Samuel Langhorne Clemens had only just achieved national literary notice with the publication of his short story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and his account of spiritual tourism in the Holy Land, The Innocents Abroad (1869), when his mind began to turn toward autobiography. He wrote Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance toward the end of 1870 and published it (all of eighteen pages) the following year with a title page featuring a gallows labeled “Our Family Tree.” After that would come the procession of lampoons, satires, parodies, and picaresques which make up The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). But in truth, all of these were really exercises of his itch for self-narration. “My books are simply autobiographies,” he commented in 1886; “I do not know that there is an incident in them which sets itself forth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not so occur.”[1] Of course, exploration of the self had been the favorite American genre from the day the first white-bibbed Puritan produced the first relation of grace to join the first visibly purified New England congregation. But Clemens made it into a non-stop industry. Huckleberry Finn began life as “Huck Finn’s Autobiography,” and Clemens was the principal broker in bringing to print the most surprisingly elegant American autobiography of the 19th century, Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs. And in the long perspective, much of Clemens’ literary life was devoted to dethroning that loathsome monument to smugness and self-promotion, the supreme American personal narrative, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.
Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Vol. 1
University of California Press
736 pages
$14.93
Yet, Clemens never actually managed to bring together all the pieces of his own self-absorption into one manuscript in his lifetime. He made his first serious attempt as early as 1876, and kept coming back to it “every three or four years.” He completed several unconnected sketches in 1897 and 1898, and actually worked up a table of contents in 1900 which showed the outline of an autobiography in 17 chapters. But by 1904, he was so dissatisfied with the slow pace of his writing that he turned to an Edison phonograph and then a professional stenographer to dictate chunks of memoir aloud. He managed to publish a few portions as “Chapters from My Autobiography” in the unbearably proper North American Review, and was so disappointed at the dull response that he arranged for them to be reprinted, with illustrations, in the New York Tribune‘s Sunday supplement. But the death of his wife in 1904 and of his daughter (who had become almost a partner in the enterprise of the autobiography) in 1908 sapped Clemens’ creativity. He had, over the years, written or dictated over 250,000 words of autobiography. But in these last months, he simply lost interest. He had long before concluded that his memoirs—such as they were—were too sizzling to publish in his lifetime, and when he died in 1910, the autobiography was only a mass of unconnected reminiscences, essays, and sketches. Even then, he stipulated that any attempt to edit and publish the material as an “autobiography” must wait until a century after his death.
What defeated him in the end was not fear of revealing too much, but fear of revealing too little. What he had long admired as “the supremest charm” in autobiographies by Cellini, Rousseau, and Casanova was the uninhibited hilarity with which each “tells the dirtiest and vilest and most contemptible things on himself, without ever suspecting that they are other than things which the reader will admire and applaud.”[2] He could not resist a posthumous poke at the expense of his brother Orion, who (he said) had set out to write a perfectly truthless autobiography himself and was more or less killed by it: “He had gone down to the kitchen in the early hours of a bitter December morning; he had built the fire, and had then sat down at a table to write something; and there he died, with the pencil in his hand and resting against the paper in the middle of an unfinished word—an indication that his release from the captivity of a long and troubled and pathetic and unprofitable life was mercifully swift and painless.”[3] But Clemens, for all his ribald sarcasm of Franklinesque self-compliment, could not bring himself up to his own mark. “The man has yet to be born who could write the truth about himself,” Clemens complained in 1899, and so autobiography, although “always interesting,” has to be taken with “a great deal of allowance.” What he really meant was that he could not quite bring himself to admit that he was Samuel Clemens.[4]
Autobiography, Clemens told William Dean Howells in 1904, “consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth.” He tried to persuade himself that “the remorseless truth is there,” but it was to be found “between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell.” Howells was not fooled. “I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself,” wrote the novelist otherwise consigned by American canonists to the devil’s-pit of gentility, “but all of it? … Even you won’t tell the black-heart’s truth.” Clemens might be (as Howells put it) “nakeder than Adam and Eve put together, and truer than sin.”[5] Eventually, Clemens had to admit that Howells had been right. Not only had he “thought of fifteen hundred to two thousand incidents of my life which I am ashamed of” but which he had “not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper”; he believed “if I should put in all or any of these incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.”[6] Leaving this continental mass unfinished and unpublished when he died in 1910 was the only way he could keep himself from turning it into a lie.
