Autobiography of mark twain, volume 1 mark twain

All texts by Mark Twain in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 have been published previously, by permission of the Mark Twain Foundation, in the Mark Twain Project’s Microfilm Edition

THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

VOLUME 1

The Mark Twain Project is an editorial and publishing program of The BancroftLibrary, working since 1967 to create a comprehensive critical edition of everything

Mark Twain wrote

This volume is the first one in that edition to be published simultaneously in print

and as an electronic text at http://www.marktwainproject.org The textualcommentaries for all Mark Twain texts in this volume are published only there

THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS

Robert H Hirst, General Editor

Board of Directors of the Mark Twain Project

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF

MARK TWAIN

VOLUME 1HARRIET ELINOR SMITH, EDITOR

Leslie Diane Myrick

A publication of the Mark Twain Project

of The Bancroft Library

Frontispiece: Photograph by Albert Bigelow Paine, 25 June 1906, Upton House, Dublin, New Hampshire

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions For more information, visit http://www.ucpress.edu

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 Copyright© 2010, 2001 by the Mark Twain Foundation All Rights Reserved Transcription, reconstruction, and creation of the texts, introduction, notes, and appendixes Copyright© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California The Mark Twain Foundation expressly reserves to itself, its successors and assigns, all dramatization rights in every medium, including without limitation, stage, radio, television, motion picture, and public reading rights, in and to the Autobiography of Mark Twain and all other texts by Mark Twain in copyright to the Mark Twain Foundation.

All texts by Mark Twain in Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 have been published previously, by permission of the Mark Twain Foundation, in the Mark Twain Project’s Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Literary Manuscripts Available in the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library, University of California Berkeley (Berkeley: The Bancroft Library, 2001), and some texts have been published previously in one or more of the following: Albert Bigelow Paine, editor, Mark Twain’s Autobiography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924); Bernard DeVoto, editor, Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940); Charles Neider, editor, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published for the First Time (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959) Unless otherwise noted, all illustrations are reproduced from original documents in the Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

MARK TWAIN PROJECT® is a registered trademark of The Regents of the University of California in the United States and the European Community.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Twain, Mark, 1835–1910

[Autobiography]

Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 / editor: Harriet Elinor Smith;

associate editors: Benjamin Griffin, Victor Fischer, Michael B Frank, Sharon K Goetz, Leslie Diane Myrick

p cm — (The Mark Twain Papers)

“A publication of the Mark Twain Project of The Bancroft Library.”

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-26719-0 (cloth : alk paper)

1 Twain, Mark, 1835–1910 2 Authors, American—19th century—Biography I Smith, Harriet Elinor II Griffin, Benjamin, 1968– III Fischer, Victor, 1942– IV Frank, Michael B V Goetz, Sharon K VI Myrick, Leslie Diane VII Bancroft Library VIII Title.

PS1331.A2 2010

818’.4’0924—dc22 2009047700

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 50% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO z39.48–1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Editorial work for this volume has been supported by a generous gift to the MarkTwain Project of The Bancroft Library from the

KORET FOUNDATION

and by matching and outright grants from the

NATIONAL ENDOWMENT

FOR THE HUMANITIES,

an independent federal agency

Without that support, this volume could not

have been produced

The Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley, gratefullyacknowledges generous support from the following, for editorial work on theAutobiography of Mark Twain and for the acquisition of important new documents:

The University of California, Berkeley, Class of 1958

Members of the Mark Twain Luncheon Club

The Barkley Fund

The Mark Twain Foundation

The Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation forPublic Giving

Lawrence E Brooks

Helen Kennedy Cahill

Kimo Campbell

Virginia Robinson Furth

The Herrick Fund

The Hofmann Foundation

The House of Bernstein, Inc

Robert and Beverly Middlekauff

The Renee B Fisher Foundation

The Benjamin and Susan Shapell Foundation

Jeanne and Leonard Ware

Patricia Wright, in memory of Timothy J Fitzgerald

and

The thousands of individual donors over the past fifty years

who have helped sustain the ongoing work

of the Mark Twain Project

The publication of this volume has been made possible by a gift tothe University of California Press Foundation by

WILSON GARDNER COMBS FRANK MARION GIFFORD COMBS

in honor of

WILSON GIFFORD COMBS

BA 1935, MA 1950, University of California, Berkeley

MARYANNA GARDNER COMBS

MSW 1951, University of California, Berkeley

University of California Press gratefully acknowledges the support of

John G Davies

and the Humanities Endowment Fund of the UC Press Foundation

List of Manuscripts and Dictations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

Note on the Text

Word Division in This Volume

References

Index

Photographs

LIST OF MANUSCRIPTS

AND DICTATIONS

Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations, 1870–1905

1870 [The Tennessee Land]

1877 [Early Years in Florida, Missouri]

1885 The Grant Dictations

The Chicago G.A.R Festival[A Call with W D Howells on General Grant]

Grant and the ChineseGerhardt

About General Grant’s Memoirs[The Rev Dr Newman]

1890,

1893–94 The Machine Episode

1897 Travel-Scraps I

1898 Four Sketches about Vienna

[Beauties of the German Language]

[Comment on Tautology and Grammar]

1900 Scraps from My Autobiography From Chapter IX

1900 Scraps from My Autobiography Private History of a Manuscript

That Came to Grief

1903 [Reflections on a Letter and a Book]

1903 [Something about Doctors]

1904 [Henry H Rogers]

1905 [Anecdote of Jean]

Except for the subtitle “Random Extracts from It” (which Clemens himselfenclosed in brackets), bracketed titles have been editorially supplied for works thatClemens left untitled.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN

1906 An Early Attempt1897–98 My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]

1906 The Latest Attempt

1906 The Final (and Right) Plan

1906 Preface As from the Grave

1904 The Florentine Dictations

[John Hay]

Notes on “Innocents Abroad”

[Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]

[Villa di Quarto]

1906 Autobiographical Dictations, January–March

9 January 7 February 8 March

10 January 8 February 9 March

11 January 9 February 12 March

1 February 26 February 28 March

6 February 7 March

Intensive editorial work on the Autobiography of Mark Twain began some six yearsago and will continue for several more years But the collective skills and expertise thathave allowed us to solve the daunting problems posed by this manuscript came graduallyinto existence over four decades of editorial work on Mark Twain We therefore thank theNational Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, both for itsthree most recent outright and matching grants over the last six years, and for its patient,generous, and uninterrupted support of the Mark Twain Project since 1966 At the sametime and with the same fervor, we thank the Koret Foundation for its recent generousgrant in support of editorial and production work on the Autobiography, all of which hasgone (or will go) to satisfy the matching component of the Endowment’s recent grants tothe Project

For additional continuing support of work on the Autobiography and for help inacquiring important original documents for the Mark Twain Papers, we thank thoseinstitutions and individuals listed on page ix The Mark Twain Project has been sustainedover the years in so many ways by so many people that we are obliged, with regret, tothank them as one large group rather than by individual names For donations to sustainour work, ranging from five dollars to five million dollars, we here thank all our loyal andgenerous supporters Without their support, the Project would long ago have ceased toexist, and would certainly not be completing work on the Autobiography at this time

Recent efforts have been made to create an endowment to support the present andfuture work of the Mark Twain Project, and we want to acknowledge those efforts here.First and foremost we thank all the members of the University of California, Berkeley,Class of 1958, led by Roger and Jeane Samuelsen, Edward H Peterson, and Don andBitsy Kosovac, who recently created an endowment of $1 million dedicated to the MarkTwain Project We thank each and every member of the Class for their far-seeing wisdomand generosity To that endowment fund we may now add, with renewed gratitude,contributions from the estate of Phyllis R Bogue and the estate of Peter K Oppenheim

