after 9/11 also overestimated the problem. they are a serious problem, but it's not communism. .. >> robert hirst is the general editor of the mark twain project at the university of california

berkeley. he describes the work in preparing "the autobiography of mark twain, volume one" published 100 years after the author's death. also discussing his thoughts on the book's success and responds to the criticism that the book has received. this hour and 20 minute event was hosted by the university of california berkeley osher lifelong learning institute at the lafayette library and learning center. >> robert came to uc berkeley in 1963. he was a student. four years later people seeing his promise offered him a job. he has been there ever since. in 1949 the granddaughter of mark twain dave uc-berkeley the material that is in the are, -- archive. in 1980 robert became that general editor of these archives.

in 2005 we began the process of putting together the volume, the first volume. i know many of you have already seen it. there will be three volumes. there is a tremendous amount of excitement associated at uc press and with all of us who love of role that mark twain has played in american literature and culture to know that a half a million copies of that autobiography have already been sold. it's on the new york times bestsellers list where it has been for 14, 15, 19 weeks, a longtime. i'm really delighted that we have robert here to tell us even more. robert hirst. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> i have to turn myself on here. no pun. aq, susan, for that

introduction. it always reminds me of the way that mark twain said he was introduced out here in california 140 years ago. he was on one of his first lecture tours in california. never published a book. of course, nobody knew him. he was up in red dog. no one even knew how to introduce them. finally the crowd persuaded a slouching and awkward big minored to get up on the stage and do the honors. he stood blinking a moment, mark twain says. he says, i don't know anything about this fellow. i only know two things. one is he has not been in the penitentiary and the other is a don't know why.

[laughter] he said he liked that because it was a compliment that did not raise the expectations too high. pain put that into the autobiography because he did not know that mark twain himself had cut it out. so, let me balance it with a little story or a few sentences that are in the autobiography. this is the end of an account of how mark twain escaped a duel that he had actually instigated in virginia city. he had sent the challenges. he, of course, didn't know anything about how to shoot a pistol. he wanted to get out of it and managed to. this is how that story in this. i've never had anything to do with tools cents. at the early disapprove of tools. i consider them on wise, and i no they're dangerous. also sinful.

if a man should challenge me now i would go to that man and say taking him kindly and for giving me by the hand and leading him to a quiet spot and kill and terry had now, i should have done this at the start. mark twain was a very disciplined public speaker, and i am not. as a general rule you ask an editor to talk, the real problem is to get him to stop. but i bring this along with me. i call this the anti filibuster device. i will -- well, let me cite mark twain's own advice. he was preparing to go on the lecture tour james riley, and he was afraid that riley would take too long on his half of the program and therefore cut into mark twain's time and make the audience impatient. they would all go home. he invents in his notebook this

little introduction. he says, i will talk until i am tired and then mr. reilly will talk until you retired. we are going to try to avoid talking until you retired, and i promise that when this thing goes off it will be very hard to persuade me to say anything else. so, what is so special about this autobiography? mark twain try for more than 30 years off and on to find a way to write his autobiography. that is a long time even for him because he would quite easily spend four, five, six, 78 years on his major books. what is remarkable is that he knew very early on how he wanted that autobiography to be constructed. you will see in the background

basically pieces of many script that belonged to the autobiography. here are a few more. you can contemplate them. this is what any fields reported in 1876 when mark twain was 40. had a conversation with him in which he said that he -- she said that he proceeded to talk about his autobiography which he intends to write as willie and sincerely as possible to leave behind him. highly posthumous. his wife having said she should take it over and leave out objectionable passages though he said very honestly 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 up passages and publishes as i go along in the atlantic and elsewhere, but i shall limit myself as to space. whenever age am writing about,

even if i am an infant and an idea comes to me about myself and i'm 40-supported and. it still amazes me when i read that paragraph to see just how clearly he knew what he wanted to do. at least 40, 30 years before he actually started doing it. there are in the papers roughly two dozen false starts and isolated chapters written by him between 1870 and 1904. thirty-five years. we see him in those drafts and chapters struggling to give up, that is to fully relinquish a chronological organization. it's something that you and i would pretty much assume was the organization principal for an autobiography. mark twain was struggling to leave that behind him. in any case is beginning traps that we have each seemed to him

an adequate. he abandoned them and stop writing more chapters. he did not read the book -- throw them away. very typical. but in 1904 shortly before his wife's death in florence mark twain had a last long dictation as a way to composes text. but not dictation of a cradle to grave narrative. it was to have the special character, what he called the right way to do an autobiography. that is to start it in no particular time of your life kamal wander at your free will all over your life, talk only about the thing which interests you. drop at the moment its interest threatens to pale and turn your talk about the new and more interesting that has interest itself into your mind. two years later in 1906 that is exactly what h doing, dictating to a very confident

stenographer and typist, josephine hobby for to, three, sometimes for hours in the morning several times a week. she would type of pronounce almost immediately and give them to clemens who actually delayed reading them for several months wanting to wait and see if this was going to work out. this process of dictation continued with some interruptions in 1906, 1907. with less intensity in 1908 and 1909 and concluded on 24 december 1909 when his kendis daughter, jean, died in the bathtub. he sat down and wrote a memorial to her which he added divide as the end of the autobiography. in less than four months he was himself dead having contributed to this autobiography, 650,000 words compiled in the utterly confident defiance of the usual

limits on such a text just as he had imagined in 1876. there he is on the porch in new hampshire. this is where a lot of the detention occurred. there he is in bed, which is also where a lot of the detention occurred. mark twain was a very relaxed person in many ways. we should mention the fact that this publication as a unusual history, at least for those of us who were involved in the scholarly edition of mark twain which has been going on since 1967. i didn't bother to be scan last week's new york times list, but, in fact, this sunday will be the 20th week on the list. i think it has found around 17. last week it was down a round number 14. as susan said, there are 500,000 copies, not necessarily sold,

but printed out there. to give you an idea of what that is compared with an our experience, let's say when we hold your volume of letters you will print 2,000 copies and expect to sell them over ten years. so this is a new game for us. an absolutely new game. in any case, all of the autobiography -- cadel want to get there, all of the autobiography man's boat -- menus kajar at berkeley. only a very few are at other institutions. they are -- they have been there since mark twain put them. so in what sense is it necessary to find mark twain's armbar ft? cannot find something that has not been lost. i'll try to make that clear as i go along. what are the mark twain papers? why did they exist?

