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.”
He once spoke of the loss of his wife, Livi, in a single terse
and powerful line: “In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have
seen only one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her.”
But in the Autobiography he prefaces a brief
acknowledgement of her illness with 20 pages of comic vituperation
against his landlady, the owner of the Italian villa in which Livi
spent her last days: an “American countess” who was a “reptile with
a filthy soul” — not to mention “excitable, malicious, malignant,
vengeful, unforgiving, selfish, stingy, avaricious, coarse, vulgar,
profane, obscene, a furious blusterer on the outside and at heart a
coward.”
Part of the fun of Twain, part of what we appreciate in his
persona, is the interplay of it all: the bleakness of his declared
view of life, somehow tangled up with the joy of his sense of
comedy. This was a man who could readily denounce the whole of
existence. “I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor
creed prejudices,” he once noted. “All I care to know is that a man
is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can’t be any
worse.” Or, in pithier form, “Often it does seem a pity that Noah
and his party did not miss the boat.” At the same time he was a man
who could indulge such gooey thoughts as “Don’t part with your
illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have
ceased to live.”
For that matter, he was the man who could write the perfect
comedy of “It was a crisp and spicy morning in early October.… The
sensuous fragrance of innumerable deciduous flowers rose upon the
swooning atmosphere; far in the empty sky a solitary esophagus
slept upon motionless wing; everywhere brooded stillness, serenity,
and the peace of God” — an entire paragraph of pseudo-Victorian
sentiment deployed for the sole purpose of setting up the
deliberate misuse of the word esophagus.
Ah, well. That’s why we love him. At least 90 percent of The
Autobiography of Mark Twain had already been published in the
earlier, expurgated editions, and this first third of the complete
text adds little to our actual knowledge of the events and emotions
of the man’s life. But for our grasp of Mark Twain — for our
belief, ever since he burst on the scene in 1865, that we
know him through his prose — the book is a gift and a
treasure.
