Barbara,

Thank you for this excellent, very detailed, and informative book review.
I'm now looking forward to purchasing it and giving my biceps another
workout if it is anywhere near as large as the first two.

Best,
Susan Bailey

Susan Bailey
Co author
The Twain Shall Meet
<http://www.amazon.com/Twain-Shall-Meet-Granddaughter-Gabrilowitsch/dp/1499799497/ref=sr_1_1/191-7847938-3534132?ie=UTF8&qid=1415889321&sr=8-1&keywords=the+twain+shall+meet+susan+bailey>
Twain Page <https://www.facebook.com/marktwainsgranddaughter>
www.marktwainonline.com
Greenville, SC

On Fri, Oct 23, 2015 at 8:46 AM, Barbara Schmidt <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:

>  BOOK REVIEW
>
>
> _ Autobiography of Mark Twain: Volume 3_. Edited by Benjamin Griffin and
> Harriet Elinor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project.
> University of California Press, 2015. Pp. 792. Hardcover. $45.00. ISBN
> 978-0-520-27994-0.
>
>
> Many books reviewed on the Mark Twain Forum are available at discounted
> prices from the Twain Web Bookstore. Purchases from this site generate
> commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <
> http://www.twainweb.net>
>
>  Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
> Barbara Schmidt
>
>  Copyright (c) 2015 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
> redistributed in any medium without permission.
>
>
> _Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 3_ is the highly anticipated final
> volume in a trilogy from the editors of the Mark Twain Project. The first
> volume was released in 2010 and became one of the most successful books in
> the history of the University of California Press. Volume 2 followed in
> 2013. In addition to moderately priced hardcover and softcover editions,
> the texts of all three volumes, annotations, and textual commentaries are
> available free of charge on the Mark Twain Project's website <
> www.marktwainproject.org>. The textual commentaries that detail Clemens's
> personal revisions, spelling and punctuation preferences, and deletions
> from the final texts are available only online. Scanning through the online
> textual commentaries, the reader may sometimes find deleted passages that
> offer unexpected insights into how Clemens edited himself.
>
>
> Volume 3 contains 93 sessions of autobiographical dictations and writings,
> thirty of which have never been previously published. An additional
> twenty-two sessions have appeared only in partial publication. The
> annotations provide unprecedented insight into the history surrounding
> Clemens's mindset. For those previously published passages, the new
> annotations provide a clarity that previous editors such as Albert Bigelow
> Paine in _Mark Twain's Autobiography_ (1924), Bernard DeVoto in _Mark Twain
> in Eruption_ (1922) and Charles Neider in _The Autobiography of Mark Twain_
> (1959) failed to offer.
>
>
> Volume 3 opens with the dictation from March 1, 1907 and the formal
> autobiography portion of this volume ends with the manuscript widely known
> as "The Death of Jean," written December 24-26, 1909. It was a passage
> Clemens designated to be the "final chapter" of his autobiography. However,
> one of the most important additional items included in the volume is the
> text of the original 433-page manuscript scholars refer to as "The
> Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript." Written between May and September 1909, prior to
> the death of Clemens's daughter Jean, this manuscript was never considered
> part of the formal autobiography.
>
>
> "The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript," which is now generating much new attention
> from Mark Twain scholars, reflects a time of upheaval in Clemens's life
> when he felt betrayed by his secretary Isabel Lyon and his business
> associate Ralph Ashcroft. In a letter to William Dean Howells that Clemens
> never mailed, he wrote "Dictating Autobiography has certain irremovable
> drawbacks" (p. 325). Clemens felt that his several female stenographers had
> been a restraint on his attempts to be candid. He wrote if the stenographer
> was female, "there are _so_ many thousands & thousands of things you are
> suffering to say, every day, but mustn't, because they are indecent" (p.
> 325). Clemens indicated his latest scheme for autobiography was to write
> candid letters to his close friends and not send them. He would put on
