Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals ed. by Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, Kenneth M. Sanderson, and: Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals ed. by Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, Bernard L. Stein (review)

Reviews 73 attract many readers — the scientific precision of Curtis’ studies — this anthology can serve as a reminder that the pictures we now take so much for granted that it is easy to dismiss them sis the romantic artifacts of a bygone era were in fact the end products of intensive study by a man who aspired to be as much scientist as artist. BRIAN W. DIPPIE, University of Victoria, B.C. Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Volume I. Edited by Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 668 pages, $20.) Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, Volume II. Edited by Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. 701 pages, $21.50.) Scholars working on the Mark Twain Papers have gathered forty-nine of Twain’s notebooks and journals. Twenty-one are now published, and the announcement is that the remaining twenty-eight are forthcoming. The first two volumes of the notebooks and journals are numbers eight and nine in the projected fifteen volume edition of Twain’s previously unpublished works. Albert Bigelow Paine’s Mark Twain’s Notebook (1935), described by Paine as complete, actually contains only about one-fourth of the notebooks and journals. The purpose of this new edition is to make the complete collection more readily available, to provide a thorough description of the materials, and to offer full annotations and an index designed to aid the scholar and/or critic in a variety of ways. Judicious exceptions to the standard of completeness are allowed. Notebooks two and three are the result of Horace Bixby’s instructions to his cub pilot to “get a little memorandum-book” and take down facts. Only a sample is provided, therefore, of Twain’s technical and obscure notes about tree limbs, islands, sandbars, and river conditions long since changed. The first notebook is dated June -July, 1855, when Twain was nineteen. Notebook twenty-one, which concludes Volume II, is dated April - May, 1882. The projected publications consist of notebooks dated from 1883-84 to 1910, the year of Twain’s death. There are time gaps (1861-65 and 1873-77, for example) due to the fact that Twain was more inclined to keep a notebook under certain conditions (most notably, when he was traveling) and because some notebooks have not been located and — quite probably — no longer exist. The content of the notebooks shows an enormous variety. The first includes exercises in French, information on phrenology, reminders of things 74 Western American Literature to do, and a variety of observations The second, prepared under the ominous eye of Bixby, has this entry: “Birds II. — Hd towh br, — & 250 under hd of II — 9 ft. D.S. — faint circle fm pt to hd towh, S open on pt.” In the fourth, we find this one: “Coleman with his jumping frog — bet stranger $50 — stranger held no frog & C got him one — in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot &he couldn’t jump — the stranger won.” Notebook seven includes three notes later used in Roughing It. Some entries are bare reminders (one on “Baker’s Blue -Jay Yarn,” for example), and others vary from a laundry list to eleven pages of Biblical references. Number seven features a sea voyage, a good sustained narrative (pages 244-80) which suggests something about the relation between notetaking and the creative act; and number eleven includes “The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary,” a fine and funny seven page story w'hich makes one think of True Grit. There is also a diary angle to the notebooks (Twain’s secret fears, especially of night, signs of a Swiftian bittterness) and bits of dialogue which catch up a tone and a character with striking immediacy and which must intrigue the student of the creative process. Modestly, the editors state that their work provides no startling new insights into Twain, in part because biographers have had access to the Berkeley library. Nevertheless, the Twain Papers are being made more available, relevant materials not in the Berkeley collection are included, the annotations represent an enormous amount of intelligent and helpful scholarship, and...