In April, HarperStudio will publish Who Is Mark Twain?, a collection of 24 previously unpublished humorous pieces by the American master. Right now, an uncorrected galley of the entire book is on the publisher’s website.

When The New Yorker published one of these pieces, “The Privilege of the Grave,” in December, it mentioned the upcoming collection. Googling the title, I was led to HarperStudio’s site for the book, which contains a “PDF e-marketing kit.” Within this PDF file is a link to the entire book online (minus the new introduction and foreword).

The complete table of contents is below, followed by my review.

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Contents

Whenever I Am about to Publish a Book

Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture

Conversations with Satan

Jane Austen

The Force of “Suggestion”

The Privilege of the Grave

A Group of Servants

The Quarrel in the Strong-Box

Happy Memories of the Dental Chair

Dr. Van Dyke as a Man and as a Fisherman

On Postage Rates on Authors’ Manuscript

The Missionary in World-Politics

The Undertaker’s Tale

The Music Box

The Grand Prix

The Devil’s Gate

The Snow-Shovelers

Professor Mahaffy on Equality

Interviewing the Interviewer

An Incident

The Jungle Discusses Man

I Rise to a Question of Privilege

Telegraph Dog

The American Press

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Review

Twenty-four “new” pieces from Mark Twain? Is today my birthday? Let’s open this unexpected present….

“Jane Austen” is an unrelenting takedown of the author of Pride and Prejudice, along the lines of Twain’s infamous “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which is one of the most vitriolic and crushing attacks that one canonical writer has ever launched on another. Of Austen, he writes:

She makes me detest all her people, without reserve. Is that her intention? It is not believable. Then is it her purpose to make the reader detest her people up to the middle of the book and like them in the rest of the chapters? That could be. That would be high art. It would be worth while, too. Some day I will examine the other end of her books and see.

All the great critics praise her art generously. To start with, they say she draws her characters with sharp discrimination and a sure touch. I believe that this is true, as long as the characters she is drawing are odious.

He then offers a devastating summary of each character in Sense and Sensibility. The piece ends abruptly and is probably unfinished. If it had been completed, it might have ranked with “Literary Offenses,” but Twain was just warming up.

From its title, “Conversations with Satan” promises to be a Letters From the Earth-style ribbing of religion. It starts out well. Satan - handsome and courtly, “aristocratically calm and self-possessed” - appears dressed as an Anglican Bishop, and tells Twain that he is one of the writer’s “most ardent and grateful admirers.” Of America, he deadpans: “I have not been there lately. I am not needed there.” Twain and Old Scratch are both smoking cigars, and this unfortunately leads Twain off the tracks - the rest of the piece is comprised of his thoughts about stogies (he hates Cuban cigars; most cigar snobs can’t tell the difference between an expensive one and a cheap one without the label; etc.). Satan is not mentioned again in this obviously unfinished piece.

“The Missionary in World-Politics” fulfills its promise of rapping religion on the knuckles. “I do not know why we respect missionaries,” Twain writes to the “Editor of the Times.”

Perhaps it is because they have not intruded here from Turkey or China or Polynesia to break our hearts by sapping away our children’s faith and winning them to the worship of alien gods. We have lacked the opportunity to find out how a parent feels to see his child deriding and blaspheming the religion of its ancestors.

He continues: “History teaches us that there is no capable missionary except fire and sword or the command of a king whose subjects have no voice in the government.”

But Twain’s self-effacing humor is present as well. In “Frank Fuller and My First New York Lecture” he writes: “Yes, and when a man gets old he wants to explain his past. He calls it that; but as a rule what he really wants to do is to whitewash it. I don’t want to whitewash mine, for it doesn’t need it. I have kept it in that kind of repair all the time.”

He says of Oliver Wendell Holmes:

He was a good friend of mine, and wrote me a poem on my 50th birth-day. I plagiarized the dedication of one of his books and used it in the Innocents Abroad. I didn’t know I had plagiarized him, but a friend proved it to me. I told Dr. Holmes about it and it made us good friends. He said we were all plagiarists, consciously or unconsciously, one or the other. It made me feel good to be one or the other - but he didn’t say which.

“Happy Memories of the Dental Chair” recounts Twain’s first visit to a dentist, which happened when he was an adult needing a long, painful operation for Riggs’ disease. Being interested in the history of drugs, I was happy to see Twain perceptively describe his experience with chloroform, which was offered to him only after the operation had been going on for an hour:

The chloroform created a radical change; it made everything comfortable and pleasant. The pains were about as sharp as they had been before, but they rather seemed to be impersonal pains; pains that belonged to the community in general, including me, but not me particularly, not me any more than the others. So I did not care for them any longer; I do not care for a pain unless I can have it all to myself.

“The Undertaker’s Tale” is a short story about an undertaker’s family (named the Cadavers) in a small village. They’re having a tough time financially - no one is dying. The daughter tries to pep up her father: “Do you remember the time that not one person died in this village during twenty-eight days? Were you downcast? Did you show any bitterness? No - not one angry word escaped your lips. You hardly even betrayed annoyance.”

In “Interviewing the Interviewer,” Twain grovels before the “godlike” Charles A. Dana, publisher of the New York Sun, beseeching him to please impart his wisdom regarding journalistic success. Because Twain paid homage, Dana deigns to reveal the secrets of the newspaper trade, starting with:

The first great end and aim of journalism is to make a sensation. Never let your paper go to press without a sensation. If you have none, make one. Seize upon the prominent events of the day, and clamor about them with a maniacal fury that shall compel attention. Vilify everything that is unpopular - harry it, hunt it, abuse it, without rhyme or reasons, so that you get a sensation out of it. Laud that which is popular - unless you feel sure that you can make it unpopular by attacking it. Hit every man that is down - never fail in this, for it is safe. Libel every man that can be ruined by it. Libel every prominent man who dare not soil his hands with touching you in return. But glorify all moneyed scum and give columns of worship unto the monuments they erect in honor of themselves, for moneyed men will not put up with abuse from small newspapers.

Everything we expect from Twain is here - acid satire, down-home charm, self-effacement, attacks on the powerful, gallows humor, political humor, droll travelogues and fables, and even some black dialect (in “The Snow-Shovelers”). It’s fantastic to see this material finally surface 99 years after the great one’s death, but why did it take so long? And when will we get to see the 500 or so other manuscripts that were unpublished when Twain died almost a century ago?