Table Of ContentMark 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
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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Mark Twain's previously unpublished works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-