why are they in berkeley? i'm going to have to try to answer those questions. before i do that i have to do the bill bit more on the recent publication. this book has already been awarded peace prizes by the american publishers association. i think it is interesting that we have never won the prize before. at think maybe the award was given for the number of copies sold. i can't be sure. mark twain said in 1908 that he was going to start a new hobby. he was going to collect couple months away of the people collect horses and autographs and so forth and so on. this was one of the complemented collected. i thought you want to see it. the cuts it out of the newspaper. that is upended you concede. he has pinned it to a piece of paper. all of the handwriting is marked lines.

mr. edison's complement. the compliment is, an american loves his family. if he has in the love leftover for some of the person he generally selects mark twain. mark twain says, i think the world of that complement. this committee does. yes, he does. here is another compliment that he cited in the same 1908 speech referring to. given you a transcription side by side. in these cases handwriting is not clear. you can follow it. little montana grow complement. mark twain said he has some one from illinois that sent this to him. she was gazing thoughtfully at a photograph of mark twain on the neighbors mantelpiece. irreverently, we have got a jesus like that at home, only hours has more trimmings. what did she mean by more trimmings?

but, for those of you have forgotten what jesus looked like, you pull a copy of a one of the family bibles. mark twain said that the difference in trimmings was halos. is he said had not arrived yet. all of this is just a way of saying that mark twain had in his own lifetime an enormous silent audience, what he called a submerged audience, an audience that did not go to bookstores, that was not like you and me, littered and intelligent and going to lectures and so forth, but simply bought his books on of oil basis and read them. submerged fame, he called it, or a submersed clientele. discussed this in 1888 when they're sitting out in the son in new york city. that story is told in the autobiography. he and stevenson agreed that

this kind of thing, the kind of fame that comes from people who you have never met and are unlikely ever to meet was of all the kinds of fame the best, the very best. i think something like that kind of fan operating when people buy mark twain's first volume of the autobiography. i think that audience is coming into view in no way that really we have never seen it in my lifetime and in the case. now, we didn't expect it, as you know. the original estimate on my part was, perhaps, 10,000 copies. that will be five times so we normally sell or print for that matter. the press is now on public record as saying that they thought maybe 100,000 copies would be it. i remember in discussing, for

instance, what the photograph should be on the front of the jacket, one of the people from the press saying they wanted something particularly eye-catching that would lead off the remainder table lets you. [laughter] he thought that was rather discouraging. and so we thought it would be good to document. it's not the remainder table. those are brand new copies. that is something that we have never seen before. now, we did do certain things to sell this book that we would not ordinarily do. we sold to various magazines, atlantic, harper's, and as you see, playboy, what are called first serial rights. these are basically small chance of the autobiography. all they need to be was short, unpublished, and funny.

that was easy. so, playboy got one. i should say that not everybody approves of the autobiography. perhaps the more famous, most famous disapproval comes from -- and i promised him the advertisement for the stock to at least address what he had to say. actually, i've reproduced what was said. that is a little easier to follow. she quotes him. here is a powerful argument for writers burning their papers. a little further down, think twice about donating your papers to an institution of higher learning. a famous writer, someday they may be used against you. i think it is clear that he does not like the autobiography. it is also clear that he has not read it very carefully.

he is encountering a scholarly edition without relief acknowledging that. but i think the one thing i wanted to say publicly is that it is good advice not to give your papers to an institution like this. although, as you might end up with a best seller of 500,000 copies being sold 100 years after you did or not, simply have no patients with what they regard as academic overkill. and for that reason they simply miss read the first half of the book and are almost willfully and where the less than one-third of the actual autobiography is in this volume. that is so because the volume has to begin with the preliminary experiments, the things that he rejected between 1870 and 1904. so, really, you get in this volume only three months of the

dictations that mark twain started in january 1906. they will go on for another three years. so it's of little harsh to judge mark twain's autobiography on that sample. and i do think that the new york times which published an editorial about this, i've never seen them review a book in the editorial days before this. i think they're right. let me read you what they said. mark twain is terrific company, plain and simple. he knew everyone, everywhere, seemed to be interested in everything incapable of making the reader in 2010 laugh on nearly every page. this is not strictly speaking an autobiography. they explained. the system he finally found for doing so is perfect. twain talked about what he is interested in until he is no longer interested in it. then he talks about something else wondering at freewill of real-life.

this is a book for dipping, not plunging. read until interest pails and then jump. it feels like a form of time travel. one moment you're on horseback in the hawaiian islands recovering from several boils with a cigar in your mouth and tell the next moment you are making a viennese made wuthering heights. we can hardly wait for volume to and if you want more positive comment on those negative reviews like ed and her del baucus review in the new york review of books 24 february. they, as see comments on both of them and comes down on the side of what he calls the old gray lady, the new york times editorial. he would not have been faced by these kinds of criticisms. he says in the autobiography, i believe that the trade of credit in the feature, music, and the trauma that is the most degraded of all trades and that it has no real value, certainly no large

volume. however, let it go. the will of god that we must have critics and missionaries and congressman and humorous. we must bear the burden in the meantime. he was fairly steady in that view of critics. he was asked by his older brother to read one of his compositions. he refused saying that the great publics, the only opinion worth having. that is just another way of referring to his submerged audience. allow me to of leave those critics behind and talk of a bit more about the papers. you can see from the slide, just a little section. mark twain got into the habit certainly in the last decade of his life and probably before that of writing things that he was quite confident he could not publish in his lifetime. he did not dare. putting them in what he calls

