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“Which Was the Dream?” was planned at the beginning of 1895 but was not written until 1897. The first twelve manuscript pages of the husband's narrative were written on 23 May, five days after Mark Twain had finished his composition of Following the Equator. For this initial chapter he drew upon his early memories of Hannibal in sketching the Tom-Sawyer-and-Becky-Thatcher-like courtship of Major General “X” and Alison Sedgewick. The rest of the incomplete draft was written during August 1897, the month in which there came the first anniversary of the death of Susy Clemens. It is hardly surprising to find many recollections of Susy—or to find some lack of coherence in what he then wrote. After the month had passed, he wrote, “There will never be an August day, perhaps, in which I shall be sane. It is our terrible month.”1

In representing the honor and greatness of “X” before his fall, he probably had in mind the military career of General Ulysses S. Grant, even though another character is more explicitly identified with him—the “young man named Grant” whose actions at the time of the fire save the assembly from panic and further tragedies. Mark Twain's own reverses, as well as those attributed to Major General “X” in the story, closely resemble those which he said in his Autobiography that Grant had suffered. The great general and President had after his retirement been forced into bankruptcy; had been unable to keep his houses or live in them; had been swindled by business associates; had in good faith written checks that “came back upon his hands dishonored.”2 A similar program of indignities, culminating in a charge of forgery,

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causes “X” to lose consciousness. In a discarded passage that originally followed at this point, his wife overhears the charge and then makes an impassioned defense of her husband. “Which Was the Dream?” is in part a fictional account of what Mark Twain had endured at the time of his business failure in 1894.

In this piece and in subsequent selections throughout this volume, occasional words have been supplied in square brackets to clarify Mark Twain's meaning. Unconscious abbreviations have been expanded (“straightford” to “straightforward”). Misspellings for which there is no contemporary or standard authority have been corrected but Mark Twain's consistently idiosyncratic spelling has been preserved. Inserted material has been moved into the text according to the author's instructions or evident intention, with punctuation corrected to integrate the insertions.

Like other texts here printed, this working manuscript presents a remarkably clear text in which cancellations average no more than one or two to a typical page and generally represent only an effort to achieve precision or conciseness and were chiefly made at the time of initial writing. Thus Mark Twain altered “happiness which had gone before” to “previous happiness,” “full of admiration” to “bursting with admiration,” and “a million and more” to “a million or two.” He deleted an entire sentence when he discovered he could improve its phrasing later in the same paragraph. For example, on page 34 Clemens cancelled “Presidents do not break down the barriers of etiquette for persons of his sex.” Occasional changes of intention are represented by the alteration of the General's name from “George” to “Tom” and his native state from “Ohio” to “Kentucky.” Most other cancellations represent such routine changes as the substitution of “courageous” for “honest,” “he” for “Sedgewick,” and “a good many” for “a number of.”

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This story fragment is a discarded part of Following the Equator, Mark Twain's account of his round-the-world tour of 1895–1896. His travels took him through the “stupendous island wilderness of the Pacific”1 and across the Indian Ocean. While in the South Pacific Ocean bound for Australia, he had noted, on 6 September 1895, “There are spots at sea where the compass loses its head and whirls this way and that; then you give it up and steer by the sun, wind, stars, moon or guess, and trust to luck to save you till you get by that insane region.”2 After he had written the first 156 pages of Following the Equator, he introduced a description of such a place, paraphrasing the notebook entry, and then began the tale of “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness.” Probably he reached this point in his composition of the book some time in November or December of 1896, after beginning work upon it on 24 October of that year.3 In writing this tale of trapped derelicts, he partly followed an earlier draft, a fragment of a few hundred words which he had called “The Passenger's Story.” This draft may be seen in the Appendix. The “second cabin passenger” who narrates it and the “bronzed and gray sailor” who narrates “The Enchanted Sea-Wilder-

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ness” are quite evidently invented characters, whose only function is to convey a story within a story.

