Autobiography of Mark Twain (5 page)

In the spring of 1885 Clemens made his first attempt at doing an autobiography for which more than a few pages survive. He had some previous experience with dictating letters and brief memoranda to a secretary, but he had never tried it for literary composition.
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Now he decided that it might be a good way to work on the autobiography. In late March he wrote in his notebook:

Get short-hander in New York & begin my autobiography at once & continue it straight through the summer.

Which reminds me that Susie, aged 13, (1885), has begun to write my biography—solely of her own motion—a thing about which I feel proud & gratified. At breakfast this morning I intimated that if I seemed to be talking on a pretty high key, in the way of style, it must be remembered that my biographer was present. Whereupon Susie struck upon the unique idea of having me sit up & purposely
talk
for the biography!
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At about the same time, he realized that dictation might be of help to his friend Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had written several articles for the
Century Magazine
’s series on the Civil War. In the spring of 1885, when he was dying of throat cancer, Grant was close to completing the manuscript of the first volume of his two-volume
Memoirs
. Clemens had recently secured them for his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Co., confident they would earn large profits both for Grant’s family and for himself. As a frequent visitor to Grant’s New York house, Clemens knew that Grant feared dying before he could finish his book. He suggested that Grant hire a stenographer to ease his task. Grant at first demurred, but later hired a former secretary, Noble E. Dawson. On 29 April Clemens visited Grant on his first day of dictation and learned that it “was a thorough success.”
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No doubt encouraged by Grant’s experience, in early May Clemens asked his friend and former lecture manager James Redpath to serve as his stenographer. He liked and respected
Redpath, who had been a journalist and knew shorthand. On 4 May 1885 Redpath replied to Clemens’s proposal: “Now about the auto. When I do work by the week, I charge $100 a week for the best I can do. I have had a run of ill-luck lately but I found that that was what I averaged. It w
^d
take you much less time than you think. I get you word for word & it takes a long time to write out.” Clemens accepted these terms and urged Redpath to come to Hartford soon. “I think we can make this thing blamed enjoyable.” It is clear that he was beginning to intuit the need for a responsive, human audience when dictating—something he articulated quite clearly six years later in a letter to Howells.
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The two men began working together sometime in mid-May and continued for several weeks. In the six dictations that survive, Clemens traced the history of his friendship with Grant, then talked about his own protégé, the young sculptor Karl Gerhardt, who had a commission to create a bust of Grant. In the longest of these dictations he launched into a detailed account of how he had acquired the right to publish Grant’s
Memoirs
, defending his tactics and countering newspaper insinuations that he had acted unethically.

Clemens probably stopped dictating shortly before Grant died on 23 July 1885.
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In July and August (and possibly earlier) Clemens read over some of the typescripts that Redpath had created from his stenographic notes, adding his own corrections here and there but making few changes in wording. He found the result far from satisfactory, as he implied in a letter to Henry Ward Beecher:

I will enclose some scraps from my Autobiography—scraps about Gen. Grant—they may be of some trifle of use, & they may not—they at least verify known traits of his character. My Autobiography is pretty freely dictated, but my idea is to jack-plane it a little before I die, some day or other; I mean the rude construction & rotten grammar. It is the only dictating I ever did, & it was most troublesome & awkward work.
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Redpath’s work as an amanuensis was unskillful. None of his stenographic notes are known to survive, but his typescripts are manifestly ill-prepared—full of typing errors, struck-over characters, and extraneous marks—and his numerous penciled corrections create punctuation that is in no way characteristic of Clemens’s own habits.

No manuscripts for the autobiography written between 1885 and 1890 have survived, but the project was certainly not forgotten. In late 1886 as he worked on
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, Clemens wrote to Mary Mason Fairbanks: “I fully expect to write one other book besides this one; two others, in fact, if one’s autobiography may be called a book—in fact mine will be nearer a library.” His 1876 plan for a work not limited “as to space” was evidently alive and well. And in August 1887, two years after halting the Grant Dictations,
Clemens wrote to his nephew, “I want a
perfect
copy of Fred Grant’s letter, for my Autobiography. I was supposing I had about finished the detailed private history of the Grant Memoirs, but doubtless more than one offensive chapter must be added yet, if Fred Grant lives.” A few months earlier he told another correspondent, “No, I’ll leave those details in my autobiography when I die, but they won’t answer for a speech.”
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Then, in December 1887, Orion wrote to ask his brother’s permission to reveal “something of your boyhood” in an upcoming interview with a local journalist. He listed a few “points” he wanted to offer:

I thought of mentioning Grandpa and Grandma Casey; some younger and older characteristics of ma (fondness for or tenderness for animals, &c.); pa’s studying law under Cyrus Walker; their marriage and removal to Tennessee; pa’s treatment of the strange preacher about the cow; his facing down the old bully, Frogg; his settling a dispute before him as justice of the peace with a mallet; your philosophical dissatisfaction with your lack of a tail; your sleep-walking and entrance into Mrs. Ament’s room; your year’s schooling; your quitting at 11; your work in my office; your first writing for the paper (Jim Wolf, the wash-pan and the broom); your going to Philadelphia at 17 . . . ; your swimming the river and back; ma’s complaint that you broke up her scoldings by making her laugh; Pa’s death; his sharp pen writing for the paper; her present age and vigor; fondness for theatre.
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Clemens had already used a number of these “points” in published work. His making wicked fun of Jim Wolf’s pointless rescue of a wash-pan and broom from the threat of a fire next door was in fact his “first writing” for Orion’s Hannibal newspaper, “A Gallant Fireman” (1851).
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And in the first chapter of
Tom Sawyer
Aunt Polly (based on Jane Clemens) had mildly complained that Tom knew that if he could “make me laugh,” her anger toward him would disappear. Still, Clemens refused Orion’s request:

I have never yet allowed an interviewer or biography-sketcher to get out of me any circumstance of my history which I thought might be worth putting some day into my
AUTO
biography. . . .

