The Mark Twain Biography Wars

Works Reviewed

Many countries have celebrated this American author by dedicating a stamp to him. Above is a sample from Equatorial Guinea, the Comoros, Romania, the United States, and the USSR (clockwise from lower left). Philatelists from around the world provided the stamps for the collage above. The US Postal Service is planning to release another Mark Twain stamp in its Literary Arts Series in 2011. (Stamps are not pictured true to size.)

These are flush times in Mark Twain scholarship. Ron Powers's fine biography Mark Twain: A Life (2005) was followed by, among other works, the studies by John Bird, Tom Quirk, and Forrest G. Robinson discussed by Neil Schmitz in the summer 2009 issue of Western American Literature. The year 2010, the centennial of the author's death, has seen the four biographies reviewed here, and, as I write, the imminent appearance, in November, of the first volume of Mark Twain's unexpurgated autobiography, issued by the University of California Press.

To adapt the title of Schmitz's essay, "The Long March in Mark Twain Studies," there has been a long march in Mark Twain biography as well as in criticism, and it has taken us through some interesting territory. Disputes over the interpretation of Samuel Clemens's life began while the author still lived and have been repeated with each generation of scholars. The continuing dialog has not only taught us much about Mark Twain, but about the nature of biography.

Mark Twain's biographies differ from those of his great contemporary Henry James because of decisions the two authors made as old men about their literary letters, notebooks, and manuscripts. Pondering this question of literary "remains," who inherits them and what use will be made of them, James wrote a gothic novella, one of his finest, about the rival claims of the artist's privacy and the biographer's curiosity. The Aspern Papers (1888) is, as James's biographer Leon Edel says, "a moral fable for historians and biographers" (338). The climax of the story comes when the narrator, a biographer, is caught by the elderly Juliana Bordereau rifling her desk in search of letters from her long-dead lover, the poet Jeffrey Aspern. The reader cringes with the humiliated biographer, who is transfixed by Juliana's eyes and denounced as a "publishing scoundrel" (286). At the story's conclusion, Juliana's "niece" Miss Tita (who, most readers will conclude, is actually the daughter of Aspern and Juliana) reveals to the biographer that she has burned the great trove of documents "one by one" (301).

James wished no publishing scoundrel sniffing through the details of his private life, and consequently, acting as his own Miss Tita, he burned his private papers. Mark Twain came to quite different conclusions. He regarded his weighty stash of letters, notebooks, and manuscripts as capital that would generate income for his heirs and kept everything. The struggle for control of these manuscripts began during his lifetime.

The fate of the papers has been one of the enduring issues of Mark Twain scholarship and, for a time, had its own gothic qualities: a mansion named Stormfield (which ultimately burns), hysteria and bitter feuds, conspiracies, deeply buried and defended secrets, and sudden, possibly coerced marriages. But the documents survived, migrating from Stormfield to Harvard to the Huntington Library and to a final safe haven at the University of California at Berkeley, where now, well housed and organized, the Mark Twain Papers are accessible to any qualified...