celebration and accomplishment. i wish every mother in this room and early happy mother's day and every thaw their an earlier anticipated happy father's day. jobs well done. best of luck to all of you in the class of 2011. [applause] >> welcome to c-span2's booktv. every weekend we bring 48 hours of books on history, biography and public affairs by nonfiction authors. ..

>> standard message and data rates apply. >> robert her hawaiist describes the autobiography of mark twain, volume one, published 100 years after the author's death. mr. hearst also discusses criticism the book has received. this was hosted 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's been there ever since.

in 1949 the granddaughter of mark twain gave uc berkeley the material that's in the mark twain archives. in 1980 robert became the chief, the general editor of these archives. and in 2005, um, they began the process of putting together the volume, the first volume that i know many of you have already seen. there will be three volumes, and there's a tremendous amount of excitement associated at uc press and with all of us who love the 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's been for 14, 15, 19 weeks, a long time. and i'm really delighted that we have robert here to tell us even

more. robert hearst. [applause] >> i have to turn myself on here, no pun. [laughter] thank you, susan, for that introduction. it always reminds me of the way 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, and no one even knew how to introduce him. but finally the crowd persuaded a slouching and awkward, big miner to get up on the stage and do the honors. he stood thinking a moment, mark

twain says, and he said i don't know anything about this fellow. [laughter] rather, i only know two things. one is he hasn't been in the penitentiary. [laughter] and the other is i don't know why. [laughter] mark twain said he liked that because it was a compliment that didn't raise expectations too high. [laughter] payne, mark twain's official biographer, put that into the autobiography because payne didn't know that mark twain himself had cut it out. so let me balance it with a little story or a little, few sentences that are in the autobiography. this is the end of an account of how mark twain escape add duel that he had actually instigated in virginia city. he had sent the challenges, and he, of course, didn't know

anything about how to shoot a pistol, so he wanted to get out of it. he managed to get out of it. and this is how that story ends. i've never had anything to do with duels since. i thoroughly disapprove of duels. i consider them unwise, and i know they are dangerous. al sinful. also sinful. if a man should challenge me now, i would go to that man and take him kindly by the hand and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet, retired spot and kill him. [laughter] now, i should have done this at the start. mark twain was a very disciplined public speaker, and i am not. i think 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 anti-filibuster device. i will -- well, let me cite mark twain's own advice.

he was preparing to go on a lecture tour with james wick ham reilly, and he was afraid reilly would take too long in his half of the program and, therefore, cut into mark twain's time and make the audience impatient. so he invents in his notebook this little introduction. it says i will talk until i am tired, and then mr. reilly will talk until you are tired. [laughter] we're going to try to avoid talking until you are tired, and i promise that when this thing goes off, it'll be very hard to persuade me to say anything else. so what's so special about this autobiography? mark twain tried for more than 30 years, off and on, to find a way to write aiz auto-- his autobiography. that's a long time, even for

him. because he would quite easily spend four, five, six, seven seven, eight years on his major books. what's remarkable about him in this matter is he knew very early on how he wanted that autobiography to be constructed. you'll see in the background here, basically, pieces of manuscript that belong to the autobiography text. here are a few more. i'm just going to leave them there so you can contemplate them. this is what annie fields said, reported in 1876 when mark actually was 40. -- mark twain was 40. she had a conversation with him in which he said that -- she said that he proceeded to talk about his autobiography which he intends to write as fully and sincerely as possible to leave behind him, postyou mouse. his wife laughingly said, she should look it over and lee out objectionable passages. no, he said, 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 age i am writing about. even if i am an infant and an idea comes to me about myself when i am 40, i shall put it in. it still amazes me to see just how clearly mark twain knew what he wanted to do. at least 40 years -- 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, a period of 35 years. and we see him in those drafts and chapters struggling to give up -- that is, to fully

relinquish -- a chronological organization, something that you and i would pretty much assume was the organization principle for an autobiography. mark twain was struggling to leave that behind him. in any case, these beginnings, these drafts that we have each seemed to him inadequate, he abandoned them and stopped writing more chapters. but did not throw them away. very typical. but in 1904 shortly before his wife's death in florence mark twain at last settled on dictation as a way to compose his text. but not dictation of a cradle-to-grave narrative. it was to have this special character, what he called, quote, the right way to do an autobiography. which is to start it at no particular time of your life, wander at your free will all over your life, talk only about the thing which interests you

for the moment, drop it the moment its interest threatens to pale and turn your talk pop the new and more interesting -- your talk upon the new and more interesting thing that has intruded itself in your mind. in 1906 that is exactly what he began doing, dictating to a very competent stenographer and typist, josephine hobby, for two, three, sometimes four hours in the morning several times a week. she would type up her notes 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 sprungs through 1906 and 1907, then with less intensity in 908 and 1909, and it concluded on 24, december, 1909, when his youngest daughter, jean, died in

the bathtub, and he sat down and wrote a memorial to her which he identified as the end of the autobiography. in less than four months, he was himself dead having contribute today this autobiography some 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 parch in new hampshire -- porch in new hampshire. that's where a lot of the dictation ooh purred. and there he is in bed which is also where a lot of the dictation occurred. mark twain was a very relaxed person in a lot of ways. susan mentioned the fact this publication has an unusual history, at least for those of us who are involved in the scholarly edition of mark actually which -- twain which has been going on since 1967.

