Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1 (review)

American Literary Realism  Fall 2012, Vol. 45, No. 1© 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Reviews j Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1. Ed. Harriet Elinor Smith et al. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 2010. 736 pages. Cloth, $34.95. Late in the explanatory material for this momentous work, the editors offer an explanation tied to the question of authorial intention: This edition of the Autobiography of Mark Twain offers the reader an unmodernized , critically constructed text, both of the preliminary manuscripts and dictations and of the final text that Clemens intended his “heirs and assigns” to publish after his death. The editorial construction adheres to his intention as it is manifest in the most authoritative documents available, or can be reliably inferred from them, and aims at presenting the texts exactly as he would have published them, so far as that is possible—that is, they were when he ceased to make changes to them. Except for the revisions the author made for magazine publication . . . all of his revisions and corrections are adopted, whether inscribed on a surviving typescript or detected by collation when the revised typescript is missing. This basic statement demonstrates the difficulty the editors faced when working through thousands of pages of manuscripts and typescripts. Here we see the tentative nature of decisions made in consort with Clemens’ “intention as it is manifest in the most authoritative documents available.” Inferences are made to help editorial work that “aims at presenting the texts exactly as he would have published them” (my emphasis). Of course, there is no way to know what Clemens would have done with this material. One wonders if, in the end, and with second or third thought, he would have published it at all. For decades, editors and scholars who took on the task of simply reading the autobiographical materials fell in a heap exhausted by the challenge of making some good sense out of the chaos of the record. Earlier editors who purposely waded into the swamp (Albert Bigelow Paine, Bernard De Voto, and Charles Neider) managed to offer only a small look at the variety of Clemens’ thinking: their editions are more often about what they think of Clemens’ collected materials. And the version that Clemens himself offered while he was still alive, through the 1906–07 installments known as “Chapters from my autobiography” in the North American Review, stands now american literary realism  45, 1 88 very separate from the whole of the autobiography as (perhaps) Clemens’ attempt to burnish and affect his legacy in advance of his losing control of the editing process after his death (not that he didn’t try to constrain and direct that work; re-reading his “Private History of a Manuscript That Came to Grief,” included in this volume, underscores Clemens’ vitriolic response to editors). This first of a projected three-volume edition sets a foundation for the work still to come. Smith and her companion editors have accomplished a herculean task in bringing a semblance of order to Clemens’ prolific and profligate meandering. Their careful assembly of Clemens’ pre-1906 materials brings readers into both Clemens’ creative realm. Here is a much more logically and biographically connected series of autobiographical experiments , from “The Tennessee Land” (1870) to Vienna sketches (1898) to a set of tightly focused biographies (1898–1905). This is a more accurately arranged collection than any earlier edition has been able to offer, and it sets a solid foundation for the final dictations that were begun in January 1906 in the presence of Paine and Clemens’ stenographer, Josephine Hobby. The editors’ introduction offers a pointed and clear argument for the inclusion of these specific pieces; the comments help to describe changes to Clemens’ thinking about autobiography as well as his plans for his peculiar take on the value of his individual rather than conventional approach to a life story. All of which culminates in Clemens’ notion of the “right” way to do autobiography as he begins to shape the dictations begun in 1904 in Florence. Paine tried a similar path in his 1924 edition; however, his approach was more an attempt to reinforce Clemens’ Mark Twain than...