4 - “Everyone Is a Moon, and Has a Dark Side”: New Phases of Mark Twain Criticism from the 1970s through the 1980s

Summary

Novelty itself has become a tradition.

—Louis J. Budd, 1983

FEAR HAD BEEN THE CONTROLLING EMOTION of his life,” concluded Hamlin Hill in his biography Mark Twain: God's Fool (1973), “fear of poverty, fear of offending and alienating his family and friends, fear of being mistaken by his audience” (269). Hill drew his title from Twain's 1877 letter to William Dean Howells in the aftermath of the Whittier Birthday fiasco: “I am a great & sublime fool. But then I am God's fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect” (MTHL 1: 215). Hill oversimplified Twain's meaning, for it offers contrition while demanding respect, with the image of the fool as court jester: buffoon and truthteller. Hill depicted Twain as a mere clown just as many had during his lifetime. Charging Twain with insecurities, poor literary craftsmanship, abusive treatment of family and employees, impotence, and pedophilia, Hill's work might seem to hearken back to the bad old days of Van Wyck Brooks. Hill was a real scholar, however, having had Walter Blair as his dissertation director and Franklin Meine as a mentor, and though one questions his conclusions, he based his ideas on material in the Mark Twain Papers, most notably the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript, in which Twain disparaged his former secretary Isabel Lyon and business manager Ralph Ashcroft (Hill “Forty” 7–8). Hill practiced the kind of primary research DeVoto favored, but reached conclusions more typical of Brooks. In an era busily shedding the restrictive husk of New Criticism, his claims and methods were highly influential. This marked a new phase in Twain criticism; Twain had said in Following the Equator that “everyone is a moon, and has a dark side” (654). With Hill's work, new light was cast on Twain's dark side.

This newness was recognized immediately by Robert Bray's reviewessay “Mark Twain Biography: Entering a New Phase” (1974), but so, too, was the connection to the old Brooksian phase. Minus socialist revolution, Hill achieved something like what Brooks had aimed for: a reading of Twain's later years and an assessment of his literary achievement. Bray praised the book as “revisionist” history that set straight the record that Paine had deliberately distorted (299). Bray noted that Hill's careful scholarship revealed truths that Brooks had arrived at through “an incisive intuition” (300).