Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Volume 1

by Mark Twain

  This basic work flow remained in place for the next sixteen months. Clemens continued to revise his typescripts, censoring or “softening” them as needed. For example, he deleted the phrase “‘Stud’ Williams was his society name”; altered “Plasmon thieves” to “Plasmon buccaneers”; changed his description of “Dr. Meredith’s two ripe old-maid sisters” to “Dr. G.’s two middle-aged maiden sisters”; altered “a dying parishioner” to “a fictitious ailing parishioner”; and deleted “God forgive me.”101 The revised typescripts were sent to the Review and marked for house style by editor David A. Munro; after typesetting, the typescripts were returned to Clemens along with the galley proofs ready for correction. The editorial relationship was easygoing: Munro and Harvey offered very few substantive revisions, and Clemens often took a joking tone in his responses. He occasionally addressed remarks to Munro in the margins of the printer’s copy or the galley proofs; pressing matters might be handled by mail and telegram and, conceivably, by telephone.102

  Critical Reception and “Sunday Magazine” (1906 to 1908)

  Between September and December 1906 brief excerpts from the early North American Review “Chapters from My Autobiography” appeared in several newspapers, accompanied by a scattering of complimentary remarks. The New York Times, for example, reprinted the passage from the first installment (excerpted from “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]”) in which Clemens identified James Lampton as the real Colonel Sellers, commenting that the passage was “noteworthy” as an example of “honest self-revelation.” Two weeks later the Times remarked that the second installment, the “story of how G. W. Carleton refused Mr. Clemens’s first book and twenty years afterward called himself for so doing ‘the prize ass of the nineteenth century,’” was “a good story.”103 Other reprinted passages included the Florentine Dictation about Robert Louis Stevenson; the emotional descriptions of Olivia and Susy; the humorous episode about the burglar alarm in the Hartford house; and the essay about dueling.104 A reviewer in the Louisville, Kentucky, Courier-Journal (possibly its editor, Clemens’s lifelong friend and distant relative Henry Watterson) called the autobiography “delightful,” and while conceding that Clemens did not claim to be “strictly speaking a historian,” went on to correct the inaccuracies in his account of Jeremiah and Sherrard Clemens.105 The Washington Post characterized the installments as “filled with his gentle humor,” and an editor of Pearson’s Magazine noted:

  It is the old Mark Twain that speaks to us again, not the solemn reformer and critic whose heavy essays have so long afflicted a good-natured and affectionate public. . . . We see him frolicking with the creatures of his fancy, stirring the dust of their droll adventures and wagging his venerable head at their quaint sayings. And then we see him kneeling beside the graves of his wife and child, recalling their every look and word, and we forget the world’s great humorist, knowing only the father, the husband, the true American gentleman.106

  None of the notices of the autobiography found in contemporary newspapers and journals, however, offered any substantial critical commentary or analysis, and after the early months of 1907, the installments received little attention.

  For all Clemens’s insistence on publishing the Autobiography only long after his death, the excerpts in the North American Review were surprisingly important to him. Just how important became clear only when he realized how few readers had actually seen the magazine text. On 30 July 1907, nine months after the installments began, Lyon made the following entry in her journal:

  Evidently the N.A. Review is on very shaky legs, for the Colonel asked Mr. Clemens to wait for the autobiographical monies that are due him; to wait until the first of the year, for funds are low & he must borrow if he pays. It annoyed the King—for it is, as he says, “doing business through sentimental channels[”]—& he doesn’t like it atall. And it isn’t fair to the King.107

  One result of this problem was that between 27 October 1907 and 27 September 1908 the North American Review chapters were reprinted, with newly commissioned illustrations, as a series in the weekly “Sunday Magazine,” a supplement that was syndicated in many large-circulation newspapers. Harvey himself proposed the syndication, but he implied that greater circulation was his only concern, not how much money it made. Lyon noted on 6 September 1907 that Harvey

  got the King’s consent—his glad consent—to syndicate the autobiography in newspapers throughout the country & so the King will reach his “submerged clientele.” It will not bring him in a penny though. If any one gets anything it will be the Harpers & they will not get much for the newspapers do not pay much for matter—no matter how great—which has been already published. It will be a good advertisement for the King’s books though.108