It is, I suppose, an acknowledgement of how much Clemens believed that even his autobiography would hover somewhere between fact and fiction that it finally appears with his pen-name, rather than his real name, in the title: Autobiography of Mark Twain . The sketches and chapters which Clemens piled up over the years were given, along with the bulk of his papers, to the Bancroft Library at the University of California (Berkeley) in 1962 after the death of Clemens’ last surviving child, Clara Clemens Samossoud, and work on a massive editorial project to catalogue and publish them began in 1966. Over the long history of the Mark Twain Project, it has occasionally been the butt of more than a few jokes for its ponderously paced efforts to over-annotate even the tiniest scraps of Clemensiana. The first volume of Clemens’ letters set a new record for scholarly myopia by attaching to a one-line telegram (sent by Clemens on June 21, 1858, announcing laconically: “Henry Died this morning leave tomorrow with the Corpse Saml. Clemens”) a footnote of 27 lines, plus commentary in the volume’s back-matter on the telegraph company’s “terms and conditions” as printed on the blank form.[7] But somehow the Project has endured both the jokes and the threats of impatient funders, and assuming that Twain’s ban on publication until 2010 ever really had legal teeth, the Project can at last say that one part of its work has at last appeared on time.
The Autobiography is largely the editorial accomplishment of Harriet Elinor Smith, who was also the lead editor for the over-abundant Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853-1866 (1988) and the subsequent second, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Letters, plus two volumes of Clemens’ Early Tales and Sketches (1979, 1981), and Roughing It (1993). Smith has Clemens in her blood, so to speak—her father, Henry Nash Smith, was the founding guru of American Studies and wrote three books on Clemens—and Harriet Smith herself has been a fixture of the Twain Project for 33 years. The Autobiography alone cost her six years, and this is, in fact, only volume one.
No one could have been more surprised, then, than Harriet Smith when the Autobiography leapt out from the publisher’s gate like a certain well-known jumping frog, demanding a print run which had to be adjusted upwards from an initial 30,000 copies to 500,000; by January, it had crept onto bestseller lists from California to The New York Times.[8] A hefty part of this unplanned-for bestsellerhood was the expectation that an autobiography which Clemens had wanted to conceal for a hundred years had to be teeming with scandal, either his own scandalous unbelief in all the available 19th-century pieties or the scandals of his peers which he slyly recorded from the inside. But Smith was adamant on this point: reports of Clemens’ tell-all skills had been greatly exaggerated. “That’s gotten exaggerated to the point where we’re accused of false advertising,” Smith said. After all, portions of the Autobiography had been available in the North American Review and the New York Tribune since Clemens published them there in 1906, and there was nothing particularly revealing even about the style. “To be honest,” Smith added, “various editors didn’t think it was his best work.”[9]
The real revelation of the Autobiography was an aspect of Clemens’ personality which few suspected was there: guilt. “He did have a tendency to feel guilty that we find puzzling,” Smith said.[10] He blamed himself for the death of his year-and-half-old son Langdon in 1872 when the child caught cold after a carriage ride. He chided himself for his “lack of endurance” in watching over his father-in-law, Jervis Langdon, before Langdon’s death. The guilt even bobs up in Tom Sawyer: the drunken tramp who incinerates himself in the town jail was a real character who, in Clemens’ dreams, accused him of giving him the matches he used to start the fire. And he bitterly regretted the “many crimes I committed against that gentle and patient and forgiving spirit,” his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens. “I always told her that if she died first”—which she did—”the rest of my life would be made up of self-reproaches for the tears I had made her shed.” She promptly and lovingly heightened his guilt by replying that “if I should pass from life first, she would never have to reproach herself without having loved me the less devotedly or the less constantly because of those tears.” They had that exchange, Clemens added, a thousand times, the last “when the night of death was closing about her.” The wonder is that he was able to live with himself for six years afterward.
