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Autobiographical Dictation, 10 April 1907 ❉ Textual Commentary

Source documents.

TS1       Typescript carbon (the ribbon copy is lost), leaves numbered 1985–91, made from Hobby’s notes and revised.
Sun       “Delmas Sums Up for Thaw,” clipping from the New York Sun, 9 April 1907, 1–2, attached to TS1: ‘He began . . . of months.’ (41.5–42.45).

The ribbon copy being lost, TS1 (a carbon copy), as revised by Clemens, with the Sun clipping pasted to its last leaf, is the only authoritative source for this dictation. To the left of the clipping Hobby wrote ‘N. Y. Sun, April 9, ’07.’ The newspaper text is an excerpt from a much longer article about the Thaw trial.

[begin page 39]
Wednesday, April 10, 1907

Mr. Clemens removes the fictions from the “Wapping Alice” tale and tells the facts; also recalls his meeting with Alice and the Swede three years afterwards. The Thaw trial drawing to a close; part of Mr. Delmas’s speech in summing up the case for the defencetextual note.

I am aware that yesterday’s dictation reads like a farcical fairy-tale and looks like an invention; but never mind how it reads or how it looks, it is neither a fairy-tale nor an invention. There is not an essential detail in it that is fictitious. There is one considerable detail which is fictitious, but it is a nonessentialtextual note. In that instance I diverged from fact to fiction merely because I wantedtextual note to publish the thing in a magazineexplanatory note presently, and for delicacy’s sake I was obliged to make the change. But this Autobiography of mine can stand plainnesses of statement which might make a magazine shiver; it has stood a good many already, and will have to stand a good many more before I get through. For my own pleasure, I wish to remove that fictive detail now, and replace it with the fact. This considerable but not essential fact was this, to wit: Wapping Alice was a woman textual note, not a man. This truth does not relieve or modify by even a shade the splendid ridiculousness of the situation, but the temporary transformation of Alice into a mantextual note does soften the little drama sufficiently to enable me to exploit it in a magazine without risk of overshocking the magazine’s readers.

What actually occurred was,textual note that when Alice stood before me sobbing, and emptied herself of her embarrassing evidence, she told me that by persuasion of the Swede’s damnable fascinations she had “fallen;”textual note that her time was approaching, and that she should presently become a mother. She said she had implored the young Swede to marry her and save her from disgrace, but that he had refused. It never occurred to me to doubt her story; nothing occurred to me but to fire up and boil with indignation, which I did. She played her part well; in fact she played it to perfection. I was not only immeasurably angry, but was saturated with evil joy, for I knew that I held all the cards and could make a most satisfactorily miserable man out of that Swede. So I told Alice to get ready for the wedding. Then I dismissed her and called George, and we laid the plans, detail by detail, as already described. In the evening, when I had the poor Swede in my trap,textual note and he was raging up and down the room and trying to imagine some way to get out of those dreadful toils, I tried to interest him in that impending child. I made a moving appeal to his parental instincts and to his duty toward that blameless little creature, but it only raised his fury a couple of thousand degrees higher than it was before. He said he would allow no man’s bastards to be foisted upon him, and said that if I were in his place I could see how cruel it was to insist upon such an outrage.

The marriage came off, with all its theatrical accompaniments, precisely as already described, and the couple, and the servants, and the policeman, retired to the dining roomtextual note below to feast and rejoice; then the clergyman put his hand on my head and in a [begin page 40] voice quivering with emotion,textual note and with happy tears in his eyes, beatified me with the moving and noble blessing which I have already quoted. But this clergyman was not “Tom.” Tom is a fiction. The real clergyman was Reverendtextual note Joseph H. Twichell, who still lives—and may he long continue with us!textual note I have used the fiction “Tom” for magazine purposes. By and by, when Joe was ready to go home we went down to the dining roomtextual note to say good nighttextual note to the victims of our stern ideas of justice and morality, and I told them they need not indulge in any more clandestine conduct in the house, buttextual note that they could make themselves free, and at home, and temporarily occupy any room ontextual note the premisestextual note except my own.

