Last year, the centenary of Mark Twain’s death, the University of California at Berkeley published the first volume of Twain’s Autobiography. In 1899, he justified the hundred-year embargo thus: “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way.” This did not, to the disappointment of our degraded age, mean the freedom to be salacious. It meant the freedom to talk without reservation or self-editing—Twain dictated these memoirs to a stenographer—and it did lead him into folly now and again. Take this bit of patent foolishness:
In the matter of slavish imitation, man is the monkey’s superior all the time. The average man is destitute of independence of opinion. He is not interested in contriving an opinion of his own, by study and reflection, but is only anxious to find out what his neighbor’s opinion is and slavishly adopt it. A generation ago, I found out that the latest review of a book was pretty sure to be just a reflection of the earliest review of it. . . . I believe that the trade of critic, in literature, music, and the drama, is the most degraded of all trades, and that it has no real value—certainly no large value.
This is ludicrous. As any fool knows, the thing to do is not to copy the earliest review of a book but to combine each successive review, stealing and chopping up other people’s opinions until your product is exhaustive, broad-minded, and flattering to your fellow critics, who will try to ruin you if contradicted in print. If this is to work, you need to be at least third or fourth in line; the longer you wait, the better. It is for this reason, and certainly not because of laziness or some other personal defect, that I’ve allowed one hundred and one years to lapse since Twain’s death before remarking on his life. The reader will surely find my stew of opinions the meatiest and most tender.
Twain struggled for over thirty years, between 1870 and 1905, with the urge to write an autobiography. He made a number of attempts, sometimes writing and sometimes dictating, but it wasn’t until the beginning of 1906 that he found a suitable stenographer and embarked on a program of daily dictation. His method of composition is perilously close to rambling or even nattering on: “I 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.”
One is occasionally tempted to accuse him of flouting that last rule. In any case, this plan is far from the right way to “do an Autobiography,” though the question remains as to whether it was the right way for Twain to do one. I could not address this question to any profit were it not for the courage of Garrison Keillor in his New York Times review. Keillor tells us not that the Emperor has no clothes, but that he is, in his Autobiography, swaddled in the white suit of self-promotion. It is so bright, so compulsively and delightedly egotistical, that it blinds Twain to his own failure to entertain.
Twain’s famous suit is discussed in detail in Michael Shelden’s rollicking biography, Mark Twain: The Man in White: The Grand Adventure of His Final Years, also released in 2010 but permitted to cure on my bookshelf until just now. Twain debuted the suit in December 1906, at a hearing on copyright law at the Library of Congress. “Mark Twain Bids Winter Defiance,” trumpeted the New York Herald. Twain’s friend William Dean Howells was scandalized. “Appearing in such clothing at a formal gathering,” Shelden writes, “was a shocking breach of etiquette.” Twain himself joked about his love of attention, but there may have been a more private reason for his new apparel:
“I can’t bear to put on black clothes again,” he told [his biographer Albert Bigelow] Paine. “If we are going to be gay in spirit, why be clad in funeral garments? . . . When I put on black it reminds me of my funerals. I could be satisfied with white all the year round.”
Was Twain’s craving for attention merely a plausible excuse for cheering himself up? Or were “his” funerals—those of his infant (and only) son Langdon in 1872, of his daughter Susy in 1896, and of his wife Olivia “Livy” Langdon in 1904—a convenient justification for dressing like a lunatic?
Keillor is a realist about it: “Samuel L. Clemens was a cheerful promoter of himself, and . . . the old man liked to dress up as Mark Twain in a fresh white suit and take a Sunday morning stroll up Fifth Avenue.” The Autobiography, which also appears at first glance to be the work of an old man shoring himself up against age and unhappiness, is, Keillor says, a “fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin in their Shakespearean romp, and bravo to Samuel Clemens, still able to catch the public’s attention a century after he expired.” To the contrary, bravo to Keillor. “Here is a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers,” he quips. The inferior humorist stands revealed.
