The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3

It’s an odd work, this autobiography Mark Twain undertook in the last few years of his life. And the third and final volume published by the University of California Press only compounds the oddity.

First, and most obvious, it is anything but a chronological account of Twain’s life. To be fair, Twain repeatedly says he is not writing the standard autobiography. He’s writing what he might call a more personally pleasurable account – some recounting of his life, observations about current events that may or may not have anything to do with his life, the inclusion of stories he likes to tell and ones told by others that he liked, notes of daily household activities, wholesale inclusion of his speeches, and occasional frank (often brutal) observations of some of his contemporaries and friends, coupled with an admonition that this wasn’t to be published until sometime well after his death.

Second, it resembles not so much an autobiography as it does one of Twain’s public speeches or performances. He wanders and meanders; he surprises; he takes you down a rabbit hole that may or may not have a point or a connection to a larger story, but the hole is always entertaining. He wanders in his memories of a lifetime, and issues and personalities of the time in which he is dictating this story (roughly 1906-1909).

Third is the ending. Long before he covers even the major events of his life, he suddenly announces on Christmas Eve 1909 that the autobiography is finished; he is done, And the reason is poignant. His adult daughter Jean, who had suffered from epilepsy, dies in 1909. His sole surviving child Clara has married, and his reason for the autobiography – to provide for his two remaining children – has disappeared.

But what stories he tells in the process!

Twain had announced he was finished with international travel. Then he receives a letter from Oxford University in 1907, saying he is to receive an honorary degree. He throws his decision not to travel out the window and hastens to England.

The day before he receives the degree (along with such other luminaries as Rudyard Kipling, Auguste Rodin and Camille Saint-Saens), he gives a speech in London, where he characteristically notes what the newspaper placards are proclaiming: “Mark Twain Arrives, Ascot Cup Stolen.” Tongue-in-cheek, he denies there’s any connection – and brings down the house in laughter. While he’s in England, he attends a garden party hosted by King Edward VII at Windsor Castle – the small-town boy from Hannibal, Missouri, has come a long way, indeed.

A rare photograph of Twain in color

He also recalls being in New York City in 1867 (I warned you the account wasn’t chronological) to visit with a former shipmate aboard the Quaker City when he traveled to the Mideast to write stories for a newspaper. The friend brings his sister with him, and together they attend a reading by Charles Dickens – the account of Steerforth’s death in David Copperfield. While the reading was dramatic (Dickens was famous for his overwhelming readings), Twain has nothing but the fondest memories – because the friend’s sister was Olivia Langdon, who would become his beloved wife of 34 years until her death in 1904.

He notes meetings with well-known politicians and industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and the deaths of close friends like Joel Chandler Harris. He seems to be dictating with a sense of inevitability; he is reaching the end of his life although Twain himself likely didn’t know how close it was, just a few months after his daughter Jean, on April 21, 1910.

Toward the end of this third volume, when he is closing down the work, he includes this line: “Night is closing down; the rim of the sun barely shows above the sky line of the hills.” It is a fitting sentiment for this uniquely American writer.

Related:

My review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Vol. 1)

My review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Vol. 2)

Top photograph: Mark Twain walking to receive his honorary degree at Oxford University.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 2

It’s a good thing that Mark Twain explains how he dictated and composed his autobiography, as noted in the first volume of The Autobiography of Mark Twain published by the University of California Press: “…start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale; and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.”

Otherwise, you would find yourself getting lost. This becomes even more true in the second volume of the autobiography. From what I can tell, the third and final volume is much the same. This is no standard autobiography, but then again, Twain probably wouldn’t have had it any other way.

In fact, I’d say this is indeed a writer’s autobiography, throwing aside writing convention. He dictates (the entire work was originally dictated to a typist) as he thinks. He’s following on stream – talking about his brother, Orion Clemons, for example, and how Twain accompanied him to the Nevada Territory in the 1860s. Orion had a job – secretary to the governor. Twain did not, so he became a reporter. But he gets deep into the discussion about Nevada when he describes the just reported 1906 earthquake in San Francisco, and then we’re soon reminiscing with him about his work on the newspaper there.

This works fine if you have an editor to straighten it all up after you. The editors of this mammoth publishing project wisely decided not to do that, so that what you see is indeed what you get – vintage Mark Twain, storyteller par excellence, not above embroidering a little if it makes a better story.

So he describes his work as a reporter at the San Francisco Morning Call and his friendship with a fellow reporter, Bret Harte (there was a time when high school students read Harte’s short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” in English class, but I rather doubt it’s taught any more). He sounds affectionate, until many pages later, when he returns to Harte, and he is not affectionate at all.

So in between descriptions of his life, you find yourself suddenly confronted with his musings on the character of god and the Bible, his absolute passion for international copyright laws, and even a chapter-length discussion on the supremacy of the house-fly. This is Twain, and in some strange way, it all works.