  Clemens hoped that this syndication would expose his work to a very different class of readers. He was undoubtedly pleased, and he even praised his portrait by F. Luis Mora that accompanied the first installment reprinted in “Sunday Magazine.”109 Many years later, on 28 October 1941, the artist John Thomson Willing, who was the art editor of the Associated Sunday Magazines at the time of the syndication, wrote to an unidentified correspondent in response to a “request for Mark Twain stories”:

  I had charge of the serial issuing of his autobiography in the Sunday Magazine[,] a supplement to many important papers and aggregating nearly two million copies a week. This autobiography was first begun in The North American Review, edited by George Harvey,—published by Harper Bros Mr Clemens was much dissatisfied by the limited circulation of this Review and so arranged for the larger distribution of the newspapers. When I showed him the initial copy of our magazine with the heading Autobiography of Mark Twain as the title he turned to me and said “Barkis, you have left something out. It should have added ‘Hitherto confidentially circulated’”—referring to its having run in the Review—110

  Autobiography as Literature (1909)

  Not surprisingly, in 1907 and 1908 the intensity of Clemens’s interest in adding to the autobiography gradually abated. In each successive year the number of dictations declined by half, they became briefer, and the proportion of inserted clippings and other documents grew larger. By 1908 much of what he produced for the autobiography was actually original manuscript that he labeled as dictation. When on 24 December 1909 he wrote that because of Jean’s death “this Autobiography closes here,” he had in fact produced fewer than twelve new pages of typescript in the previous eight months.

  In 1910, after Clemens’s death, Howells reported in My Mark Twain that at some point Clemens had “suddenly” told him he was no longer working on the autobiography, although Howells was unclear whether Clemens “had finished it or merely dropped it; I never asked.” He also recalled that at the outset of his work Clemens had intended the autobiography to be “a perfectly veracious record of his life and period,” but he now admitted that “as to veracity it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.”111 Of course, by 1904 Clemens had already convinced himself, by experiment, that an autobiography “consists mainly of extinctions of the truth,” even if “the remorseless truth is there, between the lines.” And in April 1906 he had said in one of his dictations,

  I have been dictating this autobiography of mine daily for three months; I have thought of fifteen hundred or two thousand incidents in my life which I am ashamed of, but I have not gotten one of them to consent to go on paper yet. I think that that stock will still be complete and unimpaired when I finish these memoirs, if I ever finish them. I believe that if I should put in all or any of those incidents I should be sure to strike them out when I came to revise this book.112

  We have seen that in 1898 Clemens had been so discouraged by this insight that he (temporarily) decided to change the very nature of his autobiography. But there is good reason to suppose that by the time of his death he had reached a more enlightened understanding of what his or anyone else’s autobiography could accomp
lish. In mid-1909 he was asked whether his remarks about the Tennessee land as published in the North American Review were true. “Yes,” he replied, “literarily they are true, that is to say they are a product of my impressions—recollections. As sworn testimony they are not worth anything; they are merely literature.”113

  A hundred years have now passed since Clemens’s death. It certainly seems fitting that his plan for publishing the Autobiography of Mark Twain in its entirety should just now be recovered from his vast accumulation of papers, and that the Autobiography’s standing and value as “literature” be at last recognized. This edition, prepared by his editors (if not his “heirs and assigns”), relies on the eloquent evidence of historical documents to understand and carry out his wishes for this, his last major literary work. His long-standing plan to speak as truthfully as possible “from the grave” is no longer just a plan. And as Colonel Harvey predicted more than a hundred years ago, the Autobiography is being published both as printed volumes and “by electrical method,” a fact that would no doubt have appealed to Mark Twain’s “vivid imagination.”114

  Harriet Elinor Smith

  Mark Twain Project, Berkeley

  1. “The Latest Attempt,” one of the prefaces written to introduce the final form of the autobiography; see p. 220.

