At Grandpa Twain's knee by Stefan Beck - The New Criterion: Keillor is a realist about it: “Samuel L. Clemens was a cheerful promoter of himself, and . . . the old man liked to dress up as Mark Twain in a fresh white suit and take a Sunday morning stroll up Fifth Avenue.” The Autobiography, which also appears at first glance to be the work of an old man shoring himself up against age and unhappiness, is, Keillor says, a “fraud on the order of the Duke and the Dauphin in their Shakespearean romp, and bravo to Samuel Clemens, still able to catch the public’s attention a century after he expired.” To the contrary, bravo to Keillor. “Here is a powerful argument for writers’ burning their papers,” he quips. The inferior humorist stands revealed.
This approaches an ideal way to think about Twain’s account of himself, but I must confess a twinge of confusion. Last I checked, “narcissism” refers to an exaggerated or unearned sense of achievement. Yet here we have Twain the greatest comedian of all time; Twain who created a “distinct American sense of self”; Twain who, Trombley tells us, beat the average American male life expectancy by twenty-seven years; Twain who “managed to cross the Atlantic 29 times, completed an around-the-world lecture tour at age fifty-nine, [wrote] more than 50,000 letters, scores of short stories, some 3,000 newspaper and magazine articles and more than thirty books.” To paraphrase the clergyman’s son in one of Twain’s anecdotes, “Please, won’t you, for Christ’s sake, let the man strut?”