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

by Mark Twain

  227.15–16 I wrote and sent the fifty letters . . . complete my contract] For Clemens’s list of the letters he thought he had written, and the number actually published, see 1–2 Sept 1867 to JLC and family, L2, 89–90 n. 1.

  227 footnote MacCrellish] Frederick MacCrellish (1828–82) went to California from Pennsylvania in 1852 and worked on two San Francisco newspapers, the Herald and the Ledger. In 1854 he became the commercial editor of the Alta California, and a part owner two years later (2? Mar 1867 to the Proprietors of the San Francisco Alta California, L2, 17 n. 1).

  228.3–6 Noah Brooks . . . praises of the generosity of the Alta people] Brooks (1830–1903) began his journalism career in Boston, and during the Civil War corresponded from Washington for the Sacramento Union. Clemens met Brooks in 1865 or 1866, when he was the managing editor of the Alta California. After returning East in 1871, Brooks worked for both the New York Tribune and the Times, and throughout his life wrote books on travel and history, as well as personal memoirs (7 Mar 1873 to Reid, L5, 313 n. 2). He is known to have written only one biographical sketch of Clemens: “Mark Twain in California,” published in the Century Magazine in 1898. His account of the dispute, however, defends Clemens, not the “Alta people”:

  During the summer of that year, while Clemens was in the Eastern States, there came to us a statement, through the medium of the Associated Press, that he was preparing for publication his letters which had been printed in the “Alta California.” The proprietors of that newspaper were wroth. They regarded the letters as their private property. Had they not bought and paid for them? Could they have been written if they had not furnished the money to pay the expenses of the writer? And although up to that moment there had been no thought of making in San Francisco a book of Mark Twain’s letters from abroad, the proprietors of the “Alta California” began at once their preparations to get out a cheap paper-covered edition of those contributions. An advance notice in the press despatches sent from California was regarded as a sort of answer to the alleged challenge of Mark Twain and his publishers. This sent the perplexed author hurrying back to San Francisco in quest of an ascertainment of his real rights in his own letters. Amicable counsels prevailed. The cheap San Francisco edition of the book was abandoned, and Mark Twain was allowed to take possession of his undoubted copyright, and his book of letters, entitled “The Innocents Abroad,” was published in the latter part of that year—1868. (Brooks 1898, 99)

  228.27–29 remark attributed to Disraeli . . . statistics.”] This remark was first attributed to British statesman and author Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) in the London Times on 27 July 1895. Although the quip appeared in print as early as 1892, it has not been traced with certainty to Disraeli. For a full discussion, see Shapiro 2006, 208.

  [Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Bailey Aldrich]

  228.30 Louis Stevenson] Clemens met Stevenson (1850–94) in April 1888. Ill with lung disease, Stevenson had spent the winter with his wife and stepson at a well-known health resort at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. He wrote to Clemens on 13 April, proposing that they meet in New York City, where he planned to stay from 19 to 26 April. Clemens, an admirer of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, was pleased when Stevenson wrote him that he had read Huckleberry Finn “four times, and am quite ready to begin again tomorrow” (13? Apr 1888, CU-MARK). Later in the year Stevenson left on a Pacific cruise, spending the rest of his life on various islands in the South Seas (15 and 17 Apr 1888 to Stevenson, CLjC; Baetzhold 1970, 203–6).

  229.6 I said that I thought he was right about the others] The “others” were presumably mentioned in the portion of the text that Clemens omitted, signaled by the line of asterisks. Another omission occurs below (at 229.22). The two gaps may have been part of the original 1904 typescript (now lost), but it is more likely that they were the result of Clemens’s revisions before it was retyped in 1906.

  229.7 Harte was good company and a thin but pleasant talker] See “Ralph Keeler,” note at 150.2–4. Clemens’s friendship with Harte had ended acrimoniously in 1877 with the failure of Ah Sin, the play on which they collaborated. In a later dictation Clemens explained that Harte’s character spoiled his “sharp wit,” which “consisted solely of sneers and sarcasms; when there was nothing to sneer at, Harte did not flash and sparkle” (AD, 4 Feb 1907; N&J3, 2).

