STEVENSON AND TWAIN, TWO NOVELISTS WHO KNEW EACH OTHER

Over his life Mark Twain appreciated Robert Louis Stevenson work
In 1888 Twain wrote him to express the desire “to see you & thank you for writing Kidnapped & Treasure Island…Those two great books! How we bathed in them, last summer & refreshed our spirits” .
Stevenson’s “The strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” naturally interested Mark Twain, a writer fascinated by doubleness and twin identity. Angelo and Luigi of his “Those extraordinary Twins” (1894) were two of his best-known creations in this vein. Twain went on to object to Jekyll’s and Hyde’s knowing each other: “Stevenson was wrong, for the two persons in a man are wholly unknown to each other & can never in this world communicate with each other in any way”. Following Olivia Clemens’s death, his wife, in 1904, Twain reflected in Notebook 47: “God, so atrocious in the Old Testament, so attractive in the New-the Jekyll & Hyde of sacred fiction romance. Stevenson plagiarized it? “
In “Following the equator” Mark Twain quoted Stevenson’s directions to Arthur Conan Doyle and J.M. Barrie for finding Samoa: “You go to America, cross the continent to San Francisco, and then it’s the second turning to the left”. Carlyle Smythe remarked in 1898 that Clemens “is a thorough admirer of Stevenson” “Louis Stevenson Submerged Fame” Twain wrote in Notebook 48. “Prince Otto, by author of Kidnapped” Twain wrote as entry in his notebook, on September 88. “Stephenson (sic) (Kidnapped)” he noted in March 1888, listing authors and his opinions of them; the reference seems favourable. In a letter of 15-17 April 1888 inviting Stevenson to visit Hartford, Twain expressed his willingness to travel to St. Stephens Hotel “to see you & thank you for writing Kidnapped & Treasure Island…Those two great books! How we bathed in them, last summer & refreshed our spirits”. In the notebook 26 he wrote “Prince Otto by the author of Kidnapped”. In the Indian Ocean on 8 January 1896, Twain recorded “On this voyage I have read a number of novels. Prince Otto-full of brilliances, of course-plenty of exquisite phrasing-an easy-flowing tale, but-well my sympathies were not with any of the people in it. I did not care whether any of them prospered or not. There was a fault somewhere;it could have been in me”. Mark Twain visited a Trappist monastery in Natal in April 1896; subsequently he noted: “For the Trappists draw on Louis Stephenson’s (sic) Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes”. Another reference is mentioned in “Mark Twain: a Talk about His Books”.

(…) Then, as regards Robert Louis Stevenson’s books, Mr Clemens says that is a very great favorite in America. He had read The Wrecker- which depicts the commercial and social life of San Francisco in such daring colors-but so long ago that he had almost forgotten it, but he remembered that part especially. Did he not think the picture overdrawn in some respects, especially in the portion about the boys’ stock-brokering gambling academy? “Well, Stevenson was a great, great writer. But”, said Mr Clemens in effect, “a man often oversteps the limits of probability in describing national characteristics, and yet somehow his exaggerated pictures are accepted by sensible people of other countries, who don’t know that too often these pictures have no more solid basis than that the man who draws them knows a little about the characteristics of the people he had described.”

(23)(Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction. by Alan Gribben, 2 vols, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980.
(24) Louis Becke “Mark Twain: a Talk about His Books” Evening News (Sidney), supplement, 21 september 1895

TWAIN'S NOTEBOOK

Twain's notebook as a cub pilot

Twain’s first pocket notebooks were purchased in 1857 at the age of 21 during his training to become the “cub” pilot of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. He felt confident that the job would be fairly easy to learn but found he could not remember the instructions his teacher, Horace Bixby, imparted to him. Bixby advised Clemens, “My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.” Clemens accepted Bixby’s advice and thus began a lifelong relationship with the pocket notebook.