The idea of a trap for becalmed vessels had long been in Mark Twain's thoughts. As early as 1866, when he had voyaged to the Sandwich Islands, he had recorded impressions, gained from the talk of sailors, of “baffling winds and dreadful calms” and of “month-long drifting between . . . islands.”4 In 1882 he made some notes for an intended balloon voyage story: “The frightfullest time I ever saw? It was the time I was up in my balloon and seemed to have got into that (fabled) stratum where, once in, you remain—going neither up nor down for years—forever—and I came across first one balloon and afterwards another and we three lay (apparently) motionless beside each other, the green, mummified (frozen) corpses . . . gloating mournfully from the tattered baskets.”5 Although the region of entrapment is in the upper atmosphere rather than on the seas, the situation resembles that in “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness.”

Except for “The Passenger's Story,” which it substantially includes in a revised form, “The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness” is Mark Twain's earliest actual version of the voyage-of-disaster story.

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In april 1896, Mark Twain wrote in his notebook, “All world-distances have shrunk to nothing. . . . The mysterious and the fabulous can get no fine effects without the help of remoteness; and there are no remotenesses any more.”1 There was, nevertheless, the little explored Antarctic region. And in writing “An Adventure in Remote Seas,” he evidently sought to exploit the romantic possibilities of that yet remaining faraway and fabulous sector of the globe. The working notes for the story are on the back sides of some discarded pages from the middle part of the manuscript of Following the Equator; probably they were made in the early part of 1897, when he was at work upon the travel book. However, the available evidence indicates that he probably did not write this fragmentary sea romance until late in the spring of 1898.

Fifteen years earlier, he had recorded an idea for a story situation similar to that of the marooned crew in “An Adventure in Remote Seas.” In the 1883 notebook there is this entry: “Life in the interior of an iceberg. . . . All found dead and frozen after 130 years. Iceberg drifts around in a vast circle, year after year, and every two or three years they come in distant sight of the remains of the ship.”2 He might very well have attempted to write stories of a voyage of disaster, one may suppose, even if he had not met with the personal disasters of the nineties.

This fragment contains a good deal of material about the free silver question, and the working notes contain much more. Mark Twain's tale

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was in danger of turning into a tract, and he must soon have found that he had not made the right beginning.

No record has been discovered of a George Parker who might have told the story to Mark Twain in New Zealand in 1895, and the narrator mentioned in the introductory note is in all probability a fictitious character.

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Mark Twain did not give this story a title, and A. B. Paine, his literary executor, designated the manuscript simply as “Statement of the Edwardses.” In his dictation of 30 August 1906, the author said that he would probably have called one of his unfinished stories “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” He added that his manuscript had no title, but that it began with a “pretty brusque remark by an ancient admiral, who is Captain Ned Wakefield sic under a borrowed name.”1 No draft with such an opening has been discovered; however, a notebook entry of 1897 presents what may be the remembered brusque speech: “Wakeman, Sailor-boy, ‘Get to the masthead you son of a gun.’ ”2 Mark Twain had planned to bring a Wakeman-like character into the voyage-of-disaster story; he mentioned Wakeman in his notes of 23 May 1897 for “Which Was the Dream?” and again in his further notes of 22 August for that work. And in the last episode of “The Great Dark” the ship captain has and exhibits the strength, the courage, and the colorful and effective language of the actual Captain Edgar “Ned” Wakeman with whom he had sailed in 1866. But the title “The Refuge of the Derelicts” can hardly have been intended for the existing draft of “The Great Dark,” and the latter title, aptly supplied by Bernard DeVoto, is here retained.