  229.8 Thomas Bailey Aldrich] Aldrich (1836–1907), an immensely popular poet and novelist and a pillar of the New England literary establishment, grew up in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, which served as the setting for many of his literary works. In 1852, lacking the funds to attend Harvard, he moved to New York City to work as a clerk in his uncle’s business. He soon began to publish poems, and joined the editorial staffs of several journals. During 1861–62 he was a Civil War correspondent for the New York Tribune. He married Lilian Woodman in 1865 and moved to Boston, where in 1866 he became editor of the literary magazine Every Saturday, a post he held through 1874. He succeeded William Dean Howells as editor of the Atlantic Monthly in 1881, a position he retained until 1890. Clemens first met Aldrich, after some months’ correspondence, in November 1871, and the two enjoyed a lifelong friendship. Among Clemens’s tributes to Aldrich as a conversationalist is a remark recorded by Paine: “When Aldrich speaks it seems to me he is the bright face of the moon, and I feel like the other side” (MTB, 2:642 n. 1; 15 Jan 1871 to the Editor of Every Saturday, L4, 304 n. 1).

  229.28–31 “Davis’s Selected Speeches,” . . . I have forgotten] No such series of books by “Davis” has been found. Possibly Stevenson (or Clemens) misremembered the name of William Brisbane Dick (1826–1901), coproprietor of Dick and Fitzgerald, a publishing firm founded in 1858. Compilations of prose and poetry, as well as books for entertainment or self-improvement, bulked large in their catalog, which included Dick’s Recitations and Readings, American Card Player, Dick’s Comic Dialogues, Dick’s Irish Dialect Recitations, Dick’s Art of Wrestling, and Dick’s Society Letter-Writer for Ladies, all issued between 1866 and 1887. In 1867 Clemens himself had considered offering the publishers a collection of his Sacramento Union letters from the Sandwich Islands (Cox 2000, 85–86; N&J1, 176–77 n. 166).

  [Villa di Quarto]

  230.22 January] The first part of this dictation, through “under Providence” (237.8), survives in a typescript made by Jean Clemens in 1904 and revised by Clemens, now in the Mark Twain Papers. It is the only one of Jean’s Florentine typescripts known to survive.

  230.24 Villa Reale di Quarto] Olivia’s doctors having advised a milder climate, Clemens removed his family to this Tuscan villa in the autumn of 1903. The family party consisted of Samuel, Olivia, Clara, and Jean, together with Katy Leary, their longtime servant, and Margaret Sherry, a trained nurse. They left New York in the steamer Princess Irene on 24 October, arriving at Genoa on 6 November. They made their way by train to Florence and were installed in the Villa di Quarto by 9 November. Later that month they were joined by Isabel V. Lyon, who had been hired in 1902 as Olivia’s secretary, but had since assumed more general duties; Lyon’s mother accompanied her (MTB, 3:1209; Notebook 46, TS p. 28, CU-MARK; Hartford Courant: “Clemens Family at Genoa,” 7 Nov 1903, 15; “Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; before 1 Nov 1903 to Unidentified, CU-MARK).

  230.30 King of Würtemberg] After the collapse of the Napoleonic Empire in 1814, the Villa di Quarto was the home of Jérôme Bonaparte (1784–1860), Napoleon’s youngest brother and the former king of Westphalia. He was not the king of Württemberg, but his wife, Princess Catherine, was a daughter of Frederick I, the first king of Wiirttemberg (1754–1816).

  230.31 a Russian daughter of the imperial house] The Grand Duchess Maria Nicolaievna (1819–76), a daughter of Tsar Nicholas I, purchased the villa in 1865 (“The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10–13).

  230.35 Baedeker says it was built by Cosimo I, by [ ], architect] The typescript leaves a blank space for the name, and Clemens added the brackets, fulfilling his promise, fur
ther on in the text, to “suppress” the name of the architect (231.35–36). Clemens’s likely source of information, the 1903 Baedeker guide to northern Italy, stated that the Villa di Quarto was built by Niccolò Tribolo (1500–1550) for Cosimo I de’ Medici (1519–74), grand duke of Tuscany. Other sources indicate that the building dates from the preceding century (Baedeker 1903, 525; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10–13).

