- Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3: The Complete and Authoritative Edition ed. by Benjamin Griffin, Harriet Elinor Smith
Edited by Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith. U of California P, 2015. 792pp. $45.00 cloth.
With the publication of the third volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith (and other editors of the Mark Twain Project) have completed perhaps the most daunting task in the history of Mark Twain scholarship. Now, at last, more than one hundred years after his death, we have, as the cover states, “the complete and authoritative edition.”
Volume 3, as well as Volume 2 before it, will not achieve the runaway bestseller status that the first volume attained upon its 2010 publication. The media hype surrounding that publication would perhaps have astonished and certainly delighted its author, who had suddenly and unexpectedly gone viral. General readers who were puzzled by the fragmentary attempts at autobiography before Twain arrived at his dictation method, the haphazard and apparently random structure once he did, and the many pages of notes and scholarly apparatus no doubt kept many from making it all the way through that first volume, and certainly most did not move on to the next two. That is a shame, for if they had persevered, they would have found in Volumes 2 and 3 a grab bag of memories, observations, humorous gems, and philosophical insights. The whole book as we now have it is, of course, not really an autobiography, or not one in any conventional sense. Rather, it is an opportunity for the reader to sit in a room and listen to Mark Twain talk about whatever is on his mind on a particular day, only occasionally indulging in autobiographical memories. That experience in itself is an invaluable one. [End Page 170]
Each reader will have his or her own list of highlights in the ninety-four dictations included here, covering 1907 through the end of 1909. For me, those include the telling of the gender-bending “Wapping Alice,” along with his revelation of the facts he had to omit for the sake of propriety; memories of his daughters’ young days; his account of the 1907 honorary doctorate from Oxford; his extended diatribes against President Theodore Roosevelt, “the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century; always showing off; always hunting for a chance to show off ” (187); his candid appraisal of Andrew Carnegie and his vanity; the story of selling a dog for three dollars in 1867; tributes to his “Angelfish”; his frank sexual conversation with Elinor Glyn; memories of trips to Bermuda, surely one of the chief highlights of his final years; and many, many more. The daily dictations are filled with the deaths of friends and acquaintances, and the dictations become more and more sporadic, trailing off to a mere trickle in 1909, and ending with “The Death of Jean” at Christmas of that year. Thirty of the dictations, nearly one-third, have not been previously published, and a good many of the rest have only been partially published. So at last, and finally, we have the complete autobiography.
This final volume includes several appendixes, notably the copious notes, without which so many of Twain’s references would be lost on today’s readers, since he rarely pauses to explain who or what he is talking about. The most notable addition to the third volume is “The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” strictly speaking not part of the Autobiography, but crucial to an understanding of Twain’s last years. Written from May to September 1909, these hundred-plus pages record in minute detail his falling-out with his business manager, Ralph W. Ashcroft, and his secretary/housekeeper/companion, Isabel V. Lyon. It is an account full of sadness, betrayal, anger, wry humor, bitterness, and shock, published here for the first time. Previous critics and biographers who have examined the manuscript have come to differing conclusions: Hamlin Hill and Laura Skandera Trombley side with Isabel Lyon, while Karen Lystra and Michael Shelden side with Clemens. Now, more readers can make an...