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‘Absorbing’ the Character: James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain's Theory of Performance

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SOURCE: Bush, Jr., Harold K. “‘Absorbing’ the Character: James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain's Theory of Performance.” American Literary Realism 31, no. 3 (spring 1999): 31-47.

[In the following essay, Bush explains Mark Twain's theory of performance, comments on the novelist's respect for Riley's performed poetry, and posits that both authors saw the absence of any critical space between poet and persona as responsible for the success of Riley's sentimental poems.]

Much recent work on Mark Twain, including all or parts of influential volumes by Susan Gillman, Randall Knoper, and Richard Lowry, has been preoccupied with Twain's theories of performance.1 Oddly, none of these fine books has much to say about James Whitcomb Riley (not to be confused with Twain's friend James H. Riley of South African diamond fame); in fact, Riley's name is not even listed in two of the three indexes. It is interesting, however, that Lowry's study, which does include some rather brief discussion of Riley, begins where much traditional commentary on Twain's life has tended also to begin: that is, with the famous “declaration of independence” that Twain ostensibly made before the literary gods of brahmin Boston at Whittier's birthday celebration in December of 18772 Lowry calls this both the “primal scene” and the “locus classicus” of Twain studies, and deservedly so.3 I would qualify this claim only by mentioning that it “deserves” such recognition only insofar as it has become mythologized over the years as just such a primal scene. As critics ranging from Mircea Eliade, Edward Said, Terence Martin, and others have reminded us, we are all in need of beginnings—and when none can be found, they must surely be invented.4

I broach this now to suggest an irony regarding the very first meeting between Twain and Riley, which occurred almost exactly ten years after the Whittier brouhaha. In November 1887, Riley and Twain converged on Manhattan to participate in a program of readings sponsored by the American Copyright League, and it was there that they met for the first time. James Russell Lowell held court; besides Twain, other eminent American writers, including Edward Eggleston, also participated. At this time, Riley, despite his wild popularity in Indiana, was very much an unknown quantity among the other well-known participants: mainly he was caricatured as the brash backwoodsman from the Old Northwest speaking Hoosier slang and acting like either a sentimental fool or a greenhorn nitwit. The great success of the New York program led to another engagement sponsored by the same Copyright League, this time in Washington, D.C., in March 1888. That star-studded program became the cultural event of the season, as President and Mrs. Grover Cleveland attended and held a White House reception after the final performance on 19 March 1888.

I mention Riley's participation in the Copyright readings of New York and Washington and compare it with Twain's famous confrontation ten years earlier at the Whittier dinner for four specific reasons: First, both were in a sense “break-out” performances delivered in the stellar company of the nation's literary heavyweights. Both writers, prior to these events, had enjoyed large sales of written volumes, and both had developed some popularity as newspaper writers. Today the story of Mark Twain's rise to national prominence is rather well-known in comparison with Riley's.5 However, it is important to recall briefly here that by the age of thirty, Riley had begun publishing his hugely successful dialect poems under his most famous pseudonym, the farmer “Benjamin F. Johnson of Boone.” By 1883 Riley had already published his extremely popular first volume of poetry, The Old Swimmin' Hole and 'Leven More Poems, a title signalling his insistent use of Hoosier dialect and regional themes. His journalistic work in a number of papers during the 1870s and 1880s, particularly the Indianapolis Journal from 1879 to 1888, and then the first best-selling volume of poetry had made him practically a household word among the residents of Indiana and several other Middle West states, a phenomenon very much like the popularization of Twain's name in the 1860s on the western slope of California and Washoe.

Secondly, both events can be interpreted as the beginning of a massive expansion of celebrity and public adoration of the two personalities concerned. For Twain, the Whittier dinner has taken on much more importance mythically than it can be said to hold historically as a turning point in Twain's career, despite its much later mythography (of which, by the way, Twain was a major promoter)6 Of course, it is not an exagerration to say that the Whittier dinner did in fact mark the beginning of what we might term the major phase of Twain's career, which would stretch throughout the 1880s and include his appearance at the Copyright readings. In the case of Riley, however, the stage success he enjoyed in 1887 and 1888 in New York and Washington almost undeniably did usher in a new beginning for his career. Before this veritable springboard into nation fame, Riley was hardly known among the eastern elite. Only three years earlier, for example, when stage manager James Pond suggested that Twain consider doing a tour with Riley, Twain had difficulty remembering Riley's name. About the same time, he mistakenly wrote in his journal “Kelly” in reference to the Hoosier poet, marked it out, and corrected it with Riley.7 Furthermore, a Washington Post report of the White House reception, published 20 March 1888, listed as attendees Mr. and Mrs. James Whitcomb Riley, despite the fact that Riley was a lifelong bachelor and became rather notorious for that very fact. Thus, in 1887 and 1888, Riley was only an emerging sensation, not the great luminary that he would become ten years later. Despite his relative obscurity today, it is most sobering to realize that, at the height of his remarkable fame, Riley was perhaps the most famous and beloved American poet of his time—on a par, really, with the most popular and esteemed poets at any one moment in American history, including the likes of Longfellow, Lowell, or later, Robert Frost. It is a claim made by numerous contemporary observers. Dubbed the “People's Laureate” during the latter part of his life, Riley lived long enough to witness schools in many parts of the country celebrate “Riley Day.” When he died in 1916, an estimated 35,000 people passed his body as it lay in state under the dome of the Capitol Building in Indianapolis.

