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.


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 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 This review may not be published or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. … If you leave 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.