Advice for Autobiography Writers from the Pen of Mark Twain

In 2011 I found myself thoroughly entertained by The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Volume One), an audiobook narrated by Grover Gardner. This past week I discovered Volume Two of Twain's autobiography and am proceeding through its many discs as I commute to and fro from the office. Gardner is an award-winning audiobook narrator, and Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) is one of the great figures to have appeared on the American literary scene, so it's a good marriage and a more than satisfying diversion.

In Volume Two Twain devotes quite a bit of ink to his older brother Orion (ore-ee-on), firstborn of the seven Clemens children, only three of whom attained adulthood. Orion was the first and only Secretary of the Nevada Territory, his highest achievement after which he attempted and failed at a variety of other endeavors, ultimately being supported by his brother.

As backstory I should note that when Mark Twain wrote his autobiography he actually dictated it. Also, he insisted that it not be published till 100 years after his death so that he could be absolutely honest with hurting anyone's feelings. Many of the stories about Orion are less than flattering, but his brother was long gone by the time the 21st century rolled around. Twain himself passed away in 1910, allowing this work to finally be released to the public.

What follows is some advice he gave to his brother with regards to writing an autobiography.

About 25 years ago, along there somewhere, I suggested to Orion that he write an autobiography. I asked him to try to write the straight truth in it, that he refrain from exhibiting himself in creditable attitudes exclusively and to honorably set down all the incidents of his life which he had found interesting to him, including those which were burned into his memory because he was ashamed of them.

I said that this had never been done, that if he could do it his autobiography would be a most valuable piece of literature. I said I was offering a job which i could not duplicate in my own case but I would cherish the hope that he might succeed with it. I recognize now that I was trying to saddle upon him an impossibility. I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months. I have thought of fifteen-hundred or two thousand incidents in my life of which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I would be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.

Orion wrote his autobiography and sent to me, but great was my disappointment, and vexation, too. In it he was constantly making a hero of himself exactly as I should have done and am doing now. And he was constantly forgetting to put in the episodes which placed him in an unheroic light.

I knew several incidents of his life which were distinctly and painfully unheroic, but when I came across them in his autobiography they had changed color. They had turned themselves inside out and were things to be intemperately proud of. In my dissatisfaction I destroyed a considerable part of that autobiography...

* * * *

A few reminders about Friday happenings in the Northland.

There's an art opening and reception for Scott Murphy at The Red Herring tonight from 6:00-9:00 p.m. The exhibition will feature works both new and older. If you can't make it to the opening you'll want to go out of your way to catch Murphy's paintings some evening after work.

Love Your Local Artist takes place at the Superior Public Library beginning at 5:30 p.m. A great "first stop" after work, unless you wish to run home and change into your evening attire first. This is the fifth year for this event.


Ellen Sandbeck's Bravissimo Kickstarter Party is from 4:00 - 8:00 p.m. at 2532 East Fourth Street, Duluth.

Opening reception for Ryan Tischer's new photography show, Beyond Light, will be from 6:00-9:00 at the Washington Gallery.

Open Mic Poetry at Pineapple Arts from 7:00-9:00 p.m.

For music, you can catch the Jane Gang at the Keyport (Voted #1 by the Reader readers) at 5:00 p.m. tonight, and the Fractals at 8:00 at the Clyde. For info on other bands, find a Transistor and/or Reader.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

“Get your facts first, then you can distort them as you please.” ~Mark Twain

I am currently on disc four of The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Part One, as read by Grover Gardner, who has narrated so many hours of literature in my virtual presence that he is becoming a very good friend. This audio book is 25 hours on 20 discs, and it's a most stimulating read.

The first two-and-a-half hours is all introduction, which includes a lengthy and detailed discussion of how the manuscript came to be. Countless caretakers of the manuscripts were involved in preserving Mr. Twain's writing. Many duplicates of various sections are also in existence with words struck out or portions edited in one place but not another. Systems were required for analyzing dates and times portions were produced and determining which version should supercede. The publication begins by identifying all who have been involved in sorting these strands out and assembling them properly over the past 100 years, and thanking them.

Now the notion of publishing this voluminous work 100 years after his death was not the marketing idea of a modern publisher. Quite the contrary. It was Twain's own idea, and he details it in this introduction to the story of his life.

