by Mark Twain
Revisions for magazine publication
Many of the changes that Clemens made on TS1, TS2, and TS3 were aimed at shortening, taming, or softening the texts selected for publication in the North American Review. These changes are not accepted into the edited text, on the grounds that Clemens was clear that they were temporary concessions to propriety, not permanent alterations to the text. Other changes were corrections or revisions made for purely literary reasons, and these are adopted. Very occasionally the two kinds of changes are intermixed, and in those cases we err on the side of caution, retaining the original uncensored version.
Dictated texts
Wherever works like the Autobiography were created solely by dictation, they pose all the usual problems of textual transmission plus some additional ones not native to manuscripts in the author’s hand. In a dictated text, unless the author has specified more than words while or before dictating (“use a semicolon not a period after that word”), the punctuation, spelling, emphasis, paragraphing, and many other small details simply never existed—only the inflections, gestures, and pauses of the author speaking and the grammatical structure of his sentences. It makes no sense to say that the author “intended” to spell a word in a certain way, since in speaking the word he may not have been thinking of any particular spelling at all. For some kinds of punctuation, like end-of-sentence periods and question marks, the speaker is more constrained by “rules” and probably comes a little closer to actually intending terminal punctuation, whereas the intended placement of commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, and so forth is less clear.
Of course Clemens did not dictate his autobiography in order to produce a text without punctuation. Unlike a public speech, where the authorially intended form is actually an oral performance, dictation was intended to result in a written record, in this case a double-spaced typescript that could be reviewed and corrected and ultimately published in the normal way. So to what extent should we accept the spelling, punctuation, and other details as typed by the stenographer who, we must assume, produced such details without specific instructions from the author? Clemens’s review and correction of the typescript made from Hobby’s stenographic notes (TS1) is some assurance that whatever he found wrong or misleading he corrected, but such assurance only goes so far, and his ability or willingness to scrutinize the transcript for such details was limited.
A dictating author and his stenographer collaborate to produce a text, and their respective contributions cannot easily be pried apart after the fact. To take a simple example, nowhere do Hobby’s typescripts record the kind of hesitation, reiteration, and self-correction that must have occurred even in Clemens’s slow and deliberate speech. By mutual though tacit agreement, such things were no doubt omitted, or silently repaired and smoothed over by the stenographer. Fortunately, in the case of Hobby, the collaboration was highly satisfactory to Clemens. Her stenographic notes are presumed lost, but the accuracy of her work can to some extent be judged from the resulting typescripts. They are double spaced (leaving room for revision and correction) and unfailingly neat; the rare typing errors are discreetly erased and corrected by her, with occasional doubtful spellings likewise identified by a lightly penciled question mark. And the number of corrections (as distinct from revisions) inscribed by Clemens is very small. There is some evidence that he trained Hobby to punctuate as he liked. Twenty months after dictation began, a journalist who visited Clemens reported that he “dictates slowly, using the semicolon mark, of which he is particularly fond, as frequently as possible. When the copy is handed to him by the stenographer it is almost always ready for the press, so few are the corrections to be made.”3 It is easy to find passages in the dictations that exemplify this pattern, in which the typist used semicolons where full stops would, to an uninstructed listener, seem the more natural punctuation.4 There is other evidence that Clemens actually dictated punctuation and other details. Almost forty years after his death, Lyon remembered that “Paine used to say when he was dictating he’d walk slowly up & down and say ‘period’ or ‘paragraph.’” And in 1908, when Hobby left Clemens’s employment and he had to break in a new stenographer, Mary Louise Howden, he took even more explicit control of these details. Howden herself recalled in 1925 that Clemens “put in the punctuation himself. His stenographer was never allowed to add so much as a comma.”5
Whether Clemens literally expressed the punctuation, described his preferences to Hobby, or expected her to learn his style more or less osmotically makes little difference: her punctuation of the typescripts is remarkably close to the use patterns found in Clemens’s holograph manuscripts. We know Hobby did learn from his corrections on the typescripts, eventually spelling “Twichell” and “Susy” correctly, for instance. Inevitably, when expanding her shorthand she sometimes mistyped slightly unusual words: “silver boring” for “silver bearing,” “visited” for “billeted,” and “driveling” for “drizzling.”6 But the author and the stenographer were remarkably well attuned to one another. As a result, Hobby’s spelling, punctuation, paragraphing, and so forth on TS1 (made directly from her notes), as well as her rare corrections of these details on any subsequent typescript, whether marked in her hand or introduced while typing, command assent. So, if TS1 lacks aparagraph break which was then supplied by Hobby when she created TS2, we adopt her change as a correction of the original typescript. On the other hand, when TS2 shows a change in wording not initiated by Clemens on TS1, the change is not accepted unless it is a necessary correction, one that would have been made by the editors whether or not Hobby made it. Most such small verbal differences between typescripts were obviously inadvertent.
