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Autobiographical Dictation, 29 December 1906 ❉ Textual Commentary

Source document.

TS1      Typescript carbon (the ribbon copy is lost), leaves numbered 1601–1608, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.

The ribbon copy is missing. Clemens revised the carbon copy (TS1), intending it for NAR, where it did not appear.

Marginal Notes on TS1 Concerning Publication in NAR

Location on TS Writer, Medium Exact Inscription Explanation
TS1, p. 1603 SLC, ink Stop end the excerpt after ‘calling you?” ’ (357.23).
TS1, p. 1607 SLC, ink Begin here resume the excerpt at ‘From Susy’s Biography.’ (358.36)
Saturday, Decembertextual note 29, 1906

The end of Susy’s Biography: the trip to Keokuk—Mr. Clemens speaks of the journey—Mentions hearing the leadsmen’s calls on the Mississippi steamboat—He sees his mother, then, for the last time in life—Gives the details of the romance of her life.

From Susy’s Biography. textual note

June 26, ’86.

We are all of us on our way to Keokuk to see Grandma Clemens, who is very feeble and wants to see us, and pertickularly Jean who is her name sake. We are going by way of the lakes, as papa thought that would be the most comfortable way.

We went by way of the lakes, and it was a very pleasant and satisfactory excursion. We spent a day or two in Duluth, and a day or two in St. Paul and Minneapolis; then we boarded a Mississippi steamboat and went down the river to Keokuk. In my book called “Old Times on the Mississippi” I have explained that “mark twain”textual note is the leadsman’s cry for two fathoms—twelve feet—and have also explained how I came to adopt that phrase as a nom de guerre. If the children had ever been acquainted with these not very important facts, they had forgotten them by the time that they arrived on board that [begin page 357] Mississippi steamboat. A little after nightfall we entered a shoal crossing. I was standing alone on the hurricane-deck, astern, and I heard the big bell forward boom out the call for the leads. A moment later the night wind was bringing to me out of the distance, and faintly and musically, the leadsmen’s long-drawn chant—sounds which had once been so familiar to me, and which had in them now the charm and witchery and pathos which belong with memories of a life that has been lived, and will come back no more:

“By the d-e-e-ptextual note four!”

“Quarter less four!”

H-a-l-ftextual note three!”

M-a-r-ktextual note three!”

H-a-l-ftextual note twain!”

Quarter-r-rtextual note twain!”

“Mark under water twain!”

M-a-r-ktextual note twain!”

“M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-n!”

M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-ntextual note!”

And so it went on, and on, the quaint and welcome old music beating softly upon my ear, and working its enchantments upon my spirit. Then suddenly Clara’s little figure burst upon me out of the darkness, and she assailed me in a voice that was intense with rebuke and reproach,

“Papa!”

“Well, dear?”

“I have hunted all over the whole boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling you?”


We remained in Keokuk a week, and this was the last time that I saw my aged mother in life. Her memory was decaying; indeed, for matters of the moment it was about gone; but her memories of the distant past remained, and she was living mainly in that far awaytextual note bygone time; and so the secret of her life—the great secret, the romance of her life—was presently revealed by her lips, unconsciously and unknowingly. Orion’s wife had been the recipient of this confidence, and she had kept it strictly to herself, but she felt it right and fair that I should share it with her, and so she told me about it; no, I am wrong in my dates; she did not tell me about it at that time, but at a later time, when I went West to attend my mother’s funeralexplanatory note.

It can do no harm to set it down here, for it will not see print until years after all of us who have a personal interest in it shall have passed from this life. All through my boyhood I had noticed that the attitude of my father and mother toward each other was that of courteous, considerate, and always respectful, and even deferential, friends; that they were always kind toward each other, thoughtful of each other, but that there was nothing warmer; there were no outward and visible demonstrations of affection. This did not surprise me, for my father was exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech, and in a manner he was austere. He was pleasant with his friends, but never familiar; and so, as I say, the absence of exterior demonstration of affection for my mother had [begin page 358] no surprise for me. By nature she was warm-hearted, but it seemed to me quite natural that her warm-heartedness should be held in reserve in an atmosphere like my father’s.