For although Mark Twain retails hundreds of pages of comedy, history, tragedy, and reflection—much of it, incredibly, right off the top of his head—who can spare a kind word for a writer who indulges in “excruciating passages of hero worship of General Grant . . . and accounts of [his] proximity to the general and [his] business dealings as the publisher of his memoirs”? After all, of all the genuinely fascinating things Mark Twain did in his life, why should we care that he also published the memoirs of this nobody Grant, who is notable only for an oft-repeated question about the occupant of his tomb?
Keillor is, however, dead on about Twain’s “eighteen pages of mind-numbing inventory of the Countess Massiglia’s Villa di Quarto, which he leased in Florence.” The repetitious descriptions of walls painted an “odious stomach-turning yellow” are like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Gothic tale “The Yellow Wallpaper” in miniature. In fact, they are by far the worst eighteen pages of this Gutenberg Bible-sized book. Keillor points out that Livy Clemens is dying at this point—she passed away in Florence—while her husband “compiles an inventory of furniture.” This is perhaps the only time Keillor puts a foot wrong. Surely Twain is committing the villa to memory in such detail because of, not in spite of, its awful significance. The excesses of this dull section humanize him.
Jerome Loving, addressing the “myth of Mark Twain’s geriatric despair” in his excellent 2010 biography, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens, makes a necessary point: “Few lives end happily; most flicker down to nothing.” That Twain in his dotage became gloomier, more pessimistic about mankind and man’s role in the grand scheme of things, is amply documented. Kurt Vonnegut, who named his son “Mark” after his idol, wrote in his own Last Words, A Man Without a Country (2005), “Like my distinct betters Einstein and Twain, I now give up on people too.” But as Loving writes of (or writes off) the effect of Twain’s late-life tragedies: “What tends to be overlooked is that his work and his personality always had deep-seated elements of pessimism. Indeed, these elements exist in all serious thinkers.”
Well put! There is something both unserious and punitive in the insistence that Twain, having been buffeted by tragedy, let darkness settle on his outlook. “Twain is popularly regarded as the finest stand-up comedian ever,” writes Laura Skandera Trombley, the author of Mark Twain’s Other Woman (2010), in the Los Angeles Times. It is no surprise that in today’s literary climate, so hostile to humor, the tears of a clown are frequently of much greater interest than the peals of laughter he spent his life generating.
Were Garrison Keillor, humorist, not a diamond of the first water—which I wouldn’t dream of testing by dropping him in a lake to see if he disappears—I’d wonder if he nurtured this predilection for sorrow. Although he must have laughed his eyebrows off at much of the book, he reserved most of his praise for Twain’s desolating remembrance of twenty-four-year-old Susy’s death. My suspicion, however, is baseless. The passage really does show us the love and grief of Clemens, with “Twain” nowhere to be found:
It was only one word that she said when she spoke that last time, and it told of her longing. She groped with her hands and found Katy [Leary], and caressed her face and said “mamma.”
How gracious it was that in that forlorn hour of wreck and ruin, with the night of death closing around her, she should have been granted that beautiful illusion—that the latest vision which rested upon the clouded mirror of her mind should have been the vision of her mother, and the latest emotion she should know in life the joy and peace of that dear imagined presence.
Only a man who can write like this can hope to be as funny as Twain. This is what our contemporaries so often fail to see about “irreverence.” It is a skill at pruning back or weeding out what is false, and it must be developed through the cultivation of what is true. Without reverence, there can be no irreverence. The cynical may ask what difficulty there is in loving or grieving over a daughter, to which one need only point to the Devil’s roll call of neglectful or absent or cruel fathers in the history of literature. If Twain’s life lacks the sexual scandal of other, more pointedly confessional efforts, perhaps the fault lies not in his fanatical devotion to his reputation, but in his goodness.
Laura Skandera Trombley’s review of the Autobiography—never mind that it’s so much more enthusiastic than Keillor’s—gets its subject just right. She is a renowned Twain scholar and a Twain lover. (I cannot but doubt that the two are always synonymous.) She regards the book as a “paean to Twain’s enormous energy level, his incessant need to express himself, and . . . his unwavering narcissism.”
