2. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910—Correspondence.
3. Authors, American—19th century—Correspondence. I. Quirk, Tom, 1946- II. Title.

PS1302.Q56 2004
818’.409—dc22 2004057341

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Introduction

I

During his last decade, Samuel Clemens was writing, or rather dictating, his “Autobiography.” It was a work that only death could complete and would be published, if at all, long after he was gone. Clemens embraced the premise, for it meant that he might speak, so he liked to believe, without reserve or constraint; speak with the bluntness only a dead man might enjoy. In casual yet systematic fashion, he committed himself to narrating his life according to whim and random recollection. The publication in 1906 of a bastardized version of his earlier anthology, Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888), at once incited his fury and provoked a certain introspection and became a subject for one morning’s dictation. Perusing the contents, “Mark Twain” reflected in his “Autobiography” on the fate of nineteenth-century humorists. For the forty years “wherein I have been playing professional humorist before the public,” he observed, a host of literary comedians have come and gone. “Why have they perished? Because they were merely humorists. Humorists of the ‘mere’ sort cannot survive. Humor is only a fragrance, a decoration.” And Why (he implicitly asks) have I lasted? Because (he implicitly answers) I am a moralist, and they were not. “Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach,” he continued, “but it must do both if it would last forever. By forever, I mean thirty years. With all its preaching it is not likely to outlive so long a term as that.”

Already, Twain is indulging in fuzzy math. The fame of the mere humorist is extinguished in a few years, but even the humorous moralist cannot expect more than thirty years. However, Twain himself has just observed that he has been a professional humorist for forty years, a full decade beyond “forever.” But he is not through with his calculations:

I have always preached. That is the reason that I have lasted thirty years. If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor. I should have written the sermon just the same, whether any humor applied for admission or not. I am saying these vain things in this frank way because I am a dead person speaking from the grave. Even I would be too modest to say them in life. I think we never become really and genuinely our entire and honest selves until we are dead—and not then until we have been dead years and years. People ought to start dead and then they would be honest so much earlier.

In order to be absolutely honest with his readers, Clemens imagines speaking from beyond the grave, bound by neither time nor occasion. The presupposition, of course, is that he is being beforehand with a world not yet born, and he adopts the position of a ghost in the narrative machine of his own making. But behind the undertaking there is also the presumption that Mark Twain will be of continuing interest for generations to come, far longer than the thirty (or perhaps forty) years allotted to him or any other humorist.