PhilPaine.com

Bernard DeVo­to was was one of the lead­ing Mark Twain schol­ars, as well as being a his­to­rian of the Amer­i­can far west, a pas­sion­ate advo­cate of nature con­ser­va­tion, and a lead­ing advo­cate of civ­il lib­er­ties. In this curi­ous book, writ­ten in 1932, he devotes most of his ener­gy to crit­i­ciz­ing oth­er Mark Twain Schol­ars. The book is clever, acer­bic, and some­times down­right nasty, but enter­tains pre­cisely for those rea­sons. DeVo­to detest­ed the scholas­tic habits of reify­ing abstrac­tions (The Fron­tier, Puri­tanism, The Artist, Mate­ri­al­ism) and bas­ing grand explana­tory the­o­ries on triv­ial or dubi­ous evi­dence, or no evi­dence at all. Some­times his sar­casm grates on the read­er, but often it is just so good (that is to say, cru­el, like Scot­tish humour) that it brings up a smile from that lit­tle reser­voir of mal­ice that hides some­where in even the kind­est read­er. Here is his treat­ment of one well-known pun­dit: “He exhibits the amateur’s rev­er­ence for the prin­ci­ple of ambiva­lence. This, in his lay psy­cho-analy­sis, is a device for the rec­on­cil­i­a­tion of con­tra­dic­tory evi­dence. It explains that a fact can be both its lit­eral self and a sym­bol of its oppo­site, that one fact can prove a giv­en asser­tion on one page and a con­tra­dic­tory asser­tion on anoth­er, that the two facts which seem to indi­cate irrec­on­cil­able con­clu­sions real­ly mean one thing — the pre­ferred thing.” Boy, I wish I could write sar­casm of that dis­ti­lla­tion. DeVo­to could prob­a­bly take on six coral snakes and a griz­zlie before break­fast, then move on to seri­ous sar­casm after cof­fee. Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic crit­i­cism was the bab­ble of that time, but I’m sure he would make mince­meat of today’s equiv­a­lents (“post-mod­ernism”, for example).