This approaches an ideal way to think about Twain’s account of himself, but I must confess a twinge of confusion. Last I checked, “narcissism” refers to an exaggerated or unearned sense of achievement. Yet here we have Twain the greatest comedian of all time; Twain who created a “distinct American sense of self”; Twain who, Trombley tells us, beat the average American male life expectancy by twenty-seven years; Twain who “managed to cross the Atlantic 29 times, completed an around-the-world lecture tour at age fifty-nine, [wrote] more than 50,000 letters, scores of short stories, some 3,000 newspaper and magazine articles and more than thirty books.” To paraphrase the clergyman’s son in one of Twain’s anecdotes, “Please, won’t you, for Christ’s sake, let the man strut?”
Having given us a catalogue of her subject’s professional accomplishments, Trombley barely scratches the surface of his life’s work, which was to live life and to give its great variety his undivided attention. This variety raises a question of grave importance for the future of American letters: If our writers no longer lead lives like Twain’s, how can we expect them to produce work like his? His self-styled acolyte, Kurt Vonnegut, endured the shattering tragedy of his mother’s suicide on Mother’s Day 1944, as well as the firebombing of Dresden a year later, but after that it was grad school, General Electric, and a Cape Cod Saab dealership. Today’s writers often have far less to draw on.
Let’s look at the adventures of Sam Clemens. He was born in 1835 on the Salt River, in Florida, Missouri. At four he moved to Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi. In 1849, just two years after his father’s death—he would have been entering high school, had such a thing existed—he worked at the Hannibal Courier. (There exists no record of his having written a poignant college essay about his father’s death. Such things, thank God, did not yet exist.)
Shortly thereafter he traveled to St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. At twenty he lived in Keokuk, Iowa, later St. Louis, and later Cincinnati. By twenty-three he was working as a steamboat pilot, though his skill at same is disputed. In 1861, Sam lit out for the Nevada Territory with his brother Orion, where he tried prospecting. In 1862, he was working for the territory’s Virginia City Enterprise, and his writing career was off to the races. This period is beautifully described in Roughing It. An aborted duel that obliged him to hightail it from Nevada to San Francisco is hilariously described in the Autobiography. Here Sam and his second are practicing:
Now just at this moment, a little bird, no bigger than a sparrow, flew along by and lit on a sage-bush about thirty yards away. Steve whipped out his revolver and shot its head off. Oh, he was a marksman—much better than I was. We ran down there to pick up the bird, and just then, sure enough, Mr. Laird and his people came over the ridge, and they joined us. And when Laird’s second saw that bird, with its head shot off, he lost color, he faded, and you could see that he was interested. He said, “Who did that?”
Before I could answer, Steve spoke up and said quite calmly, and in a matter-of-fact way,
“Clemens did it.”
. . . The second took Mr. Laird home, a little tottery on his legs, and Laird sent back a note in his own hand declining to fight a duel with me on any terms whatsoever.
Well, my life was saved—saved by that accident. I don’t know what the bird thought about that interposition of Providence, but I felt very, very comfortable over it.
So there’s the special providence in the fall of a sparrow. Mark Twain for some bloody feathers—hardly a bad trade.
Since dueling had been outlawed in Nevada, he was advised to “leave the territory by the next stage-coach.” He’d only been using his immortal nom de plume for a year. He was not yet thirty. Today it would be nearly impossible to accumulate a similar range of experience. The trouble begins early in life: Childhood no longer looks anything like it did to its chief rhapsodist. Caves and rafts are increasingly scarce. This condition has been adequately bemoaned and is in no danger of being reversed, so I’ll spare the reader the usual jokes about elbow pads and so-called “helicopter parents,” but it is nice to be reminded how wonderfully lackadaisical a nineteenth-century upbringing could be: “When our family moved by wagon from the hamlet of Florida, Missouri, thirty miles to Hannibal, on the Mississippi, they did not count the children, and I was left behind. I was two and a half years old.” (He was four, but does it matter?)
