IT takes an expert eye to make a sure distinction between diamonds and paste. But there are many fields, including that of description, in which the authentic is quickly and certainly recognized even by the inexpert. The America from which the genius of Mark Twain received its direction, — a Missouri village, the Mississippi River, a Nevada mining camp, the San Francisco of the sixties, — this many-colored background is presented in Mark Twain’s America, by Bernard DeVoto (Little, Brown, $4.00), not merely with uncommon skill and spirit, but also with a ring of the authentic, to be gained only by shrewd, extensive observation and much study of printed ‘sources.’ A lively style — albeit marred at times by an imperfect perception of the line that separates the clever from the ‘smarty’ — contributes generously to the making of a highly entertaining and in many respects illuminating book.
On one of its early pages the author remarks: ' A literary theory is a form of metaphysical autobiography. It permits its contriver to reconstruct facts in harmony with his prepossessions.’ Before long one finds that this is but a preface to many pages of polemics, aimed at the theory set forth by Van Wyck Brooks in The Ordeal of Mark Twain to the effect that the conventions forced upon Samuel L. Clemens by the conditions of his maturer life frustrated lamentably the Mark Twain that might have been. Despising a ‘literary theory,’Mr. DeVoto appears unconscious of propounding and defending one of his own — namely, that ‘Mark Twain never became anything but a humorist, realist, and satirist of the frontier; he never desired to be anything else.’ In the demolition of Mr. Brooks’s theory, and in the support of his own, Mr, DeVoto makes an impressive display of vigor and wit, yet anybody who has sat on a jury and felt that nothing more can be said after one side of a case has been forcibly presented must wish to hear from Mr. Brooks again.
In the Atlantic it seems fitting to look especially at Mr. DeVoto’s account of the famous dinner to Whittier on his seventieth birthday when Mark Twain attempted a humorous speech which fell dismally flat, as a similar speech under kindred circumstances would have fallen anywhere. Mr. DeVoto sets the scene with a picture of ‘parish prigs,’ of Holmes addicted to ‘a loathsome archness,’of Lowell as ‘a tragedy.’ He represents Mark Twain as ‘indifferent’ to ‘the intangibles which this society valued.’ In fact, by the time of the Whittier dinner, Clemens had undergone the taming of foreign travel, seven years of matrimony, and other experiences which rendered him anything but an indifferent alien. Howells indeed has recorded the agonies he suffered, more acute than those of any other participant in the dinner, over his mortifying performance. Howells relates also that the silence which fell upon the company ‘was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.’ Had Mr. DeVoto’s researches only run this miscreant to cover, the fellow might have become immortal as the one righteous man to save a pallid Boston from destruction. Is it, by the way, for the salvation of nations in general — if the candor so dear to Mr. DeVoto can save them — to veil behind highly technical words suggestions that, oddly enough, are still unspeakable in the vernacular? Is it possible that a Victorian reticence is still darkly at work? I wonder— and that without abatement of admiration for Mr. DeVoto’s widely various lore of the West and the effective facility and forthrightness of much of the writing in this sprightly book.
From theory and polemics there is a sharp transition to the recording of facts in Mary Lincoln, Wife and Widow (Harcourt, Brace, $3.00) by Carl Sandburg and Paul M. Angle. When Gamaliel Bradford wrote his sketch of ‘Mrs. Abraham Lincoln’ in his Wives, he said: ‘The difficulty of getting at the actual Mrs. Lincoln is extraordinary and exasperating. . . . There are but a few of her letters in print — and those few are not very significant.’ For future investigators the difficulty is now removed by Mr. Sandburg’s memoir of Mrs. Lincoln, which fills Part I of the book, and by the ‘ Letters. Documents and Appendix’ by Mr. Angle to which Part II is devoted. It is a sorrowful story, sad enough for the patient, faithful Lincoln himself, compelled to cope with a wife who must have driven him to distraction when he was in the sorest need of all the support he could receive at home, but tragic indeed for Mrs. Lincoln after her husband’s death, when, in 1875 and 1876, she was adjudged insane. The situation is now laid appallingly bare—only to the increase of Lincoln’s moral stature. Mr. Sandburg’s Prairie Years is among the most illuminating books about Lincoln. This volume, by virtue of material not available when the earlier book was written, and also through its excellent presentation of that material, is a notable addition to Lincolniuna.
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE