Tired Volcano

MARK TWAIN IN ERUPTION--Edited by Bernard DeVoto--Harper ($3.75).

When Albert Bigelow Paine finished editing his fat, two-volume Autobiography of Mark Twain, he found that he had more than half of Mark's original material left over. To the Mark Twain Estate and Harper & Brothers this seemed a conspicuous waste. So they hired Critic Bernard DeVoto (Mark Twain's America) to see what he could do with the remainder. He chopped, whittled and selected for about two years, occasionally taking time out to read choice excerpts (under the promise of strict secrecy) to breathless Harvard undergraduates. This week, after tossing out "trivialities, irrelevancies," as well as "thousands of commas and dashes," and toning down some of the more excoriating comments to a mere trickle of verbal lava, Critic DeVoto published the balance of Twain's autobiography as Mark Twain in Eruption.

The title is a little misleading. As an intellectual volcano, the Mark Twain of this book is tired and nearing extinction. Some of the material was dictated circa 1898, but most of it after 1906. Twain had previously written his great books (the first half of Life on the Mississippi, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn). He had met all the right people, shaken all the right hands. He was utterly lonely. For most of his life Twain remained, as he still is, the last major U. S. literary voice.

Of course, he knew Louisiana-born George Washington Cable, who was slowly decomposing in New England. William Dean Howells, who was smugly doing the same in New York. He knew also Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who "had very nearly as extensive an appreciation of himself and his gifts as had the late Edmund Clarence Stedman, who believed that the sun merely rose to admire his poetry and was so reluctant to set at the end of the day . . . that it lingered and lingered and . . . was never able to keep correct time during his stay in the earth." But the mind craves its equals. Twain met only one. One day an unknown young man named Rudyard Kipling trudged up to the Twain farm and sat down. They talked. Twain said afterwards: "[Kipling] knows all that can be known, and I know the rest."

The sections which DeVoto has edited include Twain's onslaughts on Roosevelt I, his profoundly worried comments on the state of the nation, boyhood reminiscences (which seem curiously out of place), vitriolic sketches of famous people. Wrote Twain of Roosevelt I: "Mr. Roosevelt has done what he could to destroy the industries of the country, and they all stand now in a half-wrecked condition and waiting in an ague to see what he will do next. . . . Mr. Roosevelt is the most formidable disaster that has befallen the country since the Civil War--but the vast mass of the nation loves him. . . ."

Less chucklesome are Twain's forebodings about the inevitable collapse of U. S. democracy into monarchy (today, says DeVoto, Twain would say dictatorship). "Rome's liberties were not auctioned off in a day, but were bought slowly, gradually, furtively, little by little; first with a little corn and oil for the exceedingly poor and wretched, later with corn and oil for voters who were not quite so poor. . . ."

Most of the book is given over to the old man's memories. He snarls with moral indignation when he thinks of Bret Harte's treatment of his wife, Mrs. Aldrich's treatment of her guests. He scolds about the recurrent miseries of official banquets. "It is an hour and a half of nerve-wrecking clamor, of intolerable clattering and clashing of knives and forks and plates, of shrieking and shouting commonplaces at one's elbow-mates . . . and when there is a band--and there usually is--the pandemonium is complete, and there is nothing to approach it but hell on a Sunday night." He begins to remember imagined slights. He had met the young Boer War correspondent, Winston Churchill, could not get a word in edgewise. Did you have a good time? somebody asked him. Said Twain glumly: "I have had a smoke."

He recalled a dinner where Novelist Anthony Trollope was host, publicity-wise Poet Joaquin Miller was guest of honor. Twain was "an obliterated guest." Miller was affecting "the picturesque and untamed costume of the wild Sierras ... to the charmed astonishment of conventional London ... He and Trollope talked all the time and both at the same time. . . ." But then, it suddenly seems scarcely important: "It was long ago, long ago--and not even an echo of that turbulence was left in this room. . . . Trollope is dead. . . . Joaquin Miller is white-headed and mute and quiet in his dear mountains."

By April 1910 Twain was dead too. Four months before, he sat near his daughter Jean's dead body, wrote: "Would I bring her back to life if I could do it? I would not. ... I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood."

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