Mark Twain had an unusually interesting life and he wanted to tell about it. But he did not know exactly how to do it. Begin with his birth and take the chronological approach? One could precede that and talk about ancestors and their influence. And should one bang it out on a typewriter? And what about all the stories and insights and feelings and beliefs that you wanted to share that you feel you can't because you will hurt other people?

This last was a thorny item for Twain. And he literally mulled it over for years, at one point suggesting that those stories be told between-the-lines, knowing they would still be painful to others when deciphered. No, the best way would be to give strict instructions that the manuscript be left unpublished till 100 years after his death, at which time he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent."

The other matter of how was resolved when he hit upon the idea of dictating his life story. And even in this form the guy was an original. It would not be a story told in any particular order. Rather, whatever interested him at the moment is what he would talk about.

The hundred years has passed and the book is now a reality, capturing all the wit and humor and acerbic commentary one might expect from the pen, or in this case tongue, of Twain. Here's one example. A reviewer wrote with such over-the-top praise for something he had written that Twain confronted him thus. "Oh come on, in the Twain household they don't lather it on with a knife, they use a trowel."

In the intro when Twain was wrestling with the problems of candidly telling his story, I thought about today's world where so much of what people think and feel is posted on blogs and on Facebook and who we are encountering when we see one another so apparently transparently displayed. What kinds of things would be written and posted if the only readers were people who lived 100 years from now, after we're dead and gone? How many people on Facebook are portraying themselves as they are, and how many have been crafting an identity that is far different from who they really are?

As for the Autobiography, here's a good summation of the book from a review by Publisher's Weekly:
Eschewing chronology and organization, Twain simply meanders from observation to anecdote and between past and present. There are gorgeous reminiscences from his youth of landscapes, rural idylls, and Tom Sawyeresque japes; acid-etched profiles of friends and enemies, from his "fiendish" Florentine landlady to the fatuous and "grotesque" Rockefellers; a searing polemic on a 1906 American massacre of Filipino insurgents; a hilarious screed against a hapless editor who dared tweak his prose; and countless tales of the author's own bamboozlement, unto bankruptcy, by publishers, business partners, doctors, miscellaneous moochers; he was even outsmarted by a wild turkey. Laced with Twain's unique blend of humor and vitriol, the haphazard narrative is engrossing, hugely funny, and deeply revealing of its author's mind. His is a world where every piety conceals fraud and every arcadia a trace of violence; he relishes the human comedy and reveres true nobility, yet as he tolls the bell for friends and family--most tenderly in an elegy for his daughter Susy, who died in her early 20s of meningitis--he feels that life is a pointless charade. Twain's memoirs are a pointillist masterpiece from which his vision of America--half paradise, half swindle--emerges with indelible force.

In the meantime, have a great new week.

Ben Franklin's 13 Virtues

This week I began listening to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin during my morning commute and it is a remarkably entertaining and insightful little book. Already I am desirous to own it even though only partially through. It seems like having a copy one can mark up and re-visit would be useful. Then again, it may just be a certain kind of covetousness on my part since the whole of it can be found online and re-visited any time one wished.

His descriptions of early life in the American colonies, and his various tactics and motivations for bettering himself would be useful for any of us. For example, he early decided (in his teens I believe) to avoid saying words like "obviously" and "most assuredly" because it immediately created a barrier between you and others who perceive you as an arrogant "know it all" and puts them in an adversarial position to you. The better approach is to ease into your views and hold them tentatively so they can be considered and received rather than resisted because we attempted to slam them home.

Kind reader, do forgive me for having not learned this wise counsel while in my younger years because it is, sadly, a lesson I would have done well to apply. Obviously, I have most assuredly been an idiot on many occasions where I surmised myself otherwise. Hopefully, it is not too late for me. old dog that I am. And may you learn from Mr. Franklin's counsel here rather than my example.

There were many other points at which I wished to pull my car over and scribble notes. Happily I have found Franklin's autobiography on a website which can be bookmarked and returned to now and then.

Franklin made deliberate attempts at living a virtuous life, and is honest about the challenges this presented him. Yet he applied himself diligently to the task. I thought this section to be especially interesting when I listened to it on the way home tonight.

