After a Century of Silence: Twain Speaks - TIME

Portrait of Mark Twain

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One thing just about everybody knows about Mark Twain is that he had the pleasure of being able to say that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. But sure enough, the day arrived — April 21, 1910 — when those reports were right on the money. Or were they? Because here we are, a century later, and there's still enough life in the old boy to debut the first volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain (University of California Press; 744 pages) at the No. 2 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. Almost as good: he's right behind Earth (The Book), co-authored by Jon Stewart, whose mix of dry wit and genuine moral outrage comes right from the Twain playbook. Samuel L. Clemens may be dead, but Mark Twain is doing just fine.

Why is Volume I just now seeing the light of day? At his death, Twain stipulated that the manuscript of his memoir was not to be published in its entirety for 100 years. He was concerned that it was too full of Twain unchained — acidic opinions and white-hot fulminations against the follies and wickedness of his time. Having seen his share of those — including the institutionalized sadism of slavery, the gluttony of the Gilded Age and the imperialist misadventures of the Spanish-American War — Twain had arrived at the not unreasonable but never popular conclusion that mankind "was not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn't served any; that he was most likely not even made intentionally; and that his working his way up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably [a] matter of surprise and regret to the Creator." (See the 100 best books of all time.)

He was also writing during a time of American military expeditions abroad and criminal malfeasance in the business world — sound familiar? — and his views on those matters were not designed to broaden his fan base. Twain was well known in his lifetime as an opponent of the Spanish-American War, but he was probably smart to think twice about going public too soon with a description of American soldiers in the Philippines as "uniformed assassins."

Twain did not rule out the publishing of parts of his manuscript before the 100-year mark, so long as "all sound and sane expressions of opinion are left out." In the decades after his death, three successive versions appeared that were variously sanitized, abridged and tidied up. But as the centenary approached, the Mark Twain Project, a scholarly effort housed at the University of California, Berkeley, got going on this definitive edition of the book. It will eventually run to three volumes, about half of whose material has never been published before.

Because of the unusual way Twain produced it, the editors, led by Harriet Elinor Smith, had their work cut out for them. After decades of aborted attempts at an autobiography, Twain had decided by early 1904 to dictate his recollections to a stenographer. He had also decided to plunge every day into whichever moment of his life he pleased to consider, with no regard for chronology. "Talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment" is how he describes his working method. "Drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime." (See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.)

This is just what he does, dipping into an item from his morning newspaper that leads him into a remembrance of a long-ago public lecture, which reminds him of a funny birthday party he once attended — at times this book reads like the one we all expected Keith Richards to write. Yet it's a method that works a definite magic. It gives Twain's volume of mostly 19th century recollections a distinctly 20th century feel. It makes him something like the first American modernist, a writer almost Proustian in his free-associational reaches into the past — no matter that Proust probably never had house cats named Plague and Pestilence, played a practical joke at the White House or spent an entire afternoon as a stumbling young huntsman being outwitted by a wild turkey.

The Bubbly Stream

Twain settled upon the idea of dictating his book while living in a rented villa near Florence, where he had gone with his wife Olivia in the hope of restoring her failing health (in vain — she died there in June 1904, after which Twain could not bring himself to return to his work until 18 months later, in New York). The villa was owned by the book's first villain — Countess Massiglia, an American divorcée whose second husband, an Italian aristocrat, was on a diplomatic mission in East Asia while she pursued an affair with her chief manservant. Twain's narrative languishes a bit while he reaches from the grave to defame, vilify and generally abominate the Countess — the kind of woman who would deliberately disable the phone Twain installed to summon doctors for his wife. Even Twain, who can abominate with the best of them, gets tiresome when he does it for 30 pages or so.

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Time for God (And His Minions) To Step Down

British protesters demand Pope quits over abuse

 

You know how they say "a picture is worth a thousand words"? Well, this is one of those pictures (this is such a cliche intro, but I'm tired). Apparently, the people had enough bullshit from the Church and religion in general (maybe, who knows, I wish!) and now that they mulled it inside waiting for some sort of sign, they are finally letting go!