i didn't bother to rescan last week's new york times list, but, in fact, this sunday will be the 20th week on the list. i think t down around 17 -- it's down around 17. last week it was down around number 14, and as susan said, there are 500,000 copies not necessarily sold, but printed out this. to give you an idea of what that's compared with in our experience, let's say we'll 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 -- i don't want to get there yet. all of the autobiographies are at berkeley, only a very few are at other institutions possibly because payne gave them away, and they have been there since

the year he died, 1910. so in what sense is it necessary to find mark gain's autobiography -- mark twain's autobiography? one can't find something that hasn't been lost. i'll try to make that clear z as i go along. what are the mark twain papers, why do they exist, and why are they in berkeley? i'm going to try to answer those questions. before i do that, i have to do a little bit more on the recent publication. this book has already been awarded these prizes by the american publishers' association, and i think it's interesting that we've never won this prize before. i think maybe the award was given for the number of copies sold, i can't be sure. [laughter] mark twain said in 1908 that he was going to start a new hobby, he was going to collect compliments. the way other people collect horses and autographs and so

forth and so on. this is one of the compliments he collected if you want to see it, he cuts it out of the newspaper. that's a pen that you can see there. he's just pinned it to a piece of paper. all of the handwriting on there is mark twain's. mr. edison's compliment. the compliment is, an american loves his family. if he has any love left over for another person, he generally selects mark twain. [laughter] and mark twain says, i think the world of that compliment. [laughter] yes, he does. yes, he does. here's another compliment that he cited in the same 1908 speech i'm referring to. um, i've given you a transcription side by side, so in this case if his handwriting isn't clear, you can follow it. little montana girl's compliment. mark twain said he had someone

from illinois sent this to him. she was gazing thoughtfully at a photograph of mark twain on a neighbor's mantelpiece. presently she said reverently, we've got a jesus like that at home, only ours has more trimmings. [laughter] what did she mean by more trimmings? [laughter] for those of you who have forgotten what jesus looked like, i pulled a copy out of one of the family bibles. mark twain said that the difference in trimmings was halos. his, he said, had not arrived yet. [laughter] 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 didn't go to bookstores, that wasn't like you and me -- literate and intelligent and going to lectures and so forth -- but simply bought his books on a loyal basis and read

them. sub americaned fame -- sub americaned fame, he called it, or a submerged clientele. he and robert louis stevenson discussed this in 1888 when they're sitting out in the sun in new york city. that story's told in the autobiography. and he and stevenson agree that this kind of fame, the kind of fame that comes from people who you've never met and are likely ever to meet was, of all the kinds of fame, the best, the very best. i think something like that kind of fame is operating when people buy mark twain's heavy first volume of the autobiography. i think that audience is coming into view in a way that really we've never seen it, not in my lifetime in any case. now, we didn't expect this, as you know. um, the original estimate on our part was perhaps 10,000 copies. that would be five times what 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, and i remember that in discussing, for instance, what the photograph should be on the front of the jacket one of the people from the press saying that they wanted something particularly eye catching, something that would just leap off the remainder table at you. [laughter] we thought that was rather discouraging -- [laughter] and so we thought it would be good to document what, you know, it's not a remainder table at costco, those are brand new copies. that's something we never have seen before. now, we did do -- [laughter] certain things to sell this book that we wouldn't ordinarily do. [laughter]

we sold to various magazines, atlantic, harper's and, as you see, "playboy" what are called first serial rights. these are basically small chunks of the autobiography. all they needed to be was short, unpublished and funny. that was easy. so "playboy" got one and, of course, i should say from this slide, also, that not everybody approves of the autobiography. perhaps the more famous, the most famous disapproval comes from garrison keillor, and i promised in the advertisement for this talk to at least address what keillor had to say. actually, i've reproduced here what tina duh pee has to say about keillor. that's 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 hire learning, famous writer, someday they may be used against you. i think it's clear that he doesn't can like the autobiography. it's also clear that he doesn't, hasn't read it very carefully. he's encountering a scholarly edition without really acknowledging that. but i think the one thing i wanted to say publicly was that it's good advice not to give your papers to an institution like this, otherwise you might end up with a bestseller of 500,000 copies being sold 100 years after your death. or not. keillor and a man from the new yorker simply had no patience with what they regard as academic overkill. and for that reason they simply misread the first half of the book and are almost woefully

unaware that less than one-third of the actual autobiography is in this volume. that's so because the volume has to begin with the preliminary experiments, the things that you 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 a little harsh, it seems to me, 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 page before this -- i think they were right. let me read you what they said. mark twain is terrific company, plain and simple. he knew everyone, went everywhere, seemed to be interested in everything and capable of making the reader in 2010 laugh on nearly every page. and this is not, strictly

speaking, an autobiography. they explain that there are many fragments. the system he finally found for doing so is perfect. twain talks about what he's rested in until he's no longer interested in it, and then he talks about something else, wandering at free will all over your life. this is a book for dipping, not plunging. read, as twain might put it, until interest pales, and then jump. it feels like a form of time travel. one moment you're on horseback in the hawaiian islands or recovering from saddle boils with a cigar in your mouth, and the next moment you're calling the see news maid. we can hardly wait for volume two. and if you want more positive comment on those negative reviews, look at andrew's review in the new york review of books, 24, february. they, that is he, comments on both of them and comes down on the side of what he calls the old gray lady, "the new york times" editorial.

mark twain himself would not have been fazed by these kinds of criticisms. he says in the autobiography, i believe that the trait of critic in literature, music and the drama is the most degraded of all trades. and that it has no real value, certainly no large value. however, let it go. it is the will of god that we must have critics and missionaries and congressmen and humorists, and we must bear the burden meantime. he was fairly steady in that view of critics. when he was asked by his older brother to read one of orion's compositions, he refused saying that the great public's the only opinion worth having. that's just another way of referring to his submerged audience. allow me to leave those critics behind and talk a little bit more about the papers. you can see from this slide this

is a little section of a letter that, to joe twitcheverything -- twitchell, that mark twain got into the habit in the last decade of his life of writing things he was quite confident he couldn't publish in his lifetime, he didn't dare publish, and putting them in what he calls his large box of postyou miss stuff. some of them finished, some of them unfinished, 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 isn't something i can easily talk about or explain here, so i'm going to try another tactic for talking about what's in the papers. because in addition to all of

