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We Like to Think We Know Him
This is the autobiography of “Mark Twain,” not the self-revelations of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the real man who used that riverboat pseudonym.
The Autobiography of Mark
Twain: The Complete and Authoritative
Edition, Volume 1
Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith et
al.
(University of California Press, 743 pages,
$34.95)
There’s something curiously unsatisfying about Mark Twain, something strangely incomplete about nearly all his books. We seem to end up enjoying him as a writer more than we actually enjoy any particular thing he wrote.
Take The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, for an obvious example. There’s no denying it contains scenes as great as any in American fiction: Huck’s incompetent impersonation of a girl, Jim’s sorrow when he thinks the boy is dead, Colonel Sherburn’s sneer as he faces down the lynch mob. But the ending of the novel is thrown away in a retread of Twain’s earlier Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which was itself a book with some classic scenes of American comedy but not much of what ordinary folks would call logic. Hemingway’s oft-quoted line that Huck Finn is where “all modern American literature comes from” suggests one of the enduring problems with American literature: we don’t know how to bring things to a conclusion.
Or take A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court -- a book with a single idea. It’s a pretty funny idea, to be sure, but only one pot-boiling device moves the whole story: the transporting of an enlightened American back to benighted times, the setting of a modern Yankee in the middle of the Middle Ages. And even then, the story can’t find its way to a coherent ending: After 200 pages of mocking medieval superstition, Twain suddenly allows Merlin’s debunked magic to work, so Hank Morgan can return to his proper time in Connecticut.
For that matter, Twain’s eccentric book-length essays — Concerning the Jews, Christian Science, Is Shakespeare Dead? — are occasionally mentioned, although no one seems to praise them much anymore. His travel writings — Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, Following the Equator — do still receive regular genuflections, but am I wrong to suggest they’re more often applauded than actually read, these days? Twain has any number of genius moments in his prose, all those nearly perfect set pieces and rolling descriptions, but almost nothing he did was complete, satisfying from beginning to end.
Oh, the short stories. It does always come back to them, when we find ourselves defending our admiration of Twain: “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The $30,000 Bequest,” “Eve’s Diary.” And yet, more often than not, what we mean when we mention such stories is the perfection of their overarching ideas, joined to a marvelous scene or two while Twain was fleshing an idea out into a published piece.
The pithy irony of his trademark prose remains as well, of course. “There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy’s life that he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” Or “If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man.” So many great lines, in fact, that Mark Twain has become one of those iconic figures — Winston Churchill and Yogi Berra are others — who have stray bits of bastard wit fathered upon them: It doesn’t much matter whether they truly coined the comic line; their names are mostly signals that something funny is coming, and modern conversational convention allows us the useful verbal gesture of As Mark Twain once said to indicate we’re looking for a laugh from what we’re about to say.
STILL, EVEN THE PARTICULARITIES of Twain’s prose style, the endless hours he put into polishing up his aphorisms, aren’t exactly what makes him seem so clear a figure in our minds. The Prince and the Pauper, for example, doesn’t possess a single one of those trademarked Twainian phrases, but it’s never been out of print — mostly, I suspect, because of its author. There were dozens of people writing that kind of story toward the end of the 19th century. The humorist Frank Stockton’s best-known tale, “The Griffin and the Minor Canon,” appeared just a few years later, and all it lacks to be an American classic is Mark Twain’s name on the cover.
But lack that name, it does. And the difference lies in the real genius of Twain. Yes, he had the gift of creating memorable characters, if not quite at the stratospheric level that Charles Dickens reached. And yes, he had the gift of composing aphoristic lines, if not quite with the nasty precision that Ambrose Bierce revealed. But from the lightheartedness of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in 1865, his first national success, all the way down to the bitterness of “The Mysterious Stranger,” the story he was working on when he died in 1910, Twain somehow always possessed the power to make us feel we knew him. He had the gift of personality in prose, the ability to put the author himself before us — and convince us that we rather like and admire the personality of that author.
Plenty of writers are missing that touch. Jane Austen had it, but her stepchild Henry James didn’t. G. K. Chesterton worked it to the bone, but writers as great as Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot always stay a step back from us, hidden by their words. In fact, there’s often something a little pathetic about it all — a too-naked plea to be liked by readers, an over-sweetened presentation of the anxious author — and the ones who do it best usually leaven the whole thing with generous comic dollops of irony and self-deprecation.
