The Mercurial Mark Twain(s): Reception History, Audience Engagement, & Iconic Authorship

James L. Machor is not a Twain Studies scholar. By this, I do not mean to suggest that he is underinformed about Twain Studies scholarship. To the contrary, very few of us can claim to have read the corpus so completely (at least up to the year 2000). Rather, I mean that he is not a regular contributor to the journals, book series, symposia, panels, and roundtables via which specialists self-identify and structure the field. These apparatuses and institutions, among them the Center for Mark Twain Studies, where I work, play essential roles in fostering, supporting, circulating, and promoting Twain Studies scholarship. But being embedded within them has the potential to make Twain Studies scholars poor evaluators of Twain’s reception, academic and otherwise.As Machor acknowledges in the preface to The Mercurial Mark Twain(s), Twain scholars have attempted comprehensive histories of Twain’s reception, have even done so relatively recently. But while each of these volumes has its virtues, all have been, in my opinion, severely impaired by their authors’ proximity to the critical corpus and, more importantly, to cross-sections of contemporary critics who contribute to it. What I would describe as intradisciplinary politics (or even gossip) seeps into, colors, and in places corrupts the tasks of surveying and assessing our vast field.Given the above, what Machor has done is an extraordinary service to Twain Studies. A senior scholar in reception studies and nineteenth century U.S. Literature, he is uniquely well-positioned to undertake this mega-corpus—there is no U.S. author more discussed than Twain—and to mine it for trends which might surprise even seasoned scholars in Twain Studies. Though I was well aware of the mythological “man in white” who emerged during the midcentury, I had never considered what Machor identifies as a concurrent “Peter Pan” myth. Twain was simultaneously being depicted as hopelessly politically naïve and as a grizzled sage of the national conscience.The Mercurial Mark Twain(s) is divided into two roughly equal parts, each with four chapters. The first part focuses on reception during Twain’s life, beginning with his early journalistic celebrity during the waning years of the Civil War. The second part covers the remainder of the twentieth century. In each chapter, one can count on regimented surveys of academic and journalistic criticism, publishing and republishing of Twain’s writings, the integration of Twain’s works into primary and secondary school curricula, and a more amorphous snapshot of “popular culture,” including adaptations of Twain’s works into film, television, advertising, and other media. This organization will make The Mercurial Mark Twain(s) an indispensable reference work, as scholars can easily find answers to simple research questions or cite Machor’s assessments of how specific critical works fit within contemporaneous trends.Each chapter begins with a more conceptual or theoretical overview. In some cases, Machor reflects on established theses in Twain Studies (dual identity, hypercanonization, etc.), showing how such theses move from the periphery to the center of Twain’s reception (and sometimes back again). In other chapters, Machor identifies trends that have been largely overlooked, including, for instance, Twain’s awkward and often conflicting invocations during World War I. Each chapter also charts and interprets the rise and fall of individual works, with Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) being covered in every chapter (except the first), but other major works shown to have specific phases (or cycles) of popularity and resonance associated with aesthetic, political, or social trends. Puddn’head Wilson (1894), for instance, resurfaces as a Civil Rights Era novel.Twain Studies scholars, I’m sure, will find much to argue with in these more interpretive sections, in part because Machor demonstrates the impact of several publications, adaptations, and works of criticism that have been largely overlooked in the twenty-first century. One of the landmark works of the early 1950s, widely reviewed, as Machor shows, was an expanded version of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit To Heaven” (1909). I did not even know this volume, Report From Paradise (1952), existed.I expect that The Mercurial Mark Twain(s) will rarely be read from cover to cover, nor was it necessarily designed to be. It stands to be the most thorough, objective, and systematically organized account of Twain’s reception, and therefore each chapter (or selections thereof) has the potential to answer research questions or be read as background to other projects in Twain Studies, reception studies, book history, etc. It is an essential resource on this basis alone. However, I want to conclude this review by drawing a little attention to the organizing conceit from which Machor draws his title.There’s nothing groundbreaking about calling Twain “mercurial” or drawing attention to his split personalities. As Machor shows, psychoanalytic readings of Twain’s multiple personas became prevalent almost immediately after his death. But while Machor traces this strain of analysis and interpretation, his primary claim is not a psychoanalytic one, but more precisely a claim about cultural capital.Machor shows that as early as the 1870s, Twain was treated as a figure of nearly unprecedented celebrity. Twain’s exceptional notoriety is sustained, and for stretches even amplified, for at least the next 120 years. The value that accrues to Twain’s celebrity—financial and otherwise—makes iconography based upon his likeness and his works desirable decorations for political campaigns, marketing and promotions, publicity and propaganda, and mass culture. As much as any other U.S. cultural figure, Twain has been adopted and appropriated with little or no consideration for whether that adoption and appropriation is coherent with his actual life and writings.Through Machor’s exhaustive work, readers can see how this splintering of iconographic Twains unfolds, and how scholars have not been immune to participating in it. The Mercurial Mark Twain(s) may be an antidote to that dangerous habit.