Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals: 1855–1873, Volume 1 MARK TWAIN UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS Editorial Board WALTER BLAIR CLAUDE M. SIMPSON HENRY NASH SMITH Series Editor FREDERICK ANDERSON This page intentionally left blank THE MARK TWAIN PAPERS The following volumes in this edition of Mark Twain's previously unpublished works have been issued to date: MARK TWAIN'S LETTERS TO His PUBLISHERS, 1867-1894 edited by Hamlin Hill MARK TWAIN'S SATIRES & BURLESQUES edited by Franklin R. Rogers MARK TWAIN'S WHICH WAS THE DREAM? edited by John S. Tuckey MARK TWAIN'S HANNIBAL, HUCK & TOM edited by Walter Blair MARK TWAIN'S MYSTERIOUS STRANGER MANUSCRIPTS edited by William M. Gibson MARK TWAIN'S CORRESPONDENCE WITH HENRY HUTTLESTON ROGERS edited by Lewis Leary MARK TWAIN'S FABLES OF MAN edited by John S. Tuckey text established by Kenneth M. Sanderson and Bernard L. Stein MARK TWAIN'S NOTEBOOKS & JOURNALS, VOLUME I edited by Frederick Anderson Michael B. Frank and Kenneth M. Sanderson MARK TWAIN'S NOTEBOOKS & JOURNALS, VOLUME II edited by Frederick Anderson Lin Salamo and Bernard L. Stein MARK TWAIN'S NOTEBOOKS & JOURNALS, VOLUME III Frederick Anderson, general editor Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo, volume editors Editorial Associates ROBERT PACK BROWNING RALPH DICKEY VICTOR FISCHER ALAN GRIBBEN BRUCE TAYLOR HAMILTON ROBERT H. HIRST LIN SALAMO BERNARD L. STEIN M A RK TWAIN'S NOTEBOOKS & JOURNALS VOLUME I (1855-1873) Edited by Frederick Anderson Michael B. Frank and Kenneth M. Sanderson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1975 CENTER FOR EDITIONOF AMERICAN AUTHORS AN APPROVED TEXT MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATON FAMERCIAN Editorial expenses for this volume have been in large part supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities administered through the Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modern Language Association. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley and Los Angeles, California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, LTD. London, England © 1975 The Mark Twain Company Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 72—87199 ISBN: 0-520-02326-9 Designed by Adrian Wilson in collaboration with James Mennick Printed in the United States of America Second Printing 1997 Preface F FOR TWENTY-FIVE years after Samuel Clemens' death his desig- FoR nated biographer and editor, Albert Bigelow Paine, collected and edited his letters, his hitherto unpublished literary works, his Auto- biographical Dictations, and finally, in 1935, a volume called Mark Twain's Notebook. In the Notebook Paine presented less than one- quarter of Clemens' journal entries, randomly selected and reordered to suit the editor's preferences. Now, on the occasion of the full pub- lication of the complex documents from which Paine drew his earlier version, it seems appropriate to evaluate Paine’s editorial labors against current standards of textual scholarship. As Mark Twain's biographer, Paine was industrious, comprehensive, and, by the test of sixty years, surprisingly fair. Despite the absence of citations to sources for his information, despite his disregard for the dates of events, and even in spite of his preoccupation with the social figure rather than the creative man, Paine’s biography is still the Mark Twain scholar's central reference. Those who followed him have in many instances corrected errors and introduced new evidence, but they have not substantially altered Paine’s portrait. As Mark Twain's biographer, Paine served his subject, his readers, and subse- quent generations very well in most respects. vii viii Preface Paine was also energetic in editing Mark Twain's work for post- humous publication, but here the value of his service to the reading public is less clear. In the year the author died Paine published a volume of Mark Twain's speeches, which he revised and reprinted fourteen years later. Seven years after Clemens' death, Paine, having completed and published the massive biography, presented a two- volume collection of letters. This is an interesting although arbitrary selection, and the reader is virtually unwarned that many letters have been silently censored, rearranged, and conflated. In 1916 Paine contrived a version of Mark Twain's "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts, deliberately pruning, amplifying, and reorder- ing the original material in a manner which departed significantly from the author's intention. His literary decisions were so persuasive that the book was looked upon as an example of Mark Twain's major writing and its text remained virtually unchallenged for nearly five decades. Scholars with access to the Mark Twain Papers were aware that the book in print had been drastically revised from the surviving manuscripts, but the extent of Paine’s editorial liberties became gen- erally known only with the publication of Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts in 1969. Paine presented Europe and Elsewhere as a collection of loosely related shorter writings in 1923. No text of any of these pieces stands up under collation with its manuscript. Mark Twain's Autobiography, which Paine printed in two volumes a year later, contains less than one-half of the original document. Since the published portion is drawn from the first part of the manuscript, it is reasonable to suppose that the editor was deflected from a more ambitious undertaking either by other interests or by the publisher's lack of enthusiasm, perhaps as a result of disappointing sales. In the portion he selected Paine acted on Mark Twain's instructions in excluding parts of the autobiography, but he also deleted unfavorable references to living persons and sup- pressed those distortions of truth which reveal the imaginative re- shaping of supposedly factual narrative. To exploit the centenary of Mark Twain's birth, in 1935 Albert Bigelow Paine performed his final and most perfunctory editorial Preface IX chore, Mark Twain’s Notebook, supplying only casual documentation. With a misleading appearance of candor, the editor asserted in his introduction to that volume: A good while ago I wrote a biography of Mark Twain. In that book I drew briefly here and there upon the set of journals, diaries, or common- place books which through a period of nearly fifty years he had kept and, what is still more remarkable, preserved. These little books are now offered in full. A man in his diary, if anywhere, can have his say. He is talking to himself—his thought and his language are strictly his own. Some of the things that Mark Twain set down in that privacy were hardly suited to the unadorned cheek of polite society in that purer pre-war day. Now all is changed. (MTN, pp. x-xi) This editorial approach sounds promising, but the statement is dis- honest. "Now offered in full" is contradicted by a comparison of the number of words in Paine’s 1935 selection (120,000, including inter- spersed remarks by Paine) with the full text of roughly 450,000 words exclusive of editorial commentary. Among the words available in the present edition are a number which Paine apparently did not consider appropriate even for the no longer "unadorned cheek" of his society. Yet there is no intention of claiming that this complete text of the notebooks offers shocking revelations about Mark Twain, since the documents have long been available to biographers and critics who have put on the record the facts Paine chose to ignore. The reader will likewise be disappointed if he expects to find here a writer's literary journals. To be sure, there are literary references throughout, and even occasional passages of sustained prose narrative. Primarily, however, the notebooks are those of a man actively engaged in society, in public affairs, in all of the time-wasting business enterprises which so appealed to Clemens but which were of such little real benefit to him. Still, the very nature of the random miscellany of reminder and comment has literary value. As Mark Twain in his Autobiographical Dictations felt he could most effectively present the truth of his life by allowing current interests and events to stimulate his rambling commentary on the past, so his notebooks provide the context of the distracting daily business and social activities within which the enor-