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11/12/24
Many years ago, I ran into a letter by Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, in which he mentions to a friend that he is sending a recent newspaper containing one of Mathew Franklin Whittier's "Ethan Spike" letters. "Ethan Spike" was an ignorant, rural fellow from the fictional town of "Hornby," in the real (and conservative) county of Oxford, Maine, which lies above Portland. I had occasion to take a drive through it when I lived in Portland, and indeed, it is still conservative. Mathew used the "Spike" character as philosophical commentary, on the deepest level, but also as society commentary and political protest.
Where these letters are provided online for the "Mark Twain Project"--which my AI copilot tells me were edited by Robert H. Hirst, Ph.D--there is an extended footnote concerning Mathew. In that footnote, he mentions that Clemens imitated Mathew's "Spike" in "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The way he worded it, for years I assumed he meant that Clemens intended to do it, but then thought better of it. I learned a year or two ago (also from AI) that it actually appears in that book. Prof. Hirst had worded his footnote as follows:
In chaptger 6 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), Clemens was to have the disreputable Pap Finn deliver an antigovernment, antiblack harangue similar to Ethan Spike's.
Samuel Clemens, in a famous essay, argued essentially that there is no such thing as plagiarism, because there is nothing new under the literary sun, and whatever anybody writes, they are drawing from what has been written, before. One could call this passage a "tribute," if either the source were given, or it was assumed that everybody would recognize the source. That might have been true in Mathew's keyday; I'm not so sure it was true in 1885, two years after Mathew's death. Still, let us say, this is a tribute. For some reason I had never looked it up, before, and I just did so, now. Bombastic, drunken speeches by conservative ignorami were Mathew's specialty, but I'll give you Clemens' imitation, here.
Prof. Hirst gives an extended excerpt from "Spike" by way of comparison, in this very footnote--but he could have drawn from one that was more on-target. Either he wasn't aware of them, or he deliberately chose not to, because it would really make Clemens look like an imitator. Not only that, a poor imitator, inasmuch as Mathew's originals were better. Clemens was good--Mathew was a genius. There's a difference.
I think I'll see if I can write to Prof. Hirst. Just thought I'd share this...
Sincerely,
Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.
