Such examples could be multiplied very easily. But even before Wilson, Constance Rourke in American Humor wrote of Christopher Newman in James’s The American: “He might have been in San Francisco or Virginia City with Mark Twain he had the habits of the time and place.” One of the first to do so was Edmund Wilson, who, in “The Ambiguity of Henry James,” wrote: “It is curious to compare A Sense of the Past with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, with which it really has a good deal in common.” Wilson’s remark is more than a passing insight: It marks an important conjunction in the orbits of two major American writers who are moving in opposite directions. Nevertheless, there has been a persistent tendency on the part of critics to pause from time to time from more strenuous reflections and imagine the two in some kind of relation. It is well known that neither Twain nor James had any admiration for the other’s work. One evening, so the story goes, when Mark Twain was in London he dined out in society with Whistler and Henry James, and the latter, broaching a subject that seemed innocently appropriate for the occasion, inquired: “Do you know Bret Harte?” “Yes,” Twain replied, “I know the son of a bitch.” Justin Kaplan in his new biography of Mark Twain regretfully acknowledges the story may be apocryphal but even if it is, Twain and James achieve in the exchange that unity in dissimilarity that is often said to characterize the best images of metaphysical poetry.
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