Horn, Jason Gary.  _Mark Twain and William James: Crafting a Free Self_.
Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 1996.  Pp. xiii + 189.
Cloth, 6-1/4" x 9-1/4".  Bibliography, index.  $34.95.  ISBN 0-8262-1072-4.

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

      Harry Wonham <[log in to unmask]>
      University of Oregon
      Eugene, OR

Copyright (c) Mark Twain Forum, 1997.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


In lucid, engaging prose, Jason Gary Horn interprets "the later Mark Twain
against William James," arguing that the disgruntled metaphysics of Twain's
final years constitute a quasi-Jamesian "religious psychology of the divided
self."  More specifically, Horn tests the status of independent thought and
action within that psychology by examining the pragmatic underpinnings of
three texts, _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_, _Personal Recollections of
Joan of Arc_, and _No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_.  Moving deftly between
Twain's late fiction and James's contemporaneous inquiries into religious
psychology and exceptional mental states, Horn situates Twain's most
eccentric literary performances at the fringes of academic philosophical
discourse, broadening our understanding of the complex intellectual milieu
in which both men participated. After locating Twain firmly within the
context of late-nineteenth-century movements in philosophy, science, and
pseudo-science, Horn offers compelling interpretations of the enigmatic
dream writings in his effort to establish what he considers a side of Mark
Twain that has traditionally eluded critics.  The Jamesian conceptual
vocabulary, he explains, "has made such an enabling move possible."

For all Horn's ingenuity and erudition, however, it remains questionable
whether such a move is really feasible or desirable.  The two men undeniably
shared what Horn describes as a "religio-pragmatic perspective," and that
perspective certainly informed their active participation in the same
late-nineteenth-century debates over such matters as free will vs.
determinism, the nature and authority of the conscious self, the legitimacy
of psychical research, and the phenomena of dreams and faith.  Moreover, it
is hard not to relish the parallel between Twain's incessant punning on the
relative "value" of truthful statements (in _The Innocents Abroad_, for
example: "I have tried to get this statement off at par here, but . . . I
have been obliged to negotiate it at a 50% discount") and James's famous
characterization of beliefs as "so much experience _funded_."  Pragmatism,
as Constance Rourke opined, may have emerged as a formal theoretical project
at Harvard toward the end of the nineteenth century, but its ruling tenets
are curiously anticipated in traditional American folklore and humor.  Add
to these vague intimations of intellectual kinship between the Harvard
professor and the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope the fact that the two
men met several times, described one another warmly in correspondence,
joined the same political party, and participated in the same professional
society, and it is difficult to understand why, as Lou Budd observes in a
dust jacket blurb, "nobody has linked Twain and James in more than a few
generalizing sentences."  For all its good intentions, _Mark Twain and
William James: Crafting a Free Self_ reveals why.

Horn's effort to move beyond "generalizing sentences" to an authoritative
account of the Twain/James relationship operates on two levels.  On one
hand, he argues that "the two directly influenced one another," and that
this reciprocal influence grew out of "a continuing personal interchange
over time."  On another level, aside from the question of influence, Horn
proposes to offer a revisionist reading of Twain's later years by "using
James as a mediating agent or cultural reflector."  James's writings on
psychology and religious experience, in other words, "provide us with the
necessary vocabulary for interpreting the complex and often unexpected turns
of Twain's mind and texts." As a notoriously unsystematic thinker--so the
argument goes--Twain struggled unsuccessfully to articulate a theory of
divided personality, with the result that critics have tended to dismiss his
late writings as the products of "a kind of literary senility."  By showing
that Twain's late fiction amounts to a clumsy fictional reiteration of
Jamesian psychology, Horn intends to defend Mark Twain as a "serious
thinker," "who grew in imaginative strength during the last two decades of
his life."  James's writings, according to Horn, "will provide us with the
necessary plumb line for sounding the voice of Mark Twain, for ascertaining
the depth of his intellect."

Horn pursues these twin projects with flair and conviction, but both are
fraught with difficulties.  On the question of reciprocal influence, he can
produce no new evidence about the Twain/James personal relationship, and
thus must ask the existing evidence to do some very heavy and awkward
lifting.  The two men met for dinner in Florence in 1892, and James later
wrote that he had seen Twain "a couple of times" in Florence.  The substance
of their conversations is unknown, but Horn hints, without further support,
that "the fraternizing at Florence" may have inspired a period of creative
rejuvenation in both writers.  They dined again in New York in 1907, after
which James described Twain as "a dear little genius," "only good for
monologue, in his old age, or for dialogue at best."  Writing to his brother
Henry from New York, William also mentioned dining out regularly during his
visit, leading Horn to venture the dubious conclusion that "surely a few of
these meals were shared with the author."

