Autobiography of Mark Twain

by Mark Twain

  183.42–43 Major J. B. Pond was alive in those days] James B. Pond died in 1903 (see AutoMT1, 600 n. 381.14, and AD, 20 Nov 1906, note at 280.17–20).

  186.34 Daguerre’s monumental invention] Artist and inventor Louis Daguerre (1757–1851) introduced the first commercially successful photographic process, the daguerreotype, in 1839.

  187.25 General Horace Porter] See AutoMT1, 631 n. 427.29–30.

  Autobiographical Dictation, 29 August 1906

  189.5–6 Chapter XXXI, where we quoted . . . a wronged and grieving western girl] See the Autobiographical Dictation of 18 June 1906. Like the earlier reference to “Chapter XLI” (AD, 27 Aug 1906), this mention of a chapter number has not been explained.

  189.13 Soldier Boy’s story] “A Horse’s Tale,” discussed in the note at 189.43–190.4.

  189.20 your story of the poor dog] “A Dog’s Tale,” which appeared in Harper’s Monthly in December 1903 (SLC 1903f).

  189.32 (Mrs) Lillian R. Beardsley] Lillian Robinson Beardsley (1867–1925) was born in Coventry, Connecticut; her husband was a clerk in a custom house (Rasmussen 2013, letter 165).

  189.43-190.4 The “Horse’s Tale” . . . distributed abroad in Spain] Clemens began “A Horse’s Tale” in September 1905 at the request of the actress and animal rights activist Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865–1932), who wrote:

  I have lain awake nights very often wondering if I dare ask you to write a story of an old horse that is finally given over to the bull-ring. The story you would write would do more good than all the laws we are trying to have made and enforced for the prevention of cruelty to animals in Spain. We would translate and circulate the story in that country. (Fiske to SLC, 15? Sept 1905, MTB, 3:1245–46)

  “I shall certainly write the story,” Clemens replied, and it was soon written—”not manufactured calmly but with an eight-day drive & rush,” as he told Clara. “For an 8-day job it isn’t a bad tale. Profitable, too—an average of $700 a day—for it is to go into the magazine—Jan. & Feb. numbers of Harper’s” (18 Sept 1905 to Fiske, CU-MARK; 1 Oct 1905 to CC, photocopy in CU-MARK; 6 Oct 1905 to CC, CU-MARK). Publication in Harper’s Monthly was delayed to August and September of 1906; the story was reprinted as a book in 1907 (see AD, 17 July 1906, note at 145.36–146.2). No Spanish translation or printing has been found, although Mrs. Fiske apparently “had thousands of ‘The Horse’s Prayer’ [sic] printed on water-proof paper and distributed” in Cuba (W.C.T.U. 1913, 205; SLC 1906h, 1907b).

  190.10–14 editor of Harper’s Bazar projected a scheme for a composite story . . . would take an interest in it or not] Elizabeth Jordan (1867–1947) was the editor in charge of Harper’s Bazar, but it was Howells who initiated the idea for the collaborative novel The Whole Family. Serialized from December 1907 to November 1908, it almost realized an interest Howells and Clemens had shared for many years. In 1876 they planned a “Blindfold Novelette”—or “Skeleton Novelette”—in which several writers would independently work up a story from the same basic outline and publish the results serially in the Atlantic Monthly, then edited by Howells. In April 1876 Clemens wrote out his treatment of the plot, which he called “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage,” and eventually handed it in to Howells. It remained unpublished, however, because Howells could not persuade enough authors to join the scheme. Clemens nevertheless couldn’t “seem to give up that idea,” as he told Howells in 1879, and in 1893 he wrote Olivia, “I mean to change the plan of the skeleton novelettes, & throw in a new detail or two which will be an improvement, I think. Pity, too; for if I kept to the old plan, my story is already written, & lies in pigeonholes at home” (15 Apr 1879 to Howells, Letters 1876–1880; 20 Oct 1893 to OLC, photocopy in CU-MARK). In May 1906, more than twenty years after their first discussions, Howells pitched The Whole Family to editor Jordan, offering to contribute the chapter in the persona of “the Father” and suggesting that Clemens “do the Small Boy” (Howells 1928, 2:224; June Howard 2001, 1, 13–15).