The third reason for comparing the Copyright readings with the Whittier birthday dinner is because, within the span of just ten years, the tables had seemingly been completely turned on our beloved Mark Twain. At the Whittier dinner of 1878, Twain was considered the brash, western bull coming to make a name for himself among the haughty “easterners”; by 1888, Twain is the most famous of the easterners, and it is now Riley the Hoosier poet who is laying siege to the promontories of fame and fortune, with Twain now securely transformed from the upstart Western whippersnapper into one of the stars referred to by the Post as the “literary gods of America.”8 In fact, the Copyright reading was not Riley's first visit to the eastern establishment: in December 1881, his agent James Redpath had arranged a reading for Riley at legendary Tremont Temple. Riley, of course, was breathless with anticipation, and while in Boston had even worked up the nerve to knock on the door of the great master himself, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, to whom Riley had earlier in his career sent two letters of introduction along with some of his verse. Longfellow graciously received his visitors, and listened to Riley recite some of his poems, including “Old-Fashioned Roses,” which contains the line, “They ain't no style about 'em, / And they're sorto’ pale and faded.” These slangy words caused Riley to feel “humble and almost irreverent”: still, the visit had a lifelong impact on the young poet, one of an almost religious significance, according to Riley's biographer: “This was a great hour for him. To stand in the presence of this Brahmin was like being at the gate of heaven.”9

Even though he had made this original pilgrimage to the “center of the universe” in 1881, Riley's almost adolescent enthusiasm upon receiving the invitation of 1887 for the New York copyright appearance is most evident in a letter announcing the engagement to one of his close friends, Dr. James Matthews, dated 25 November 1887:

As yet I am not at liberty to state my mission to N.Y., but, in confidence, you must know that I go there by invitation of International Copyright League, to read with, American Authors, at Chickering Hall, dates 28 & 29th. Aint that a great, big, and all-swelled-up honor for the little bench-legg'd Poet out o' this blessed Hoosier Nazareth? Only think of it!—introduced, by Jas. Russell Lowell, to thousands of the crowned heads of the strictly elite literary eye-and-ear auditor of that Athens! oh heavens—oh heavens! I feel, indeed, that “I am but a poor sewing girl”! & “Save me—save me! or I shall escape!” Lowell, Stoddard, Stedman, “Twain,” Stockton, Cable, Page—and the Lord only knows the rest of the glorious list!10

It is hard to miss the breathless innocence of these remarks—along with the reverence for the “Athens” of American culture as represented by the “glorious list” of participants. Riley's obvious reverence is for a hegemonic order that has been described as “the closest thing to a coherent national literary culture that America has ever had.”11 Such a reaction can easily be compared with Twain's similar fervency regarding his invitation to read at Whittier's celebration ten years earlier.

Finally, the Copyright readings are significant because Riley, though placed dead last in the evening's very long program, proved to be the biggest sensation of the entire evening. I believe that I do not exaggerate when I claim that all stage performers are rather egotistical, and sensitive to their reception, and somewhat competitive in how their reception compares, for instance, with their co-performers. I believe that I also do not embellish by suggesting that Mark Twain was a competitive performer regarding such matters—that he rather liked being the brightest star among stars. Thus, I believe that the audience's extensive applause for Riley, and the consequent press reports of the evening, may have tweaked Twain just a bit in their effusive and almost overwhelming praise of Riley. For example, according to the New York World (in a review possibly written by Bill Nye, the well-known platform comedian who often performed with Riley): “The fun of Mark Twain shriveled up into a bitter patch of melancholy in the fierce light of Mr. Riley's humor.” The Washington Post said this about Riley's reading: “It was the gem of the evening for humor. … To say that the audience was delirious with laughter would be within the truth. Mr. Riley is a whole performance himself. His listeners might have been there now if he could have been persuaded to continue.” The Chicago News put it this way: “Official reports from the recent authors' readings at Washington bring the intelligence [that the participants included] a distinguished humorist from Connecticut [and] a little tow headed cuss from Indiana. The report goes on to say that the little tow headed cuss got all the applause.”12 The report in the Post went on to say that, “So thoroughly charmed was the audience with Mr. Riley's work that when he sat down not a person in the house stirred, although according to the programme the end had come.”13

Another thorough and frank analysis of the evening is found in a letter written by Nye, a close friend of Riley, to Dr. Matthews; according to Nye,

Our mutual friend Riley secured the Metropolitan pelt here at the Author's Readings as you doubtless know before this. He had everything against him in some ways and had it all his own way after all. Of twenty readers and authors none in any way approached his success at all. He was stuck down at the tail of the programme in a half apologetic way and overlooked by the chairman till the crowd had begun to go home. Then he was put forth as an afterthought by the aged and tottering foreigner Jas [James] R. Lowell who is spending the winter with friends in Massachusetts.


