Autobiography of Mark Twain (8 page)

When Olivia died suddenly on 5 June 1904, Clemens’s interest in his autobiography quite naturally evaporated, and in the next year and a half he wrote only one short sketch for it, “Anecdote of Jean.” But before Olivia died, his new enthusiasm for dictating the autobiography gave rise to a scheme to provide income for the family he thought would survive him (he was then sixty-eight). In the same January letter to Howells in which he enthused about dictation he described this new idea: “If I live two years this Auto will cover many volumes, but they will not be published independently, but only as
notes
(copyrightable) to my existing books. Their purpose is, to add 28 years to the life of the existing books. I think the notes will add 50% of matter to each book, & be some shades more readable than the book itself.”
⁶⁰

This notion was still alive almost a year after Clemens had begun his dictations to Josephine
Hobby in January 1906. In December of that year he spoke of it to a reporter, who then summarized it in the New York
Times:

As soon as the copyright expires on one of his books Mark Twain or his executors will apply for a new copyright on the book, with a portion of the autobiography run as a footnote. For example, when the copyright on “Tom Sawyer” expires, a new edition of that book will be published. . . . About one third of this new edition of “Tom Sawyer” will be autobiography, separated from the old text only by the rules or lines. The same course will be followed with each book, as the copyright expires.

So far as possible the part of the autobiography will be germane to the book in which it appears. . . .

He is confirmed in this by the experience of Sir Walter Scott, from whom he got the germ of his idea. Scott kept his copyrights alive by publishing new editions with commentaries. . . . He believes his scheme will insure a copyright of eighty-four years instead of forty-two, and, as he said the other day: “The children are all I am interested in; let the grandchildren look out for themselves.
⁶¹

It is difficult to know just how serious Clemens was about this scheme because it was never put to the test. On 24 December 1909, in “Closing Words of My Autobiography,” he explained that the

reason that moved me was a desire to save my copyrights from extinction, so that Jean and Clara would always have a good livelihood from my books after my death. . . .

That tedious long labor was wasted. Last March Congress added fourteen years to the forty-two-year term, and so my oldest book has now about fifteen years to live. I have no use for that addition, (I am seventy-four years old), poor Jean has no use for it now, Clara is happily and prosperously married and has no use for it.

Because of that change in the law, he evidently told Clara much the same thing. She protested, and he replied on 23 February 1909:

Maybe I ought to have said “half-wasted.” Bless your heart I put in two or three years on that Autobiography in order to add 28 years to my book-lives. Congress has
_^
now
_^
gone & added 14 of the 28; & the law is now in such a sane shape that Congress can be persuaded presently, without difficulty, to add another 14. . . .

My child, I wasn’t doing the Autobiography in the world’s interest, but only in yours & Jean’s.
⁶²

Still, it is clear that extending his copyrights had never been his primary motive for creating the
Autobiography
.

Clemens, his two daughters, Katy Leary, and Isabel Lyon accompanied Olivia’s body back to America in July 1904. They buried her at Quarry Farm, and Clara entered a rest home in New York City while Clemens, Jean, and Lyon spent the rest of the month in a rented summer home in Lee, Massachusetts. On 10 August Clemens went to New York and soon signed a three-year lease for a town house at 21 Fifth Avenue, which he and Jean occupied in December 1904 after it was renovated and furnished.

One year later, in January 1906, work on the autobiography had been at a standstill for eighteen months. A catalyst was needed to revive the enthusiasm of 1904, and on the night of 3 January it arrived in the form of Albert Bigelow Paine. Paine was an experienced writer and editor who in 1904 had published a biography of Thomas Nast which Clemens admired. On that January evening Paine attended a dinner in honor of Clemens, hosted by The Players club, and happened to be seated “nearly facing” him. Three days later he called at 21 Fifth Avenue and asked to write Mark Twain’s biography. After brief preliminaries Clemens turned to him and said: “When would you like to begin?” Paine went on to suggest that a stenographer be hired to take notes of what Clemens said in response to the biographer’s questions. Clemens said that he thought he would “enjoy dictating to a stenographer, with some one to prompt me and to act as audience,” and he offered Paine office room and access to “a trunkful or two” of his manuscripts, notes, and letters. “Whatever you need will be brought to you. We can have the dictation here in the morning, and you can put in the rest of the day to suit yourself. You can have a key and come and go as you please.”
⁶³

It was agreed that work should begin on 9 January. On that Saturday morning, Paine arrived accompanied by a stenographer, Josephine S. Hobby. The procedure for working on the biography was promptly decided, but Clemens

proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of those earlier autobiographical chapters, begun with Redpath in 1885, and continued later in Vienna and at the Villa Quarto. He said he did not think he could follow a definite chronological program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical order. It was his purpose, he declared, that his dictations should not be published until he had been dead a hundred years or more—a prospect which seemed to give him an especial gratification.
⁶⁴

Josephine Hobby was an experienced stenographer and an excellent typist, known to Paine for about eight years. She had previously worked for Charles Dudley Warner and Mary Mapes Dodge and was currently employed by the Century Company, which, since 1899, had also
employed Paine as an editor of
St. Nicholas
, a magazine for young people. Hobby charged one dollar per hour of dictation and five cents per hundred words of typescript. She began immediately with a transcription of the morning’s conversation. “We will try this,” Clemens told Paine, “see whether it is dull or interesting, or whether it will bore us and we will want to commit suicide. I hate to get at it. I hate to begin, but I imagine that if you are here to make suggestions from time to time, we can make it go along, instead of having it drag.” He proposed a schedule of four or five days a week, for roughly two hours each morning.
⁶⁵
Clemens talked while Hobby took him down in shorthand and Paine listened appreciatively. For these early sessions, Paine recalled, Clemens usually dictated from bed, “clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown of rich Persian pattern, propped against great snowy pillows.”
⁶⁶