Twain kept 40-50 pocket notebooks over four decades of his life. He often began one before embarking on a trip. He filled the notebooks with observations of people he met, thoughts on religion and politics, drawings and sketches of what he saw on his travels, potential plots for books, and even ideas for inventions (he filed 3 patents during his lifetime). Many of his entries consist of the short, witty, pithy sentences he is famous for. He felt that if he did not write such things down as they came to his mind he would quickly forget them. He would also record little snippets in his notebooks of what had happened that day, such as what he had eaten and who he had seen. And finally, he wrote dirty jokes in the back of them.

He had his leather bound notebooks custom made according to his own design idea. Each page had a tab; once a page had been used, he would tear off its tab, allowing him to easily find the next blank page for his jottings:

Read more: http://artofmanliness.com/2010/09/13/the-pocket-notebooks-of-20-famous-men/#ixzz155Hydp5E

THE MYSTERIOUS ENTRY

The entry concerning the meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson is written in the first pages of the notebook 27, august 1887-July 1888. The notebook is of the type designed by Clemens and custom-made for him with a small tab projecting from the upper outside corner of each leaf. The tabs were meant to be torn off one at a time as each pair of facing pages was filled, so that by grasping the remaining tabs when opening the notebook the user could turn automatically to the next fresh page.

The entry says:

Robert Louis Stevenson
St. Stephens Hotel East 11 th

There is also a date, above to the right.
Apl 19th to 26th

According to the critical edition of the University of California Press this is a notebook which doesn’t have the ordered structure of an agenda but only the function. Mark Twain separates each entry with a simple and irregular line. The date is undefined, between April 19th to 26th. No year is specified but the entry is written at the beginning of the notebook which starts in August 1887.
The Stevenson’s lines are put between 2 different entries that give the names and the addresses respectively of Stilson Hutchins and Rev. Henry Hopkins with no date. Stilson Hutchins, the editor of Washington Post, was one of the founders of the Mergenthaler Linotype Company. In early 1886 Clemens had indicated a desire to confer with him about their potentially competitive composing machines. The Reverend Henry Hopkins, pastor of the First Congregational Church at Kansas City was a trustee of Drury College, a coeducational Institution in Springfield, Missouri. It is hard to date these 2 pages of the notebook mostly because another entry concerning the dinner at Delmonico in honor of Irving, chronologically confirmed by other sources, on March 26 1888, appears only 77 pages further.

Monday midnight March 26, (88) Delmonico’s supper to Irving & Miss Terry-by Daly. (#)

But what is stranger is that according to the notes of the edition of California Press 88 in brackets has been added “possibly not in Clemens’ hand”. Someone, not Twain, had reviewed the notebook. But why it was so important to add 88? Probably for avoid any doubt: 1888, not 1887. The mystery remains because March 26 (88) appears only 77 pages after the entry concerning Robert Louis Stevenson, dated April. The biographers say that the only meeting between the 2 novelists took place in April 1888 but why to write an entry dated April presumably 1888, 77 pages before an entry dated 26 March 1888? It is not logical. It is logical only if the Stevenson entry dates back, months before, like for example September, October 1887. It could also explain why the date

“Apl 19th to 26th” has been clearly added.

