#2 in a series (read complete blog)

Ah, the ironies of literary history! Mark Twain, who was obsessed with the business end of  being a writer, would have gotten an enormous kick out of the amazing commercial success of an authoritative scholarly version of his autobiography (100 years after he joined Captain Stormfield on that gauzy cloud next to the harp-player who only knew one tune).

And he would have been particularly tickled that the main text of the Mark Twain Project’s massive best-seller is virtually identical  to a dusty, out-of-print version published in 1924.

Especially if he could have gotten a piece of the action.

 “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” Volume 1, is one big book, weighing in at 736 pages. But of that Tolstoyan bulk, only 264 pages comprise the “Autobiography” per se. The introduction takes up 58 pages, followed by 138 pages of “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations” that Twain ultimately decided not to include, and then 181 pages of explanatory notes and 85 pages of appendixes and other end-matter.

All well and good. Callimachus said “A big book is a big evil,” but he was wrong about this one. Like everything done by the Mark Twain Project – I have quite a few of their Twain editions, and they set the standard in the field – this one is first-rate.

But by editor Harriet Elinor Smith’s own admission,  about 95 percent of the “Autobiography” proper in this Volume 1 is identical to the first version of Twain’s autobiography, edited by his literary executor and official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine.

That fact, to put it mildly, is not widely known.

Most readers – and most of the press, too, for that matter – seem to assume that much or all of this first volume is  original and never before published, embargoed for a century in compliance with what the flap copy on the book says was Twain’s “strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for 100 years.”

That was pretty much what I assumed, too, until I found the ancient Paine volumes slumbering peacefully at the Page Desk of the San Francisco Public Library. But after spending the better part of the weekend curled up with this book and the Paine – as well as the two other versions of Twain’s Autobiography -- I discovered that assumption was totally wrong.

A little background.

Twain started working on his autobiography, in various aborted forms, as early as 1870, when he was 35 (he died in 1910, aged 74.) In 1906, with the autobiography project stalled for the umpteenth time, he was approached by a writer and editor named Albert Bigelow Paine, who proposed to write his biography.

Twain agreed and Paine suggested that they use a stenographer to take notes of what Twain said in response to his questions. Twain hit it off with the stenographer, Josephine Hobby. And he enjoyed the dictation form and decided to use the dictated material for his autobiography as well.

Twain’s dictations, often given from his bed, lasted three years and resulted in a vast body of text, more than 5,000 pages in typescript. In December 1909 Twain decided the work was finished and insisted that it not be published in its entirety until 100 years after his death, which took place four months later.

Just as the dictation form allowed Twain to wander freely about from subject to subject as the spirit moved him, paying no attention to chronology – a method that he insisted was the only way to capture the essence of a life – so his insistence on posthumous publication freed him to speak his mind about his contemporaries. But the inveterate performer and audience-pleaser (and money-obsessed businessman) immediately violated his own supposedly strict embargo. Just seven months after he began the autobiographical dictations, he published about 25 short excerpts in the North American Review.

The three editors who worked on successive editions of his autobiography also disregarded his instructions to wait  a century before publishing it. Each of those editors took a completely different approach to the vast and unruly heap of material before them – which is where the confusion, and the fun, starts.

Paine, Twain’s first literary executor, official biographer and the editor of the first version of his autobiography, published in 1924, followed Twain’s express wish that the materials not be presented chronologically but “in the order in which they were written.” The editors at the Mark Twain Project (hereafter MTP) also take this approach -- which is why Paine’s two-volume “Autobiography,” aside from some earlier Twain material that Paine erroneously included, is almost identical to Volume 1 of the MTP version.

Paine’s successor, Bernard DeVoto, disliked Paine’s digressive, shapeless approach. His “Mark Twain in Eruption” (1940) included only passages from the dictations that Paine did not publish, and arranged those in thematic order.

The third version of the “Autobiography,” edited by Charles Neider and published in 1959, is by far the most well known. (It’s the one I had read.) Neider also rejected Paine’s approach. Weaving together passages from earlier writings with some of the autobiographical dictations, Neider created a conventional, chronological autobiography that begins “I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri” and ends with Twain’s heartbreaking piece about the death of his daughter Jean, which took place just months before his own death.

(I actually love the Neider version, even though it deviates from Twain’s own more chaotic plan, and one of the things I’m looking forward to in these blogs is seeing how the stream-of-consciousness Paine/MTP version compares with it.)

So what does this all mean? I’ll take that up in my next post.