4/5/24
I've discovered something, and I'm going to use this blog to get my thoughts straight about it. Anyone can read or not read as they see fit.

First of all, I am attempting to set the record straight with regard to Mathew Franklin Whittier's 19th-century literary legacy, as well as that of his wife, Abby Poyen Whittier. Both (i.e., together and separately) were plagiarized numerous times; and their work was so exceptional, that when stolen, it made a number of these plagiarists famous. Reams and reams of papers have been written about these various works, all assuming original authorship by the plagiarist. As such, they are all fundamentally mistaken.

Now, we are talking so many papers, with so many plagiarists, that it would be impossible to read them all. It would take a lifetime to read all the papers touching upon "A Christmas Carol," for example. Likewise the other disputed works, like "The Raven." Even in this example, which concerns one story by Samuel Clemens (a.k.a. "Mark Twain"), it would seem that there is such a history of scholarly commentary that I could never get to the bottom of it. Obviously, for the most part I find it a waste of time. Suppose there are two people named "Mortimer Snerd." One was an accomplished violinist, and the other was a maintenance man, who also, coincidentally, played the violin as a hobby (i.e., rather badly). Now suppose the scholars had them confused, and had written 1,405 papers about the wrong man. Would there be any particular point in my reading those 1,405 papers? And, would there by any point in my listening to recordings of his playing?

That's the dilemma I'm in. Everything written on these stories is fundamentally, fatally flawed. So while scholars may derride me for not having "read the literature," in a particular sense, there's no literature to read.

And my time and energy are limited.

Okay, so now I have to very, very briefly set the stage. In 1877, Mathew's big brother, the famous poet, was thrown a 70th birthday bash. The three guests of honor were Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Mark Twain read aloud a story, as his speech, which lampooned all three of them. This was actually Mathew's story, which he had ghost-written for the speech. Twain re-wrote it to set it in California, with West Coast idioms, instead of New England as Mathew would have undoubtedly written it. Otherwise, it's entirely Mathew's work. I recognized his style immediately, and there is a clue hidden in the text, as well. A small clue, but a significant one. The disconnect, which makes this seem implausible, is that nobody understands that Mathew was a better humorist than Mark Twain was; and Mathew was of the original generation, having actually launched the entire genre in 1825, as a boy of 12. So Mathew has better professional credentials than Twain has--public image notwithstanding.

Now, what I ran into yesterday, is a paper entitled "The Scent of a Satire: Validating 'The Invalid's Story," by John H. Davis, in The Mark Twain Annual No. 10 (2012) pp. 71-90. He opines that this story was written the same year, 1877, before the Whittier birthday story was written. However, my AI Co-pilot says this is a matter of scholarly dispute, and that nobody really knows when Twain wrote "The Invalid's Story." Here, Dr. Davis gives it as a fact.

I haven't read this paper yet; I've only started the first page or two. I've read far enough down to see that while "The Invalid's Story" is generally considered to be shallow and slapstick, Dr. Davis is attempting to draw out deeper layers of meaning. The plot is ostensibly simple. A man, learning that his friend has died, is asked to accompany the body and casket to its final resting place. Somehow (implausibly and without any real bearing on the story), the casket is switched for a box of guns. Someone has placed limburger cheese in the box of guns. The hero, and his companion on the train, not knowing what limburger cheese smells like, think that the odor is coming from the corpse (this being even more implausible). The protagonist becomes so ill, that as he narrates the story, he informs the reader, at the conclusion, that he is on his way to die, himself.

That's it in a nutshell. It's funny, if you like that sort of thing. Kind of like the Three Stooges. But Dr. Davis reads more into it. After acknowledging that many scholars deem it superficial, he begs to differ:

The train where it is set is moving away from the East. Touching upon mortality (a theme on which critics agree), Victorian sensitivities to bodily functions and sentimentality regarding death as well as religion, class attitudes, and notions of worthiness, including literary merit, particularly the author's, this tale of a smell may be a subtle satire about perceptions or judgments of others and of suitable subjects for literature.

You get the idea, but I think he's reaching. If Mark Twain made such symbolic references, they were unconscious, and proceeded from his own personal psychology and world view. You might as well read deep philosophy into the Three Stooges, or Jerry Lewis, or the movie, "Airplane." "Airplane" has more depth, I think, than this story by Mark Twain has--if you've suffered a defeat in the past, you have to get your self-confidence back or you'll lose your marriage.

What Dr. Davis has done, is to assume both stories were written by the same man, and then, jam that square peg into that round hole by shaving off the corners. He sees two stories which offended the public, and he puts two and two together and gets five, which is to say, they must have been written in close proximity in time; "The Invalid's Story" must have been written first; and they must have both been written by Mark Twain.

In reality, "The Invalid's Story" is the product of a slapstick humorist and is without philosophical depth. The story read aloud at the Whittier birthday is complex, targeted specifically at certain real individuals,** and has layers of meaning. The first story is situational humor; the second is real satire. They are totally different. And, finally, the second story is precisely in the style used by Mathew Franklin Whittier since he was publishing as a boy.

The author of the Whittier birthday story, in 1877, is the same author as wrote "The Metampsychosis," signing "By A Modern Pythagorean" in the May, 1826 edition of "Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine." That story was falsely claimed by a Scottish literary hack named Robert Macnish. If you compare these two stories, you will see that they are identical in style, except that "The Metampsychosis" doesn't lampoon any particular living individual. But lots of Mathew's other stories did.*

Here are links to the three stories, so you can compare the styles, yourself:

"The Metampsychosis":
https://archive.org/details/sim_blackwoods-magazine_1826-05_19_112

The Whittier Dinner Speech
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/onstage/whitier1.html

"The Invalid's Story":
https://americanliterature.com/author/mark-twain/short-story/the-invalids-story

This has been Mathew's fate, to be plagiarized, and for his legacy to be wrongly attributed. He created the perfect storm for plagiarism, by publishing exceptional, innovative work anonymously, then never stepping forward to dispute the false claims--and ghost-writing, at various points in his career, didn't help matters, either. This has created a veritable nightmare for Academia, because it exposes all these scholars as...I'm struggling to explain this in objective rather than disparaging terms. It showcases just how much these people have been "reaching" in their analyses. That may be the best I can express it.

If I can obtain contact information for Dr. Davis, I'll try to initiate a discussion. I'm not expecting to get very far with it. I didn't get very far with one of his colleagues, recently, who stopped our exchange after one or two e-mails. The last I wrote him, I commented, "I'm not wrong about this, you know."

That wasn't merely a stubborn assertion. I'm really not wrong about this.

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.

*"The Metampsychosis" is treating lightly the esoteric teachings from the ancient Greek philosophers, which Abby was teaching Mathew as part of passing along her privately-tutored education to him. Abby, being four years younger, would have been eight when Mathew wrote "The Metampsychosis" at age 12. Mathew was a child prodigy, but Abby was off-the-charts precocious, like Alma Deutscher (see video opening this page).

**Mathew had long known the three guests of honor socially, and in the case of Holmes, personally; and he had a long-standing beef against them, having been snubbed in recent years by the Boston literati. Additionally, he had been estranged from his brother for many years, and his name does not appear on the official seating chart for the event. Mathew loved practical jokes; and William Dean Howells, who arranged the event, tells us that while the room was in shocked silence, one man whom he refuses to name was laughing hysterically. That would have been Mathew, who had crashed the party to watch his Trojan Horse practical joke unfold.