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“A Splendor of Stars & Suns”: Twain as a Reader of Browning's Poems

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Alan Gribben
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Extract

Samuel Clemens' infatuation with the poetry of Robert Browning during and after the 1880s demonstrates the subtle dimensions in Browning's verse that a gifted oral interpreter can disclose. Whatever first attracted Clemens to the Browning canon, however, it was not the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. When Clemens began courting Olivia Langdon she was already a partisan of Mrs. Browning's works, and the couple had several good-natured exchanges about the intelligibility of her poems. In a letter of 17 May 1869 Clemens jocularly alluded to “some dark & bloody mystery out of the Widow Browning”; on another occasion he turned to Livy for an explanation of obscurities in Aurora Leigh.* In the second week of Livy Clemens' marriage she appended a teasing note to the letter which Clemens was writing to Mrs. Mary Mason Fairbanks, vowing that she, along with Clemens' sister and niece, “will make Mr Clemens read aloud to us in Mrs Browning—Felicity to us—but what to him?”* Around 1872 Clemens declared, in a letter written to Livy, “If they were to set me to review Mrs. Browning, it would be like asking you to deliver judgment upon the merits of a box of cigars.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 6 , Spring 1978 , pp. 87 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

NOTES

87 Leigh: The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Wecter, Dixon (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 96—heareafter cited as LLMT.Google Scholar Clemens' reference to Aurora Leigh occurs in a still-unpublished letter described in LLMT, p. 34.Google Scholarhim?”: ALS of 13 Feb. 1870, Mark Twain Memorial, Hartford, Conn., published in Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. Wecter, Dixon (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949), p. 125—hereafter referred to as MTMF.Google Scholarcigars”: Quoted in Clemens', ClaraMy Father, Mark Twain (New York: Harper, 1931), p. 47.Google Scholar (Hereafter cited in the text as MFMT.)

88 appetite: Clemens, to Howells, William Dean, 12 07 1885Google Scholar, Mark Twain-Howells Letters, ed. Smith, Henry Nash and Gibson, William M. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, Belknap Press, 1960), p. 533—subsequently referred to as MTHL.Google Scholarnon-cultivation”: Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals, ed. Anderson, Frederick, Salamo, Lin, and Stein, Bernard L. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1975), II, 139.Google Scholar

89 Bede”): Quoted by Salsbury, Edith Colgate, Susy and Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 279.Google Scholar1873: Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Paine, Albert Bigelow (New York: Harper, 1917), p. 207.Google ScholarYork”: This volume is part of the Mark Twain Papers, University of California, Berkeley—hereafter designated as MTP. The Editor of that collection, Frederick Anderson, assisted me significantly with my research. hearsay”: My Mark Twain: Reminiscences and Criticisms, ed. Baldwin, Marilyn Austin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1967), p. 16.Google Scholar

90 S.L.C.”: Carrie Estelle Doheny Collection, Edward Laurence Doheny Memorial Library, St. John's Seminary, Camarillo, California. The librarian, Mrs. Mary R. Gayle, brought this and other items to my attention during my visit to Camarillo in 1972. Clemens merely signed the second volume “To Susie Clemens from Papa.” Previously unpublished excerpts from Mark Twain's writings are copyright © 1978 by Trustees under the will of Clara Clemens Samossoud. weeks: Clemens, to MrsFoote, Mary Hallock, 2 12 1887Google Scholar, published as When Huck Finn Went Highbrow, ed. de Casseres, Benjamin, Limited edition of 125 copies (New York: Thomas F. Madigan, 1934), p. 7.Google Scholar

93 truth”: When Huck Finn Went Highbrow, p. 7.Google Scholarentanglements”: “Mark Twain as a Reader,” Harper's Weekly, 55 (7 01 1911), 6.Google Scholar

94 knew”: Memories of a Southern Woman of Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 84.Google Scholar1887: King, to King, Nina Ansley, 10 06 1887Google Scholar, quoted by Bush, Robert, “Grace King and Mark Twain,” American Literature, 44 (1972), 35.CrossRefGoogle Scholartexts: See my essay, “‘It Is Unsatisfactory to Read to One's Self’: Mark Twain's Informal Readings,” Quarterly Journal of Speech, 62 (1976), 49–56.Google Scholaremotion”: Samuel Langhorne Clemens: Some Reminiscences (privately printed, 1935), pp. 14–15.Google Scholarinterpretation”: Remembered Yesterdays (Boston: Little, Brown, 1923), p. 321.Google Scholarverse”: “The Real ‘Mark Twain,’” Pall Mall Magazine, 16 (09 1898), 30–31.Google ScholarBrowning”: Mark Twain's Letters, p. 490.Google Scholar

95 him”: Mark Twain: The Man and His Work, 3rd ed. (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1967), p. 35.Google Scholarpoems”: On the Poetry of Mark Twain (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1966), p. 22.Google Scholartimes”: Clemens, to MrsFairbanks, Mary Mason, 22 03 1887Google Scholar, published in MTMF, pp. 260–61.Google Scholarit”: “Mark Twain,” Harper's Magazine, 92 (05 1896), 822.Google Scholar

96 1891: Notebook 30, TS pp. 23, 25, MTP.Google Scholarbrother”: My Mark Twain, p. 16.Google Scholar In identifying this poem I received assistance from Bernard L. Stein and became indebted to William Dean Howells' Literary Friends and Acquaintances, ed. Hiatt, David F. and Cady, Edwin H. (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 265, 332.Google Scholar

97 did”: Isabel V. Lyon Journals, TS p. 229, MTP.Google Scholar

98 1951): See “The Dispersal of Samuel L. Clemens' Library Books,” Resources for American Literary Study, 5 (1975), 145–65.Google Scholar My forthcoming book—Mark Twain's Library: A Reconstruction, scheduled for publication by G. K. Hall & Company of Boston—assembles an annotated catalog of the surviving volumes and their present locations. volumes: As described in “‘Good Books & a Sleepy Conscience’: Mark Twain's Reading Habits,” American Literary Realism, 9 (1976), 299–303.Google Scholar

99 dissertation: Wallace, Robert Dawson, “An Analytical-Historical Study of the Factors Contributing to the Success of Mark Twain as an Oral Interpreter,” (doctoral dissertation, Univ. of Southern California, 1962), pp. 291–346.Google Scholarfog”: Quoted by Paine, Albert Bigelow in Mark Twain: A Biography, 2 vols. (New York: Harper, 1912), p. 847—hereafter MTB.Google Scholar1884: Reported in The Twainian, 27 (03–04 1968). 1.Google Scholar

101 atrocities: Reprinted in Mark Twain: Life as I Find It, ed. Neider, Charles (Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1961), pp. 275–95.Google Scholarlaughs”: Mark Twain: Life, pp. 267–72.Google Scholar