The relevance of this project to his autobiography was inescapable, and in the “closing days” of that year he began to write “The Machine Episode,” an unsparing account of the way Paige had charmed and beguiled him into an enormous investment without having yet achieved a salable product. By the time Clemens added the second part to this self-revealing account, in the winter of 1893–94, Paige had still not perfected the machine but was about to sign a new, more satisfactory contract for it. Left in a rather unfinished state, the manuscript was very likely among those Clemens reviewed in 1906 before deciding to omit it from the final form. He did return to the subject in an Autobiographical Dictation of 2 June 1906.

Vienna (1897 and 1898)

Clemens’s hopes for the Paige typesetting machine were finally crushed in December 1894, and the bankruptcy of Webster and Company earlier that year had placed its debts solely on his shoulders. In the summer of 1895, in order to repay them, he, Olivia, and Clara undertook a lecture tour around the world (Susy and Jean stayed at home), which ended when they arrived in England on 31 July 1896. The family landed at Southampton and then traveled to Guildford, where they learned that Susy was ill in Hartford. “A fortnight later Mrs. Clemens and Clara sailed for home to nurse Susy,” Clemens recalled in 1906, and “found her in her coffin in her grandmother’s house.” Within weeks of this calamity Clemens wrote his friend Henry H. Rogers that he intended to “submerge myself & my troubles in work.” In the last week of September 1896 he reminded himself to “Write my autobiography in full & with remorseless attention to facts & proper names.”34 But he still needed to finish the book about his around-the-world lecture tour.35 The family spent the winter and spring of 1897 in London while Clemens wrote Following the Equator, which would be published in November.

In the summer of 1897 they retreated to Switzerland, and in late September they moved to Vienna. Two autobiographical manuscripts were begun that fall, “Travel-Scraps I” and a much longer sketch called “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].” “Travel-Scraps I” appears to be unfinished, or at least not quite ready for the typist, since Clemens made a tentative revision of its title, in pencil (“Travel-Scraps. ^from Autobiog^”) and the manuscript itself still has two sets of page numbers (1–20 and 1–28). It was probably written soon after Clemens arrived in Vienna, for it is largely a complaint about London’s cab drivers and its postal service, things that would naturally have been on his mind since the spring.

On the evidence of the paper and ink used, “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It]” was begun about the same time, but probably not completed until 1898. Clemens identified the text as “From Chapter II.”36 (The first page of this manuscript is reproduced in facsimile in figure 1.) It begins as a history of the Clemens and Lampton relatives and ancestors and, more briefly, the despised Tennessee land. But it meanders, without apology, into an anecdote about an incident in Berlin in 1891, and it ends with an evocative description of Clemens’s idyllic summers on his uncle’s farm near Florida, Missouri. This typical combination of early memories and later experiences helps to make clear why Clemens would reject the idea of a completely chronological narrative: his preference for juxtaposing related events from different times deeply resisted that way of organizing his story. At the same time, labeling the sketch “From Chapter II” implied that most of what it contained would come early in the autobiography, as would befit a review of ancestors. The chapter number suggests that while he was not writing about his experiences in the order of their occurrence, he was still making an attempt to assign chapter numbers that respected chronology.

Before Clemens completed “Random Extracts” in 1898, he wrote several more sketches for the autobiography between February and June of that year, grouped here under the supplied title “Four Sketches about Vienna”: “Beauties of the German Language,” “Comment on Tautology and Grammar,” “A Group of Servants” (the only one that Paine did not include in his edition), and “A Viennese Procession.” These were not reminiscences but rather more like entries in a diary, with each piece prefaced by a date. None of these sketches would be included in his final plan, but he did eventually include another manuscript written at this time, “Dueling,” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 19 January 1906.

Two further sketches were written in the fall of 1898 and also later inserted into the final structure of autobiographical dictations. The first was “Wapping Alice,” a tale deemed unsuitable for magazine publication, which was based on an actual event. It joined a growing collection of manuscripts that Clemens would eventually draw on for what he called “fat”—“old pigeon-holed things, of the years gone by, which I or editors didn’t das’t to print”—that he would use to enlarge the bulk of the Autobiography.37 More than a year after he began dictating his autobiography in 1906, he inserted “Wapping Alice” in the Autobiographical Dictation of 9 April 1907.

The second sketch was “My Debut as a Literary Person,” which he dated “October 1, 1898” and labeled “Chapter XIV.” The revision of this manuscript reflects a season of discouragement about the autobiography, a mood that shows up sporadically during the winter of 1898–99. Just below the title he first inserted a footnote: “This is Chapter XIV of my unfinished Autobiography and the way it is getting along it promises to remain an unfinished one.” Then he changed “unfinished” to “unpublished” and canceled the words following “Autobiography.” When the sketch appeared in the Century Magazine for November 1899, it omitted any reference to his autobiography. Still, it is the first “chapter” to be published in fulfillment of his long-held plan to publish selections from it.38

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FIGURE 1. The first page of the manuscript of “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].” Clemens deleted the epigraph shown here—two stanzas from The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám—and “From Chapter II” when revising the forty-four-page typescript (now lost) that was made from the manuscript; they are therefore omitted from the present text. Two notes at the top were written by Paine: “Vienna | 1897–8” and “no 109” (a filing designation). Rosamond Chapman, DeVoto’s assistant, wrote “Publ. 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.