I am sure I know more about lying than anybody who has lived on this planet before me. I believe I am the only person alive who is sane upon this subject. I have been familiar with it for seventy years. The first utterance I ever made was a lie, for I pretended that a pin was sticking me, whereas it was not so. I have been interested in this great art ever since. I have practiced it ever since; sometimes for pleasure, usually for profit. And to this day I do not always know when to believe myself, and when to take the matter under consideration.

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Naturally, it took Mark Twain to state the truth we’ve been futilely asking memoirists to own up to—that all memories are touched by invention. Twain wrote—or rather, dictated—these lines in 1906, but they are reaching the public only now due to his stipulation that his complete Autobiography (University of California, 743 pages) should not be published until 100 yearsafter his death.

The almost mythological hubris of such a command is worth considering. Among Twain’s coevals, perhaps only Theodore Roosevelt could have trusted in his power to fascinate an audience a century beyond him (Roosevelt is rather richly patronized throughout the Autobiography, and you sense a spirit of rivalry behind it—Twain did not like being upstaged). What about in the cynical present? Is there anyone who could withstand the storms of ridicule that sort of presumption would incite?

No, giants strode the earth in those days, and few were as energetically self-promoting as Twain. By withholding publication, he fed the conceit that he alone of all memoirists could speak honestly—“as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter.” He foresaw with unerring clarity that the appetite for an “uncensored” tell-all, as spoken from the grave, would never abate.

But the Autobiography, at least what’s included in this first volume (a hugely frustrating caveat I’ll return to), is far subtler than an old man’s airing of grievances. It took Twain decades to hit on a method that would keep him interested in the chore of a memoirist’s composition. The book starts fitfully, with a seemingly arbitrary compilation of journal extracts, including an interminable description of the furniture in the Florentine villa he rented in the sad final days of his wife’s life. It begins in earnest only 50 pages in. That is when the “New York dictation” of January 1906 kicks in. It was at this point that Twain discovered a style and, just as important, a process that would suit both his declining memory and his instinct to exaggerate. At the time, he was a widower, his first two children had died, and he mainly occupied himself by playing billiards in his Fifth Avenue apartment. Each morning at 11 o’clock, he was joined in his bedroom by an amanuensis and his slightly toadying editor, Alfred Bigelow Paine, and would begin to speak.

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He explains the process thus: “The idea of blocking out a consecutive series of events which have happened to me, or which I imagine have happened to me—I can see that is impossible for me,” he says. “The only possible thing for me is to talk about the thing that something suggests at the moment—something in the middle of my life, perhaps, or something that happened only a few months ago.”

These lines, with their artless repetitions of “for me” and “thing,” give a sense of the disarming informality of the dictations. By 11:00, Twain had usually read the morning paper, and if some event grated on him sufficiently, he would pause in his reminiscences to talk about “the thing of new and immediate interest.” Newspaper clippings, fan letters, and transcripts of old speeches are planted throughout the shuffled narrative, which follows a slipstream of consciousness from Twain’s salad days as founding member of the prestigious Players Club to a recent speech in Carnegie Hall in support of Booker T. Washington to his boyhood antics in Hannibal, to name only a few of the destinations.

This approach leads to a certain amount of woolgathering and sentimentality—Twain is constantly brought up short by the fact that nearly everyone he’s talking about has died. But the Autobiography is enlivened by his uncanny ability to speak across the hundred-year divide and make us feel we’re at his bedside. “The events of life are mainly small events,” he tells us. “They only seem large when we are close to them.” Twain’s recollections, then, ceaselessly waver between those of a man passionately involved in the happenings of his time and those of the Preacher of Ecclesiastes, who knows that, sub specie aeternitatis, everything is vanity.

A few news items in particular bracingly interrupt the backward glances in this volume. Twain enjoys documenting John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s syndicated Sunday-school talks, and he’s wryly hilarious in observing the “theological gymnastics” that helped the Standard Oil heir mitigate Jesus’ injunction to “sell all thou hast and give it to the poor.” Also dominating the news cycle at the time was the “Mrs. Morris incident,” in which a woman petitioning President Roosevelt was roughly removed from the White House, provoking a maelstrom of ersatz outrage on her behalf for weeks. (“These unwarrantable and unnecessary brutalities demand an investigation,” a Texas congressman is quoted as saying in a New York Times clipping, in case you thought congressional grandstanding a present-day phenomenon.) Twain puts in his two cents on the matter, but he has a mordant awareness of the essential idiocy of the uproar. Soon we realize that Rockefeller’s pieties and the circus of the Morris incident are overshadowing pogroms against Russian Jews as well as the United States’s increasingly bloody engagement against a recalcitrant tribe of Philippine Muslims (called Moros). The latter conflict bursts back onto the front pages—and into Twain’s dictations—after the infamous Moro CraterMassacre, in which nearly 900 natives were killed, including women andchildren.

