Book review: Autobiography of Mark Twain, volume one

An episode recounted in this glorious book concerns the author's gullibility as an investor. Having worked as a printer in his youth (as well as a steamboat pilot, gold prospector and much else), for years the successful writer pumped thousands of dollars into a new machine for typesetting. It never quite took off, and he never saw a penny.

Your investment in this book will be better rewarded, though the type, so minuscule it is sometimes scarcely readable, may cripple your eyesight. Ironically it is Twain himself who is indirectly to blame.

For decades he toyed with the idea of an autobiography, finally hitting on a kind of free-form dictation method: "Start at no particular time in your life, wander at your free will all over your life, talk only about the thing that interests you for the moment, drop it the instant the interest threatens to pale."

On top of that he had an elaborate scheme for staggered release, so that the full text would only be published this year, the 100th anniversary of his death. The result is a book of some 400,000 words, in which the false starts and the notes and index take up two-thirds of the text.

The reason for Twain's ban on immediate publication has nothing to do with embarrassing personal revelations. "Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man," he says, "the biography of the man himself cannot be written." In fact he explicitly warned against expectations of Rousseauesque confessions, and their absence is a relief.

The haphazard chronology and eye-straining type make this an ideal book for lucky dipping, and everywhere there are arresting passages in which the author's unrelenting candour shines through. If ever there was a man with a nose for bullshit it was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, alias Mark Twain.

He grew up in Hannibal, a small Southern town on the Mississippi. Though not rich, his father owned land and slaves but sold them and hired his workers instead. A girl of 15 got $12 a year plus "two linsey-wolsey frocks and a pair of stogy shoes - cost, a modification of nothing." As a boy he had some black playmates but there are no smarmy retrospective feelings: "We were in effect comrades. I say in effect as a modification. We were comrades but not comrades."

The closest he comes to emotion is at the death of a daughter, Susy, and his lengthy extracts from her youthful and not especially perceptive biography of her father can be wearisome.Otherwise the tone is crisp, at times scandalously so, but often it is the shock of the unmediated truth that is so funny: "Cripple him, but leave the rest to his mother," he says after getting caught up in the mid-19th century fashion for duelling and vowing to aim for the legs.

Those seeking contemporary echoes will not have far to look. No-one could be more of a patriot - in a sense Mark Twain is America - and he delights in mockery of the Germans, the Italians and especially the English. On their music: "They love it with a breadth and looseness of taste not known elsewhere but in heaven..." On their comedians and performers: "London has a warm big heart, and there is room in it for all the misappreciated refuse of creation."

At the same time nationalistic swagger in the USA is a standing target: of newspaper reports on the killing of 600 Moro tribesmen by American troops in the Philippines, he said: "The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like the sun in its zenith: 'Death List is now 900.'"

Nothing attracted his satire more than religion, and its combination with cash produces some riotous stuff. Of a young Rockefeller who runs a Bible class, he says: "Satan, twaddling sentimental sillinesses to a Sunday school, could be no burlesque on John D Rockefeller." The still prevailing American creed of mawkish faith coupled with licensed greed and sincerity la Jean-Jacques is dynamited in a phrase.

The articles and lectures Twain threw in between bouts of dictation are also preserved intact. Not that we regret it: the speeches especially make you yearn for a viva voce CD of this prodigiously gifted stand-up with a vocabulary as luxurious as that of Dickens' novels. I would commend America's funniest writer for his irony too but then we Europeans know that Americans have no sense of that. However, as the editors settle down to volumes two and three I hope somebody is at work on a popular, non-academic edition of volume one in non-crabby print. Presentationally at least, this version horribly constricts its author's big bold soul.