Mark Twain's intention of making the first half or three-fourths of the story comic has been discussed in the General Introduction. Although in his extensive use of comic sea language he was burlesquing the writings of W. Clark Russell, he was also working in a literary

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mode that he had used much earlier. In 1868 he had written of a young lady who had read in a Sunday school library a tract about “a wicked sailor who was ordered to ascend to the main hatch and reef a gasket in the sheet anchor; from his dizzy height he saw the main-tops'l jib-boom fetch away from the clew-garnets of the booby hatch. . . .”3 For some other comic effects, he drew upon the experiences of his global tour of 1895–1896. For example, the incident in which the Superintendent of Dreams keeps making the mate Turner's coffee disappear probably owes something to a disconcerting practice encountered in South African hotels: “And here they . . . knock on the open door, wake you up, tramp across the floor with a cup of coffee, find that you are apparently asleep, and then clear out. You find you can't get to sleep anymore, so you reach for the coffee, and discover that the idiot has carried it away.”4 The actions of the Superintendent of Dreams also have effects much like those achieved by an invisible young man in “Shackleford's Ghost,” a story fragment that was probably written about the same time: “Now and then somebody sits down in his lap, or runs against him and is frightened.”5 His trip also furnished some of the more tragic incidents; a notebook entry of 28 August 1895 tells of two girls who were attacked by “an octopus with tentacles 12 feet long.”6 In the story, Edwards recalls that a boy has been badly hurt by an octopus. The description in Book II of the giant squid may owe something to Frank Bullen's representation in The Cruise of the Cachalot, which Clemens had read, of a huge cuttlefish, “as awful an object as one could well imagine even in a fevered dream. . . . The eyes . . . were at least a foot in diameter, and, seen under such conditions, looked decidedly eerie and hobgoblin-like.”7

The intended conclusion for “The Great Dark” is found in two sets of notes: some working notes, probably made in August 1898 (these have been summarized by DeVoto in Letters from the Earth), and a notebook passage of 21–22 September 1898. The notebook entry, which appears to be the latest plan for ending the story, extends the action to a time fifteen years after the beginning of the voyage, whereas the working notes have the tragic finale occurring after the tenth year at

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sea. However, much the same sequence of incidents is presented in both groups of notes. When in Edwards's dream of a voyage in a drop of water under the lens of a microscope the ship comes directly into the reflected light of the instrument, the sea dries up. Both Edwards and the captain take provisions and make a desperate trek overland to another ship on which children of theirs have been held as prisoners; they arrive too late and find only mummified bodies. At the last, Edwards was to awaken, finding himself still comfortably at home. His wife Alice would just then be coming in with the children to say goodnight. But these planned events were never written as a part of the story. The manuscript breaks off after a courageous declamation by the captain. The mood at the last is one not of despair but of exuberance. And it should be noted that in the fall of 1898 Mark Twain's wife Olivia observed, “I have not known Mr. Clemens for years to write with so much pleasure and energy as he has done during this last summer.”8 Perhaps it was his strength that betrayed his intention of writing a tragic and despairing conclusion.

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“Indiantown” presents a gallery of characters for “Which Was It?” and was probably written in 1899 at about the time Mark Twain began work upon the latter story. George Harrison is identified in the working notes as a character drawn from the author's brother Orion Clemens. His friend the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell is mentioned as the original of the Rev. Mr. Bailey. David and Susan Gridley are quite evidently drawn from Samuel and Olivia Langdon Clemens (Mark Twain first used “Sam” as Gridley's first name). Squire Fairfax resembles the Lord Fairfax who was a friend of the Virginian branch of the Clemens family (see the General Introduction). Even the spectral Orrin Lloyd Godkin may have had a real-life counterpart in a patient with a case of “galloping consumption” who was taking the Kellgren cure at Sanna, Sweden, where the Clemenses were staying in the summer of 1899 (for treatment of Jean Clemens); he had, it seems, the appearance of a walking corpse and was called by others “The Shadow.”1 Another fragment, “A Human Bloodhound,” the materials of which closely match those of “Indiantown,” presents a character called Godkin whose acute sense of smell affords him an uncanny knowledge of the doings of his fellow villagers. In this sketch Godkin has a friend, called “The Corpse,” who relishes philosophical discussion and has written an “Account of the Creation.”2