Instrumental in all recent fund-raising for the Project has been the Mark TwainLuncheon Club, organized ten years ago by Ira Michael Heyman, Watson M (Mac)Laetsch, and Robert Middlekauff Their leadership has been unflagging and indispensable,and we thank them for it and for a thousand other forms of help We also thank all of theClub’s nearly one hundred members for their loyal financial and moral support of theProject, and on their behalf we extend thanks to the several dozen speakers who haveagreed to address the Luncheon Club members over the years Our thanks also go toDave Duer, director of development in the Berkeley University Library, for his continuingwise and judicious counsel, and for his unprecedented efforts to raise financial support forthe Project Last but not least we want to thank the Berkeley campus as a whole forgranting the Project relief from indirect costs on its several grants from the Endowment

We are grateful for this and all other forms of support from our home institution

We thank the staff of the University Library and The Bancroft Library at Berkeley,

especially Thomas C Leonard, University Librarian; Charles Faulhaber, the James D HartDirector of The Bancroft Library; and Peter E Hanff, its Deputy Director, all of whomserve on the Board of Directors of the Mark Twain Project To them and to the othermembers of the Board—Jo Ann Boydston, Laura Cerruti, Don L Cook, Frederick Crews,Michael Millgate, George A Starr, G Thomas Tanselle, and Lynne Withey—we areindebted for multiple forms of moral and intellectual support.

Scholars and archivists at other institutions have been vital to editorial work on thisvolume Barbara Schmidt, an independent scholar who maintains an invaluable website(www.twainquotes.com) for Mark Twain research, tops our list when it comes toinformation and documentation freely and generously volunteered For this particularvolume she also provided us with photocopies of important original documents notpreviously known to us Kevin Mac Donnell, an expert dealer and collector of Mark Twaindocuments, has as always been generous in sharing his extensive collection Photographsand other documentation were also provided by the following, to whom we express ourthanks: Lee Brumbaugh of the Nevada Historical Society, Reno; Christine Montgomery ofThe State Historical Society of Missouri, Columbia; Patti Philippon of the Mark TwainHouse and Museum, Hartford; and Henry Sweets of the Mark Twain Boyhood Home andMuseum, Hannibal At our own university, we are grateful to Dan Johnston of the DigitalImaging Laboratory for generating superb digital files from negatives of rare photographs

We would also like to thank the following archivists who generously assisted us in ourresearch: Louise A Merriam of the Andersen Library, University of Minnesota; EvaGuggemos of the Beinecke Library at Yale University; and Kathleen Kienholz of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Letters, New York Patricia Thayer Muno and James R.Toncray contributed important information about their families

We are grateful for the tireless help of Kathleen MacDougall, our highly skilled copyeditor and project manager at UC Press, who contributed much to the accuracy of theeditorial matter and was a guiding hand at every stage of the production process Wethank Sandy Drooker, who designed the book and the dust jacket with her usualconsummate skill As of old, we again thank Sam Rosenthal, who expertly supervised theprinting and binding process, and Laura Cerruti, our sponsoring editor, whose enthusiasmand support for this edition were essential to its publication

All volumes produced by the Mark Twain Project are the products of complex andsustained collaboration The student employees listed on page iii as Contributing Editorscarried out much of the preliminary work of transcribing, proofreading, and collating thesource documents that form the basis of the critical text Associate editors BenjaminGriffin, Victor Fischer, and Michael B Frank contributed to every aspect of the editorialwork They carried out original research for and drafted much of the annotation, andhelped with the painstaking preparation and checking required to produce accurate texts,apparatus, and index Associate editors Sharon K Goetz and Leslie Diane Myrick broughttheir unmatched technical expertise and innovative programming to bear on thechallenge of publishing this edition simultaneously in print and on Mark Twain ProjectOnline (www.marktwainproject.org) None of us would be able to edit as we do withoutthe Project’s administrative assistant, Neda Salem, who skillfully held the bureaucracy at

bay and patiently answered the myriad requests for information and copies of documentswhich the Project receives from scholars and the general public.

We wish to express special gratitude to my colleague Lin Salamo, who retired fromthe Project before this volume was completed After more than two decades of dedicatededitorial work, she contributed to this edition what is arguably her most significantprofessional accomplishment—reassembling and analyzing the hundreds of typescriptpages that make up the Autobiographical Dictations Her research was the indispensablekey to our new understanding of Mark Twain’s plan for his autobiography

H E S

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L Clemens) tried repeatedly, and atlong intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscriptbefore he had made much progress By 1905 he had accumulated some thirty or forty ofthese false starts—manuscripts that were essentially experiments, drafts of episodes andchapters; many of these have survived in the Mark Twain Papers and two other libraries

To some of these manuscripts he went so far as to assign chapter numbers that placedthem early or late in a narrative which he never filled in, let alone completed None dealtwith more than brief snatches of his life story

He broke this pattern in January 1906 when he began almost daily dictations to astenographer He soon decided that these Autobiographical Dictations would form thebulk of what he would call the Autobiography of Mark Twain Within a few months hereviewed his accumulation of false starts and decided which to incorporate into the newerdictation series and which to leave unpublished By the time he had created more thantwo hundred and fifty of these almost daily dictations (and written a final chapter inDecember 1909, about the recent death of his daughter Jean), he had compiled morethan half a million words He declared the work done, but insisted that it should not bepublished in its entirety until a hundred years after his death, which occurred less thanfour months later, on 21 April 1910

This belated success with a project that had resisted completion for thirty-five yearscan be traced to two new conditions First, he had at last found a skilled stenographerwho was also a responsive audience—Josephine S Hobby—which encouraged him toembrace dictation as the method of composition, something he had experimented with asearly as 1885 Second, and just as important, dictating the text made it easier to follow astyle of composition he had been drifting toward for at least twenty years As he put it inJune 1906, he had finally seen that the “right way to do an Autobiography” was to “start

it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk onlyabout the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interestthreatens to pale, and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that hasintruded itself into your mind meantime.”1

Combining dictation and discursiveness in this bold way was unexpectedly liberating,

in large part because it produced not a conventional narrative marching inexorablytoward the grave, but rather a series of spontaneous recollections and comments on thepresent as well as the past, arranged simply in the order of their creation The problem ofmethod had been solved It was also liberating to insist on posthumous publication, butthat idea had been around from the start and was closely tied to Clemens’s ambition totell the whole truth, without reservation As he explained to an interviewer in 1899: “Abook that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he couldsecure in no other way In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly

as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons orgrandsons.” Posthumous publication was also supposed to make it easier for Clemens to

confess even shameful parts of his own story, but that goal proved illusory In that same

1899 interview he admitted that a “man cannot tell the whole truth about himself, even ifconvinced that what he wrote would never be seen by others.”2

But if delaying publication failed to make him into a confessional autobiographer, itdid free him to express unconventional thoughts about religion, politics, and the damnedhuman race, without fear of ostracism In January 1908 he recalled that he had long had

“the common habit, in private conversation with friends, of revealing every privateopinion I possessed relating to religion, politics, and men”—adding that he would “neverdream of printing one of them.”3 The need to defer publication of subversive ideasseemed obvious to him “We suppress an unpopular opinion because we cannot affordthe bitter cost of putting it forth,” he wrote in 1905 “None of us likes to be hated, none of

us likes to be shunned.”4 So having the freedom to speak his mind (if not confess his sins)was still ample justification for delaying publication until after his death

Seven months after he began the Autobiographical Dictations in 1906, however,Clemens did permit—indeed actively pursued—partial publication of what he had so faraccumulated He supervised the preparation of some twenty-five short extracts from hisautobiographical manuscripts and dictations for publication in the North American Review,each selection deliberately tamed for that time and audience, and each prefaced by anotice: “No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime ofthe author.”5 But not long after Clemens died, his instruction to delay publication for ahundred years began to be ignored—first in 1924 by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain’sofficial biographer and first literary executor, then in 1940 by Paine’s successor, BernardDeVoto, and most recently by Charles Neider in 1959

