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Robert E Stewart <[log in to unmask]>
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Sun, 6 Jul 2014 23:20:58 -0400
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For  those of us who receive HTML as Text with lots of spurious static, 
here is  Shelly's fine tribute in plain text format.  
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 LeMaster
’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=85I 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 China 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 the 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.

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
[log in to unmask]
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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