Robert Hirst is the general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley and picked the 24 pieces in Who Is Mark Twain? from Twain's voluminous archives. Here he answers several questions about Twain and the book, HarperStudio's first title, which appears on April 21.
The blogger Ben Sutherland said Mark Twain's spirit 'lives as a garden gnome in Stephen Colbert's pants.' What do you make of that?
Doesn't Sutherland have that backwards? Colbert is clearly the offspring of Mark Twain, not the other way around. Besides, when Mark Twain used "deadpan," he knew enough not to shout it at the top of his lungs. Huck says, for instance, "I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking considerable many resks, though I ain't had no experience . . . and yet here's a case where I'm blest if it don't look to me like the truth is better, and actuly safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it's so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it."
You have to take that in slowly to appreciate the point. No one is shouting.
What would Twain have said about Barack Obama?
It's above my pay grade to try to figure out what Mark Twain would have said; I have enough difficulty figuring out exactly what he did say. But I suppose it's fair to guess that whatever he might have thought of Obama, the question of his "race" would not have entered in. He told a correspondent in 1909: "To my mind one color is just as respectable as another; there is nothing important, nothing essential, about a complexion. I mean, to me. But with the Deity it is different. He doesn't think much of white people, He prefers the colored. Andrea del Sarto's pink-&-lily Madonnas revolt Him, my child. That is, they would, but He never looks at them."
How was Twain ahead of his time?
Certainly in the matter of race he was, beyond any question, ahead of his time. "I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being--that is enough for me; he can't be any worse."
But if you mean in his literary work, I think it's fair to say that he experimented more or less constantly with literary forms that went beyond the conventions of his day. That is surely the case with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but it's also true with several of the pieces forthcoming in Who Is Mark Twain?--stories like "The Undertaker's Tale" and "The Snow-Shovelers." He was the kind of writer who tried hard never to look back on what he had done. He never revised books after they were published--only before. Once they were in print, he was eager to move on to the next challenge.
Why hasn't this work been published before?
Mark Twain wrote and published an enormous number of words, and at his death he left unpublished an equally large body of material, including literary manuscripts like those in Who Is Mark Twain? and thousands of letters, notebooks, his autobiography and so forth. Even though the Mark Twain Project has been editing and publishing these materials since 1967, we are far from done, and these 24 pieces just haven't yet reached the top of our schedule. So we're grateful to HarperStudio for giving us the chance to publish them now.