Each of these editors undertook to publish only a part of the text, and none ventured

to do so in the way that Clemens actually wanted it published Paine began his volume edition with all but a handful of the manuscripts and dictations carried out before

two-1906, as well as several texts that were probably never part of those early experiments

He arranged all of them “in accordance with the author’s wish in the order in whichthey were written, regardless of the chronology of events.”6 It now seems clear thatPaine’s understanding of “the author’s wish” was mistaken: Clemens never intended toinclude all those false starts, let alone in chronological order; he intended only thedictations begun in 1906 to be published that way But having chosen this course, Painethen had space for only a relative handful of the dictations And on top of that, he feltobliged to suppress or even alter certain passages without notice to the reader Heeventually acknowledged that he had published only about one-third of what he regarded

as the whole text.7

DeVoto was critical of Paine’s acceptance of “the arrangement Mark Twain originallygave” the dictations, “interspersed as they were with trivialities, irrelevancies, newspaperclippings, and unimportant letters—disconnected and without plan.” Instead he chose toprint only passages that Paine had left unpublished, drawn from “the typescript in whicheverything that Mark wanted in his memoirs had been brought together” (that is, theAutobiographical Dictations begun in 1906) DeVoto then arranged the selections bytopic, “omitting trivialities and joining together things that belonged together.” And he

said with great satisfaction that he had “modernized the punctuation by deletingthousands of commas and dashes, and probably should have deleted hundreds more.” Hewas confident that he had “given the book a more coherent plan than Mark Twain’s” and

he was unapologetic about having “left out” what seemed to him “uninteresting.”8

Neider, too, was unhappy with Paine’s acceptance of Mark Twain’s plan to publish theautobiography “not in chronological order but in the sequence in which it was written anddictated What an extraordinary idea! As though the stream of composition time were insome mysterious way more revealing than that of autobiographical time!”9 Neider hadpermission from the Mark Twain Estate to combine some thirty thousand words from theunpublished dictations with what Paine and DeVoto had already published Like DeVoto,

he omitted what he disliked, and was also obliged to exclude portions that Clara ClemensSamossoud (Clemens’s daughter, by then in her eighties) disapproved of publishing Hethen (figuratively) cut apart and rearranged the texts he had selected so that theyapproximated a conventional, chronological narrative—exactly the kind of autobiographyMark Twain had rejected

The result of these several editorial plans has been that no text of the Autobiography

so far published is even remotely complete, much less completely authorial It istherefore the goal of the present edition to publish the complete text as nearly aspossible in the way Mark Twain intended it to be published after his death That goal hasonly recently become attainable, for the simple reason that no one knew which parts ofthe great mass of autobiographical manuscripts and typescripts Mark Twain intended toinclude In fact, the assumption had long prevailed that Mark Twain did not decide what

to put in and what to leave out—that he left the enormous and very complicatedmanuscript incomplete and unfinished

That assumption was wrong Although Mark Twain left no specific instructions (noteven documentation for the instructions that Paine professed to follow), hidden within theapproximately ten file feet of autobiographical documents are more than enough clues toshow that he had in fact decided on the final form of the Autobiography, and which of thepreliminary experiments were to be included and which omitted This newly discoveredand unexpected insight into his intentions is itself a story worth telling, and it is told forthe first time in this introduction

Three printed volumes are planned for this edition, which will also be published in full

at Mark Twain Project Online (MTPO) Exhaustive documentation of all textual decisionswill only be published online.10 This first volume begins with the extant manuscripts anddictations that must now be regarded as Clemens’s preliminary efforts to write theautobiography and that he reviewed and rejected (but did not destroy) in June 1906.They are arranged arbitrarily in the order of their date of composition, solely becauseClemens himself never specified any order Some of these texts he explicitly labeled

“autobiography,” and some are judged to be part of his early experiments on othergrounds, always explained in the brief headnotes that introduce them We include thosepreliminary texts for which the evidence is reasonably strong, without asserting that therewere no others

The Autobiography of Mark Twain proper begins on p 201 in this volume, starting

with the several prefaces Clemens created in June 1906 to frame the early manuscriptsand dictations he had selected as opening texts, followed by his almost dailyAutobiographical Dictations from 9 January through the end of March 1906—all that willfit into this volume The dictations are arranged in the chronological order of theircreation because that is how Clemens instructed his editors to publish them Theremaining volumes in this edition will include all the dictations he created between April

1906 and October 1909, likewise arranged chronologically, the whole concluding with the

“Closing Words of My Autobiography,” a manuscript about the death of his youngestdaughter, Jean

PRELIMINARY MANUSCRIPTS AND DICTATIONS

Autobiographical Fiction and Fictional Autobiography

Autobiography as a literary form had a special fascination for Mark Twain Long before

he had given serious thought to writing his own, he had published both journalism andfiction that were, in the most straightforward way, autobiographical From the earliestjuvenilia in his brother’s Hannibal, Missouri, newspaper (1851–53) to his personal brand

of journalism in Nevada and California (1862–66), he played endlessly with puttinghimself at the center of what he wrote Twenty years and nine books later, in October

1886, he acknowledged (and oversimplified) the result: “Yes, the truth is, my books aresimply autobiographies I do not know that there is an incident in them which sets itselfforth as having occurred in my personal experience which did not so occur If theincidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, & the result would

be an autobiography.”11 He was thinking of his travel books and personal narratives—TheInnocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi—the onlybooks up to that point in which he set forth anything “as having occurred” in his ownexperience To be sure he also made extensive fictional use of that experience Thefactual basis of characters and situations in works like The Gilded Age, The Adventures ofTom Sawyer, and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been thoroughly documented, andthe autobiographical content is obvious in dozens of shorter works like “The PrivateHistory of a Campaign That Failed” and “My First Lie and How I Got Out of It,” even whenthey are not entirely factual.12

More germane to Clemens’s thinking about his own autobiography is his interest infictional autobiography—that is, fictions in the shape and form of an autobiography MarkTwain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography was written in late 1870 and published in pamphletform in March 1871 Mark Twain tells us that his own parents were “neither very poor norconspicuously honest,” and that almost all of his ancestors were born to be hanged—andfor the most part were hanged An even briefer “burlesque” called simply “AnAutobiography” appeared in the Aldine magazine in April 1871: “I was born November

30th, 1835 I continue to live, just the same.”13 The whole sketch takes fewer than twohundred words and pointedly leaves the reader as ignorant of the facts as before.

Burlesque implies familiarity with genuine autobiographies, despite what Clemenstold William Dean Howells in 1877 (“I didn’t know there were any but old Franklin’s &Benvenuto Cellini’s”) Benjamin Franklin’s didactic bent made him a lifelong target ofMark Twain’s ridicule But he thought Cellini’s autobiography the “most entertaining ofbooks,” and he admired the daring frankness of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions andGiovanni Giacomo Casanova’s Mémoires, as well as Samuel Pepys’s Diary, which Painesaid was the book Clemens “read and quoted most.”14

In 1871 he proposed writing “an Autobiography of Old Parr, the gentleman who lived

to be 153 years old,” but apparently he never did so.15 In the summer of 1876 he wrotefour hundred pages of a work he was then calling “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” And inMarch 1877, he told Howells he was writing such a work about his own older brother: “Ibegan Orion’s autobiography yesterday & am charmed with the work I have started him

at 18, printer’s apprentice, soft & sappy, full of fine intentions & shifting religions & notaware that he is a shining ass.” He assigned various real incidents of Orion’s life andaspects of his character to an apprentice named Bolivar, and wrote more than a hundredpages before abandoning the project.16

In 1880, Orion’s decision to write a real autobiography prompted Clemens to suggestthat he instead “write two books which it has long been my purpose to write, but I judgethey are so far down on my docket that I shan’t get to them in this life I think thesubjects are perfectly new One is ‘The Autobiography of a Coward,’ & the other

‘Confessions of a Life that was a Failure.’ ” The object here was not burlesque, but rather

a kind of thought experiment to test the difficulty of telling the whole truth in anautobiographical narrative—in this case, by shielding it behind a deliberate fiction

My plan was simple—to take the absolute facts of my own life & tell them simply

& without ornament or flourish, exactly as they occurred, with this difference, that Iwould turn every courageous action (if I ever performed one) into a cowardly one, &every success into a failure You can do this, but only in one way; you must banish allidea of an audience—for no man ^few men^ can straitly & squarely confess shamefulthings to others—you must tell your story to yourself, & to no other; you must notuse your own name, for that would keep you from telling shameful things, too

Another version of this scheme Clemens said was more difficult, to “tell the story of anabject coward who is unconscious that he is a coward,” and to do the same for “anunsuccessful man.”

