Mark Twain, a Literary Life

A bland but busy chronological account of Sam Clemens's writing career as ""Mark Twain,"" Emerson's meticulous run-through of the ups and downs--mostly downs--of the humorist's professional life supplements his earlier The Authentic Mark Twain (1984). Hardly any piece of writing, major or minor, published or unpublished, is ignored, revealing a writer of self-defeating contradictions. While Clemens lusted for fame, he was quite willing to settle for fortune--often just money enough to maintain the posh lifestyle he first acquired by marrying the puritanical Olivia Langdon and by his first successes as ""Mark Twain."" Bad investments, misplaced loyalties and a chronic inability to finish much of what he began forced Clemens to wield his ""pot-boiler pen."" As an author of books mostly sold (in the U.S.) by subscription, he sometimes had to pad his works and to submit to censorship (often wifely) of his strongest vein, irreverence. Few of his full-length fictions stand up artistically, according to the author. Many are amiably empty of the brash literary personality he had created that liberated his genius. Emerson sees the often-fragmentary and repetitious writings of the last decades as created out of Clemens's personal shame at his sense of artistic waste and his bitterness at the hypocrisies of the bourgeois public that sustained him. The folksy, vernacular humor that had made Clemens famous had turned sardonic and even black. Although largely devoid of the biographical detail that fleshes out a life, Emerson's graphic record of the failed artist who created perhaps the greatest novel written in America, Huckleberry Finn, will be a standard resource. Illus. not seen by PW. (Dec.)