Free Autobiography of Mark Twain by Mark Twain Page B

January through August 1906 Autobiographical Dictations. The resolution of this first part of the textual mystery shows, among other things, that TS1 is the primary source for the text of those dictations, and that when parts of TS1 are lost, the missing text can be reliably restored from either TS2 or TS4, because they were created by copying TS 1 before the losses occurred. Our understanding of the typescripts also helps to explain the multiple inscriptions on so many of their pages: they are the traces left behind by the editors and typists who collaborated with Clemens in 1906–9, and by the editors who published parts of the autobiography after his death, from Paine to DeVoto. The four typescript pages reproduced in facsimile in figures 14 – 17 illustrate some of the many hands that had to be identified and, above all, distinguished from Clemens’s own hand.
The
North American Review
(August and September 1906)

    To recapitulate: by 21 June Clemens had read through and corrected all of TS1 that Hobby had so far typed (over nine hundred pages, probably through the dictation for 20 June 1906). 87 He had reviewed his earlier manuscripts and selected at least those he wanted to begin with (he would later select several more, inserting them in later dictations). And he had written the title page and the several prefaces to frame those early pieces and introduce the 1906 dictations. Hobby began to create TS2, and an unidentified typist started TS4, probably as soon as Hobby made the revised TS1 available.
    With all that in train, Clemens left Dublin on 26 June to be away for a month, in Boston and New York City, occasionally visiting Henry Rogers at his home in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, and joining him on his yacht, the
Kanawha
. Following Rogers’s advice, he met several times with the Harper executives and lawyers in order to resolve their mutual disagreements about the recent republication of
Mark Twain’s Library of Humor
. While in New York he also met with S. S. McClure and left with him some pages from the dictations about Susy—probably those of 2–7 February. McClure wrote Clemens about them on 2 July:

This is not a business letter it is a love-letter. I read the wonderful chapters of your autobiography all are wonderful, but the chapters about the dear dear child are the finest I have ever read in literature

I wept & loved & suffered & enjoyed

    FIGURE 14 . The first page of the Autobiographical Dictation of 11 January 1906 (TS2, 178). Clemens wrote in ink at the top of the page and in the left margin, and crossed out the entire page. The “$3-Dog” (which he suggested as part “II” of a
Review
installment) is from AD, 3 Oct 1907. David Munro, a
Review
editor, wrote the title, the author’s name, and an instruction to include the “Prefatory note as usual.” “1877” is in an unidentified hand. The excerpt was published in December 1907 (NAR 25), typeset directly from this page.

    FIGURE 15 . The first page of the Autobiographical Dictation of 12 January 1906 (TS2, 199). Clemens noted in ink in the left margin: “None of this is printable while I am alive. It is too personal. . . . Leave it till I am dead, then print
all
of it some day. SLC.” In pencil in the right margin, he wrote, “ USE ONLY THE DREAM .” Stenographer Josephine Hobby wrote “Auto. Part” in the center and Harvey, editor of the
Review
, wrote inclusive page numbers “199 to 242” at the top right. Paine, who in early 1907 helped Clemens prepare a section for publication in the
Review
, wrote in the top left corner, and later added (in blue pencil), “Copied for use”—referring to another typescript, TS3, prepared from this one to serve as printer’s copy for the excerpt, which was published in the
Review
for 19 April 1907 (NAR 16).

    FIGURE 16 . The first page of the Autobiographical Dictation of 7 March 1906 (TS1, 419). Clemens wrote “Follow Susy’s spelling & punctuation always. SLC” at the top left; inserted