The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2

It’s a good thing that Mark Twain explains how he dictated and composed his autobiography, as noted in the first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain published by the University of California Press: “…start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale; and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.”

Otherwise, you would find yourself getting lost. This becomes even more true in the second volume of the autobiography. From what I can tell, the third and final volume is much the same. This is no standard autobiography, but then again, Twain probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In fact, I’d say this is indeed a writer’s autobiography, throwing aside writing convention. He dictates (the entire work was originally dictated to a typist) as he thinks. He’s following on stream – talking about his brother, Orion Clemons, for example, and how Twain accompanied him to the Nevada Territory in the 1860s. Orion had a job – secretary to the governor. Twain did not, so he became a reporter. But he gets deep into the discussion about Nevada when he describes the just reported 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and then we’re soon reminiscing with him about his work on the newspaper there.

This works fine if you have an editor to straighten it all up after you. The editors of this mammoth publishing project wisely decided not to do that, so that what you see is indeed what you get – vintage Mark Twain, storyteller par excellence, not above embroidering a little if it makes a better story.

So he describes his work as a reporter at the San Francisco Morning Call and his friendship with a fellow reporter, Bret Harte (there was a time when high school students read Harte’s short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in English class, but I rather doubt it’s taught any more). He sounds affectionate, until many pages later, when he returns to Harte, and he is not affectionate at all.

So in between descriptions of his life, you find yourself suddenly confronted with his musings on the character of god and the Bible, his absolute passion for international copyright laws, and even a chapter-length discussion on the supremacy of the house-fly. This is Twain, and in some strange way, it all works.

He quotes liberally from his daughter’s Suzy biography of him that she had been writing – in the 1880s. And he notes the last entry she made, which ends with an incomplete sentence. Suzy died sometime later. And he includes an extensive discussion of how his daughter Clara kept the news of his daughter Jean’s illness from his wife, Olivia, who herself was declining and would soon die.

Olivia and Clara Clemons, 1895

These are not asides. Twain was profoundly affected by the death of three of his children and his wife. Clara would be the only child to outlive him, in fact. And yet he plays more the reporter in these cases; he simply states fact, omitting the emotion and the huge grief he felt.

Like the first volume, this volume, too, is filled with the names of famous of the time. Twain traveled in rather privileged circles; he was America’s most famous writer and doors everywhere were open to him (this volume also includes a rant about President Theodore Roosevelt, and if you’re familiar with Twain at all, you know one of his rants could be downright venomous).

By the time he was dictating this biography, most of the people he had grown up with, had been friends with, and whom he knew intimately as friends were gone. And one has that sense of the elder statesman, looking back, looking forward and looking at the here-and-now, and knowing he is the last of a particular breed. He himself would probably have rejected the elder statesman title and said it was simply a matter of outliving everyone else.

One volume to go.

Related:

My Review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Vol. 1)

Top photograph: Mark Twain in the Nevada Territory in the late 1860s.

A story and its settings

To create the settings for my novel Dancing Priest, I started first with my imagination. Once the words began to move from my head to the computer screen, however, I found I needed more. And so I went looking.

Photos for the University of Edinburgh weren’t hard to find. What were hard to find were pictures of older buildings that served as student dormitories – the university likes to show off the new buildings. I found the Pollock Halls of Student Housing and knew that this was the place where Michael Kent and his friend Tommy McFarland lived; I just moved it close to the center of the university.

I searched hard and long for a place that could serve as the farm belonging to the Iain and Iris McLaren, where Michael grew up. It had to look older but not old, and it had to be near hills, where Michael learned mountain biking. Ideally, it also had to have room for the gardens created by Iris. I kept an eye out for years (literally), and then one day a monthly issue of English Garden magazine showed up at home, I opened it up, and found An Cala. As soon as I saw it I knew I had found “The McLarens.”

This is a “smallish” estate built in the 1930s – I made it smaller by whacking off a wing. It’s in Argyll on the west side of Scotland, and actually sits on the Isle of Seil. It’s famous for its gardens, and behind it are tall hills that could easily serve as the area for Michael to bike. And there was plenty of room for a barn. All I did was flip the estate from the western coast of Scotland to the eastern, closer to Edinburgh.

Then came the scenes of the Olympics in Greece. There are all kinds of cycling and motorcycling tours of the country, and pictures were relatively easy to find. The one shown here has most of what I was looking for when I thought of the road race event, including the  guardrail.

Since the Summer Olympics were held in Athens in 2008, there were plenty of photos of the events, and especially the closing ceremonies at Olympic Stadium. This is one of my favorite parts of the novel, and I worked it and reworked it until I almost couldn’t stand it. But I still love the scene and what happens when the British Olympic Team enters the stadium.

The last major setting is St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. There are several by that name in the area, but the one I created is entirely fictitious. I situated it somewhat close to downtown. It has a mission-style exterior, like this photo of a church in Florida. I swiped the interior from my own church in St. Louis.

Having these pictures in my mind as I wrote, edited and rewrote was important. I could see Michael greeting parishioners after worship service outside the front entrance. I could see him biking on those switchbacks in Greece. I could see Iris in her gardens and Iain tending to horses in the barn. And I could picture Tommy arguing with Michael in their rooms against accepting another roommate.

The settings, and the pictures of them, were integral to telling the story.

Photo of the University of Edinburgh – Pollock Halls of Student Housing by Anita363. Sourced via Flickr. Used with permission via Creative Commons license.

Dinner at Luce, Hotel Intercontinental San Francisco

Seated by the window,
I peer through the gauze
curtain, watching traffic,
bicyclists zoom by oblivious
aggravating drivers like
they always do, always are
they shouldn’t be allowed
to manuever like that
a group of young women
walks by laughing, one
glances into the gauze
and smiles, walking on,
the wind blowing her hair.
The Jerusalem artichoke soup
is magnificant,
the almond bread superb
but the Chilean merlot
is heaven.

This poem is submitted for One Shot Wednesday, hosted by One Stop Poetry. To read more poems, please visit the site. The links will be live at 4 p.m. Central time.

Photograph: Luce Restaurant, Hotel Intercontinental San Francisco, via Hotel Chatter.

Chinatown and Memory

I’ve been in San Francisco most of this week, attending a conference. I've been to the city six or seven times, and every I go, I eat a dinner at Kan’s Chinese Restaurant on Grant Street, right in the heart of Chinatown.

The food is good, but that’s not why I eat there. I’m okay with Chinese food, but I’m not a major fan.

The area is steeped in history, but that’s not why I eat there, either. Most of that history is gone, hidden behind storefronts for cheap touristy things (“Good quality t-shirts for $1.99!”).

I eat there because the first time I ate there, somewhere back in the 1980s, I ate dinner with a good friend. We knew each other through the work we did – we were both in communications, but in different parts of the country. We'd met a conference years before, and with a couple of other people had talked late one evening (or early the next morning) about communications, employers and journalists – the things PR people usually talk about.

Later, we were both in San Francisco for a communications convention, he because he was a big wheel in the association and me to pick up an award for speechwriting. He'd been born and raised in Detroit but had lived a long time in Oakland before moving back east, and he knew the family that had owned Kan’s for generations, back in the days of the real Chinatown and Dashiell Hammett and the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the tong wars and all that stuff that makes up the legend of the place.

That first time we met, he told me something that rather startled me. “If you’re going to be a speechwriter,” he said, “you might as well be a great speechwriter. And if you’re going to be a great speechwriter, you better get real familiar with the poets.” And by “the poets” he meant three of the moderns – T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and Wallace Stevens. He was so adamant about it that over a period of about a year he sent me a volume of the complete poems of each of the three.

I read them. I knew he liked Dylan Thomas the best. I liked Eliot, but I really liked Wallace Stevens. And from those three I started reading more.

He taught me something else: don’t settle for mediocrity. Take the risk. Do it. Strive for something great. I’d come up with something I thought innovative, and he’d say “Exactly!” because he had already done it. Eventually, he stopped saying “Exactly!” He started saying “Wow!” And he meant it.

We lived in different cities; we worked for different employers. Long months would pass before we might talk again, but we’d pick up right where we left off. I knew he was essentially a lonely person, filling his life with work and the association he loved so deeply.

Then, in the late 1990s, he told me he had gone to Brazil for a business trip, got sick and nearly died, spending months in the hospital from some major tropical assault on his immune system. But he recovered, even though he looked thin and wan the next time I saw him.

About a decade ago, I was reading a communications magazine, and I turned a page and found his obituary. I didn’t know, but then there wouldn’t have been anyone to tell me. The obituary was rather cryptic. And then I understood. But it didn't matter. He was my friend.

So on Monday night I was in Kan’s, with its clientele of tourists, locals who like Chinese food, a scattering of business people, several families, some students and a couple of construction workers. You have to walk up a flight of stairs from the street; it sits above what used to be a Chinese souvenir store but is now the Floating Sushi Boat Restaurant. Behind the hostess’ counter are autographed pictures of Kenny Rogers and Sandra Bullock. The main dining room has a 16-foot ceiling and nine crystal chandeliers. Red and white tablecloths alternate on the tables. Lots of Chinese artifacts decorate the walls.

I wasn’t there for the food or the atmosphere; I was there out of memory for my friend. I miss his acerbic wit, his passion for communications, his impatience with mediocrity, and his love for poetry.

I sat there at Kan’s, and could still hear him reciting lines from Dylan Thomas.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light…