Yet Clemens’ guilt had a certain self-serving aspect, as though its chief problem was the pain it caused him, not the larger metaphysical conclusions he might draw from it. He raged against the money-makers of the Gilded Age, not because their works were evil, but because the ones he trusted had taken the profits of his writing and nearly sunk him into destitution. In his youth, Clemens asserted, “there was nothing resembling a worship of money or its possessor.” But men like “Jay Gould,” he complained, “reversed the commercial morals of the United States …. The people had desired money before his day, but he taught them to fall down and worship it.” He left no whip unbloodied when opportunity came to lay it on the back of John D. Rockefeller, “twaddling sentimental sillinesses to a Sunday-school,” or those of the tribe of Rockefeller he believed had lured him unwisely into fortune-making schemes. He was careful, however, not to include on his rap-sheet of robber princes his own father-in-law, who had made a fortune in coal, lumber, and railroads in upstate New York. And he displayed a stupendous insensibility to the amoral celebrity-of-the-day, Daniel Edgar Sickles, who had murdered his wife’s lover on the sidewalk in front of the White House, escaped hanging by pleading temporary insanity, wangled a commission in the Union Army and cheerfully disobeyed George G. Meade’s orders to stand his ground at Gettysburg, then dodged court-martial when a piece of Confederate ordnance blew his knee-cap off, used his position as U.S. minister to Spain to seduce Queen Isabella, embezzled funds devoted to monument-building at Gettysburg, and spent the half-century between Gettysburg and his own death in 1914 defaming the reputation of Meade. Sickles, in Clemens’ eyes, was just an adorable old duffer who “always seems modest and unexasperating” and “never made an ungenerous remark about anybody.” Clemens first met Sickles in Paris, and later lived across the street from him in New York City, and, in the company of perhaps only four or five other people on the rest of the planet, was “sure Sickles must have been always polite.” Clemens assumed the most amazing innocence in others until proof of guilt emerged; but when it did, the only cure he had for the sting of gullibility was to sink their reputations in the Gehenna of his sarcasm.
Another part of Clemens’ guilt is reflected in the remarkably poor way he handled his own fame. After speaking at Carnegie Hall, “the usual thing happens,” Clemens said (or wrote). “I shake hands with people who used to know my mother intimately in Arkansas, in New Jersey, in California, in Jericho—and I have to seem so glad and so happy to meet these persons who knew in this intimate way one who was so near and dear to me. And this is the kind of thing that gradually turns a person into a polite liar and deceiver, for my mother was never in any of those places.” Clemens, for all that he snarled at people peddling truth, loved truth more than he ever cared to admit, and got less of it than he wanted; but this made him see his star-struck admirers as tempters who wanted to make him into a “polite liar,” and in his heart he hated them for that. He was no easier, however, on legitimate acquaintances from his school-days in Hannibal, Missouri. He had known John Garth and Helen Kercheval in those years, but now expressed only an arid nostalgia: “They grew up and married. He became a prosperous banker and a prominent and valued citizen; and a few years ago he died, rich and honored. He died. It is what I have to say about so many of those boys and girls.” This is not a reminiscence; it is a statement of contempt for two nice people who had never, unlike the great Samuel Langhorne Clemens, escaped the rut of niceness. But it was also a contempt mingled with guilt, as if he was startled at feeling so little in common with them. And after the guilt, despair. “These tiresome and monotonous repetitions of the human life—where is their value?” Clemens asked out loud. “There was nobody then who could answer it; there is nobody yet.”
Actually, Clemens did not want to hear that there might be such an answer. There is no clue in the Autobiography of the root of Clemens’ all-too-well-known scorn for Christianity, but he did admit, in an early sketch for the Autobiography, that “each boy has one or two sensitive spots, and if you can find out where they are located you have only to touch them and you can scorch him as with fire.” Nothing pricked him more furiously than the suggestion that he was responsible for evil or suffering; nothing dogged him more vigorously than the suspicion that he was. He never forgot, or let others forget, that “mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience, and knew but the one duty—to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions; particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it.” He hated his “Presbyterian” conscience like Ahab hated the White Whale, but he was no more able to escape it than Ahab was Moby-Dick. Which is why Clemens’ railing against the Bible (of which there is much less in the Autobiography than might be supposed) was less a matter of denouncing, Tom Paine-like or Voltaire-like, the errors, miscalculations, misidentifications, and concluding unscientific postscripts they accused it of, than it is a burning resentment at being made to feel a guilt he was convinced he didn’t deserve. Two of Clemens’ most popular works—and the two which are not humor books, The Prince and the Pauper and The Tragedy of Puddn’head Wilson—are both about twins (or at least look-alikes) whose lives have been switched. In the hands of Gilbert and Sullivan, this was an occasion for comedy, but in the hands of America’s greatest comedic writer, the switch was anything but funny. Each, like Clemens, had been saddled with an identity he was convinced he did not deserve. This is a resentful, perhaps even dishonest, way to live, since we cannot escape who we are. Paradise truly has been lost, and the blame for it rests inalterably on our shoulders, whether we are conscious of earning it or not. We do not return to innocence, or cling to it, or light out for the territories in pursuit of it; the only way out is redemption.