Then the little bench-legged poet proceeded to introduce his new style of hand-sewed humor and homely pathos in a way that made the hairy-backed members and literateurs of the effete east hunt for the tall grass! I need not add more. The audience, the Press and the Critics had to say that the little gentleman from Indiana had wiped up the ground with his rivals.14

Nye, who makes some interesting remarks about Riley gaining the “pelt” of the “effete east” who are forced to hide in the “tall grass,” is here apparently including in this description the likes of Mark Twain. Furthermore, his account of the rousing success of Riley is corroborated in a letter sent to Riley by another of his early admirers, Hamlin Garland: “We were glad to hear that you captured the audience at New York.”15

All of this is to say that the circumstances of their initial contact, in which a relatively obscure younger writer outshines the older world-renowned celebrity in front of his peers and, in Washington several months later, even in front of the President, begins to explain the great admiration that Twain developed for Riley. Of course, Twain might have been sorely jealous inwardly of Riley's great success; in fact, when he agreed to perform with Riley in New York in 1894, Twain did so only under the condition that “Riley leave all the humorous to me and restrict himself to the serious”—a comment demonstrating Twain's fear of being once again upstaged by a greater talent.16 However, outwardly Twain always took honest pleasure in truly great performers. Further, Twain's admiration constituted a genuine devotion to the excellence of Riley's craft as a performer. This admiration and fondness is a key feature of the handful of letters that Twain wrote to Riley over the years from 1890 to 1903.

For example, in December of 1890, Riley sent Twain a copy of his latest book of verse, Rhymes of Childhood. On 29 December 1890, Twain wrote back from Farmington Avenue in Hartford:

My Dear Old Riley:


Thanks a thousand, thousand times, for the charming book, which laments my own lost youth for me as no words of mine could do.

Yours ever, Mark.17

As Kenneth Lynn long ago noted, Twain almost idolized “the pleasant valley of childhood,” the “Happy Valley of unspoiled youth and crystal-clear impressions which so captured the imagination of the post-Civil War generation.” Twain once wrote, for instance, that remembering Hannibal was like “bathing in the Fountain of Youth.”18 Recreating such a “Happy Valley” must be considered one of the major achievements of Riley's poetic corpus, and certainly is one reason that Twain so much admired him. In response to this praise, Riley wrote back to Twain on 31 December, “Your comment on the Child's book is the prize gift to me of all this uncommonly considerate Christmas.” In the same letter, Riley recalls how as a youth he encountered Twain's “Celebrated Jumping Frog,” which he applauds for its “absolute life and character plausibility or veracity.”19 Barely over a month later, in a letter dated 2 February 1891, Twain responded to Riley's just published poem, Erasmus Wilson: “It's a darling poem, and I thank you ever so much for it. But—when it comes to reciting it, I can't even remotely approach you. You are the only man alive that can read your poems exactly right. There are poets who can't read their works worth shucks; and if they should offer to read their poems once I should easily have the grit to say, ‘Oh, gimme the book and lemme show you how!—you just make me tired’; but I should never say that to you; no, I take my hat off to you, my boy, you do know how.”20 This letter indicates both Twain's sincere praise of Riley's skill as a reciter and his almost violent dislike for the vast majority of readers.

At first, Twain apparently included himself in that majority, as he confesses about his initial naive underestimation regarding the high art of “reading”:

I supposed it would only be necessary to do like Dickens—get out on the platform and read from the book. I did that and made a botch of it. Written things are not speech; their form is literary; they are stiff, inflexible, and will not lend themselves to happy and effective delivery with the tongue—where their purpose is to merely entertain, not instruct; they have to be limbered up, broken up, colloquialized, and turned into the common forms of unpremeditated talk—otherwise they will bore the house, and not entertain it. After a week's experience with the book I laid it aside and never carried it to the platform again; but meantime I had memorized those pieces, and in delivering them from the platform they soon transformed themselves into flexible talk, with all their obstructing precisenesses and formalities gone out of them for good.21

Comments like these testify to Twain's growing conviction that, as Fred Lorch once put it, “the art of reading required greater skill than the art of lecturing.”22 Further, and in corroboration with abundant evidence, it seems that for Mark Twain, Riley was the consummate reader.

One other letter from Twain to Riley provides additional nuance regarding Twain's admiration for the Hoosier poet. From the Hotel Metropole in Vienna, dated 16 January 1898:

Dear Riley:


By gracious, old friend, you've squared your promise made to me in Washington so many years ago, when you said you would send me a book. And a lovely book it is, too, and has your old subtle touch, and your delicious felicities of phrase—and your old effective x-ray is present, too, and penetrating to the deep place.


Go on and sing!


I'll order the Hartford people to send you my book. You'll find some mighty good pictures in it, by Dan Beard, and Frost and other of our gifted boys.


Live long and live high!

