J. R. LeMaster is best known by Mark Twain scholars for having co-edited The Mark Twain Encyclopedia with Jim Wilson. But I think it’s important to recall another, less-known contribution he made to Twain scholarship: he is responsible for having given readers in the English-speaking world access to an important commentary on Mark Twain published in China.
LeMaster had a long and deep connection to China that included spending two years in Beijing and publishing a moving bilingual book of his own poetry about China (Journeys Around China, Chinese translations by Sui Gang and Hua Zhi, published in China in 2003). But I am particularly indebted to him for having restored to us a major a speech delivered in Beijing by a leading Chinese writer in 1960 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death.
For decades, scholars had assumed this speech had been lost, but Le Master’s determined searching over many years finally bore fruit. He and a Chinese scholar named Zhao Huazhi, managed to locate a copy. They arranged for it to be translated into English by Zhao Yuming and Sui Gang. Edited by J.R. Le Master, who worked with them on the translation, it was published in US-China Review in 1995. [US-China Review 19 (Summer 1995), pp. 11-15 as “Mark Twain: Exposer of the Dollar Empire.”
The speech was particularly noteworthy not only because Lao She was one the leading Chinese authors of the 20th century, but also because the aspects of Twain’s social criticism that he highlighted were not particularly salient at mid-century in the US. Arguing that Twain’s criticism of the ‘Dollar Empire’” “has retained profound and immediate significance throughout the past half century,” Lao She asserted that “Mark Twain’s reprimand of the imperialist aggressive powers and sympathy for the anti-colonialist Asian and African people [are] especially significant. This is the part of his literary heritage we should value most.” But until the publication of Jim Zwick’s book Mark Twain’s Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine-American War in 1992, this was probably the part of Twain’s literary heritage that his countrymen valued least. (Virtually the only American critics paying attention to this aspect of Twain at the time Lao She made these remarks were Philip Foner and Maxwell Geismar.)
Although Lao She’s speech served China’s ruling interests at the time and contained some of the expected Cold War jargon, it also contained some insightful readings of pieces by Twain with which American readers were then largely unfamiliar. With a few exceptions Twain’s trenchant critiques of the country he loved tended to be as ignored in the United States at midcentury as they were celebrated in China.
Indeed, among the works Lao She mentioned in the 1960 speech was Twain’s “Treaty with China,” a piece so obscure that it was not reprinted from its original 1868 publication until Martin Zehr brought it to light in 2010 in the Journal of Transnational American Studies (http://escholarship.org/uc/item/5t02n32
In addition to being the 50th anniversary of Mark Twain’s death, 1960 was the sixtieth anniversary of the anti-imperialist, anti-missionary Boxer Uprising in China. (Lao She had written a four-act play about this event titled Shen Ruan the same year that he gave this speech. ) Most Americans by 1960 had long forgotten the sympathy that Mark Twain had shown to the Boxers, but Lao She and his countrymen had not. Lao She quotes with approval Twain’s comment, “The Boxer is a patriot…I wish him success. I am a Boxer myself.”
Lao She was president of the National Association of Writers when he gave this speech. An influential novelist and dramatist, he was named “The People’s Artist” and played a prominent role in the Chinese literary establishment before he was purged from the Communist Party and became a victim of the Cultural Revolution (It is undisputed that Lao She delivered this speech. However, as I learned in 2009 from Gongzhao Li, the prominent Chinese poet and scholar, Yuan Kejia evidently claimed in a Chinese journal in 1985 that he was paid to write this speech for Lao She to deliver, and that he was its actual author despite the fact that the text continues to be widely credited to Lao She in China, and appears in his Collected Works. )
I met J. R. LeMaster in 2006 when I gave a keynote talk at an American Studies Association of Texas at Baylor. He was kind enough to give me a copy of the piece that he had done so much to recover and get translated and published. He and I were both pleased that I was able to include the Lao She/Yuan Kejia speech in The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (Library of America, 2010).
I learned only last December, through correspondence with LeMaster, of the depth of his association with Lao She’s family. LeMaster’s book of poetry, Journeys Around China, includes a photograph of LeMaster with Lao She’s son, Xu Yi, taken when LeMaster visited him in his home. Xu Yi was Director of the Beijing Library of Contemporary Literature and spent most of his life writing about his father. LeMaster wrote me that he got to know him quite well. LeMaster also directed the senior thesis of Lao She’s granddaughter, although he notes that he left Chine before she completed it. During his stay in China, LeMaster conducted interviews with half a dozen Chinese writers, including “a writer of opera who was beaten alongside Lao She.” LeMaster wrote me that “Lao She drowned in Lake Kunming, either drowned himself or was murdered and thrown there. Xu Yi says he could stand no more humiliation and took his own life.” LeMaster noted that the interviews he conducted in China are in the oral history archives at Baylor.