If Twain and James attended numerous dinners together, and if serious
conversation took place during those dinners, one might expect to find
evidence of substantive intellectual exchange in their correspondence.  But
again the evidence cannot support the weight of Horn's argument.  James's
letters to Twain are lost, and Twain's to James--reproduced here, one
wonders why, in an appendix--mention nothing about either man's work, but
instead catalogue the virtues of osteopathy and Plasmon.  Twain did read
_The Principles of Psychology_ and at least one third of _The Varieties of
Religious Experience_, and Horn's useful study of his marginalia in those
volumes would seem to support Susan Gillman's entirely plausible claim in
_Dark Twins_ that James's work nurtured Twain's emerging theories about
complex human personality.  But there is apparently no evidence of a more
direct personal influence, unless one accepts Horn's imaginative hypothesis
that the number forty-four in Twain's _No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger_ may
have been gleaned from James's discussion in _Principles_ about Felida X, a
patient whose suffering from divided personality became acute "at the age of
_forty-four_" (emphasis Horn's).

If the naming of 44 does represent Twain's homage to William James, the case
for reciprocal influence is even more sketchy.  Horn claims that in the 1896
Lowell Lectures James "praised Twain for his brilliant use of subliminal
power and 'first class originality of intellect.'"  The lecture on "Genius,"
according to Horn, "emphasized respect for Twain's work and recognized his
extraordinary creative insight."  But the creative insight in this case
seems to be Horn's, for in the passage he cites James merely mentions Mark
Twain in a long list of geniuses, including Jay Gould, Rockerfeller, Sarah
Bernhardt, Washington, and Rudyard Kipling, among many others.  There is no
effort to single out Twain's work, nor is there any suggestion that his "use
of subliminal power" is any more "brilliant" than that of Bonaparte or
Pagannini, two other "geniuses" who, according to this argument, must also
have exerted "direct influence" on James's thinking.  Horn again uses the
Lowell lectures to overstate his case when he claims that James "defended
Twain and Tolstoy as artistic geniuses whose 'psychopathic peculiarities' or
'morbid' temperaments served to pluralize experience."  Yet James mentions
neither Twain nor Tolstoy in the passage quoted here, and there is
absolutely no indication that "he may well have been thinking of Twain," as
Horn claims, when he described Tolstoy's "pathological melancholy" elsewhere
in the Lectures.

This highly questionable use of "evidence" has surprisingly little bearing
on Horn's larger revisionist project, for he is wisely not committed to the
idea that Twain cribbed his psychological theories from James's writings.
In fact, his choice of the 1890 _Principles_ as a "plumb line" for sounding
the depths of _Huckleberry Finn_, and of the 1902 _Varieties_ as an
interpretive guide to _Joan of Arc_, necessarily treats the issue of direct
influence as irrelevant.  But serious problems persist.  To begin with, Horn
frames his revisionist inquiry against the bogey man of Twain criticism:
Hamlin Hill, Henry Nash Smith, James M. Cox, Leslie Fiedler, Justin Kaplan,
William Gibson, and others, are all found wanting for their failure to
appreciate the "seriousness" of Twain's late work.  Horn sustains this
fabulous generalization by quoting very selectively from these critics and
by neglecting the work of others, like Susan Gillman, Michael Kiskis, and
Randall Knoper, who have recently taken Twain's late work very seriously.

More problematic, however, is the implication that Mark Twain's
"seriousness" can best be appreciated by translating his fiction into a
Jamesian "vocabulary." Horn's interpretive strategy throughout the book
involves reading Twain's psychological fiction "in James's terms," so that,
for example, "in _No. 44_, Twain fictionally reiterates the point James
continually argues in _Varieties_, that [the] phenomenon of experiencing
visitations from within, even if the visitor appears to be Satan himself,
'connects itself with the life of the subconscious, so-called,' and 'chiefly
consist[s] in the straightening out of the inner self."  These are James's
words, employed to underscore the "seriousness" of Twain's fragmentary
Mysterious Stranger manuscripts.  But this approach inevitably begs the
question: is Twain really in need of such translation?  In the absence of a
case for creative influence, what is to be gained by grafting a clinical
vocabulary onto Mark Twain's most experimental efforts in fiction?  Can't we
appreciate the "seriousness" of his imaginative writing on its own terms,
while at the same time entertaining Bruce Michelson's assertion in _Mark
Twain on the Loose_ that the essence of Twain's art lies in its unrelenting
"subversion of seriousness"?  It seems to me, after reading this compelling
but problematic book, that until we can sustain such a paradox in our
readings of Twain, we are unprepared to make sense of his complicated
relation to American pragmatism and, perhaps, to William James.