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Greetings! I have done many themed columns in the 52 Book Challenge. The challenge is over and I was victorious. My one regret was that in all those themed months I did not do a month dedicated to a single author. However, we are at an interesting point. Not a point really, more like a spot between two other points. I've reached the end of the first 52 Book Challenge but I can't start the next one until January 2012 which means you won't read it until February. So this point between two places is two fathoms deep. Furthermore, there is only one author worthy enough to be the first author to get his own column. A man who is for more than a century has represented the conscience and poetry of the American soul. I speak, of course, of Samuel L. Clemens. What? Did you think I was going to shout Mark Twain like an 1860s river boat pilot?
Before we begin, I went to a lot of trouble to dig up a poem I wrote for a class years ago. The professor asked us to do a writing prompt. The old cliché all poetry professors give. Write about someone from history you wished you could meet. There were a half dozen Martin Luthor King Jr. poems, five or six people writing about Abraham Lincoln and even a few Princess Diana poems coming to maybe two or three pages each. I don't mean to brag, but this entry was judged to be the best the class:
"Let's go fishing by the river, Mister Clemens.
I bet I can catch one nine feet long.
You'll claim to have caught one four times that.
Let's take a river boat down the Mississippi, Sam.
Maybe you would prefer a raft?
Perhaps we could con my friends into painting a fence.
Those could be some grande ol' times
But ne'er the Twain I shall meet."
And now on with this month's book. Yes, only one book because it was long.
- The Autobiography of Mark Twain:
The interesting facts about this book is that in spends about 100 pages or so with drafts, sketches, chapters and other writings that Clemens was uncertain about and had almost considered worthy of his trash pile. The material is funny. It also sheds light on his thought process. He was willing to throw away things many other writers could spend their entire careers wishing they could achieve. As for the material originally intended to be published, it is surprisingly honest. Most celebrity autobiographies are self aggrandizing. It's true now and it was true in Twain's day. He takes huge, painstaking steps to avoid this. He doesn't cover up some of the horrible things he had done or thought he did. He doesn't shy away from talking about his mistakes or moments where he acted like "a damned fool." There are some chapters that seem a little redundant if one has read "Life on The Mississippi," "Roughin' It" and "Innocents Abroad." However the retellings here are different. Where the versions in previous books were arranged to be humorous there are always elements that just seem too fanciful to be true. Here, for the first time, you can see Clemens- through his dictator- sort out fact from fiction. Then again, sometimes not. There are a lot of moments in this book where I was laughing like a madman. For once, I didn't get odd looks for this because people could see the words Mark Twain on the cover. What surprised me was how much certain chapters made me want to cry- particularly those which include text written by Suzy Clemens, his daughter who died when she was in her twenties. She was dead for decades when the book was being put together. Her father has been dead for over a century now. It's impossible for me to have known her. Between Clemens's stories and her own words I felt like I did. It was almost like these events weren't happening more than a hundred years ago but were happening as I was reading it. This book belongs on your shelf right next to Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Letters from the Earth. The only real problem is the name. Mark Twain wasn't a man. He was just a mask Clemens wore to say what needed to be said when it needed to be said. It should no more be called "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" than a book about Jim Henson should be called "The Life of Kermit the Frog."
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