“Meandering at Quarry Farm” (A Quarry Farm Testimonial)

EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.

Andrew Hebard is an Associate Professor of English at Miami University of Ohio, working in the field of late nineteenth century American literature.  He has published articles in journals including American Quarterly; Law, Culture, and the Humanities; African American Review, Arizona Quarterly, The Mark Twain Annual, and Studies in American Naturalism.  His book, The Poetics of Sovereignty in American Literature, 1885-1910 (Cambridge, 2013) examines how American literature conventionalized legal forms of sovereignty and administration.  His current book project, Draining the Swamp: Gilded Age Corruption Narratives, examines the relationship between literary aesthetics and political corruption in the late nineteenth century.

Professor Hebard gave a paper at the Eighth Quarry Farm Symposium “Mark Twain and the West: Celebrating the 150th Anniversary of Roughing It.”

• Andrew Hebard, “Corruption and Reform in Mark Twain’s West” (October 2, 2021 – Quarry Farm Barn)

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At the very end of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s cowritten novel, The Gilded Age, there is curious appendix in which the authors apologize for the fact that the story never manages to find the father of one of novel’s main characters.  Twain and Warner draw the reader’s attention to an incoherence in the novel, a mystery raised but never solved.  Their apology, however, is not quite sincere, for it is only “perhaps” that “some apology to the reader is necessary.”  That insincerity is “perhaps” also fitting, for The Gilded Age is a meandering novel, both geographically and thematically.  It travels down some paths that lead to dead ends and others that wander through subplots.  There are characters of more or less importance in the novel, but no clear through-line to pull everything together.

One might attribute this laxity of form to the fact that The Gilded Age was a cowritten novel.  Collaboration can be messy.  One might also attribute it to the fact that this was Twain’s first attempt at writing a novel.  Certainly, some of his later novels are more composed and not as prone to meandering.  And yet, one might also understand all this wandering as a deliberate choice, one very much aligned with Twain’s sense of storytelling as an art.  Take for example Twain’s “Story of the Old Ram”, a tale that appears a few years earlier in Roughing It and that he incorporated into his lecturing repertoire.  In Roughing It, Twain hears the story from Jim Blaine, but only after he’s become “sociably drunk.”  The story itself is a series of digressions, and Blaine “maunder[s] off, interminably, from one thing to another, till his whisky got the best of him and he fell asleep.”  One never finds out what happens to the Old Ram, but that is precisely the point and, more importantly, the humor of the story.  There is pleasure to be found in a tale that meanders.

My time at Quarry Farm was marked by a similar sort of pleasure, one that I discovered rather than planned for.  I arrived in Elmira with a well-wrought plan, a list of texts I would examine and a clear sense of how to start writing my proposed book chapter on The Gilded Age.  As a mid-career scholar with graduate students and administrative responsibilities, scholarship often requires creating a highly structured daily schedule that carefully carves out time for thinking, researching, and writing.  That time is precious, and I often approach it with a ruthless efficiency and with carefully laid out plans.  My time at Quarry Farm, however, ended up being structured differently.  I read and wrote a good deal, but like the Story of the Old Ram the tale of my reading and writing was a meandering one.  I never quite knew where an idea would take me, and this produced unexpected insights and pleasures. 

There were a lot of factors that contributed to my meandering.  Not only did I not have any university-related responsibilities, but I was also freed from my everyday routines.  Two weeks is a lot of time to read and write, but it is also not quite enough time to establish new routines.  In fact, there was much at Quarry Farm that conspired against routine.  There were mornings when Greg the cat insisted on sitting on my lap as I read on the porch and other mornings when he was happy to completely ignore me.  The weather was also inconstant, ranging from stunningly sunny days in the mid 70s to the torrential downpours of the remnants of Hurricane Debby.  On some days the surrounding landscape invited long walks through the countryside on others it didn’t. The workers installing the fire suppression system sometimes arrived at 8am, sometimes at 9am or 10am, and sometimes not at all.  They worked in different parts of the house, and I subsequently found myself shifting my own location in the house rather than establishing a single work space.  The many different kinds of spaces in the home invited movement.  There was also the library on the second floor, a collection of Twain editions, Twain scholarship, and broader scholarship that somehow was both comprehensive and eclectic.  Every time I needed a particular essay or book chapter, I was delighted to find it in the onsite collection. But I also found myself discovering books that were completely unexpected.  Did I plan to read short stories by Ambrose Bierce?  No.  Am I glad that I did?  Absolutely.

I would imagine that Twain did establish routines when he was at Quarry Farm.  His stays were longer, and he often labored under deadlines.  Nevertheless, if his travel writings are any indication, I would also imagine that he had a penchant to wander.  Some thoughts require space rather than definite direction, and if there is one thing that I am most grateful for concerning my stay at Quarry Farm, it was that it allowed me to rediscover how meandering can be a powerful way of thinking.