It was about this time I conceiv'd the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection. I wish'd to live without committing any fault at any time; I would conquer all that either natural inclination, custom, or company might lead me into. As I knew, or thought I knew, what was right and wrong, I did not see why I might not always do the one and avoid the other. But I soon found I had undertaken a task of more difficulty than I bad imagined. While my care was employ'd in guarding against one fault, I was often surprised by another; habit took the advantage of inattention; inclination was sometimes too strong for reason. I concluded, at length, that the mere speculative conviction that it was our interest to be completely virtuous, was not sufficient to prevent our slipping; and that the contrary habits must be broken, and good ones acquired and established, before we can have any dependence on a steady, uniform rectitude of conduct. For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.

In the various enumerations of the moral virtues I had met with in my reading, I found the catalogue more or less numerous, as different writers included more or fewer ideas under the same name. Temperance, for example, was by some confined to eating and drinking, while by others it was extended to mean the moderating every other pleasure, appetite, inclination, or passion, bodily or mental, even to our avarice and ambition. I propos'd to myself, for the sake of clearness, to use rather more names, with fewer ideas annex'd to each, than a few names with more ideas; and I included under thirteen names of virtues all that at that time occurr'd to me as necessary or desirable, and annexed to each a short precept, which fully express'd the extent I gave to its meaning.

These names of virtues, with their precepts, were

1. TEMPERANCE. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation.

2. SILENCE. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation.

3. ORDER. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time.

4. RESOLUTION. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve.
5. FRUGALITY. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing.

6. INDUSTRY. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions.

7. SINCERITY. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly.

8. JUSTICE. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty.

9. MODERATION. Avoid extreams; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve.

10. CLEANLINESS. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation.

11. TRANQUILLITY. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable.

12. CHASTITY. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dulness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation.

13. HUMILITY. Imitate Jesus and Socrates.

My intention being to acquire the habitude of all these virtues, I judg'd it would be well not to distract my attention by attempting the whole at once, but to fix it on one of them at a time; and, when I should be master of that, then to proceed to another, and so on, till I should have gone thro' the thirteen; and, as the previous acquisition of some might facilitate the acquisition of certain others, I arrang'd them with that view, as they stand above. Temperance first, as it tends to procure that coolness and clearness of head, which is so necessary where constant vigilance was to be kept up, and guard maintained against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits, and the force of perpetual temptations. This being acquir'd and establish'd, Silence would be more easy; and my desire being to gain knowledge at the same time that I improv'd in virtue, and considering that in conversation it was obtain'd rather by the use of the ears than of the tongue, and therefore wishing to break a habit I was getting into of prattling, punning, and joking, which only made me acceptable to trifling company, I gave Silence the second place. This and the next, Order, I expected would allow me more time for attending to my project and my studies. Resolution, once become habitual, would keep me firm in my endeavors to obtain all the subsequent virtues; Frugality and Industry freeing me from my remaining debt, and producing affluence and independence, would make more easy the practice of Sincerity and Justice, etc., etc. Conceiving then, that, agreeably to the advice of Pythagoras in his Golden Verses, daily examination would be necessary, I contrived the following method for conducting that examination....

Well, if your interest has been peaked, that's my aim here. Much good can probably come from ruminating on these precepts.

Q

"Imagine what a harmonious world it could be if every single person, both young and old shared a little of what he is good at doing." ~Quincy Jones

79 Grammy nominations, 27 Grammys… yet still not entirely a household name. What’s with that?

When Michael Jackson’s Thriller hit the scene, it might have been Jackson’s name on the marquee, but without doubt Quincy Jones, his producer/arranger, helped put him there. In fact, his whole career has been one of cheerfully adjusting the spotlights that shone on other performers, to put them in their best light.

We all remember the charity performance of superstars assembled for “We Are The World”, but few recall that it was Quincy Jones who produced and arranged the assemblage of superegos, and made it work. Who among us does not recall the shocking In Cold Blood, yet few know that Jones produced the score that set the tone.

Q, The Autobiography of Quincy Jones, is an anecdotally rich portrait of a creative genius and good natured soul who made good in America against heavy odds. If you want an inside look at the black experience mid-century, read Q. If you want an ringside seat as the jazz scene came to full flower, read Q. If you want up close and personal stories about what it takes to rise above circumstances and achieve success beyond one's dreams, this book reveals that, too.

I only have one Frank Sinatra CD, the Quincy Jones produced L.A. Is My Lady. The arrangements are stellar, making it possible for the elder statesman crooner to shine. Jones is the catalyst, setting the stage, the mood, the lights, never drawing attention to himself but serving to make every moment count. I was listening to it last as I tried my hand at painting the pictures of Jones here.

