Paul:  When I first came across the Neider edition of Twain's Autobiography,
I thought his editorial decisions were nothing short of criminal.  His
decision to suppress dictation dates needlessly confuses the reader; his
excision of those dictations and excerpts that did not meet his criterion
of "truly autobiographical" (whatever that means) is an unwarranted intrusion;
and, perhaps worst of all, his reordering of the material by chronology
rather than by date of composition flies in the face of several direct
instructions from Twain himself.  As Robert Atwan once pointed out, one
might as well correct Huck's grammar as rearrange the chronology of Twain's
autobiography, written in accordance with what Twain himself called a
"systemless system."  Moreover, and you have to read Neider's introduction
carefully to pick up on this, some of the words and even sentences in the
Neider edition are Neider's, not Twain's, as Neider took it upon himself
to write transitional connections between the dictations in order to further
his chronological approach--nor are these editorial transitions indicated
as such in the text.
 
   I have since softened my opinion somewhat, largely because Neider never
intended his edition as a scholarly text, but rather had the "general
reader" in mind.  And as we know, if there was an author that had, has,
and deserved a popular audience (i.e., non-academic), it was and is Twain.
Still, I think Neider did not give the "general reader" enough credit;
the public is clearly capable of handling non-linear plots, as evidenced
by, among a host of others, the success of Tarentino's *Pulp Fiction*.
 
  I have not seen the recent (1991?) edition of the autobiography that you
cite, but it sounds like a welcome addition.  My own sense is that
Neider's edition is too flawed to be of use to the scholar and too
condescending to the general reader; that the De Voto edition is not the
autobiography at all, but a collection of essays (as its title indicates); and t
hat the Paine edition, while itself flawed, remains the best available.
 
  I believe we need a *manageable* edition of the autobiography, with
selections and excisions throroughly debated and indicated in the text,
and ordered according to Twain's instructions--we need, in other words,
an edition that lets all readers meet Twain in the raw.  After all, as
Carl Van Doren said, "[Twain] created many characters, but none of them is
greater than himself."
 
  As for a complete, scholarly edition, I doubt if such a thing is either
possible or worthwhile.  As you know, the 40-year project that was Twain's
autobiography has left us with, by a conservative estimate, some 2,000 pages
of typed manuscript.  It it, to put it mildly, a somewhat eclectic document,
embracing newspaper clippings, correspondence, obituaries, transcripts of
speeches, extracts from Susy's biography of Twain and Benvenuto Cellini's
autobiography, and occasional essays on topics ranging from the German language
to bowling to personal hygiene to copyright law.  Moreover, at one time or
another the autobiography was meant to include complete works of fiction
(*1601*, "Wapping Alice," and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven") as well
as a lengthy piece of lit-crit (*Is Shakespeare Dead?*).  Finally, in a
gesture that I have never been able to quite understand (perhaps someone out
there could explain it to me), Twain's professed object in writing the
autobiography was to "distribute it through each of my existing books and
[thus] give each of them a new copyright of twenty-eight years" (qtd. in
Neider'sc introduction xiii).  Thus, in a sense, Twain's autobiography
includes--is--his entire corpus, every word he ever wrote.
 
  It is my feeling that the Twain "autobiography" exists only in the
abstract: the difference between it and any textual representation ot it
is a bit like the difference between poetic meter and poetic rhythm, the first,
as Paul Fussell explained a long time ago, being an abstract ideal and the
second a particular, concrete manifestation of that ideal, always already
different from the "original" it points to.  We can talk about the "auto-
biography," in other words, but I doubt we'll ever read it.
 
Nick Mount
Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS