The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Steve
Courtney.
~~~~~

_Mark Twain and Youth: Studies in His Life and Writings_. Kevin Mac Donnell
and R. Kent Rasmussen, eds. Bloomsbury, 2016. Pp. xxv +313. Softcover.
$29.95. ISBN 978-0-8135-7597-1. Hardcover. $112. ISBN 9781474223126. Ebook.
$24.99. ISBN 9781474223119.


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Steve Courtney


Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.



"Youth," Livy Clemens called him. His friend Howells said he was "a youth
to the end of his days." Twichell tossed a piece of driftwood into a stream
and watched his friend Mark, at 42, "running down stream after it as hard
as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy."
The books everyone remembers are about two boys. Franklin D. Roosevelt
called Hannibal the "cradle of the chronicles of buoyant boyhood." At the
Hartford house, his girls ruled the roost. In old age, he collected proxy
grand-daughters.


For these and many other reasons it's high time for this book, and the
editors are well-suited to the task. Kevin Mac Donnell's generosity with
his vast collection of Twainiana and his even vaster store of detailed
information is legendary. His energy is phenomenal, and he seems to make a
habit of sleuthing out a new Clemens mystery every year. R. Kent Rasmussen
is another legend, the _Mark Twain Journal_'s 2015 Legacy Scholar. He
applies poetry and precision to everything he does, from his indispensable
reference work _Mark Twain A to Z_ to his _Mark Twain for Kids_ and his
latest, _Mark Twain for Dog Lovers_. Notably, neither the editors nor any
of the contributors are receiving compensation for their work; royalties
are being distributed to the Twain centers at Berkeley, Hartford, Hannibal
and Elmira.


But before the editors take the stage, they surrender it--as who
wouldn't?--to Hal Holbrook. Holbrook's foreword is a shocker--though he
addresses the book's theme, he also uses the foreword as a podium to
express a chilling view of the world as it has unraveled since 1910, the
year of Clemens's death.


"I wonder if God invented Man because he was disappointed in the monkey,"
Holbrook quotes, a line that in _Mark Twain Tonight_ never fails to get a
laugh. But here, Holbrook turns on his audience: "You think that's a joke?
Think again. . . . The century I was born into was not funny" (xi).
Holbrook is truly channeling the late-life Clemens here, the so-called
"dark" Clemens, but he undercuts even this dismissive stereotype: "Right.
So, 'The War Prayer' has nothing to do with us?" (xv). Holbrook's last line
is searing--well, you've got to read it all, no spoilers here. His
contribution alone is more than worth the ticket price.


Whew. The lights come back up, and Mac Donnell and Rasmussen enter. With
their combined stagecraft, they get down to business: Clemens's unique
status as a serious 19th-century author associated with "concepts of
youth;" the things he said and the things others have said about these
concepts; and the descent of this book from a 1961 work, _The Innocent Eye:
Childhood in Mark Twain's Imagination_, by Albert E. Stone Jr.


Stone concentrated on the portrayal of youth in Clemens's works, while
_Mark Twain and Youth_ directs much of its energy toward biographical
issues as well. And since 1961, Mac Donnell and Rasmussen point out, so
much primary material has either been unearthed or rescued from obscurity
by publication that a fresh look at the subject is well justified.
"Critical insights into Twain's writings and biography have followed paths
that could not even have been imagined during the mid-twentieth century,"
they write (xxi).


They move on to describe the book's approach, and briefly foreshadow the
work of the 25 essayists and their 26 essays. (The indefatigable Henry
Sweets of Hannibal does double duty.) These are organized into five
sections:  "Overviews,"  "The Clemens Family," "Sam Clemens's Life
Experiences," "Mark Twain's Writings," and "Modern Perspectives."


The stage lights dim again, and a spotlight beams on the first of these
essayists. One by one the other members of the cast enter. To conclude (no
doubt to the reader's relief) this theatrical metaphor, Mac Donnell and
Rasmussen have handled their co-directors' role well. While every one of
these essays is scholarly and authoritative, each avoids academic jargon.
Mac Donnell has previously written about another author that such treatment
shows "a sign of respect for his reader, just as medical personnel are
increasingly trained to avoid medical nomenclature as a sign of respect
when talking to patients." The co-editors also minimize what might be
called "footnote intrusion," using parenthetical documentation and minimal
endnotes.