In these cases the titles I have suggested would not be used This latter plan isthe one I should use I should confine myself to my own actual experiences (toinvent would be to fail) & I would name everybody’s actual name & locality &describe his character & actions unsparingly, then change these names & localities

after the book was finished To use fictitious names, & localities while writing is abefogging & confusing thing.

The inspiration for both of these ideas was obviously two autobiographies thatClemens admired

The supremest charm in Casanova’s Memoires (they are not printed in English)

is, that he frankly, flowingly, & felicitously tells the dirtiest & vilest & mostcontemptible things on himself, without ever suspecting that they are other thanthings which the reader will admire & applaud Rousseau confesses tomasturbation, theft, lying, shameful treachery, & attempts made upon his person bySodomites But he tells it as a man who is perfectly aware of the shameful nature ofthese things, whereas your coward & your Failure should be happy & sweet &unconscious of their own contemptibility.17

Clemens himself seems not to have attempted what he urged Orion to try, but it isobvious he was thinking about the challenge of writing with the perfect frankness headmired in these writers The question of how fully he could tell the truth about himself,and especially to what extent he could confess what he regarded as his own shamefulbehavior, occupied him off and on throughout work on the Autobiography

The First Attempts (1876 and 1877)

Clemens’s plan to write his own autobiography is more or less distinct from thesefictional uses of the form The first indication that he had such a plan survives only in thereport of a conversation that took place when he was forty Mrs James T Fields and herhusband were visiting the Clemenses in Hartford She recorded in her diary that at lunch,

on 28 April 1876, Clemens

proceeded to speak of his Autobiography which he intends to write as fully andsincerely as possible to leave behind him—His wife laughingly said, she should look itover and leave out objectionable passages—No, he said very earnestly almoststernly, you are not to edit it—it is to appear as it is written with the whole tale told

as truly as I can tell it—I shall take out passages from it and publish as I go along, inthe Atlantic and elsewhere, but I shall not limit myself as to space and at whateverever age I am writing about even if I am an infant and an idea comes to me aboutmyself when I am forty I shall put that in Every man feels that his experience isunlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down—he finds also thateverybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, andtherefore he should write it down.18

This remarkable statement shows that Clemens was already committed to severalideas that would govern the autobiography he worked on over the next thirty-five years.The notion is already present that publication must be posthumous, a requirement linked

to the ambition to have “the whole tale told as truly as I can tell it,” without censoringhimself or allowing others to do it for him He also plans to publish selections from thenarrative while still alive, withholding the rest “to leave behind him.” He will not limithimself “as to space,” but will be as digressive and discursive as he likes, even ignoringchronology when it suits him These cardinal points are clearly interrelated: absolutetruth telling would be made easier by knowing that his own death would precedepublication, and discursiveness (quite apart from his natural preference for it) would help

to disarm his own impulse toward self-censorship But it would take another thirty years

to actually apply these various ideas to a real autobiography

Just a year or so later, sometime in 1877, Clemens seems actually to have begunwriting, prompted (as he recalled in 1904) by a conversation with his good friend JohnMilton Hay Hay “asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t Hesaid that I ought to begin at once” (since the time to begin was at age forty, andClemens was already forty-two)

I had lost two years, but I resolved to make up that loss I resolved to begin myautobiography at once I did begin it, but the resolve melted away and disappeared

in a week and I threw my beginning away Since then, about every three or fouryears I have made other beginnings and thrown them away Once I tried theexperiment of a diary, intending to inflate that into an autobiography when itsaccumulation should furnish enough material, but that experiment lasted only aweek; it took me half of every night to set down the history of the day, and at theweek’s end I did not like the result.19

In late November 1877 Clemens listed “My Autobiography” among other projects in hisnotebook, reminding himself to “Publish scraps from my Autobiography occasionally.” Hedid indeed write an eleven-page manuscript at this time which he intended as the firstchapter of an autobiography—very likely the “beginning” that in 1904 he rememberedhaving thrown away He titled it merely “Chapter 1,” but it is commonly known as “EarlyYears in Florida, Missouri,” the title Paine assigned it.20 It begins, “I was born the 30th ofNovember, 1835”—the same way Clemens began his Aldine burlesque in 1871—and itgoes on to reminisce briefly about his early memories of childhood in that “almostinvisible village of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri.” Like “The Tennessee Land” (the onlyextant autobiographical fragment that was written earlier, in 1870) it ends somewhatabruptly, exactly as if the author’s interest had “melted away and disappeared.”

If Clemens did, as he says, make successive attempts to write the autobiography

“every three or four years” after 1877, few are known to survive.21 What we have insteadare such things as his advice in 1880 to Orion about his autobiography: “Keep in mindwhat I told you—when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do

not go back, but jam it in where you are Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography

in the least.”22

Clemens took between three and seven years to complete almost all of his majorbooks He required that much time chiefly because he always encountered stretchesduring which he was unable to proceed, and composition came to a complete halt Since

at least 1871 he had found it necessary, when his “tank had run dry” in this way, to

“pigeonhole” his manuscripts And he learned to resume work on them only after the

“tank” had been refilled by “unconscious and profitable cerebration.”23 But the time hespent on his earlier books is brief compared with the nearly four decades it took him tofinish his autobiography Its construction was certainly punctuated by long interruptions

as well, but for somewhat different reasons Until January 1906, the tank seemed to “rundry” after relatively brief stints of writing, or dictating, because he grew dissatisfied withhis method of composing the work, or with its overall plan, or both

General Grant and James W Paige (1885 and 1890)

In the spring of 1885 Clemens made his first attempt at doing an autobiography forwhich more than a few pages survive He had some previous experience with dictatingletters and brief memoranda to a secretary, but he had never tried it for literarycomposition.24 Now he decided that it might be a good way to work on theautobiography In late March he wrote in his notebook:

Get short-hander in New York & begin my autobiography at once & continue itstraight through the summer

Which reminds me that Susie, aged 13, (1885), has begun to write my biography

—solely of her own motion—a thing about which I feel proud & gratified At breakfastthis morning I intimated that if I seemed to be talking on a pretty high key, in theway of style, it must be remembered that my biographer was present WhereuponSusie struck upon the unique idea of having me sit up & purposely talk for thebiography!25

At about the same time, he realized that dictation might be of help to his friendUlysses S Grant Grant had written several articles for the Century Magazine’s series onthe Civil War In the spring of 1885, when he was dying of throat cancer, Grant was close

to completing the manuscript of the first volume of his two-volume Memoirs Clemens hadrecently secured them for his own publishing house, Charles L Webster and Co.,confident they would earn large profits both for Grant’s family and for himself As afrequent visitor to Grant’s New York house, Clemens knew that Grant feared dying before

he could finish his book He suggested that Grant hire a stenographer to ease his task.Grant at first demurred, but later hired a former secretary, Noble E Dawson On 29 AprilClemens visited Grant on his first day of dictation and learned that it “was a thorough