> paper what he had been unable to verbalize and in "The Ashcroft-Lyon
> Manuscript" he said "It is the best way to quiet your indignant soul. It is
> efficient. I have practised it for forty years" (p. 412).
>
>
> Until now, scholars who did not have the opportunity to visit the Mark
> Twain Papers at Berkeley and study this manuscript were forced to rely on
> brief quotations and interpretations offered through the lenses of other
> biographers such as Hamlin Hill (_God's Fool_, 1973), Karen Lystra
> (_Dangerous Intimacy_, 2004) and Laura Skandera Trombley (_Mark Twain's
> Other Woman_, 2010). Each offered snippets and interpretations trimmed to
> fit their own theories. Michael Shelden (_Mark Twain: Man in White_, 2010)
> offered a more balanced viewpoint. Now with publication of the manuscript,
> along with editorial annotations, scholars are positioned to form judgments
> based on their own readings.
>
>
> Two additional autobiographical writings are included in the appendixes.
> These include 1873 autobiographical notes provided to Charles Dudley Warner
> for an entry on Clemens that appeared in _Cyclopaedia of American
> Literature_ (1875). Also included are autobiographical writings given to
> Clemens's nephew Samuel Moffett for a biographical sketch that was first
> published in the October 1899 issue of _McClure's Magazine_.
>
>
> While "The Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript" will likely be the star attraction of
> volume 3 for many Mark Twain scholars, the previously unpublished material
> is not without its ability to surprise. Hitherto unpublished material from
> March 1907 includes comments on women's rights that Clemens characterized
> as a revolution "the only one achieved in human history for the
> emancipation of half a nation that cost not a drop of blood" (p. 4). Never
> before published anecdotes on moral dilemmas include stories about a
> feather-duster salesman and a Frenchman's scheme for pawning fake
> watches--stories that Clemens himself described as having "so many
> different kinds of morality mixed up in it that I find myself getting
> confused" (p. 12). Also in March 1907, he explains how he was cornered into
> giving a flattering speech for a Russian Czarist who supported a cause
> Clemens publicly opposed. Clemens confided, "Some occult instinct seemed to
> inform me that I was in an embarrassing position" (p. 18).
>
>
> In April 1907 he inserted a version of the short story "Wapping Alice" into
> the autobiography as well as the actual facts surrounding the incident.
> This story was published in 1981 for Friends of the Bancroft Library and
> has received scholarly scrutiny for not only being one of Mark Twain's most
> blatantly sexual stories, but also one that featured a homosexual twist.
> Also in April he inserted a manuscript never previously published regarding
> his contempt for laws regarding the age of consent for sexual relations--an
> imagined dialogue between the "President of the United States" and an
> "Ignorant Citizen."  However, Clemens's views on the laws regarding the age
> of sexual consent are in direct opposition to the views he professed in
> January 1908 when discussing his opinions of the work of author Elinor Glyn
> as he confessed "I quite agreed with her view that in the matter of sexual
> relation man's statutory regulations of it were a distinct interference
> with a higher law--the law of Nature" (p. 196).
>
>
> Clemens's contradictory views on sexual relations may come as no surprise
> to Mark Twain scholars. However, his unwillingness to take a leadership
> role in combating prejudice and racism against African Americans may come
> as a disappointment to some readers. His July 30, 1907 dictation and the
> accompanying annotations reveal that when Clemens traveled to Oxford
> University in June 1907 he was asked to intercede in a "small storm" among
> the white Rhodes Scholars over the election to their ranks of a black
> scholar named Alain Leroy Locke. Clemens was assured that his viewpoints on
> racial matters would be respectfully received. In the end, however, Clemens
> refrained from making any effort to dissuade the students from opposing the
> young black man's scholarship when he addressed them. Almost a year later
> in his dictation of July 14, 1908 Clemens faced a similar situation arising
> from the storm of public controversy surrounding President Theodore
> Roosevelt's inviting Booker T. Washington to lunch with him in the White