  231.13 Countess Massiglia] The Countess Massiglia (1861–1953), whom Clemens called “the American bitch who owns this Villa,” was born Frances Paxton, in Philadelphia (25–26 Feb 1904 to Rogers, Salm, in HHR, 557; U.S. National Archives and Records Administration 1950–54). She had been married and divorced before meeting Count Annibale Raybaudi-Massiglia, an Italian diplomat whom she married in about 1891. In addition to his remarks here, Clemens wrote about the countess in an unpublished sketch entitled “The Countess Massiglia” (SLC 1904a), and in his letters and notebooks. His only published mention of her during his lifetime was a glancing blow in a 1905 article, “Concerning Copyright” (Hartford Courant: “Mr. Clemens in Florence,” 9 Nov 1903, 1; “Twain and Countess at Law,” 22 Aug 1904, 7; “The Home of an American Countess in Italy,” Town and Country, Sept 1907, 10; SLC 1905b, 2). By a strange coincidence, Isabel Lyon had known the countess slightly

  in Philadelphia about 15 years ago. I came in contact with her because Mr. John Lockwood boarded with her mother at 20th & Cherry Streets. The mother was vicious; & the daughter who was then Mrs. Barney Campau, behaved abominably with Mr. Fred. Lockwood, ruining the happiness of that family. . . . When I saw her as I did the evening of the day that we arrived here—she of course said she had never seen me. I soon made it quite plain to her that she had— But enough— Here she remains, although she said she was going to spend the winter in Paris. She has furnished an apartment over the stables for herself & the big Roman steward of the place—& they two live there together to the annoyance of society. . . . Here she remains, a menace to the peace of the Clemens household, with her painted hair, her great coarse voice—her slitlike vicious eyes—her dirty clothes—& her terrible manners. (Lyon 1903–6, 36–38)

  233.23 contadini] Peasants, farmers.

  235.14 Blackwood] Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, a British literary monthly.

  236.29–30 without her witness was not anything made that was made] Compare John 1:3, “and without him was not any thing made that was made.”

  238.34 majestic view, just mentioned] Clemens deleted the passage mentioning the view, which originally ended the previous paragraph. It described a “charming room” from which “one has a far stretching prospect of mountain and valley with Florence low-lying and bunched together far away in the middle distance.”

  239.23–24 Professor Willard Fiske . . . Walter Savage Landor villa] Fiske (1831–1904) was a scholar of Northern European languages whom the Clemenses had met through their mutual friend Charles Dudley Warner. A seasoned traveler, Fiske twice helped the Clemenses with their arrangements to lease Florentine villas, in 1892 and 1903. Having inherited a vast fortune, in 1892 he purchased a villa that had once belonged to English poet and essayist Walter Savage Landor (1775–1864) (Horatio S. White 1925, 3, 393–95; “Like a Romance,” Hartford Courant, 27 May 1890, 3; see also AD, 10 Apr 1906).

  240.42–241.1 little shiny white cherubs which one associates with the name of Della Robbia] The Florentine sculptor Luca della Robbia (1400?–1482) was the principal member of a family of artists who specialized in the use of glazed terra cotta to decorate walls and ceilings.

  241.9 lesson in art lest the picture . . . perfection] At this point in the text Clemens dictated the following instruction to himself, “Here Insert Rhone Voyage.” He clearly referred to a manuscript entitled “The Innocents Adrift,” a highly fictionalized account of his ten-day boat trip down the Rhône River in September 1891. Clemens never finished it, but he continued to revise it and consider mining it for extracts; a brief one appears in chapter 55 of Following the Equator. In 1923, Paine published an abridged and rewritten version as “Down the Rhône.” Clemens probably did not intend to interpolate it in its entirety. He may have meant to use the section of it wherein his fictive fellow voyagers debate the proper qualifications for the appreciation of high art. But clearly he did not follow through on his intention (SLC 1891a; SLC 1923, 129–68; Arthur L. Scott 1963).

  242.22 our old Katy] Household servant Katy Leary had sailed with the Clemenses from New York in October 1903. At the time of this dictation she had been in their service for twenty-three years and had long been “regarded,” as Clemens wrote, “as a part of the family” (Notebook 39, TS p. 51, CU-MARK; see also AD, 1 Feb 1906).

  243.21 podere] Property, estate.

  244.29 a good friend, Mrs. Ross, whose stately castle was a twelve minutes’ walk away] Janet Duff Gordon Ross (1842–1927), the daughter of a baronet, lived at Poggio Gherardo, a villa that she and her husband had purchased in 1888. She enjoyed a wide social circle of writers and artists, and published several books of her own—a family biography, sketches of Tuscan life, and collections of autobiographical essays. She described her 1892 meeting with Clemens:

  In May our friend Professor Fiske, who lived near Fiesole, brought a delightful man to see us, Mr. Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. We at once made friends. The more we saw of him the more we liked the kindly, shrewd, amusing, and quaint man. He asked whether there was any villa to be had near by, and from our terrace we showed him Villa Viviani, between us and Settignano. I promised to get him servants and have all ready for the autumn. (Ross 1912, 318–19)

  244.31 year spent in the Villa Viviani] The Clemenses stayed at the villa from late September 1892 to late March 1893.

