In the United States, they have Rush Limbaugh and people recently reported saying they own guns for armed resistance to “socialism”… and they have American scholarship. Which is almost too wonderful. Vastly endowed universities are set in small prairies of lawn above which, in superb libraries, great and little things are minutely researched for editions of and studies in.
Such is the Autobiography of Mark Twain produced by six contributing editors serving Harriet Elinor Smith and eleven directors of the Mark Twain Project of the University of California, Berkeley. There are 736 pages, of Volume 1, and it weighs 2.5 kilos on the bathroom scales. The text proper occupies 466 pages, explanatory notes take 182, appendices fill 60. The cover shows a photo of the author of Tom Sawyer, on all known evidence, a cheery sort of cove, caught in the half dark, looking up and out with an expression of concentrated malevolence. This could very well be Dr Moriarty.
The text is to be read throughout on the pattern of following p397 with a finger securely lodged at p609. This is an explanatory note, useful or otherwise as the case may be. On p398 we read an anecdote told by Edward Loomis, Clemens’ nephew by marriage, a good one, very Hannibal, Missouri, mid-19th century, concerning an alcoholically reformed sexton who, after nine days abstinence, finds himself beyond town limits, in a bar, on New Year’s Eve. His friend murmurs succinctly: “Do you realise we are outside the diocese?”
On p610 comes a linked explanatory note: “Edward Eugene Loomis (1864-1937) married Julia Langdon (1871-1948)” and was “by 1874 serving as superintendent responsible for overseeing the bituminous coal and lumber interests of the Erie Railroad Company… became manager of the anthracite coal properties of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad company… and in 1902 was elected first vice-president, member of the board of managers, and director and officer of all the railroad company’s subsidiary corporations.” No statement goes unexplained, filled out and, where necessary, corrected. It’s that sort of book.
It is, of course, the fault of Samuel Langhorne Clemens aka Mark Twain (1835-1910). I feel American scholarship coming on. He kept starting on an autobiography and kept getting bored, distracted, doing something else and kept stopping. He then, in 1906, settled to consistent dictation. Publicity has proclaimed this the first appearance of the Autobiography, a claim needing its own explanatory note. Most of it has been available since the 1950s. This is only the first uncensored version, which a university English scholar assures me adds nothing very valuable or thrillingly off-colour. Never mind. The button down Morlocks toiling at the Twain-face have assembled the false starts, one false start distinguished from another with Clemens’ own amusing headings.
Continuous narrative begins at p250 in helpful bold type – Now comes the New York dictation, beginning January 9 1906 – also his warning that “I shall scatter through this Autobiography newspaper clippings without end.” He does.
One point about Clemens/Twain is that he was a rough and ready, unofficial person, typesetter, small town paper editor who had knocked about life in no very co-ordinated way and wouldn’t have recognised a Project if it had offered him a schooner of beer in a silver rush Nevada bar. The other is that he was a sane, generous minded, sardonic fellow as remote from contemporary Palin/Limbaugh/Tucson derangement as very well could be. He detested slavery and supported Booker T Washington’s liberating Tuskegee black educational institute. (You simply have to make a mental adjustment across a hundred years on reading of “George, our colored butler”). Anti-slavery made him that radical thing, a Republican. But he happily describes and (say the explanatory notes, exaggerates) the near excommunication of a Congregational minister who votes against a corrupt Republican presidential candidate: “Blaine, Blaine, James G Blaine / The continental liar from the state of Maine.” Yet he is less political than a man among men and women of all sorts. Which is why Roughing It and Huckleberry Finn have so much charm for us.
Naturally we are interested to learn that “Huckleberry Finn was Tom Blankenship” and that “Tom’s father was at one time the town drunkard, an exceedingly well defined and unofficial office of those days.” Tom himself “was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had… he was tranquilly and continuously happy, and was envied by all the rest of us.”
Sadly, we want to know what happened to the real Huck. Clemens, dictating, obliges. “I heard four years ago, that he was Justice of the Peace in a remote village in Montana.” Suddenly the Project workforce cease from micro-gleaning to melancholy truth.
“Blankenship who remained in Hannibal, was arrested repeatedly for stealing food. No evidence has been found that he went to Montana. In 1889, Clemens was informed of his death from cholera, and confirmed it when visiting Hannibal in 1902.” They even supply press clippings about thefts and death. Scholarship is remorseless. Clemens, like Twain, had a sunny side to keep up.
Fortunately there is an unsunny Clemens loose among the crooks and humbugs of the Gilded Age. So unsunny it takes you back to that cover photograph: “Satan twaddling sentimental silliness to a Sunday school could be no burlesque upon John D Rockefeller.”
“John McCall has the right and true Rockefeller whang. He snivels owlishly along and is evidently as happy as and as well satisfied with himself as if there wasn’t a stain on his name.” Elisha P Bliss of the American Publishing Corporation had talked Clemens into a royalty of 7.5 per cent for Roughing It and is memorialised: “In a small, mean, peanut stand fashion, he was sharp and shrewd.”
He is, too, “a tall, lean, skinny, yellow, toothless, bald-headed professional liar and scoundrel… a Yankee of the Yankees… When he was after dollars, he showed the intense earnestness and eagerness of a circular saw.” No explanatory note can spoil that.