The family did not return to Hartford that summer, nor the next, nor the next. I suppose we were in Europe, but I do not remember. However, in the third of these summers we were again in Elmira, New Yorktextual note, and I went to Hartford on a flying trip to see how George and the other servants were getting along. I remained several days.textual note On a bright Sunday afternoon I was walking leisurely down the flagged walk toward the upper gate, when I saw a carriage stop in the street; next I noticed that there was a lady and a gentleman in it, and that they were looking intently and apparently expectantly toward me. The carriage was an open one—a fine new Brewster; the horses were coal black and shiny and proud; the occupants of the carriage were finely and fashionably dressedtextual note and gloved, and the gentleman had on his head a silk hat which was as shiny as the coats of the horses. I quickened my pace, and when I got to the carriage the gentleman lifted his hat, the lady bowed and smiled; then, after a moment, recognition burst upon me—these splendidtextual note birds were Alice and the Swede!textual note The Swede’s face broke into smiles of a glad and happy sort, and he said—

“Mr. Clemens, when you made me marry Alice that time three years ago I could have killed you, but I want to thank you now!textual note it was the greatest favor anybody ever did me. I hadn’t a cent; I hadn’t any work; I hadn’t a friend, and I couldn’t see anything in front of me but the poor housetextual note. Well, Alice is the girl that has changed all that; she saved me, and I thank you again. She got work for me, all I could do, from Garvie and Hills, the contractors who built your houseexplanatory note; she started a little restaurant down in Main streettextual note, and got Mr. Bunce and Mr. Robinson and Generaltextual note Hawley and Mr. George Warnerexplanatory note, and all your other influential friends who had known her in your house, to come and try her bill of fare. They liked it, and brought everybody else, and pretty soon she had all the custom she could attend to, and was making money like a mint, and it’s still going on yet. She took me out of wage-worktextual note and made a contractor and builder out of me, and that is what I am now, and prospering. This is our turnout; these are our clothes, and they are paid for. We owe it all to you, Mr. Clemens, and your arbitrary and mistaken notions of justice, for if you hadn’t forced me to marry Alice or pack up andtextual note go to the penitentiary it never would have happened.” He paused; then he added, without any bitterness in his tone, “But as to that child, it hasn’t ever arrived, and there wasn’t the damnedesttextual note least prospect of it the time that she told you that fairy-tale—and never had been!”textual note

Then he laughed, and Alice laughed, and, naturally, I did the same. Then we parted.

[begin page 41] I have now told all the facts and removed all the fictionsexplanatory note, and to my mind the facts make a plenty good enough tale without any help from fiction.


The tremendous Thaw trial is approaching its end. Mr. Delmas delivered a part of his argument for the defencetextual note yesterday. I append an extract from itexplanatory note.

He began with the birth of Evelyn Nesbit, passing over her infant years, strangely enough, with only a word or two. He said:

When she was 10 years of age the family began to feel the pinch of want, the sufferings of poverty and the gnawing of hunger. At 12 she became the family drudge, assisting her mother in such household duties as a brave, courageous child of her age could perform. In this condition the family continued, moving from place to place, with no fixed habitation, wandering like Arabs upon the face of the earth.

But this did not continue forever. Nature had endowed the child with the fatal gift of beauty, in which her mother saw the means of supporting the family. And so at the age of 14 years in Philadelphia she embarked her daughter upon the perilous career of an artist’s model. Soon afterward to New York the family came, and by procurement of her mother the employment which Evelyn had in Philadelphia was resumed here, and the beautiful child wended her way through the city streets from morn till eve, day after day, going from one studio to another and from artist to artist, and at the end of the week turning over to her mother the scanty dollars which she had earned and which went to support the family consisting of herself, her brother and her mother.

Appearance of the Tempter.

