In
The Yeomen of the Guard,
William S. Gilbert wrote “an accepted wit has but to say 'Pass the
mustard,' and they roar their ribs out!” This sentiment certainly
applies to Samuel L. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. Known for his
exaggerations, much of what he presents in The
Autobiography of Mark Twain must be taken with a liberal dose of
salt, although it is hardly an autobiography in the sense the word is
understood.
Twain
struggled for years with the idea of writing his autobiography,
beginning as early as 1877, when the concept was broached by his friend
John Hay, one-time assistant secretary to Abraham Lincoln. Twain studied
various autobiographies and determined that the only way for a person to
write truthfully about himself was to arrange for publication long after
his death, in this case, a century. Even then, Twain struggle with his
autobiography, with this final version being comprised of essays, news
clippings, sketches of his friends, and almost stream-of-consciousness
dictation. What it completely lacks is a chronology or internal
narrative.
Because
Twain discussed ideas and memories as they occurred to him and because
the final work, of which this volume is only the first third, is
comprised of so many items and false starts, the autobiography suffers
from some repetition, although this is often by design.
Where
Twain does inflict an outline on his reminiscences, it is through the
auspices of his daughter, Susy, who, as a child, wrote a biography of
her father. Following Susy’s death in 1896 at age 24, he incorporated
her biography into his autobiographical writings and dictations, using
it to jog his memory and lead him to flesh out the incidents she
described.
The
primary reason the autobiography works is because it plays to Twain’s
strengths as an author…a series of short sketches written with his
customary humor and the cynicism he brought to so much of his work, and
which is so frequently hidden under the veneer of his humor.
Because
Twain’s reminiscences are achronal, the inclusion of a timelineof
Clemens’s life is a necessity, and the editors have included one among
the appendices, although both the timeline and the biographical sketches
of Twain’s family may have been better placed as part of the
introduction. The editors
also include copious notes detailing sources and support material to
provide additional background to the many offhand comments Twain made,
but which are opaque to readers more than a century after the dictations
were originally transcribed.
An
interesting thing about the autobiography is that while I enjoyed it and
found many places that caused me to laugh out loud, when I asked my wife
to read those same passages, she found herself lost by Twain’s
language…until I simply began reading the passages to her, at which
point she found the humor. For this reason, the audio version of the
tome may be preferred by those otherwise daunted by the sheer size of
the book.
With only a third of the autobiography published, the
reader knows more about the various individuals Twain knew and
interacted with than about the specific details of Twain’s life, but
the individual who was Samuel Clemens comes across in these
interactions, allowing the reader to know that individual man, if not
the events or chronology of his life.
Volumes two and three are eagerly awaited, not for the
expectation that they will provide more insight into Twain’s personal
history, but merely for Twain’s view of the world around him and his
cynical and humor outlook on events.
