Even as We Speak by Clive James Page B

neat as all the others in the Library of America, and even more solid, energetic, genial and creative: it makes a good gift suggestion for the new Administration. If President Clinton is a better
speechmaker than President Bush, it is mainly because he steals better stuff. He should steal from the best: Mark Twain, who could rock the room for an hour while talking nothing except sense, and
would have staved off Arsenio Hall without needing a saxophone.
    For some years, it has been becoming clearer that the Library of America is the symbol for itself that the United States has long been in search of. Colonial Williamsburg is too Disneyfied to
stand for tradition, Disneyland too childish to stand for innovation, Mt Rushmore too big to stand in your living room. You can line up the Library of America on a few shelves. Of course, the
French could do the same sort of thing earlier. The Pléiade was the library that Edmund Wilson had in mind when he caned the Modern Language Association for burying the country’s
intellectual heritage while pretending to preserve it, sponsoring volumes that owed too much to pedantry, not enough to readability, weighed a ton, and looked like hell. Wilson kept up the campaign
for a long time but seemed to stand no better chance of winning it than of beating his income-tax rap. Then the Library of America made Wilson’s dream happen. From its first few volumes it
was obvious that the Library of America had struck the ideal balance between authority and portability. Its volumes begged irresistibly to be picked up, like brilliant children.
    Remarkably, they didn’t lose this unthreatening quality even as they multiplied. If you own more than about thirty of the sixty-five volumes so far, monumentality becomes a present danger:
the massed black jackets loom like midnight, and it starts to look as if the Pléiade had chosen better – first, to wear white, and then, when that started looking like a cliff of snow,
to let the horizontally striped gold-blocked spines show through a transparent jacket, like scaling ladders to a Fabergé Bastille of imprisoned wisdom. But you can always alleviate the pangs
of gazing at a wall of uniformity by taking one of the Library of America volumes down and letting it fall open in the hand. If this is dignity, it is user-friendly. And with these two volumes of
Twain’s minor writings here is the original, unashamed vitality that lies at the heart of the whole enterprise. You could just about convince yourself that
Huckleberry Finn
was a
work of literature in the Old World style, aimed at a refined public – after all, it certainly has the rank, if not the manner. But Twain’s journalism is a daunting reminder that he was
ready to lavish everything he had on everybody, every time. He was democratic all the way down to his metabolism. For Twain, there was no division between democracy and creativity. They were
versions of the same thing: exuberance.
    Twain’s fugitive pieces have been collected before; but now we have, with just the right amount of critical apparatus, the authoritative texts, and all arranged chronologically, so that we
can watch him grow. He grew like bamboo in the rain. His first hit was a newspaper sketch called ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’. Twain wasn’t the first American journalist to
write tall tales under a pen name; Petroleum V. Nasby, whom Twain knew and admired, was one of several practitioners already in the field. Nor was Twain the first to combine the high style with the
low, squandering highfalutin resources on a shaggy-dog story. What was new, attention-getting, and instantly popular was the quality of the evocation when he worked the switch out of mandarin
diction into the concrete vernacular.
    The story of the Jumping Frog is told to Twain by a yarn-spinner – ‘good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler’ – who isn’t afraid to be boring: ‘Simon Wheeler
backed me into a corner and blockaded me