those literary manuscripts, there's all kinds of stuff. and if this is a little overwhelming, it's meant to be. 10,000 letters, 715 literary manuscripts, working notes for huck finn. this is a bookplate that he makes in 1848, the earliest known document. sample of his hair, 50 notebooks, checks, bills, clippings, proofs, photographs and on and be on and on. those are are all things that are not literary manuscripts really or that are not the main core of the papers, but they are, in my view, a one way of understanding how we grasp mark twain in the view of the fact that he left all this behind. it's very unusual for a writer to be willing to leave all of his unpublished manuscript, his

drafts, his notes, not to mention his checks, notes about how much beer he drank and so forth. it's very unusual for an author, in fact, in my opinion unique in the 19th century america, to leave all that evidence behind. mark twain said he could imagine being dead. most people, he said, think of being dead as looking down from somewhere or up from somewhere and seeing you, for instance, reading the the autobiography. but he said, no, that's not how i imagine it. i tried out blif ontwo million years before i was born, and i'm pretty sure i'll like it when i die. so he is quite willing for you to see this. he might be a little uneasy here and there, but he's quite willing for the world to see this. and i think there's a parallel between that kind of bravery, if you will, and the publication of the autobiography. i'm just going to go into a few

details while i've got time. things that are in there, so you get a sense of what the papers hold. this is the earliest known image of mark twain taken when he was probably graduating as a printer, becoming a -- not a printer's double, but an apprentice printer. you can see that he's holding a printer's stick with the word -- with the letters sam in it, identifying him. this is a -- that bookplate i was talking about, basically, it's an exercise that a typesetter would do to learn how to set up advertisements for the newspaper. the interesting thing about this, parly s that it's literally we think it's the earliest thing he put his hand to. he was in the papers since the beginning, since 1910, but not discovered until 1984. that's an aspect of the papers which i think is quite remarkable. we're still finding things that we didn't know we had.

this was a late photograph, mark twain is returning from bermuda, he's going to die within a few weeks. here's another photograph, this has been described as a practical joke. t not a practical joke. mark twain had commissioned his protege, carl gerhart, to do a bust of him. and that bust was eventually photographed and put in the front piece of huckleberry finn. and any doctor will tell you if you want to get the neck right, you have to see the shoulders. he went to an art photographer -- means they photograph nudes -- and has this photo of himself taken so the sculptor can make that bust. now, i dare say mark twain thought it was funny, too, so he kept it, and it's probably the only unique photograph of him anywhere. this is an example of what we have, about 150 books.

[laughter] i put it in because it requires no exla nation. here's another one. he's talking about someone who went out with him, he's describing the photograph. self-complacency of 40 years ago. this is the way god look when he's had a successful season. [laughter] now, this is an example of a notebook, basically, one of the very early notebooks. this one comes from be a notebook he kept when he was learning to be a pilot. this blue heading means from the new orleans delta to the head of island 62 and 63, and these are, basically, just notes of what that passage of the river, you know, what kinds of problems it encountered and how he should navigate it in the future. we haven't yet published this. here's another river notebook. i just isolated this little phrase for you. had quarter twain or mark twain

and got too high. he's recording the depth of the water, and he means they're two and a quarter fathoms or two fathoms in ozark. here's that hair i was mentioning. why would we bother about his hair? this is what we call a well tested example. isabelle lyon, connection problem. click to open intel wireless troubleshooter for help. i don't think so. all the help i can get. any case, it's well attested because isabelle lyon is attending a haircutting in new hampshire when mark twain is almost 70. 1905 she dates it, she describes it in great detail, and she includes this swatch of his hair. what good is that? well, here's another thing that was found in that bible. i don't know if you can see the hair down here. this is the same clipping,

flipped over. the clipping has been folded at the bottom to hold on to the hair. this is a poem. it's not a poem written by mark twain, it's actually taken from a magazine. but this says up here, for margaret. and it was our supposition, actually, that this was jane clemens' way of memorializing her 9-year-old daughter who died when she was 9, something fairly common many those days. -- in those days. but that's just a guess. until you can do something with the evidence you have. so if you look at the dna in this one and the dna in this one, if they have the same my to cond real dna, then they have the same mother. so we know a little bit more about how mark twain's sister was born. this is just two pages from the manuscript for tramp abroad. mark twain is imagining himself over in germany, and he's missing american food.

and so he starts off this list -- this is only two pages of a four-page list. and i think, you know, he goes on and publishes this in the last chapter of tramp abroad, but the wonderful thing about a manuscript like this is you can see him coming back to it and changing it and underlining things he's forgotten and changing the whole content of it in a 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 mark twain ever wrote. it's written from san francisco in october, 1865. he's down and out, so to speak. he's without a job or, actually, just recently taken a job. he's out of money, probably drinking too much. and he writes to his older brother and sister-in-law and says that he only had two

powerful am bigs in life. -- ambitions in life. one was to become a pilot, and the other was to become a minister of the gospel. i accomplished the one, he says, and failed in the other because i could not supply myself with the necessary tock in trade -- stock in trade, religion. i've given it up forever, i never had a call in that direction any anyhow, and my aspirations were the very ec ecstasy of presumption. and i have had a call to literature of a low order. it's not to be proud of, but it is my strongest suit. and he goes on, basically, to resolve to make something out of that talent even though he does consign, he thinks, to a low level of literature. the last thing i want to point out is a little postscript. mark twain knows full well this is an important letter. p.s., you had better shove this in the tough, for if -- stove, for if we strike an agreement, i

don't want any unpublished letters of mark twain. fortunately, they didn't burn it. i think it's a pretty remarkable statement for someone who hasn't yet published a book. [laughter] mark twain did not lack confidence. here's another letter, he wants howell to read the proof. he says yesterday mr. hall, that's the publisher, wrote that the proofreader was improving my punctuation, and i ordered him shot without giving him time to pray. [laughter] now, in order to give you a sample of what are roughly 11,000 letters, i thought i would just take a small category, begging letters, answering or not answering. this is one in reply to someone who's asked him to support an orphanage. i beg to wish the best success and a long career of usefulness to the infant asylum, but words are empty.