The hypothesis is that Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain met not only in April 1888, as the biographies remind but before, in 1887. Let us go back to September 1887. Stevenson is just arrived in New York City (September 7th), he spent one night at the luxury Victoria Hotel (Fifth Avenue, 27th street) with his wife Fanny, his mother Maggie, his stepson Lloyd, his maid Valentine Roch. Only one night. Then he mysteriously escaped to Rodhe Island, Newport, as guest of the millionaire Charles Fairchild, who commissioned John Singer Sargent a painting of the Scottish novelist. But he is alone. Why? What happened at Victoria Hotel? Probably a furious quarrel with his wife Fanny accentuated by his health getting worse. Two weeks later he is recovered, back to Manhattan without Fanny and Lloyd. Only his mother and his maid are with him. He also changes the hotel. He moves from a luxury place, the Victoria Hotel, to a pitiful hotel, the Stephens Hotel as Twain calls it (but the right name is St Stephen Hotel, 46-52 East 11th Street), in the Greenwich Village, called at the time the Sodome and Gomorre of New York City because of the hetero and gay prostitution. The St Stephen Hotel was later, after Stevenson’s time, incorporated with the Hotel Albert, a handsome red-brick and limestone edifice which still stands at the S.E. corner of University Place and E. 11th Street (not to be confused with the Albert apartment building on the corner of 10th and University). Mrs. G. Van Rensselaer, who interviewed Stevenson in the Hotel St Stephen in the spring of 1888, found him “in a dismal hotel, in the most dismal possible chamber. Even a very buoyant soul might have been pardoned if… it had declined upon inactivity and gloom. But these were not the constituents of the atmosphere I found.”
But why Robert Louis Stevenson, one of the most important and famous novelists at that time moved, and twice, to a cheap hotel? He stayed there in October 1887 and during his second stay, in April 1888 coming from the Saranac retire, always alone, only with his mother and their maid Valentine. In both cases, October 1887 and April 1888, the Mark Twain’s entry in the notebook could be right, apart the date which might be added for not generating any doubts or suspicious. In October 1887 Twain stayed some days in New York city but there is no evidence of what he really did. The 2 novelists could meet in the autumn 1887 and they could see each other again in April 1888.
Other two oddities:
-Robert Louis Stevenson on April 9th 1888 is still in Saranac Lake from where he sends a letter to Sidney Colvin telling him “Fanny is off to San Francisco, and next week I myself flit to New York: address Scribner's.” He doesn’t leave his true address, the St. Stephen Hotel. Mark Twain between March and April 1888 comes more times to Manhattan and always stays at the Murray Hill Hotel 42nd street and Park Avenue, far from the Greenwich Village.
-In April 13dt Stevenson writes a letter showing some familiarity to Mark Twain which replies on April 15th .

In lack of evidences let us accept the official version of the April 1888 as first meeting. Where exactly the two novelists did meet? In Washington Square as the tradition suggests?
Thanks to Melissa Baldock, Director of Preservation and Research at the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation for the first time another version of the meeting appears as it mentioned in the Greenwich Village Guide , Edited by William H. Honan, 1959. The name of another hotel is given:

“Turn right on University and left on 9th Street. Another colourful hotel, the famous old Lafayette once stood at 30 East 9th Street…Mark Twain is said to have entertained Robert Louis Stevenson here…”. (Greenwich Village Guide, Edited by William H. Honan, 1959).

For the first time there is another version of the meeting between Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain but with no date. Not on a bench of Washington Square but in an hotel, The Lafayette Hotel. Called at that time “Martin Hotel” the hotel was bought in 1902 by a French-born maitre Raymond Orteig and rebaptised “ “The Lafayette Hotel” . In 1953 it was demolished for a modern apartment building. Nobody could say where William H. Honan, a well reputed journalist from New York Times got the information. It seems that he just gave voice to some rumours “is said to have entertained”.
Let us go back to the Mark Twain notebook, to the section dated April 1888 (77 pages after the Robert Louis Stevenson’s entry). At page 378 of the edition of California Press there is a very cryptic entry:

Chianti- Maspero
University Place below W 9th

According to the editors “W” has been added later. Let us point out the second line first:

University Place below W9th

Which address is it? This is the address of the Martin Hotel, the hotel mentioned by William H. Honan. Mark Twain didn’t write the name of the hotel, only the address. An information useful just to him, not to others and more indiscrete readers. But before the address he noted