> House. Clemens relates that a short time later he met Roosevelt at Yale and
> the president asked him his opinion of the controversy. Clemens advised
> that if the invitation to a black man to his table were not required by
> duty, "it might be best to let it alone, since the act would give offence
> to so many people when no profit to the country was to be gained by
> offending them" (p. 257).
>
>
> Clemens offers some insight into the amount of pressure he felt from people
> wanting him to take up their various personal causes as his "duty" and lend
> public support to some special interest. In previously unpublished
> dictation of January 13, 1908 he explained:
>
>
> "the opportunity to do a duty was always furnished me by an outsider, it
> seldom originated with me; it was always furnished by some person who knew
> more about my duties toward the public than I did. I said I believed that
> if I should become the champion of every cause that was brought to my
> attention and shown by argument that it was my duty to take hold of it and
> champion it, I shouldn't ever have any time left to punch up the China
> missionaries or revel in any of the other duties that were my own invention
> and that were occupying all the spare room in my heart. =E2=80=A6 If you
> le=
> ave out
> the China missionaries, and King Leopold of Belgium and the Children's
> Theatre, I am not working many duties of my own invention, but am mainly
> laboring at duties put upon me by other people" (p. 199).
>
>
> Clemens's animosity toward President Roosevelt is prominent throughout the
> volume. While much of this dictation was published in _Mark Twain in
> Eruption_, what was behind his ill will is revealed in the detailed
> annotations in this edition. Clemens's ire could easily be fueled by news
> stories related to Roosevelt's hunting escapades. Clemens's concern for
> animal rights is paramount in his dictation for October 10, 1907 when he
> compared game hunters such as Roosevelt to Indian savages:
>
>
> "When we read of red Indians chasing a helpless white girl who is fleeing
> for her life, with bullets and arrows whizzing around her, the Indians'
> humanity is not apparent to us; the Indians seem to us only cruel and
> brutal, and all our sympathies are with the frightened girl. The fleeing
> deer is just as frightened, just as timid, just as void of offence; the
> deer's sharp agony and the girl's is the same, and it would seem to be
> logical that if the Republican hunter's performance is sport, and
> legitimate, the Indian's performance must be also regarded as sport, and
> legitimate" (p. 162).
>
>
> Clemens's moods run the gamut of human emotions: depression resulting from
> outliving his colleagues; frustration with the entire human race; sarcasm
> related to religion and politics; obsession for cleanliness and white
> clothes; joy approaching giddiness upon receiving an honorary degree from
> Oxford University; a penchant for surrogate granddaughters he called his
> "angelfish"; and a certain amount of pride and ingenuity over his scheme to
> fund a library in Redding, Connecticut by selling his autographed receipts
> for donations. There are only three sessions of dictation between April 16,
> 1909 and October 21, 1909 when he bitterly denounced Isabel Lyon as a drunk
> and a "whisky thief" (p. 310).
>
>
> Items in the appendix include a detailed chronology of events in the
> Ashcroft-Lyon affair. There is also the text of a long letter from Ralph
> Ashcroft to Clemens's attorney John B. Stanchfield giving Ashcroft's
> version of circumstances surrounding the controversy. The photo section for
> this volume includes both familiar photos and some that will be new to Mark
> Twain scholars. One group photo of Clemens at Stormfield with Ralph
> Ashcroft and Isabel Lyon features another man who has been misidentified by
> several previous biographers as a stenographer named W. E. Grumman. That
> man is now correctly identified as Archibald Henderson, author of the 1911
> biography _Mark Twain_.
>
>
> Clemens himself did not leave historians with an orderly and completely
> truthful story of his life. The editors of the three volumes that make up
> _Autobiography of Mark Twain_ deserve the heartfelt gratitude of scholars
> everywhere for producing an autobiography that checked the facts and
> presented Mark Twain's chaotic life story with unprecedented clarity.
>