deeds show the earnest spirit. therefore, i am willing to be one of a thousand citizens who shall agree to contribute two or more of their children to this enterprise. [laughter] and he goes on and gives it a very nice signature, it's called a double signature, not always that way. mark twain's not cheap. he knows what they will do with it, they'll sell it, and they will get their $200 contribution. now, mark twain didn't always answer such letters, and when he didn't, he often wrote what he would have said on the envelope. [laughter] this was a good example of mark twain's sharpness matched up with his very tender heart. the idiots seem to be uncommonly thick this year. of. [laughter] wants god knows what, declined. [laughter] bid for an autograph letter, too thin. the excuse for autograph letter was, it didn't persuade him. from some bore who wants to destroy the death penalty with

an eye to his own future. [laughter] from an unknown idiot in ireland, this is the worst piece of cheek of all. from a boston ass, and then two days later from that same boston ass. [laughter] from some unknown person who probably has brains and modesty in if about equal proportions. i could go on almost infinitely with examples like this. they're all through the papers. now, this is a letter that is part of another aspect of his replying to requests for autographs. he eventually figures out a way to answer the request, give -- grant the requests 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 foe insane. it's probably a guard, but he

could be an administrator, and he probably wrote his letter using asylum stationary because mark twain is stiped off to where he's coming from. certainly, i'll write you an autograph letter for your collection, and what is more, though please do not tell the officers of the asylum that i said such a thing, i believe that you are wickedly and unjustly confined there. [laughter] that is, if they are rigorous with you for portions of your letter to me are quite rational, and i'm stayed if you were put -- satisfied if you were put under judicious treatment, you would get over it. and, of course; nice signature. the whole theory is, of course, when the man gets this letter and reads it, he may change his mind about showing it to his friends. [laughter] there are dozens of such letters. here's one i didn't put into the collides. you have to listen carefully to this. i am a long time answering your letter, my dear miss harriet,

but you must remember it is an equally long time since i received it. [laughter] so that makes it even, and nobody to blame on're side. [laughter] i think you'd like to know that i rate you as a five-second audience. it usually takes about ten seconds to get that one. here's another. to the english writer, william ballentine. he was so impatient for a reply that he enclosed a piece of paper and a stamp with his original letter. mark twain answered, paper and stamp received. [laughter] please send envelope. one other point before i go on and actually get to the autobiography. mark twain loved cancellations. and unlike you and me, he would

probably never quail at sending a letter through the mail that had such a cancellation in it. you and i might be a little embarrassed to do that, but he was not. he also knew that that cancellation can be read. here's our attempt to read it. that's really just a kind of tracing, it took us about six months to pass it around the office giving people each a shot at it. and you can see we're still having trouble with this second line. we can't really do that confidently because the way you read such a thing is by picking out the descenders and ascenders and those are consonants or, in this case, i is not a copse nafnlt but they help you narrow down what is likely to be under the loopy lieu. and in this case for this whole stretch you have only one descender, no dots on the i, no nothing. it took us a while to get it.

we finally did get it. indeed, i am under a, and he stops and starts over, indeed, a suspicion comes over me. this is suspicion right here. that i owe you either 25 or $50. it was in this way and so forth and so on. now, how do we know that he knew they could be read? this is a little piece from a letter hewrites to his fiancee what's trying to persuade him to become a christian. and she's being very wary about the letters she receives, and she's noted in one of them he's actually torn out a whole section of the page and sent the page with the letter itself. and she's asked him, what was that confession? he says, the confession i destroyed was that i had refused to lecture a week here for about $600 because now we're at this point. i can't tell it again, you would say i was a lovesick idiot.

down here now, and between ourselves, i am. i could not be so reckless as to write the above if you had any curiosity in your composition. in other words, if you were curious enough to try to pry under that cancellation and figure out what i said, then i wouldn't dare write this. but, of course, we can tell now it was written precisely to invite her to uncover it. and he knows that she will do that. and then this dot here, in brackets meaning it's another speaker, that's libby when she discovers what he's just said and what he's just done. how do we know that that actually worked? well, we know because mark twain invents a way to prevent those cancellations from being read. he goes in, and he crosses the ls, and he adds ascenders and descenders, and in general misleads you so badly that unless you know that's going on, you simply cannot read the cancellation. and we know that's going on

here. he says that's the way to scratch it out. when you find you have written what you didn't mean the write, goes on and basically dares her to read it. we're pretty sure she couldn't, took us a while. i do this as an example to show you what kind of editors have been on the mark twain project for 40 years. this is something that not everybody understands or knows. we were very lucky simply to understand it. and it's something that was, i think, citizen 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, there are 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 wrestled with the documents he left behind and figured out what no one had

known before. no one had known that mark twain actually finished his autobiography, that he knew exactly what he wanted in it and exactly what he did not want in it. so that's the sense in which i had in mind when i talk about finding the autobiography. there are 5,000 pages in the mark twain papers, but unless you know how to understand those 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 feeling, and he means not just people who are alive when he's writing, but anyone who's their descendant or their descendants. a hundred years is a kind of nice round figure. but this shows you on occasion

