The idea of a memoir that flowed in a canal-straight course was never going to interest Samuel L Clemens, still less his irrepressible alter ego, Mark Twain. Like the river that became his greatest subject, there would have to be meanderings and digressive tributaries, sudden floods of drama and discarded ox-bows of comic observation; moreover it would, by necessity, just keep rolling along. That The Autobiography of Mark Twain should have been begun while the author was 42, and restarted and abandoned 30 or 40 times over the course of the next three decades, that it should have eventually done away with beginnings and middles and ends and sought to submerge the reader in the unstoppable narrative of what was on the mind of America's favourite writer on any morning he chose to compose it, should therefore come as no surprise. Neither should the fact that a century after the book concluded – with the author's death – much of it still reads as compulsively as if it were being dictated in the next room.
Twain insisted on the 100-year embargo before publication in order to allow himself to speak freely, to tell all – though the idea that he had been tight-lipped in his opinions up to that point would have come as news to both friends and enemies. The embargo was not honoured by his estate's trustees, and various abridged versions of the autobiography have appeared over the years. Never before has the book been published as Twain wished it, though – in all its fragmentary and convoluted glory. It is, too, a valedictory gift that keeps on giving; this is the first volume of three, which will be spaced over much of the next decade. It comes freighted with about 300 pages of impeccable scholarly and biographical notes, an academic undertaking, led by Harriet Elinor Smith of the Mark Twain project, which seems proof of the notion that you can't say one thing without immediately having to qualify it with another. The exhaustive apparatus would no doubt have amused the satirist in Twain and, in the way it constantly demands cross-referencing, frustrated the immediacy-addicted reporter.
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