Before Clemens was done dictating in 1909, he and Hobby, along with three other typists, generated more than five thousand pages of typescript. That enormous body of material has, since Clemens’s death, constituted the largest part of the manuscript known as the “Autobiography.” But probably since DeVoto’s time as editor of the Mark Twain Papers, anyone who consulted that file was likely to be puzzled by two things. First, most of the Autobiographical Dictations between January and August 1906 were filed in folders—one per dictation—containing between two and four separate, distinct typed copies of essentially the same text. No one understood the purpose of the duplicates. Second, the differences (if any) between these various “duplicates” were not obvious or readily intelligible: pagination differed, seemingly without pattern; some contained handwritten authorial revisions, while others were unmarked; and many were extensively marked by at least half a dozen different (mostly unidentified) hands, in addition to the author’s. These documents constituted the central puzzle confronting anyone who set out to publish the
Autobiography of Mark Twain
.

A first step in solving the puzzle was to find reliable ways of distinguishing between the several, nearly identical typed copies in any given folder. The paper used, specific characteristics of the typewriter and habits of the typist, and of course the unexplained differences in pagination proved to be essential pieces of evidence. The very first typescript Hobby created from her stenographic notes was eventually isolated and identified in this way, and it is called hereafter TS1 (for typescript 1). Each of the other typescripts (sometimes with carbon copies as well) were similarly identified, and are herein referred to by number (TS2, TS3, and TS4). Once they were physically distinguishable in this way, it became possible to see that the (understandable) fashion in which daily dictations were filed had in fact long obscured why there
were
different typed copies.
⁶⁷
It was in turn possible to decide, on the basis of meticulous collation,
which was copied from which, and to begin to make some sense of the various differences between them.

By 18 January Hobby had settled on a standard format for each session: she recorded the time spent on dictation and a word count at the top left of the first page, with the page number centered, and the date of dictation at the right, usually followed by a summary of the contents. Hobby marked in pencil any errors she had failed to correct on the machine. The typescript then went to Clemens for correction and revision. TS1 would total roughly twenty-six hundred consecutively numbered pages, beginning at page 1 with the dictation of 9 January 1906 and ending with the dictation of 14 July 1908, which Hobby completed shortly before leaving Clemens’s employment. Two later stenographer-typists produced another hundred or so pages of typescript, which did not continue the TS1 pagination sequence.
⁶⁸

Hobby soon agreed to give up her job with the Century Company in order to work for Clemens exclusively during the summer and possibly longer. On 13 March Lyon commented in her journal, “Mr. Clemens finds her entirely to his liking & he says ‘it is a case of established competency’ which is saying a great deal—for she is a good audience, is sympathetic & very appreciative.”
⁶⁹
By 8 April Hobby had transcribed her notes through the end of the 28 March 1906 dictation.

Despite the risk of somehow losing TS1, a unique copy (there was no carbon copy at this point), Clemens allowed Clara to carry away and read about five hundred pages, through the end of the 16 March dictation. He also lent Twichell three days’ dictation, probably those for 23, 26, and 27 March. On 8 April, Lyon recorded that “M
^r.
Twichell is here—M
^rs.
, too—& M
^r.
T. thinks the auto. MS. is absorbingly interesting.” He presumably returned the three dictations at that time. The same day Clemens took the entire 28 March dictation (Orion’s misadventure with Dr. Meredith’s “old-maid sisters”) up to lunch with Howells at the Hotel Regent. Howells returned the pages by the next day’s mail:

I want to see every word of the 578 pages before this, which is one of the humanest and richest pages in the history of man. If you have gone this gate [
i.e
., gait] all through you have already gone farther than any autobiographer ever went before. You are nakeder than Adam and Eve put together, and truer than sin. But—but—but you really
mustn’t
let Orion have got into the bed. I know he did, but—

Lyon noted that Clara had written “enthusiastically about it too,” but her letter has not been found. Clemens replied to her in Atlantic City, two days before she was supposed to return the pages to him:

I am so glad, you dear ashcat! so glad the auto interests you; I was so afraid it wouldn’t. I couldn’t guess as to how it might read, for I have purposely refrained from reading a line of it myself, lest I should find myself disappointed & throw up the job. I wanted it to gather
age
before I should look at it, so that it would read to me as it would to a stranger—then I could judge it intelligently. However, as Twichell wanted to experiment with it I took the last 3 days instalments & corrected them—& in this way I found out that I was doing well enough for an apprentice who was an unpractised learner in the art of dictating to a stenographer. Twichell’s verdict is, that the interest doesn’t flag. That’s all I want. I only want to interest the reader, he can go elsewhere for profit & instruction.
⁷⁰

On 11 April Clemens took a break from his dictating routine, and did not resume until 21 May, after he, Jean, and Lyon were settled for the summer in the isolated Upton House near the village of Dublin, New Hampshire. Clemens arrived there on 15 May; Paine and Hobby arrived a few days later and found quarters nearby. Paine reported, “We began in his bedroom, as before, but the feeling there was depressing.” He described the view from the verandah of the Upton House as “one of the most beautiful landscape visions on the planet,” and reported that Clemens soon saw the opportunity it presented: “I think we’ll do our dictating out here hereafter. It ought to be an inspiring place.” Lyon occasionally recorded Clemens’s (and her own) impatience with the “old-maidish whims” and slowness of the “Hobby horse,” but for the most part the morning sessions seem to have been remarkably amicable.
⁷¹
Lyon described one of them in her journal: