Autobiography of Mark Twain (174 page)

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 1906, 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.

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).

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.

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.

H. E. S.

1
. 10 Oct 1898 to Bok, ViU. See “Revisions for magazine publication,” below.

2
. Only nontextual changes, such as the typographic style of titles, are omitted from this record. But all such “silent” changes are still listed by category at
MTPO
.

3
. “A Day with Mark Twain,” Chicago
Tribune
, 29 Sept 1907, F6. It is not clear whether the reporter observed Clemens at work or was repeating remarks by Isabel Lyon.

4
. See AD, 30 Mar 1906, p.462.

5
. Notes made by Doris Webster for Dixon Wecter about an interview with Isabel Lyon, ca. March 1948, CUMARK; Howden 1925. Typescripts prepared by Howden show that she typed some punctuation, presumably because Clemens spoke it aloud, but that he supplied the vast bulk of it by hand—as in the AD of 6 Oct 1908, for example. Clemens’s practice with Hobby does not show this same kind of after-the-fact punctuation of the typescript, suggesting that she, more than Howden, had learned what was expected.

6
. Each of these errors is identified by Clemens’s correction of them on the ADs of 9 Jan, 13 Jan, and 14 Feb 1906.

7
. This essay was written in 1898 and published as a magazine article in 1899, but without any indication that it came from the autobiography

8
. Clemens referred to “Mark Twain’s 70th Birthday: Souvenir of Its Celebration” (SLC 1905g). In the dictation of 16 December 1908 he again said, “I think I will insert here (if I have not inserted it in some earlier chapter of this autobiography) the grand account of the banquet which ... appeared in Harper’s Weekly a week later.”

9
. AD, 13 Jan 1906, p. 274.

10
. See the Textual Commentaries at
MTPO
for “Travel-Scraps I,” “Ralph Keeler,” the ADs of 17 Jan 1906 and 15 Mar 1906, and “Horace Greeley.”

11
. 16 Jan 1904 to Howells, MH-H, in
MTHL
, 2:778. This letter is quoted more fully in the Introduction, pp. 20–21.

12
. In the ADs of l6 Feb and 23 Feb l906.