Mr. Clemens’s method of writing stories—Tells how some of his stories were commenced, how they were sometimes left for several years unfinished—Some of them have never been finished—Trouble with telephones—Miss Lyon’s long-distance message to Clara Clemens—Mr. ScovelⒶtextual note gives a clause of telephone law.
I was never willing to destroy “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” Now and then, in the past thirty years, I have overhauled my literary stock and transferred some of it to the fire, but “Stormfield’s Visit” always escaped. Secretly and privately I liked it, I couldn’t help it. But never mind about that, I wish to speak of something else now.Ⓐtextual note
ThereⒶtextual note has never been a time in the past thirty-five years when my literary shipyardⒶtextual note hadn’t two or more half-finished ships on the ways, neglected and baking in the sun; [begin page 196] generally there have been three or four; at present there are five.Ⓐtextual note This has an unbusiness-like look, but it was not purposeless, it was intentional. As long as a book would write itself I was a faithful and interested amanuensis, and my industry did not flag;Ⓐtextual note but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. Then I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived, through a couple of years’ restfulⒶtextual note idleness, and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis.
It was by accident that I found out that a book is pretty sure to get tired, along about the middle, and refuse to go on with its work until its powers and its interest shouldⒶtextual note have been refreshed by a rest and its depletedⒶtextual note stock of raw materials reinforced by lapse of time. It was when I had reached the middle of “Tom Sawyer” that I made this invaluable find. At page 400 of my manuscript the story made a sudden and determined halt and refused to proceed another step. Day after day it still refused. I was disappointed, distressed, and immeasurably astonished, for I knew quite well that the tale was not finished, and I could not understand why I was not able to go on with it. The reason was very simple—my tank had run dry; it was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing. When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-holeⒶtextual note two yearsⒺexplanatory note I took it out, one day, and read the last chapter that I had written. It was then that I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again, in time, while you are asleep—alsoⒶtextual note while you are at work at other things, and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebrationⒶtextual note is going on. There was plenty of material now, and the book went on and finished itself without any trouble.
EverⒶtextual note since then, when I have been writing a book I have pigeon-holed it without misgivings when its tank ran dry, wellⒶtextual note knowing that it would fill up again without any of my help within the next two or three years, and that then the work of completing it would be simple and easy. “The Prince and the Pauper” struck work in the middle, because the tank was dry, and I did not touch it again for two years. A dry interval of two years occurred in “The Connecticut Yankee at the Court of King Arthur.” A like interval has occurred in the middle of other books of mine. Two similar intervals have occurred in a story of mine called “Which Was It?”Ⓔexplanatory note In fact, the second interval has gone considerably over time, for it is now four years since that second one intruded itself. I am sure that the tank is full again now, and that I could take up that book and write the other half of it without a break or any lapse of interest—but I shan’tⒶtextual note do it. The pen is irksome to me. I was born lazy, and dictating has spoiled me. I am quite sure I shall never touch a pen again; therefore that book will remain unfinished—a pity, too, for the idea of it is (actually)Ⓐtextual note new and would spring a handsome surprise upon the reader, at the end.
There is another unfinished book, which I should probably entitle “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” It is half finished, and will remain so. There is still another one, entitled “The AdventuresⒶtextual note of a Microbe During Three Thousand Years—Ⓐtextual noteby a Microbe.” It is half finished and will remain so. There is yet another—“The Mysterious Stranger.”Ⓔexplanatory note It is more [begin page 197] than half finished. I would dearly like to finish it, and it causes me a real pang to reflect that it is not to be. These several tanks are full now, and those books would go gaily along and complete themselves if I would hold the pen, but I am tired of the pen.
There was another of these half-finished stories. I carried it as far as thirty-eight thousand words four years ago, then destroyed it for fear I might some day finish it. Huck FinnⒶtextual note was the teller of the story, and of course Tom Sawyer and Jim were the heroes of itⒺexplanatory note. But I believed that that trio had done work enough in this world and were entitled to a permanent rest.