Mark Twain's notes reveal that he was at this time planning to use

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again the device of an apparent time lapse in the action of the story, as in “Which Was the Dream?” The squire was to be “35 before crash, 45 after.” George Harrison was to be 36 and then 46; his father Andrew, 65 and then 75. And the intended biographical parallel is shown by a listing of the children of Gridley—parenthetically identified as Susy, Clara, and Jean. When Mark Twain began to write of the Gridleys in the latter part of this fragment, he let the focus of his interest stray away from his planned story. But in doing so, he provided an interesting account, partly in the fictional and partly in the autobiographical mode, of his relationship with Olivia.

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Mark Twain at first called this novel “Which Was Which?” but by 1902, when he wrote much of it, he was referring to it as “Which Was It?” And he used the latter name again when he spoke of it as one of his unfinished books in his autobiographical dictation of 30 August 1906. During the summer and fall of 1899 he wrote approximately the first one-third of the manuscript, working sometimes in London and more often in Sanna, Sweden, where Jean was receiving osteopathic treatment. (Some of his preoccupation with diseases and cures found its way into the story.) The greater part of “Which Was It?” was written between 1900 and 1902. By the end of May 1903 two typescripts were in existence—one of the first 215 pages of manuscript and a later one of the entire manuscript. The first typescript bears Mark Twain's carefully made inkscript corrections and revisions, which have largely been followed as his latest intention. The first nine chapters of the other typescript contain a few corrections and revisions, but many irregularities in the same chapters were left uncorrected; he may have merely glanced through this copy, or a part of it. Accordingly, the holograph has been ordinarily credited with primary authority after the first 215 pages. Revisions in the later typescript have been used when evidence substantiates their authority.

The basic plot of “Which Was It?” resembles that of “Which Was the Dream?” George Harrison, like General “X,” is at first seen living in a beautiful mansion, much respected, favored of fortune, blessed with a wife and children who share his happiness. Like “X,” he has a momentary dream of disaster which seems to him to last for many years. In attempting to save the family from debt and disgrace, he commits murder. This action produces a sequence of further disasters, which he numbers as the bitter fruits of his crime. As the story was planned, he was to suffer every possible degradation and then at last awaken to find his wife Alice coming in with the children to say goodnight. Although

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Mark Twain did not carry “Which Was It?” quite far enough to reach that ending, this story is by far the longest of those in which he used the dream framework and the nightmare of disaster. The book is a compendium of his later thoughts and moods and literary enthusiasms, and the reader will find sections which parallel passages in some of his other works of the same period, including “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “The Lowest Animal,” and What Is Man?

Although the story is loosely structured, the unusually extensive working notes show that Mark Twain did much planning for it and introduced changes as he proceeded with the writing. He used several names for the squire of the village—Baldwin, Brewster, and Fairfax; the latter name became the final choice. The daughter of the squire is first called Sadie and later Helen. The wronged Negro, who has been both sired and swindled by George Harrison's uncle and who contrives to revenge himself upon George, is called Pomp at first and later Jasper. In all such cases, the names that appear to represent Mark Twain's latest intention have been used.

A dominant theme of “Which Was It?” is that of human selfishness, with its corollary that any man will act meanly or even criminally when sufficiently tempted. This same theme, treated perhaps in a lighter way, had been a favorite one that Mark Twain used as a platform topic in lecturing his way around the world. As one newspaper reported, “To every story he applied a moral, always pert and often humorous. ‘Always be brave to the limit of your personal courage, but when you reach the limit, stop, don't strain.’ That was the opening sentiment of the lecture.”1 Repeatedly, in giving what he represented as his “lecture on morals,” he made his anecdotes illustrate the point that every young man should learn “how far he can rely on his courage before he is compelled to begin to use his discretion.”2 As it was reported when he was nearing the end of his tour, “In a drawling tone, its very lowness adding piquancy, the lecturer was soon giving the house those quaintly characteristic touches seen in his writings. There was no particular form in the ‘moral sermon,’ which might have run on for weeks and been complete in its incompleteness.”3 In the same sense, “Which Was It?” has also a kind of completeness.

