as the study proceeds there are continual contrasts and comparisons of her own premises in what becomes almost a self-contained system. She is good at suggesting Bellow’s evolution and growing maturity as a writer and at delineating a complex sense of his uses of comedy.

Cohen uses criticism that has gone before her, and one feels in her book the sense of a scholarly community sharing ideas and insights. Though she places Bellow within other contexts (Judaism, Bellow criticism and Bellow’s remarks concerning his own writing and writing in general, and a wide expanse of other writers) her primary focus is on the comic variety -evidenced in Bellow’s novels. Her understanding of comic theory is sound; she draws heavily from Henri Bergson’s "Laughter"; Wylie Sypher’s essays on comedy in Comedy; and Nathan Scott, Jr.’s "The Bias of Comedy and the Narrow Escape into Faith." The application of their ideas in Bellow is convincing and illuminating—both toward the theories and toward the vital expression of them in Bellow.

While the dazzling pyrotechnics of Cohen’s language might put her in the same boat with Bellow (she describes his "liberties" with language in The Adventures of Augie March as "piquantly truant" and "often so wildly clever that they steal the show from the more sedate thoughts they are meant to convey"), Cohen’s critical vocabulary is actually so rich and finely nuanced that she can suggest the functioning of comedy in Bellow’s work in a number of ways and within a very subtle range of variations. The following passage illustrates both Cohen’s penchant for phrase-making and her sense of the shifts in Bellow’s comiiic style and purposes:

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The function of comedy in Bellow’s work is, according to Cohen, varied, but pervasive. Bellow’s "underlying comic vision is there to oppose his pessimistic outlook." Bellow retaliates against despair by using comedy to "interrupt, resist, reinterpret, and transcend adversity." His comedy of character both exposes and affirms man. His comedy of ideas sets up a tug of war between the body and the mind. And his comedy of language reveals his faith in words—"unlike the literature of the absurd whose language has been reduced to mechanical phrases, nonsense syllables, incoherent grunts, and even silence"—and shows that in the process of comedy "created by language" Bellow "animates, loosens up, and coins words and phrases to make for a comic style which entertains as well as elucidates."

Though Cohen insists on the elements of agony and despair in Bellow’s work, she is careful to take him away from the razor edge of the Black Humorists; she brings him much closer to the center, and I think she is correct in doing so. Her analysis makes strong claims for the curative and the balance which the comic brings to a vision of life, and she is careful to

be non-reductive. The comic vision that she presents to us throughout this study is one which does not resolve; it, rather, reveals. The tensions, the paradoxes, the evils, and most particularly, the mysteries of life will always be there, and Bellow’s comedy, she asserts, "has not unraveled the mystery. What his comedy has done is sharpen our perception of it, and increase our awe of it."

In the preface to his recent book The Dismemberment of Orpheus, Ihab Hassan says that the book that we write is never the book that we imagine. So, too, is the book that we read never quite the book that we want. It is perhaps then in the spirit of a coach who says to her star athlete, "If you’d just raise your arm a little higher next time . . . ," that I suggest one area that I am dissatisfied with in Cohen’s book. It is human nature that sometimes the very thing that one deems a virtue can also be considered as a flaw, and it is that very careful focus, that almost explication de texte, which makes me feel that the book may be too narrow. For my part, I would have enjoyed a final chapter in which Cohen gave freer scope to her background in comedy as she saw its implications more deeply in the modern scene. I don’t really get a sense of Bellow as a comic writer among other modern comic writers. Cohen mentions Black Humorists, dark comedy, and the absurd, but comedy as it explores man in extremity, as it arouses "terror" (Ellen Leyburn’s discussion of it, for example, in "Comedy and Tragedy Transposed" in The Yale Review, 1964); or the comic "as a frightening moment, as an abyss that opens suddenly . . ." (in the playwright Friedrick Dürrenmatt’s essay Problem of the Theatre) are absent from her work. It seems to me that we need to place Bellow more thoroughly within the current context, alongside the various forms of comedy that are produced side by side in our culture. But that, I suppose, just leaves another book to be written.