InⒶtextual note Rouen, in ’93,Ⓐtextual note I destroyed fifteen thousand dollars’ worth of manuscript, and in Paris, in the beginning of ’94, I destroyed ten thousand dollars’ worth—I mean,Ⓐtextual note estimated as magazine stuff. I was afraid to keep those piles of manuscript on hand, lest I be tempted to sell them, for I wasⒶtextual note fairly well persuaded that they were not up to standard. Ordinarily there would have been no temptation present, and I would not think of publishing doubtful stuff—but I was heavily in debt then,Ⓐtextual note and the temptation to mend my condition was so strong that I burnt the manuscripts to get rid of it. My wife not only made no objection, but encouraged me to do it, for she cared more for my reputation than for any other concern of ours. About that time she helped me put another temptation behind me. This was an offer of sixteen thousand dollarsⒶtextual note a year, for five years, to let my name be used as editor of a humorous periodicalⒺexplanatory note. I praiseⒶtextual note her for furnishing her help in resisting that temptation,Ⓐtextual note for it is her due. There was no temptation about it, in fact, but she would have offered her help, just the same, if there had been one. I can conceive of many wild and extravagant things when my imagination is in good repair, but I can conceive of nothing quite so wild and extravagant as the idea of my accepting the editorship of a humorous periodical. I should regard that as the saddest (for me)Ⓐtextual note of all occupations. If I should undertake it I should have to add to it the occupation of undertaker, to relieve it in some degree of its cheerlessness. I could edit a serious periodical with relish and a strong interest, but I have never cared enough about humor to qualify me to edit it or sit in judgment upon it.Ⓐtextual note
There are some books that refuse to be written. They stand their ground, year after year, and will not be persuaded. It isn’t because the book is not there and worth being written—it is only because the right form for the story does not present itself. There is only one right form for a story, and if you fail to find that form the story will not tell itself. You may try a dozen wrong forms, but in each case you will not get very far before you discover that you have not found the right one—then that story will always stop and decline to go any further. In the story of “Joan of Arc” I made six wrong starts, and each time that I offered the resultⒶtextual note to Mrs. Clemens she responded with the same deadly criticism—silence. She didn’t sayⒶtextual note a word, but her silence spoke with the voice of thunder. When at last I found the right form I recognized at once that it was the right one, and I knew what she would say. She said it, without doubt or hesitation.
In the course of twelve years I made six attempts to tell a simple little story which I knew would tell itself in four hours if I could ever find the right starting-point. I scored six failures; then one day in London I offered the text of the story to Robert McClure, [begin page 198] and proposed that he publish that text in the magazine and offer a prize to the person who should tell it best. I became greatly interested and went on talking upon the text for half an hour; then he said,
“You have told the story yourself. You have nothing to do but put it on paper just as you have told it.”
I recognized that this was true. At the end of four hours it was finished, and quite to my satisfaction. So it took twelve years and four hours to produce that little bit of a story, which I have called “The Death-WaferⒶtextual note.”Ⓔexplanatory note
To start right is certainly an essential. I have proved this too many times to doubt it. Twenty-five or thirty years ago I began a story which was to turn upon the marvels of mental telegraphy. A man was to invent a scheme whereby he could synchronize two minds,Ⓐtextual note thousands of miles apart,Ⓐtextual note and enable them to freely converse together through the air without the aid of a wire. Four times I started it in the wrong way, and it wouldn’t go. Three times I discovered my mistake after writing about a hundred pages. I discovered it the fourth time when I had written four hundred pages—then I gave it up and put the whole thing in the fire.
IⒶtextual note have mentioned an unfinished book which might be entitled “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” In the manuscript the story has no title, but begins with a pretty brusque remark Ⓐtextual note by an ancient admiral, who is Captain Ned WakemanⒶtextual note under a borrowed name. This reminds me of something.
Four or five months ago, in the New York home, I learned by accident that we had been having a good deal of trouble with our telephonesⒶtextual note. The family get more or less peace and comfort out of concealing vexations from me on account of the infirmities of my temper, and it would be only by accident that I could find out that the telephones were making trouble. Upon inquiry I discovered that my tribe had been following the world’s usual custom—they had applied for relief to the Telephone Company’s subordinates. This is always a mistake. The only right way is to apply to the President of a corporation; your complaint receives immediate and courteous attention then. I called up the headquarters and asked the President to send some one to my house to listen to a complaint. One of the chief superintendents came—Mr. Scovel. The complaint occupied but a minute of our time. Then he sat by the bed and we smoked and chatted half an hour very pleasantly. I remarked that often and often I would dearly like to use the telephone myself, but didn’t dare to do it because when the connection wasⒶtextual note imperfect I wasⒶtextual note sure to lose my temper and swear—and while I would like to do that,Ⓐtextual note and would get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, I couldn’t venture itⒶtextual note because I was aware that by telephone law the Company can remove your telephone if you indulge yourself in that way.