No doubt encouraged by Grant’s experience, in early May Clemens asked his friendand former lecture manager James Redpath to serve as his stenographer He liked andrespected Redpath, who had been a journalist and knew shorthand On 4 May 1885Redpath replied to Clemens’s proposal: “Now about the auto When I do work by theweek, I charge $100 a week for the best I can do I have had a run of ill-luck lately but Ifound that that was what I averaged It wd take you much less time than you think I getyou word for word & it takes a long time to write out.” Clemens accepted these terms andurged Redpath to come to Hartford soon “I think we can make this thing blamedenjoyable.” It is clear that he was beginning to intuit the need for a responsive, humanaudience when dictating—something he articulated quite clearly six years later in a letter

to Howells.27

The two men began working together sometime in mid-May and continued forseveral weeks In the six dictations that survive, Clemens traced the history of hisfriendship with Grant, then talked about his own protégé, the young sculptor KarlGerhardt, who had a commission to create a bust of Grant In the longest of thesedictations he launched into a detailed account of how he had acquired the right to publishGrant’s Memoirs, defending his tactics and countering newspaper insinuations that he hadacted unethically

Clemens probably stopped dictating shortly before Grant died on 23 July 1885.28 InJuly and August (and possibly earlier) Clemens read over some of the typescripts thatRedpath had created from his stenographic notes, adding his own corrections here andthere but making few changes in wording He found the result far from satisfactory, as heimplied in a letter to Henry Ward Beecher:

I will enclose some scraps from my Autobiography—scraps about Gen Grant—they may be of some trifle of use, & they may not—they at least verify known traits

of his character My Autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction &rotten grammar It is the only dictating I ever did, & it was most troublesome &awkward work.29

jack-Redpath’s work as an amanuensis was unskillful None of his stenographic notes areknown to survive, but his typescripts are manifestly ill-prepared—full of typing errors,struck-over characters, and extraneous marks—and his numerous penciled correctionscreate punctuation that is in no way characteristic of Clemens’s own habits

No manuscripts for the autobiography written between 1885 and 1890 have survived,but the project was certainly not forgotten In late 1886 as he worked on A ConnecticutYankee in King Arthur’s Court , Clemens wrote to Mary Mason Fairbanks: “I fully expect towrite one other book besides this one; two others, in fact, if one’s autobiography may becalled a book—in fact mine will be nearer a library.” His 1876 plan for a work not limited

“as to space” was evidently alive and well And in August 1887, two years after halting

the Grant Dictations, Clemens wrote to his nephew, “I want a perfect copy of Fred Grant’sletter, for my Autobiography I was supposing I had about finished the detailed privatehistory of the Grant Memoirs, but doubtless more than one offensive chapter must beadded yet, if Fred Grant lives.” A few months earlier he told another correspondent, “No,I’ll leave those details in my autobiography when I die, but they won’t answer for aspeech.”30

Then, in December 1887, Orion wrote to ask his brother’s permission to reveal

“something of your boyhood” in an upcoming interview with a local journalist He listed afew “points” he wanted to offer:

I thought of mentioning Grandpa and Grandma Casey; some younger and oldercharacteristics of ma (fondness for or tenderness for animals, &c.); pa’s studying lawunder Cyrus Walker; their marriage and removal to Tennessee; pa’s treatment of thestrange preacher about the cow; his facing down the old bully, Frogg; his settling adispute before him as justice of the peace with a mallet; your philosophicaldissatisfaction with your lack of a tail; your sleep-walking and entrance into Mrs.Ament’s room; your year’s schooling; your quitting at 11; your work in my office; yourfirst writing for the paper (Jim Wolf, the wash-pan and the broom); your going toPhiladelphia at 17 ; your swimming the river and back; ma’s complaint that youbroke up her scoldings by making her laugh; Pa’s death; his sharp pen writing for thepaper; her present age and vigor; fondness for theatre.31

Clemens had already used a number of these “points” in published work His makingwicked fun of Jim Wolf’s pointless rescue of a wash-pan and broom from the threat of afire next door was in fact his “first writing” for Orion’s Hannibal newspaper, “A GallantFireman” (1851).32 And in the first chapter of Tom Sawyer Aunt Polly (based on JaneClemens) had mildly complained that Tom knew that if he could “make me laugh,” heranger toward him would disappear Still, Clemens refused Orion’s request:

I have never yet allowed an interviewer or biography-sketcher to get out of meany circumstance of my history which I thought might be worth putting some dayinto my AUTObiography

I have been approached as many as five hundred times on the sketch lay, but they never got anything that was worth printing.33

biographical-Clemens would make use of only a few of these “points” in the autobiography But hisstinginess about letting others reveal the raw materials of his history is certainlyunderstandable, and it may suggest that at this time in 1887 he still intended to write anautobiography that would include these anecdotes from his early life

By the fall of 1890, Clemens had been investing money in the typesetting machineinvented by James W Paige for almost ten years (since 1881) It was, however, still notcompleted The relevance of this project to his autobiography was inescapable, and in the

“closing days” of that year he began to write “The Machine Episode,” an unsparingaccount of the way Paige had charmed and beguiled him into an enormous investmentwithout having yet achieved a salable product By the time Clemens added the secondpart to this self-revealing account, in the winter of 1893–94, Paige had still not perfectedthe machine but was about to sign a new, more satisfactory contract for it Left in arather unfinished state, the manuscript was very likely among those Clemens reviewed in

1906 before deciding to omit it from the final form He did return to the subject in anAutobiographical Dictation of 2 June 1906

Vienna (1897 and 1898)

Clemens’s hopes for the Paige typesetting machine were finally crushed in December

1894, and the bankruptcy of Webster and Company earlier that year had placed its debtssolely on his shoulders In the summer of 1895, in order to repay them, he, Olivia, andClara undertook a lecture tour around the world (Susy and Jean stayed at home), whichended when they arrived in England on 31 July 1896 The family landed at Southamptonand then traveled to Guildford, where they learned that Susy was ill in Hartford “Afortnight later Mrs Clemens and Clara sailed for home to nurse Susy,” Clemens recalled in

1906, and “found her in her coffin in her grandmother’s house.” Within weeks of thiscalamity Clemens wrote his friend Henry H Rogers that he intended to “submerge myself

& my troubles in work.” In the last week of September 1896 he reminded himself to

“Write my autobiography in full & with remorseless attention to facts & proper names.”34But he still needed to finish the book about his around-the-world lecture tour.35 Thefamily spent the winter and spring of 1897 in London while Clemens wrote Following theEquator, which would be published in November

In the summer of 1897 they retreated to Switzerland, and in late September theymoved to Vienna Two autobiographical manuscripts were begun that fall, “Travel-ScrapsI” and a much longer sketch called “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].”