Mr. Delmas then traced the young girl’s drifting progress from the studios of artists to the stage, following the lines marked out by her own testimony on the witness stand. About this time, he remarked, the tempter arrived. He went on:

He saw, he desired and with the consummate skill of a man whose hair had grown almost gray, though he had a family in which his excellent wife and his gifted son sat by his side about the hearth, he determined to make her his.

Mr. Delmas went on to tell how, as Evelyn had testified, Stanford White ingratiated himself with her mother and induced her to go to Pittsburg, leaving her daughter in the care of the architect. After expressing a wish that he could pass over the night of Evelyn Nesbit’s ravishment without any reference, he continued:

Into one of those dens fitted with all the taste and splendor and dazzling beauty with which this man of genius could endow his surroundings this child was one night lured, under the pretence that others were to be there. When she arrived she found herself alone with this man, who was old enough to be her father and who had pledged himself to protect her during her mother’s absence.

[begin page 42]

Need I recall to your memories how the child was led from one step to another until overcome, plied with wine and drugs, she became unconscious and the victim of the man who had lured her there to her undoing?

Need I recall to you the terrible scene you heard torn from the lips of the unfortunate victim. O, better for Stanford White if he had never been born, rather than that he should have seen that day! Better that his ears had never opened than that they should have heard the shriek of horror and anguish of the victimexplanatory note that lay mangled and devoured before him! For what had he done? He had perpetrated the foulest, the most cowardly, the most dishonorable of the sins and crimes that can stain or deface the image of God. He, the strong, the powerful, had lured a poor, little child to her undoing and to gratify a moment of passion and lust had crushed the poor little flower that was struggling toward the light and toward Heaven.

He had committed a crime that the law declares a felony and which in the old Anglo-Saxon language is labelled by the ugly name of rape. It is that cowardly crime which the Chief Magistrate of this nation recently said in a message to Congress was a crime which everywhere should be punished by deathexplanatory note. He who had erected churches and sanctuaries crowned by the symbol of redemption had forgotten the word of the Redeemer when he called a little child and sat him in the midst of them and said: “Whoso receiveth such a little child in my name receiveth Me, but whoso shall offend one of these little ones, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were cast into the sea.”

Oh, Stanford White, did you in the impiety of your hard heart imagine that the cry of this fatherless child heard that night in the silence of this great city—the cry of a child deserted by her mother, left alone in this city of millions—did you imagine that God would not hear that cry or believe that retribution would not come? Far better were it for Stanford White had he died before that day. For then he might have died at the meridian of his splendor, then public mourning might have attended his obsequies, then he might have died before his name became a byword and his memory would not have survived only to be execrated.

Debauched Her Mind, Too.

Mr. Delmas made a considerable pause here, as the vigor with which he pronounced this excoriation seemed to take a good deal of his strength. When he had recovered he went on to tell how Stanford White, having outraged Evelyn Nesbit’s body, proceeded to do what he could to debauch her mind. He said:

He went to her and knelt on the floor at her side and kissed the hem of her dress and told her to dry her tears, that what she had done all women did and that the only sin was to get found out. He told her that if she could only keep the thing locked in her breast all would be well—that all women were wicked, only some succeeded in concealing their vices and others were found out. And so he lured her again and again to the same den or to others that he had and thus induced her to continue those unholy relations for a period of a couple of months.

