Mark Twain: a Study of the Short Fiction. . - Reviews - book review

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by Jason Horn

MARK TWAIN: A STUDY OF THE SHORT FICTION by Tom Quirk. Twayne's Studies in Short Fiction Series. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1997. xiv 232 pages. $24.95.

"Twain's repeated professions of innocence or ineptitude in literary craftsmanship are not to be believed," according to Tom Quirk, and readers may well agree with him after following his lead through more than 60 of Twain's short works. Preferring description to extended analysis and interpretation, Quirk allows Twain's voice to mingle with his own as he deftly moves between text and context, charting the course of Twain's imaginative growth. To constrain Twain's shorter works too narrowly within conventional boundaries would be a mistake, Quirk warns; better to follow the play of his imagination through a variety of forms in a "seemingly spontaneous" re-creation of them.

Quirk takes this route in his book's first section, where he critically reviews Twain's short fiction beginning with Samuel Clemens's adoption of the Twain persona in 1863 and moving on through his career stages: the "Early Years, 1863-1873, the "Middle Years, 1874-1890," and the "Late Years, 1891-1910." Twain's early years were experimental ones, as Quirk points out, and while working with multiple literary forms, he reshaped them to fit his developing persona and narrative technique. Such experimentation rises to the forefront of the jumping frog story especially, as Quirk reads it, a "tightly controlled" tale that allows its author to "indulge in various stylistic maneuvers that amount to a blend of vernacular poetry and almost surreal transformations." Twain's other early stories reveal a similar stylistic play, according to Quirk, as seen in the way he recasts the common frame-tale form in "Cannibalism in the Cars," integrating the "appropriate technical vocabulary" with "comic specificity" in "Journalism in Tennessee," and shifting narrative perspectives that mingle in his stories "Buck Fanshaw's Funeral" and "Dick Baker and His Cat."

Quirk seconds Howells's estimate of Twain's "growing sense of seriousness" during his middle years. Yet he importantly points out that Twain could include both an earnest retelling of Aunt Rachel's memories of slavery in "A True Story" and a series of farces about the McWilliams family in the same collection. His "Carnival of Crime" offers a similar mix. For while it teases readers into metaphysical reflections, Quirk shows it to be primarily a "comedy of conscience" that displays only the "germ" of Twain's later ontological observations.

Even in his later observations, as Quirk describes them, Twain expressed many of his deepest thoughts in a dramatic manner "without being particularly responsible to intellectual consistency or logical rigor." He became so imaginatively engrossed in the "dramatic situation" in "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," for instance, that he allowed it to shape the story into what Quirk calls one of the "most devastating comments on the desire for riches to be found in American literature." Twain could tighten his narrative grip, however, and Quirk finishes his criticism by closely considering Twain's narrative command in a story he had been shaping most of his literary life: "Extract of Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

In section two, Quirk includes five of Twain's shorter pieces. Readers will recognize the often-anthologized "Fennimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" and "How to Tell a Story." While few may have read Twain's "Report to the Buffalo Academy," "Reply to the Editor of `The Art of Authorship," or his essay on "William Dean Howells," Quirk shows that in all his selections Twain enunciates his composing standards and artistic principles. He insists, for example, that writers follow their natural and instinctive urges but requires of them what he required of himself: constant effort to clarify one's point through precise use of language.

Quirk's selection of critical essays in the final section both supports and challenges his own readings. Essays by W. D. Howells and Louis J. Budd enlarge upon Twain's gifts as a humorist, Howells singling out the serious strain of Twain's comic aim and Budd Twain's playful delight in transcending normative bounds of experience. Quirk's choice of Don Florence's piece reinforces Budd's image by tracking the author's experimental play through his early writings. His inclusion of Walter Blair's analysis of "Jim Baker's Blue-Jay Yarn" and Gregg Camfield's reading of "The Facts Concerning a Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" is especially valuable, since both critics extend Twain's artistic reach significant into significant moral, intellectual, and literary traditions. And by concluding with Susan K. Harris's observations on Twain's portrayal of "Eve" as inherently wise and intelligent, Quirk closes his book with an ever-expanding image of an author capable of imagining experience apart from the determining forces of his own.

By broadening our understanding of Twain's artistic range, Quirk reveals a surprisingly fluid and intelligently flexible creative artist. More consideration could have been given to Twain's later dream tales and especially to No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, for Twain is at his experimental best in this story. But my personal prejudice qualifies this complaint. Few could complain, in fact, about Quirk's book. His choice to follow the growth of Twain's imagination rather than hamper it by theoretical constraints is both refreshing and rewarding.