“Travel-Scraps I” appears to be unfinished, or at least not quite ready for the typist, sinceClemens made a tentative revision of its title, in pencil (“Travel-Scra ps ^fromAutobiog^”) and the manuscript itself still has two sets of page numbers (1–20 and 1–28) It was probably written soon after Clemens arrived in Vienna, for it is largely acomplaint about London’s cab drivers and its postal service, things that would naturallyhave been on his mind since the spring

On the evidence of the paper and ink used, “My Autobiography [Random Extractsfrom It]” was begun about the same time, but probably not completed until 1898.Clemens identified the text as “From Chapter II.”36 (The first page of this manuscript isreproduced in facsimile in figure 1.) It begins as a history of the Clemens and Lamptonrelatives and ancestors and, more briefly, the despised Tennessee land But it meanders,without apology, into an anecdote about an incident in Berlin in 1891, and it ends with anevocative description of Clemens’s idyllic summers on his uncle’s farm near Florida,

Missouri This typical combination of early memories and later experiences helps to makeclear why Clemens would reject the idea of a completely chronological narrative: hispreference for juxtaposing related events from different times deeply resisted that way oforganizing his story At the same time, labeling the sketch “From Chapter II” implied thatmost of what it contained would come early in the autobiography, as would befit a review

of ancestors The chapter number suggests that while he was not writing about hisexperiences in the order of their occurrence, he was still making an attempt to assignchapter numbers that respected chronology

Before Clemens completed “Random Extracts” in 1898, he wrote several moresketches for the autobiography between February and June of that year, grouped hereunder the supplied title “Four Sketches about Vienna”: “Beauties of the GermanLanguage,” “Comment on Tautology and Grammar,” “A Group of Servants” (the only onethat Paine did not include in his edition), and “A Viennese Procession.” These were notreminiscences but rather more like entries in a diary, with each piece prefaced by a date.None of these sketches would be included in his final plan, but he did eventually includeanother manuscript written at this time, “Dueling,” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19January 1906

Two further sketches were written in the fall of 1898 and also later inserted into thefinal structure of autobiographical dictations The first was “Wapping Alice,” a taledeemed unsuitable for magazine publication, which was based on an actual event Itjoined a growing collection of manuscripts that Clemens would eventually draw on forwhat he called “fat”—“old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I or editorsdidn’t das’t to print”—that he would use to enlarge the bulk of the Autobiography.37 Morethan a year after he began dictating his autobiography in 1906, he inserted “WappingAlice” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 April 1907

The second sketch was “My Debut as a Literary Person,” which he dated “October 1,1898” and labeled “Chapter XIV.” The revision of this manuscript reflects a season ofdiscouragement about the autobiography, a mood that shows up sporadically during thewinter of 1898–99 Just below the title he first inserted a footnote: “This is Chapter XIV of

my unfinished Autobiography and the way it is getting along it promises to remain anunfinished one.” Then he changed “unfinished” to “unpublished” and canceled the wordsfollowing “Autobiography.” When the sketch appeared in the Century Magazine forNovember 1899, it omitted any reference to his autobiography Still, it is the first

“chapter” to be published in fulfillment of his long-held plan to publish selections from

it.38

FIGURE 1 The first page of the manuscript of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts fromIt].” Clemens deleted the epigraph shown here—two stanzas from The Rubáiyát of OmarKhayyám—and “From Chapter II” when revising the forty-four-page typescript (now lost)that was made from the manuscript; they are therefore omitted from the present text.Two notes at the top were written by Paine: “Vienna | 1897–8” and “no 109” (a filingdesignation) Rosamond Chapman, DeVoto’s assistant, wrote “Publ Auto, 81ff”—wherePaine published the text.

Clemens’s unsettled attitude toward his “unfinished” autobiography is clear, but notreadily explained On 10 October 1898, even as he was preparing “My Debut” formagazine publication, he told Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal,

A good deal of the Autobiography is written, but I never work on it except when

a reminiscence of some kind crops up in a strong way & in a manner forces me; so it

is years too early yet to think of publishing—except now & then at long intervals asingle chapter, maybe I intend to do that, someday But it would not answer for yourMagazine Indeed a good deal of it is written in too independent a fashion for amagazine One may publish a book & print whatever his family shall approve & allow

to pass, but it is the Public that edit a Magazine, & so by the sheer necessities of thecase a magazine’s liberties are rather limited For instance: a few days ago I wrote

Chapter XIV—“My Debut as a Literary Person”—my wife edited it, approved it (withenthusiasm—this is unusual), & said send it to you & retire the “PlatonicSweetheart.” It was a good idea, & I said I would But on my way to the villagepostoffice with it I remembered that it contained a sentence of nine words which youwould have to drive a blue pencil through—so that blocked that scheme.39

A month later, in a more ambitious frame of mind, he wrote to Rogers that he nowplanned to “take up my uncompleted Autobiography & finish it, & let Bliss and Chattoeach make $15,000 out of it for me next fall (as they did with the Equator-book).” Butalmost immediately he changed his mind about the need for money, and concluded that

he would “never write the Autobiography till I’m in a hole It is best for me to be in a holesometimes, I reckon.” Then, just a few days later, he wrote again to Rogers: “I haveresumed my Autobiography, and I suppose I shall have Vol 1 done by spring time I hope

so I expect so.” And at last, in February 1899, still trying to find a magazine publisher for

“My Debut,” he told Century editor Richard Watson Gilder: “I have abandoned myAutobiography, & am not going to finish it; but I took a reminiscent chapter out of it sometime ago & & had it copyrighted & had it type-written, thinking it would make a readablemagazine article.”40 So within the span of a few months he claimed that a “good deal” ofthe autobiography was written; that he would never finish it until he was “in a hole”; that

he expected to have the first volume “done by spring time”; and that he had “abandoned”

it altogether He was obviously struggling with how, or even whether, to proceed with awork that had been in and out of the pigeonhole for twenty years

Innumerable Biographies (1898 and 1899)

It is difficult to be entirely sure, but Clemens seems to have become discouraged atleast in part over his inability to be completely frank and self-revealing, after the fashion

of Rousseau and Casanova His solution was, at least temporarily, to recast theautobiography as a series of thumbnail biographies of people he had met over the years.Several autobiographical manuscripts written in Vienna—“Horace Greeley,” “Lecture-Times,” and “Ralph Keeler”—are character sketches that were part of this reconception,one that he also relied on to some extent in 1904 The Vienna portraits recall men andwomen whom he knew in his days on the lyceum circuit in the early 1870s The new planprobably owed something to the idea of a lecture he wrote back then called

“Reminiscences of Some un-Commonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet.” Hedelivered this lecture, which he said covered his “whole acquaintance—kings, humorists,lunatics, idiots & all,” only twice No text of it is known to survive, but in Vienna heevidently resurrected its premise.41 In an interview for the London Times in May 1899 thereporter explained:

Mr Clemens has kindly given me permission to telegraph to The Times some

particulars of a pet scheme of his to which he has already devoted a great deal of histime and which will occupy a great part of the remainder of his life In some respects

it will be unparalleled in the history of literature It is a bequest to posterity, in whichnone of those now living and comparatively few of their grandchildren even will haveany part or share This is a work which is only to be published 100 years after hisdeath as a portrait gallery of contemporaries with whom he has come into personalcontact These are drawn solely for his own pleasure in the work, and with the singleobject of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, without malice,and to serve no grudge, but, at the same time, without respect of persons or socialconventions, institutions, or pruderies of any kind

Clemens even spelled out exactly why he had abandoned his original plan for anautobiography: “You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it You are too muchashamed of yourself It is too disgusting For that reason I confine myself to drawing theportraits of others.” And in an interview after he returned to London, he said again thatthe new idea had actually supplanted his earlier ideas for the autobiography:

I’m not going to write autobiography The man has yet to be born who couldwrite the truth about himself Autobiography is always interesting, but howsoevertrue its facts may be, its interpretation of them must be taken with a great deal ofallowance In the innumerable biographies I am writing many persons arerepresented who are not famous today, but who may be some day.42

If this switch to biographical portraits signaled frustration over the puzzle of how totell even the shameful truths, his interest in it was still relatively brief We have noindication that he wrote any further portraits until 1904, and by 1906 the character-sketchidea had fallen entirely out of favor For about a year Clemens seems not to have addedanything to his accumulation of autobiographical “chapters.” In the fall of 1899 he movedhis family to London, and for about a year seems to have taken leave of theautobiography

Scraps and Chapters (1900 to 1903)

