Fields and her husband were visiting the Clemenses in Hartford. She recorded in her diary that at lunch, on 28 April 1876, Clemens

proceeded to speak of his Autobiography which he intends to write as fully and sincerely as possible to leave behind him—His wife laughingly said, she should look it over and leave out objectionable passages—No, he said very earnestly almost sternly, you are not to edit it—it is to appear as it is written with the whole tale told as truly as I can tell it—I shall take out passages from it and publish as I go along, in the Atlantic and elsewhere, but I shall not limit myself as to space and at whatever ever age I am writing about even if I am an infant and an idea comes to me about myself when I am forty I shall put that in. Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else and therefore he should write it down—he finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.18

This remarkable statement shows that Clemens was already committed to several ideas that would govern the autobiography he worked on over the next thirty-five years. The notion is already present that publication must be posthumous, a requirement linked to the ambition to have “the whole tale told as truly as I can tell it,” without censoring himself or allowing others to do it for him. He also plans to publish selections from the narrative while still alive, withholding the rest “to leave behind him.” He will not limit himself “as to space,” but will be as digressive and discursive as he likes, even ignoring chronology when it suits him. These cardinal points are clearly interrelated: absolute truth telling would be made easier by knowing that his own death would precede publication, and discursiveness (quite apart from his natural preference for it) would help to disarm his own impulse toward self-censorship. But it would take another thirty years to actually apply these various ideas to a real autobiography.

Just a year or so later, sometime in 1877, Clemens seems actually to have begun writing, prompted (as he recalled in 1904) by a conversation with his good friend John Milton Hay. Hay “asked if I had begun to write my autobiography, and I said I hadn’t. He said that I ought to begin at once” (since the time to begin was at age forty, and Clemens was already forty-two).

I had lost two years, but I resolved to make up that loss. I resolved to begin my autobiography at once. I did begin it, but the resolve melted away and disappeared in a week and I threw my beginning away. Since then, about every three or four years I have made other beginnings and thrown them away. Once I tried the experiment of a diary, intending to inflate that into an autobiography when its accumulation should furnish enough material, but that experiment lasted only a week; it took me half of every night to set down the history of the day, and at the week’s end I did not like the result.19

In late November 1877 Clemens listed “My Autobiography” among other projects in his notebook, reminding himself to “Publish scraps from my Autobiography occasionally.” He did indeed write an eleven-page manuscript at this time which he intended as the first chapter of an autobiography—very likely the “beginning” that in 1904 he remembered having thrown away. He titled it merely “Chapter 1,” but it is commonly known as “Early Years in Florida, Missouri,” the title Paine assigned it.20 It begins, “I was born the 30th of November, 1835”—the same way Clemens began his Aldine burlesque in 1871—and it goes on to reminisce briefly about his early memories of childhood in that “almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe county, Missouri.” Like “The Tennessee Land” (the only extant autobiographical fragment that was written earlier, in 1870) it ends somewhat abruptly, exactly as if the author’s interest had “melted away and disappeared.”

If Clemens did, as he says, make successive attempts to write the autobiography “every three or four years” after 1877, few are known to survive.21 What we have instead are such things as his advice in 1880 to Orion about his autobiography: “Keep in mind what I told you—when you recollect something which belonged in an earlier chapter, do not go back, but jam it in where you are. Discursiveness does not hurt an autobiography in the least.”22

Clemens took between three and seven years to complete almost all of his major books. He required that much time chiefly because he always encountered stretches during which he was unable to proceed, and composition came to a complete halt. Since at least 1871 he had found it necessary, when his “tank had run dry” in this way, to “pigeonhole” his manuscripts. And he learned to resume work on them only after the “tank” had been refilled by “unconscious and profitable cerebration.”23 But the time he spent on his earlier books is brief compared with the nearly four decades it took him to finish his autobiography. Its construction was certainly punctuated by long interruptions as well, but for somewhat different reasons. Until January 1906, the tank seemed to “run dry” after relatively brief stints of writing, or dictating, because he grew dissatisfied with his method of composing the work, or with its overall plan, or both.

General Grant and James W. Paige (1885 and 1890)

In the spring of 1885 Clemens made his first attempt at doing an autobiography for which more than a few pages survive. He had some previous experience with dictating letters and brief memoranda to a secretary, but he had never tried it for literary composition.24 Now he decided that it might be a good way to work on the autobiography. In late March he wrote in his notebook:

Get short-hander in New York & begin my autobiography at once & continue it straight through the summer.
Which reminds me that Susie, aged 13, (1885), has begun to write my biography—solely of her own motion—a thing about which I feel proud & gratified. At breakfast this morning I intimated that if I seemed to be talking on a pretty high key, in the way of style, it must be remembered that my biographer was present. Whereupon Susie struck upon the unique idea of having me sit up & purposely talk for the biography!25

At about the same time, he realized that dictation might be of help to his friend Ulysses S. Grant. Grant had written several articles for the Century Magazine’s series on the Civil War. In the spring of 1885, when he was dying of throat cancer, Grant was close to completing the manuscript of the first volume of his two-volume Memoirs. Clemens had recently secured them for his own publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Co., confident they would earn large profits both for Grant’s family and for himself.