"A man cannot tell the whole truth about himself," Mark Twain said in an interview in 1899, and elaborated later: "You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are much too ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting."
He tried, of course, and the first volume of his complete, enormous, stream-of-consciousness autobiography was finally published this month, a century after the great writer's death. The reason for the delay was that Twain felt freer to speak his mind in the knowledge that no one mentioned in the book would be alive to take offence when it was finally available to the public.
The struggle to write something as true as possible preoccupied Twain (born Samuel L Clemens) for decades, and he encouraged his brother Orion to write a book entitled "The Autobiography of a Coward" or "Confessions of a Life that was a Failure", which would dwell agonisingly on the parts of a man's life he would rather not publicise. Unsurprisingly, this book was never written.
Twain's autobiography has sections that dwell at length on the lives of others: Ulysses S Grant, the Civil War commander of the Union army, has 30 pages dedicated to his life, and although this has historical interest, it's not nearly as juicy as the parts in which Twain gets down to the business of laying bare his private soul - or attempting to, anyway.
It's well known that Twain is no stranger to self-aggrandisement, and there's plenty of boasting involved (the autobiography itself is hailed as revolutionary, and Twain eulogises about his own method: "what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what darling & worshipful absence of the signs of starch... and other artificialities!") But there's also shame, frustration and awkwardness.
In one rather sweet episode, we are told of a 14-year-old Clemens practising his dance as a bear for a play, naked, and unaware that he was being watched by a couple of hidden girls. After he heard a couple of them sniggering, and fled, it took a long time to get over the mortification: "During several weeks," he writes, "I could not look any young lady in the face."
There are small moments of failure. "I could have made a neat retort," he writes at one point, "but didn't, for I was flurried and didn't think of it till I was downstairs." It's a familiar feeling.
But the autobiography of Mark Twain that has just been published isn't quite the "The Autobiography of a Coward"he tried to foist on his brother. Is this even feasible, or as Twain says, is it impossible for any of us to see ourselves as we really are?
Twain was a fan of Samuel Pepys' Diary, which includes accounts of Pepys' jealousies, infidelities and insecurities. Although Pepys had the manuscripts of his diaries bound, and must have imagined future readers, he had the advantage over Twain of not imagining a huge readership poring over his innermost thoughts.
The tell-all celeb autobiography, full of childhood misery, juicy personal details and eventual triumph has only become the millions-selling industry it is now in the past couple of decades. In an age of scandals being splashed over the pages of tabloids and celebrities eager to prove they are normal people, just like the rest of us, it's no big deal to read about Russell Brand's lowest moments in My Booky Wook or Katie Price's indiscretions over the course of her four autobiographies. Mark Twain was writing in a different era, in which dignified leaders left behind edited versions of their lives to go down in history, but as Pepys's diary showed, there was precedent for autobiographies that strove to be painfully honest. Casanova's explicit memoirs, in which he writes "I have delighted in going astray and I have constantly lived in error" are infamous, and Rousseau describes in his Confessions framing a young servant girl for a theft he committed, and refusing to help support his five illegitimate children.
There are no such shocking revelations to be found in The Autobiography of Mark Twain, although there is a fair amount of ire directed at others. "[James W] Paige and I always met on effusively affectionate terms," Twain writes at one point of the inventor who wasted much of Twain's life savings, but he continues to say that he would like nothing more than to see him suffer.
Even without any such revelations, the book does communicate the full force of Mark Twain's energetic personality, and the portrait of a man it offers is full, colourful and nuanced. Perhaps it is impossible for any man, Rousseau and Casanova included, to tell "the whole truth about himself", but a century after Mark Twain's death, we're lucky to be able to at least feel as though we have got to know the cantankerous, self-absorbed, hilarious and brilliant writer, who with characteristic hyperbole called himself "the only person who has ever found the right way to build an autobiography".
The Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Vol. 1 Edited by Harriet Elinor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project,University of California Press