Incomplete revision
Because Clemens never prepared any of the texts for actual typesetting and publication, it is not always possible to follow his instructions. For instance, to the dictation of 20 February 1906 Clemens added a note: “Insert, here my account of the ‘Hornet’ disaster, published in the ‘Century’ about 1898 as being a chapter from my Autobiography”—a reference to “My Debut as a Literary Person.”7 But if that bald instruction were carried out, the resulting text would be both self-contradictory, because it would still include the remark “I will go no further with the subject now,” and deeply puzzling, because it would contain a very long and rather irrelevant digression. Similarly, he noted in the dictation of 12 January 1906, “(Here paste in the proceedings of the Birthday Banquet)”—referring to the thirty-two-page illustrated issue of Harper’s Weekly commemorating his seventieth birthday.8 The length and nature of this publication make it impractical to carry out his instruction in a printed volume. Indeed both instructions are more plausibly construed as instructions to himself rather than to his editors. In such cases, Clemens’s intention can be described and—wherever possible—the reader directed to the relevant text. In the case of “My Debut,” the text is already included with the preliminary manuscripts and dictations in this volume. The impracticality of including the Harper’s Weekly issue is overcome by directing the reader to a scanned copy at MTPO, and the elastic boundaries of the website may be used for other, similar cases, the rationale for which is always explained in the Textual Commentary. In general, such rough edges are an inevitable part of works that were not set into type and published by the author. On the other hand, if informal remarks can be rendered intelligibly in their own right (“I will ask Miss Lyon to see—but I will go on and dictate the dream now”) they are included in the edited text, even though the author would doubtless have removed them had he carried out the revision he planned.9
Errors of external fact
Clemens’s misstatements of fact are almost always allowed to remain uncorrected in the text. For example, when he gave the year of his first meeting with Ulysses S. Grant as 1866 (rather than the correct year, 1868), the error is merely pointed out in the explanatory notes, because it is clear that his memory (not the typist) was at fault. Likewise, in a paragraph of reminiscence about his family in the dictation of 28 March 190
6, Clemens said that his sister Margaret died at the age of “ten, in 1837” when she in fact died at the age of nine in 1839, and that his brother Orion was “twelve and a half years old” at the time of the family’s move to Hannibal, when he was actually fourteen. In the dictation of 8 March 1906 he mistakenly referred to a “Miss Hill,” dean of Barnard College, whose name was actually “Gill.” And in the dictation of 12 March 1906 he relied on a New York Times article that misnamed someone “Johnson” instead of “Johnston.” In all these cases the text is permitted to stand as Clemens left it, and its factual errors are addressed only in the notes.
On the other hand, if Clemens indicated that he wanted something checked, and by implication made accurate, the text has been corrected. For example, in the dictation of 5 March 1906 Clemens described a room in the Villa Viviani as “forty-two feet square and forty-two feet high,” but added a query in the margin of the typescript: “42? or was it 40? See previous somewhere.” He had used the lower number in the manuscript about the Villa Viviani inserted into “Villa di Quarto,” so that number has been adopted in the text. Errors introduced by the stenographer or typist have also been corrected, since they cannot have been intended by Clemens. For example, in TS2 and TS4 of the dictation for 11 January 1906 (TS1 is lost), Clemens appears to say that he was in Venice in “1888,” when in fact the year was 1878. It is extremely unlikely that the error was his, since he did not travel in Europe in the 1880s. But the difference of one digit could easily have been a transcription error, and it is therefore corrected.
Errors of form: spelling, syntax, and punctuation
Factual errors apart, it is naturally the case that publishing the autobiography texts as Clemens intended does sometimes require the correction of trivial spelling errors and lapses such as omitted words. We take it as given that he did not intend his published works to contain such obvious errors: there can be no doubt that he would want “monotonous” substituted for manuscript “monotous,” and “initiated” printed instead of manuscript “iniated.” Nor could he have expected phrases such as “look her” or “either us” to remain uncorrected, and they have therefore been altered to “look at her” and “either of us.” Simple errors in the typescripts (such as “publsher”) or in printed texts being quoted by Clemens (such as “yaung” for “young” in the New York Times) are likewise corrected. If the name of a real person is correct but misspelled, it is mended, whether the error originated with Clemens or with his stenographer (“Greeley” instead of “Greely,” for example).10
We approach the task of correction with caution, always bearing in mind Clemens’s well-documented attitude toward misguided interference with his text. Whenever seeming errors were in fact intended (dialect spellings, for instance), we of course make no change. Small grammatical quirks deemed more or less peculiar to spoken language are also preserved intact. Clemens himself was highly appreciative of this aspect of dictated narrative, “the subtle something which makes good talk so much better than the best imitation of it that can be done with a pen.”11 For that reason (among others) we do not alter sentences like the following: “To-day she is suing for a separation from her shabby purchase, and the world’s sympathy and compassion are with her, where it belongs.” Or, “A careful statement of Mr. Langdon’s affairs showed that the assets were worth eight hundred thousand dollars, and that against them was merely the ordinary obligations of the business.”12 And although there is evidence that Clemens sometimes welcomed corrections of his grammar (see the letter to Ticknor quoted below), errors that are common in spoken language, like “who” for “whom,” have been retained.