Always sincerely yours,

Mark Twain

This letter is also memorable for the rather unusual address on the envelope in which it was sent (all the way from Austria!):

Mr. James Whitcomb Riley
Poet, + a dern capable one, too,
Indianapolis, Indiana, U. S. of America(23)

Among other things, the lack of a full address suggests the very great fame of Riley in his heyday; just as much, the funny line is a direct compliment of Riley as a poet. Moreover, Twain's admonition to “Go on and sing!” is reminiscent of his comments in his well-known letter of 1889 to Andrew Lang. There, Twain compares high culture with popular culture, or what he terms the arts produced for the “Belly and its Members.” Twain chastizes those who assume “that if a book doesn't meet the cultivated-class standard, it isn't valuable.” This critical law, says Twain, “requires Whitcomb Riley to sing no more till he can sing like Shakespeare.” Later in the same letter, Twain chides the notion that “Homer [is more valuable than] the little everybody's-poet whose rhymes are in all mouths to-day and will be in nobody's mouth next generation,” which I take to be another thinly-veiled reference to Riley. His point is summed up with a crashing metaphor, in which he laments “the superstition, in a word, that the vast and awful comet that trails its cold lustre through the remote abysses of space once a century and interests and instructs a cultivated handful of astronomers is worth more to the world than the sun which warms and cheers all the nations every day and makes the crops to grow.”24 Characteristically, Twain is openly concerned with a work's “worth”: and here, by analytical sleight-of-hand, he is claiming that for the vast majority of Americans, Riley far outweighs Homer and Shakespeare in value. In effect, comments like these make clear that Twain regarded Riley's art very highly. Thus, both sources encourage Riley to “Go on and sing!”

We might well ask, what was it about Riley that so intrigued Twain, and by extension, what was it about Riley that caused Twain to heap such lavish praise on his competitor in his well-known essay, “How to Tell a Story,” where Riley's skills are openly invoked as the quintessential achievement of any story-teller known by Twain? My suggestion is that Riley embodied in his greatest performerly moments exactly the attributes that Twain mentioned throughout various of his writings as being fundamental to great performance. More to the point, a fuller understanding of Twain's continued admiration for Riley both reflects and augments what we know about Twain's theory of performance, story-telling, and what he calls the “humorous story,” which is a “high and delicate art” that “depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling.”25 As he put it in 1889, “The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious.”26 In short, Riley epitomized for Twain (and many other prominent American litterateurs of the time) the truly humorous and purely innocent public persona: and the upshot of this realization for Twain scholars, therefore, should issue in a much more serious and sustained analysis of Riley and his platform career.

A telling detail of Twain's comments is his assertion that Riley's performance comprised a “perfect simulation,” or, to put it another way, that Riley succeeded at “absorbing” his character onstage. With this concept in mind, it is interesting that on 26 March 1888, soon after the Washington performance for the Copyright League, Twain and Riley again met when they attended a late night dinner at Delmonico's in New York, given in honor of the renowned Shakespearean actor Henry Irving and Ellen Terry. Irving, according to one historian, was “unquestionably the greatest actor of the English stage in the last half of the century”; he and Terry, his costar at the famous Lyceum Theatre (a forerunner of the British National Theatre), became such great “sources of national pride” that in 1895 Queen Victoria made Irving the first British actor ever knighted.27 As the evening at Delmonico's transpired, the toastmaster, General William T. Sherman, asked Riley to recite some of his verse. His reading was apparently again the highlight of the evening—evidenced, for example, by the fact that Terry, seated across the table from Riley, was moved to tears.28 More importantly, Irving was also greatly pleased—as attested by the fact that later, he “declared that Jim [Riley] would have made the greatest actor in the history of the American stage had he followed the stage seriously as a life work.”29

This event at Delmonico's is of somewhat more interest because Irving, who was then at the height of his fame, was a key participant in the ongoing debate of the 1880s and later about the nature of acting. This debate is summarized most famously as a confrontation pitting Denis Diderot against William Archer. Diderot's emphasis on the logical and rational mind (the “head”) of the actor remaining emotionless and detached from the character being portrayed was outlined in his volume The Paradox of Acting, written in the 1770s but not published until 1830. For Diderot, this paradox was simply that “to move the audience, the actor must remain unmoved.”30 The English translation of The Paradox of Acting did not appear until 1883—and importantly, it did so with a strongly argumentative preface attached by Henry Irving attacking many of Diderot's conclusions.

Irving's brief counterpoint to the volume anticipated what would become a few years later the manifesto of an entirely antithetical approach to the craft of acting: the Scottish philosopher William Archer's Masks or Faces? A Study in the Psychology of Acting, published in 1888.31 There Archer emphasized the actor's dependence on the functions of the “heart,” consisting of emotions, the unconscious, automatism, autosuggestion, amenuensis, and multiple identity. Masks or Faces? is indeed a fascinating cultural document of the time, being a sustained collection of evidence harvested from hundreds of extensive interviews with the famous and not-so-famous actors of the day, all compiled by Archer. For Archer, the brunt of this evidence indicates the impracticability of Diderot's claims—that, for example, by the very testimony of the actors, an artistic effect is best created on stage when an actor achieves close identification with the mindset and the emotions of the character. Rejecting Diderot's vision of the unified consciousness of the actor, Archer takes a much more modern approach: “The real paradox of acting, it seems to me, resolves itself into the paradox of double consciousness.”32 Archer, heavily influenced by the burgeoning field of the “New Psychology” (associated with the likes of G. Stanley Hall and William James), goes on:

Many actors—a surprising number, indeed,—seem to be quite unaware of any double action of the mind. Some resent the suggestion, as though it implied carelessness or unconscientiousness on their part. Others simply reply that the actor should be ‘absorbed’ in his character, and seem powerless to analyse the state they describe as absorption.33

To be very brief, Irving was among those theorists who stood with Archer's modern appraisal, arguing that an actor must not merely mimic a character; he must become or “absorb” that character somehow. Other critics of the time agreed, making the focus on absorption a crucial feature of the rise of realism in the American theater. The distinction is a fine line, but it appears, as Randall Knoper has recently explained, that Mark Twain sided with those theorists, like Henry Irving and William Archer, who championed the attempts of actors to experience the emotions of their characters and thereby to “absorb” a character.34 In this context, Twain's affinities with this theoretical position are most clearly seen in the section entitled “In a Writer's Workshop” published in Mark Twain in Eruption. There, Twain demonstrates the method of absorption by analyzing his well-known tale from Roughing It, “My Grandfather's Old Ram,” with special emphasis on its success as a verbal form as opposed to a written form. Here he distinguishes between “reading” a work on-stage and “delivering” it, or “telling” it: “in reading from the book you are telling another person's tale at secondhand; you are a mimic, and not the person involved; you are an artificiality, not a reality; whereas in telling the tale without the book you absorb the character and presently become the man himself, just as is the case with the actor.”35 Elsewhere, Twain describes the process of telling a story from a boy's point of view: “Experience has taught me long ago that if I tell a boy's story, or anybody else's, it is never worth printing; it comes from the head not the heart, and always goes into the wastebasket. To be successful and worth printing, the imagined boy would have to tell his story himself and let me act merely as his amenuensis.”36

When we compare “In a Writer's Workshop” with the Andrew Lang letter of 1889 and with “How To Tell a Story,” I believe that it is obvious that Twain's great admiration for Riley is directly related to his theory of performance. One critic has summarized this theory as follows: “the success of the platform version was achieved at the moment when his language, inflection, tempo, and pauses exactly harmonized with the character and personality of the narrator of the story”—when, I would submit, the speaker succeeds in “absorbing” the character.37 Given their theoretical affinities, it is also instructive to remember that Twain also shared with Henry Irving a great esteem for the performerly genius of James Whitcomb Riley. Evidence for Twain's quick attempt to copy Riley after the Copyright readings is the fact that as early as 21 January 1889, he recited a poem by Riley at a reading at Smith College in Massachusetts. The poem, “The Absence of Little Wesley,” which is a melodramatic lament grieving the death of a beloved grandson, first appeared in the Century magazine in May 1888, shortly after the reading in Washington and the dinner with Irving and Riley at Delmonico's.38 The poem is typically Rileyesque: its performance would involve “absorbing” the persona of the grandfather, and drawling out the lines written in misspelled Hoosier vernacular:

Sence little Wesley went, the place seems all so strange and still—
W'y, I miss his yell o' “Gran-pap!” as I'd miss the whipperwill!
And to think I ust to scold him fer his
                    everlastin' noise,
When I on'y rickollect him as the best
                    o' little boys!(39)

In short, an extended analysis of Riley's technique, subject matter, and widespread appeal would show that Riley embodied more skillfully than virtually any other American platform personality precisely what Twain valued in such a performer—especially insofar as Riley was able fully to “absorb his characters,” rather than merely to mimic them.

Evidence supporting this conclusion is abundant in the many extant contemporary reviews of Riley as performer. Specifically, one notes over and over the tendency to mark in Riley three major strengths: a humble realism, an ability to evoke pathos and move audiences to tears, and most telling of all, a natural absorption of the character. Regarding Riley as humble realist, one must first recall that his most famous persona was as western farmer, most notably the Benjamin Johnson of Boone character that became his trademark. This shift in emphasis from the elite and the wealthy (mainly of the east) to the lowly and humble (often now of the west) can also of course be said to represent the major movement in literary culture dubbed “realism”; thus I refer to it here as humble realism. It is a connection noted at the time by many others, including Riley. For example, in the programs for his shows often appeared the following:

II. Studies of Hoosier Dialèct.
                                        “Tell of the things jes' like they wuz—
                                        They don't need no excuse”(40)

Among other things, this brief heading indicates a conscious sense of the inferiority complex many western writers felt about presenting the humble realism of their places of origin. A reference to his own ostensible inferiority is signalled in one performance: “‘Us farmers in the country we'se just about the same,’” so continued Mr. Riley … and while Mr. Riley told of the farmer's love for June and sunshine, his listeners saw before them the rugged old man and followed his words with happiness.”41 The confession of sameness, Riley hoped, overcame the tension of cultural and geographical difference. This tension, well-known to Twain, is amplified in a comment by Riley: “I never represent people as the scholar thinks they ought to think and feel,—I never try to edit nature. Nature is good enough fer God, it's good enough fer me.”42 Celebrating the voices of humble Americans like farmers was a major aspect of Riley's accomplishment, as noted in one review: “His lyrics are full of feeling and possess a democratic sympathy of the common humanity.”43 Hamlin Garland would later recall: “In [Riley] America had a writer who voiced as no one else had voiced the outlook of the American farmer.”44 Garland sent his appraisal, with its emphasis on humility, to Riley in a letter written in 1887: your performance “is so genuine, so faithful to the lives and loves of the humble folk … what many humble folk think but can not put into words. … Your power lies in voicing the emotions of the farmer and other humble people: All that you write thus is exquisitely true.”45

Any reading of the critical reviews of Riley in the 1880s-1890s will quickly show that Riley did indeed succeed, as Garland suggests here, in “voicing the emotions.” Over and over the reviewers comment on Riley's audiences weeping—a feature that is typically coupled with the reviewer's strongly positive evaluation of Riley's ability to produce “pathos”: “two of his poems he recited. One of them, a farmer's hopeful, happy, monologue, was a beautiful piece of dialect imitation, while the poem which followed, a little war story in verse, was full of pathos and so sympathetically delivered that it brought tears to everybody's eyes”;46 “he told his stories in a humorous way and sometimes with a pathos that brought tears to the eyes of the more sympathetic”;47 “tears started in the eyes of many a breathless listener. It is in the word painting of such scenes of pathos that Mr. Riley is especially gifted”;48 “His pathos was incomparably tender and impressive. I have seen large audiences sit breathless, tears gleaming in their eyes, under his potent spell”;49 “The applause which followed it took a peculiar form; it came via the eye. Sometimes it was whisked off at the corner of the eyelid, sometimes it wound its way silently adown the nose, sometimes it was absorbed in the folds of a kerchief.”50 Similar comments are very common in eyewitness accounts of Riley's performances, and testify to his apparently uncanny ability to generate tears among his listeners.

Finally, and perhaps most relevant to my discussion here, numerous observers noted Riley's great talents not merely as a poet or reader of literature, but as a “natural” actor. Moreover, mention was frequently made of his ingenious ability to “absorb” or even become for the time being his character. One reviewer notes, “As a storyteller Mr. Riley has few equals and his manner was as natural and unaffected as are the sketches of the characters which he has given to the world. … Everything he does seems natural and the force of his manner is all the more striking.”51 Another states a clear difference between Riley and his stage partner: “He imitates types of character with remarkable naturalness, and tells a story with inimitable skill. … [Riley] loses himself in them for the time being. He is Mr. Riley only between acts. Bill Nye is Bill Nye all the time.”52 Finally, one critic mentions Riley's seemingly double nature: “when it was over they remembered that it really was not the farmer but only Mr. Riley telling about him. … His manner of delivery in impersonating the Indiana farmer was so natural and life like that one began to feel two personalities were existing in Mr. Riley.”53

In short, a remarkable feature of these reports is the way that they seemingly echo the much more theoretical debates about acting that were concurrently being carried out among the various theorists mentioned earlier. That is, without making explicit reference to this underlying debate, the very terms of the debate seem to emerge in these descriptions of Riley: his naturalness, his knack for “losing himself” in his portrayal, and in effect, his talent for “absorbing” his character in the way then being advocated by the likes of Irving and Archer. When one critic claims that he “began to feel two personalities were existing in Mr. Riley,” it is reminiscent of Archer's emphasis on the double consciousness of great actors. Overall, it is hard when reading these excerpts not to come to the conclusion reached by one other contemporary observer: “Mr. Riley's facial expression was so marvelous that I have always thought he might have been even greater as an actor than as a poet.”54 Or, as another critic put it, “He is a born actor.”55 Apparently, as mentioned above, Henry Irving was of the same opinion. It seems clear that Riley's great accomplishment coincided almost perfectly with the emergence of radical new developments in the theory of acting and performance. More specifically, Riley's acting genius became, for Twain, Irving, and many others, an exemplary embodiment of the revolutionary changes then being advocated. Riley, thus, was in the right place at the right time due to his mastery of the skill of “absorbing” his personas. As such, he should also be recognized as one of the contemporary leaders in the movement toward the realization of the Real in American literary culture.

In retrospect, much of the trashing of the likes of Riley can be attributed to the rise of Modern poetics coupled with the so-called “Revolt from the Village” movement often associated with authors like Hamlin Garland (who ironically gave Riley strong praise, as we shall see), Sherwood Anderson, and many others (not to mention their literary forebears like Howells and Twain!). For instance, in the midst of his numerous severe attacks upon America's declining pioneer spirit in the frequently scathing classic Main Street, Sinclair Lewis presents characters such as Dr. Will Kennicott, who are mostly not much more than cartoonish caricatures of the average small-town denizen caught in the webs of conformity. Will provides, for example, his opinions on literature after Vida Sherwin has read passionately aloud from the works of Yeats: “That's great stuff. … I like poetry fine—James Whitcomb Riley and some of Longfellow—this ‘Hiawatha.’ Gosh, I wish I could appreciate that highbrow art stuff. But I guess I'm too old a dog to learn new tricks.”56 Ostensibly, of course, Lewis here is parodying the artistic values of the frontier; however, by lumping Riley together with Longfellow in a blanket indictment of Victorian poetry, Lewis overlooked or at least underestimated the obvious contributions that Riley had made to American literature. It is a mistake that Lewis prominently repeated in his Nobel speech of 1930, an argument that I have developed in detail elsewhere.57 Conversely, I would turn the tables on old Will Kennicott—and on Sinclair Lewis—and suggest that it is sometimes the sophisticated, highbrow critical dogs who need to learn the new tricks, and that in Riley the Hoosier poet are untold depths of what Jane Tompkins labelled the sentimental power of an entire generation of middle and lower class Americans.58 Thus we can conclude that Twain, in his role as ingenious social and cultural discerner of trends and truths, was able to learn what the older dogs of Brahmin and genteel culture were unable to learn: the sheer brilliance and enduring performative value of one James Whitcomb Riley.

Twain was hardly alone in this recognition. Hamlin Garland would much later recall a dinner that he attended with Riley at the hotel of a young rising star of the British literary scene, Rudyard Kipling. The anecdote that Garland narrates about this meeting in New York in 1892 again highlights the “sentimental power” attainable by the Hoosier Poet nearing the height of his career. Listening to the wonderful talk of Kipling about India, Garland became “jealous for the honor of American literature. I wanted Riley to show what he could do.” Thus he suggested that Kipling ask Riley for a recitation of some of his poems.

Instantly his big blond face took on something quaint and tender, something Hoosier came into it as he began to voice “Nothin' to Say,” that touching and wistful monologue in which a gentle old farmer replies to his daughter's remark, “Father, I'm going to be married, what have you to say?” with, “Nothin' to say, my daughter, nothin' at all to say.” The poet followed this with “That Young'Un,” which is the story of the little son of the miller who knew what the bees said, what the birds sang, but could never quite tell “what the water is a-talkin' of.” At the close of this exquisitely truthful and deeply moving poem in the vernacular, Kipling sprang to his feet and, pacing back and forth, said with unmistakable sincerity, “By the Lord, that's American literature!”59

This is indeed ringing praise for Riley. At this late date, it is truly difficult to imagine that Riley was, for many at that time, the embodiment of American literature, a fact witnessed by Garland's memory of Kipling's amazed admiration. Similar generalizations, of course, have long been said about Mark Twain; and similarly, it is impressive that Riley was sometimes even compared directly with Twain. Garland once put it this way: “[Riley] loved to drop into the speech and drawl of his Hoosier characters, and to me this was a never-failing delight. I have never met a man save Mark Twain who had the same amazing flow of quaint conceits. He spoke ‘copy’ all the time.”60 And Riley's eulogy in the London Times echoed Garland's comparison: “He was as great an authority on the manners and habits of thought of the essential American, the keen-eyed, loose-limbed, tobacco-chewing, slow-speaking worker who is the creator of the pivotal industries of the United States, as Mark Twain. …”61

Riley's achievement, as “authority” on the “habits of thought” (or what Robert Bellah has termed “habits of the heart”) of the “essential American,” constitutes a remarkably panoramic “cultural shorthand” of late Victorian belief.62 As we scurry about “discovering” long forgotten literary figures to include in an ever-expanding canon, let us not forget some of the more obvious writers who, in their primes, rivalled in fame, fortune, popularity, and cultural power the likes of Mark Twain—especially those like Riley whom Twain, Garland, Kipling, and many others explicitly and ardently praised.

Notes

  1. See Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1989); Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995), and Richard S. Lowry, “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).

  2. The standard account of the event is Henry Nash Smith, “That Hideous Mistake of Poor Clemens,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 9 (1955), 145-80; see also Ellen Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Miffin's Formative Years (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), pp. 217-23; and Arthur Gilman, “Atlantic Dinners and Diners,” Atlantic Monthly, 100 (1907), 646-57. For commentary on this speech as cultural reconstruction of the original Declaration, see Harold K. Bush, Jr., American Declarations: Rebellion and Repentance in American Cultural History (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1999).

  3. Lowry, pp. 14, 24.

  4. See Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return; or, Cosmos and History, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1954); Edward W. Said, Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York: Basic, 1975); and Terence Martin, Parables of Possibility (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1994).

  5. For an account of Twain's growing fame during the early 1870s, see Jeffrey Steinbrink, Getting to Be Mark Twain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1991).