Chianti-Maspero

No doubt that Chianti is referring to the Italian wine. But what about Maspero and, why is underlined? There are two different explanations and the line can make the difference.
Maspero could be a label’s cigars. Twain was very fond of smoking. He couldn’t do without. Maspero was the label of Egytyan cigars. In this sense Chianti and Maspero match very well. But why to underline Maspero?
The line can introduce another meaning, another explanation. Maspero wasn’t only a label of very luxury Egyptian cigars but also the name of a very famous coffee house in Louisiana, dating back to 1788. It was here that the Lafitte brothers, Jean and Pierre, conducted some of their operations, soliciting orders of smuggled and pirates goods among the city's elite. It was here that Andrew Jackson plotted the battle of New Orleans and later on conspirators met to foment revolutions in neighbouring countries. It was also here that thousands of human beings, fresh off the slave ships, found themselves in the entresol awaiting their fates in the slave exchange below, where they would be sold to the highest bidder. Although the building belonged to the Paillet family it was named for Pierre Maspero, who operated the exchange. It was “Maspero's Exchange” to the English-speaking and “La Bourse de Maspero” to the French. In the 1930's a writer for the W.P.A. had this to say about Maspero's old “Exchange Coffee House”: “Judges, generals, soldiers, merchants, and planters met to carry on commercial transactions, and the gay buccaneers of the Baratara gathered in secret meetings”. Could Maspero be a secret word, a joke that Mark Twain invented only and exclusively for his own pleasure just to remind what really happened at the Martin Hotel?
Further in the notebook two entries add mystery to the mystery. It is a French nonsense phrase:

Pas de lieu Rhone que nous (#)

According to the editors “this French nonsense phrase reproduces the sound of “Paddle your own canoe”. But behind “Paddle your own canoe” other mysteries are hidden. A reference of this linguistic game is located for the first time in a passage of Henry James’ Principles of Psychology.

“Take the already-quoted catch, Pas de lieu Rhone que nous: one may read this over and over again without recognizing the sounds to be identical with those of the words paddle your own canoe.“
The difficulty with this passage is that James refers to this as an "already-quoted catch," which suggests he has discussed it earlier in the book. Thus far, an earlier mention by James doesn’t exist. Is it possible that James edited out the earlier passage and failed to correct this mention? Or perhaps James meant "oft-quoted" rather than "already-quoted"?

What is amazing is that The Principles of Psychology were published in 1890, 2 years later than the Mark Twain’s entry and that Twain met personally William James for the first time only in 1892. Could James be informed of the linguistic game of Twain and then just mentioned it in his work? And from whom? No answer unless Twain used to quote the sentence in his personal life and someone hearing of it just told James. But let us look again at the double sentence

Pas de lieu Rhone que nous

and

paddle your own canoe.

The Rhone river, before and after this entry, represents a very important place for both Robert Luis Stevenson and Mark Twain. The Scottish novelist lived in France (Hyères) from March 1883 until the end of June 1884. The Rhone River and the Rhone region is not far from there. Years later, while in Samoa, he declared “I was only happy once: that was at Hyères”.
In a letter to the painter William H. Low he writes:

TO W. H. LOW
[SKERRYVORE, BOURNEMOUTH, MARCH 1886.]
(…)
The Rhone is the river of Angels. I adore it: have adored it since I was twelve, and first saw it from the train.

According to Andrew Lang,

“In turning over old Jacobite pamphlets, I found a forgotten romance of Prince Charles's hidden years, and longed that Mr. Stevenson should retell it. There was a treasure, an authentic treasure; (…) The tale was to begin sur le pont d'Avignon: a young Scotch exile watching the Rhone, thinking how much of it he could cover with a salmon fly, thinking of the Tay or Beauly”

The river stroke the Stevenson’s imagination so high that he put it as an element of his narration. The Rhone always remains for him the river of Angels that he saw as a child. For Mark Twain too the Rhone River represented not a turning point in his life but a very happy moment. What is strange is that the American novelist made a boat trip down the Rhone only after the meeting with Stevenson and after that entry in his notebooks. It was in September 19, 1891
Let us back now to the second sentence

paddle your own canoe.

Is important to say that canoe is a reference in the Robert Louis Stevenson biography. An Inland Voyage, published in 1878 is Stevenson’s earliest book, he was 26 years old, and a pioneering work of outdoor literature. The trip was undertaken with Stevenson’s English friend Sir Walter Grindlay Simpson mostly along the Oise River from Belgium to France. Stevenson named "Arethusa" in the book after his canoe and Simpson called "Cigarette" along with his canoe each had a wooden canoe rigged with a sail, comparable in style to a modern kayak, known as a "Rob Roy". Stevenson addressed Sir Walter as “My dear Cigarette”. Cigarette could evocate Maspero as cigars.
But don’t forget also that “paddle your own canoe” can have many meanings all related to the imagery of self-reliance as “mind your own business”. The caution was given by President Lincoln and the first written citation of the phrase is in the American writer and lawyer James Hall's Letters from the West, 1828. Paddle your canoe as “Act independently and decide your own fate”, was also employed by the founder of the Scouts Movement, Lord Baden-Powell, when he used it as the title of a book in 1939.