It is well known that Clemens wanted his punctuation respected, and not altered by anyone else. “Yesterday Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me,” he once wrote to Howells, “& I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”13 He was equally alert to the well-intentioned “corrections” of the various typists he hired to copy his manuscripts. In revising the typescript for chapter 25 of Connecticut Yankee (where one of the knights applies for a position in the Yankee’s standing army), Clemens added the following remark: “Try to conceive of this mollusk gravely applying for an official position, of any kind under the sun! Why, he had all the ear-marks of a type-writer copyist, if you leave out the disposition to contribute uninvited emendations of your grammar and punctuation.”14
His objection to “uninvited emendations of... grammar and punctuation” was, however, somewhat less absolute than those words might suggest. To the publisher Benjamin H. Ticknor, then overseeing the typesetting of The Prince and the Pauper, he wrote in mid-August 1881:
Let the printers follow my punctuation—it is the one thing I am inflexibly particular about. For corrections turning my “sprang” into “sprung” I am thankful; also for corrections of my grammar, for grammar is a science that was always too many for yours truly; but I like to have my punctuation respected. I learned it in a hundred printing-offices when I was a jour. printer; so it’s got more real variety about it than any other accomplishment I possess, & I reverence it accordingly.15
And to Chatto and Windus in 1897 he complained about the proofreader of More Tramps Abroad (the English edition of Following the Equator):
Conceive of this tumble-bug interesting himself in my punctuation—which is none of his business & with which he has nothing to do—& then instead of correcting misspelling, which is in his degraded line, striking a mark under the word & silently confessing that he doesn’t know what the hell to do with it! The damned half-developed foetus! But this is the Sabbath Day, & I must not continue in this worldly vein.16
The punctuation in Clemens’s manuscripts, as well as in the typescripts, is faithfully reproduced except where it is deemed defective—for example, in the rare instances when he omitted a closing quotation mark or the second comma in an appositional clause. Dictated texts, in which the punctuation is somewhat less authorial than in the manuscripts, have received a few additional corrections, to accord with Clemens’s consistent manuscript usage. The following examples illustrate the three categories in which punctuation has been added: 1. “Mr. Twichell, do you take me for a God damned papist?” (comma supplied); 2. “Yes,” I said, “that is my position” (second comma supplied); 3. “and we said, ‘That is a very good thing to do’” (comma supplied before a paragraph break).
Uniformity
It is well established that throughout his career Clemens strove to avoid spelling, capitalizing, or abbreviating the same word in more than one way within a given work, and the extraordinary consistency of his manuscripts in this respect is itself strong testimony to that intention. But he also knew that he required the cooperation of the typesetter to achieve and maintain uniformity of this kind in print. In 1897 we find him complaining, again on the proofs for More Tramps Abroad, that this “proof-reader doesn’t even preserve uniformity.” And on the first manuscript page of “A Horse’s Tale” he addressed himself to the “composing-room,” asking it to “ignore my capitalization of military titles, & apply its own laws—the which will secure uniformity, & that is the only essential thing.”17
To fall short of “uniformity” in this sense meant to Clemens that unintended, pointless, and therefore potentially misleading variation in spelling, capitalization, and the rendering of numbers and abbreviations (expanded or not) would mar the published text. Variation in these formal elements within a single work has therefore been treated as an error and corrected in all parts of the text, except where Clemens is quoting someone else. The preliminary manuscripts and dictations, written or dictated over a period of thirty-five years, are each made uniform within themselves; the final text of the Autobiography is made uniform throughout. In cases where the stenographer spelled or capitalized a word consistently, that form has been retained. Where the typescripts vary, however, Clemens’s preferred forms have been adopted. These have been identified through a wide-ranging search of all
available manuscripts, whose results are recorded in a 125-page document in the Mark Twain Papers (1,456 entries, from “acoming” to “zig-zag”) that lists every variant form in the Autobiographical Dictations, as well as the form or forms found in Clemens’s handwritten additions to the typescripts and in hundreds of other manuscripts. The result is that the rendering of these details is brought into uniformity, while the form adopted is as completely authorial as the evidence permits.
Inserted documents
Into the typescripts of his dictations, Clemens frequently inserted not only his own earlier manuscripts, but also newspaper clippings, letters he had received, and other documents. His own inserted manuscripts have been treated in accord with the editorial policy already described. In the case of other texts, simple errors (typographical and otherwise) are corrected, but they are not altered to achieve uniformity of spelling, capitalization, and so forth. If we have the document that Hobby transcribed into the text, we retranscribe it as the primary source. Her transcription tells us how detailed or inclusive Clemens wanted such a text to be (in other words, what he instructed her to leave out). If the document from which she worked cannot be found, we of course rely on her transcription, correcting only manifest errors. Inserted texts can on occasion be very complex and require exceptions to these rules of thumb.18 In all such cases the rationale for changing the readings of the source documents in any way is fully spelled out in the Textual Commentary available online for each text.