500 years is necessary. this passage about to be typed up is, you know, can't be published until the year 2406. that just shows you that's a long time. it doesn't show you he literally expects that much time to go by. the passage also tells you a little about what he expected to happen if, in fact, these things were published. he says the things which i am about to say will be common place at the time of offense whereas in our day they could inflict pain upon my friends, awane wane dances and thousands of strangers who i have no desire to hurt and could get me cut off from all human fellowship. and 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's not a motive that's widely recognized. of course, there's yet another

motive, and that is selling the book. this is a page 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 there was nothing offensive in it. but this shows you he's addressing the editor and saying, david, let's proceed every installment with that note which says the autobiography will not be issued in book form during my lifetime, mark. and that is, literally, what happened. so you, basically, have 25 desperate reminders that -- separate reminders that this autobiography is not really here in those american review, and you can't get it until mark twain dies. that's what we call a marketing plan. [laughter] now, people have asked me why wasn't it published before, of course, the answer is that it has been partly published before and badly published. this is payne, mark twain's official biographer and the

publisher of the autobiography in 1924. this is his successor, bernard devoto who publishes his selection of the autobiography in 1940. this is a man named charles who is not one of the literary editors but, basically, got access to the autobiography after it had come to berkeley. i've given you three pictures of him to show you the effect of editing mark twain. [laughter] but to be fair, to be fair, i've included this too. [laughter] that shows you the effect of editing mark twain since 1967. and that shows you who the real guilty parties are at this time. i'm really just a kind of supervisor, i don't really do any editing. i'm the kind of darth darth vadar in the corner office who criticizes what they do. i'm not welcome most of the time. [laughter] now, i do want to talk a little

bit about why those editions by payne and devoto are not satisfactory. payne and devoto felt absolutely free to write on the original documents. you can see all of these pencil markings are by payne. in fact, payne actually hands them to the printer, and he numbers them as part of the printer's copy. and when the printer is cone with them -- done with them what does he do? he puts them on a spindle. that's what this little hole is all about. i mention this not to kind of beat up on payne, but because it does lead to the fact that there are things that should have been in the autobiography manuscript that are gone, that are lost. and one of the things the editors managed to do was to solve that problem as well. now, you can see down here that payne has decided he doesn't like what's being said here. um, let me blow it up a little

bit for you. this is a discussion of a man named newton who's a faith healer who is with called in when olivia lang done was paralyzed for a number of years, couldn't stand or walk. doctors really did no good at all. they were finally persuaded to hire this guy newton, and mark twain says newton made some passes about her head with his hands, and he put an arm behind her and shoulders and said, now you will sit up, my child. payne doesn't like that. it's too pagan, right? so newton opened the windows, lawn darkened and delivered a short, fervent prayer. [laughter] and when mark twain repeats this business about the passes of his hands over the head, he just crosses it out. now, that's the way that passage has been published in payne and in nyder because nyder couldn't tell that this wasn't mark twain. here are a couple more pages that illustrate the way devoto

treated these things. he's on record as saying that he disapproved of the punctuation and that he took out hundreds and hundreds of commas and dashes when he published it. he only publishes a very small selection of it, and as you see, he feels perfectly free to write on the manuscript instructions to his typist. in this case, he's crossed out the commas. you can see him. and, of course, mark twain is over here, and there's some mark twain here, so one of the basic problems in dealing with this manuscript is to figure out which marks are the author's and which are devoto's. how do we know that those commas are devoto's? well, if you take a text that he's done this to and compare it to the way he publishes it, you can see that the commas have all disappeared. qed. so here we have mark twain writing, here we have devoto

writing. it's one of the great achievements of these editors that they figured out how to distinguish between all of the markings on this document. here's just a simple example that has maybe five different handwritings on it. all of the pencil markings, commas, hyphens, stuff like that -- here's payne -- they're all by payne. they also have payne's typesetter. this is payne numbering the printer's copy. this is partnership adding new york. this is actually someone we don't know. and here's mark twain. not for mm c.. what does that mean? it means not sr. s.s. mcclure who is thinking about serializing it. he even corrects some of the things the stenographer gets wrong. for instance, down here the stenographer has written in the effect, nonexistent and unfeasible. clearly, that is not what he

says. he inserts invisible and decides that isn't needed east because if it's -- either because if it's nonexistent, of course it isn't visible. so the challenge here is to figure out exactly what mark twain wanted and what the others -- to leave out the desires of the other markers. another challenge that is hard to explain but with i think worth contemplating is that in many of these daily dictations there are one, two, three, four, sometimes slight hi less, sometimes three, sometimes just two, types and copies of the same dictation. not war r car -- not carbons. these are retypings of this dictation. and this is the same, this is the front page of may 21. may 21, you can see, looks

roughly the same throughout. as you can see here, this one is page 726, the next one is 883, and the next one is 4. and the next one is 1115. that's a big mystery. why are those differences in pagination so prominent? what does it imply about the manuscript? does it imply he's moving this passage around, and, therefore, it gets different pagination when he wants it in different places? i don't think so. we didn't think so. eventually, well, we could say at least it wasn't this, this is the normal way a manuscript gets transmitted. no, that's not what's happened here. this is something like what happened. it was eventually figured out by identifying the physical characteristics of different type scripts, that there was one central type script, ts i, that was made from the original stenographer's notes. and at some point they had it retyped in what we call ts ii

and yet again in what we call ts iv. the question is -- that's big progress because it tells you what has the most authority, and it tells you what to make of, let's say, variants in the type script here. but the problem is this thing. this one is page 1, this is page 150, this is page 408. why? i think it's clear that this, these high numbers imply that there's something missing up here. but where is it? where is it? actually, it was in the file, we just didn't know it. this is an attempt -- it is not the los angeles freeway -- [laughter] this is an early attempt to diagram the relationship between these various texts. 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, describes all of the folders.

here's the original, here's ts ii and iv made from it, and then ts iii is, basically, an extract of very small things that go into the north american review. that's the page 4 example. now, this is the real key. how did we figure this out? >> mark twain wrote out a series of holograph pages that he clearly intended to begin the autobiography. in this case you can see he numbers the title page 1. he numbers this an early attempt, 2. this is a preface to something that has, he's done in the past that he says is a failure. it's an example of the old, old, unflexible and difficult method of autobiography. i'm just giving it here so you can see what i went through to get to this final solution. here's page 3. heretic cert the -- here insert the old 44 typewritten pages. that would be great if you knew what they were, wouldn't it?