  6. My book American Declarations develops this argument in some detail; see pp. 124-46.

  7. Mary Boewe, “On Stage and Off with James Whitcomb Riley and Mark Twain,” Traces, 7 (Fall 1995), 18.

  8. Boewe, p. 19.

  9. Richard Crowder, Those Innocent Years: The Legacy and Inheritance of a Hero of the Victorian Era, James Whitcomb Riley (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), pp. 106.

  10. Riley to Dr. James Matthews, 23 Nov. 1887; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  11. Richard Brodhead, “Literature and Culture,” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott et al. (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 472-73.

  12. Boewe, pp. 19-21.

  13. “Authors as Readers,” Washington Post, 18 March 1888.

  14. Typed copy of letter by Bill Nye to Dr. Matthews, dated 22 Dec. 1887. In PS 2700, Box 14, #115 [Lilly #1], p. 112; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  15. Hamlin Garland to Riley, letter dated 17 Dec. 1887; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  16. Boewe, p. 22.

  17. Letter dated 29 Dec. 1890; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. This letter by Mark Twain is © 1999 by Richard A. Watson and Chase Manhattan Bank as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. It is published here with the permission of the University of California Press and Robert H. Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Project.

  18. Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1972), pp. 186-87.

  19. James Whitcomb Riley, Letters of James Whitcomb Riley, ed. William Lyon Phelps (Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill, 1930), p. 115.

  20. Riley, Letters, pp. 329-30.

  21. Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Pages About Men and Events, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper, 1940), pp. 216-17.

  22. Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain's Lecture Tours (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1968), p. 158.

  23. Letter and envelope dated 16 Jan. 1898; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. This letter by Mark Twain is © 1999 by Richard A. Watson and Chase Manhattan Bank as Trustees of the Mark Twain Foundation, which reserves all reproduction or dramatization rights in every medium. It is published here with the permission of the University of California Press and Robert H. Hirst, General Editor of the Mark Twain Project.

  24. Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert B. Paine (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923), II, 526.

  25. From Twain's “How To Tell a Story”; quoted in Lowry, p. 18.

  26. Lowry, p. 22.

  27. Benjamin McArthur, Actors and American Culture, 1880-1920 (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 136-37.

  28. Crowder, p. 131.

  29. Boewe, p. 21.

  30. McArthur, p. 181.

  31. For a handy edition of the two key texts, see The Paradox of Acting by Denis Diderot (preface by Henry Irving) and Masks or Faces? by William Archer (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957).

  32. Archer, p. 184.

  33. Archer, p. 187. For Archer's connections with the “New Psychology”—including such recent “discoveries” as the unconscious (he attributes his term “autosuggestion,” for instance, to “Eduard von Hartmann, ‘the Philosopher of the Unconscious’”)—see McArthur, pp. 180-83.

  34. Knoper, pp. 74-95; esp. pp. 75-77.

  35. Mark Twain in Eruption, p. 224.

  36. Mark Twain in Eruption, p. 243.

  37. Lorch, p. 157.

  38. Boewe, p. 21.

  39. Riley, “The Absence of Little Wesley,” in The Complete Poetical Works of James Whitcomb Riley (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1992), pp. 414-15.

  40. “Nye and Riley,” St. Joseph Herald, 7 April 1889.

  41. “Pleasing Speaker,” Elmira Advertiser, 21 March 1899.

  42. Hamlin Garland, Commemorative Tribute to James Whitcomb Riley (New York: American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1922), p. 6.

  43. “Pleasing Speaker,” Elmira Advertiser, 21 March 1899.

  44. Garland, Commemorative Tribute, 2.

  45. Hamlin Garland to Riley, letter dated 17 Dec. 1887; Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

  46. “Authors as Readers,” Washington Post, 18 March 1888.

  47. “An Evening with the Poet,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 15 Dec. 1892.

  48. “Pleasing Speaker,” Elmira Advertiser, 21 March 1899.

  49. Quoted in Crowder, p. 129.

  50. Sarah S. Pratt, The Old Crop in Indiana (Indianapolis: Pratt Poster Co., 1928), p. 215.

  51. “An Evening with the Poet,” San Francisco Evening Bulletin, 15 Dec. 1892.

  52. “Nye and Riley,” St. Joseph Herald, 7 April 1889.

  53. “Pleasing Speaker,” Elmira Advertiser, 21 March 1899.

  54. Pratt, p. 213.

  55. “Authors as Readers,” Washington Post, 18 March 1888.

  56. Sinclair Lewis, Main Street ([1920]; New York: Signet, 1980), p. 120.

  57. See Harold K. Bush, American Declarations, esp. pp. 147-66.

  58. Jane Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1985).

  59. Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings (New York: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 172-73.

  60. Garland, Commemorative Tribute, 5.

  61. Quoted in Crowder, p. 273.

  62. See Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985). For Tompkins' version of “cultural shorthand,” see Sensational Designs, pp. xi-xvi.

The author would like to acknowledge the abundant and gracious help, including access to key materials used in this article, provided by Mary Boewe.

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Re-Forming Frontier Values: The Dialect Poetry of James Whitcomb Riley

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