For the last 40 years of his life, Mark Twain worked at the monumental task of recounting his monumental life. But he never got too far. Then, in 1904, it came to him. The perfect method:
"Start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life. . . . It is the first time in history that the right plan has been hit upon."
No one had ever written an autobiography like that before - he proudly calls it "a complete and purposed jumble" - and he knew it. At the end of his writing life, Twain, the great self-reinventor, invented one more brand-new form: something we know today as stream-of-consciousness writing, familiar throughout the century since, in the work of James Joyce, Bob Dylan, and many in between.
Amazingly, the Autobiography of Mark Twain, completed and arranged as he intended it, has never been published. Books by that name, yes - but expurgated, shortened, rearranged by editors who thought they knew better. He forbade full publication until 100 years after his death, which is this year.
In November, after six years of labor by a team of experts on four very full file cabinet drawers of papers and files, the 760-page first volume of the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain will be published by the University of California Press. Within five years, two more volumes will appear, and the entire work, with variants and notes, will be available online. Though about 90 percent of the first volume has seen the light here and there, more than half of the entire thing is previously unpublished.
In Volume 1, a reminiscence of 1853-54 reads: "By and by I went to Philadelphia and worked there some months as a 'sub' on the Inquirer . . . ." Highlights in coming volumes include his trip to Oxford University for an honorary degree, thoughts on palm-reading, and (originally suppressed) diatribes against religion.
It's the never-seen last major work of perhaps our most famous writer, a platinum opportunity to accompany his mind as it takes the grand tour, the ultimate interior monologue.
Robert Hirst, general editor of the Bancroft Library's Mark Twain Papers and Project at Berkeley, says, "The thrill of seeing the entire work, as he intended it to be, is extraordinary." Harriet Elinor Smith, principal editor of Volume 1, says that although she doesn't want to oversell its literary merits, the Autobiography is "rewarding, something really different."
Twain tells of his boyhood, roasts contemporaries, and inveighs at human ills. Previously unprinted, for example, is this uncompromising March 30, 1906, salvo at U.S. politics and capitalism, smacking two presidents and one great moneybags, and savaging our hallowed precepts:
"The McKinleys and the Roosevelts and the multimillionaire disciples of Jay Gould - that man who in his brief life rotted the commercial morals of this nation and left them stinking when he died - have quite completely transformed our people from a nation with pretty high and respectable ideals to just the opposite of that."
Also never published are funny passages, such as this 1903 remembrance of his sickly days as a youth:
"I had begun to die, the family were grouped for the function: they were familiar with it, so was I. I had performed the star part so many times that I knew just what to do at each stage without a rehearsal, although so young; and they - they had played the minor roles so often that they could do it asleep. They often went to sleep when I was dying. At first it used to hurt me, but later I did not mind it, but got some one to joggle them, then went on with my rendition."
No bombshell revelations, no dirty secrets. The big news is that Twain considered the work done, and that he indicated what to leave in, what to leave out, and how to structure it - that is, not to structure it. Let the mind go.
Scholars had thought it was just a big pile of false starts, one more unfinished project by a writer notorious for them. Peter Conn, professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, writes by e-mail, "I suspect that he left more incomplete drafts and fragments than any writer of comparable importance."
Ben Griffin, associate editor of the Mark Twain Papers, calls it "the most complicated and vexing textual situation I've ever heard about." Hirst says, "It was a fascinating puzzle, puzzling beyond belief."
From about 1870 to 1909, Twain worked on a self-project, leaving a trail of fizzles and false starts. From 1906 to 1909, he spent many mornings in bed, dictating to a secretary. A typescript was made, Twain made notes and corrections, and a new typescript was made. More than 2,500 pages exist. After the death on Christmas Eve 1909 of Jean Clemens, his youngest daughter, he stopped. He had less than four months to live.
Almost a century later, Smith and then-editor Lin Salamo shouldered the task of reassembling and resequencing those many unsorted transcripts. The documents with Twain's 1904 brainstorm were already known, but once the materials were reassembled in their proper order and relation, Smith says, she and Salamo were "amazed to realize he had come to a final decision about the project."
(Twain was so excited, he wrote a friend in 1906: "The form of this book is one of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages. . . . It ranks with the steam engine, the printing press & the electric telegraph. I am the only person who has ever found out the right way to build an autobiography." That includes some of the great autobiographers of all time, among them Augustine of Hippo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Casanova. Griffin looked through the history of autobiography and says, "There's no precedent very close to it.")
What was it like to work so closely with the fulminating, overflowing Twain brain? Smith says, simply, "He lives with us," and adds, "It was fascinating to watch him go unfettered from topic to topic, as interest dictated. It's a window into his mind."
It's also full of zingers (English villagers have a rapt, wholehearted love of music, "particularly if it is doleful"); yarns; grand thoughts; reminiscences of boyhood; portraits of Ulysses Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Helen Keller, and other greats of his world; and plenty of funny stuff. "This guy can't go for five minutes without telling a joke," Hirst says. "When you find yourself still laughing at something you've already read dozens of times, that's quality."
Not usually considered a modern writer, Twain never used the term stream of consciousness - more frequently used to describe the work of writers such as Marcel Proust (at work in 1909 on what would become In Search of Lost Time) and writers of the next generation, such as Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner.
But Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of English at Stanford University, says, "In some ways, he was crafting a very modernist form in which stream of consciousness figured prominently, although he never called it that."
Conn cautions that Twain "always had trouble finding a form and finishing much of anything," so the Autobiography might be a way of turning "his weakness into a strength." But he likes the idea that Twain was doing in an autobiography what others were trying to do in fiction: replacing chronology and coherence "with a more impressionistic (and therefore in psychological terms, more real) transcription of what happens in whichever order it happens."
Alan Kitty, a Twain interpreter and impersonator in Princeton, says, "He used to say, 'Accident is the name of the greatest of all inventors.' So if you're writing about a life, how can that be a planned thing? It must be something that simply happens. What better way - especially for Mark Twain - to write an autobiography?"