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 Never Quite Sane in the Night I want to reflect at some length on the ways Samuel Langhorne Clemens thought about and represented his own life. The interest of the task is inseparable from its complexity, for my subject was fixed by a lifelong fascination with his myriad and finally ungraspable self, and with such kindred matters as human nature, the fathomless depths of the human mind, and the challenge of autobiography. The writer’s thoughts never strayed for long from the events of his past. ‘‘Yes,’’ he observed in , ‘‘the truth is, my books are simply autobiographies.’’1 Clemens’s potent autobiographical impulse was the expression of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experience of life. Had those memories been as idyllic as some of the books he wrote about them, Clemens would have written a great deal less. For he wrote not so much to memorialize the past as to transform it; he was preoccupied, that is, not so much with fond memories as with things he could not forget. ‘‘I wonder why we hate the past so,’’ his good friend William Dean Howells once asked him, to which the humorist replied, ‘‘It’s so damned humiliating.’’2 At the very center and focus of what Clemens could not forget was the tormenting image of what he took to be himself, a hopelessly flawed and profoundly guilty man. Remorse harried him relentlessly, not least of all because he was never able to acquiesce comfortably in his autobiographical self-constructions. Even as he felt compelled, and even morally obliged, to tell the truth about himself, Clemens came increasingly to recognize that the subtle lure of evasion was too strong to be resisted. Still, he never doubted that the truth was there, concealed in the massed records of his life, if one only knew how to look for it. This book is an attempt to bring that buried truth to light. If we are what we most frequently and intensely think and feel, then it is Clemens’s distinctive ‘‘self’’ that I would like to draw out. This was certainly the self as he understood it. ‘‘What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words!’’ he wrote. ‘‘His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his   The Author-Cat brain is grinding, and his thoughts, not those other things, are his history. . . . The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night nor day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written’’ (MTA, :). I take the humorist at his word here, though I regard his claims on the score of secrecy as a species of wishful thinking. As we shall see, his need to conceal the ‘‘history’’ of his volcanic interior life competed on nearly equal terms with his need to reveal it. And so great was his fascination with that inner ‘‘life,’’ and so pressing his felt need to express it, that he wrote constantly, even compulsively, about himself . Whatever his intentions, then, the hot truth would out, willy-nilly. Clemens wrote most, of course, about his childhood, the period in his life, we may be sure, when his ceaseless inner fires were first ignited. It was a deeply troubled time. Ron Powers, whose treatment of the early life is aptly entitled Troubled Waters, foregrounds ‘‘the terrors, the griefs, the guilts, the angers and the hallucinating obsessions that strung their path through [Clemens’s] boyhood.’’3 According to Dixon Wecter, young Sam was his mother’s ‘‘problem child, with his illnesses, vivid imaginings, habits of wandering toward the nearest creek or river, and didos that seemed to multiply as improving health increased his power for mischief.’’ Unlike his siblings, the boy ‘‘was fitful, idle, erratic, unpredictable.’’4 His father, John Marshall Clemens, was proud, taciturn, an ambitious but frustrated lawyer and judge who shrank from personal intimacy, and who died suddenly in , when his most famous son was just eleven. Clemens remembered his father as a stern, humorless, emotionally remote figure whose failure as a provider instilled in his son a reflex acquisitiveness and fear of poverty. ‘‘My father and I were always on the most distant terms when I was a boy,’’ he recalled, ‘‘a sort of armed neutrality, so to speak.’’5 Relations with...

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