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Mark Twain and France The Making of an American Identity
Paula Harrington and Ronald Jenn
Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2017 Hardcover. 244 pages. ISBN 978-0826221193. $50
Reviewed by Claire Parfait Université Paris 13
Mark Twain’s anti-French feelings are well known. The American humorist delivered such put-downs as “France has neither winter nor summer nor morals” and “the French are the connecting link between man & the monkey” [4]. The fact that France was frequently the butt of Mark Twain’s wit has often been commented on, but had not so far been the subject of a full monograph. This is what a transatlantic team of Twain specialists set out to do in this highly readable scholarly work. Paula Harrington, who heads the Farnham Writers’ Center at Colby College in Maine where she also teaches, has widely published on Twain. She teamed up with Ronald Jenn, a professor at the University of Lille 3 and an expert in translation studies, focusing on translations of Twain into French. The authors’ main argument is that Twain's relationship with France was both much deeper and more complex than was previously thought. Mark Twain and France explores the various sources and facets of Twain’s dislike of the French, in order to demonstrate that Twain used the French as a foil against which “to help build a modern American sense of cultural self” [7]. In other words, “France and the French contributed to Twain’s construction of a new kind of ‘American’ identity in the second half of the nineteenth century” [6]. Similarly, Twain himself used France as a foil to define his own identity as an American writer. This is convincingly demonstrated in the course of seven chronological chapters, followed by a bibliography and index. The book opens with a useful timeline of the visits of the Clemens family to France (1867-1895). Chapter one (“Accounting for the Creoles. 1835-60”) goes back in time to explore the French beginnings of Missouri as part of the Louisiana Territory which Napoleon sold to Jefferson in 1803. Twain mostly ignored the French legacy of his home state, which jarred with the notion of Manifest Destiny as uniquely American, though in Tom Sawyer he appropriated a French legend of a treasure hunt. Harrington and Jenn trace one source of Twain’s anti-French feeling to Francis Parkman’s multi-volume France and England in North America (1865-1892). Twain became a great fan of Parkman and absorbed his strong anti-French and anti-Native American bias. Yet he also developed an interest in French history—particularly Joan of Arc—and in French culture and language when his work on steamboats took him to New Orleans. He repeatedly tried to learn French, with varying degrees of success. Indeed, while he “rejected French heritage and influence in North America,” Twain “valued continental French culture as a means of social mobility” [37]. Chapter two (“Leaving the River. 1861-66”) focuses on Twain’s stay in the West and reporting trip to Hawaii. While the Gold Rush and the failed revolution of 1848 lured many French immigrants to California and Nevada, Twain systematically omitted all reference to them in his newspaper reporting. Yet he poked fun at the French in a number of ways, for instance the use of malapropisms and the letters of a fictitious Frenchman. Twain’s newspaper articles depict the French as conceited, dishonest, and lewd. In Twain’s crime reporting, the villains are sometimes not just French, but “very French” [47]. For Harrington and Jenn, taken together with Twain’s continued interest in French culture, this is evidence of “cultural anxiety about American versus French standing” [41]. This cultural anxiety led Twain to minimize France while still borrowing from its language, and to use France to make Americans laugh at themselves, about their obsession with the latest fashions, for example. Yet while the jabs at Americans remain good-humored, those targeting the French are merciless. In Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands, Twain worries about French imperial hopes in the Pacific. His “Dining with a Cannibal” parody, in which the narrator is offered a fried Frenchman for dinner (the host apologizes, the Frenchman ought to have been baked), may express the wish for America to replace France as the height of civilization. In the same way, his burlesque of Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea may be understood as an American writer’s desire to outmatch one of the best-known French authors of his day. The third chapter (“France for the First Time. 1867-69”) looks at Twain’s first visit to France, in the context of a new wave of American tourism to Europe which attracted increasing numbers of Americans to France, and especially Paris, after the Civil War. When Mark Twain visited in 1867—an experience which he recounted in Innocents Abroad (1869)—the city was hosting the Exposition Universelle, which drew some eleven million visitors to the French capital. Harrington and Jenn suggest that Innocents Abroad should be read as a work closer to fiction than to travel journalism. Indeed, a number of the letters which Twain contracted to write for a newspaper were lost in the mail, and Twain had to reconstruct part of the journey from memory and from accounts written by fellow travelers on board the Quaker City. The authors take issue with those Twain scholars who consider those reconstructed sections as weaker than the others and show how Twain “creates a tale of two countries, with one culture caricatured to delineate the identity of the other” [72]: the American character is defined in opposition to the French character. And the French definitely suffer under Twain’s pen: they are promiscuous, unfaithful, and sex-obsessed. The authors contend that Twain’s characterization of the French as lazy, dirty and immoral “represents a projection of traits he recognized—and was afraid of—in himself” [79]. In his biography of Mark Twain, Justin Kaplan noted that Twain’s inconsistent attitude to sexuality and sexual morality (in Paris he delivered a speech in praise of masturbation yet was offended by a statue of Venus by Titian in the Louvre, which he deemed obscene) was partly due to “built-in American puritanism,” partly to “his own intensely troubled, incurably divided concern with sexuality”(1). In chapter 4 (“Jumping the French. 