According to LeMaster, three sets of government censors refused to let three different publishing houses publish his book of poems. The version of Journeys around China that finally appeared in China in 2003 omits about half of the original manuscript, including all the poems he wrote about the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Although the more political poems were cut by the censors, many of the poems that remain are quietly beautiful and evocative.
I feel compelled, on the occasion of his passing, to express my appreciation for LeMaster’s determination to share a major Chinese commentary on Twain with the English-speaking world. I am personally grateful to him for having made me aware of it when he did. For encountering this text help make me realize that I had been largely oblivious, as a scholar, to he global body of commentaries on Mark Twain in languages other than English.
That realization set in motion an odyssey that led me to seek out writing on Twain in languages other than English for The Mark Twain Anthology. In addition to leading to my discovery that the first book devoted to Mark Twain published anywhere was published in French in Paris in 1884, this journey led me to uncover interesting commentaries on Twain originally published in Chinese, Danish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and Yiddish have all engaged Twain. In many cases, they had never been translated into English before. Previously untranslated texts included essays by Nobel Laureates from Denmark and Japan, by two of Cuba’s most prominent public intellectuals, by Argentina’s most celebrated author, by another famous Chinese writer, by a major Russian poet, and by respected writers from Germany, Italy, Spain, and the Soviet Union. I had the pleasure of sending a copy of the book to J. R. LeMaster not long after it came out.
[For more on this topic, see my Mark Twain Anthology, and also my essay, “American Literature in Transnational Perspective: The Case of Mark Twain.” Blackwell Companion to American Literary Studies, ed. Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine (2011). Also relevant are Selina Lai’s forthcoming book, Mark Twain in China to be published next year by Stanford University Press, and a project on “The French Face of Twain” that Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn are undertaking.]
The changes in my mental map that J. R. LeMaster helped set in motion have been profound. I am grateful for all he taught me.
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Shelley Fisher Fishkin
Joseph S. Atha Professor of Humanities, Professor of English, and Director of American Studies, Stanford University
Mail: Department of English, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2087
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https://english.stanford.edu/people/shelley-fisher-fishkin
On Jul 3, 2014, at 4:24 PM, Kevin Bochynski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> The following obituary appeared today in _The Crescent-News_, Defiance, Ohio, and will be of interest to members of the Mark Twain
> community. Dr. LeMaster was co-editor with James D. Wilson of _The Mark Twain Encyclopedia_ published by Garland in 1993.
>
> Jimmie 'J.R' LeMaster
>
> WACO, Texas -- Jimmie (J.R.) Ray LeMaster, Waco, died Sunday, June 29, 2014,
> at his residence.
>
> He was born in Pike County, Ohio, to Dennis Samuel and Helen Algina (Smith)
> LeMaster on March 29, 1934. He attended Camp Creek Township Elementary
> School before moving to Washington Court House, Ohio, where he attended
> junior high and high school, moving to New Boston, Ohio,in his final year.
> He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1951, and served four years. Upon being
> discharged from the Navy, LeMaster moved to Defiance, Ohio, where he worked
> in an iron foundry and attended classes at Defiance College.
>
> Upon graduation, he taught in local high schools before returning to his
> alma mater to teach in 1962, having completed a master of arts degree at
> Bowling Green State University. While working at Defiance College, he
> received his PhD degree from Bowling Green in 1970. He taught at Defiance
> College for 15 years before moving his family to Waco to teach at Baylor
> University in 1977. When he retired from Baylor in 2006, he had taught for
> 47 years, including two years in Beijing, People's Republic of China.
>
> He was preceded in death by his parents; his wife, Wanda; his son, Lon;
> brother, Dennis and his wife, Karin; and half brother Tom McDowell.
>
> He is survived by his two daughters, Lisa and DeNae, as well as his brother,
> Marvin and his wife, Shirley; half brother, Richard McDowell and his wife,
> Alice; sister-in-law, Patsy McDowell; and numerous nieces and nephews.
>
> In lieu of flowers, memorial gifts may be made to The Wanda May LeMaster
> Service Award, c/o Michele Tinker, Defiance College, 701 Clinton St.,
> Defiance, Ohio 43512; email address, [log in to unmask]; phone,
> 419-783-2303.
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