Ann Ryan approaches “Mark Twain” as a mythic American construct, severely misguided in its sentimentality, especially as it represents Twain's attitudes towards black people. Though her admiration and affection for Twain is quite evident here, a tragic sense of him as a man and author emerges; she sees him as quite often enslaved to his own weaknesses and especially the allure of money and fame. As she puts it in her introduction, “For many of his admirers, some of whom may not have read his works, Twain is an artifact of Americana, a symbol of homespun wisdom and decency. As he aged, Twain himself became acutely aware of how his identity was divined and divided by the emerging celebrity culture he helped to cultivate.” Ryan lays to rest many an old chestnut about Twain and especially his early life in Hannibal. Twain represents a “fault line” in American culture, “celebrating the dream of America while suppressing any facts or histories that undermine that heroic national narrative. . . . In lesson plans, at tourist sites, and in a steady stream of literary and biographical criticism, Twain's legacy has been curated to represent, in particular, his progressive attitudes about race. Maintaining those investments, however, requires that we forget the darker truths which inspired his writing and haunted his life.”Twain wrote very few ghost stories, though there are many notes and fragments. His Gothic aesthetic hits many targets. It's not only Emmeline Grangerford. For example, in such men as “Judge” Clemens and Pap Finn he portrays a “critique of a kind of performative, often swaggering white masculinity that continues to influence American politics and culture.” He may not have believed in ghosts, but he was “surrounded by them” in the form of his many losses, family, finances, the Hartford house, the Civil War. She sees Twain as desperately trying to balance the disruptive with a need to please. She notes that H. L. Mencken found “poignancy in his flaws and a deep humanism in his efforts to move beyond them.” Ryan's powerful study reveals Twain's contradictory genius. Her command of primary sources is particularly impressive.His father's ghost is the subject of Chapter I, “The Ghost of John Marshall Clemens,” with his brutality toward slaves and his neglect as a father. Ryan analyzes the father-son relationship throughout the book. Marshall Clemens’ death, likely from syphilis, with his son Sam peering through a keyhole at the autopsy, receives a dramatic reinterpretation. Ryan outlines the general atmosphere of grief that seemed to follow Twain, such as Susy's death. Behind everything are “the losses of the Civil War, losses that left the country not only burying its dead but looking for their ghosts.” (An interesting comparison to her approach is Harold K. Bush's Continuing Bonds with the Dead: Parental Grief and Nineteenth-Century American Authors 2016.) Turning to the work of Drew Gilpin Faust, Ryan stresses just how much disfigurement was inflicted on survivors of the war. At the same time, the war inspired numerous seances. Those with Twain's neighbors Harriet Beecher Stowe and Isabel Hooker included Ouija boards and planchettes. William James was trying to prove the existence of an afterlife and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps was following her vision. Twain spoofs both of them in “Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.” This chapter, like the ones that follow, include a “coda”: the amusing “‘In the Clutch of Circumstances,’ by A. Burglar.”“The True Story of Daniel Quarles” is the coda for Chapter II, “The Ghost of Daniel.” It will surprise even dedicated Twain scholars that the famous ghost story, “The Golden Arm,” and likewise “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It,” a narrative by “Aunt Rachel,” are much darker and more nuanced in their origins than is widely known. There is much more that readers understand here; Ryan demystifies both narratives. Twain struggled to tell the truth about black suffering. But he also was in chronic need of money. “The Golden Arm” earned Twain fame and fortune, but Ryan argues that Daniel is “reduced to fragments and partial memories” and the pathos of this and Aunt Rachel's story is in large part self-referential. It could be read as a revisionist history of happy darkies; however, all the while underneath are Pap Finn and Colonel Grangerford. Chapter II may be the strongest of the chapters—and it is especially chilling.In Chapter III, “The Ghost of Jim,” Ryan describes how white culture sees black people as abused bodies or body parts, in the “morgue” of America. She brings in such thinkers as Dunbar, Du Bois, and Ellison to comment on Jim: Dunbar's “We Wear the Mask,” Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” and Ellison's illustration of “change the joke and slip the yoke.” Indeed, pap's attack on the black “p'fessor” he sees on the train is an attack on “the new Negro,” especially Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, in addition to the above writers. There is an excellent discussion of the little-studied “Jim's Ghost Story,” an excised portion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn depicting Jim in an autopsy ward; this odd tale Ryan connects to Sam's observing his father's autopsy. In this chapter she brilliantly explores Twain's dualistic portrayals of fearful black men and fearing black men. Its main focus is on events at the Phelps Farm against the background of Nat Turner's rebellion. At the Phelps Farm the racist murderousness is loud—“Sis” Hotchkiss is fun to laugh at, as is the terrified Aunt Sally—but at the same time, Sis Hotchkiss seems worse than even pap in her diatribes. (We must also remember that Uncle Silas Phelps is a clergyman who loves to sit passively and read the New Testament adventures of Paul and Silas.) But the aim at that farm is what Ryan calls “black fragmentation.” She is able then to connect the famous autopsy episode to lynching and to the pathetic story “A Dog's Tale.” Its coda is from James by Percival Everett.Since at least 2015 Ryan has been delineating a fascinating and little-known aspect of Twain's persona, his popularity among spiritualists, photographers of ghosts, those with intense interest in the afterlife, fortune tellers. After Susy's death Twain researched the afterlife and increasingly wrote stories of mystical, spectral figures such as “The Chronicle of Young Satan” and No. 44: The Mysterious Stranger. In chapter IV, “The Ghost of Sam Clemens,” Ryan notes that, ironically, as skeptical in the extreme Twain was of seances, spiritualists latched onto him as an ever-popular, genial presiding spirit of America. This she terms “loving Sam Clemens to death.” Twain became an “embalmed” idea; even Albert Bigelow Paine created his own spectral friend in Twain—as Paine wanted to see him as “his” Twain. However, “Twain knew that a ghost represents a deep discontent and pain or yearning,” not an amusing spectacle. Ryan doesn't mention Twain's savage critique of Mary Baker Eddy in Christian Science, but it fits right in. On a different note, Ryan reviews the existence of many, many Twain impersonators.The illustrations are interesting and numerous; I would have preferred to see them placed in a photo section on slick paper because photos just look better. Her choice of illustrations is very fine.Throughout the book and especially in the voluminous notes, a reader sees a master of Twain scholarship but also hears the voice of a slightly tormented lover of Clemens and his work. There is in the book sometimes an uncanny sense of how well she knows her man and the “Mark Twain” he created. But Ryan concludes with the statement, “I want to meet the spirit of Samuel Langhorne Clemens.”This is a brave, impassioned, and beautifully argued book. It illuminates with terrific new clarity the relationship Clemens and Twain had with black people and it examines many new and sometimes little-known “ghosts” that result.
Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Thu,) studied this question.