1870-78”), Harrington and Jenn offer a new interpretation of two short pieces Twain wrote about the Franco-Prussian war of 1870. By 1870, Twain was comfortably settled in Buffalo; the success of Innocents Abroad had made him financially comfortable and his marriage to Olivia Langdon had introduced him to the upper class. The United States was prosperous and Twain confident that his country was on the way to surpassing Europe and especially France. The humorist’s pieces on the 1870 war parody American journalism while caricaturing the European nations involved in the conflict, in a burlesque where the French come off worst. While poking fun at his own country and countrymen, Twain used the French once again “to build up an American sense of superiority and difference” [90]. The chapter also explores the literary quarrel between Twain and Thérèse Bentzon, the pen name of Marie-Thérèse Blanc, an important literary critic of the time. Twain took issue with her translation of his Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and decided to write a “revenge translation” [92] entitled “ ‘The Jumping Frog’ in English, Then in French, Then Clawed Back into a Civilized Language Once More by Patient, Unremunerated Toil.” As the authors explain, the problem in fact did not lie in the translation but in Bentzon’s condescension toward a writer whose (American) humor she deemed much inferior to that of Rabelais and Voltaire. It certainly rankled. Chapter 5, “Paris from the Inside. 1879,” examines the four months that Twain spent in Paris with his family that year. For most critics, that stay is central to Twain’s dislike of France and the French. Harrington and Jenn, however, convincingly contend that his anti-French feeling cannot be ascribed only to those months of bleak weather, in which the writer, suffering from dysentery and rheumatism, was vainly trying to finish A Tramp Abroad. The authors use new and unexplored sources, including a “carte de visite” album held at Cornell University, to show Twain’s ambivalence toward France and the French. The writer’s album, with its photographs of politicians, men of letters, painters, etc., shows that Twain took a keen interest in French politics and culture. In addition, Harrington and Jenn suggest that the unpublished French chapters of A Tramp Abroad, while extremely harsh on the French, may be an answer to a French etiquette book that Twain had bought and which described American culture as immature and took French superiority for granted. Much as Twain had reacted to Thérèse Bentzon’s translation, he lashed out at France to defend America and create “an inverted scale of civilization, with the French falling at the bottom” [127]. The two French chapters that did make their way into A Tramp Abroad, though still critical, were much milder. For Harrington and Jenn, Twain “had fought the French in his writings and won” [138]: he had overcome “his American inferiority complex” [138] which partly explained his bellicose attitude toward the French. This may be the reason why he did not include the harshest parts of the manuscript in the published version. In chapter 6 (“Less to Prove. 1880-92”), the authors explore the reception history of Twain’s works in France. The 1880s proved to be a defining decade for Twain’s reception in France, with translations of several novels and a first full-length monograph on the American writer. By the end of the decade, Twain had become the representative American writer as well as a yardstick for humor. He had also become newsworthy and the French press reported on his doings. The unpublished manuscript of his river voyage down the Rhône river in 1891 (very different from the sanitized version published posthumously by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1923) reveals that Twain’s attitudes toward France “while still not wholly glowing”, had grown “more modulated and complex” [139]. Twain’s fame was now established and the United States had become a leading industrial power, luring millions of European immigrants. Like Twain, the country itself had established its identity and had much less to prove. Notes taken during the trip down the Rhône show that, with occasional relapses into what we would today call French bashing, Twain no longer automatically assumed that Americans were superior. Chapter 7, eloquently titled “Coming to Terms. 1893-99,” investigates the final developments in Twain’s relationship with France. By then the writer had his own entry in the Larousse dictionary, a clear sign that he had achieved full recognition and fame on this side of the Atlantic too. In this final chapter, Harrington and Jenn focus on Twain’s Joan of Arc, mostly written during the writer’s longest stay in France, which they see as “combining French and American narratives to create a single universal tale of perfect human behavior” [180]. Twain’s choice of a French heroine (and one who had fascinated him from childhood) reveals “how much he has come to terms with France and the French” [182]. While Twain’s nationalist answer to the American travelogue of French novelist Paul Bourget is reminiscent of his earlier nationalistic criticism of Thérèse Bentzon, the American writer vigorously sided with Émile Zola at the time of the Dreyfus affair. By the late nineteenth century, Twain denounced American imperialism, thus finding “his final foil at home” [184]. Twain “did not much like France or the French,” Andrew Hoffman observed in Inventing Mark Twain : The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens(2). Mark Twain and France provides a carefully documented, well-written and highly entertaining (the topic, after all, is Mark Twain) account of the sources, evolution, complexities and contradictions of this dislike of the French, while deftly placing the discussion within the wider context of American and French history. The work will be of interest to Twain specialists, of course, but also to anyone interested in US and French relationships and literary history on both sides of the Atlantic. It has been shortlisted by the French Heritage Society for the French Heritage Literary Award. ________________ (1) Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983 (1966) : 221-222. (2) New York: William Morrow, 1997 : 267.
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