How to give a foretaste of 26 essays, each one of them intriguing? (I mean
this seriously: No clunkers here.) I think the best way is to pick one at
random from each of the five sections. In the interests of disclosure: This
book is dotted with friends, a number of whom have spoken in "The Trouble
Begins at 5:30" lecture series that I ran for six years at the Hartford
house. (The series continues under the able direction of James Golden, an
essayist here.)


In the very start of the "Overviews" section, Holger Kersten's "Mark Twain
on Youth and Aging," carries on the tale of Clemens's remarkable
youthfulness and the perception of his youthfulness among his
contemporaries, and carries it through to his own attitudes toward age.
Kersten, who opines about American literature from the cool distance of the
University of Magdeburg, says that "it is hardly possible to pin down
Clemens to an unequivocal position" (6) on this issue. As in so many other
of his positions--on religion, on war, on race, on anything--Clemens saw no
need to be consistent. He yearned for youth as a time "full to the brim of
the wine of life" (8). Yet he also could value (through the voice of Sandy
McWilliams, a 72-year old angel in _Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven_)
the chance "to sit quiet, and smoke and think--not tear around with a
parcel of giddy young kids" (9). Meticulously, Kersten reviews the evidence
for Clemens's many opinions--and deftly analyzes these opinions--the funny,
public, stagey ones; the ones personally expressed in vivid correspondence;
and the darker, private ones, as far as we can ever plumb the privacy of
this extraordinary man. The editors were wise to put this essay up top.
Lawrence Berkove picks up the thread with further exploration into
Clemens's "countertheology," Lucy E. Rollin explores children's literature
of the era and where Clemens fits in; and Alan Gribben shares how Clemens's
lifelong reading informed his views on youth.


"The Clemens Family" is a subject near and dear to the heart of those lucky
enough to work at the Hartford house. John Bird writes on "Sam and Livy as
Parents": "Parenting, of course, is both an inexact science and highly
individualized, developed in partnership, relying on the experience of each
parent's upbringing, practiced mostly in private, but also reacting to the
pressures and attitudes of society at large, and very much an evolving,
adaptive, and improvisational process" (55). How Samuel and Olivia Clemens
developed their partnership is an intricate and fascinating tale. Bird
describes Livy's roles, including that of home-schooler, alone and in
tandem with governess Lilly Foote; and Livy's punishments, which started
with an interrogation, moved on to closing the offending child in a dark
closet, and then, if the child was incorrigible, to "whipping" her with a
letter opener, probably one made of flexible horn and--Clemens says--never
applied in anger. Clemens even lauded her disciplinary restraint in print,
in a letter to the _Christian Union_ in 1885, which did not exactly please
the very private Livy Clemens. Clemens himself, another essayist in this
volume points out, thinking to spank Jean, instead "fraternized with the
enemy," (181) as he put it.


Bird carries his parenting survey briefly into the Clemens literature,
touching on _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ and the other
classics--seeing, for example, Jim as a surrogate father for Huck.
Ultimately, he concludes, the Clemenses' parenting "shares more with the
latter part of the twentieth century than the latter part of the nineteenth
century," (63) perhaps omitting the letter opener. Other essays here
include "Sam and his Siblings" by Sweets, an exploration of a possible
literary use of Langdon Clemens's death by Joseph Csicsila, and essays on
the daughters themselves: Golden on Susy, Cindy Lovell on Clara, and Karen
Lystra on Jean's last years.


"Sam Clemens's Life Experiences" contains a miscellany of biographical
subjects, including an oddity that might rank with Clemens's _What is Man?_
for its Socratic form. Victor Fischer and Benjamin Griffin, both Mark Twain
Project editors deeply involved in the editing of the definitive _Mark
Twain's Autobiography_, offer not a dialogue between an Old Man and a Young
Man, as in Clemens's work, but an exchange between an Old Editor and a
Young Editor. The matter for debate is how much Clemens's attitudes about
Youth--and indeed about determinism and free will and moral education--can
be gleaned from the _Autobiography_, and if any firm knowledge can be
salvaged from his aforementioned inconsistencies, his pose as a "bad little
boy," and his sometimes manufactured or misremembered memories. It's an
entertaining _jeu d'esprit_ of genuine intellectual substance from two
great scholars--one of whom is in fact older than the other. Other subjects
in this section are "Sam's Boyhood Friends" (Sweets), "Health, Disease and
Children" (K. Patrick Ober), and "Mark Twain's Angelfish" (Barbara Schmidt).


