Tuesday, January 19, 2016

measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote - Twain versus Scott in Life on the Mississsippi

First they read Walter Scott.  It was like the shock of a new world revealed.  (Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pecuchet, Ch. 6, tr. Mark Polizzotti)

Sir Walter Scott is probably responsible for the Capitol building [of Louisiana]; for it is not conceivable that this little sham castle would ever have been built if he had not run the people mad, a couple of generations ago, with his medieval romances.  The South has not yet recovered from the debilitating influence of his books.  (Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi, 1883, Ch. 40)

Twain’s great screed against Walter Scott is in Life on the Mississippi, Chapter 46.  I have long wondered to what extent he meant it.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.  (Ch. 46)

In the next line he does call this a “wild proposition.”  His argument is that for some unspecified reason, Southern culture was especially susceptible to Scott’s “Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical, common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.”

Twain returns to the idea enough that I think he did mean it.  Tom Sawyer is Twain’s Scott-damaged representative, harmless enough in his own book but dangerous in the notorious last episode of Huckleberry Finn (1885).  That much-hated ending has almost convinced me that Twain was right, although he puts too much emphasis on the medieval Scott, when his Scottish novels are more important (and also better novels).

The Southern gentility, much of it descended from the people depicted in Scott’s novels, embraced the ethos of honor and glory they read about in the novels as their own, along with an ugly modernization of the clannishness.  Losing the war only added to the identification with Scott’s doomed loyalists and fanatics, sacrificing everything for the Young Pretender or radical Calvinism, depending on which novel seemed most appealing.  That Scott and his protagonists are generally on the other side is beside the point.

Much of the decline of Scott comes from the massive shifts in our idea of honor – true no matter who I mean by “our,” I think – and the replacement of glory with celebrity.  Twain, one of his time’s greatest celebrities, writes as an opponent of the old honor.

[Scott] did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.

So, that first line aside, I just about half believe Twain, maybe about as much as he believed himself.

Life on the Mississippi is, setting the Scott chapter aside, great fun from beginning to end – “The Mississippi is well worth reading about” (Ch. 1).  It is about one-third the memoir of Twain’s time as a cub pilot in the 1850s, and two-thirds a travel book with Twain revisiting the river.  I had thought the proportions were reversed.  At times I wished the proportions were reversed.  I mean, the glory days of the steamboats, what a time.  A visit to St. Paul – Twain is thorough – is not as interesting, even in Twain’s hands.  The proportion of nonsense and digression is satisfyingly similar to other Twain “non-fiction.”

22 comments:

  1. i read "life" numerous times when i was young; always remember it with great affection. have you come across his diatribe on cooper? that's another screed in which his critical side comes out. interesting what you imply re the transference of cultural stereotypical values; i've often thought that habits of thought, or, what, mass modally behavioral systems have a lot to do with how and what happens in social interactions in a larger sphere. not being clear here; it's like why it's de rigeur for advertising men to wear dark suits and muted ties, or why ranchers try to look like john wayne. social movements or behaviors like this may account for why the human world acts in irrational ways-wars, rebellions, fanaticism, etc. even patterns of thinking: monarchy, democracy, political theorems of all sorts may derive from some sort of brain attractiing concept or idea. i know i'm not very clear about this, but somewhere in there is what i think is a fairly good proposition re human behavior. that is reflected in literature. whaddayathink?

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  2. Yes, the two attacks on Cooper are masterpieces of their kind. I should have mentioned that Twain also thinks Scott ruined Southern prose. It's his explanation for why there were no great Southern writers.

    He thinks Scott ruined Northern prose, too (e.g., Cooper), but that Northern writers more quickly shook off the bad influence. The Southern writers stuck with it.

    It is the stickiness you are writing about, I think. Most cultural ideas don't stick to anything. But when they do, maybe you get the results you are describing, you get a system that starts changing things.

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    1. I get the feeling in talking to various readers that many more people today have read Twain's attack on Cooper than have read Cooper (myself included). I didn't know there were two attacks: I've only seen "Literary Offenses".

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    2. There is a second essay titled, in the Library of America volume, "Fenimore Cooper's Further Literary Offenses." But maybe it is wrong to call it a second attack. I think it is actually just more of the same essay. Twain wrote long and had to cut out a bunch of offenses. But he saved them, so they were published posthumously.

      More more more. Take that, dead horse, and that, and that!

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  3. I continue to follow your postings with great interest, but -- alas -- I have not much that is worthwhile to add because I have not read Twain in a long, long time; however, I am poised to return to Twain once I get Poe out of my system (which I have highlighted at my blog this morning). Still, I like the idea you put forward (which I now paraphrase): readers who think Twain was writing "nonfiction" ought to be careful about that kind of thinking.

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  4. Twain is not afeared to include a stretcher or two, for the sake of variety.

