Paying the Freight

And so the last ungainly bale of Mark Twain's autobiography has at last been none-too-gently offloaded by the University of California Press and the Mark Twain Project.  Unlike the first, back in 2010, there's been blessed little notice of this, the final shipment.  Hard now to remember the fanfare that greeted the project's inaugural volume, which quickly became one of that holiday season's most unlikely bestsellers.  To date, at the bookstore where I work we've sold one copy and that to me.  Don't know that we will move the other four copies ordered any time soon, and that's a real shame.

Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 3, edited by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith and Co. is every inch as intimidating as either of the earlier two, which is of course the blessing and the curse of the whole enterprise.  Unlike earlier editors like Charlers Neider and Bernard DeVoto, the present Project crew determined to take the elderly Twain at his word.  Early on in the dictation of these pages, Twain announced that he intended a new kind of autobiography; one not restrained by either chronology or narrative convention.  Whatever he may or may not have intended to do, these three volumes have made painfully clear that what the old boy did was talk, and talk, and talk.  Sometimes he talks most entertainingly, as one might expect from one of the supreme talkers in our literature.  Often as not though, not -- at least when the dull stuff is  measured by weight.  Still, now, thanks to this "authoritative" edition, no one can say he hasn't had it all out.

Bernard DeVoto spent years among Twain's unpublished papers and produced various worthy and still readable volumes, none of which laid claim to the title of Twain's "Autobiography." Neider, confronted with the same hay-mow of material, attempted to shape the autobiographical stuff into some kind of recognizable story.  His book remains a thoroughly readable abridgement, if by no means what Twain seems to have had in mind. Neider's is a book to which I have returned many times, always with pleasure and great respect for his herculean effort.  Twain's editors then, down the decades, may be not only the only people to have read all of Twain's Autobiography, but the only people ever likely to.  At least now, those of us inclined to browse about may do so just as we please.  Here at last we have the whole of Twain's original, tidied, but hardly "edited" in any sense that those earlier gents might recognize. (Even as to the bare minimum of useful footnotes, there would seem to have been no room left in this new version for anything but Twain's original text, various supplemental additions ((!)) and an index, in other words, more of more.)

Just by way of contrast, Oxford University Press last year released an authoritative text of Anthony Trollope's autobiography, at 328 pages, including a new introduction, selections from some biographical essays and his biography of Thackeray, an appendix of "Passages Omitted from An Autobiography," and a section of explanatory notes.  The comparison is not entirely fair.  Trollope's book is a notoriously tight and workmanlike effort and Trollope a much less expansive character than Twain.  I mention Trollope's book both as a model of what Twain evidently did not choose to write, and as an example of what an academic press can do to enhance such a book for the common reader.  But then, I've already read An Autobiography by Anthony Trollope and already own at least two editions.  And now it seems I also own all three giant volumes of Twain's.

I can't say I regret the opportunity.  In the 700+ pages of this third and concluding volume there are stories already familiar to me from earlier biographies and from more finished versions of some of this material in previously published essays and journalism.  Even within the text of this edition there are repetitions, sometimes within pages of one another, sometimes from volume to volume -- though all of these, it must be said, are the fault of the author and not his editors, as so I suppose we must call them.  There's much that is boring, a considerable part that is devoted to subjects and personal relationships of no great interest, I should think, to even the man's biographers.  That said, there is still much to delight the more casual reader willing to browse around.  This last volume being particularly rich in Twain's reading of the newspapers and his ongoing amusement at the sometimes ridiculous exploits of then President Theodore Roosevelt.  There's a brief and very funny three day stretch describing  the "overgrown boy" from the White House rather haplessly hunting bear in Louisiana.  Twain side very much with the bear.  Finally he suggests that the President's trophy was just as likely a cow, considering the unreliability of the witnesses and the newspapers reporting the event.

A perfectly good book might have been made -- and might still be made --from just Twain's reading of the newspapers.  DeVoto did something very like in his books on Twain, after all: Mark Twain's America, Mark Twain in Eruption, etc.

Now that the last volume of this new edition is out, it seems safe to conclude that no matter what the old man intended when he took the project up of dictating his autobiography, what he ended up with was little more that a barn full of talk, baled and stacked and left, at last, to moulder.  It seems clear now that what he was doing was neither writing nor even dictating a book, but passing the time until Halley's Comet came back.  (He famously said that having been born when it first appeared in 1835, he expected to go out with it when it returned in 1910, and he did.)  It does no good to pretend that all of this  talking amounted to an autobiography at all, but that doesn't mean that the common reader has any reason to regret the Mark Twain Project's effort to see it all in print and available.  Scholars will no doubt benefit from the effort, but so will anyone willing to treat the result less like a book -- which it simply isn't -- and more like an opportunity to access material otherwise unavailable for generations heretofore.  If then the autobiography is a failure, so be it.  Twain failed to shape the material into anything much, and his latest editors can't imagine that they have produced anything more than a definitive text from which, presumably books might yet be made, or remade.  Whatever these three huge volumes actually are, and however few the readers they are likely to find, at least they exist.

