“Genius” is a word people use to describe a phenomenon beyond their understanding, a way of  knowing or creating that seems superhuman. But surely dogged persistence, the single-minded pursuit of a cherished idea or goal that spans years — decades, even — is a facet of genius.

One thinks of Thomas Edison beavering away in his lab, chasing the fantasy of converting electricity into illumination. Although Edison is credited with inventing the incandescent lightbulb, there were at least twenty other credible lightbulbs on the market before Edison’s.

But Edison’s genius, in this case, took the form of dissatisfaction. He wanted a better, cheaper, more efficient, longer-lasting lightbulb, and he was relentless in his quest. By the time he was done, he’d tested over 6,000 natural and man-made fibers, looking for the one filament that would meet his requirements.

“Genius,” he famously pronounced, “is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.”

Of course, there are other kinds of genius, like the kind that endows a five-year-old Mozart with the ability to compose eerily advanced music.

But genius of the Edisonian variety seems more democratic — more deserved, in a way — on account of the work ethic that underlies it. 

The Wizard of Menlo Park poring over a fiber of carbonized bamboo may seem a world away from a writer hunched over his desk, but there are similarities.

There are the Mozarts of literature: prodigies, like the poets John Keats and Arthur Rimbaud, whose late adolescence produced great and lasting works. And then there are the Edisons, writers who suffer from a huge idea that sinks in its talons and doesn’t let go until its requirements are met.

For instance, Mark Twain. I was surprised to learn recently that Twain spent between three and seven years on each of his major novels. That seems to me like a reasonable amount of time, since it’s only slightly slower than my own pace – and I’m certainly no Mark Twain.

Seven years may seem like a long time to work on any one piece of writing, but Twain’s biggest project, clocking in at 500,000 words, or the equivalent of five ordinary novels, took no less than thirty-five years to write. And most of that time was spent figuring out the method of getting it down.

I’m referring to Twain’s autobiography, the first volume of which was published last year after lying in a vault for one hundred years, as stipulated in its author’s will.

Last December, after I’d been given Volume One as a gift, I wrote about the autobiography as one of the year’s literary triumphs, based on the scale of the achievement of compiling the thing in the first place, which was an exhaustive, decades-long process, part detective-work and part monumental construction. (You can find that column at the following Web address: http://www.matthewolshan.com/Op-Eds/Column-List.php?id=122)

I have a lot more reading ahead of me, but the story of how Twain came to write the autobiography is fascinating in itself. It reveals an author deeply dissatisfied with the status quo – that is, with the standard memoir, a list of events in a life told more or less chronologically – and determined to invent a new form, a new kind of autobiography that would reflect the inner man, not the outer. After all, the inner man is with us all our waking hours, whereas the outer man, who interacts with others and the world, only takes the stage from time to time.

A writer is always searching for his freedom, the combination of material and form that will unlock the word-horde. Twain’s 100-year ban on publishing was part of that freedom; i.e., not having to worry about offending contemporaries who might appear in the pages of his memoir.

But another kind of freedom eluded Twain’s attempts from 1870 to 1905: the ability to talk about himself with the ruthless honesty he admired in the memoirs of Rousseau and Casanova, his two favorite autobiographers. Part of the problem was cultural. The French were infinitely more comfortable with a man’s self-confessed “ugliness,” particularly the frank depiction of his sexuality.

But an even larger problem was his split identity: there was Samuel Clemens, the writer, and Mark Twain, his towering literary alter ego. Whose autobiography was it to be?

In fits and starts – over thirty years! — experimenting with forms ranging from diary to portrait to travel writing to humorous sketch, Twain wrestled with his life’s story. Finally, in 1906, when he was just past seventy, he struck on the magic combination of method and content.

First, the method: he would dictate his memoir to a stenographer, rather than write it down himself. Talking his life, rather than writing it, would let him range across the material at the speed of conversation, with a live audience in the form of a trusted secretary who could give him instantaneous feedback.

Complementing this new method would be a radical departure from the linear memoirs of the past. In his own words, the right way to do an autobiography was to “start at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it at 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.”

Anyone who has been trapped by a free-associating elderly relative knows that this isn’t always the recipe for an enjoyable afternoon.

But in the hands of a master, whether it be Mark Twain or Marcel Proust, who hit upon a similar methodology for fictionalizing his life experience in the novels that comprise In Search of Lost Time, you’re in for a dip in a vast, sometimes sleepy, sometimes wild, sea of consciousness.

This column was published in the Perry Co Times on 29 September 2011

For more information, please contact Mr. Olshan at writing@matthewolshan.com