Autobiography of Mark Twain Read Online Free PDF Page B

uncle’s farm near Florida, Missouri. This typical combination of early memories and later experiences helps to make clear why Clemens would reject the idea of a completely chronological narrative: his preference for juxtaposing related events from different times deeply resisted that way of organizing his story. At the same time, labeling the sketch “From Chapter II” implied that most of what it contained would come early in the autobiography, as would befit a review of ancestors. The chapter number suggests that while he was not writing about his experiences in the order of their occurrence, he was still making an attempt to assign chapter numbers that respected chronology.
    Before Clemens completed “Random Extracts” in 1898, he wrote several more sketches for the autobiography between February and June of that year, grouped here under the supplied title “Four Sketches about Vienna”: “Beauties of the German Language,” “Comment on Tautology and Grammar,” “A Group of Servants” (the only one that Paine did not include in his edition), and “A Viennese Procession.” These were not reminiscences but rather more like entries in a diary, with each piece prefaced by a date. None of these sketches would be included in his final plan, but he did eventually include another manuscript written at this time, “Dueling,” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19 January 1906.
    Two further sketches were written in the fall of 1898 and also later inserted into the final structure of autobiographical dictations. The first was “Wapping Alice,” a tale deemed unsuitable for magazine publication, which was based on an actual event. It joined a growing collection of manuscripts that Clemens would eventually draw on for what he called “fat”—“old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I or editors didn’t das’t to print”—that he would use to enlarge the bulk of the
Autobiography
. 37 More than a year after he began dictating his autobiography in 1906, he inserted “Wapping Alice” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 April 1907.
    The second sketch was “My Debut as a Literary Person,” which he dated
“October 1, 1898”
and labeled “Chapter XIV.” The revision of this manuscript reflects a season of discouragement about the autobiography, a mood that shows up sporadically during the winter of 1898–99. Just below the title he first inserted a footnote: “This is Chapter XIV of my unfinished Autobiography and the way it is getting along it promises to remain an unfinished one.” Then he changed “unfinished” to “unpublished” and canceled the words following “Autobiography.” When the sketch appeared in the
Century Magazine
for November 1899, it omitted any reference to his autobiography. Still, it is the first “chapter” to be published in fulfillment of his long-held plan to publish selections from it. 38

    FIGURE 1 . The first page of the manuscript of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].” Clemens deleted the epigraph shown here—two stanzas from
The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
—and “From Chapter II” when revising the forty-four-page typescript (now lost) that was made from the manuscript; they are therefore omitted from the present text. Two notes at the top were written by Paine: “Vienna | 1897–8” and “no 109” (a filing designation). Rosamond Chapman, DeVoto’s assistant, wrote “Publ.
Auto
, 81ff”—where Paine published the text.

    Clemens’s unsettled attitude toward his “unfinished” autobiography is clear, but not readily explained. On 10 October 1898, even as he was preparing “My Debut” for magazine publication, he told Edward Bok, editor of the
Ladies’ Home Journal
,

A good deal of the Autobiography is written, but I never work on it except when a reminiscence of some kind crops up in a strong way & in a manner forces me; so it is years too early yet to think of publishing—except now & then at long intervals a