Opinion: Why Mark Twain Can't Win After All These Years

Poor old Mark Twain. Dead for a hundred years now, he's recently undergone the two worst kinds of editing that any writer can endure: too much and none at all.

I'd have said the two worst kinds of editing that any writer can endure and live, but of course it's too late for that. Too late by a century. We can still hope for the survival of his reputation, though. In spite of the too little editing that he demanded outright, and the too much that he's getting whether he likes it or not.

Twain should have known better than to demand that his "Autobiography," the first volume of which was released in November, go to press exactly the way he recorded it.

After all, he'd been struggling with the shape of the project for the better part of his working life. Pages in longhand, recycled newspaper and magazine pieces, volume after volume of personal dictation, even the odd Edison phonograph cylinder (now, sadly, lost).

Each time he launched himself back into the work according to some new system, he could be counted upon to exclaim (usually to his old pal William Dean Howells) that he'd hit at last on the secret formula for turning out precisely the work he'd had in mind from the start. A kind of free-ranging autobiographical mind map, laying bare not just his personal history but his way of seeing and understanding the world.

Time proved him wrong again and again. He knew it, which is why he was forever giving up and regrouping and trying once more with different technology, a different plan, a different method. And now a full century's passage -- despite the blameless efforts of the good people at the University of California's Mark Twain Project -- has proved him wrong again.

How wrong? Wrong enough that kindly old Twain acolyte Garrison Keillor, himself no stranger to the homespun and the cunningly not-quite-free form, wrote of the "Autobiography" in the New York Times Book Review, "Here is a powerful argument for writers' burning their papers."

Then again, Twain asked for it. The truth is he didn't just ask for it, he insisted on it, stating again and again that a man can speak freely only from the grave, and that only when he himself had been under the ground for a century would it be time for readers to hear him straight. Undiluted. Unedited. With all of the boring parts left in, I mean.

Which is just the opposite of what the folks at NewSouth Books have in mind for two of Twain's other volumes.

You've heard of them, I suppose. One is called "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," and it's a fairly inconsequential boy's book. The other is called "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," and it's the undisputed fountainhead of American literature.

The NewSouth folks, under the direction of one Alan Gribben, have fused Tom and Huck together into a single sort-of-seamless whole -- a whole that Twain never by any means intended -- and they plan to unleash their strange two-headed monster come February. (This, by the way, is what happens when books enter the public domain. Another thing that happens is that people like me write novels like "Finn." The whole business would have driven Twain, a tireless crusader for perpetual copyright, absolutely nuts.)

Of course, Gribben and the NewSouthers have a few other tricks up their editorial sleeves, including the abolition of the N-word. It has to go, according to Gribben's introduction, because "this editor gradually reached the conclusion that an epithet-free edition of Twain's books is needed today."

One might be tempted to ask Mr. Gribben, either behind his old-fashioned "this editor" mask or straight out, "Needed by whom?" By sensitive minds requiring protection from the cruelties of history? By young readers who will be as disoriented by the attachment of the juvenile Tom to the mature Huck as they will be when they finally encounter the original texts and demand to know what villain has installed all of that harsh language while they weren't looking? Or perhaps by NewSouth itself, looking to sell its modest print run to some school district or other? There are needs, and then there are needs.

And then there's poor old Mark Twain. Regardless of what kind of editing he gets, the old dear dead guy just can't seem to win. And neither can we.

Jon Clinch is the author of the novels "Kings of the Earth" and "Finn," which takes readers on a journey into the history and heart of one of American literature's most brutal and mysterious figures: Huckleberry Finn's father. Read his blog on Red Room.