[laughter] we didn't know what they were and, in fact, they don't exist. it turns out they were lost, the only thing that survives is the original manuscript and a couple of those type scripts that were made of it. so you can see here, the next page is not 4, but 45 because it follows 44 pages. payne, who doesn't understand comes in and calls it 9, don't ask me why. this was to precede some of the examples of dictation that he'd done in 1904. goes like that. this is, this is the text that he's referring to that he wants to begin it with. this is a wonderful, wonderful text despite the fact that he says it's not so good. this is his description in june of 1906 when those pages are being written. it's a lines description of his reading it on the porch.

mr. clemens read the very first autographed autobiography beginning written about 1879. 44 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, it's followed by the latest attempt, and he say here, okay, this is the end of that, and this is where the first time in history that the wright clan has been hit upon for an autobiography. in any case, to make a long story short or shorter than it should be, that's what explains these bumps up here. these things were put in place after type ts i was made but before ts ii and ts iv were made. there he is in bed again. now, i got roughly seven

minutes. it's a little bit incoherent to do et this way, but i'm going to do it anyhow. that's grover cleveland. there are a couple of wonderful passages about grover cleveland that i think i really owe it to mark twain to read simply because that gives a better idea of the autobiography than i can on my own. mark twain did not know cleveland when they were co-residents in buffalo. and this is a account of how they first met. during the time that we were in buffalo, mark twain was in buffalo, in the '70 and '71, mr. cleveland was sheriff, but i never happened to make his acquaintance or even see him. i'm going to let you read the original here. in fact, i was not even aware of his existence. fourteen years later, he was to become the greatest man in the state. i was not living in the state at the time. [laughter]

six seconds, that's pretty good. i was not living in the state at the time. i lost my place, sorry. at the time i was on the public highway and companied with another bandit, george w. cable. we were robbing the public with readings from our works during four months, and in the course of time we went to albany to levy tribute, and i said we ought to go and pay our respects to the governor. so cable and i went to that majestic capitol building and stated our errand. we were shown into the governor's private office, and i saw mr. cleveland for the first time. we three stood chatting. i was born lazy, and i comforted myself by turning the corner of a table into a sort of seat. presently, the governor said, mr. clemens, i was a fellow citizen of yours in buffalo a good many months ago, and during those months you burst suddenly into a mighty fame out of a previous long, continued and no

doubt proper obscurity. [laughter] but i was nobody, and you wouldn't note me or have anything to do with me. now that i've become somebody, you have changed your style, and you come here to shake hands with me and be sociable. how do you explain this kind of conduct? this is the president-elect, remember? oh, in buffalo you were nothing but a sheriff. i was in society. i couldn't afford to associate with sheriffs. but you're a governor now, and you are on your way to the presidency. it's a great difference, and it makes you worth while. [laughter] there appeared to be about 16 doors to that spacious room. from each door a young man now emerged, and the 16 lined up and moved forward and stood in front of the governor with an aspect of respectful expectancy in their attitude. no one spoke for a moment, then the governor said: you are dismissed gentlemen. your services are not required. mr. clemens is sitting on the

bells. [laughter] perhaps you can see it down here, payne is busy penciling, he's going to cross out what i'm about to read you. he doesn't like the explicitness of it. this is what mark twain says, we could pull it out of ts iv, you see, because of the way payne publishes it. what he actually says is there was a cluster of 16 bell buttons on the corner of the table. my proportions at that end of me were just right to enable me to cover the whole of that, and that is how i came to hatch out those 16 clerks. [laughter] so you're going to get to see what he actually wrote for the first time. one more passage. i'm going to try to squeeze this in. if it rings, i'll stop. that's francis clara folsom cleveland. she got married in the white house to president cleveland in

1884. she was the first person to be married in the white house. she, as you can see, is beautiful and young, and she was a great asset to the cleveland administration because she was very willing to go out and be a sort of jackie kennedy to the world. um, one more thing, does anyone know what arctics are? you wear your arctics, what do you do? >> [inaudible] >> yes. snowshoes or at least galosheses, probably boots. not too much pavement in washington, especially during the winter time. in any case, you need to know that. ..

which i have been speaking of. when i was leaving hartford for washington on the occasion referred to she said i have written a small warning and put it in the pocket of your best test. when you are dressing to go to the reception at the white house you will put your fingers in your vest pocket. you will find that little note. read it carefully and do what it tells you. i cannot be with you so i delegate by sentry duties to this little note. if i should give you warning by word of mouth now that passed from your head and be forgotten in a few minutes. it was president cleveland's first term. i had never seen his wife beyond the good hearted and sympathetic

and fascinating. sure enough just as i was finished dressing to go to the white house i found that low note which i had long ago forgotten. it with a gray little note to, a serious little note like its rider but it made me laugh. gentle gravity produces that effect upon me where the expert humorous joke fails. i do not laugh easily. should i finish? when we reach the white house and i was shaking hands with the president he started to say something but i interrupted him and said if your excellency will excuse me i will come back in a moment. i have a very important matter to attend to and it must be attended to at once. i turned to mrs. cleveland, the young and beautiful and fascinating and gave her my card on the back of which i had written he didn't. i asked her to sign her name below those words. she said he didn't want? i said never mind. we cannot discuss that now.