  2. “Mark Twain’s Bequest,” London Times, 23 May 1899, 4, in Scharnhorst 2006, 334. All of the abbreviations and short forms of citation used in these notes are fully defined in References.

  3. AD, 13 Jan 1908.

  4. “The Privilege of the Grave,” written in 1905, published in SLC 2009, 56.

  5. These words came at the end of the editorial note that preceded each of the twenty-five selections in the Review.

  6. MTA, 1:1. The following pre-1906 writings published by Paine in the autobiography did not meet the criteria for inclusion in this edition: “Jane Lampton Clemens” (1890; published in Inds, 82–92), “Macfarlane” (1894–95; published in WIM, 76–78), and “Henry H. Rogers (Continued)” (1909) (MTA, 1:115–25, 143–47, 256–65).

  7. Paine told a reporter in 1933 that the “complete autobiography . . . would fill about six volumes, including the two already published, and probably would not be made public for ‘many, many years’” (“Canard Blasted by Biographer of Mark Twain” New York Herald Tribune, 8 July 1933, clipping in CU-MARK).

  8. “Introduction,” Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), vi–ix; hereafter MTE.

  9. “Introduction,” The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Including Chapters Now Published for the First Time, arranged and edited, with an introduction and notes, by Charles Neider (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), ix, xvi, xx–xxiii; hereafter AMT

  10. MTPO (http://www.marktwainproject.org) is an open access website maintained by the Mark Twain Project in order to make all of its editions available online. Autobiography of Mark Twain is the first work to be published there simultaneously with the print edition, and the first to publish the textual apparatus only in electronic form.

  11. 8 Oct 1886 to Kate Staples, NN-BGC.

  12. SLC 1869a, 1872, 1880a, 1883, 1873–74, 1876, 1885a, 1885b, 1899e.

  13. SLC 1871a, 1871c.

  14. Howells had asked for suggestions for a series of “Choice Biographies.” 6 June 1877 to Howells, Letters 1876–1880; “The Late Benjamin Franklin,” SLC 1870c; Gribben 1980, 1:134, 241–43, 2:539–40; MTB, 3:1538.

  15. 18 Aug 1871 to OLC, L4, 446–47. He may have been reading Henry Wilson’s Wonderful Characters; Comprising Memoirs and Anecdotes of the Most Remarkable Persons of Every Age and Nation (1854). Among its subjects was Thomas Parr, who reputedly lived from 1483 to 1635.

  16. 9 Aug 1876 and 23? Mar 1877 to Howells, Letters 1876–1880. The manuscript is unfinished and untitled; Paine titled it “Autobiography of a Damned Fool” (SLC 1877b).

  17. 26 Feb 1880 to OC, Letters 1876–1880. Clemens would remember and rehearse his advice to Orion in his Autobiographical Dictation of 23 February 1906; see the note at 378.25–27 for a fuller account of Orion’s autobiography, which is now lost.

  18. Annie Adams Fields Papers, diary entry for 28 Apr 1876, MHi, published in Howe 1922, 250–51.

  19. See “John Hay,” note at 223.27–28, for a discussion of the possible date of this conversation. No such “diary” is known to survive, but some of the texts written in Vienna in 1898 have the look of diary entries. See “Four Sketches about Vienna.”

  20. N&J2, 50–51; MTA, 1:7.

  21. In 1940 DeVoto published a manuscript about Joseph H. Twichell’s encounter with a profane ostler which he described as “one of the random pieces that preceded Mark’s sustained work on the Autobiography,” suggesting that it was “probably written in the 1880s and at one time formed part of a long manuscript—I cannot tell which one” (MTE, 366–72). But this anecdote was not part of any draft of the autobiography. It was written for Life on the Mississippi (1883) and removed from the manuscript before publication.

  22. 6 May 1880 to OC, Letters 1876–1880.

  23. AD, 30 Aug 1906. Clemens said that he made this discovery while writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but there is good reason to suppose that he experienced the same difficulty in 1871 while writing Roughing It, even though he did not then know to “pigeonhole” the manuscript until the “tank” had refilled itself. See RI 1993, 823.

