Cleaned-up Twain

...In part they were trying to suggest that Twain ended his life at peace with himself and the universe and that The Mysterious Stranger, a dark and deterministic piece, was his gentle farewell...

...In fact, even in Neider's bowdlerized version, the letters show Twain's development from the wide-eyed youthful adventurer who left home with a promise to his Mama "not to throw a card or drink a drop of liquor" to the iconoclast who in his last years wrote to William Dean Howells: "Tomorrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs and assigns burnt alive if they venture to print it this side of 2006 A.D.—which I judge they won't...

...He has "also excluded letters in which Clemens indulged in his penchant for philosophical determinism, a humorless belief in man as a piece of mechanical clockwork about which Clemens was dogmatic, even fanatical, and which was usually associated with his personal pessimism...

...There is no way to get around the horror of racism embedded in Twain's soul, and it fueled a good deal of his pessimism about the "damned human race...

...I could read his prose on salary, but not Jane's...

...Why Harper didn't simply reprint the original is beyond me, for Neider's volume exhibits its own editorial arrogance...

...In the meantime you can find Paine's two volumes in almost any library...

...he would have appreciated the irony of recent attempts to ban Adventures of Huckleberry Finn because of its repeated use of "nigger"—most notably in the passage where Tom's Aunt Sally asks Huck if anyone was hurt in a steamboat accident...

...After just a moment Twain said, "When I read that review of yours I felt like the woman who said that she was so glad that her baby had come white...

...He explains in the introduction that the collection was made to please himself, and consequently he has not hesitated to delete sections he thought boring...

...Neider omits the next letter to Howells in which Twain says: "I have been dictating some fearful things for four successive mornings—for no eye but yours to see until I have been dead a century—if then...

...He almost always drew blood in describing these encounters and often, as in the comment to Howells, you have to look carefully to see how deeply he cut...

...Well, it's lucky,' " she answers, " 'because sometimes people do get hurt.' " Anyone who can explicate that exchange at any level has gone a long way toward comprehending the depth of American racism and Twain's skill in exposing it...

...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches literature and folklore at California State University, Fresno...

...It seems a great pity that they allowed her to die a natural death...

...The grounds are patriotic: "Our country does not need to be taught lessons in pessimism at this time...

...We'll simply have to wait for someone else to give us the letters of the real Mark Twain...

...Fairbanks, a "shipmother" to Twain on his Quaker City excursion...

...Paine reports in detail the first meeting of Twain and Ho-wells after the latter's favorable review of The Innocents Abroad...

...N'm," says Huck...

...He has modernized Twain's punctuation, with a resulting "wonderful airiness...

...There is no way to edit out the complexity of black-white relations and Twain knew it better than most of our writers...

...No, there is a difference...

...Despite his later transgressions, Paine knew more about the details of Twain's life than anyone else and his comments are as important as the missives themselves...

...It follows that he was death on anything he thought overly intellectual or pretentious— including his own failures, as when he commented on the title of a forthcoming lecture: "It is a little top-heavy, though, because there is more truth in the title than there is in the lecture...

...Neider skirts the scandal in his introduction to this condensation of the two-volume collection of letters edited by Paine and published in 1917...

...It's pleasant to imagine what Twain would have done to this self-indulgent attempt to reduce him to a simple-minded comic...

...Another drawback in Neider's edition is the omission of most of Paine's brilliant notes to the original volumes...

...In brief, wherever possible I have favored the comic and humane sides of Clemens...

...But I got them out of my system, where they had been festering for years—and that was the main thing...

...They rewrote passages, added sections of their own, and tacked on an ending to a manuscript that Twain actually never finished...

...Or again to Howells, his favorite correspondent, about Poe: "To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austen's...

...Killed a nigger...

...That's the real Mark Twain—and of course Neider deletes it...

...I feel better now...

...That is the authentic voice of Mark Twain, and it recalls Walt Whitman's entreaty to the poet to "make every word he speaks draw blood...

...In 1963 Twain scholar James Tuckey demonstrated convincingly that six years after Twain's death his literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, in cahoots with a Harper & Brothers editor, published a fraudulent edition of The Mysterious Stranger...

...It does need to have its mood lifted by great humor...

...In general Neider misses the significance and nature of Twain's humor which was most characteristically American in its emphasis on the clash of cultures, between blacks and whites, Easterners and Westerners, or Americans and Europeans...

...he has deleted Twain's courtship letters to Olivia Langdon because he found them "overly sentimental," and he has left out the "false, strident, self-abasing" letters to Mrs...

...He succeeded so well because for the first time in our literary history he brought the accents of American English to the fore—as Hemingway said, all modern American literature begins with Huck Finn...

...Jane is entirely impossible...

...It is not possible to detail here all the significant omissions in Neider's selection...