What Mark Said About Sam

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN (388 pp.)--Edited by Charles Neider--Harper ($6).

"I am not alive. I am dead," wrote Mark Twain. "I wish to keep that fact plainly before the readers. If I were alive I would be writing an autobiography on the normal plan." There was certainly nothing normal and no plan about his autobiography. He began writing it at 42 and believed that it "would live a couple of thousand years." When he died at 74, in 1910, he left about 500,000 words of notes, scraps, reminiscence and recrimination.

Since then three editors have tried to shape this mass into an orderly autobiography. The first version appeared in 1924, and by cutting out all seemingly offensive passages. Editor Albert Bigelow Paine tried to keep Mark Twain's reputation as spotless as his linen. In 1940 Bernard DeVoto published another portion of the manuscript. Now Charles Neider, novelist and essayist, gives what seems closest to the truth of the matter.

He has restored at least a dozen previously deleted episodes, but most of them make the modern reader wonder why the old man should have been prevented for so long from rattling his dead bones. Today Mark Twain's often irreverent notions about God, Bible and his fellow men seem no more fearsome than a day in a college classroom. By the lights of modern determinist psychology, for instance, there is scarcely anything startling in this statement: "Sometimes a man is ... a born scoundrel--like Stanford White*--and upon him the world lavishes censure and dispraise; but he is only obeying the law of his nature. [The human race] did not invent itself, and it had nothing to do with the planning of its weak and foolish character."

Up the Ladder. Sam Clemens was the most erratic of autobiographers. Just about the only event of his life that he set down in conventional autobiographical manner was the beginning: "I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri . . . The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town."

Autobiographer Clemens never used the chronological approach, scribbled or dictated his recollections at random. But Editor Neider has contrived to fit them into a sort of chronological narrative, in which the reader can follow the broad outlines of Mark Twain's hectic life--his days on a newspaper in Hannibal, Mo. (he worked for board and clothes), his career as printer in St. Louis, silver miner in Nevada, correspondent in the Sandwich Islands, river boat pilot on the Mississippi. Clemens fondly speaks of one "charmingly leisurely boat, the slowest on the planet. Upstream she couldn't even beat an island; downstream she was never able to overtake the current."

As Mark Twain became a famous author and an investor in weird business schemes, he also grew crotchety. As Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a garrulous, white-maned provincial literary lion, he strove to climb the social ladder; he was so proud of his scarlet doctor's robes from Oxford that he wore them at his daughter's wedding. But as Mark Twain he sneered at society--and sometimes at himself.

He was often the impresario of his own personality, yet there was a saving cynicism even when he indulged his vanity. He solemnly gives the recipe for preserving the luxuriance of his planter's pompadour--wash it every day in soapy water. Yet through it all can be heard the laughter of Mark at Sam.

The Visible Split. The old magic is there. Despite the period jocosity, Sam's spats of spite, the bad blood over bad debts, and all too many last words with forgotten men who wronged him, Mark Twain's mastery remains. The "boy paradise" of Hannibal lives again. It is fascinating to watch the way in which the old man recalls--with a sort of wonder at his own power--how actual events became transmuted into his creations, so that his fictional folk became more real than his own memory of them. Who has forgotten Huckleberry Finn, but who remembers Tom Blankenship, son of the Hannibal town drunkard, who served as Huck's model?

It is plain to see why so many U.S. writers have gone to Mark Twain's school, or played hookey from it to their loss. Critic T. S. Eliot, in his study of Huckleberry Finn, got Sam dead to rights: "The adult side of him was boyish . . . only the boy in him, that was Huck Finn, was adult." The split runs right through the autobiography and gives it psychological fascination.

Mark Twain, as he himself might have put it, is not half the man he was 50 years ago. The large, devoted public for whom the quirks and crankery of Mark Twain had the fascination of gossip has died off since his death in 1910. Yet few today will dispute Editor Neider's claim for the autobiography that "the greatness is there. You can edit the trivia out, but you cannot edit the greatness in."

*White, topflight American architect (Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station. Washington Arch), was shot and killed in 1906 by Harry K. Thaw, jealous husband of ex-Showgirl Evelyn Nesbit.

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