He quotes liberally from his daughter’s Suzy biography of him that she had been writing – in the 1880s. And he notes the last entry she made, which ends with an incomplete sentence. Suzy died sometime later. And he includes an extensive discussion of how his daughter Clara kept the news of his daughter Jean’s illness from his wife, Olivia, who herself was declining and would soon die.

Olivia and Clara Clemons, 1895

These are not asides. Twain was profoundly affected by the death of three of his children and his wife. Clara would be the only child to outlive him, in fact. And yet he plays more the reporter in these cases; he simply states fact, omitting the emotion and the huge grief he felt.

Like the first volume, this volume, too, is filled with the names of famous of the time. Twain traveled in rather privileged circles; he was America’s most famous writer and doors everywhere were open to him (this volume also includes a rant about President Theodore Roosevelt, and if you’re familiar with Twain at all, you know one of his rants could be downright venomous).

By the time he was dictating this biography, most of the people he had grown up with, had been friends with, and whom he knew intimately as friends were gone. And one has that sense of the elder statesman, looking back, looking forward and looking at the here-and-now, and knowing he is the last of a particular breed. He himself would probably have rejected the elder statesman title and said it was simply a matter of outliving everyone else.

One volume to go.

Related:

My Review of The Autobiography of Mark Twain (Vol. 1)

Top photograph: Mark Twain in the Nevada Territory in the late 1860s.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain

For almost 40 years, Mark Twain had worked fitfully on his autobiography. A story here, a remembrance there, a chapter or two in between – but the project seemed to be shelved over and over again, the pieces he completed likely incorporated into articles, speeches, stories and books. Then, in 1905, he decided to dictate the story of his life, hiring a secretary for the specific work. Almost four years and 500,000 words later, he was done.

And then he decided that it wouldn’t be published for 100 years after his death.

Two years after Twain’s death in 1910, some 90,000 words of the autobiography were published by his own literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937). Then historian Bernard Devoto (1897-1955) followed suit in the 1940s. In the late 1950s, historian Charles Neider (1915-2001) similarly used large parts of the autobiography manuscript. Paine and Devote stayed true to the way Twain had dictated the manuscript – more reminiscences than orderly chronology – while Neider restructured what he used into a more standard chronological account.

In 2010 (the 100^th anniversary of Twain’s death), the Mark Twain Project, part of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, published the first of three volumes constituting not only Twain’s autobiography but associated papers and articles as well as extensive scholarly notes. The publication was edited by Harriet Elinor Smith, one of the Mark Twain Project editors.

The official title of the first volume is The Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, Vol. 1. It represents an astonishing amount of work.

The portion of volume 1 that is Twain’s autobiography proper occupies about 270 pages. It’s preceded by 200 pages of introduction and related articles and writings by Twain (the introduction alone is almost 60 pages, and well worth reading to understand both how Twain write his autobiography and how Paine, Devoto and Neider did and didn’t follow his instructions). This first portion of autobiography is followed by 210 pages of explanatory notes, 30 pages of references, and a 23-page index. This, obviously, is a huge scholarly undertaking.

Parts of the autobiography are more than familiar – 30 years ago, I had read a three-volume reprint of Paine’s The Autobiography of Mark Twain that I had found on a remaindered table at a local bookstore. This was a 1980 reprint of the original 1912 edition.

Both the Paine edition and the new University of California Press edition are vintage Twain. He apparently found himself unable to produce a standard, chronological account (likely one result of dictating the work). He says as much as he explains his plan: “…start it at no particular time of your life; wander at your free will all over your life; talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment; drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale; and turn your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself into your mind meantime.”

Notice that he refers to the work as a talk. The autobiography more resembles a folksy, sitting-around-the-cracker-barrel speech than it does a literary endeavor. There’s no question that Twain took himself and his writings seriously; but he gives the perception of casualness, down-home, speech of the people, almost as if this is an effortless undertaking.

And it’s funny, filled with the trademark brand of humor than made (and still makes) Twain famous, as in “Recently some one in Missouri has sent me a picture of the house I was born in. Heretofore I have always stated that it was a palace, but I shall be more guarded, now.” He was actually born in the town of Florida, Missouri, but grew up in Hannibal, some 35 miles away. Hannibal has a tourist economy built around Mark Twain.

Included in this first volume are (in no particular order) stories about his birth and growing up; working as an editor in the Nevada territory; his family’s fixation on the “land back in Tennessee’ that was to be their financial windfall; and stories about Horace Greeley, William Dean Howells, George Washington Cable, John Hay, John Greenleaf Whittier, Helen Keller, and Nikolai Tchaikovsky, among others (he met these people at different times of his life). And the volume also has his moving account of the death of his brother Henry in 1858 from injuries received during an explosion of the steamboat Pennsylvania on the Mississippi River.

This is a wonderful effort the Mark Twain Project has undertaken, to publish this autobiography as well as Twain’s other works. He remains one of the greatest American writers; he is certainly the quintessential American writer.

Top photograph: Mark Twain’s boyhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, by Andrew Balet via Wikimedia Commons.