A book review, of sorts, of Mark Twain’s Vol. I

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March 24, 2011 - 12:00 AM

Mark Twain started to write his autobiography many times but gave it up as a task probably impossible but certainly unrewarding. Many of those efforts were tossed in the trash. But others were kept and became a massive collection. That collection is now being laboriously edited and published. Three volumes are planned. The first came out this year.
Twain convinced himself that he could not write a conventional biography that began with his birth and ended at the sunset of his life. He thought that would only be a literary exercise and basically dishonest, because he could never bring himself to put down on paper what the events of his life really meant. It would do violence to his own reputation, he was certain, and be grossly unfair to all of the people who were important to him to have his thoughts about them put down on paper.
He said, over and over, that he wanted to do no harm to the memory of any person. The 100-year delay would ensure that everyone he mentioned — and every mention was an evaluation — was long dead and would not have their feelings hurt.
Despite his misgivings, he wrote of his memories at great length (and awesome wit), and dictated to trusted secretaries even more  than he wrote, with the strict instruction that his stories of himself and his reflections on others not be published for 100 years after his death, which occurred in 1910.

VOLUME ONE, therefore, is a jumble; slow going, but infinitely fascinating. Here are a couple of paragraphs that give a reader an understanding of Twain’s dilemma:
“What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things, are his history.
“His acts and his words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water — and they are so trifling a part of his bulk, a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden — it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, day nor night. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would be a whole book of eighty thousand words — three hundred and sixty five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man — the biography of the man himself cannot be written.”

WE MUST TAKE HIM at his word. The mill of Twain’s mind most certainly did incessantly grind. The fires that burned away the dross and left his thoughts so brilliant bright were volcanic in their intensity.
The tossing, boiling mind of Samuel Clemens doubtless would have produced a novel a day if there had been a way to move it from his head to paper. A novel worth reading, too.
That such a transfer is beyond our science is a great blessing, when the rest of mankind is contemplated. Yes, minds other than Twain’s toss and boil all day long. But as any student of stream-of-consciousness writings and utterances can attest, most of what streams out is repetitious to the point of exasperation, much of it is nonsense, and flashes of brilliance rare, indeed.
Mark Twain was a literary genius who, a century after his death, belongs in the company of all of history’s masters of words. Put a copy of Volume One by your bed and sip a few pages each night. It will do wonders for the quality of your dreams.

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