Here’s a little serendipitous note: the night before I was watching Rear Window, the Hitchcock thriller starring Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. Few know that it was Princess Grace (Kelly) who introduced Quincy Jones to Frank Sinatra in 1958 in Monaco.

In the fifties Jones played with nearly all the greats, from Lionel Hampton to Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Ray Charles. The second half of that serendipitous note is that I am currently watching Ray, the biographic overview of one amazing musician, and in an early scene the two cross paths in Seattle.

It’s a brief encounter here in the film, but in the book , Jones makes it out to be a significant moment for him. His desire is to make music, but to some extent he’s unsure of his prospects. Suddenly, this blind kid (and Ray was just a kid, not even 16) shows up in town, having crossed the country from Alabama, knowing no one, yet establishing himself in a foreign community. At this Quincy Jones wondered what was holding him back.

Quincy Jones has been part of our lives in ways we didn't even know. Today, let’s give a big hand to da man. Thank you, Quincy Jones, wherever you are, for your perpetual optimism and style.

Clapton Autobiography Proves To Be A Worthy Read

"I am, and always will be, a blues guitarist." ~Eric Clapton

It’s Dylan Days in the Northland, but since I just finished reading Eric Clapton’s autobiography I can’t help but address it one more time.

First, a few details. I listened to the audio version, which was abridged. It was very good and covered his life with ample detail to be satisfying. According to some reviews the unabridged version has dry spots. Perhaps he felt an obligation to produce a lengthier tome, as opposed to a slimmer volume, because he was paid $7 million dollars to write it and did not wish to shortchange his sponsors.

The book comes across as a remarkably candid personal account of his life. He doesn’t flinch from things that put Eric Clapton in a poor light. It's real, tragic at times, actually quite powerful. It's not something you pick up for the juicy gossipy bits. It's a real account of one man's struggle to achieve manhood. This is, in fact, the single theme throughout: Clapton’s struggle to become a mensch. Despite great personal pain, escapist behavior and setbacks, he came through the dark valley and up the other side to make a contributions beyond his own self-promotion.

Being one of the luminaries of the rock scene this past four decades, it’s not surprising that Clapton’s career bisected many other greats of the era and he gives much praise to these with whom he had the privilege of performing. As someone quite talented, his assessments carry a measure of weight.

If you do a Google search you’ll quite a few reviews of this book, and I would encourage you to check them out. I like Greg Kot's review of October 14, 2007 which opens like this:

“Clapton is God,” the graffiti in London once said. But Eric Clapton knew better. He wasn’t God. He was struggling mightily to be a man, and by his own admission didn’t quite become one until he was well into his sixth decade.

“Clapton: The Autobiography” (Broadway Books) does what many rock historians couldn’t: It debunks the legend, de-mythologizes one of the most mythologized electric guitarists ever, puts a lie to the glamor of what it means to be a rock star.

“Backstage, John [Lennon] and I did so much blow that he threw up.” Those few words capture the book’s tenor: intimate, scandalous, titillating, but ultimately sad, at times pathetic. Legends reduced to drug-addled buffoons.

As a first-time author, Clapton has a matter-of-fact, self-deprecating touch. In this autobiography, for which he was reportedly paid nearly $7 million, the guitarist who launched the Yardbirds, Cream and Blind Faith psychoanalyzes himself and recounts a life riddled with drugs, booze, womanizing, shame, self-doubt and self-destructive choices. He sleepwalks through the prime of his life in a haze of self-medication, and rightly trashes most of the albums he released in the ’70s and ’80s. “There was no reason for me to be making records at all,” he acknowledges, yet he went right on making them, tarnishing a great legacy almost beyond repair.

What struck me most about the book is the feeling of transparency it conveys. At the end I felt I understood his views, convictions as it were, regarding music and art and the values he possessed. He lays his heart bare in this story, and perhaps that has always been the power behind his work.

Consider these lines from the song Tears In Heaven, written with Will Jennings after the horrorific loss of his four year old son Conor. I still remember the shock I felt when I heard that nightmarish news in 1991, having a son of my own at a similar age. I can't even imagine going through something like that.

Time can bring you down,

Time can bend your knees.

Time can break your heart,

Have you begging please, begging please.

When I finished the book last night I put on his Greatest Hits album Time Pieces, followed by Derek & the Dominoes and his breakout Journeyman album while making art in my studio. It was a nice evening after a thought provoking read.