Auto, 81ff”—where Paine published the text.

Clemens’s unsettled attitude toward his “unfinished” autobiography is clear, but not readily explained. On 10 October 1898, even as he was preparing “My Debut” for magazine publication, he told Edward Bok, editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal,

A good deal of the Autobiography is written, but I never work on it except when a reminiscence of some kind crops up in a strong way & in a manner forces me; so it is years too early yet to think of publishing—except now & then at long intervals a single chapter, maybe. I intend to do that, someday. But it would not answer for your Magazine. Indeed a good deal of it is written in too independent a fashion for a magazine. One may publish a book & print whatever his family shall approve & allow to pass, but it is the Public that edit a Magazine, & so by the sheer necessities of the case a magazine’s liberties are rather limited. For instance: a few days ago I wrote Chapter XIV—“My Debut as a Literary Person”—my wife edited it, approved it (with enthusiasm—this is unusual), & said send it to you & retire the “Platonic Sweetheart.” It was a good idea, & I said I would. But on my way to the village postoffice with it I remembered that it contained a sentence of nine words which you would have to drive a blue pencil through—so that blocked that scheme.39

A month later, in a more ambitious frame of mind, he wrote to Rogers that he now planned to “take up my uncompleted Autobiography & finish it, & let Bliss and Chatto each make $15,000 out of it for me next fall (as they did with the Equator-book).” But almost immediately he changed his mind about the need for money, and concluded that he would “never write the Autobiography till I’m in a hole. It is best for me to be in a hole sometimes, I reckon.” Then, just a few days later, he wrote again to Rogers: “I have resumed my Autobiography, and I suppose I shall have Vol. 1 done by spring time. I hope so I expect so.” And at last, in February 1899, still trying to find a magazine publisher for “My Debut,” he told Century editor Richard Watson Gilder: “I have abandoned my Autobiography, & am not going to finish it; but I took a reminiscent chapter out of it some time ago & & had it copyrighted & had it type-written, thinking it would make a readable magazine article.”40 So within the span of a few months he claimed that a “good deal” of the autobiography was written; that he would never finish it until he was “in a hole”; that he expected to have the first volume “done by spring time”; and that he had “abandoned” it altogether. He was obviously struggling with how, or even whether, to proceed with a work that had been in and out of the pigeonhole for twenty years.

Innumerable Biographies (1898 and 1899)

It is difficult to be entirely sure, but Clemens seems to have become discouraged at least in part over his inability to be completely frank and self-revealing, after the fashion of Rousseau and Casanova. His solution was, at least temporarily, to recast the autobiography as a series of thumbnail biographies of people he had met over the years. Several autobiographical manuscripts written in Vienna—“Horace Greeley,” “Lecture-Times,” and “Ralph Keeler”—are character sketches that were part of this reconception, one that he also relied on to some extent in 1904. The Vienna portraits recall men and women whom he knew in his days on the lyceum circuit in the early 1870s. The new plan probably owed something to the idea of a lecture he wrote back then called “Reminiscences of Some un-Commonplace Characters I Have Chanced to Meet.” He delivered this lecture, which he said covered his “whole acquaintance—kings, humorists, lunatics, idiots & all,” only twice. No text of it is known to survive, but in Vienna he evidently resurrected its premise.41 In an interview for the London Times in May 1899 the reporter explained:

Mr. Clemens has kindly given me permission to telegraph to The Times some particulars of a pet scheme of his to which he has already devoted a great deal of his time and which will occupy a great part of the remainder of his life. In some respects it will be unparalleled in the history of literature. It is a bequest to posterity, in which none of those now living and comparatively few of their grandchildren even will have any part or share. This is a work which is only to be published 100 years after his death as a portrait gallery of contemporaries with whom he has come into personal contact. These are drawn solely for his own pleasure in the work, and with the single object of telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, without malice, and to serve no grudge, but, at the same time, without respect of persons or social conventions, institutions, or pruderies of any kind.

Clemens even spelled out exactly why he had abandoned his original plan for an autobiography: “You cannot lay bare your private soul and look at it. You are too much ashamed of yourself. It is too disgusting. For that reason I confine myself to drawing the portraits of others.” And in an interview after he returned to London, he said again that the new idea had actually supplanted his earlier ideas for the autobiography:

I’m not going to write autobiography. The man has yet to be born who could write the truth about himself. Autobiography is always interesting, but howsoever true its facts may be, its interpretation of them must be taken with a great deal of allowance. In the innumerable biographies I am writing many persons are represented who are not famous today, but who may be some day.42

If this switch to biographical portraits signaled frustration over the puzzle of how to tell even the shameful truths, his interest in it was still relatively brief. We have no indication that he wrote any further portraits until 1904, and by 1906 the character-sketch idea had fallen entirely out of favor. For about a year Clemens seems not to have added anything to his accumulation of autobiographical “chapters.” In the fall of 1899 he moved his family to London, and for about a year seems to have taken leave of the autobiography.

Scraps and Chapters (1900 to 1903)

Clemens’s use of the terms “Scraps” and “Extracts” (as well as “Random”) in 1897–98 suggests that he was looking for a way to label “chapters” which, while not themselves strictly chronological, might still have been parts of some coherent narrative sequence.