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He was often the impresario of his own personality, yet there was a saving cynicism even when he indulged his vanity. He solemnly gives the recipe for preserving the luxuriance of his planter's pompadour—wash it every day in soapy water. Yet through it all can be heard the laughter of Mark at Sam.
The Visible Split. The old magic is there. Despite the period jocosity, Sam's spats of spite, the bad blood over bad debts, and all too many last words with forgotten men who wronged him, Mark Twain's mastery remains. The "boy paradise" of Hannibal lives again. It is fascinating to watch the way in which the old man recalls—with a sort of wonder at his own power—how actual events became transmuted into his creations, so that his fictional folk became more real than his own memory of them. Who has forgotten Huckleberry Finn, but who remembers Tom Blankenship, son of the Hannibal town drunkard, who served as Huck's model?
It is plain to see why so many U.S. writers have gone to Mark Twain's school, or played hookey from it to their loss. Critic T. S. Eliot, in his study of Huckleberry Finn, got Sam dead to rights: "The adult side of him was boyish . . . only the boy in him, that was Huck Finn, was adult." The split runs right through the autobiography and gives it psychological fascination.
Mark Twain, as he himself might have put it, is not half the man he was 50 years ago. The large, devoted public for whom the quirks and crankery of Mark Twain had the fascination of gossip has died off since his death in 1910. Yet few today will dispute Editor Neider's claim for the autobiography that "the greatness is there. You can edit the trivia out, but you cannot edit the greatness in."
*White, topflight American architect (Manhattan's Pennsylvania Station. Washington Arch), was shot and killed in 1906 by Harry K. Thaw, jealous husband of ex-Showgirl Evelyn Nesbit.