this is surge. won't you please sign your name? she said i cannot commit myself in that way. who is it that did and what is it that he didn't? i said time is flying. won't you take me out of my distress and sign your name to it? it is all right. i give you my word is all right. she looked nonplus but hesitatingly she took the pen and said i will sign it. i will take the risk but you must tell me all about it right afterward so you can be arrested before you get out of the house. there is nothing criminal about this. she signed and i handed her mrs. clemens's note which was brief and simple and to the point. it said don't worry your arctea in the white house. we said that card on its way to

mrs. clemens. thank you very much. [applause] >> those blue cards and your questions. >> the inquisition. all right. okay. >> i don't know when this microphone will go on. >> it is up to them. >> it is not working.

it is working. it is working for you. oh and i made the mistake of taking off my earlier. it is over in my bed. one second. >> turned it on. want me to hold it? okay. >> okay. [inaudible] >> questions. i have a question. i hadn't realized that mark twain was interested in

establishing a new narrative around autobiography. i would like to ask, i know the editors made millions of decisions. so how do you guide the pathway to establish a new narrative? >> once you figure out the relationship, you have a standard way of treating them. one that is derived from the notes. anything that the others have that are different are either mistakes or their changes by mark twain. you would adopt those and put them into the beginning text and you eventually have a text that is exactly what he wanted that those documents can tell you. there are aspects of the manuscript that are so large and

unfinished that is not ready for the press or the printer. he didn't prepare it for the printer and he will say things like here is the celebration of my 70 fifth birthday. there are 28 pages like this. there is no way to put it in. the most we can do is in surge a link on the electronic sight. i should have said all of this is available on marktwainproject.org free of charge. but as far as shaping what he does we are not trying to shake it. we are trying to follow what the evidence shows and what those early manuscript pages showed us for the first time was all of those preliminary measures we put in front of the book but label. they don't belong in the

autobiography. the response is he is treating them as if they were all part of the autobiography. mark twain did not want them included even though payne they should have known better did include them. that is the first time we knew he had excluded that. he knew what was to follow and you are off and running. you just follow the chronology. does that answer your questions? >> one of the questions the audience asks is how did the prior authors, payne and the others get a hold of his autobiography prior to being donated to uc-berkeley and how did they get to his wish that a hundred years after his death? >> the last thing first. if you read the newspaper you think mark twain has written

this embargo and his will. he did not. it is not that firm a prohibition. it is there to protect him as he is composing it so he doesn't imagine anyone is alive knows what he is going to say. he knows he is dead and that met control what anybody publishes. to the first part, payne and global were the first literary editors. mark twain appointed payne. he assigned him to the right to do the autobiography and payne rules over the paper along with clara, until he died in 1937. he is such an exclusion this that he is trying to write a book about mark twain and can't get access to the papers but payne dies. and the squeaky wheel and appointed his successors so they have direct access to the mark twain papers that are still

outside. we are talking 1937-1940. how did they do what they wanted to do? who was to stop them? it is not that unusual for editors of commercial books to do what they think will sell. he thinks that will interfere with the sales of harper's edition of it. i don't know if i answered that question. if i didn't please speak up. >> what percentage of the autobiography, the editors editions, is the original dictation which he started in 1906. >> what percentage of it? almost the entire percentage. it is 100% of the finished

autobiography. there are things that he inserts versus the story about the dual effort and the long end and he inserts it as part of the dictation. i don't know if that answers the question but the autobiography he wanted published is almost entirely fiction. >> is there any proof he said the coldest winter i ever spent was a summer in san francisco? >> as far as i know there is no proof. what we do know is that he quotes an 18th-century actor saying that about paris. i can see why that might have gone picked up and change, did he say it about the vancouver? or seattle? are will offer $75 a day but the

fact is i can't prove a negative but we look for this and look for it. we never found any evidence that he said it. >> did mark twain ever live in san francisco? >> yes. he had to leave virginia city because of the dual. dueling was outlawed and he would have been in prison. he and gillis come to san francisco where he takes a job as a local reporter in 1864. he hates local reporting so he resigned as just about the same time george barnes is willing to fire him. he then stays in san francisco without serious employment. it is not very much money. he is living off of the income or the value of mining stocks but towards the end of 65 those

stocks disappear and he has to get a job. he writes his old boss, he says let me write a baited a letter from san francisco to the enterprise and joe says shore, do it. so he writes a 2,000 word letter. six days a week for five months, some of the best sweater's he ever wrote and maybe 20% of them. we look for than everyday. usually go into your attic and see if there are old newspapers. most of the things that survive are not enterprise clippings or enterprise issues but contemporary newspapers that reprinted at because he was very good copy. that is how those work. >> the person who asked the san francisco question wants to know if you know the neighborhood that he lived in and if he ever met robert louis stevenson.

>> do i know the neighborhood? you can piece out the neighborhood. it so changed that to me it doesn't really look like the neighborhood but he mentions being on montgomery street so you figure out roughly where he was. just not very likely. did he ever meet robert louis stevenson? yes. he was very fond of stevenson. he didn't know him for very long. he and mark twain came up with the idea of a submerged audience and mark twain talked-about this in washington square in new york. he was outside taking the sun because he had tuberculosis and mark twain met him and liked him. and have a very long correspondence with him unfortunately. >> talk a little more about submerged audience. an interesting concept. >> don't rely on my study.