Textual Notes Wednesday, April 10, 1907
  defence ●  defense (TS1) 
  nonessential ●  non- | essential (TS1) 
  wanted ●  wish wanted  (TS1-SLC) 
  woman  ●  woman ‘woman’ underscored  (TS1-SLC) 
  but the temporary transformation of Alice into a man ●  but it but the temporary transformation of Alice into a man  (TS1-SLC) 
  was, ●  was,  (TS1-SLC) 
  “fallen;” ●  fallen;  (TS1-SLC) 
  trap, ●  toils, in my study, trap,  (TS1-SLC) 
  dining room ●  dining-room (TS1) 
  emotion, ●  emotion,  (TS1-SLC) 
  Reverend ●  Rev. (TS1) 
  us! ●  us. ! period mended to an exclamation point  (TS1-SLC) 
  dining room ●  dining-room (TS1) 
  good night ●  good-night (TS1) 
  but ●  and but  (TS1-SLC) 
  on ●  in on  (TS1-SLC) 
  premises ●  house premises  (TS1-SLC) 
  New York ●  N.Y. (TS1) 
  I remained several days. ●  I remained several days.  (TS1-SLC) 
  dressed ●  dressed,  (TS1-SLC) 
  splendid ●  handsome splendid  (TS1-SLC) 
  Swede! ●  Swede. ! period mended to an exclamation point  (TS1-SLC) 
  now! ●  now; !  (TS1-SLC) 
  poor house ●  poorhouse (TS1) 
  street ●  Street (TS1) 
  General ●  Gen. (TS1) 
  wage-work ●  wage-work (TS1-SLC) 
  pack up and ●  pack up and  (TS1-SLC) 
  damnedest ●  damndest (TS1) 
  fairy-tale—and never had been!” ●  fairy-tale.” —and never had been!”  (TS1-SLC) 
  defence ●  defense (TS1) 
Explanatory Notes Wednesday, April 10, 1907
 

I diverged from fact . . . because I wanted to publish the thing in a magazine] Clemens evidently considered writing up the story of Lizzie Wills as early as May 1891, when he wrote in his notebook, “How we made an honest woman of the English servant girl” (Notebook 30, TS p. 43, CU-MARK). When he finally drafted his account in 1897–98, he used the participants’ real names, including his own and Patrick McAleer’s. In the fall of 1898, however, when he decided to offer the story to James J. Tuohy of the New York World, he prepared the manuscript for publication by substituting (albeit inconsistently) the fictional names of “Jackson” and “Dennis” for the original “Clemens” and “Patrick,” and disguising the city names of Rochester, Northampton, and Springfield. He had the manuscript typed with the fictional names, explaining to Tuohy that he had made “fiction of this tale,” because

the public won’t give shucks for fact when it can get fiction—& besides I’ve always been a little sore over this cussed adventure, & I couldn’t bring myself to substitute my own name for “Jackson’s” if I should try. However, some day in my Autobiography I intend to get over that delicacy. The thing happened in my house fifteen years ago—I have changed one large but not essential detail—& the participants are mainly dead by this time, perhaps. But my pastor the Rev. Joe Twichell isn’t, & he took out the licence, sweated 3 hours in the bathroom, married the couple, & gave me his tearful blessing for my good deed. (10 Nov 1898 to Tuohy, photocopy in CU-MARK)

Tuohy rejected the story, despite the “detail” that had been changed for the sake of propriety—the gender of the protagonist. In April 1899 Clemens offered the typed version to John B. Walker of Cosmopolitan, who also declined to print it. By August of that year he had decided that the tale was not “publishable” as drafted and, as he told Rogers, he had no interest in rewriting it (5 Apr 1899 to Walker, photocopy in CU-MARK; 22 Aug 1899 to Rogers, Salm, in HHR , 407). In January 1906, when Clemens told the story in an after-dinner speech at The Players club, he called Lizzie “English Mary” and altered several other details, but he did acknowledge his own role in the forced marriage (for a text of the speech see AutoMT1 , 662–63). By April 1907, when he decided to insert the manuscript into his autobiography (setting aside the typed version), he was ready to make the same admission in writing: he added a note to his typist, “Wherever ‘Jackson’ appears, change it to Clemens, & ‘Dennis’ to Patrick. SLC” (see the Textual Commentary at MTPO ). Clemens made one more attempt to publish the story, in August 1907, when he sent it to Frederick Duneka for the Christmas issue of Harper’s Monthly (the version has not been identified). Duneka rejected it in favor of extracts from “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.” “Wapping Alice” remained unpublished until 1981 (Duneka to SLC, 2 Aug 1907, CU-MARK; SLC 1907–8, 1981).

 

Garvie and Hills, the contractors who built your house] The Clemenses’ house at 351 Farmington Avenue in Hartford, designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, was built in 1873–74 by John B. Garvie, a general contractor, and John R. Hills, a stonemason.