Although I'm not a believer, I respect others' choices. So here's what I have to say. I'm not against people with faith, but I am against organized religion of all sorts. You are free believe anything you want, but please stop intersecting your lifes with your religion, it's a annoying. See what happens? People go berserk! Humans are not exactly "God's bread" (a Romanian saying, refering to one's goodness) and these past events proved it even more so.

Let's abolish religion and go on with our lives, good or bad, we can get over obstacles just by being ourselves and thinking them through not asking some inexistent divinity's help.

There’s Only One Way to Stop Iran

PRESIDENT OBAMA should not lament but sigh in relief that Iran has rejected his nuclear deal, which was ill conceived from the start. Under the deal, which was formally offered through the United Nations, Iran was to surrender some 2,600 pounds of lightly enriched uranium (some three-quarters of its known stockpile) to Russia, and the next year get back a supply of uranium fuel sufficient to run its Tehran research reactor for three decades. The proposal did not require Iran to halt its enrichment program, despite several United Nations Security Council resolutions demanding such a moratorium.

Iran was thus to be rewarded with much-coveted reactor fuel despite violating international law. Within a year, or sooner in light of its expanding enrichment program, Iran would almost certainly have replenished and augmented its stockpile of enriched uranium, nullifying any ostensible nonproliferation benefit of the deal.

Moreover, by providing reactor fuel, the plan would have fostered proliferation in two ways. First, Iran could have continued operating its research reactor, which has helped train Iranian scientists in weapons techniques like plutonium separation. (Yes, as Iran likes to point out, the reactor also produces medical isotopes. But those can be purchased commercially from abroad, as most countries do, including the United States.) Absent the deal, Iran’s reactor will likely run out of fuel within two years, and only a half-dozen countries are able to supply fresh fuel for it. This creates significant international leverage over Iran, which should be used to compel it to halt its enrichment program.

In addition, the vast surplus of higher-enriched fuel Iran was to get under the deal would have permitted some to be diverted to its bomb program. Indeed, many experts believe that the uranium in foreign-provided fuel would be easier to enrich to weapons grade because Iran’s uranium contains impurities. Obama administration officials had claimed that delivering uranium in the form of fabricated fuel would prevent further enrichment for weapons, but this is false. Separating uranium from fuel elements so that it can be enriched further is a straightforward engineering task requiring at most a few weeks.

Thus, had the deal gone through, Iran could have benefited from a head start toward making weapons-grade 90 percent-enriched uranium (meaning that 90 percent of its makeup is the fissile isotope U-235) by starting with purified 20 percent-enriched uranium rather than its own weaker, contaminated stuff.

This raises a question: if the deal would have aided Iran’s bomb program, why did the United States propose it, and Iran reject it? The main explanation on both sides is domestic politics. President Obama wanted to blunt Republican criticism that his multilateral approach was failing to stem Iran’s nuclear program. The deal would have permitted him to claim, for a year or so, that he had defused the crisis by depriving Iran of sufficient enriched uranium to start a crash program to build one bomb.

But in reality no one ever expected Iran to do that, because such a headlong sprint is the one step most likely to provoke an international military response that could cripple the bomb program before it reaches fruition. Iran is far more likely to engage in “salami slicing” — a series of violations each too small to provoke retaliation, but that together will give it a nuclear arsenal. For example, while Iran permits international inspections at its declared enrichment plant at Natanz, it ignores United Nations demands that it close the plant, where it gains the expertise needed to produce weapons-grade uranium at other secret facilities like the nascent one recently uncovered near Qom.

In sum, the proposal would not have averted proliferation in the short run, because that risk always was low, but instead would have fostered it in the long run — a classic example of domestic politics undermining national security.

Tehran’s rejection of the deal was likewise propelled by domestic politics — including last June’s fraudulent elections and longstanding fears of Western manipulation. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad initially embraced the deal because he realized it aided Iran’s bomb program. But his domestic political opponents, whom he has tried to label as foreign agents, turned the tables by accusing him of surrendering Iran’s patrimony to the West.

Alan J. Kuperman is the director of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Sign in to Recommend Next Article in Opinion (24 of 26) » A version of this article appeared in print on December 24, 2009, on page A23 of the New York edition.
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