the section on stevenson is at the beginning of the final form but stevens and proposed it. he talks about this person and, davis who has published all sorts of practical books and piano playing. he has discovered enormous qualities. he never read anything by him. this was not davis but a guy named dick who wrote all sorts of practical books that sold in the millions. the idea is this is someone who was unknown from the normal world, popular world that you and i live in but they were below the surface. he was regarded as the real

audience. he was right. >> what was the extent of mark twain's formal education? >> he left school at the age of 12 when his mother died. he was trained in the country, and school and all in one room. you can guess from the age of 12 that it was not that formal. he is one of the true great autodialer remics of the world. he has no formal training. he doesn't even have a whaling ship little of harvard and yale. if you study him you find out that he has read everything. principally nonfiction but really just very wide. just looking at this, you find references to all kinds of

literary themes, shakespeare and that kind of stuff. that disappears after a while but basically the beginning of this lifelong appetite for new literary texts. >> two more quick questions. why was uc-berkeley chosen to receive the papers? >> i did explain that very well. mark twain wrote his will in such a way that his descendants and there turned out to only one daughter, could not think over the papers or sell the papers or give the papers to anybody except through their own will. this was designed to protect them from men. it didn't work. she married her second husband who basically richter off $5 million but kept the papers

together. they would love to sell them piece by piece but couldn't. illegal situation wasn't right for that. when they were out here, they go from payne to harvard. he resigns 151/6 in times and that does resign and dixon takes them to huntington. dixon makes a tall courtly texan who knows how to deal with clara. he was good genius at that. when he goes to berkeley says can i take the papers? she says sure. before the papers arrived he says i really think you should change your will so that instead of going to yale which is where they were intended to go they go to berkeley. you see what he was worried about. he was worried that clara would die and those papers -- his biography which was based on

those papers would come to a halt. she writes that kansas are will sent a column next week. that is why. don't get me wrong. the papers are not their property until she dies 1860's to and there are efforts to get them back piecemeal. the people in charge were wise enough to resist. sam su was something of a snake and a gambler. we know he offered letters that were in the family the additional 750 love letters between a levee and clarence over many years. he offered them for $50,000 and strauss said no. this is too much. this was 1952. he comes back and says you can have them for $10,000 but i need the money by sunday.

so they opened up the bank of america and get $10,000. we know he did that with other things that were held and sold to the world. >> peter frazier reminds me that there is a lunch club a, a mark twain lunch club that has been meeting for quite some time, was a year. they are one of the individuals that have funded the mark twain project and the whole endeavor. can you talk a bit more about the funding? >> funding is always a problem as you might imagine. it is not funded directly by the university. has been funded since its inception for the national endowment for the humanities. they have an absolutely loyal to us. must be the longest-running project they ever had to pay

for. beginning in 1980 they said we will shift to the matching grants. you have to raise a dollar for us to give you a dollar. of the grants since 1980 have been 50/50 and it is my job to find people who are willing to give that kind of money on the basis of what we do and what they hope we will do. we have been very successful recently but it is not a challenge that goes away. it will always be there. >> always better for all of this. thank you for joining us. thank you for coming. [applause] >> for more information on mark twain and his autobiography visit themarktwainproject.org. what are you reading this summer? booktv wants to know.

>> i am reading a book about the coldest winter and quite frankly i held on to this book not wanting to open up the pages to it. it goes over the korean war and for most people familiar with the korean war said you don't want to know. what do they mean by that? i was in korea when the chinese surrounded the entire eighth army and it was a nightmare. that was 60 years ago and to the best of my knowledge i haven't suffered psychologically about that war. it pains me when i think of the number of americans that died in

korea. it even becomes more difficult when people ask me to explain my heroic actions in a country i have no idea where i was or why i was there. so i thought it would be better not to expose myself to in any more of this nightmare and i left it alone. i have six different copies of this book. some had lovers in korea. some of them say that their worst thoughts about what happened was actually proven by this book. has to why we got involved. did we know what we were doing?

was it successful? i feel secure enough to take a look at what happened over 60 years old and see where this actually takes me. in june of 1950 i was 20 years old. i was in the second infantry division and told we were going to stop the communist invasion of south korea. are don't know if i said this publicly but i had no idea where korea was or what invasion we were talking about. and even when i came back home, one of the most tragic things was i never missed it and i could probably explain where i

was. now i can see that out of the ashes of a broken down community, crushed to the ground, all of this has come one of the greatest democracies and economic powers in that region and a longtime friend of the united states. those are good thoughts. i was in korea in 1950 and to continued expansion of a democracy. quite frankly i may not want to know why i was there. so that if it does happen it won't be in the house of representatives. >> tell us what you are reading this summer. sent as a suite at booktv.

>> the balance between security and libertine the additional difficulties of a climate change treaty and the limits of international law. your questions for author at university of chicago law professor eric poser booktv. what are you reading? here's what you had to say.

send us a tweet at booktv to let us know when you plan on reading this summer. you can e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. >> we look at the upcoming titles for february of 2011 and we are joined by lissa warren, vice president and senior director, there are three books we want to talk about that are upcoming for your press and i want to start with this one. >> a big book for us. one of the big book of the year. it is about last year during that time, he had a son of a deal cancer and knew he was dying. he bankrupted his family was bad business deals so he knew he had one year to finish writing his memoirs, turn it in and get it

published so the finances could be used for his family. his publisher was mark twain. there is an amazing literary back story behind this wonderful work of history. >> did he manage to get it published? >> he did. three days after returning in the manuscript he passed away. >> the grant memoir is a model for current presidents to use. >> legendary. the best presidential memoir ever written about also one of the best military histories ever written because the civil war works as well. >> lissa warren, another presidential book by stanley windtrap. >> this looks at pearl harbor and the days following the bombing and looks at the date of america at that time was the darkest christmas in history but in many ways the most unified american christmas in history.

>> why choose to make this a book? >> he can't go wrong and has a tendency to look at holidays in america and history in america. this was a perfect match. >> one more we want to talk about. this is frederick law olmsted. >> he had previously done democracies -- biographies of ralph nader and alan greenspan. he researched the life of frederick olmsted who we know as the designer of central park and was and if infamous landscape designer but he was more than that. was an abolitionist which i wasn't aware of and a journalist which also was not aware of. this chronicles all of the different places he designed for including mclean hospital in the boston area and he ended up at the mclean hospital at the end of his life. strange how his life came full circle. >> host: what is coppo? >> it is