As Mark Twain did, which is what has made the recent publication of the first volume of his autobiography such an event. We think we know the man, we imagine that we’ve lived with him for a more than a century, and now we get to hear him talk about himself. Various portions appeared in 1924, 1940, and 1959, but Twain left instructions that the work as a whole was not to be issued until 100 years after his death. Now that we’ve arrived, at last, at that point, the University of California Press has begun to bring out the text, complete with an overwhelming scholarly apparatus (only 270 of the 736 pages in this first of three volumes are Twain’s actual text; the rest is notes, introductions, prefaces, and appendices).
MAYBE THE THING TO REMEMBER, however, is that this is the autobiography of “Mark Twain,” not the self-revelations of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the real man who used that riverboat pseudonym. Clemens invented “Twain,” cobbled him up as a public persona — and the man we think we know, the man who wrote this autobiography, is still a literary construction. Even when, in The Autobiography of Mark Twain, he allows us to visit some of the back rooms of his life, he keeps more than a few doors tightly sealed against intruders. He demanded a century’s embargo on the book so he could be “frank and free and unembarrassed” while he dictated the rambling narrative. But only Twain is frank and free in the text. Clemens remains more than a little embarrassed.
Twain began the project in 1877 at age 42, “but the resolve,” he explained, “melted away and disappeared in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about every three or four years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away.” Finally, in 1904, he “hit upon the right way to do an autobiography: start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.”
All of which makes the Autobiography sound like fun. Which it is. Kind of. But you don’t get connected narrative out of this style of writing, and the book has an underlying tone of resentment that fights against the humor of the tall tales, as though — and I think this the best way to understand Mark Twain — the youthful prose style wanted to do comedy, while the old man writing that prose wanted to do tragedy.
The Autobiography drags in a few places: The material on General Grant, for instance, needed an edit that he never gave it. But, for the most part, his gift of timing in prose and his power of aphorism remained with him till the end. He describes a business partner as “a great fat good-natured, kind-hearted, chicken-livered slave; with no more pride than a tramp, no more sand than a rabbit, no more moral sense than a wax figure, and no more sex than a tape-worm.”
Letter to the Editor View all comments (37) | Leave a comment
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Vern Crisler | 3.23.11 @ 9:55AM
"But the ending of the novel is thrown away in a retread of Twain's earlier Adventures of Tom Sawyer...."
This is sheer nonsense, and is merely a politically correct opinion repeated endlessly without any thought. Twain's Huckleberry Finn wasn't a sociological tract, but was keeping the story humorous, just like his masterpiece Tom Sawyer.
Twain was an atheist, an anti-Christian, a quasi-Progressive ("change" is the fundamental fact, he claimed), and it's no wonder he wanted to suppress these views in Victorian society.
Despite these less than lovely aspects of Twain -- Mencken adopted these aspects but not the humor -- much of his work is respectful toward religion, down-to-earth, humorous, and enjoyable, pure Americana.
simon templar| 3.23.11 @ 10:42AM
Twain was an agnostic, was not anti-christian, was critical of all hypocritical, religious, pious fools, and was a capitalist, free market, libertarian. Recognizing that change is a fact of life is not Progressive nor Conservative. It is just reality. I have been reading material on Twain for thirty years. Like the founders let us not use them to reflect our personal political agendas.
Fred| 3.23.11 @ 3:48PM
I second Simon Templar. I would add that Victorian England and America had very strong reformist streaks that some would call "Progressive" e.g. abolitionism, women's sufferage, the temperance movement (seems reactionary to us but was seen at the time as a way of "improving" society). There was a strong atheist/agnostic streak as well, particularly after Darwin published "Origin of Species;" see Carlyle, Thomas; Arnold, Matthew; Huxley, T.S. and many others in addition to every town's "village atheist." In short, "progressive" and agnostic views were nothing Twain would have had to hide in Victorian England or America.
Vern Crisler | 3.23.11 @ 7:15PM
Simon, you need to do some rereading.
simon templar| 3.24.11 @ 1:39AM
You made the claim that he was an atheist. He was not. Twain was a Presbyterian. He was often critical of organized religion and certain elements of Christianity through his later life. He also engaged in religious discussions and attended services, his theology developing as he struggled with the deaths of his family and his own mortality. In his essay Three Statements of the Eighties in the 1880s, Twain stated that he believed in an almighty God, but not in any holy scriptures, Providence, revelations or afterlife retribution. He later wrote and spoke in ways that contradicted a strict deist view, for example, plainly professing a belief in Providence. I think it would be more accurate to call him an agnostic or deist. As far as the anti-christian thing, he did not hate christ nor his philosophy but rather those that practiced organized religion and did not practice what they preached. You also claimed he was a "progressive." I took this too mean what we know of progressivism as it is defined today. He was not. If he were alive today he would most likely be defined as a libertarian, free market capitalist. Look it up if you do not believe me.
Alan Brooks| 3.23.11 @ 11:44PM
"hypocritical, religious, pious fools"
That's what American religion is about today. It WAS somewhat different in the post 1776-era, though; too bad you can't invent a time machine and hang out with Ben Franklin- and boy did he like to party. So did Mark Twain, as you know.
Cathouse on Saturday; church on Sunday...
simon templar| 3.24.11 @ 1:51AM
Alan, I lived long enough to realize that piety, hypocricy, and religiosity is not exclusive to those who believe in God or profess a certain faith. I have seen it every where from rabid intolerant atheists to "religious" communists and everything in between. This has gone on throughout the ages. We are not so different than our ancestors. Mark and Ben may have partied as you put it but this does not take away from the validity of their faith or the object of their faith. The fact remains that all men fall short of the mark despite their best intentions or efforts.
mames| 3.23.11 @ 10:37AM
Truth be told, aside from his acerbic wit, like that of Churchill both men died sad and bitter people precisely because of their atheism. But that aint a funny or pretty story and is likely why he does not reveal it in his autobio. Never the less he remains a brilliant writer with gifts he received from the God he denied existed.
simon templar| 3.23.11 @ 10:43AM
mames, he was not atheistic.
skedaddle| 3.23.11 @ 11:59AM
I don't know what it is people read of Twain's that makes them think he was an atheist. His view of religions that they should be many and small (I'm rephrasing) and suited to each man was an indictment of large, organized religion but not of being religious. I'm from the Show-Me State and Twain's take on issues reminds me of my elderly relatives that are long gone. He reflected his time and place - it's derisively called "flyover country" now by the same people who write snotty articles about Twain.
Michael L. Hauschild| 3.23.11 @ 12:38PM
Any creature who has suffered under the wrath of the” editor”, the devious ministrations of the “monitor,” or the shallow malicious slander of the “peer review” or “comment “must immediately cease their chicken scratching, trek online or to the Library and read “Journalism in Tennessee.” It will not make the suffering less, but it will apply the lubrication needed to minimize the abrasions as we slide into the purgatory of rewrite or the death of rejection.
Stormzeye| 3.23.11 @ 12:39PM
Unfortunately, the review is boring and makes me want to avoid reading about a man I always admired from afar as a mid-westerner who yearned for the clarity of pre-industrial times before the Civil War. Perhaps a good biography would be more revealing.
JFGalt| 3.23.11 @ 12:52PM
This was one dumb article. Read Twain and enjoy it for what it is. Why are there so many people that can only find jobs studying things to death and writing book reports on them where they pull out every fancy word they can sum. This reads like some publish or perish work of acedemia. AS can do better.
JP| 3.23.11 @ 1:31PM
I agree. I never really thought of Twain as an intellectual per se. He was a singularity in the world of literature. I think people should just enjoy his books period, and allow the intellectuals to waste thier time analysing and parsing his words.
Fred| 3.23.11 @ 3:51PM
You know, JF, being conservative does not necessitate being anti-intellectual and phillistine.
kingsmill| 3.23.11 @ 1:39PM
Bottum is never interesting. Glad they ousted him at First Things. That story needs to be told.
Seek| 3.23.11 @ 1:55PM
Mark Twain wasn't anti-religious per se, but he was skeptical of hustlers who used religion to stoke fear and generate cash. In that, he presaged Mencken -- and good for him.
Mark Shepler| 3.23.11 @ 1:56PM
"...this is the autobiography of "Mark Twain," not the self-revelations of Samuel Langhorne Clemens..."