your thought box's stuff where he says he has stacks of literary remains. so in the mark twain papers are roughly 700 manuscripts, some of them finished, some of them on finished. many of them brief, most of them brief, in fact. many of them quite interesting, some of them quite good. not unpublished because they were bad, but for other circumstances. and that is actually the core of the mark twain papers. but it is not something that i can easily talk about or explain here, so i'm going to try another tactic for talking about what is in the papers. in addition to all of the literary manuscripts there is all kinds of stuff. if this is a little overwhelming it is meant to be. 10,000 letters, 700 the very manuscript's, working notes, marginalia. this was the bookplate that he

makes in 1848, the earliest known document. a sample of his hair. fifty notebooks, checks, bills, clippings, proves, photographs, and on and on and on. those are all things that are not literary manuscripts relief or that are not the main core of the papers, but they are, in my view, one way of understanding how we grasp mark twain in view of the fact that he left all this behind. it is very unusual for a writer to be willing to leave all of his unpublished manuscripts, drafts, notes, not to mention his checks, notes about how much beer he drank and so forth. carry unusual for an author. in fact, in my opinion unique in 19th century america to leave all that evidence behind. mark twain said, he could

imagine being dead. most people think of being dead as looking down from somewhere or up from somewhere and seeing you, for instance, reading the autobiography. he said that is not how i imagine that. i tried to dozen years before, and i'm pretty sure i like it when i die. he is quite willing for you to see this. he might be a little uneasy here and there, but he is quite willing for the world to see this. at think there is a parallel between that kind of bravery, if you will, and the publication of the autobiography. i'm just going to go in to a few details. i have time. things that are in there so that you get a sense of what the papers hold. this was the earliest known image of mark twain. it's taken when he was probably graduating as a printer, becoming -- not a printer's devil, but an apprentice

printer. you can see that he is holding a printer's tech with the letters stand in that, identifying him. this is a booklet that i was talking about, basically an exercise that typesetter would do to learn how to set up advertisements for the newspaper. the interesting thing about this party is that it's literally the earliest thing that we think he put his hand to. it was in the papers since the beginning, 1910, but not discovered until 1984. that is an aspect of the papers which is quite remarkable. we are still finding things we did know we had. this is a late photograph. mark twain is returning from bermuda. is going to die within a few weeks. another photograph, this has been described as a practical joke. it's not a practical joke. mark twain had commissioned his

protege to do a bust of him, and that bust was eventually photographed and put in the front of huckleberry finn. then if he wanted to get the neck right you have to see the shoulders. mark twain goes to charles thomas pro meyer, an art photographer. as this picture of himself taken so that the sculptor can make that bust. now, i daresay mark twain thought it was kind of funny, so he kept it. it is probably the only absolutely unique photograph of him anywhere. this is an example of what we have. it requires no explanation. here's another one. talking about someone. describing this photograph. the old familiar plymouth church itself complacency of 40 years ago. it is the wake of lax and he has

had a successful season. now, this is an example of a notebook. a very early notebook. councilman notebooks he kept and he was learning to be a pilot. this blue heading means from the new orleans delta to the head of ireland's 62, 63. basically his notes of what that passage of the river, what kinds of problems it encountered and how he should never did it in the future. he had not yet published this. another river notebook. i isolated as the phrase for you. headquartered twine or mark twain. recording the depth of the water. two-and-a-half, two and 1/4 fathoms or 2 fathoms. here. interesting. why would we bother about his hair? this is what we call a well

tested example. connection problem. click to open in tell wireless trouble shooter for help. i don't think so. all the help i can get. any case, is a lion is attending a haircutting in new hampshire when mark twain is almost 70. 1905, she dated. she describes it in great detail and include this swatch of his hair. what good is that? well, here is another thing that is found in the bible. i don't know if you can see the hair down here. this is the same clipping flipped over. the clipping has been told that the bottom to hold on to the hair. this is not a poem written by mark twain or in hannibal. it is a poll taken from the magazine. this says up here, for margaret. it was our supposition that this

was jean commences way of memorializing her 9-year old daughter who died when she was nine. something fairly common in those days. but that is just a guess until you can do something with the evidence you have to be so if you look at the mitochondrial dna in this one and the mitochondrial dna in this one, if they have the sign mitochondrial dna then they have the same of the. we know a little bit more about how mark twain's sister was mourned. this was just two pages from the manuscript from travel abroad. mark twain is imagining himself over in germany, and he is missing american food and so he starts off this list. only two pages of a four page list. i think he goes on and publishes this in the last chapter. but the wonderful thing about the manuscript like this is that you can see him coming back to it and changing it and interlining things that he has

forgotten and changing the whole content of it in the way that shows that this is really of great interest to him. we also have lots of letters. this is what i call the most important letter marked whenever wrote. it is written from san francisco in october 1865. he is down and out to speak. he is without a job. actually, just recently taken a job. out of money, and drinking too much. he writes to his older brother and sister-in-law and says that he only had to powerful ambitions in life. one was to become a pilot and the other was become a minister of the gospel. i accomplished the one, he says, and failed and the other because i could not supply myself with the necessary stock in trade, i.e. religion. i have given it up.

and never had a call in that direction in the house. my aspirations were the very ecstasy of presumption. i have had a call to literature. it is nothing to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit. he goes on basically to resolve to make something out of that talent even though it does consign him, he thinks, to a low level of literature. the last thing i want to point out is a postscript. mark twain knows full well this is an important letter. p.s., you had better show this in the stove. if we strike a bargain at don't want any of certain. remains published after i implanted. fortunately it was not burned. a remarkable statement from someone who has not yet published a book. mark twain did not lack confidence. another letter to howell. the yankees going to the press. he once held to be the prove to

be it yesterday mr. hall wrote that it was improving but punctuation. it telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray. now, in order to give you a sample of what are roughly 11,000 letters i thought i would take a small category, those from which he is answering begging letters, answering or not answering. this is one in reply to someone asking him to support an orphanage. i beg to the best success and long career of usefulness. words are empty. deeds are what should the earnest spirit. therefore i am willing to be one of the thousand citizens to shell agreed to contribute to a more of their children to this enterprise. he goes on and gives it a very nice double signature. not always that way. mark twain is not cheap.

he knows what they will do with it. they will sell it and get their $200 contribution. now, mark twain didn't always answer such letters. when he didn't he often wrote what he would have said, at least in brief, on the envelope. this is a good example of his sharpness matched up with his very tender heart. the idiots seem to be uncommonly take this year. wants god knows what to read bag for an autograph letter. 210. excuse for an autograph letter did not persuade him. from some bore who wants to destroy the death penalty with an eye to his own future. from an unknown 88 in ireland. this is the worst piece of cheek of all. from a boston. today slater, from that same boston has.

from some unknown person who probably has brains and modesty in about equal proportions. i could go on with almost infinite examples like this. there are all through the papers. now, this is an letter that is part of another aspect of his reply to requests for autographs. he eventually figures out a way to answer the request, grant the request, but have a little fun in the process. this is an answer to a letter who was actually an employee of the dayton, ohio asylum for the insane. probably a guard, but could be administrator, and he probably wrote his letter using asylum stationery. mark twain is tipped off to where he is coming from. this is the way he tells the sky could be certainly i will write you an autograph letter for your collection. what is more, please to not tell the officers of the asylum that

i said such a thing, i believe that your wickedly and unjustly confined there. that is, if there are riggers. portions of your letter are quite rational. i am satisfied that if you will put under mild and judicious treatment you would get over it. that, of course, my signature. the whole theory behind this is, of course, that when he gets this letter and reads it he may change his mind about showing it to his friends. there are dozens of such letters. here's one that did not put into the slide to be to have to listen carefully. i am a long time answering your letter, my dear ms. harriet. you must remember that it is in the plea long time since i received it the that makes this even. nobody to blame on either side. i think you would like to know that i write you as of 52nd audience. it usually takes about ten

seconds. here is another. to the english writer, william valentine. so impatient for a reply that he imposed a piece of paper and a stamp with his original letter. mark twain answered, paper and stay here received. him please send an bobblehead. as one of the plan before i go on and get to the autobiography, mark twain loved cancellations. unlike you and me he would probably never quayle at sending a letter to the male that had such a cancellation and it. you and i might be of little embarrassed, but he was not. he also knew that cancellation could be read. here is our attempt to read it. that is really just the kind of

tracing. it took us about six months to pass it around the office giving people each shot it. you can see we are still having trouble with the second line. we can't really do that confidently because the way you read such a thing is by picking out that the cinders and ascenders. those are consonance or in this case. but they help you narrow down what is likely to be under the lip be the be loop. in this case you have only one descender. no dots on the eyes, no nothing. it took us a long while. we finally did get. indeed, i am under a. he stops and starts over. indeed, a suspicion comes over me. this is suspicion right here. comes over me. i owe you to either 25 or $50. it was in this way and so forth and so want to read now, how do we know that he knew they could

be read? this is of little piece from a letter he writes to his fiancee, olivia langdon, trying to persuade him to become a christian. being very wary about the letters she receives and the noticed that in one of them he has torn out a whole section of the page and send a page. and she has asked him what was that confession? he says, the confession i destroyed was that i had refused to lecture a weak year for six of the dollars because we are now at this point. i can't tell it again. you would say i was a lovesick it down here now. and between ourselves i am. i could not be so reckless has to write the above if you had any curiosity in your composition. if you were curious enough to try to pry under the cancellation to figure out what i said then i would dare to write this, but, of course, you

can tell now that it was written precisely to invite her to uncover it. he knows that she will do that. then this down here in brackets, meaning it's another speaker, that is the the when he discovers what she has just said. how do we know that that actually worked? well, we know because mark twain in venice away to prevent those cancellations from being read. he goes in and he crosses the else and he adds ascenders and descenders and in general this leads you so badly that unless you know that's going on you simply cannot read the cancellation. we know that is what was going on here. that's the way to scratch it out. when you find you have written what he did not mean to write pretty basically their search to try to read it. we're pretty sure she couldn't. it took us awhile. i'm giving you this example to to show you what kind of the editors worked on the project for 40 years.

this is something that not everybody understands or knows. we are very darkly simply to understand it. it is something that was, i think, sitting us in good stead when we came to work on the autobiography to which i actually am going to get right now with 20 minutes to go. as i see it, actually two kinds of stories in this. the story of how mark twain actually tried and tried and tried and eventually succeeded in doing an autobiography, and another story which is how the editors themselves wrestle with the documents left behind and figured out what no one had done before, no one had known that marked when actually finished his autobiography, that he knew exactly what he wanted in it and exactly what he did not want in a. so, that is the sense which i have in mind when i talk about finding the autobiography. 5,000 pages in the mark twain papers, but unless you know how

to understand this pages you won't find his autobiography. you will find, in effect, what others have found and mistaken for the autobiography. why did mark twain want it suppressed or not published in its entirety for 100 years? i don't think this is a very complicated question. he wants the freedom to compose it as he wants to without fear of hurting anybody's feelings and he means not just people who are alive when he is writing, but anyone who is there descended with their descendant. one hundred years is a nice round figure. this shows you that on occasion 500 years is necessary. this is about to be typed up. cannot be forced to of the year 200406. that just shows you that that is a long time. it does not show you heat naturally expect that much time to go by.

also tells you a little bit about what his internal, what he expected to happen if, in fact, these things were published. he said the things which are about to say will be commonplace of the time and parent of a fence or as in our day they could inflict pain upon my friends, acquaintances, and thousands of strangers whom i have no desire to hurt and could get me ostracized the sides and cut off from all human. the ostracism is the main thing. i am human. nothing could persuade me to do any bad deed or any good one that would bring that punishment upon me. that is not a motive that is widely recognized. of course tier is yet another motive, and that is selling the book. this is a pace that is about to go to the north american review in which mark twain published a very small selection of the autobiography in 1906 and 1907 edited down so that there is nothing offensive in that. this shows you that he is addressing the editor and

saying, david, let's receive every installment which says the autobiography will not be issued in book form during my lifetime. that is that really what happened. so you basically have 25 separate reminders that this autobiography is not really here in the north american review, and you can't get it into mark twain dice. that is what we call a marketing plan. now, people have asked me, why wasn't it public before? of course the answer is that it has been partly published before and badly published. this is mark twain's official biographer and the publisher of the autobiography in 1924. this is his successor who publishes his selection of the autobiography in 1940. this is a man named charles who is not one of a literary editors but basically got access to the

autobiography. i've given you three pictures of him to share you the effect of editing mark twain. but, to be fair, to be fair, to be fair, i have included this, too. that shows you the effect of editing mark twain since 1967. and that shows you who the real guilty parties are. i am really just the kind of supervisor. i don't really do any editing. i am the kind of darth vader in the corner office to criticize what they do. i'm not welcome most of the time now, i do want to talk of the bit about why those additions are not satisfactory. pain felt absolutely free to write on the original documents. you can see all of these pencil markings.

in fact, he actually hands into the printer and numbers them as the printers copy and when the printer is done with them, what does he do? he put them on a spindle. that is what this bill hole is all about. i mentioned this not to kind of just beat up on pain, but because it leads to the fact that there are things that should have been in the autobiography that are gone, lost. one of the things the editors managed to do was to solve that problem as well. now, you can see down here the pain has decided he does not like what is being said here. blow it up a little bit for you. this is a discussion of a man named newton who is a faith healer, call then when olivia langdon was paralyzed for a number of years, could not stand or walk. doctors really did no good at all. they finally were persuaded to hire this guy, nugent. mark twain says newton made some

passes about her head with his hands. he put an arm behind her and said night you a set up my child. it's to pagan, it's too bushy belushi. and so new and opened the windows and delivered a short fervent prayer. and when mark twain repeats this , passes his hands over the head, he just cross it out. that is the way that has been published. it could not tell that this was not our kind. here are a couple more pages that illustrate the way devote a treated these things he is on record as saying that he disapproved of the punctuation and that he took out hundreds and hundreds of commons and dashes when he published it. he only publishes a very small selection of it, and as you see, he is perfectly free to write on

the manuscript, instructions to his typist. in this case he has cost up the comments. and of course mark twain is over here. so one of the basic problems in dealing with this manuscript is to figure out which marks by the authors and which are the photos. how do we know that those comments to ', if you pick ataxias done this to, you can see the comments of all this appeared. qed. so here we have mark twain. one of the great achievements of these editors that they figured out how to distinguish between all the markings on this document. here is just a simple example that has maybe five different handwritings not. all of the pencil markings,, hyphens is pain.

they also have his typesetter. this is numbering the printers copy, this is actually someone we don't know. here is mark twain, not for mc. what does that mean? it means not for ss mcclure who is thinking about symbolizing it. he even correct some of the things that the stenographer gets wrong. for instance, down here the stenographer has written, in effect non existent and unfeasible. clearly that is not what he said. he crosses and infeasible out and says invisible. he decides that is in need of either because of its non existent of course it is invisible. so the challenge here, and it is throughout the autobiography, to figure out exactly what mark twain wanted and what the others , to leave out the desires

of the other marchers. another telesat is hard to explain but worth contemplating is that in many of these daily dictations, one, two, three, four, sometimes rightly, sometimes three, sometimes just to tide copies of the same dictation, not carbons. if they were carbons that would be easier, but these are retyping of this dictation. this is the front page of may 21. you see this looks roughly the same throughout. as you can see here, this one is paid 76. the next one is 83. the next one is for. the next one is 1115. that is a big mystery. why are those differences so

prominent? what does it imply? does it imply he is moving this around and therefore it gets different pagination when he opted in different places? adopting so. we didn't think so. eventually we could say it was at least not this. this is the normal way it gets transmitted. now, that isn't what happened here. this is something like what happened. it was eventually figured out by the divine the physical characteristics of different typescript that there was one central typescript, gs1 that was made from the original stenographers notes. at some point they had it retract and won because t s2 to read it again in what we call t s4. the question is, it tells you what has the most authority and it tells you what to make of the variants in the typescript. the problem is this. this is page one.

page 150. page 408. why? had think it is clear that these high numbers imply that there is something missing appear. where is it? where is it? actually, it was in the file. you just know it. not the los angeles freeway. this is an early attempt to digram the situation, the relationship. i won't bother you. i can't even understand it myself. this is actually the relationship that we figured out that is permanent and occupies all of the folders, described of the folders. here is the original, t s2 and four. and then t s3 is really an extract of very small things that go into the review. that is page four. now, this is the real key. how did we figure this out?

wrote out a series of holograph pages that he clearly intended to begin the autobiography. in this case you can see in numbers the title page one. an early attempt. this is a preface to something that has been done in the past. he says it is a failure, an example of the old, old, and flexible and difficult method of autobiography. i'm just giving here pigweed what i went through to get to this final solution. here is page three. here insert the 44 typewritten pages. that would be great if we knew what they were. look, we didn't. that, they don't exist. it turns out they have been lost. the only to that survive are the things that were made from, the original manuscript, ken antelope tuskers that were made from at purdue concede that the next page is not four but

45 don't ask me why. proceeding some of the examples that he had done in 1904. it does like that. this is the text that he is referring to. he wants to begin it. a wonderful, wonderful text despite the fact that he says it's not so good. this is his description in june of 1906 on those pages are being written. as bill lyons description of his reading it on the porch. mr. clemens wrote the very first autograph barbara for beginning written many years ago, about 1879. forty-four typewritten pages and telling of his boyhood days on the farm. it's beautiful. he was deeply moved as he read on and on. in other words, we know from this that mark twain knows full well this is a moving and

wonderful passage. then, as i said, he says here, okay. this is the end of that. the first time in history that it is reviewed upon. in any case to make a long story short or shorter than it should be, that is what explains these bonds appear. these things are put in place after type t s1 was made put before t s2 and t s4 were made. in bed again. now, i have roughly seven minutes. of little incoherent to do it this way, but i'm going to do it anyhow. grover cleveland, a couple of wonderful passages about grover cleveland. but i think i've really owe it to mark twain to read simply

because that gives a better idea of the autobiography. i can on my own. mark twain did not know cleveland when they were told residents in buffalo. this is an account of how they first met. during the time that we were in buffalo or mark twain was in buffalo in '70 and '71 mr. cleveland was shares. and never happened to make his acquaintance or even see him. in fact, i suppose i was not even aware of his existence. fourteen years later he has become the greatest man in the state. in addition i was not living in the state of the time. [laughter] that's pretty good. i was not living in the state of the time. lost one place. side. at the time i was on the public highway in company with another banded wrapping the public with

reading some art works. in the course of time we went to albany to levy tribute. asset we ought to go and pay our respects. we went to that majestic capitol building in stated our arendt. we were shown into the governor's private office. i saw mr. clinton for the first time. we three stood chatting. i was born lazy. i comforted myself by turning the corner of the table into a sort of seat. presently the governor said, mr. clements, was a fellow citizen of yours in buffalo a good many months ago, a good while ago and during those months he burst suddenly into a mighty frame out of a previous one continued and no doubt deserved proper obscurity. i was nobody, and you would not notice me or have anything to do with me. but now that i have become somebody you have changed her style and come here to shake hands with me and be sociable. how do you explain that? this is the president-elect.

very simple, your excellency. in buffalo you were nothing but a share of. i was in society. i could not afford to associate with sheriff's. you are governor now and on your way to the presidency. it is a great difference in makes it worthwhile. there appeared to be about 16 stores. from each a young man emerged. the 16 lined up and move forward and stood in front of the governor with an aspect of respectful expectancy in their attitude. no one spoke for a moment, and then the governor said, you are dispersed gentlemen. your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting home of the benefits . perhaps he can see it down here. he doesn't like the explosiveness of it.

he actually says there was a cluster of 16 bell buns on the corner of the table. a hint belmont proportions at that ended may were just right to enable me to cover the whole of that nest and that is how i can to hatch out the sexting talks. i'm going to try to squeeze the san. if it brings out a stop. francis wilson cleveland. she got married in the white house. 1884. the first person to be married in the white house. as you can see, beautiful and young. she was a great asset to the cleveland administration because she was willing to go out and be a jackie kennedy to the world. one more thing. was this anyone know what our

ticks are? you where your arctic. yes. snowshoes or at least galoshes. probably boots. too much pavement in washington, especially during the wintertime. in any case you need to know that. i was born heedless, and therefore i was constantly or quite unconsciously committing breaches of minor proprieties which brought upon the humiliations' without too had humiliated me, but didn't. ..

>> you will find that little note there. read it carefully, and do as it tells you. i cannot be with you, and so i delegate my duties to this little note. if i should give you a warning by word of mouth now, it would pass from your head and be forgotten within a few minutes. pfs the first term, and the young, the beautiful, the good-hearted, the sympathetic, the fascinating. just as i finkished dressing to go to the white house, i found that note which i forgot. it was a grave little note, a serious note like the writer, but it made me laugh. her gravity has that effect upon me where the expert joke would have failed, for i do not laugh easily. should i finish?

when i reached the white house and shook hands with the president, he said if you exsen len sigh could excuse me, i'll be back in a moment, but i have an important matter to attend to as once. i turned to ms. cleveland, the young, the beautiful, and fascinating, and gave her my card on the back of which i wrote, he didn't. he didn't. i asked her to sign her name below the words. he said he didn't? he didn't what? oh, i said, never mind, we cannot stop to discuss this now. this is urgent. please sign your name. i handed her a pen. why? i can't commit myself that way. what is it that he did or didn't? i said time is flying flying flying. sign your name it it. it's all right. i give you my word it's all right.

hesitatingly and mechanically she took the pen and said, i will sign it. i will take the risk, but you must tell me about it afterwords so you will be arrested before you get out of the house in case there's anything criminal about this. she signed, and i handed her the note which was very brief and simple and to the point saying don't wear your arctics in the white house. [laughter] it made her shout, and at my request, we sent the card at once to the mail on the way to ms. clemons. thank you very much. [laughter] [applause] >> if we could gather the blue cards with your questions --

white cards. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> the inquisitions. >> and i don't know when the microphone is going to go on. >> it's up to them. >> it's not working. it is working. oh, it's working for you, oh, and i made the mistake of taking off my microphone. >> where is it? >> it's over in my bag. hold on one second. >> turn it on, yeah.

want me to hold it? well, i have to hold two microphones. >> just let me hold the black thing. okay. >> okay, this is helpful. okay, well, as we're gathering up the questions, i have a question. i hadn't realized that mark twain was interested in establishing a new narrative around autobiography, and i'd -- i mean, i'd like to ask -- i know the editors made millions of decisions, and so how did they find themselves guiding that pathway of establishing a new narrative?

>> well, once you figure out what the relationship between those various type groups is, you have a standard way of treating them. the one that is derived from the notes has the most authority. anything that the others have that are different are either mistakes of the typist or changes by mark twain. you adopt those in the beginning text, and you eventually have a text that is exactly what we wanted in so far as those documents can tell you. there's documents that the script is so large and unfinished, not ready for the print or the press. he didn't prepare it for the printer. he says things like here insert the celebrations of my 75th birthday. that's pages of harper that have 28 pages like this. there's no way physically you can put it in, just up cert a

link to it on the electronic site. all of this is available on marktwainproject.org, free of charge, you don't have to buy it, and that has advantages over some of the print. we're not trying to shape it, but follow what the evidence shows, and what those earl pages showed us for the first time was all of the things, all the preliminary measures. we put them in the front of the book and labeled as preliminaries. they don't belong in the book. they are treating them as if they are all part of the autobiography, and they are, of course, fragmentary and didn't want them include, even though payne, who should have known better, did include them, and that's really the first time that we knew he had excluded that. he knew how it was to begin, follow, and then you're off and running. you just have to follow the

chronology of the dictations. does that answer your question? >> all these are good questions. one of the questions that the audience asked is how did the prior authors, payne and the other, get a hold of his autobiography prior to being donated to uc berkley, and how did they get past, you know, his wish after his death? >> you would think mark twain written this into his will. he did not. it's simply not that firm a prohibition. it's actually more there to protect him as he's composing it so he doesn't imagine nip alive will hear what he's going to say. you know, he's going to be dead and can't control when anybody publishes it. now, go to the first part, they

were the fist literary to the estate, and he was appointed. payne rules over the papers along with clara, the only daughter, until he dies. he's just an exclusionist. payne dies, and devoto, squeaky wheel is appointed the successor, so they have direct access to the mark twain papers that are still outside the university of california. we're talking about 1937 and 1940, 41, 42, 43. now, how did they get to do what they wanted to do? what was the stop them? in fact, it's not really all that unusual for editors of commercial books to do what they think will sell.

that's what devoto is doing when he crosses out the commas to improve the edition and sales of it. >> what percentage of the autobiography, not including uc berkley's editor edition is the original dictation that he started in 1906? >> what percentage? it's almost 100% of the actual finished autobiography. there are man knew script -- manuscript pieces in there, and he just inserts it as dictation. basically the one he wanted published is almost entirely dictation. okay.

is there any proof that he said the coldest winter was spent in san fransisco? [laughter] >> as far as i know there's no proof. what we do know is that he quotes an 18th century actor saying that about paris. one can see why that was picked up and changed to san fransisco. you know, every year, cities like vancouver and seattle write me asking if he said it about their city. i'm tempted to represent it to them for $75 a day. [laughter] i can't proof the kneeing -- negative. we have never found any evidence that he said it. >> did mark twain ever live in san fransisco? >> oh, yeah. he had to live virginia city because of the dual. dualing was outlawed.

he came to san fransisco and takes a job on the morning call as a local reporter. in is? may of 1864. he hates local reporting, so he resigns just about the same time george barns is going to fire him. he then stays in san fransisco really without serious employment. he writes things, but not much money. he's living off the income or value of stocks he managed to get a hold of. he runs out of the stocks, and he has to get a job, so he writes his old boss on the virginia territory enterprise saying let me write a daily letter from san fransisco to the enterprise, and joe says, sure, do it. he writes a 2,000 word letter six days a week for about five

months, and it's some of the best letters he ever wrote, and we have about 20% of them. we look for them every day. we go into the attic and see if you have old newspapers. [laughter] most of the things that survive are not clippings or issues, but are contemporary newspapers that reprinted it at the time because he was very good copy, and he was free. that's how those texts survive. >> the person what asked the san fransisco question also wanted to know if you know the neighborhood he lived in and if he ever met robert louis stephenson? >> do i know the neighborhood? you can piece out the neighborhood because it's so changed and to me, it doesn't really look like the neighborhood. you know, he mentioned montgomery street. you can figure out likely where he was. did he meet robert?

yes, indeed. he was fond of him, but didn't know him very long. it was he has and mark twain that came up with the idea of the sub mernged add yeps. they talk about their discussing this in washington square in new york and stevenson was taken in the sun to stay warm because he had tuberculosis. he liked him, but didn't have a long correspondence with him unfortunately. >> can you talk more about submerge the -- submerged audience? >> the section on stevenson is at the very beginning of the final forum, but basically -- stevenson proposes it, and he says he's talked about this person, davis, who has published all kinds of practical books, how to do this, piano playing, practical books, and he discovered in enormous

quantities. he discovered this from a book seller. he had never heard about this guy, never read anything by him. the editors figure out this is not davis, but dick who writes all kind of practical books that sold in the millions, okay? the idea is that this is someone who is unknown to the sort of the normal world if you will, the popular world that you and i live in, but he's known to the readers, they are submerged, below the surface, and mark twain regarded them as his real audience. i'll also point out is that he was right. they are buying his book. does that help? >> yeah, very, definitely. what was the extent of mark twain's formal education? >> mark twain left school at the age of 12 when his father died. he was trained really in the country common school that is still the all grades in one

room. you can guess from the age of 12 about what grade he was in, but it's not that formal. he is one of the true great auto di -- of the world. he doesn't even have a scholarship. you find he's read everything, he's read and read and read and read. principally nonfiction, but also very, very widely. look at his early letters and there's references to all kinds of literary main themes, shakespeare, that kind of stuff. it does disappear after awhile, but it's his lifelong appetite for literary text. >> two more quick questions. >> okay. >> why was uc berkley chosen to

receive the papers? >> why was it chosen? i didn't explain this well. i'm glad they asked that. mark twain wrote his will in such a way, and only one daughter as a desendent, could not even give the papers to anyone except through their own will. this was designed to protect them from men. it didn't work. her second husband ripped her off of about $5 million, by it kept the papers together. a guy would have have loved to sell them piece by piece, but couldn't. the legal situation wasn't right for that. when they were out here, i rushed over that. they go from payne to devoto to takes them to harvard, resigns 15 times, then timely does resign, then goes out, and there's a big tall courtly