  244.35 When we were passing through Florence] The source of the text from here to the end is Clemens’s manuscript, now in the Mark Twain Papers.

  246.46 the Magnificent Lorenzo] Lorenzo de’ Medici, known as “the Magnificent” (1449–92), was the effectual ruler of Florence from 1469 to his death.

  Autobiographical Dictation, 9 January 1906

  250.19–21 you are going to collect from that mass of incidents . . . and then write a biography] Clemens was speaking to Albert Bigelow Paine (1861–1937), who planned to write his biography. Paine grew up in Iowa and Illinois, leaving school at fifteen. At twenty he went to St. Louis, where he worked as a photographer; several years later he operated a photographic supply business in Kansas. After one of his stories was accepted by Harper’s Weekly, he moved to New York in 1895, where he wrote for periodicals and published books for both children and adults. In 1899 he became an editor of St. Nicholas, a magazine for young people, and in 1904 published Th. Nast: His Period and His Pictures, the first of his many biographies. His Mark Twain: A Biography appeared in 1912, and was followed by editions of the Letters (1917), Autobiography (1924), and Notebook (1935). Paine explained in his edition of the autobiography:

  It was in January, 1906, that the present writer became associated with Mark Twain as his biographer. Elsewhere I have told of that arrangement and may omit most of the story here. It had been agreed that I should bring a stenographer, to whom he would dictate notes for my use, but a subsequent inspiration prompted him to suggest that he might in this way continue his autobiography, from which I would be at liberty to draw material for my own undertaking. We began with this understanding, and during two hours of the forenoon, on several days of each week, he talked pretty steadily to a select audience of two, wandering up and down the years as inclination led him, relating in his inimitable way incidents, episodes, conclusions, whatever the moment presented to his fancy. (MTA, 1:ix–x)

  Paine devoted a chapter of his biography to an account of his conversation with Clemens at The Players club dinner on 3 January 1906, and the “arrangement” they agreed on three days later (see MTB, 4:1257–66; AD, 10 Jan 1906). Clemens’s secretary, Isabel V. Lyon, made a note of their discussion in her diary on 6 January 1906
:

  Albert Bigelow Paine came this morning to talk over the matter of writing Mr. Clemens’s Biography—Mr. Clemens has consented to have some shorthander come & take down the chat that is to flow from Mr. Clemens’s lips—I hope it may prove inspirational—The commercial machine (Columbia Graphophonic) that Mr. Clemens was looking upon as a boon—hasn’t proved so—He dictated his birthday speech into it—and a few letters—but that is all—There is something infinitely sad in the voice as it is reproduced from the cylenders—and how strickening it would be to hear the voice of one gone—(Lyon 1906, 6)

  The “shorthander,” one of the “select audience of two” for the Autobiographical Dictations, was stenographer and typist Josephine S. Hobby (1862–1950), formerly a secretary to Mary Mapes Dodge, the editor of St. Nicholas magazine from 1872 until her death in 1905 (for the “birthday speech” see AD, 12 Jan 1906; Lyon 1906, 47, 71–72; “Aide to Mark Twain Dies,” New York Times, 31 Jan 1950, 21; see also the Introduction, pp. 25–27).

  251.19–29 I want to read . . . quoted six years later at $160,000,000] The article Clemens “read” from has not been found in the New York Times. His account is substantially confirmed by independent sources, however, including the astonishing rise in the 1874–75 stock prices (see Lord 1883, 309, 314–15). John W. Mackay (1831–1902) was born in Ireland and came to America as a boy. From 1851 until 1859 he was a miner in California and then moved to Nevada. In January 1872, in partnership with James G. Fair (1831–94), also originally from Ireland, and two others (see the note at 252.25), Mackay took control of the Consolidated Virginia mine, whose stock in the previous year had fallen below $2 per share. The “Big Bonanza” silver strike in the Consolidated Virginia and the adjacent California mine, made in October 1874, was ultimately valued as high as $1.5 billion (L6: 24 Mar 1875 to Bliss, 425 n. 2; 29 Mar and 4 Apr 1875 to Wright, 439 nn. 5, 9).