Let us look back to the 2 sentences

Pas de lieu Rhone que nous

and

paddle your own canoe.
After explaining the different meanings I want to stress now the very sophisticated linguistic game, one sentence just evoking the other by sounds, one meaning evoking the other just by sounds, that is to say by allusion. The first meaning opposing itself to the second. It is important to stress that Robert Louis always adored the French culture (he spoke a good French, he liked the French food and he lived in France in a very pleasant way) while Twain, except for the Rhone, always hated the country and the language. He spoke a good German but not a good French. But surprisingly Twain wrote the entry in French suggesting the meaning only by sounds “Pas de lieu Rhone que nous” could be a sort of tongue-twister that quickly repeated gives “paddle your own canoe” and slowly “Pas de lieu sauf que nous” (“no place except us”), a kind of sentence of love. In this linguistic game it could be hidden to my point of view the contradictory Mark Twain’s feelings toward Robert Louis Stevenson. I love you and I hate you, no place except us and act independently and decide your own fate. Neither with nor without you. But how to prove that this is Stevenson whom Twain is referring too?
The entry was made towards the end of April 1888 because after this there is another entry saying:

Telegraph Charley Lang [#]

No Browning next week

According the editors of University of California Press Twain may have telegraphed to inform the brother-in.law Charles J. Langdon of the state of his wife’s health. Around mid-April she was still suffering the effects of what Clemens called “a savage combined attack of diphtheria & quinsy” . Twain wrote “Pas de lieu Rone que nous” in the same days when he met Robert Louis Stevenson in April 1888 which makes presumable that he was referring to him.

(15)Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume III (1883-1891), ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1979,. “Details of Inscription” page 744
(16) On the Trail of Stevenson, Clayton Hamilton, Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1916
(17)A. Hammerton, Stevensoniana, 1907, p. 88
(18)Greenwich Village Guide,edited by William H. Honan, 1959
(19)Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1975.
(20)The Principles of Psychology. New York: Henry Holt. Reprinted 1950 by Dover Publications, Inc Volume II, chapter xix, The perception of 'things', pp.80).
(21)'Recollections of Robert Louis Stevenson'. ADVENTURES AMONG BOOKS. London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1912
(22) SLC to Candace Wheeler, 19 April 1888, Clifton Waller Barrett Library, University of Virginia, Charlottesville.

II PART OF MY PAPER

II
Unfortunately Robert Louis Stevenson’s papers as well as the Mark Twain’s were scattered widely around the world, and found their way into numerous libraries, archives and private collections. Many of their papers were also been destroyed by relatives or friends. Thus, finding evidences becomes more and more difficult. Let us start considering the remaining letters they exchanged each other. In the Mark Twain papers, in the Bancroft Library at University of California, Berkeley, there are two items remaining from Mark Twain to Robert Louis Stevenson
The first is an autograph note signed by Twain and his wife Livy, dated 1902 and sold the same year in the Chicago Book Auction. It is not clear why is mentioned in the correspondence with Stevenson, already died. The text says “Let us save the to-morrows for work. Truly yours. Mark Twain”. The second item has been written between 1888.04.15 and 1888.04.17 from Hartford Connecticut as an answer to a Stevenson letter
Three letters remain from Stevenson to Clemens, the first dated April 13th, 1888, the second April 16th, 1893 and the last one August 12th 1893. Plus a quotation of Twain in a letter from RLS to John A. Symonds, dated February 1885.
The most impressive letter is dated April 13th, 1888

“My dear Mark Twain, I should have written a great while ago to the author of Huckleberry Finn—a book which I have read four times, and am quite ready to begin again tomorrow. I think you will like to hear this: I got Huckleberry when I was pretty ill … read it straight through, began at the beginning and read it straight through again without a break. Just at this juncture, down comes a Distinguished Painter [Sargent] to do my portrait; he was very refined and privately French; and when I insisted that Huckleberry was to be read aloud at the sittings, he wilted, sir. But I told him he had to face it, and he did, and I believe it did him good. I think he supposed I should have had Baudelaire read aloud to me.”