I just finished this volume a few weeks ago and I do not agree with this assessment. And what Mr. Bottum must know, and curiously leaves unsaid, is that Clemens himself confesses several times, indeed laments, that it is impossible for any "man to tell the truth about himself." That none can or will do it. No matter how he tries he will always smooth over the rough patches, clean up the dirty parts, excuse by way of omission his cowardly, low or mean acts, justify his motives and otherwise put the best light and face on his deeds and life. It was against this self-protective tendency in part he chose his method of random timeline in the hopes the truth will out almost by accident, as it were. By dictating what interested him at the moment and brought forth his enthusiasm, the facts would be teased out so that a fuller and truer picture would emerge. In his plainly stated view, a rote recitation of dates, places and events cannot help but lend itself to self-promotion and justification becaue the moment you say "and thus I went here to do this" the implications of "why" must be addressed. And it's the "why" that is ultimately the make up of a man, no? He lays it out himself early on in the work not to mention the editor in the 200+ pages of academic and editorial notes preceding the actual autobiography.
At first the random recollections seem discordant precisely because one is expecting a straightford, linear recounting of his life from birth to death. So it's probably not helpful to point out to non-Twain afficianados that a basic knowledge of his life and doings is almost a prerequisite to fully enjoying the autobiography. That's because, for example, when he recounts a lecture about his adventures in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) you will not know that was just after a seven year adventure beginning in 1861 when he took the Overland Stage with his brother Orion to Virginia City, NV at the height of the silver rush there, moved on to San Francisco to become a reporter and was later offered a gig to go to Hawaii to report on the scene there and with a hundred scrapes and side-adventures along the way. Like meeting Brigham Young in Salt Lake City and having the mormon patriarch give him some sage advice on the reality of having multiple wives and hordes of children. That stretch of his life is when he first met national writing success and his subsequent lectures to capitalize on his travel stories cemented his public persona. To not know that history and read a solitary passing remembrance of one little lecture is to quite literally miss the forest for a single tree. You might get the point of his particular recollection but will surely miss its larger context and meaning in the making of the man the recollection was meant to flesh out.
As to his best known works, I read them regularly, each every few years. Roughing It is an absolute joy and frolicking adventure but also valuable as much for its historical observations as his humor. To read Roughing It is akin to reading a newspaper travelogue from the day with its attendent details of place, time, manners, customs and all that was life in the 1860s west. His little aside, one of many, about the time a man and his family arrives, flat busted, in a California mining camp and the noble effect her presence has on the hundreds of men nearby who have not seen a woman for months or years is priceless. The men demand to see the woman and one fears trouble is at hand when they bellow "FETCH HER OUT!" to the hesitating husband. Instead the family is made rich in gold dust by the homesick and grateful men who wanted just an innocent look at her or chance to hear her voice. Our apprehension also tells us something about our age and Twain's. In the autobiography Twain flatly states that if one would know what life was truly like in the past there is no better source than newspapers of the time. Apparently, he took it to heart and wrote with this axiom in view but if you didn't know he was a newspaperman long before an author you'd miss the connection.
The autobiography is exactly how you'd come to know an aged relative's full story by spending time with him. It's unlikely you would sit down together one day and he to proceed to lay out his life from start to then, chapter and verse. You'd catch glimpses into past episodes, snatches of narrative and revelations into who he really was as those events came to his mind and to your ears in conversation. For that is how old men like to tell it- as their recollections and lessons learned seem relevant to what passes before them now. But that more natural, evolving process pre-supposes some basic knowledge of the man's life. So to any who would read Twain's autobiography but who are not familiar with his life a little remedial reading of even a cursory biography first is strongly recommended.
Michael L. Hauschild| 3.23.11 @ 6:44PM
I was just happy to see the works of Twain appear again to remind me to dig around in my library. However your assessment and review here, while not of Twain "peer" catagory, is possibly the best, cohesive analysis to find these pages in some time. Kudos.
Mark Shepler| 3.23.11 @ 9:53PM
I am no scholar and probably couldn't respectably research my way out of a paper bag. Just an avid fan, lifelong reader and a guy with a knack for keyboards.
Thanks for that.
Regards.
skedaddle| 3.24.11 @ 8:49AM
I much prefer your book review to the one we're commenting on. I'm only about a third of the way through but I've enjoyed Twain for years. You're right that this autobiography requires some bsic knowledge of Twain's life and work. Thanks.
simon templar| 3.23.11 @ 4:55PM
I love the man. Let's celebrate him and be thankful. Yes, let us not over analyze the man until we loose site of what made him so unique, American, and great. He was an honest man who was truly trying to understand this world and left us with a meaning of what it is to be an American. His observations, jokes, and wit are priceless.