Two related fragments, “Trial of the Squire” and the “Dying Deposition” of Andrew Harrison, will be found in the Appendix.

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“Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” was written at Dublin, New Hampshire, between 20 May and 23 June 1905. During that time Mark Twain worked rapidly and exuberantly. On 11 June he wrote to his daughter Clara that he had reached page 240 of the manuscript and exulted, “It beats the record (—oh, all to smash!).”1 Five days later he reported to F. A. Duneka of Harper & Brothers, “I am deep in a new book which I enjoy more than I have enjoyed any other for twenty years and I hope it will take me the entire summer to write it.”2 But by 24 June he had apparently emptied the tank of his inspiration. He informed his friend Joseph H. Twichell, “I began a new book here in this enchanting solitude 35 days ago. I have done 33 full days' work on it. To-day I have not worked. There was another day in this present month wherein I did no work—you will know that date without my telling you.”3 The date was that of his wife's death, which had come on 5 June of the preceding year. This story, like other selections in this volume, was written with pleasure but written nevertheless under the shadow of disaster.

There is no evidence that Mark Twain took up work upon the manuscript again after the 24th; probably he had already written all of it that now exists. According to A. B. Paine, “He tired of it before it reached completion. . . . Its chief mission was to divert him mentally

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that summer during those days and nights when he would otherwise have been alone and brooding upon his loneliness.”4 Paine called the work “a fantastic tale” and “a sort of scientific revel”; he also commented, “It was a satire, of course—Gulliver's Lilliput outdone—a sort of scientific, socialistic, mathematical jamboree.”5 The narrator, a cholera germ who in a previous existence has been a human being, comes to the world of the microbes to escape the tainted atmosphere of his former country, a land of get-rich-quick opportunism. But with irony Mark Twain then shows “Huck,” as the narrator comes to be called, elaborating a foolish dream of an imaginary fortune in gold and persuading even himself that it is a reality. “Huck” illustrates the author's gospel of selfishness as he schemes to keep all of the dream gold for himself rather than share it with his partners. Like other one-horse individuals, he is ready to lie and cheat and steal when tempted beyond his limit. The story breaks off after he has revealed his own corruption. Were it not for Mark Twain's statement in 1906 that he had left the manuscript half-finished, one might even say that at this point the narrative ends, for there is a sense of finality in “Huck's” moral disintegration. Although Mark Twain made many notes for the story, on sheets of small note-pad paper, they do not reveal any further intention for the plot; rather, they suggest that in any continuation he would have used this book as a vehicle for further satire on a variety of topics, including stock market manipulations, Tammany Hall, the Russo-Japanese War, and imperialism. Two brief fragments satirize, respectively, pension frauds and “Kitchen Science.” The latter fragment, which shows “Huck” cynically adopting a religion that will not, he believes, require of him any charities or sacrifices, logically follows the “ending” mentioned above. However, it was not included in a typescript that was prepared under Mark Twain's direction, and he probably did not intend to use it. The typescript was made by Jean Clemens, who followed the holograph but occasionally changed or omitted words or phrases. Since there is no evidence that these alterations were intended by Mark Twain, the holograph has in such cases been credited with primary authority. The typescript has, however, been considered reliable for its indication of the sections of the manuscript that Mark Twain meant to include and of his intended ordering of them, for in these

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matters his daughter followed his directions, which appear as marginalia in the holograph.

The chapters have been numbered as he designated them; there are two runs of XI–XIV. However, the narration is continuous throughout the manuscript, and there seems to be no warrant for omitting or changing the order of either of the two sequences. His two prefaces have also been presented as he wrote them.