Mr. ScovelⒶtextual note gladdened me by informing me that I could allow myself that indulgence without fear of injuriousⒶtextual note results, for there wouldn’t be any, there being a clause in the law which allowed me that valuable privilege. Then he quoted that clauseⒶtextual note and made me happy.
Two or three months ago I wanted that nameless manuscript heretofore mentioned, and I asked my secretary to call up my New York home on the long-distance and tell [begin page 199] my daughter Clara to find that manuscript and send it to me. The line was not in good order, and Miss Lyon found great difficulty in making Clara understand what was wanted. After a deal of shouting back and forth Clara gathered that it was a manuscript that was wanted, and that she would find it among the manuscriptural riffraff in my study somewhere. Then she wanted to know by what sign she would recognize it. She asked for the title of it.
Miss Lyon—using a volume of voice which shouldⒶtextual note have carried to New York without the telephone’s help, said—
“It has no title. It begins with a remark.”
It took some time to make Clara understand that. Then she said,
“What is the remark?”
Miss Lyon shouted—
“Tell him to go to hell.”
Clara. “Tell him to go—where?”
Miss Lyon. “To hell.”
Clara. “I can’t get it. Spell it.”
Miss Lyon. “H-E-L-L.”Ⓐtextual note
Clara. “Oh, hell.”
I was troubled, not by the ear-splitting shouting, which I didn’t mind, but by the character of the words that were going over that wire and being listened to in every office on it, and for a moment I was scared and said,
“Now they’ll take our telephone out, on account of this kind of talk.”
But the next moment I was comfortable again, because I remembered that blessed clause in the telephone law which Mr. Scovel had quoted to me,Ⓐtextual note and which said:
“In employing our telephones no subscriber shall be debarred from using his native language.”
I had reached the middle of “Tom Sawyer” . . . When the manuscript had lain in a pigeon-hole two years] Clemens had reached the end of what was ultimately chapter 18 when “the story made a sudden and determined halt.” On 4 September 1874 Clemens wrote to John Brown:
I have been writing fifty pages of manuscript a day, on an average, for some time, now, on a book, (a story). . . . But night before last I discovered that that day’s chapter was a failure, in conception, moral, truth to nature & execution—enough blemishes to impair the excellence of almost any chapter—& so, I must burn up the day’s work & do it all over again. It was plain that I had worked myself out, pumped myself dry. (SLC and OLC to Brown, L6, 221–25)
Clemens canceled the last paragraph on manuscript page 500 (not 400 as claimed in this dictation) and destroyed the remainder of the chapter. He resumed work on the manuscript eight or nine months (not two years) later, completing it by 5 July 1875 ( TS, 10–12, 505, 583 n. 148.30).
“The Prince and the Pauper” struck work in the middle . . . a story of mine called “Which Was It?”] The composition of The Prince and the Pauper began in 1877 but was broken off in early 1878 when the Clemenses went to Europe; it was not resumed until 1880. A “dry interval of two years” in Connecticut Yankee has not been identified; work on the novel was intermittent between 1885 and 1889. The first phase of work on “Which Was It?” was in the summer and fall of 1899 while Clemens was living in London and Sanna (Sweden); he resumed work on it in 1900–1903, then abandoned it ( P&P, 3–7; CY, 1–13; WWD, 177–78).
“The Refuge of the Derelicts.” . . . “The Mysterious Stranger.”] “The Refuge of the Derelicts” and “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” are substantial but unfinished novels, written in 1905–6 and 1905 respectively, and left in manuscript at Clemens’s death (they have been published in FM, 157–248, and WWD, 430–553). “The Mysterious Stranger” is Clemens’s fourth and last attempt at a story about a boyish supernatural being who visits earth. The earliest treatment discernible is embedded in the second, which takes place in eighteenth-century Austria (“The Chronicle of Young Satan,” 1897–1900); the third is set in nineteenth-century Missouri (“Schoolhouse Hill,” 1898). The last attempt, entitled in full “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” takes place in a fifteenth-century Austrian village and print shop. It was incomplete at the time of the present dictation; Clemens would add more than a hundred pages to the manuscript in 1908, but he still left it in an unfinished state (Tuckey 1963; MSM, 1–34).