  24. Back in 1873 he had hired Samuel C. Thompson to accompany him to England as his secretary. Thompson was a novice at shorthand, and he was dismissed almost immediately when Clemens became dissatisfied with this “first experience in dictating.” He later explained, “I remember that my sentences came slow & painfully, & were clumsily phrased, & had no life in them—certainly no humor.” It also did not help that he found Thompson to be a humorless and unpleasant companion (N&J1, 517–18, Thompson’s notebook is on 526–71; “To Rev. S. C. Thompson,” SLC 1909a, 12). A later experiment with dictation came in the spring of 1882 when Clemens hired Roswell Phelps, a trained stenographer, to accompany him and James Osgood on their trip down the Mississippi. Phelps recorded Clemens’s (and others’) remarks at the time, but Clemens did not dictate to him when writing Life on the Mississippi (N&J2, 516–18, Phelps’s notebook is transcribed on 521–74).

  25. N&J3, 112. Clemens would eventually reproduce much of Susy’s biography in the final form of his autobiography, beginning with AD, 7 Feb 1906.

  26. Grant 1885a, 1885b, 1885c, and 1886; “Grant’s Last Stand,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 6 Feb 1894, unknown page; AD, 26 Feb 1906.

  27. Redpath to SLC, 4 May 1885, CU-MARK; 5 May 1885 to Redpath, MiU-H. See 4 Apr 1891 to Howells, NN-BGC, in MTHL, 2:641, quoted below in the section on the Florentine Dictations. Clemens’s earlier letter containing the proposal that Redpath accepted has not been found.

  28. 17 June 1885 to Pond, NN-BGC; 12 Sept 1885 to Redpath, CU-MARK.

  29. 11 Sept 1885 to Beecher, draft in CU-MARK. Beecher was then preparing a eulogy for Grant to be delivered in Boston on 22 October 1885, and had written Clemens for biographical information; in particular, he wanted to know if Grant had been “a drunkard for a time” (Beecher to SLC, 8 Sept 1885, CU-MARK).

  30. 16 Nov 1886 to Fairbanks, CSmH, in MTMF, 258; 3 Aug 1887 to Webster, NN-BGC; 3 and 4 Feb 1887 to Smith, ODaU (the “details” referred to have not been identified). Clemens returned to the topic of Grant’s Memoirs in the Autobiographical Dictations for 6 February, 28 May, 1 June, and 2 June 1906. The last of these included remarks about Fred Grant, but not his letter of 22 July 1887 (TS in CU-MARK), which disputed the accuracy of the financial statement from the Webster Company accountant.

  31. OC to SLC, 5 Dec 1887, typed copy of the original letter made by or for Paine, given to the Mark Twain Papers by Anne E. Cushman in 2004. The typescript reads “your mark in my office,” clearly a mistranscription.

  32. SLC 1851.

  33. 8 Dec 1887 to OC, NPV.

  34. AD, 4 June 1906; 20 Sept 1896 to Rogers, Salm, in HH
R, 237; Notebook 39, TS p. 4, CU-MARK.

  35. On 1 November he again wrote Rogers: “After I finish the present subscription book, I shall go straight on & clear out my skull. There are several books in there, & I mean to dig them out, one after the other without stopping. . . . One of them—my Autobiography—should be sold by subscription, I judge” (1 Nov 1896 to Rogers, Salm, in HHR, 243–44).

  36. Paine published it as “Early Days” (MTA, 1:81–115).

  37. 17 June 1906 to Howells, NN-BGC, in MTHL, 2:811.

  38. Clemens evidently revised the title again on the typescript (now lost) that he sent to the Century. See the editorial headnote to this manuscript.

  39. 10 Oct 1898 to Bok, ViU. The “too independent” words may have been “the bowels of some of the men virtually ceased from their functions” (143.35–36). Clemens had sent Bok “My Platonic Sweetheart” on 2 September, but Bok rejected it and soon Clemens himself decided against publishing it (Notebook 40, TS p. 32, CU-MARK; HHR, 365 n. 1, 373 n. 3).