If the whole thing has proved hardly worth the wait, at least the freight's been paid, and I for one am grateful to have the result, even if I can't imagine we'll be selling any of the damned things come Christmas this year.

Twain Project

Well now, here it is at last. Part of it, anyway, the first part of three. The official hoopla started a couple of months ago, with magazine covers and the like, but for those of us in the book business, this thing has been coming on for a very long time indeed. Looks like it won't be complete anytime soon, either.

We decided to mark the occasion, both of the centenary of the death of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, and the publication of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume One, with a reading. Come November 16th, a couple of the usual suspects and myself will be reading from The Diaries of Adam and Eve: Translated by Mark Twain, as well as other material, some of it from this new book. Should be a grand affair, on a modest scale, but just grand, none the less.

I only saw the new book for the first time at the PNBA convention in Portland, earlier this month. I'd anticipated something very like the book as is: big, impressively, not to say exhaustively annotated, well made, if almost impossibly clumsy to handle. At 10.3 x 7.4 x 2.6 inches, and weighing in at four pounds, the thing looks and feels like the kind of scholarly job typical of both the University of California Press, and The Mark Twain Project, admirable academic institutions, the pair of 'em. By such lights, this volume must represent not only years, if not decades of painstaking scholarship, by many hands, but also something of an editorial triumph, getting the thing down to just this first massive volume. One shudders to think what the eventual set of three will require by way of careful engineering, just to move it all from shelf to desk without aid of pulleys, levers and hired labor. Nonetheless, the price, at only $34.95, comes as a pleasant shock.

I was determined to read the thing without actually buying a copy, and failing that, without lugging the thing around for more than a day or two, but that resolution has already collapsed. I could justify the purchase by again mentioning the quite reasonable price, and the need to read up in preparation for our November event, but truth be told, I must always have known that I would sooner rather than later feel the need to own a copy. If the format has proved to be everything I dread in academic publishing, the book, once complete, promises still to be everything that Twain intended. The versions I've read already suffered mightily from fussing; first by Twain's family, then his estate, and his posthumous editors, etc., all of whom were really only following something like the author's own instructions, one way and another. It was, after all, Twain himself who instructed that the book be put in a drawer and kept there for one hundred years after his death. Still feel sure this book will prove to be worth the wait, if not the weight.

Those who've worked up the present edition have every reason to be proud of the restoration they've done. Considering both the state in which the editors found the original material, and what has been made of it heretofore, they've done a remarkable job. Such a reconstruction no doubt requires explanation, textual support and the like, and believe me, it's all here. In other words, the whole intellectual apparatus that, in this first volume at least, represents a full two thirds of the actual book, is necessary, and even has a certain fascination of it's own. This edition, clearly, is a story unto itself. Now if, as Twain famously advised a young writer, " Anybody can have ideas--the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph" then this book may well represent the limitations of academic style as well as the best of contemporary critical understanding of the subject. There is no way to avoid the obvious drawbacks of unwrapping all this matter just to get at the Twain in the middle. This is not a genial publication. My hope had been that the editors might follow the example of Michael Holroyd's multi volume biography of G. B. Shaw, and put all the additional matter; notes and abstracts, and bibliographic materials and the rest, into a separate and concluding volume, and thus allow for readers to trust them unless and until moved by curiosity or necessity to consult that separate volume. (As a bookseller, I can vouch for a high percentage of the readers of Holroyd's masterly biography having purchased that last volume, even if it was never much read thereafter, except as it was meant to be, as a key to what came before. I used it just that way myself.) Had the editors of the Twain done such a thing, they might also have spared all of us the need to carry seven hundred odd pages around in order to read just the two hundred and fifty or so actually written by Twain. My hope now is that the editors of Twain, presumably after the third and final volume is printed, will someday offer the full text of the autobiography in an edition abridged of much if not most of the surrounding stuff, the idea being to allow for readers less interested in reading around and into the book and more interested in just reading the damned thing itself.

But until that does or does not happen, we have the book we get. Bellyaching aside, I am most glad to have it. If I can't bring myself to carry it in my bag each day, I've already found that it will not take me more than a day or two to read what I most want of it right here in my own house, where I can trust the table on which I've propped it. And yes, I'm already reading into some of the accompanying matter. Just tonight, I've been reading nothing but. I feel a bit like the baby who ignores the present to play with the box and the tissue it came in. Still, I think I might choose to prolong this much anticipated experience even if all I had was the autobiography itself. I've already had recourse, twice, since starting this book, to the edition of Twain's letters I already own.

My only real impatience at this point is with the sluggardly publication schedule for the rest of this project. I'm sure, by academic standards, the next two volumes are just racing to the bookstores. As a reader though, the idea that I won't see this thing through for years yet is maddening. I should, I suppose, be grateful for what I've got, and I am, truly.

I just wish I had more... and less, of course.