As I have said, my mother’s memory for immediate events failed in the closing years of her life. When she was eighty-five or eighty-six years old a Medical Convention took place in a river town some distance north of Keokuk—Burlington, Iowa. Doctors came to the Convention from many parts of the United States, among them a physician verging toward ninety years of age—Dr. Gwynn, I have forgotten his first name. It was in midsummer. My mother, for her safety’s sake, was kept under watch in those days, but one day when the watch was for the moment relaxed she disappeared. She was gone two days, and during this time no trace of her could be found; then she reappeared looking tired and worn, and sad. What had been happening was this: she had found Dr. Gwynn’s name in the list of delegates to the Burlington Convention; she had slipped away and wandered to the river and taken passage for Burlington in the steamboat. The Convention’s labors were nearly finished. She went to the principal hotel and asked eagerly for Dr. Gwynn. She was informed that he had taken his departure for Kentucky the day before. She made no comment except with her face and eyes, which revealed that she had suffered a deep disappointment. She returned to Keokuk, and then her injured mind betrayed her, and in the privacy of the home she told Orion’s wife a secret which she had carried in her heart for more than sixty yearsexplanatory note. It was this:

When she was a girl of twenty,textual note in Lexington, Kentucky, she became engaged to a fine young fellow who was making his sure and steady way toward prosperity and acceptance as a physician. They were passionately fond of each other. Young John M. Clemens had been a suitor for her hand, but had been rejected. There was to be a ball in a town five or ten miles away. In that day that young girl had a passion for dancing, and, indeed, for everything else that had charm and pleasure and vigorous life in it. She wanted Gwynn to take her to the ball; he was not able to do it; he said his duties required him to remain at his post, and he must not desert it. The young girl was grievously disappointed, and she upbraided him for his lack of devotion. He defended himself, and the incident ended in a lovers’ quarrel. He had hardly turned his back when my appointed father appeared on the scene. He once more begged her to marry him, and in her anger she said she would, but it must be instantly, lest her mind undergo a change, since she was not marrying him for love, but to spite Gwynn.

For more than sixty years she had grieved in secret for the crime committed against herself and another in a moment of unreflecting passion. It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in my long lifetime.

From Susy’s Biography. textual note

July 4,

We have arived in Keokuk after a very pleasant

So ends the loving task of that innocent sweet spirit—like her own life, unfinished, broken off in the midst. Interruptions came, her days became increasingly busy with [begin page 359] studies and work, and she never resumed the Biography, though from time to time she gathered materials for it. When I look at the arrested sentence that ends the little book, it seems as if the hand that traced it cannot be far—is gone for a moment only, and will come again and finish it. But that is a dream; a creature of the heart, not of the mind—a feeling, a longing, not a mental product: the same that lured Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken, to the pier, day after day, week after week, there to stand in the gloom and the chill of the dawn gazing seaward through veiling mists and sleet and snow for the ship which he knew was gone down—the ship that bore all his treasure, his daughterexplanatory note.

Textual Notes Saturday, December 29, 1906
  December ●  Dec. (TS1) 
  From Susy’s Biography.  ●  From Susy’s Biography. (TS1) 
  “mark twain” ●  “M mark twain! ‘M’ marked for lowercase and exclamation point canceled  (TS1-SLC) 
  d-e-e-p ●  d-e-e-p (TS1-SLC) 
  H-a-l-f ●  H-a-l-f (TS1-SLC) 
  M-a-r-k ●  M-a-r-k (TS1-SLC) 
  H-a-l-f ●  H-a-l-f (TS1-SLC) 
  Quarter-r-r ●  Quarter-r-r  (TS1-SLC) 
  M-a-r-k ●  M-a-r-k (TS1-SLC) 
  M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-n ●  M-a-r-k t-w-a-i-n (TS1-SLC) 
  away ●  away,  (TS1-SLC) 
  twenty, ●  twenty, -three,  (TS1-SLC) 
  From Susy’s Biography.  ●  From Susy’s Biography. (TS1) 
Explanatory Notes Saturday, December 29, 1906
 

I went West to attend my mother’s funeral] Jane Lampton Clemens died on 27 October 1890; she “was borne by her children to Hannibal and laid to rest” beside her husband ( MTB, 2:901). In his moving tribute to her, “Jane Lampton Clemens,” Clemens concluded, “She always had the heart of a young girl; and in the sweetness and serenity of death she seemed somehow young again. She was always beautiful” ( Inds, 82–92).