    In Ch. 24, he is kind enough to give the story about dredging alligators to another character:

    [Twain]: "I should think that dredging out the alligators wouldn't have done much good, because they could come back again right away."

    [pilot]: "If you had had as much experience of alligators as I have, you wouldn't talk like that. You dredge an alligator once and he's convinced. It's the last you hear of him. He wouldn't come back for pie."

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  5. I so hope you'll read "The Innocents Abroad." That and "Mississippi" gave me hope that I could find more Twain that I would like, and Puddinhead Wilson is on the TBR shelf now, along with all three versions of The Mysterious Stranger. Huck Finn, and I just re-read him, still doesn't do it for me. He's no Ishmael.

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  6. Maybe I'll return to the travel book aspect of Twain today. I might have one more thing to say about it. Worth a try. Roughing It sounds like a sure thing for you. It pairs with Mississippi nicely.

    A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator are the two I have not read. I hope to get to at least one of them this year.

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  7. Bernard Shaw shared Twain's opinion of Scott: "With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his."

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  8. Shaw and Twain are classic examples of why I seldom if ever pay attention or credence to one writer's opinion of a competitor. It just shows how small-minded and jealous they are.

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    1. I should take offense, really. I'll think about it. Maybe I can work up a teaspoon of high dudgeon.

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    2. Second thoughts: If a person is going to be small-minded and jealous about another, let it be gloriously small-minded and jealous.

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    3. To be fair to Shaw, he was reviewing Sir Henry Irving's production of Cymbeline, which may justify a jaundiced view of Shakespeare, if not Scott and Homer.

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  9. Hah, I was just thinking about Twain on furriners--The Awful German Language and his book about the Jumping Frog scratched into French and back out again. I have read the Leatherstocking tales and so am well equipped to appreciate Twain's attacks on Cooper, especially as I go by Cooper's moldering body fairly frequently, so he comes to mind--well, he does come to mind constantly in Cooperstown, as most everything is named after him, or Natty Bumppo, or a tale.

    I love Life on the Mississippi and a good deal of Twain, but I also find a good bit to appreciate in the Leatherstocking tales. There's a certain amount of deep wading, but there's some beauty and dreamy strangeness too.

    And pshaw, Shaw! What twaddle that is. Although I love Shaw's description of his mother's cremation so much!

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    1. i've read quite a bit of cooper also and i've found him accessible and sometimes surprising; i liked "the oak openings" about the beehive chaser...

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    2. I am quite fond of the water burials and Deerslayer in love with the forest. I actually re-used the water burials in a book of my own. Same lake, same bodies, but now Cooper is also dead.

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  10. Well, one kind of writing ain't getting done tonight, so how about this kind.

    I love the Shaw quote. He and Twain are writing when Scott is still a worthwhile enemy. Not too much later, he is vanquished.

    Honestly, I usually feel like I learn a lot from writer's lunges at each other. Not necessarily what the writer intended; still, a lot.

    I have only read The Pathfinder, which has the scene Twain minces, and had good luck with it. When I visit Cooperstown, I will search out the spot where that scene takes place. Cooper was a klutz, but he had a mythic imagination that was totally unlike Scott's, or Twain's for that matter. "Dreamy strangeness" in not Scott's line of goods.

    Oh, I have read the passage on the slaughter of the passenger pigeons. Neither Twain nor I have much argument with that.

    I had no idea Cooper wrote a novel about bees and honey.

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    1. he wrote quite a few books other than the deerslayer series. a trilogy taking place in the south seas-rather defoesque, some sailing adventures, and miscellaneous productions re european political machinations. i inherited a cooper series of books-big and black with two pages on one-that have occupied me in idle moments for fifty years.

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    2. The pshaw! part was for Shaw on Shakespeare.

      Yes, Cooper really had an eye for mythic, iconic moments--the plow magnified against the setting sun in the west, etc.

      There is an elderly man around the block from me who is head of the Cooper Society and a gen-u-ine expert.

      I know what you mean about the attacks. I have been thinking about Poe's decimation of the high reputation of W. W. Lord (rector here in Cooperstown but also in Vicksburg during the siege!), and how poetry has changed since Poe. And wondering if his fury at Lord (who had what might be called a more old-fashioned interest in variety of forms) is connected with his strictures about what poetry can and cannot be, and with the subsequent diminution of what most poetry is (small, lyric, rhapsodic, etc.)

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  11. You have inspired me to look over a list of Cooper's works. It is more varied than I had realized. I knew about The Spy and the sea-faring novels, but not the rest. 18th century Venice, "first totalitarian novel"! A Swiftian satire set in Antarctica! Very interesting.

    Also, I have read The Deerslayer, not The Pathfinder. An irritating error.

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    1. Cooper Society, and Hugh MacDougall: http://external.oneonta.edu/cooper/introduction.html
      You would find him interesting on Cooper--he knows all!

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  12. MacDougall's website is just the one I have been inspecting. The magic of search engines.

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