If Mark Twain had kept a blog...

The Autobiography of Mark Twain is here at last, bringing to mind the revelries of what must've been my senior year of college in Missouri. That's when I took an entire course on Twain and spent most of the time in class trying to impress the boy sitting next to me. He wound up wowing me by acing all the tests despite goofing off throughout every single lecture and skimming the books a few minutes before the tests. What's up, Cory?

Anyway, I have to agree with this review of Twain's autobiography (which I leafed through in a bookstore in Montana and would have purchased except it is about four inches thick and was too big to fit in my suitcase along with all the other books I'd accumulated on the trip), that this book is the equivalent of Twain's personal blog:

"Perhaps "repository" is a better word for what he proceeded to pile up over the course of six manic months in 1906 and left behind, still incomplete, at his death: an unorganized, crumbling, sneeze-provoking mass of letters, diaries, oral transcripts (more than 5,000 pages of them), news clips and other memorabilia. Now to be published in its entirety—this is the first of what will eventually be three volumes—"Autobiography of Mark Twain" aspires to completeness and definitiveness. Yet, as even the publisher admits, it is less a book than a gigantic fragment: the outpourings of a egotist so garrulous that the type sometimes dwindles to a size that will constrict your pupils.

Fortunately, Twain was that rare motormouth whose every word beguiles us. That does not mean that this book does not ramble. On the contrary, rambling is its deliberate style. Except for a few "written" passages of orthodox narrative and other preliminary scraps, it is mostly a collection of stream-of-consciousness monologues, dictated in Twain's New York townhouse between Jan. 9 and March 30, 1906.

He congratulated himself on having hit upon something new in nonfiction, after more than 30 years of stylistic experiments: "a form and a method whereby the past and the present are constantly brought face to face . . . like contact of flint and steel." At the drop of an ash from his cigar, he could segue from memories of "Uncle Dan'l," the original of Nigger Jim in "Huckleberry Finn," to a headline in that morning's newspaper. Oral flexibility transcended the drag of linear narrative and enabled Twain to be selective in his truth-telling. And since saying a thing was, in a strange way, less specific than writing it, he could edge closer to self-exposure—always with the liberating assurance that his comic persona would step in and make light of stories that threatened to become embarrassing or libelous."

Twain even predicted the possibility of the electronic delivery of his divergent collection of thoughts:

By June 1909, Twain realized that he was on the way to producing the longest book ever attempted. He lost heart and left it unfinished—at a half-million words. His stream of consciousness had become an unmanageable flood: He needed to get out of it before he drowned.

One of the first magazine men to pitch for serial rights to the autobiography prophetically advised Twain to insert a clause in his will allowing for full publication in "the year 2000 . . . by electrical method, or by any mode which may then be in use." This edition is a bit late for that deadline. But stylistically speaking, it can only gain by appearing at a moment when the preferred forms of human communication are torrential texting and tweeting. What an irony that our supreme literary craftsman should be seen, in retrospect, as the inventor of the blog!

Something to aspire to. Using wit and wisdom to spin everyday news into literary gold, a la Samuel Clemens:

On the whole, however, this volume is hard to stop reading. Twain's prosody is so sure, and his powers of observation and selection so great, that he can take the most unpromising material—a real-estate deed, a letter from a would-be author—and make it glitter, like dull stone that turns out to be quartz or even diamond. Like Nabokov, he knew how to "caress the details, the divine details.