COMPARATIVE BOOK REVIEW

Scharnhorst, Gary. _Bret Harte, Opening the American Literary West_.
University of Oklahoma Press, 2000. Pp. 272.  Bibliographical notes and
index.  Hardcover, $29.95.  ISBN 0-8061-3254-X.

and

Nissen, Axel.  _Bret Harte, Prince and Pauper_.  University Press of
Mississippi, 2000. Pp. 326.  Bibliographical notes and index.  Hardcover,
$28.00.  ISBN 1-57806-253-5.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Barbara Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>

Copyright (c) 2000 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

In the 1870's, Bret Harte (1836-1902) became the highest paid writer in
America--his fame born in his vivid stories of the old West and California
gold rush mining camps.  A friend and cohort of Samuel Clemens, he later
fell out of favor with Clemens and became the subject of some of Clemens'
bitterest written and verbal outrages.  Harte is the subject of two
biographies just released this fall.  Both books--Gary Scharnhorst's _Bret
Harte, Opening the American Literary West_ and Axel Nissen's _Bret Harte,
Prince and Pauper_ lay claim to being the first Bret Harte biography in
seventy years to be written from primary resources.

Gary Scharnhorst, Professor of English at the University of New Mexico and
coeditor of American Literary Realism, is a name familiar in the world of
Twain research with his numerous published contributions to both Twain and
Harte scholarship.  His book is Volume Seventeen in the Oklahoma Western
Biographies series.  Axel Nissen, associate professor of American
literature at the University of Oslo, Norway, is a new name to the world of
Twain scholarship.  His book is derived from his 1997 doctoral thesis.

Scharnhorst, in his source notes, refers to Nissen's previous work as a
valuable detailed record that is "marred by its search for evidence of
homoeroticism in Harte's life and writing" (Scharnhorst, 238).  Nissen's
acknowledgments include a note of thanks to Scharnhorst among others for
assistance and encouragement.

Both books are well researched and written in a style that will appeal to
the general reader as well as literary researcher.  Scharnhorst's book is
prefaced with an explanation that all volumes in the Oklahoma Western
Biographies series carry no reference notes.  Thus, readers who wish to pin
down exact sources for his research will have difficulty doing so.
However, to Scharnhorst's credit, he advises that he has deposited a fully
documented copy of his manuscript with the University of New Mexico English
Department library.  Although his book contains no formal bibliography, the
final section is an extensive discussion of resources and editorial
commentary on previously published Harte research.  Nissen's book contains
extensive reference notes and formal bibliography.  Both books provide the
reader with a different assortment of black and white photos.

Both authors draw essentially from the same primary sources including
Harte's letters, diaries, letters of contemporaries, and documents held by
Harte's descendants.  Unfortunately, there appear to be only two letters
and one inscribed photo from Clemens to Harte that have survived.  None of
Anna Harte's letters to her husband have survived.

Both Scharnhorst and Nissen present a similar picture of Harte's family
background; early life; his literary work in California; and his rise to
national fame as editor of the West coast journal _Overland Monthly_.
Nissen diverges at this point in his biography to present his theory of
"brotherly love" found in "The Luck of Roaring Camp"--a story that caught
the attention of East coast editors.  Both authors document Harte's trek
across America to take the literary world of Boston by storm; his troubled
financial and family life and downward spiral on the East coast; his
diplomatic years in Germany and Scotland entailing a twenty year separation
from his wife and family; his success as a writer away from America; and
his final years as a "kept" man in England by Madame Hydeline Van De Velde.
One of the most significant differences between the books regards the
Harte and Clemens relationship.

Both authors recount the initial meeting between Clemens and Harte in San
Francisco where Harte was working at the U.S. Mint and also editing the
literary journal _Californian_.  Clemens contributed to Harte's journal and
Harte is depicted as the colleague who encouraged Clemens to publish his
jumping frog story.  In one of the few errors in Scharnhorst's book,
_Saturday Gazette_ (as opposed to _Saturday Press_) is incorrectly
identified as the original publisher of the jumping frog story.

Both authors agree that Harte lent a valuable editorial hand when it came
time for Clemens to polish his manuscript for _Innocents Abroad_ slated for
released by American Publishing Company in 1869.  Harte gave _Innocents
Abroad_ a favorable review after publication; however, the oversight of
providing Harte with his personal review copy led to animosity between the
two writers.  It is also within the analysis of this misunderstanding that
Scharnhorst begins to pull ahead of Nissen when it comes to adeptly
identifying characters within Harte's stories that are based on Samuel
Clemens.  Scharnhorst proposes that in Harte's "The Iliad of Sandy Bar,"
published in 1870, the characters of two quarreling miners Matthew Scott
and Henry York are based on Harte and Clemens respectively.  Scharnhorst
theorizes that "The Iliad of Sandy Bar" was Harte's "open invitation to
Clemens to bury the hatchet" (Scharnhorst, 48).

By 1870 Clemens had married and relocated to New York where he edited the
_Buffalo Express_.  In 1871 Harte also left California to accept a position
with the prestigious _Atlantic Monthly_ journal at an unprecedented yearly
contract of $10,000 (equivalent to over $100,000 in today's dollars.)
Harte's dismal spiral and inability to produce works to fulfill his
contract in a timely fashion would eventually lead to editor William Dean
Howells turning to Clemens for his story "Old Times on the Mississippi."
Both Scharnhorst and Nissen agree that Clemens' hand in recruiting Harte to
write his first novel _Gabriel Conroy_ for American Publishing Company
began to drive another wedge between the two writers when the novel turned
out to be a dismal sales failure.

The final collaboration between Harte and Clemens was the play "Ah Sin"
which Scharnhorst describes as "arguably the most disastrous collaboration
in the history of American letters" (Scharnhorst, xiv).  Scharnhorst tells
readers that Harte and Clemens quarreled after completing the draft of the
script.  Nissen provides his readers more detail on the final break
resulting from the "Ah Sin" collaboration and quotes extensively from
Clemens' autobiography regarding an alleged insult that Harte made against
Clemens' wife Livy.  Nissen dates the final break between the two writers
as March 1, 1877 when Harte wrote Clemens a long accusatory letter.
According to Nissen, "Harte appears never to have given his lost friend so
much as a passing thought after they parted forever in 1877" (Nissen, 191).
According to Scharnhorst's theory, that's not so.

Harte's departure from America, where his literary flame was all but
extinguished, came with a diplomatic appointment first to Germany in 1878
and later to Scotland.  It was an appointment that Clemens lobbied against
in his private letters and is well documented by both Scharnhorst and
Nissen.  Clemens wrote to his colleague William Dean Howells, "To send this
nasty creature to puke upon the American name in a foreign land is too
much" (Scharnhorst, 139).

Although Harte's diplomatic career ended in 1885 when a new U.S.
Presidential administration took office, he never returned stateside to
reunite with his family.  Ten years later in 1895, Clemens was still
heaping verbal abuse Harte's way--this time via an interview from Australia
that was published in the Sydney Morning Herald.  According to Scharnhorst,
Harte himself may have provoked this outburst.  In a theory differing from
Nissen's "never more a passing thought" theory--Scharnhorst proposes that
Harte's 1893 story "An Ingenue of the Sierras" dramatized an embarrassing
and little-known episode in Clemens' early career.  Scharnhorst's theory is
based on the probability that as editor of the _Buffalo Express_ in 1870,
Clemens had written a parody of Harte's famous poem "Plain Language from
Truthful James."  The parody in question was titled "Three Aces" signed by
Carl Byng, a name thought to be Clemens' pseudonym.  Clemens denied
authorship of "Three Aces" when it was criticized as a feeble imitation of
Bret Harte's previous work.  Scharnhorst proposes that Harte's story of a
highwayman who plunders and "sails under false colors" is a retaliation at
Clemens.  Although evidence of Clemens' authorship of "Three Aces" was not
strong enough to prompt Joseph McCullough and Janice McIntire-Strasburg to
include it in their collection of _Mark Twain at the Buffalo Express_, it
is a theory which is not as implausible as a theory put forth by Nissen.

In a chapter titled "The Scent of Heliotrope," Nissen decides to hitch his
Bret Harte theory to Andrew Hoffman's "Mark Twain and Homosexuality" theory
(published in _American Literature_, 1995):  "Is it possible to have two
close relationships end with such passion if the relationships themselves
had not been passionate?" (Nissen [quoting Hoffman], 240).  The support put
forth by Nissen to uphold his theory is that the best evidence of intimacy
between Harte and his relationships with men were in his methods of
addressing them.  Nissen writes that Harte's "surviving letters show that
there were only four men outside his family whom Harte addressed by their
Christian names" (Nissen, 239).  The four were Charles Warren Stoddard (a
known homosexual), Charles Watrous, Arthur Collins and Mark Twain.  Nissen
leads his readers to question the possible relationship of Harte with all
four.

Nissen's climactic theory will not come as a surprise to his readers.
Throughout his book he has taken the position that Harte's relations with
several women were truly platonic.  Scharnhorst, on the other hand, has
hinted that Harte was being discreet in affairs with other women for his
wife's sake.

Each book wraps up with the death of Harte.  Scharnhorst provides readers
with a bit more detail regarding how Harte's immediate family finished out
their lives.  In one questionable comment Scharnhorst states that Clemens
made headlines by refusing to contribute to a charitable fund to aid
Harte's surviving daughter when she had fallen on hard times.  This is in
contrast to a New York Times article dated January 30, 1907 wherein Clemens
provided a letter of support for aid for Harte's daughter.  The lack of
source notes in Scharnhorst's book makes it difficult to resolve this
discrepancy.

While Scharnhorst's _Bret Harte_ is the shorter work without reference
notes, it offers greater insight into how the Harte and Clemens
relationship was reflected in Harte's writing.  Nissen's _Bret Harte_
contains a wealth of facts and research that contribute to Harte
scholarship.  However, his theory built around "only four first names" is
one that lacks credibility.