Autobiography of Mark Twain (172 page)

6 February:
MTA
, 2:59–64, partial.

7 February: NAR 4, 705–10, partial;
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, 2:64–73, partial;
AMT
, 201–3, 274–75.

8 February: NAR 4, 710–16;
MTA
, 2:73–83, partial;
AMT
, 204–10; SLC 2004, 173–76, partial.

9 February: NAR 5, 833–38;
MTA
, 2:83–91, partial;
AMT
, 210–13; SLC 2004, 15–19, partial.

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, 186–90.

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, 2:128–34.

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, 190.

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The texts listed below in italic type were published in full or nearly so—that is, with no more than a paragraph or occasional sentence omitted.

The Introduction traces the history of Clemens’s work on his autobiography, from the preliminary manuscripts and dictations he produced between 1870 and 1905 through the Autobiographical Dictations that he began in early 1906. It also gives an explanation of his final plan for the
Autobiography of Mark Twain
, based largely on an analysis of various typescripts and manuscripts created in 1906. These source documents are summarized here, and the summary is followed by a description of the editorial policy that has been used to create the critical text of this edition.

The source documents for the texts collected in the section entitled Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations include manuscripts in the author’s hand as well as a diverse assortment of typescripts made from his dictation by James Redpath, Jean Clemens, or Josephine Hobby. Redpath took down Clemens’s words in an unidentified shorthand and typed the translation himself on an all-capitals typewriter. Jean Clemens, a novice at the typewriter, transcribed Isabel Lyon’s longhand notes. Hobby was a skilled stenographer and her own typist. Her typescripts are the most reliable, with Redpath’s and Jean’s somewhat less so. The manuscripts are the most straightforward record of the author’s intention, but even they sometimes contain errors. The editorial policy discussed below has been applied to each work, with adjustments as needed to accommodate its particular textual history, which is always described in detail in the Textual Commentary at
Mark Twain Project Online
(
MTPO
).

Produced between 1906 and 1909, TS1 is the first of three distinct, sequentially paginated typescripts for the final plan of the autobiography as conceived by Clemens in 1906, now in the Mark Twain Papers. Typed by Hobby, it begins with the dictation of 9 January 1906 and ends with the dictation of 14 July 1908, extending far beyond the other sequences. Two later typists, Mary Louise Howden and William Edgar Grumman, produced an additional hundred or so pages of typescript, numbering each dictation separately. TS1 and the typescripts of Howden and Grumman, transcribed by each typist from his or her shorthand notes, are the primary record of Clemens’s dictated text. Together they are the
only
text for the roughly one
hundred and seventy dictations made between late August 1906 and 1909. Clemens revised many of the pages of TS1 for publication in the
North American Review
, adjusting the wording to accommodate omissions and suppressing or altering text that he considered “written in too independent a fashion for a magazine.”
¹
Only in TS1 is the date of dictation close to the date the typescript was created. Many pages of TS1 were marked by Paine as the printer’s copy for his 1924 edition of the autobiography; he discarded some of the material he chose not to include, and those pages are now missing.

The page numbers on TS2 (made by Hobby) and TS4 (made by an unidentified typist) differ from those on TS1 and from each other because both typescripts begin with material not present in TS1 (everything before the 9 January 1906 dictation). Together TS2 and TS4 total over twenty-five hundred pages. Begun in mid-June, they provide conclusive evidence of exactly which of his accumulated drafts and false starts Clemens decided to include in his final plan for the autobiography. TS2 and TS4 begin with “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It],” but omit the preface (“An Early Attempt”) that was written to introduce it. The second (three-part) preface—“The Latest Attempt,” “The Final (and Right) Plan,” and “Preface. As from the Grave”—is fully present in TS4, which also includes four Florentine Dictations, but in TS2 the five pages on which the three-part preface was typed, as well as the pages containing the third and fourth Florentine Dictations, are lost. Both typescripts continue with the 1906 Autobiographical Dictations that were begun on 9 January; TS2 ends with the dictation of 7 August, and TS4 ends with that of 29 August. Both typescripts incorporate the revisions that Clemens wrote on TS1. He further revised much of TS2, making improvements in wording as well as softening and censoring the texts for publication in the
North American Review
. He made no changes on TS4. Whenever TS1 is extant for a given dictation, TS4 is derivative and does not affect the critical text. When TS1 is missing, however, both TS2 and TS4 are relied on to recreate its text, since both derive from it, so that either one may contain authoritative readings that are not found in the other. When TS2 and TS4 do not vary from each other, they confirm the reading of the missing TS1.