84
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
virtue. "I was never what she thought me," he wrote on the occasion
of "Mother" Fairbanks' death in 1899, "but I was glad to seem to her
to be it." Such submission to conscience as embodied in a surrogate
mamma of genteel taste and sentimental Christian principles appeared
to Twain, at any rate, a way into the cultured WASP world; and this
conviction seemed to him justified when the book which had taken
final shape under Mrs. Fairbanks' supervision was hailed by William
Dean Howells, spokesman-in-chief for that world.
His spontaneous expression of pleasure at that review is, however,
a giveaway, not only in its unguarded vulgarity, but
in
the implications
of its metaphor. He had felt reading it, Twain said, like the woman
whose baby had come white; and, indeed, with the acceptance of
The
Innocents Abroad,
he had been accepted as fully "white," in the sense
that the Anglo-Saxon first settlers of America had given that mythological
adjective, "white," that is to say, not merely by virtue of not being a
"nigger," which was good enough at home-but by virtue of having
attained a certain level of culture as the New England Brahmins de–
manded.
But he was not, finally, quite one of them, as was to become em–
barrassingly evident to his gente'el defenders at the infamous Whittier
Birthday Dinner, a decade or so after his voyage on the "Quaker City."
Confronting what Stuart P. Sherman would still
be
able
to
call as late
as 1910, "the leading geniuses of New England," i.e., the most proper
literary Bostonians, Twain told into the "black frost" of their disap–
proval an utterly irreverent, pseudo-Western yarn involving "Mr. Long–
fellow, Mr. Emerson, Mr. 'Oliver Wendell Holmes-consound the
lot. . . ." Why Longfellow himself was not "melted down" by the ir–
reverent miner who in Twain's tale cried out, "Hiawatha, if you'll be
so kind as to hold
your
yawp for about five minutes and let me get this
grub ready, you'll do me proud," he could not fathom. Three decades
later he was still protesting, "It is just as good as it can be. It is smart.
It is saturated with humor ... what could have been the matter with
that house?" Twain was never able really to understand why his homely
anecdote had failed to tickle his auditors; but Mr. Sherman, last
apologist for the values he had unwittingly challenged, is in no doubt.
"I know very well," he asserts, "that Congreve or Addison or George
Meredith would have agreed . . . that Mark Twain's reminiscence was
a piece of crude, heavy intellectual horseplay-an impudent affront
offered to Puritan aristocracy by a rough-handed plebian jester from
Missouri." So, too, would Twain's wife, as he acknowledged in a letter
of apology to Longfellow. "As to
my
wife's distress, it is not to
be