Tar Heel Laughter. Edited by Richard Walser. Chapel Hill, N.C.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1974. xvi, 312 pp. $9.95.

Tar Heel Laughter, compiled by Richard Walser who is perhaps the Tar Heel State’s "best-known collector of native literary work" as claimed on the dust jacket, is another useful volume in a series which began in 1942 with North Carolina Poets and includes such titles as Poets of North Carolina, Short Stories of the Old North State, and Literary North Carolina. Using selections from newspapers, magazines, and oral reports as well as purely literary sources, Tar Heel Laughter chronicles humor in North Carolina from John Lawson’s curious and often hyperbolic anecdotes in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709) to the "country sayings" of "Senator Sam" Ervin.

Drawing, among other sources, upon the extensive material in the libraries of the University of North Carolina and Duke University, the book is oriented as much toward folklore as literature, and as Professor Walser states in his introduction, it "is a reader’s edition and not a scholarly one." As such, it will be particularly interesting to any Tar Heel who wants an accurate and amusing account of laughter in North Carolina. However, as a scholar trained in literature and folklore, Professor Walser has also edited a volume which will be of use to the student because of its generally comprehensive nature and thoughtful attention to "scholarly details" such as timely and knowledgeable head and footnotes, an extensive bibliography, and a carefully compiled index—so needed in a work drawn from many sources. About half of the twenty chapters deal with general topics—Old-Time Tom-foolery, Legal Wit, Black Merriment—and the rest are devoted either to real people—Thomas Wolfe or Harry Golden—or to a literary persona such as John Winslow’s Billy Warrick. The overall sequence is chronological. Thus the book is a useful tool for students of North Carolina humor in particular anti perhaps of Southern humor in general.

But is North Carolina humor a definable entity separable from Southern humor? In observing that "humor is a ‘traveling’ commodity" and that "it is not possible that each selection in a book of regional humor can positively be identified as originating in that region," Walser takes note of this problem. Much of the material seems generically Southern, a "humor of rhetorical exhilaration." Still, existing as a "vale of humility between two mountains of conceit" (in Thomas Wolfe’s phrase), North Carolina does seem to have an identity which colors many of the selections. First, the humor Is produced unconsciously: it derives from a sense of wonder and admiration aroused by things and people that exist in the Old North State. Next, it usually results from keen observation of people, places, and things—observations that inspire a quick, incisive, and ironic response, although the irony may become apparent only in retrospect. Then, it gives people (individually and collectively) their due, while revealing but little conscious regard for whether that due is complimentary or critical. Ever present in most selections is a capacity for self-criticism, an element which has enabled Tar Heels to survive both achievement and calamity without overindulgence in unwarranted presumption or self-destructive despair. Other elements that have enriched Tar Heel laughter, especially during the past century, are irreverence (intentional and accidental), occasional cruelty, and rural ignorance that expresses itself in often profound but rather consistently incongruous and sometimes ludicrous wisdom. True enough, as the above qualities indicate, Tar heel laughter does have a great deal in common with humor traceable throughout human history and at various locations on the globe—especially the hill country humor of such neighboring states as Kentucky and Tennessee. Yet a close scrutiny of laughter spoken by and about Tar heels reveals traits that are distinctive if

not unique—particularly those selections which deal with a certain character or area.

A case in point centers on the personality of Governor Zeb Vance (1830–92). Although, as Walser observes, "seldom can a collector be positive that Vance was the originator of a certain turn of speech, a certain anecdote, a certain incident," his "oversized personality" seems to draw attention to itself. His wit, marked by the quick, ironic response that can turn a losing situation into a winning one—a quality especially needed when he held public office after the Civil War—can be described as at the least "Southern" if not specifically Tar Heel. Consider Vance’s reply to General Kilpatrick of Pennsylvania, who, in Zeb’s words, claimed that "he tamed me by capturing me and riding me two hundred miles on a bareback mule."

These are not only the words of a Southerner still fighting back but the words of a mountain man from a state "caught in the middle" for most of its existence.

Although Tar Heel Laughter is certainly adequate for a "reader’s edition," it might have been more complete had it begun, not with John Lawson’s 1709 work, but with Thomas Hariot’s A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land (1588) which is, as Walser himself says in Literary North Carolina, "the first book about the New World written in English by one who had lived there." Although related with serious intent, Hariot’s exaggerated account of the "medicinable vertues" of "uppowoc" (tobacco) strikes the modern reader’s funnybone with at least as much force as similar anecdotes by Lawson. However, this is a minor omission in a book which more than adequately fulfills its purpose of supplying the general reader with an account of Tar Heel laughter.

A Cheerful Nihilism: Confidence and the Absurd in American Humorous Fiction. By Richard Boyd Hauck. Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana. 1971. xiv, 269 pp. $9.50.

Richard Boyd Hauck has written a thematic study of "The Absurd" in American literary humor. His book is addressed to the knowledgeable

reader rather than the specialist. Divided into eight chapters, Hauck’s study begins with an essay on the American Sisyphus, the representative American writer who creatively laughs at nihilism. In the following chapters, Hauck groups Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and John Barth, all chosen for their consciousness of the absurd, with frontier humorists such as Henry Clay Lewis, John S. Robb, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, William Tappan Thompson, and Thomas Bangs Thorpe.

The most rewarding sections in A Cheerful Nihilism are those on frontier and contemporary humorists. Hauck has done substantial work on some little known frontier writers whose works appeared in Spirit of the Times. His application of Albert Camus’s definition of absurdity in The Myth of Sisyphus to the productions of the frontier works smoothly enough as does his application of the myth to the novels of John Barth, in particular to either extant edition of The Floating Opera. Todd Andrews confronts Camus’s first question of suicide and finds little reason either to die or to live. In short, he finds no reason and arbitrarily decides to live in the second version. In the first version he feels interest in the fate of a convulsing child and takes that unsuspected feeling to be, in part, a hopeful reason to live.

Hauck is less successful, however, in his analysis of Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, and Mark Twain. Jonathan Edwards, maintains Hauck, soberly created a solution to his awareness of absurdity, fully aware, as Camus was aware, of the absurdity of creating a human solution. Edwards, however, was working within the confines of the Puritan cosmos, and the abyss beneath his feet was quite literally hell, not the abyss of contemporary consciousness. Benjamin Franklin, explains Hauck, was a confidence man, in that he was a self-made man who created himself with full knowledge of the alternatives to confidence: in modern terms, pessimism and death. If by imitating Socrates and Jesus, Franklin can evince humility, and humility is a valuable trait in society, then Franklin will imitate. In Hauck’s thesis, Franklin will consciously and absurdly create meaning in a meaningless universe. Franklin, however, was an eighteenth-century Deist confident of the powers of man and man’s reason. His belief in mankind is echoed by Faulkner’s belief that man will endure. Franklin’s self-confidence followed naturally from the nature of existence as lie saw it.

Finally, the man who fits Hauck’s thesis least is Mark Twain. One cannot quarrel with Hauck’s observations about Mark Twain’s ambivalence toward purposefulness and purposelessness; one can hardly differ with Hauck’s generalization that Twain wrote "serious comedy." What is disturbing is Hauck’s almost casual assumption that Mark Twain was at home among philosophical niceties as he was with the frontier yarn. Far from a trained, rigorous thinker, Twain was a writer of profound imagination and huge comic sense, who in old age professed a profound despair at the nature of man, fate, amid the anthropomorphic Christian

God. The Connecticut Yankee is far more complex a work than Hauck delineates; since the definitive work of Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain’s Fable of Progress, the novel has been viewed, as one of Hauck’s notes says, as emblematic of " ‘absolute despair.’ " But paradoxically, Twain habitually juxtaposed burlesque humor and light-hearted parody with hopeless passages, playing havoc with the tone of works from Huck Finn to the Mysterious Stranger (now known as Chronicle of Young Satan).