Clemens’s use of the terms “Scraps” and “Extracts” (as well as “Random”) in 1897–98suggests that he was looking for a way to label “chapters” which, while not themselvesstrictly chronological, might still have been parts of some coherent narrative sequence Inthe fall of 1900 he used the term “Scraps” in the titles of three more sketches for theautobiography: “Travel-Scraps II,” “Scraps from My Autobiography Private History of aManuscript That Came to Grief,” and “Scraps from My Autobiography From Chapter IX.”Only one of these made it into the final form: “Travel-Scraps II” continued the 1897

recital of grievances about London’s telephones and postal system and was ultimatelyinserted in the Autobiographical Dictation for 27 February 1907 “Scraps from MyAutobiography Private History of a Manuscript That Came to Grief” was much longer Itconcerned a recent experience with T Douglas Murray, an amateur historian, who hadinvited Clemens to write an introduction for an English translation of Joan of Arc’s trialrecords Clemens submitted his draft, and wrote Murray: “When I send the Introduction, Imust get you to do two things for me—knock the lies out of it & purify the grammar(which I think stinks, in one place.)”43 Murray took this invitation all too literally andproceeded to revise the text extensively, making the language more formal, evenpretentious Enraged by this tampering, Clemens proceeded to draft a reply in the shape

of a scathing letter to Murray, which of course he never sent, preparing it instead for theautobiography.44 The third manuscript, also excluded from the final form, neverthelessillustrates a rather different dynamic, namely the persistent reluctance or inability tobreak entirely free from the chronological structure of conventional autobiography Themanuscript was titled (as revised) “Selections ^Scraps^ from my Autobiography Passages

rom Chapter IX.” Paine thought it was written “about 1898” but it was in fact written in

1900, as one reference in the text makes clear The assignment of a chapter number issomething that it shares with only a handful of other manuscripts, summarized in thefollowing list

fourteen in both Chapter IV and Chapter IX, but between Chapter IX and Chapter XIV heaged from fourteen to thirty, and then to age sixty-two by Chapter XVII Still, this roughapproximation is exactly what one would expect if the chapter numbers were onlyestimates, intended to place the chapters in approximate chronological order Togetherthey again suggest that although he was not writing about his life in the order of itsoccurrences, he was still trying to maintain an overall chronology, even as late as 1903.

The text numbered “Chapter IX” (“Scraps from My Autobiography,” written in 1900)

is suggestive in a related way The chapter number would place it relatively early in hislife It recounts two stories from Clemens’s youth, when he was fourteen (1849–50), but

it concludes each story with much later events—the first in Calcutta in 1896 when he wassixty-one, and the second in London in 1873 when he was thirty-eight In both cases itseems that to follow the stories to what Clemens regarded as their natural conclusion, itwas necessary to skip over several decades of his life So whatever else “Chapter IX” was

in 1900, it was not a purely chronological account—even though the chapter numberplaced it toward the beginning of the narrative

A similar tension occurs in the two manuscripts with chapter numbers written in 1903but revised in 1906 after Clemens had settled on discursiveness as the principle for thewhole autobiography: both were inserted into the dictations for 1, 2, and 3 December

1906 In 1903 he titled the first one “Scraps from My Autobiography From Chapter IV,”and began it with a marginal date (“1849–51”) It concerns his youthful encounters withmesmerism in Hannibal The second 1903 manuscript, paginated separately but probablywritten at the same time (they share the same ink and paper), brought this story to itsconclusion It is another story about mesmerism, in which a haughty aristocrat isembarrassed by being hypnotized and ordered to undress, in retaliation for his incredulity.Clemens originally titled it “From Chapter XVII.” But when he decided to use themanuscripts in the December dictations, he removed all reference to chapter numbers Sothe first mesmerism story was originally assigned to Chapter IV, and its naturalconclusion to Chapter XVII, separated by some twelve putative chapters Their revisionshows that in 1903 Clemens was still wrestling with the compulsion to maintain somesemblance of his life’s chronology, while in 1906, when he made the manuscripts into onecontinuous narrative, he had clearly shed that compulsion

On 15 October 1900 the family arrived in New York City, where they soon rented ahouse at 14 West 10th Street “Jean is learning to type-write,” Clemens wrote a friend, “&presently I’ll dictate & thereby save some scraps of time.”45 Jean’s new skill may haveprompted Clemens to think again of dictating, rather than writing, the autobiography.There were other temptations as well The president of Harper and Brothers, GeorgeHarvey, was clearly interested in the prestige that would flow from having the rights topublish the autobiography, even though it would not actually appear until long after bothmen had died On 17 October 1900 Harvey proposed to Rogers (who was acting asClemens’s agent) to “publish the memoirs in the year 2000” and suggested that Clemens

“insert a clause in his will to the effect that the memoirs shall be sealed without reading

by his executors, and deposited with a trust company.”

The agreement would, of course, provide for publication in whatever modesshould then be prevalent, that is, by printing as at present, or by use of phonographiccylinders, or by electrical method, or by any other mode which may then be in use,any number of which would doubtless occur to his vivid imagination, and would form

an interesting clause in the agreement.46

Harvey was in fact eager to make Harper and Brothers into Clemens’s exclusiveAmerican publisher, and on 14 November, after much discussion, he proposed a rate oftwenty cents a word for the exclusive serial rights to anything he might write in the nextyear, as well as the exclusive right to publish all of his books in the same period Oneweek later Clemens wrote to Harvey, “Let us add the 100-year book to the arrangementsagain, & make it definite; for I am going to dictate that book to my daughter, with thecertainty that as I go along I shall grind out chapters which will be good for magazine &book to-day, & not need to wait a century.” Nothing dictated to Jean at this time hasbeen found, but Clemens soon agreed to Harvey’s “proposal regarding the publication of

my memoirs 100 years hence,” although no formal contract for the autobiography wassigned at this time.47

In August 1902, Olivia’s health grew alarmingly worse Despite temporaryimprovements, it continued to decline, and in 1903, on the recommendation of herdoctors, Clemens decided to take the family to Italy In early November they settled intothe Villa di Quarto near Florence In addition to Clemens himself, the travelers includedOlivia, Clara, and Jean Three employees were also with them: longtime family servantKaty Leary, a nurse for Olivia, and Isabel V Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’ssecretary but had since assumed more general duties

The Florentine Dictations (1904)

During his eight-month stay in Florence Clemens made unusual progress on theautobiography, in large part because of a renewed enthusiasm for dictation as a method

of composition He had experimented with mechanical methods of transferring words topaper ever since the dictations to Redpath in 1885 In 1888 he tried (and failed) to getaccess to one of Thomas Edison’s recording phonographs.48 Then in 1891 he suffered anattack of rheumatism in his right arm and, compelled by the necessity of working on hiscurrent book (The American Claimant), he did briefly experiment with the phonograph “Ifeel sure I can dictate the book into a phonograph if I don’t have to yell I write 2,000words a day; I think I can dictate twice as many,” he wrote to Howells on 28 February.But by 4 April he had concluded that the machine “is good enough for mere letter-writing”but

you can’t write literature with it, because it hasn’t any ideas & it hasn’t any gift forelaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is

just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil.

