The Autobiography Of Mark Twain – Mark Twain [Edited by Charles Neider, 1959] ★★½

Twain In Twilight: Disorganized, Dis-spiriting, Still Quotable

Mark Twain produced one of the most celebrated autobiographies in American literature. This was not his own, but rather that of Ulysses S. Grant, which Twain painstakingly midwifed to great commercial success and lasting popular acclaim. It still ranks high among presidential memoirs.

Twain also wrote an autobiography of his own, a very notable work even if it is hard to similarly declare a success. Four radically different versions of The Autobiography Of Mark Twain exist in print, without a clear consensus as to which, if any, should be considered definitive. 

But of the four currently extant, including a three-volume set completed this year, the autobiography edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959 may well be the most digestible.

Alas, as Twain himself might say, being digestible isn’t the same as being nourishing…or even palatable.

Twain wrote his Autobiography in an undisciplined, fitful manner, beginning in 1870 and continuing in fits and starts until shortly before his death in 1910. In it, he describes his approach to writing as that of an “amanuensis,” jotting down his thoughts as they come to him as if by mere dictation, ready to set aside a project indefinitely if the flow of ideas becomes bogged down. In the case of the Autobiography, it never appears to have been too focused an endeavor.

“I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet,” Twain writes at one point. “I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish this autobiography, if I ever finish it.”

Hardly inspiriting. Neider dates this passage as written in April, 1906, four years before Twain’s death. Much of the Autobiography, at least in Neider’s edition, seems to have been a product of Twain’s sunset years, both in terms of when he wrote and what he wrote about. Chapters center on the various health crises of his wife and daughters, along with a slew of financial problems with which Twain had to wrestle.

The Autobiography, at least in Neider’s hands and reportedly by Twain’s design, doesn’t offer a life story as much as a series of subjective essays, each incorporating vague personal reminiscences or philosophical rumination. Think of them as ear-chewings in print. Two sequential chapters may be written on completely different topics.

In this fashion, Twain uses the book to spout off in his singular, endearing way about a variety of topics, such as healthy living:

It seems a pity that the world should throw away so many good things merely because they are unwholesome. I doubt if God has given us any refreshment which, taken in moderation, is unwholesome, except microbes. Yet there are people who strictly deprive themselves of each and every eatable, drinkable and smokable which has in any way acquired a shady reputation. They pay this price for health. And health is all they get for it.

On a regular Autobiography bugbear, publishers:

All publishers are Columbuses. The successful author is their America. The reflection that they – like Columbus – didn’t discover what they expected to discover, and didn’t discover what they started out to discover, doesn’t trouble them. All they remember is that they discovered America; they forgot that they started out to discover some patch or corner of India.

On greed in America:

I believe the entire population of the United States – exclusive of the women – to be rotten, as far as the dollar is concerned. Understand, I am saying these things as a dead person. I should consider it indiscreet in any live one to make these remarks publicly.

Twain at his "Stormfield" home in Redding, Connecticut, in 1908, around the time he was working on his Autobiography, simultaneously enjoying two of his favorite things, his pool table and a cat. Several cat photos are included in the Neider edition. [Image from http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/]

Twain makes the point again and again that he is free to write what he really feels on the basis that the Autobiography won’t be published until after his death. To that end, he indulges himself on a number of themes that would have no doubt shocked readers in his day and have the power to bother still, about the falsity of religion, the hypocrisy of moral living, and the basic pointlessness of existence.

Yet these subjects did creep into subjects Twain wrote of while alive. Much of Twain’s motivation for posthumous publication seems to have been his taste for visceral score-settling. At least in Neider’s edition, Twain expends little ink on people he admired, preferring to write about those he hated.

And how the man could hate! About one of his publishers, Elisha Bliss: “Well, Bliss was dead and I couldn’t settle with him for his ten years of swindlings. He has been dead a quarter of a century now. My bitterness against him has faded away and disappeared. I feel only compassion for him and if I could send him a fan I would.”

On the obnoxious widow of a literary friend: “I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.”

Bret Harte was a celebrated author in Twain’s day who collaborated with Twain on a failed play, “Ah, Sin.” Twain describes Harte as a man who abandoned his country in order to be free of his wife and family: “He hadn’t any more passion for his country than an oyster has for its bed; in fact not so much and I apologize to the oyster.”

Is this sort of thing fun? Well, yes. Twain knew how to entertain the human animal in both its highest and baser forms, and there are jewel-cut passages of prose here that work in these directions. But as a narrative work, Twain’s Autobiography has the same problem that plagues some of Twain’s better-regarded novels, like Pudd’nhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. It has no structure.

Instead, what you get is a compendium, of humor and sorrow, tending more to the latter, especially in the book’s second half, which is written with more industry and passion than the early chapters and focuses on the deaths of his wife, Livy, and two of his three daughters, Susy and Jean. The three died within a 13-year-period; the Neider edition is constructed in such a way that they come at you one after the other.

The final chapter of the Neider edition, written on Christmas, 1909, just weeks before Twain’s own death, is a lament on the passing of Jean, an epileptic who died in her bathtub earlier that same morning. It’s heart-rending in its immediacy, and a long ways indeed from the frontier humorist whose voice centers such lighter fare as The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer and Life On The Mississippi.

Twain’s eloquence here, indeed throughout his Autobiography, is the piercing eloquence of pure despair. As Jean still lies under a sheet, Twain describes how her beloved German Shepherd stares at him with woeful eyes, clearly registering the loss of his dear owner. It’s painful stuff, all the more for how Twain, who admits he never much liked dogs, finds in his daughter's pet a reflection of his own insoluble loss.

He expresses this well in writing of the others, too. About Susy, who died in 1896, he likens her loss to that of a beloved home: “A man’s house burns down. The smoking wreckage represents only a ruined home that was dear through years of use and pleasant associations. By and by, as the days and weeks go on, first he misses this, then that, then the other thing. And when he casts about for it he finds that it was in that house.”

Twain’s fixation on death elsewhere in Autobiography is more of a weight; for a writer who celebrated life at its best, reading this is quite a comedown.

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other. Age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shames and humiliations bring down their prides and their vanities. Those they love are taken from them and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year-by-year. At length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last – the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them – and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they have existed – a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.

If there’s any consolation in reading Twain’s Autobiography, it’s in the fact that Twain himself has managed to escape this fate. Alas, the nullity he felt about life’s purpose remains the main takeaway of this sad, dispiriting book.