Autobiography of Mark Twain (12 page)

He was always icily indifferent to the Autobiography before, but thought he would like to look at it now, so I told him to come up. He arrived 3 days ago, & has now carefully read close upon a hundred thousand words of it (there are 250,000). He says it is the “greatest book of the age,” & has in it “the finest literature.”

He has done some wonderful editing; for he has selected 5 instalments of 5,000 words each; & although these are culled from here & there & yonder, he has made each seem to have been written by itself—& without altering a word. At 10,000 words a month we shall place about 110,000 or 120,000 words before the public in 12 months. . . .

To-morrow Harvey will carry away one full set of the MSS to Howells & get him to help select instalments. I can’t do the selecting myself. The instalments will come to me in galley-proofs for approval, but I guess I will pass them on to you for final judgment after I have examined them.
⁹¹

Not only did Harvey “carefully read close upon a hundred thousand words” of the autobiography’s 250,000, but by the time he left Dublin on 4 August he had read the remaining 150,000 words, encompassing the pre-1906 material and all the dictations through the end of June.
⁹²

Harvey’s “wonderful editing” was exactly as Clemens characterized it: he selected excerpts and patched them together to create five installments, essentially without “altering a word.” Domestic anecdotes were a principal theme. He used the moving description of Olivia, and of Susy and her death, with nearly all the excerpts from Susy’s biography of her father that were quoted in the February and March dictations. Other favored topics included Clemens’s amusing misdeeds, such as his swearing about the missing shirt buttons; Susy’s charming eccentricities of spelling; Clemens’s puzzlement over the “spoon-shaped drive”; and the challenges of the burglar alarm at the Hartford house. Harvey also included the recollections of Hannibal, such as the story of “playing bear” from “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX” (which Clemens had omitted from his plan for the
Autobiography
), the dreadful anticholera “Pain-Killer,” and Orion’s 3:00
A.M.
call on a young lady. Harvey did not share Howells’s squeamishness about Orion climbing (by mistake) into bed with the “middle-aged maiden sisters” (as they were called in the
North American Review
text): he included that episode without apparent concern. He rejected material with less broad appeal, such as the death of Patrick McAleer (the Clemenses’ beloved coachman), and omitted Clemens’s excursions into political commentary—the massacre of the “rebellious” Moro people in the Philippines and the treatment of Mrs. Morris, who had been thrown out of the White House. Harvey’s penciled notations on the typescripts, such as “Begin,” “End,” and “Continue,” show that Clemens’s own participation in the selection process was probably much smaller than has previously been supposed.
⁹³

Since Harvey drew each
Review
installment from several different daily dictations, Hobby was now charged with creating yet another typescript to serve as printer’s copy, working “under high pressure” to get it ready in time for the first chapter of the series, in the issue slated for 1 September. This composite typescript, called TS3, was typed from the start with a carbon copy, and was paginated independently of the three other ongoing sequences.
⁹⁴
Hobby managed to complete two batches of TS3, of some two dozen pages each, in time for Clemens to revise them lightly and give them to Harvey when he left Dublin on 4 August. She immediately set to work typing a third large batch of TS3 (sixty-three pages), which Clemens agreed to send off “as soon as finished.” These three batches of TS3 were intended for installments 1–5 in the
Review
. Because TS2 had at that time been completed only through 12 February, Harvey also
asked that the “copy of complete dictation beginning with Feb. 13 as it proceeds” be forwarded to him.
⁹⁵

Clemens soon revised and returned the proof for the first installment, first to Clara for her approval, and then to the
Review
editors. But no sooner had he done so than a new decision was made: an excerpt from the first half of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” the text that he had just recently chosen to begin the
Autobiography
, would now lead off the series. It has not been discovered who made this late change, or why, but by the end of August Clemens had read galley proofs for this “Virginia-Clemens” installment, as he called it in a letter to Mary Rogers.
⁹⁶

The first issue of “Chapters from My Autobiography” appeared on 7 September, accompanied by a statement that would be repeated before each installment:

P
REFATORY
N
OTE
.—Mr. Clemens began to write his autobiography many years ago, and he continues to add to it day by day. It was his original intention to permit no publication of his memoirs until after his death; but, after leaving “Pier No. 70,” he concluded that a considerable portion might now suitably be given to the public. It is that portion, garnered from the quarter-million of words already written, which will appear in this R
EVIEW
during the coming year. No part of the autobiography will be published in book form during the lifetime of the author.—E
DITOR
N.A.R.

In the “Editor’s Diary” section of the same issue Harvey “let go all holts,” as Clemens might say, in an announcement of the upcoming series:

The proverbial irony of fate was never more clearly marked than by the fact that the life of the world’s greatest humorist has consisted of a succession of personal tragedies. . . . But in his breast there lived a spirit which rose triumphant over all depressing emotions, and still continues, after half a century, to make joy for more millions of human beings the world over than any other now existing. An attempt, even by one accomplished in the art, to analyze the character of this unique human genius would be futile. Its phases are too multifarious. There is humor pre-eminent, wit unexcelled, philosophy rare, if uneven; repugnance, often violent, to wrong in any form; instinctive and invariable, though occasionally ill-timed, revolt against oppression of humanity whether by God or man; all supplemented by the reasonableness of a comrade, the kindliness of a friend, the devotion of a lover and the sweetness of a child. . . . It is a wonderful autobiography that he is writing,—wonderful, because of the variety of experiences it depicts, wonderful because of its truth, its sincerity, its frankness, its unhesitating and unrestricted human feeling. . . . We have read perhaps a quarter of the million of words which will finally be written, and are convinced that a life story of such surpassing interest was never told before.
⁹⁷

Reading the above in proof, Clemens facetiously professed himself “troubled” and suggested to Mary Rogers that she write a letter of protest to Harvey, even providing her with a text. She was to say that Harvey’s “prodigal, even extravagant” praises “sounded cold & indifferent” to him. “He is almost morbidly fond of compliments, & he realizes that these are good ones, but thinks they are over-cautious & thin. When we of the family butter him we do not do it with a knife, we use a trowel.”
⁹⁸

Harvey’s first round of selections, the second through sixth installments, appeared in the
Review
between 21 September and 16 November. According to Clemens, during his August visit he had actually earmarked a total of twenty-four selections—“a year’s lot”—drawing on the dictations of January, March, and April 1906, “John Hay,” and the second part of the “Random Extracts” sketch for installments 7–8 and 10–13, published through 1 March 1907.
⁹⁹
Later material, from the dictations of October 1906 through February 1907, began to appear in installments 14 and 15, published on 15 March and 5 April 1907. Hobby made only one additional batch of TS3, for installment 16, published 19 April 1907. Apart from the dictation of 21 May 1906 (“My experiences as an author . . . ”), which had been used in installment 2, no material from the dictations of May through August 1906 was published in the
Review
.
¹⁰⁰
In those months Clemens dictated some rather stringent comments about religion, business, and various of his associates—comments he had no intention of publishing during his lifetime. Besides, there were soon so many excerpts stockpiled that the making of further selections could be safely postponed.

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

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 M
^r.
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