texasian who knew how to deal with clara. he was a genius at that. when he decides he wants to leave to go to berkeley. he asks to take the papers, and he -- she says sure. he said i think you should change your will so that instead of going to yale, which is where they were intended to go, they go to berkley. you can see what he was worried about. he was worried if she dies, and his biography based solely on those papers would be coming to a halt. she writes him back and says i'll send you a copy next week. that's why. now, don't get me wrong, the papers are not the property until she dies in 1962, and then there's a part to get them back. fortunately the people in charge of them were wise enough to

resist that. it was something of a snake, a gambler. we know, for instance, what he offered letters that were in the family, love letters, about 715 letters between them over many, many years. he came and offered them to for up to $50,000. he said no, that's too much. this is 195 #. however, he comes back in three weeks and says you can have them for $10,000, but i need the money by sunday. they go over and open 7:the bank of america and give him his $10,000. he did that thing with other things held by clara, sold them out into the world. >> interesting. peter fraser reminds me there's a lunch club, a mark twain lunch club that has been meeting for

quite some time for twice a year, and they are one of the sets of individuals that funded the mark twain project and the whole endeavor. can you talk more about the funding? >> yes, the funding is always a problem as you might imagine. this is not funded directly by the university. it's been funded really since its inception by grants of the national endowment for the humanities. they have been absolutely loyal to us. i think we must be the longest running project they ever had to pay for. beginning in 1980 they said, well, we're going to shift entirely to gifting and matching all grants. you raise a dollar in order for us to give you a dollar. alls grants since 1980 have been 50/50 that way, and it's my job to find people willing to give that kind of money on the basis of what we will do and hope to

do. we've been successful reppedly, but it's not a challenge that winds up and goes away. it's always going to be there. >> well, the world is better. [laughter] for all of this, and, robert, thank you for joining us. everybody, thank you for coming. [applause] >> for more information on mark twain and autobiography, visit the marktwainproject.org.

>> in an hour, we're going to cover thousands of years of history and touch several parts of the planet. ready to roll? this is a journey as we touch all these places did actually start from a family -- two family stories, and so if we can look at the world map, we were in jerusalem in israel visiting with my family, and i asked about the story of one of my

aunts, a mysterious aunt of mine, a nonjewish woman who married into our jewish family, and i wondered the story on her. it turned out her grandfather was a serf in russia. do you remember what a serf is? hold on, you in the look row. hand this to him. >> i think it was a slave. >> a serf was very much a slave. he was a person or woman who could be bought and sold with the land. my aunts grandfather was a serf, but he had invented a process for working with beet sugar that was so useful he became so rich he bought his freedom. when we learned about that, we learned about a connection to mareena's family. >> i had always known about my

family's connection to sugar because my great grandparents traveled from india across to gianna which is in south america, but considered part of the caribbean, and they came to cut, to work on sugar plantations, so part of what fascinated us was what is this substance where someone in his family all the way in russia, a serf, and someone in my family looking to get a better life over here in end ya and over to the caribbean, what is this substance to effect people from such different parts of the world? >> before we trace that out, we want to ask you a question. how many of you think you might have sugar somewhere in your family background?

so that's one, two, three, oh, man, yes, yes. >> i want to bring this out, i just want to hear from a couple of you where you family might have been from, okay? >> well, i think my family might have been in the caribbean. >> caribbean. >> absolutely. >> very good. okay. >> i feel my family was either in the caribbean or in europe. >> very good, both. >> okay, okay. >> i think my family was either in the caribbean or europe. okay, very good. anybody else here? >> actually i know my family was from the caribbean, and that's -- >> if you have the caribbean in your backgrounds, you definitely have shore gar in your backgrounds, but we believed that many more people have sugar in their background than they

know, and we're about to take you as i say spinning around the world, and the subtitle of our book is a story of magic, skies, slavery, freedom, and science, and let's start out with magic. why might we relate sugar to magic? well, sugar kane, if we go back to the world map, originally was very first, you know, off the edge opt far edge, we know that it was first grown in new guinea, and they grew sugar cane. have you seen that before? >> okay, good. >> have any of you ever tasted sugar cane? all right, all right. we do know that sugar cane was first grown in new guinea, and then it was brought up to india, # and the reason we know that is that there are prayers to the

goddessdurga, and you would burn various offerings to her, and one of the offerings burned was sugar gain, and we know the original word for sugar was that which brings sweetness to the people, but at a certain point, the name for this substance changed, and the new name for it was shakara which means gravel. can anybody guess why you would use a world that means gravel for sugar? >> you might use gravel because when you put it in your hand it kind of like -- it came out like sand and sand is like gravel. >> exactly right. originally, they had cane, but

they learned how to make cane into sugar, and this is one the crucial things. sugar granules do not exist in nature. they exist in cane. we had to learn to turn the cane into little pieces of sugar, and we'll get to that, but before we get to that, the question is how did knowledge of suregan cane spread? how did people learn about this plabt growing in new guinea? this substance used in religion in india? does anyone remember who might have brought knowledge of sugar across -- that girl there, great, i think the second guy there has not spoken yet. >> christopher -- >> no, no, ahead of us, buddy. we're way back. >> i think it's spreading

because it went across the world, and i think china had it? >> yeah, but before china gets it, there's a woman there, -- >> i think it was the slaves. >> that's later. we're way back. we're in bc, guys. we're way, way back. >> the australians. >> no, no australians. >> the greeks. >> yes, alexander the great. if anybody of you remember the story, alexander the great is cop qering across from -- conquering across from greece, across iran. he gets to the edge of india, and his troops sigh i won't go any further. i've gone as far as i'm going to go, but alexander is conquering. he has this