Scholar sucks juice from Twain

“Mark Twain: Unsanctified Newspaper Reporter.” By James Caron (University of Missouri Press, 412 pp., 2008).

This is a book for Mark Twain scholars and specialists, not for Twain lovers. It is thoroughly researched and footnoted. Caron’s knowledge of Twain is vast and intimate. But the comic genius of Samuel Clemens must be enjoyed on the pages of Twain’s works, not written about.

We get a long discussion of the differences between Mark Twain as “narrator of comic character” and Sam Clemens the man. In just one paragraph on “the ethical purpose of comic laughter” we find that Plato says, Aristotle faults and Cicero notes.

On the next page we find how humor is defined by “English men of letters, including Thomas Hobbes, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison and Henry Fielding.” Ben Jonson resides in the same sentence and Thackeray dwells one sentence later. It is all too much.

Then we get long discourses on comic laughter. Caron cites Plato and Mikhail Bakhtin on Rabelais. One footnote runs to nine lines, the author unnecessarily showing his homework. When Caron writes of Twain’s “anthropological approach” the reader stiffens. Twain and anthropology do not jibe. Moreover, Caron’s prose is often murky, academic.

Section and chapter headings talk of “The Communal Function of Comic Violence.” “Comic Violence and Cultural Barbarism” and “Playing with Comic Dynamite.” Scholarly to be sure but dull stuff.

The best section deals with the glory days on the Comstock. Only San Francisco could rival Virginia City as the pre-eminent metropolis in the Far West. At times the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise had a larger circulation than any paper in San Francisco.

The Enterprise epitomized Washoe journalism. “It was…the brainiest sheet on the Coast. It was privy to all of the mountain’s secrets (Mount Davidson) both above and below the earth’s crust. It had acquired enormous prestige. It could make or break any man in the Nevada Territory. It was honest and fearless…It was Comstock to the core, the mirror of her astounding personality, the sounding board of her buoyant, virile life.”

As for Twain on the Comstock, his local columns exhibit “capable reporting and sly yarn spinning.” But the “yarn spinner overshadowed...the reporter,” mixing fact and fiction. Indeed, Twain had been hired in 1866 by the San Francisco Morning Call as a reporter, not a comic writer. He was soon fired, admitting his “reportorial shortcomings.”

Caron is occasionally afflicted with the Biographer’s Syndrome. He hypothesizes: “Writing his local columns, Clemens must have”…“Clemens apparently would not sign”… “Clemens probably would have made the decision”…“Clemens most likely employed.”

But Twain himself was always a compelling figure. He launched his literary career on the Enterprise, working for the paper from September 1862 to May 1864. Twain called himself unsanctified because he used his comic vision to play hell, “embodying what proper society might call social ‘sins.’ ”

He symbolized “the Nevada territory in its madcap moods, its carnivalesque frontier democracy.” His comic flair was perfect for Comstock miners, stamp mill operators and teamsters.

Comstock writers like Dan De Quille (William Wright) influenced the comic sketches and fantasies of Mark Twain. Caron notes the striking similarities between De Quille and Twain.

Caron, an English professor at the University of Hawaii, deals with Twain’s writing in the 1860s. Twain was a brilliant Western writer, using the traditional tactic of the tall tale and deadpan exaggeration.

But under the surface fun, the Twain had a deep sense of justice. He muckraked in San Francisco in 1864 for the Morning Call. Much later he excoriated the American military intervention and slaughter in the Philippines.

The San Francisco Bulletin noted this characteristic “Beneath the surface of his pleasantry lies a rich vein of serious thought. He instructs as well as amuses and even his broadest jokes have a moral.”

Caron, writing about Twain’s 1866 travel letters from Hawaii (which the author spells as the affected “Hawai’i), notes Twain’s prudishness about the hula-hula. Twain said the dance was lascivious, demoralizing, barbaric. He associated the hula with sex.

Nevertheless, lovers of the spirit, humor and sardonic laughter of Twain would do better to reread his early works than struggle with the Caron tome. Such works as: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865), “Journalism in Tennessee” (1869), “The Innocents Abroad” (1869) and “Roughing It” (1872).

I recall reading parts of “Roughing It” and being unable to resist laughing out loud. A tribute to a great humorist. Twain was a comic giant who gained such worldwide renown that even the dour Soviets applauded him.