No Particular Time

Mark Twain via circa71.wordpress.com

Writing one’s auto­bi­og­ra­phy should most likely be a daunt­ing and befud­dling task. How does one gain a prop­erly edi­to­ri­al­ized per­spec­tive on expe­ri­ences, rela­tion­ships and past actions? What of all those ele­ments most defines you? Could you be truly hon­est with your­self? Could this pos­si­bly be cap­ti­vat­ing to readers?

It seems rather impos­si­ble to wrap one’s head around. Such an under­tak­ing is appar­ently so cere­brally chal­leng­ing that Mark Twain — the “father of American lit­er­a­ture” as pro­claimed by William Faulkner — was over­whelmed with the process. Luckily for us — this lit­er­ary genius even­tu­ally solved the riddle.

“It is a sys­tem which is a com­plete and pur­posed jum­ble — a course which begins nowhere, fol­lows no spe­cific route, and can never reach an end while I am alive …”

Our fas­ci­na­tion with Twain appears inter­minable as well. Originally slated for a 7,500 print by edi­tors at the University of California Press, the pro­duc­tion run is up to 275,000 copies after a few short months. Frantic retail­ers, scram­ble as they may, can­not keep the 4-pound colos­sus on their shelves. Twain appar­ently always wanted to write an auto­bi­og­ra­phy yet strug­gled might­ily with the exe­cu­tion. He attuned his trou­bles to try­ing to fol­low a chrono­log­i­cal cal­en­dar; a plan that, he wrote, “… starts you at the cra­dle and dri­ves you straight for the grave, with no side excur­sions permitted “.

The man born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens led a tumul­tuous life full of men­tal anguish, fam­ily dys­func­tion, ill­ness and finan­cial tur­moil. His pen name bor­rowed from river­boat life dur­ing his days on the Mississippi River (“mark twain!” is an excla­ma­tion indi­cat­ing a safe water depth of two fath­oms for the boats). As a fas­ci­nat­ing per­haps non-coincidence, Halley’s Comet was vis­i­ble in the sky above on both the day of his birth and day of his passing.

As adept as Twain was with the writ­ten word, he was sur­pass­ingly mar­velous as a sto­ry­teller. He fas­ci­nated his con­tem­po­raries with an abil­ity to trans­late com­plex ide­olo­gies into spon­ta­neous speech. Not coin­ci­den­tally, he remains one of the most oft-quoted lit­er­ary tal­ents. He was com­pli­cated and con­tra­dic­tory in his polit­i­cal and social com­men­taries that were founded in anti-imperialism, abo­li­tion­ism and eman­ci­pa­tion. He was crit­i­cal of orga­nized reli­gion and Christianity while call­ing American sol­diers “uni­formed assas­sins”. His “Votes for Women” speech in 1901 was a crit­i­cal spark plug for the real­iza­tion of Women’s Suffrage.

“I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.”

So Twain hit upon the right way to do his auto­bi­og­ra­phy — dic­tat­ing his expe­ri­ences to his stenog­ra­pher while propped up against a mound of regal pil­lows, clad in a silk dress­ing gown of exotic Persian pat­terns. This bril­liant satirist had a hard time fig­ur­ing what rules to break as he strug­gled to account for him­self dur­ing the last few years of his life. Amidst the nearly 2,000 pages of dic­ta­tion were sear­ing accounts of ven­omous and inflam­ma­tory rela­tion­ships with many walks of life. Candid and unfil­tered were these resentment-laden tales from dishar­monies that most never knew existed.

” … she was excitable, mali­cious, malig­nant, venge­ful, unfor­giv­ing, self­ish, stingy, avari­cious, coarse, vul­gar, pro­fane, obscene, a furi­ous blus­terer on the out­side and at heart a coward.”

The com­pletely non-linear ora­tions from Twain have always been an iras­ci­ble hand­ful for edi­tors. Biographers were unsure how to struc­ture the pas­sages and his daugh­ter guarded the pas­sages, believ­ing much of the text to be exces­sively scald­ing and vis­ceral. It was his strict wish that his story not be released until 100 years after his death on April 21, 1910. It was not only a pro­tec­tive ges­ture towards his loved ones, but also a stroke of mar­ket­ing genius. Despite efforts to safe­guard the mate­r­ial over the years, parts of the auto­bi­og­ra­phy sur­faced, only increas­ing the thirst for the ran­corous humor and rich social com­men­taries that framed his work.

“It is by the good­ness of God that in our coun­try we have those three unspeak­ably pre­cious things: free­dom of speech, free­dom of con­science, and the pru­dence never to prac­tice either of them.”

The hunger for the first volume of his auto­bi­og­ra­phy (vol­umes 2 and 3 are on rumored to be on the way in all of their unabashed glory) from new gen­er­a­tions of read­ers has left Twain as one of the very few authors to have pub­lished new best-selling books in each of the last three centuries.

Ernest Hemingway stated that “all mod­ern American lit­er­a­ture comes from a book by Mark Twain called Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. He changed the rules of fic­tion when he let a red­neck kid tell his story in his own dialect. He seemed to flow a clas­sic com­bi­na­tion of wit and insight that seemed par­tic­u­larly American and belied his iconic image clad in the benign white suit and bowtie.

It seems to us that he truly was a mas­ter show­man of his time — yet ahead of his time — and ulti­mately cool. His new auto­bi­og­ra­phy finally gives us, out of all the chaos, a story about Mark Twain, as told exactly by Mark Twain released pre­cisely when he wanted. It is unde­ni­ably rel­e­vant and fas­ci­nat­ing right now.

HighStreet.Cincinnati