The best review of the Autobiography I have come across, which space does not permit me to plagiarize in full, is the biographer Edmund Morris’s in The Wall Street Journal. Although Morris notes that the book prefers not to “cohere into a satisfactory whole,” he pronounces Twain “that rare motormouth whose every word beguiles.” (Absolutely—except for those exceptions Keillor sniffed out.) Twain’s hard opinion of himself, which had made him so skeptical that an honest autobiography could be written, is to be pitied: Twain’s “personal derelictions were . . . few, and by no means contemptible. Mark Twain was actually a magnificent person.”
How did Twain get so good, so moral, so wise? Earlier I wondered whether this was the proper way for Twain to “do an Autobiography.” I now assert that it was, because its fragmentation demonstrates, more clearly than any conventional approach could have, the nature of Twain’s development—as a writer, and as a moral man. Twain wrote, “The events of life are mainly small events—they only seem large when we are close to them. By and by they settle down and we see that one doesn’t show above another. They are all about one general low altitude, and inconsequential.” This is not so. The glimmerings of Twain’s moral genius can be found in many of these “low altitude” moments:
We had a little slave boy whom we had hired from some one, there in Hannibal. . . . He was a cheery spirit, innocent and gentle, and the noisiest creature that ever was, perhaps. All day long he was singing, whistling, yelling, whooping, laughing—it was maddening, unendurable. At last, one day, I lost all my temper, and went raging to my mother, and said Sandy had been singing for an hour without a single break, and I couldn’t stand it, and wouldn’t she please shut him up. The tears came into her eyes, and her lip trembled, and she said something like this—
“Poor thing, when he sings, it shows that he is not remembering, and that comforts me; but when he is still, I am afraid he is thinking, and I cannot bear it. He will never see his mother again; if he can sing, I must not hinder it, but be thankful for it. If you were older, you would understand me; then that friendless child’s noise would make you glad.”
It was a simple speech, and made up of small words, but it went home, and Sandy’s noise was not a trouble to me any more.
For my money, this is every bit as moving as the death of Susy Clemens.
Of course, Twain did not come to hate slavery then and there, by the grace of the canned thunderclap in which today’s memoirs traffic. It was only the first whisper of a moral sentiment. “In my schoolboy days,” he relates, “I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing.” Twain had to learn about slavery on his own, through observation and empathy, recollection and deep thinking—a conspiracy of small events.
Would Twain have become such an exacting critic of religious attitudes had he not cut his teeth on the “scriptural” sophistry deployed in defense of the peculiar institution? Twain on the amateur theology of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., is a trivial but amusing example: “The inference was plain. Young John’s father’s millions and his own were a mere incident in their lives and not in any way an obstruction to their salvation. Therefore Christ’s admonition [‘Sell all thou hast’] could have no application to them.” Twain on the March 1906 Moro Massacre in the Philippines—about which Morris, the author of three volumes of biography of Teddy Roosevelt, states that “clean-cut American boys . . . behaved just as barbarously as they would later do at My Lai and Abu Ghraib”—imbues sarcasm with the fury of a jeremiad.
How could he not? In the antebellum South, he had seen children like Sandy taken from their mothers. He’d seen slaves whipped, “cuffed,” raped, and lynched, and he knew the abuse of the defenseless as something more than an abstraction. His guilt and shame, and the timeless art he fashioned from them, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and elsewhere, were not a pose. He learned the hard way.
Twain’s Autobiography contains too much life to hint at in even one hundred reviews. It must be gotten at the source, savored, and digested. There is one great lesson I hope will stick in the reader’s craw. This year, the publisher NewSouth announced that it would release an edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in which the novel’s 219 uses of “nigger” are replaced with “slave.” This proposed act of sickening literary and historical vandalism was widely and justly condemned. But it is easy to condemn, even in a culture that insists on the timid formulation “the n-word” in adult publications. It is harder, for some unaccountable reason, to acknowledge what Twain’s life and Autobiography prove so elegantly: The young are resilient, and possess a measure of native wisdom. They learn from experience, some, it’s true, more than others. We can’t all be Mark Twain. But the child made safe from everything, who experiences nothing beyond the common run of things, hasn’t a chance in h—l of it.