I filled four dozen cylinders in two sittings, then found I could have said about asmuch with the pen & said it a deal better Then I resigned I believe it could teachone to dictate literature to a phonographer—& some time I will experiment in thatline.49

His expectation in December 1900 of relying on Jean to type up dictatedautobiography at last became a reality in January 1904, when he tried dictating oncemore, but not to a machine According to Isabel Lyon,

About January 14, Mr Clemens began to dictate to me His idea of writing anautobiography had never proved successful, for to his mind autobiography is likenarrative & should be spoken At Mrs Clemens’s suggestion we tried, and Mr.Clemens found that he could do it to a charm In fact he loves the work But we havehad to stop for he has been ill, Mrs Clemens has been very ill, & I too have taken aweary turn in bed.50

Lyon did not know shorthand and so took down Clemens’s words in full, then gaveJean her record to be typed Shortly after he had begun to dictate, Clemens wrote toHowells on 16 January:

I’ve struck it! And I will give it away—to you You will never know how muchenjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography; then you willrealize, with a pang, that you might have been doing it all your life if you had onlyhad the luck to think of it And you will be astonished (& charmed) to see how liketalk it is, & how real it sounds, & how well & compactly & sequentially it constructsitself, & what a dewy & breezy & woodsy freshness it has, & what a darling &worshipful absence of the signs of starch, & flatiron, & labor & fuss & the otherartificialities! Mrs Clemens is an exacting critic, but I have not talked a sentence yetthat she has wanted altered There are little slips here & there, little inexactnesses,

& many desertions of a thought before the end of it has been reached, but these arenot blemishes, they are merits, their removal would take away the naturalness of theflow & banish the very thing—the nameless something—which differentiates realnarrative from artificial narrative & makes the one so vastly better than the other—the subtle something which makes good talk so much better than the best imitation

of it that can be done with a pen

It seems that he recognized Lyon’s lack of shorthand as an advantage, for he went on

to urge Howells to try this method, but “with a long-hand scribe, not with a stenographer

At least not at first Not until you get your hand in, I should say There’s a good deal ofwaiting, of course, but that is no matter; soon you do not mind it.” More important even

than the leisurely pace was the scribe’s role as audience: “Miss Lyons does the scribing, &

is an inspiration, because she takes so much interest in it I dictate from 10 30 till noon.The result is about 1500 words Then I am a free man & can read & smoke the rest of theday, for there’s not a correction to be made.”

Dictation proved so congenial, in fact, that his opinion of the drafts and experiments

he had written over the years now began to change He continued to Howells:

I’ve a good many chapters of Auto—written with a pen from time to time & laidaway in envelops—but I expect that when I come to examine them I shall throwthem away & do them over again with my mouth, for I feel sure that my quondamsatisfaction in them will have vanished & that they will seem poor & artificial &lacking in color

One would expect dictated stuff to read like an impromptu speech—brokenly,catchily, repetitiously, & marred by absence of coherence, fluent movement, & thehappy things that didn’t come till the speech was done—but it isn’t so.51

Howells replied to this letter on 14 February, shrewdly raising a familiar issue (clearlynot for the first time)—the difficulty of telling the whole truth:

I’d like immensely to read your autobiography You always rather bewildered me

by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself But all of it? Theblack truth, which we all know of ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-browntruth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront? Even you wonttell the black heart’s-truth The man who could do it would be famed to the last daythe sun shone upon.52

Clemens had of course already reached the same skeptical conclusion He answeredHowells:

Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day’s dictating—taking this position: that

an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly ofextinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, withhardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between thelines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterestedspectator neither it nor its smell (though I didn’t use that figure)—the result beingthat the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.53

What those “safeguards” were remains unknown, since no copy of the “first day’sdictating” has survived The most one can say is that Clemens seems to have moved onfrom his despair at not being able to tell “the black heart’s-truth,” rationalizing that thattruth would emerge anyway, in spite of all his attempts to suppress it In a dictation

made in late January 1904 he hinted at the disinhibiting nature of talk:

Within the last eight or ten years I have made several attempts to do theautobiography in one way or another with a pen, but the result was not satisfactory,

it was too literary

With a pen in the hand the narrative stream is a canal; it moves slowly,smoothly, decorously, sleepily, it has no blemish except that it is all blemish It is tooliterary, too prim, too nice; the gait and style and movement are not suited tonarrative

Two years later, in mid-June 1906, he would look back on this time in 1904 as themoment he discovered free-wheeling, spoken narrative as “the right way to do anAutobiography.”54

Only six Florentine Dictations are known to survive Three of them are portraits offriends or acquaintances—“John Hay,” “Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas BaileyAldrich,” and “Henry H Rogers”—presumably products of the “portrait gallery” concept.Two are reminiscences: “Notes on ‘Innocents Abroad’ ” and a sketch (untitled) recallinghis first use of the typewriter The sixth is a complaint about the Villa di Quarto, thefamily’s current residence near Florence.55 It is the longest and the least polished, anextended diatribe about the rented villa and especially its hated owner, the CountessMassiglia Clemens concluded it by inserting an 1892 manuscript about the Villa Viviani,where the Clemenses had lived during an earlier, more enjoyable stay in Florence.Despite that moderating addition, the 1904 dictation is replete with fiery insults to thecountess—so much so that when, in May and June 1906, Clemens considered publishingselections of autobiography with S S McClure, he marked in blue pencil the offendingpassages on Jean’s typescript and wrote (on the verso of page 2), “Leave out that blue-penciled ^passage^ (& all blue-penciled passages[)] in the first edition,” and added,

“Restore them in later editions.”56

It is clear that there were Florentine Dictations that have not survived, at least not

as originally dictated In August 1906 Clemens said that he had created more than adozen “little biographies,” of which we have almost none

By my count, estimating from the time when I began these dictations two yearsago, in Italy, I have been in the right mood for competently and exhaustively feedingfat my ancient grudges in the cases of only thirteen deserving persons—one womanand twelve men It makes good reading Whenever I go back and re-read those littlebiographies and characterizations it cheers me up, and I feel that I have not lived invain The work was well done The art of it is masterly I admire it more and moreevery time I examine it I do believe I have flayed and mangled and mutilated thosepeople beyond the dreams of avarice.57

Only one such Florentine Dictation is known to survive: Clemens certainly “flayed”

the Countess Massiglia in “Villa di Quarto.” We can only guess who the “deserving” menwere by considering other evidence For example, in a letter of 29 January 1904 Clemensvented his anger toward Henry A Butters, head of the American Plasmon Company,whom he held responsible for his investment losses: “As soon as I get back we will pullButters into Court, & I guess we can jail him He occupies space enough in myAutobiography to pay back all he & his pimp have robbed me of.”58 But no such text from

1904 or earlier survives, and Butters is mentioned only in passing in the laterAutobiographical Dictations (On 31 October 1908, for example, Clemens described him

as “easily the meanest white man, and the most degraded in spirit and contemptible incharacter I have ever known.”) There are others who might have received harshtreatment in now-lost dictations from 1904 whose portraits were then “done over”between January and August 1906 Clemens scattered a few sarcastic remarks aboutCharles L Webster in the early 1906 dictations, then excoriated him at length in the onefor 29 May 1906 Other candidates include Daniel Whitford, Clemens’s attorney; James W.Paige, inventor of the failed typesetter; and of course Bret Harte.59

The Copyright Extension Gambit (1904 to 1909)

When Olivia died suddenly on 5 June 1904, Clemens’s interest in his autobiographyquite naturally evaporated, and in the next year and a half he wrote only one shortsketch for it, “Anecdote of Jean.” But before Olivia died, his new enthusiasm for dictatingthe autobiography gave rise to a scheme to provide income for the family he thoughtwould survive him (he was then sixty-eight) In the same January letter to Howells inwhich he enthused about dictation he described this new idea: “If I live two years thisAuto will cover many volumes, but they will not be published independently, but only asnotes (copyrightable) to my existing books Their purpose is, to add 28 years to the life ofthe existing books I think the notes will add 50% of matter to each book, & be someshades more readable than the book itself.”60

This notion was still alive almost a year after Clemens had begun his dictations toJosephine Hobby in January 1906 In December of that year he spoke of it to a reporter,who then summarized it in the New York Times:

As soon as the copyright expires on one of his books Mark Twain or his executorswill apply for a new copyright on the book, with a portion of the autobiography run as

a footnote For example, when the copyright on “Tom Sawyer” expires, a new edition

of that book will be published About one third of this new edition of “TomSawyer” will be autobiography, separated from the old text only by the rules or lines.The same course will be followed with each book, as the copyright expires

So far as possible the part of the autobiography will be germane to the book inwhich it appears

He is confirmed in this by the experience of Sir Walter Scott, from whom he got