A Cheerful Nihilism is provocatively titled and executed; its treatment of modern artistic consciousness is fairly sound. Its merit is that it raises new arguments among students of humor in America.

David Kesterson’s Josh Billings is an excellent introduction to a writer who is, one is convinced by the introduction, "currently too much ignored." The organization is especially good. In a general study of this kind there is often the problem of the overlapping of topics, but Kesterson has dealt clearly and succinctly with Shaw’s life, subject matter, literary forms, and techniques in his nine chapters: "Man of Many Trades," " ‘Affurisnis,’ " "Essays and Sketches," "Salmagundi," "Jest Books," "Almanacs," "Josh on the Platform," "A Word of Appraisal," and "Conclusion."

In the biographical chapters Shaw emerges as a genial man with "more friends, perhaps, than any other man in the city of New York," (among them such notable figures as Mark Twain, Charles Farrar Browne, James Whitcombe Riley, Petroleum V. Nasby, Thomas Nast, Bayard Taylor, William Cullen Bryant), who did not begin his writing career until he was in his middle forties and yet became immensely popular as a columnist, almanac writer, and $100 a night lecturer. It would be difficult to find a more genial motto than the one Kesterson uses for an epigraph:

Perhaps the best chapters, however, are those that deal with Shaw’s work, and since they contain a generous amount of quotation, they are, as Josh would say, "a grate deal ov phun." These quotations are one of the best features of the book because, as Kesterson notes in his preface, some of these works are out of print and "many of them are not commonly

found in libraries." Kesterson differentiates Shaw from most of the other literary comedians by pointing out that he uses non-narrative forms. He is very adept at the aphorism: "There iz 2 things in this life for which we are never fully prepared, and that iz twins." Among the techniques used in his aphorisms are pithiness, misspelling, incorrect grammar, distorted syntax, slang, anticlimactic sentences, understatement, puns, malapropisms, and extraordinary or mixed figurative language. Singled out for comment is Shaw’s imagery: "Shaw had the rare poetical ability to convey his thoughts in sharp verbal pictures, surpassing the often trite, hyperbolic images of his contemporaries."

Shaw’s essays and sketches, brief (rarely more than five hundred words) and apparently loosely structured, were some of his most famous productions and cover a wide range of topics: "The Pompous Man," "The One Idea Man," "The Happy Man," "The Cunning Man," "The Pashunt Man," "The Square Man," "The Oblong Man." He is unusually profuse in observations about the animal world: "Aunt and Grasshopper," "Snails," "Angle Worms," "The Pissmire," "The Cursid Musketo," "The Crow," "The Robbing," "Sandy Hill Crane," "The Blak Snaik," "The Hoop Snaik," "The Possum," "The Rabbit," "Essa on the Muel"—to name only a few. Another variety of Shaw’s work is the jest book: Twelve Ansestrals Sighns in the Billings’ Zodiac Gallery, Josh Billings Spice Box, Josh Billings’ Trump Kards: Blue Grass Philosophy, Josh Billings’ Cook Book and Pictorial Proverbs, and Josh Billings Struggling With Things. Of the Spice Box volumes, Kesterson says, "Presented mostly in normal spelling, grammar, and syntax, these books are the most likely of all Shaw’s jest books to provide an evening’s curious entertainment for the modern reader." Shaw’s own favorite undertaking were his burlesque almanacs, Josh Billings’ Farmer’s AIlminax, published over a ten-year period and collected in a one-volume edition under the title Old Probability: Perhaps Rain—Perhaps Not.

In the last two chapters, Kesterson summarizes the critical opinion of Shaw in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and, in a very judicious manner, considers the matter of spelling in Shaw’s work. He concludes by placing Shaw not only among the American literary comedians of the nineteenth century with whom he is usually associated, but also in the broader group of humorists and moralists of Western literary tradition.