"Mark Twain's Writings" is the longest section, with eight essays. These
include a treatment of the early work by David E. E. Sloane; of _The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ by Peter Messent; of _The Prince and the Pauper_
by Hugh H. Davis; of _Pudd'nhead Wilson_ by Debra Ann McComb; and of
_Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc_ by Ronald Jenn. Two more general
essays treat "Gender Bending as Child's Play" by Linda A. Morris and
"Orphans and Adoption" by Wendelinus Wurth.


Andrew Levy, whose _Huck Finn's America: Mark Twain and the Era That Shaped
His Masterpiece_ made a splash when it came out two years ago, provides the
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ essay. A superb writer, he sheds new light
on a book that has been written about hundreds of times. "One cannot say
the topic of childhood and _Huckleberry Finn_ is something new," he writes,
"as that is among the most ridiculous things one could possibly say about
the book" (176). But he develops the idea that the little-discussed issues
of childhood in the book are as important as the much-discussed issues of
race in the book. The "buoyant boyhood" of FDR's phrase, the straw-hatted
idyll of fishing and mischief, is not what Clemens is talking about, Levy
argues. In the critical literature, he says, it's hard to find a "serious"
reading of _Huckleberry Finn_ on youth. He says the book's portrayal of the
anguish of abuse, the sadisms of education, the child's separation from
nature are worth far more consideration. He points out the interesting fact
that the period Clemens was writing _Huckleberry Finn_ was the same period
that he was recording his own children's behavior--both funny sayings and
moments of insight--in "A Record of the Small Foolishnesses of Susie and
'Bay' Clemens (Infants)." He finds a child's struggle against adults in the
events of the much-discussed final chapters of the book. This is a fresh
view of this section, whose tedium I've always ascribed to Clemens's habit
of losing interest in the final stages of writing a book. In sum, Levy
argues, "a story about the failure of American adults to raise their
children humanely and wisely is being told _inextricably_ from a story
about endemic and cyclical racism" (183).


In the final section, "Modern Perspectives," Shelley Fisher Fishkin writes
of "Black and White Youth in Mark Twain's Hannibal," Mark Dawidziak writes
of "Mark Twain and the Movies," and Jocelyn A. Chadwick writes of "Mark
Twain Meets Generation Z." Like all the essays I've mentioned only by name
or subject here, each is a gem. But I like how the editors have chosen to
run John R. Pascal's essay, "A Secondary School Perspective," to conclude
this work, because Pascal stands aside and lets 14-year-old boys (for the
most part--one would hope for more girls, but he teaches in a boys' school)
have their say. Youth gets in the final words on this subject, and they
are, as always, couched in as imaginative ways as Susy and Clara did in the
"Small Foolishnesses." I liked "Even though Mark Twain was being corrosive,
he always spoke against something that was truly wrong" (259). Corrosive,
indeed. How brilliant to hand over the issue of Mark Twain and Youth
to--well, youth!


We breathe the air of fresh encounters as these young people speak: "Have
you ever fallen victim to a cheater? No doubt you have. Here our Jim Smiley
was robbed of his money and dignity on a simple bet!" (261). And "I cried
when Huck cried for Buck Grangerford" (267).


The two Homers who edited this book rarely, but occasionally, nod. Here and
there indented paragraphs of block quotations are not indented, giving the
reader the unnerving impression that the essayist has lapsed into the first
person, and in Clemens's voice. "Lily" Gillette Foote is Lilly Gillette
Foote. The collaborator with Peter Messent on the forthcoming collection of
Clemens-Twichell letters is not the excellent scholar named. In fact there
are two of them: Harold K. Bush and, er, this reviewer.


But these can all be fixed when the next printing rolls around. And it will
roll around. Mac Donnell and Rasmussen have added an important collection
to the body of Twain criticism. It is stunningly broad and full of
fascination. The way they have herded their academics and independents,
their literary analysts and biographers, into a comprehensive whole is
stunning. And what an important theme. They conclude their eloquent
introduction: "Youth was at the core of Twain's writings; his own youth the
prism through which he framed his narratives, and his narratives the prism
through which his readers view not only American culture but all of
humanity in our most tragic and comic moments."