 

a Medical Convention took place in a river town . . . a secret which she had carried in her heart for more than sixty years] Clemens apparently heard his mother’s “secret” in 1886 from Pamela Moffett, who had visited Jane, Orion, and Mollie in Keokuk in April, then stopped over in New York and Hartford on her way back to Fredonia. Jane Clemens had first told Orion, then Pamela during her April visit, and finally Mollie, enjoining each to secrecy. The doctor (whose name both Clemens and Mollie reported as “Barrett”—not “Gwynn”—at the time) was Richard Ferril Barret (1804–60), who had lived in nearby Green County, Kentucky, when Jane married John Clemens in 1823. He studied medicine in Cincinnati and at Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky, between 1824 and 1827, and married Maria Buckner in 1832. In 1840 he was a cofounder, with Dr. Joseph Nash McDowell, of the Medical Department at Kemper College (later Missouri Medical College) in St. Louis. He was later described as “eminently noble and engaging,—a figure tall, graceful, and courtly, and a countenance of the Roman model. . . . His pride of race and scholarly habits made him appear exclusive and aristocratic, but his impulses were ardent, and his manners polite and engaging” (Scharf 1883, 1:677). His son, Richard Aylett Barret (b. 1834), who became a successful doctor, lawyer, and journalist, lived much of his life in St. Louis. Clemens told a somewhat different—and probably more accurate—version of his mother’s story to Howells in May 1886. He said that Orion had accompanied Jane to “a convention of old settlers of the Mississippi Valley in an Iowa town” (not a “Medical Convention,” as he recalls here); when she was told that Dr. Barret had “returned to St. Louis,” they “went straight back to Keokuk” (19 May 1886, NN-BGC, in MTHL, 2:566–68). The event may have been the “Tri-State Old Settlers’ Reunion,” which was held in Keokuk in September 1885; no convention in Burlington, or another “Iowa town,” has been documented. And if there was a Dr. Barret at the reunion, it was the son of the one Jane had known, who had died in 1860 (letters in CU-MARK: PAM to Samuel Moffett, 2 Apr 1886 and 21 May 1886; MEC to SLC and OLC, 3 Feb 1887; and OC and MEC to SLC and OLC, 23 Feb 1887; Inds, 300–301; Conard 1901, 1:160–63; Scharf 1883, 1:676–77; Carolyn D. Palmgreen, personal communication, 30 Dec 1985, CU-MARK; Varble 1964, 113–14, 351–52).

 

Aaron Burr, old, gray, forlorn, forsaken . . . ship that bore all his treasure, his daughter] Theodosia Burr Alston (1783–1813), daughter of former Vice-President Aaron Burr, was a child prodigy who knew several languages, including Latin and Greek. After her mother’s death, when she was eleven, she served as hostess in her father’s house. In 1801 she married Joseph Alston (1779–1816) of South Carolina, who was elected governor in 1812. In 1807 Aaron Burr was arrested for what came to be known as the Burr Conspiracy, but was acquitted on a technicality and retreated to Europe for four years before resuming his legal career in New York. In December 1812, in ill health and depressed over the death of her ten-year-old son, Theodosia boarded the schooner Patriot in Georgetown, South Carolina, bound for New York. For weeks, Burr daily walked the Manhattan pier watching in vain for the ship, whose fate remains unknown (Lomask 1982, 361–63; Parmet and Hecht 1967, 56, 67, 88–90, 163, 300–304, 328–30; Côté 2012).