 

Mr. George Warner] George H. and Lillie Warner were the Clemenses’ neighbors ( AutoMT1 , 580 n. 327.14; for Bunce, Robinson, and Hawley see AD, 9 Apr 1907, note at 31.41–42).

 

I have now told all the facts and removed all the fictions] Clemens wrote a factual account of the events in three letters to Olivia in July 1877, when it took place. On 17 July he told her that “there has been no burglar in the house, but only one or both of Lizzie’s two loafers.” His main concern at that point was to confirm that neither she nor her “loafers” had stolen anything. When confronted with the fact that Taylor had left the house early one morning, Lizzie claimed that she “was sent for to the nursery one evening (it was later than he ought to have remained) & while she was gone the alarm was put on. She knew no other way to do than to leave him in her room all night & go herself and sleep with Mary.” When Mary denied that Lizzie had slept with her, Clemens told Lizzie, “ ‘Your friend slept with you the night he left this house so early in the morning.’ She confessed.” He thereupon “laid a plan” to force Taylor to marry her. He went himself to the courthouse to get the marriage license, then called on the chief of police. Upon his return home he discovered that Lizzie was not in the house, so he sent a note to summon her. She was present when Taylor arrived, and remained, “crying straight along,” while Clemens questioned him. Twichell officiated at the wedding ceremony, and “Lizzie cried through the service & the prayer, & then her husband put his arm about her neck & kissed her & shed a tear & said ‘Don’t cry’ ” (17 July 1877 to OLC [1st and 2nd], and 17 and 18 July to OLC, CU-MARK).

 

The tremendous Thaw trial . . . an extract from it] Clemens returns to a subject he discussed in the Autobiographical Dictation of 28 February 1907: the trial of wealthy playboy Harry K. Thaw for the June 1906 murder of architect Stanford White. Thaw sought revenge for White’s seduction of his wife, Evelyn Nesbit—an artist’s model and chorus girl—when she was a sixteen-year-old virgin (see AutoMT2 , 647 n. 454.3–7). Delphin M. Delmas (1844–1928) studied law at Yale University and was admitted to the bar in California in 1866. He practiced law in San Jose, and then in San Francisco, serving also as district attorney of Santa Clara County and as a regent of the University of California. Considered a great courtroom orator, he was said to resemble Napoleon because of his short stature and the “little brow wisp of hair” that he used to disguise his baldness. Thaw’s other two attorneys summoned Delmas from California to deliver the closing argument and “win the fight for Thaw’s life” (“Delmas Opens Plea for Thaw,” New York Times, 9 Apr 1907, 1).

 

Stanford White . . . heard the shriek of horror and anguish of the victim] Delmas thought that Thaw’s only hope of acquittal lay in pleading insanity, and he tried to withdraw from the case when Thaw insisted that his defense be based on the “unwritten law” that justified his act of revenge. Delmas used his closing argument to excoriate White and paint a lurid picture of the seduction scene to persuade the jury that “Providence had sent Thaw to avenge the wrong” (“Thaw His Own Lawyer,” Washington Post, 16 Apr 1907, 15; “Delmas to Jury,” Los Angeles Times, 9 Apr 1907, I1). He was partially successful: a mistrial was declared on 12 April after the jury failed to agree on a verdict. When Thaw was retried in 1908 he was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to an insane asylum.

 

Chief Magistrate of this nation recently said . . . punished by death] In his address to Congress on 4 December 1906, President Roosevelt condemned the lynch law and recommended the death penalty for crimes against women:

Every colored man should realize that the worst enemy of his race is the negro criminal, and above all the negro criminal who commits the dreadful crime of rape; and it should be felt as in the highest degree an offense against the whole country, and against the colored race in particular, for a colored man to fail to help the officers of the law in hunting down with all possible earnestness and zeal every such infamous offender.

In addition, he said the “members of the white race” should realize that “no man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered” (“Summary of the Features of Message,” Chicago Tribune, 5 Dec 1906, 13).