But Clemens did not want redemption, which is why his humor has such a stiletto edge to it, and why, in the end, he could not be as totally transparent as his autobiographical models demanded. What Clemens wanted was innocence, and he was enraged at having it stripped away. During a brief and barren spell, living in Buffalo, Clemens got to know David Gray, a local newspaper editor who had emigrated from Scotland. Gray’s upbringing, Clemens wrote, had made him a Presbyterian “of the bluest, the most uncompromising and most unlovely shade.” But being “doomed to grind out his living in a most uncongenial occupation,” Gray soon abandoned his Presbyterianism and turned “a frank rationalist and pronounced unbeliever.” Years later, Clemens learned that Gray had suffered a stroke and “that his brain was affected, as a result.” But even though the stroke robbed him of his editor’s job, Gray was “living quite privately and teaching a daily Bible Class …. His unbelief had passed away; his early Presbyterianism had taken its place.” Now, when Clemens at last met Gray after thirty years, “the same sweet spirit of the earlier days looked out of his deep eyes … great, fine and blemishless in character, a creature to adore.” Clemens could have smirked if he had been inclined: he returns to faith only after his brain has stopped working. Instead, what Clemens noticed was, with the return of faith, the return of innocence. In the volume’s last entry, from 1906, Clemens included a letter from Helen Keller, “a young woman who has been stone deaf, dumb, and blind ever since she was eighteen months old,” but who was nevertheless able to write Clemens a letter which he was confident “would pass into our literature as a classic and remain so.” Innocence, he wanted to believe, must somehow triumph over sense. But the only evidence he could offer for it was a brain-wrecked Bible teacher and the most famous blind deaf-mute in America.
Harriet Elinor Smith concluded from the start that she would not attempt to work Clemens’ vast jumble of recollections into some form of synthetic narrative. It would have required doing too much violence to texts which had never enjoyed much proximity or shared meaning anyway, and a century after the author’s death was not the time to attempt such. All told, there are 82 documents in this first volume of Clemens’ Autobiography, the single largest portion being the autobiographical dictations he made in 1906. They are spread over 467 pages of text, and are accompanied by 58 pages of spare and simple introduction and 198 of “explanatory notes” and appendices (plus a bibliography, index, facsimile reproductions of several of Clemens’ pages, and photographs). In the midst of a Mark Twain Project which has already stretched over almost half a century, it is a mountain rising up from the plain. The other aspects of the edition are about the writings; this volume is about the writer. And about what he could not bear to tell himself, or us.
Allen C. Guelzo is Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College, where he directs the Civil War Era Studies Program.
1. “Introduction,” Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography: The Chapters from the North American Review , ed. Michael J. Kiskis (Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1990), p. xxvii.
2. Clemens to Orion Clemens (February 26, 1880), Jean Webster McKinney Papers, Vassar College.
3. “Chapter XII—Orion Clemens—resumed,” in Mark Twain’s Own Autobiography , ed. Kiskis, p. 109.
4. Curtis Brown, “Mark Twain Talks” (1899), in Gary Scharnhorst, ed., Mark Twain: The Complete Interviews (Univ. of Alabama Press, 2006), p. 343.
5. Clemens to W.D. Howells (March 14, 1904), in Mark Twain’s Letters, Arranged with Comment , A. Bigelow Paine, ed. (Harper and Brothers, 1917), Vol. 2, p. 751.
6. “Chapter XII—Orion Clemens—resumed,” pp. 108-109.
7. “Twain Project Suffers From ‘Imperial Vision,'” Chronicle of Higher Education (March 11, 1992).
8. Kathleen Maclay, “Twain autobiography—the way he wanted it—hits stores today,” UC Berkeley News Center (November 15, 2010) at newscenter.berkeley.edu/2010/11/15/mark-twain/.
9. Craig Seligman, “Twain Mocked Virgin Birth in Memoir Kept Secret for a Century: Interview,” Bloomberg News (December 2, 2010) at bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-02/twain-mocked-virgin-birth-in-memoir-kept-secret-for-a-century-interview.html.
10. Reyhan Harmanci, ” ‘If You Knew Mark Twain Like I Do’: Interview with New Memoir’s Editor,” The Bay Citizen (November 10, 2010) at baycitizen.org/mark-twain/story/if-you-mark-twain-do-interview-editor/.
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