  190.23–32 Mr. Howells began the composite tale . . . Thus far, the boy has not applied to me] Clemens at first consented to contribute to The Whole Family, telling Jordan that the idea was “excellent” but that he would first need to see some of the other authors’ installments (notes by Lyon on Jordan to SLC, 29 May 1906, CU-MARK). Howells’s chapter was dispatched to him, as well as the second chapter—”The Maiden Aunt”—written by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1852–1930), a widely published author of novels and tales of New England life. But inspiration did not strike, and on 4 August Clemens resigned his charge. Jordan begged him to leave the matter open, however, and in December 1906 Harper’s Bazar was still advertising Mark Twain as one of the authors of The Whole Family (SLC 2001, 70–75; 4 Aug 1906 to Jordan, CU-MARK; Jordan to SLC, 10 Aug 1906, CU-MARK; June Howard 2001, 16–17).

  190.37–191.8 letters which were handed to me by a neighbor yesterday . . . letter No. 1] These semiliterate letters were shown to Clemens in August 1906 by Sumner B. Pearmain (1859–1941), a Boston stockbroker and Clemens’s neighbor in Dublin, New Hampshire (Roswell F. Phelps 1941; Lyon 1906, entries for 17 June and 29 Aug). Pearmain had excised the names of the writer (Jennie Allen) and the addressee (Anne Stockbridge). For the complete story, see the Autobiographical Dictation of 5 October 1906.

  191.11 Shevyott] That is, cheviot, a kind of wool cloth.

  191.12 passy menterry] That is, passementerie, decorative trimming or edging.

  192.15–18 Captain Ned Wakeman . . . I made two voyages with him, and we became fast friends] Edgar Wakeman (1818–75), once described by Clemens as “a splendidly uncultured old sailor, but in his own opinion a thinker by divine right,” was born not at sea (as Clemens claims at 192.24), but in Westport, Connecticut (24 Apr 1901 to Phelps, CtY-BR). He went to sea at the age of fourteen, and from 1850 was a steamship captain based in San Francisco. Clemens made just one journey with Wakeman, in 1866, on the America going from California to Nicaragua on the way to New York, and saw him thereafter only once, in 1868. But Wakeman was to inspire a whole crew of fictional or semifictional sea captains in Mark Twain’s works: Captain Waxman in his December 1866 letters to the San Francisco Alta California, Captain Ned Blakely in chapter 50 of Roughing It, Hurricane Jones in “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion” (1877–78), the Admiral in “The Refuge of the Derelicts” (1905–6), and Eli Stormfield, the hero of the long-gestating “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (see the note at 193.39–194.2). In December 1872 Clemens was instrumental in a successful campaign to relieve the ailing seaman’s financial distress; and he tried to help Wakeman find a publisher for his book, eventually issued posthumously as The Log of an Ancient Mariner (Edgar Wakeman 1878, 21, 30–31, 119–37; N&J1, 241–43; RI 1993, 331, 677–78 n. 331.10; FM, 157–248).

  192.37–38 he brought the murderer of his colored mate to trial in the Chincha Islands] Clemens’s notebook entry made during his 1866 voyage with Wakeman reads “Hanging the negro in the Chinchas.” This alludes to an incident of March 1858 when Wakeman was commanding the clipper ship Adelaide, anchored at Elide Island, off Mexico. A black sailor, William Williams, was accused of murdering the second mate, a white man; Wakeman was part of a group of ships’ officers and crewmen who sat in judgment on Williams and hanged him. (The Chinchas, off Peru, are guano islands, like Elide Island.) Clemens used the same phrase in an August 1868 letter to the Chicago Republican. Four years later, adapting Wakeman’s experience in chapter 50 of Roughing It, Clemens swapped the ethnicities of the accused and the dead man. Thereafter, he consistently recalled that Wakeman “hung the mate . . . for killing the negro,” rather than the other way around (18 Mar 1874 to OC, L6, 82–84). Wakeman was noted for his involvements with summary justice; he was a prominent vigilante in San Francisco’s early days, and was remembered in connection with more than one lynching (N&J1, 253, 336; SLC 1868b; RI 1993, 677 n. 331.10; “Tragedy at Elide Island. Homicide of Thomas P. Lewis and Lynching of William Williams,” San Francisco Bulletin, 12 Apr 1858, 3; “Coroner�
��s Inquest,” San Francisco Alta California, 14 June 1851, 4; “Our Ocean Commandery, No. 3. High-Handed Work of Capt. Wakeman,” Boston Journal, 2 Aug 1890, 5).