Sincere thanks to Mark Shepler..your post should have been the article..excellent insight, review, and style.
Michael L. Hauschild| 3.23.11 @ 7:09PM
Sorry Simon, I read these things in order and did not get to yours before reading Mark's. Didn't mean to step on your post.
Lawrence Cannon| 3.23.11 @ 9:37PM
Twain's writing reminds me of Lewis Grizzards.
joe| 3.23.11 @ 10:27PM
loved the parts where he talks about meeting General Grant.
Do I expect a soul baring memoir from Samuel Clemens? No. Just more writing I love.
jo anne white | 3.24.11 @ 12:44AM
I agree with Mr. Cannon.
In my opinion if Twain 's art had been painting instead of writing he would have been a political cartoonist. I wish that I could have met him.
Jason| 3.24.11 @ 12:58AM
Huck Finn is one of the greatest pieces of American literature ever written. I find the ending fits perfectly into the structure of the novel. I concede the ending is anticlimatic, but Huck Finn escapes right back into the obscurity from which he emerged. I find it poetic.
simon templar| 3.24.11 @ 1:56AM
Hey! For all those out there who love MT, did you know that Val Kilmer was in the process of making a film about Mark Twain. Go out to youtube..there is a film trailer out there that is incredible. He impersonates Twain and it is the best I have ever seen.
Mark Shepler| 3.24.11 @ 11:41AM
Hmmm, I skipped through the 10 minute trailer. The very title gives me the willies and what I heard even more so. I dunno Simon, seems like an agenda movie to me- Kilmer on a tear against Christianity in general and Christian Science in particular via a resurrected Twain, like a body snatcher, in the effort. See some of the comments above for a taste.
Twain's writing is so varied and much was so topical, particularly his lectures, that anybody today with an axe to grind can claim his support with a little selectivity. Just like the misuse of the Bible he's excoriating Miss Eddy for. Remember the tiresome Hal Holbrook play? I would not be interested in watching such a rant just to see the imitation because behind the production values it is, after all, only Val Kilmer picking and choosing the Twain he wants to present. If Kilmer wants to run something down let him do it in his own stead not dig up and possess Twain to go in his place.
On the other hand, I loved Kilmer as Doc Holliday in Tombstone and his Twain appears to be the same bit with the quirks, ticks and irascibility of age thrown in. Will have to wait and learn more as its release approaches.
simon templar| 3.24.11 @ 6:33PM
Mark, Ok..but please see the whole thing. Actually, Kilmer is a christian, christain scientist. His intention of doing this movie about Twain and Miss Eddy was not to tear down christianity but to illustrate the love, hate relationship and soul searching he had with Miss Eddy..it was a fascinating, strange, and conflicting relationship. Twain indeed said the very things presented in the video. This was a part of his life when he was searching for spiritual answers and at the same time very skeptical and cautious about the charlatans of his days making money on peoples legitimate spiritual concerns. At any rate, I thought his performance was quite good and interesting to watch in an acting sense. By the way, thought your post was excellent.
Mark Shepler| 3.24.11 @ 10:07PM
Of course, will keep an open mind and am certainly eager to see any good depiction of Mark Twain, or pace Mr. Bottum, the real Samuel Clemens.
I've just grown tired of that quirk of our age wherein our technology allows somebody to reach back in time and pluck someone or thing out of the past and yoke it to their cause.
What I'd REALLY prefer is a straight up movie rendition of Roughing It or Innocents Abroad or even the kind of biography that has yet to be done that lets one judge the man for himself.
Thanks for the compliment on my post. :)
Bill Croke| 3.26.11 @ 12:23AM
Nice one, Jody. Excellent in fact. Bill Croke.
Christian Louboutin | 6.23.11 @ 6:15AM
There's something curiously unsatisfying about Mark Twain, something strangely incomplete about nearly all his books. We seem to end up enjoying him as a writer more than we actually enjoy any particular thing he wrote.
Creative Recreation | 8.10.11 @ 11:35PM
is good
Ace| 9.7.11 @ 11:44AM
In what way was "esophagus" misused?