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Twain was an anti-imperialist, and he dulyrages against the battle. Butforeign wars and the triumphalism that surround them are, for him, merely another aspect of the whole appalling condition of humanity. It’s the sheep-like attentions of men, their tendency to be consumed by any foolish excitement even as death tolls mount behind them, and the preening regard with which they rate their concerns that draw from Twain his most toweringly Promethean laments:

A myriad of men are born; they labor and sweat and struggle for bread; they squabble and scold and fight; they scramble for little mean advantages over each other; age creeps upon them; infirmities follow; shame and humiliation bring down their prides and their vanities; those they love are taken from them, and the joy of life is turned to aching grief. The burden of pain, care, misery, grows heavier year by year; at length ambition is dead; pride is dead; vanity is dead; longing for release is in their place. It comes at last—the only unpoisoned gift the earth ever had for them—and they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence…. Then another myriad takes their place, and copies all they did and goes along the same profitless road, and vanishes as they vanished—to make room for another and another and a million other myriads to follow the same arid path, through the same desert and accomplish what the first myriad, and all the myriads that came after it accomplished—nothing!

Perhaps the signal advantage of Twain’s disordered chronology is that saturnine meditations like this can be bookended by altogether cheerful anecdotes. Strange as it may seem, on the whole there is a genial sweetness to Twain’s demeanor, a showman’s desire to make his audience smile despite it all. Twain had the masterpieces of Rousseau and Cellini in mind when he envisioned his Autobiography, but his true muse was his gifted daughter Susy, who died at 24 of spinal meningitis. Twain includes numerous passages of an extraordinary biography of him that she wrote when she was 13. Her death was the primary source of the disillusion on display in the just-quoted passage, but the whimsy and candor of her own charmingly rambling narrative is the example he tries to reproduce, as much as loss and sadness crowd upon him.

The web of all these winking tall tales, elegies, and thunderous denunciations begins to wrap itself around you—and then this volume unceremoniously ends. Twain was right in believing that this book could wake up from a slumber of a century without any loss in vigor, but what he could not have predicted was the incredibly inhospitable way his editors would publish it.

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The publication of the Autobiography is the work of an association called the Mark Twain Project, which has, it must be said, done yeomen’s service in making the mountains of Twain’s unpublished work available to readers while honoring Twain’s thorny, often vague posthumous demands. But in the process of producing this first volume, the Mark Twain Project spiraled out of control. There are six credited editors, led by Harriet Elinor Smith, who has gotten her name on the front cover. These editors were joined in their labor by 18 additional editors and board members.

Now, Twain was an outsized figure, to be sure, but he stands no chance against numbers like that. Inevitably, nearly half of this 743-page book—the introduction and explanatory notes—is written by the editors. Another 150 pages is given over to “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations,” Twain’s early abortive attempts at memoir-writing, which contain interesting things but which Twain himself dismissed as “random and spasmodic diaries.” The actual Autobiography does not begin until page 203; it goes on for a paltry 250pages; the second of the three volumes will be published sometime in the next two years. We’re not waiting on Twain any longer but rather his editors, and there doesn’t seem to be any earthly reason why.

These are massive intrusions, and the editors ought to have known that such intrusions would have made Twain dance with rage. (The Autobiography is hard on publishers: of Elisha Bliss, the savvy businessman who first made him a bestseller, Twain notes, “he was destitute of intelligence; his brain was a loblolly, and he had the gibbering laugh of an idiot.”) The trade edition of Volume 1, besides being a mere fragment of the whole, is too heavy to carry around and intimidatingly overgrown with reference material. It seems perversely designed to warn away its readers. The editors justify their boring Explanatory Notes by claiming that “they attempt to point out which of [Twain’s] statements are contradicted by historical evidence, providing a way to understand more fully how his memories of long-past events and experiences were affected by his imagination and the passage of time.” The head-scratching assumption here is that Twain’s imagination is something that needs oversight and correction. Were they not listening when he spoke about the great art of lying?

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The effect is to turn this living, breathing work into a museum piece. In that regard, maybe Twain did see his fate coming after all. In his blaspheming breakout work The Innocents Abroad (1869), he describes wandering endlessly through the “crumbling wonders of Rome…till sometimes we seemed moldering away ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless, and liable at any moment to fall prey to some antiquary and be patched in the legs and ‘restored’ with an unseemly nose and labeled wrong and dated wrong and set up in the Vatican for poets to drivel about and vandals to scribble their names on forever and forevermore.” His Autobiography has the hallmarks of a great work of literature, but it’s being entombed in a catacomb of citations andappendices. Let’s hope that in the succeeding volumes the editors will get out of its way.