  193.7–24 When he was fifty-three . . . then the nautical paradise was complete] Wakeman was thirty-six when he met and married Mary E. Lincoln, one of the passengers aboard his ship, the SS New Orleans, en route from San Francisco to Panama. By his own account in The Log of an Ancient Mariner, his words on seeing the young lady sleeping in an armchair on deck were: “‘Gentlemen,’ I replied, ‘that is my wife; if, when she opens her eyes, she be not swivel-eyed and with all her head-rails rotted out, I shall marry that girl, if I kill eleven men before breakfast to get up an appetite.’ “They were married on 24 December 1854. In 1862 Wakeman built with his own hands the house in Brooklyn, California (later part of Oakland), where Mary and he would raise five children (“Births, Marriages and Deaths in California,” New York Times, 31 Jan 1855, 1; Edgar Wakeman 1878, 171–76, 227–28; Robert P. Wakeman 1900, 292; Bishop 1877, 450).

  193.31–37 when he died he left his family . . . Ralston, the banker, took the matter up and raised it in an hour] In 1872, when Clemens’s help was enlisted, Captain Wakeman had not died, but had suffered a disabling stroke. Clemens’s public appeal for $5,000 to pay off the mortgage on the Wakemans’ house was published on the front page of the San Francisco Alta California on 14 December 1872. The money was raised in a few days, thanks to the energetic solicitation of H. D. Bacon; banker William C. Ralston, mentioned by Clemens, also contributed (Ray B. Browne 1961, 322–24; “Success of the Wakeman Subscription,” San Francisco Bulletin, 27 Dec 1872, 3).

  193.39–194.2 he once told me of a visit which he had made to heaven . . . Howells and he said, “Publish it.”] In 1906 Clemens had been working on “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” for at least thirty-seven years, off and on, and considering (and rejecting) publication for nearly as long. Clemens said in an August 1868 letter to the Chicago Republican that he had heard Wakeman tell “his remarkable dream” while visiting with him in Panama City, sometime in late July (SLC 1868b). This precludes his having started to write his own version “in the first quarter of 1868,” but the first quarter of 1869 is plausible. Clemens worked on the tale fitfully until March 1878, at which time Howells urged publication of a newly reconceived version (with the addition, he suggested, of a preface by the dean of Westminster). In 1878–81, the bulk of the story (chapters 3 and 4) was written. Sometime in the 1880s, according to Joe Goodman, Clemens showed him those chapters and expressed the fear that publishing the story “might hurt his literary reputation; that the public wasn’t yet advanced enough for that sort of thing” (Goodman to Tufts, 12 July 1908, CU-MARK). The manuscript stayed “pigeonholed” until 1905–6, when Clemens added chapters 1 and 2, along with other passages whose intended position within the whole is unclear (23 Mar 1878 to OC, Letters 1876–1880; Baetzhold and McCullough 1995, 129–38).

  194.3–4 “The Gates Ajar,” a book which had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven] The Gates Ajar, by Massachusetts author Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911), was published in November 1868 and, according to Clemens, went “straight to the hearts of all the sentimental people with limited imaginations in the land” (SLC 1901–2). The afterlife is portrayed in this novel as an extension and perfection of earthly life—a conception that was criticized as unorthodox and materialistic; Bret Harte sneered, in a review which Clemens reprinted in the Buffalo Express, that Phelps’s heaven was “a place where little boys find the balloons that they lose on earth” (Harte 1869a, 293). The Gates Ajar was a tremendous commercial success, selling nearly 70,000 copies in its first decade and spawning three sequels (Elizabeth Stuart Phelps 1964, 124–25; BAL, 8:20865; 25 Aug 1869 to Stoddard, n. 2, Letters NP1; “The Great Novel of the Year!” Publishers’ Weekly, 13 Oct 1877, 449).

  194.17–18 I mean to put it into this Autobiography now.† It is not likely to see the light for fifty years, yet] On the typescript of this dictation Paine noted, “He changed his mind a year later—Stormfield was published both in j[our]nal & book form in 1907–8.” This would not necessarily preclude the text’s incorporation into the Autobiography; but in subsequent Autobiographical Dictations, Clemens’s references to “Captain Stormfield” assume that the reader has not read (or indeed heard of) it. The inference must be that at some point he rescinded his order to insert it; consequently it is not included in this edition (for the fullest text of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” see Baetzhold and McCullough 1995, 129–88). At the time he made the present dictation, it is clear that Clemens had not decided what to do with “Stormfield.” The footnote in which he says he has “just burned the closing two-thirds of it” is contradicted by the next day’s dictation (AD, 30 Aug 1906). His intention as declared here to let the work remain unpublished “for fifty years, yet” is at odds with the fact that he offered it at this time to George Harvey as an article for Harper’s Monthly. Harvey rejected the story as too controversial for religious sensibilities, and mildly scolded Clemens: “I’m sure it wouldn’t do to print it now and I guess you’re sure too, if you’ll tell the truth.” Yet a year later Harvey published it in Harper’s Monthly after all, and in 1909 the same text became Mark Twain’s last published book (Harvey to SLC, 7 Sept 1906, NN C; SLC 1907–8, 1909b).