I carried it as far as thirty-eight thousand words . . . Tom Sawyer and Jim were the heroes of it] Clemens seems to allude to a story he worked on when his family was staying at York Harbor, Maine, in 1902. The manuscript is not extant and is known only from his correspondence, notebooks, and stray references. Set as usual in a fictionalized Hannibal, the book’s first section would take place during Huck and Tom’s youth; the second section was to portray them and their contemporaries fifty years later. Howells records that in August or September 1902 Clemens read aloud to him from “an admirable story” which was populated with “characters such as he had known in boyhood,” but which he later denied having written (Howells 1910, 90; Howells to SLC, 20 Oct 1902, CU-MARK, in MTHL, 2:747–48). From his notebooks it is clear that Clemens planned to work into this novel many of his own memories which had been, or would be, used in the Autobiography (Notebook 45, TS pp. 2, 13, 21, CU-MARK).
an offer of sixteen thousand dollars a year . . . as editor of a humorous periodical] The offer referred to may have been from Robert Barr (1849–1912), who in 1892 founded The Idler, a London monthly. At that time he offered Clemens the position of nominal coeditor, with no duties attached; no agreement was reached (reportedly because Clemens’s requested share of the profits was too high), and the coeditorship went to humorist Jerome K. Jerome, author of the popular Three Men in a Boat. Clemens did however assist in launching The Idler, serializing in its pages his novel The American Claimant, and acting as the magazine’s American distributor through his firm of Charles L. Webster and Company. In 1895 Barr quarreled with Jerome and lost editorial control of The Idler; but in 1897 Jerome was forced out, and Barr, as sole proprietor, tried to relaunch the magazine. He again offered Clemens a place on the masthead and was refused: “No, bedad I dasn’t be either editor or associate. It is a pity, too, for I think you will make your scheme succeed. Go ahead—you are young & full of energy—& grand prosperity attend you! I am old, & will get me to a nunnery” (29 Sept 1897 to Barr, photocopy in CU-MARK; Oxenham 1946, 36–37; Ashley 2006, 93–100; SLC 1892b).
six attempts to tell a simple little story . . . “The Death-Wafer.”] Inspired by a passage that Clemens read in 1883 in Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, “The Death-Disk” is the story of three soldiers who are convicted of exceeding their orders; one of them is to be selected by lot for execution. The daughter of one soldier innocently hands him the disk of sealing wax that condemns him to death. Clemens initially planned it as a tragedy to be written in collaboration with Howells, but after his 1899 conversation with Robert McClure (brother of S. S. McClure, and London agent for McClure’s Magazine), he decided to supply a happy ending. The story was published in the 1901 Christmas issue of Harper’s Monthly (20 Dec 1883 to Howells, MH-H, in MTHL, 2:455–59; N&J3, 14–15; Rasmussen 2007, 1:100–101; “Find R. B. M’Clure Suicide in His Home,” New York Times, 31 May 1914, 1; SLC 1901; see also AD, 7 June 1906 and the note at 106.1).
Source documents.
TS1 ribbon Typescript, leaves numbered 1188–99 (numbering in pencil by an unidentified hand), made from Hobby’s notes and revised in pencil.TS1 carbon (incomplete) Typescript carbon, leaves numbered 1188–95 (1196–99 are missing; numbering in pencil by an unidentified hand), revised: ‘Thursday . . . who is Captain’ (195 title–198.19).
Clemens revised TS1 ribbon in pencil. His revisions were transferred to TS1 carbon by Lyon; Clemens then made a further round of revisions to TS1 carbon, with an NAR installment in view; no part of the dictation was published there. We judge that there was an intention, albeit a failed one, to bring the two copies into conformity, and we accept the revised readings of both ribbon and carbon, except for the deletion of the first three sentences (clearly a temporary modification for imminent publication) and the insertion of asterisks at 198.17.
TS1 carbon is now fragmentary; two leaves containing the “trouble with telephones” anecdote are missing. For the portion of the text where TS1 carbon is missing, TS1 ribbon is our only witness.
Marginal Notes on TS1 carbon Concerning Publication in NAR