I have been approached as many as five hundred times on the biographical-sketch lay, but they never got anything that was worth printing.
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Clemens would make use of only a few of these “points” in the autobiography. But his stinginess about letting others reveal the raw materials of his history is certainly understandable,
and it may suggest that at this time in 1887 he still intended to write an autobiography that would include these anecdotes from his early life.

By the fall of 1890, Clemens had been investing money in the typesetting machine invented by James W. Paige for almost ten years (since 1881). It was, however, still not completed. The relevance of this project to his autobiography was inescapable, and in the “closing days” of that year he began to write “The Machine Episode,” an unsparing account of the way Paige had charmed and beguiled him into an enormous investment without having yet achieved a salable product. By the time Clemens added the second part to this self-revealing account, in the winter of 1893–94, Paige had still not perfected the machine but was about to sign a new, more satisfactory contract for it. Left in a rather unfinished state, the manuscript was very likely among those Clemens reviewed in 1906 before deciding to omit it from the final form. He did return to the subject in an Autobiographical Dictation of 2 June 1906.

Clemens’s hopes for the Paige typesetting machine were finally crushed in December 1894, and the bankruptcy of Webster and Company earlier that year had placed its debts solely on his shoulders. In the summer of 1895, in order to repay them, he, Olivia, and Clara undertook a lecture tour around the world (Susy and Jean stayed at home), which ended when they arrived in England on 31 July 1896. The family landed at Southampton and then traveled to Guildford, where they learned that Susy was ill in Hartford. “A fortnight later Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed for home to nurse Susy,” Clemens recalled in 1906, and “found her in her coffin in her grandmother’s house.” Within weeks of this calamity Clemens wrote his friend Henry H. Rogers that he intended to “submerge myself & my troubles in work.” In the last week of September 1896 he reminded himself to “Write my autobiography in full & with remorseless attention to facts & proper names.”
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But he still needed to finish the book about his around-the-world lecture tour.
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The family spent the winter and spring of 1897 in London while Clemens wrote
Following the Equator
, which would be published in November.

In the summer of 1897 they retreated to Switzerland, and in late September they moved to Vienna. Two autobiographical manuscripts were begun that fall, “Travel-Scraps I” and a much longer sketch called “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].” “Travel-Scraps I” appears to be unfinished, or at least not quite ready for the typist, since Clemens made a tentative revision of its title, in pencil (“
Travel-
Scraps.
_^
from Autobiog
_^
”) and the manuscript itself still has two sets of page numbers (1–20 and 1–28). It was probably written soon after Clemens arrived in Vienna, for it is largely a complaint about London’s cab drivers and its postal service, things that would naturally have been on his mind since the spring.

On the evidence of the paper and ink used, “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from
It]” was begun about the same time, but probably not completed until 1898. Clemens identified the text as “From Chapter II.”
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(The first page of this manuscript is reproduced in facsimile in
figure 1
.) It begins as a history of the Clemens and Lampton relatives and ancestors and, more briefly, the despised Tennessee land. But it meanders, without apology, into an anecdote about an incident in Berlin in 1891, and it ends with an evocative description of Clemens’s idyllic summers on his uncle’s farm near Florida, Missouri. This typical combination of early memories and later experiences helps to make clear why Clemens would reject the idea of a completely chronological narrative: his preference for juxtaposing related events from different times deeply resisted that way of organizing his story. At the same time, labeling the sketch “From Chapter II” implied that most of what it contained would come early in the autobiography, as would befit a review of ancestors. The chapter number suggests that while he was not writing about his experiences in the order of their occurrence, he was still making an attempt to assign chapter numbers that respected chronology.

Before Clemens completed “Random Extracts” in 1898, he wrote several more sketches for the autobiography between February and June of that year, grouped here under the supplied title “Four Sketches about Vienna”: “Beauties of the German Language,” “Comment on Tautology and Grammar,” “A Group of Servants” (the only one that Paine did not include in his edition), and “A Viennese Procession.” These were not reminiscences but rather more like entries in a diary, with each piece prefaced by a date. None of these sketches would be included in his final plan, but he did eventually include another manuscript written at this time, “Dueling,” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19 January 1906.

Two further sketches were written in the fall of 1898 and also later inserted into the final structure of autobiographical dictations. The first was “Wapping Alice,” a tale deemed unsuitable for magazine publication, which was based on an actual event. It joined a growing collection of manuscripts that Clemens would eventually draw on for what he called “fat”—“old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I or editors didn’t das’t to print”—that he would use to enlarge the bulk of the
Autobiography
.
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More than a year after he began dictating his autobiography in 1906, he inserted “Wapping Alice” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 April 1907.

The second sketch was “My Debut as a Literary Person,” which he dated
“October 1, 1898”
and labeled “Chapter XIV.” The revision of this manuscript reflects a season of discouragement about the autobiography, a mood that shows up sporadically during the winter of 1898–99. Just below the title he first inserted a footnote: “This is Chapter XIV of my unfinished Autobiography and the way it is getting along it promises to remain an unfinished one.” Then he changed “unfinished” to “unpublished” and canceled the words following “Autobiography.” When the sketch appeared in the
Century Magazine
for November 1899, it omitted any reference to his autobiography. Still, it is the first “chapter” to be published in fulfillment of his long-held plan to publish selections from it.
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