  194.31–195.2 His guess was right, and the two men were inseparable . . . I have printed it in full in one of my books] In August 1874 Twichell traveled from New York to Peru, accompanying his friend Yung Wing, who was on a diplomatic mission. On 22 August he wrote Clemens from a steamship approaching Panama that he had met Captain Wakeman on board (CU-MARK):

  What a delicious old misanthrope he is—what an entertaining denunciator! And, oh Mark, what a titanic commentator on the Old Testament!! . . . The thought that you had heard the same fascinating and unspeakably amusing talk, added to my relish of it. But I mean to tell him before I say goodbye, or when I say goodbye that I am a minister. I think it will tickle him to recall certain of his remarks on the profession.

  Drawing on Twichell’s account of his conversations with Wakeman, Clemens worked up the rationalizing exposition of 1 Kings 18 (Elijah’s contest with the prophets of Baal), which he attributed to Captain Hurricane Jones in the second chapter of “Some Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion.” This sketch, first published in the Atlantic Monthly, was included in the collection The Stolen White Elephant, Etc. in 1882 (Courtney 2008, 151–52; SLC 1877–78, 1882b, 36–105).

  Autobiographical Dictation, 30 August 1906

  196.12–19 I had reached the middle of “Tom Sawyer” . . . When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-hole two years] Clemens had reached the end of what was ultimately chapter 18 when “the story made a sudden and determined halt.” On 4 September 1874 Clemens wrote to John Brown:

  I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time, now, on a book, (a story). . . . But night before last I discovered that that day’s chapter was a failure, in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution—enough blemishes to impair the excellence of almost any chapter—& so, I must burn up the day’s work & do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry. (SLC and OLC to Brown, L6, 221–25)

  Clemens canceled the last paragraph on manuscript page 500 (not 400 as claimed in this dictation) and destroyed the remainder of the chapter. He resumed work on the manuscript eight or nine months (not two years) later, completing it by 5 July 1875 (TS, 10–12, 505, 583 n. 148.30).

  196.28–32 “The Prince and the Pauper” struck work in the middle . . . a story of mine called “Which Was It?”] The composition of The Prince and the Pauper began in 1877 but was broken off in early 1878 when the Clemenses went to Europe; it was not resumed until 1880. A “dry interval of two years” in Connecticut Yankee has not been identified; work on the novel was intermittent between 1885 and 1889. The first phase of work on “Which Was It?” was in the summer and fall of 1899 while Cle
mens was living in London and Sanna (Sweden); he resumed work on it in 1900–1903, then abandoned it (P&P, 3–7; CY, 1–13; WWD, 177–78).

  196.39–42 “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” . . . “The Mysterious Stranger.”] “The Refuge of the Derelicts” and “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” are substantial but unfinished novels, written in 1905–6 and 1905 respectively, and left in manuscript at Clemens’s death (they have been published in FM, 157–248, and WWD, 430–553). “The Mysterious Stranger” is Clemens’s fourth and last attempt at a story about a boyish supernatural being who visits earth. The earliest treatment is discernible embedded in the second, which takes place in eighteenth-century Austria (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” 1897–1900); the third is set in nineteenth-century Missouri (“Schoolhouse Hill,” 1898). The last attempt, entitled in full “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” takes place in a fifteenth-century Austrian village and print shop. It was incomplete at the time of the present dictation; Clemens would add more than a hundred pages to the manuscript in 1908, but he still left it in an unfinished state (Tuckey 1963; MSM, 1–34).

  197.4–7 I carried it as far as thirty-eight thousand words . . . Tom Sawyer and Jim were the heroes of it] Clemens seems to allude to a story he worked on when his family was staying at York Harbor, Maine, in 1902. The manuscript is not extant and is known only from his correspondence, notebooks, and stray references. Set as usual in a fictionalized Hannibal, the book’s first section would take place during Huck and Tom’s youth; the second section was to portray them and their contemporaries fifty years later. Howells records that in August or September 1902 Clemens read aloud to him from “an admirable story” which was populated with “characters such as he had known in boyhood,” but which he later denied having written (Howells 1910, 90; Howells to SLC, 20 Oct 1902, CU-MARK, in MTHL, 2:747–48). From his notebooks it is clear that Clemens planned to work into this novel many of his own memories which had been, or would be, used in the Autobiography (Notebook 45, TS pp. 2, 13, 21, CU-MARK).