Twain is so impressed by Stevenson that invites him in his Hartford House but he’s also available to visit him in New York:

“To see you and thank you for writing kidnapped and Treasure Island...Those two great books”.

It is interesting to remark that in the Stevenson letter (April 16th, 1893) to Twain Stevenson says:

“My health has vastly improved since that very pleasant afternoon we spent together in Washington Square among the nurse-maids like a couple of characters out of a story by Henry James”.

According to Stevenson it seems that the two novelists met just one afternoon in Washington Square. Unfortunately the original is lost, this letter is just a copy made by Fred J. Hall, head of the Twain publishing house. Nothing prevents that have been made substantive changes to the text as it was for a number of documents belonging to Twain.
Nobody knows if there were more letters existing but the few remaining testified a correspondence between the two novelists. They are letters dated 1888 and 1893, during the Stevenson stay in the South Seas. But what happened in the middle? The problem is that the most of their correspondence has gone. But why? The best answer comes from the Sidney Colvin’s Prefatory Note to “Letters and Miscellanies of Robert Louis Stevenson” :

“Some of the outpourings of the early time are too sacred and intimate for publicity; many of the letters of his mature years are dry business letters of no general interest; many others are mere scraps tossed in jest to his familiars and full of the catch-words and code-words current in their talk, but of little meaning to outsiders. Above all, many have to be omitted because they deal with the intimate affairs of private persons”.

The intimate affairs of private persons. Consider this letter sent by Robert Louis Stevenson .

“Samuel Clemens, Esq.,
Dear Mark Twain,
There are, or there seem to be, certain storms ahead in my affairs to which I wish to refer with elaborate discretion. It is possible however that you may hear before many days from a gentleman signing himself Charles Baxter and hailing from Edinburgh. He is my friend and agent at home; and he if does address you I ask as a particular favor to give his proposals far more consideration than they will deserve. The truth is that (like yourself) I think I begin to be weary of publishers. I am accordingly trying to reorganize the whole term of my business; and if this fail, Mr Baxter has my instruction to apply to no one else than Mark Twain. I do not know whether you ever consent to handle such works as mine. I don’t sit up to be General Grant or the author of Huckleberry Finn. But if my agent does apply to you I shall be a simple man over-board and appeal to you in charity for a line and a swimming belt.”

The letter is dated 16 April 1893, the year when many public appearances earn Mark Twain the sobriquet “Belle of New York” and when the New York Stock Exchange crashes. For Twain is a very animated period of his life. From January to June he lives in Florence with his family but from 22 march to late May he goes alone to America and back on business. At the end of June (June 28) he settles family in Berlin which means that probably he received this letter in Us or later back to Europe. Financially speaking is not a good moment for him. The Webster & Co, his own publishing house, is going to the bankruptcy, finally declared on April 18th, 1894.
For Stevenson too 1893 is a very hard year. Non only the last year of his life but also the year of the his wife Fanny’s spectacular breakdown that confined her to the bed for months. So why Stevenson asked to be published by Twain, given the situation of both, and what was the answer? Unfortunately nothing remains and nothing has been written on. The remaining correspondence cannot help in retracing the most important lines of their friendship.
Let us go back to Washington Square’s meeting. When exactly did the two novelists meet?
The best place to find informations are the Mark Twain’s notebooks. Whatever the novelist the importance of notebooks in a biographical reconstruction is fundamental. If the novelist is someone called Mark Twain, so accustomed in travelling all around the world the importance is even bigger. According to Charles Neider “Clemens’s notebooks were not literary, bookish. (…) He will set downthoughts, reflections, ideas for stories. Is notebooks are markedly proper.”
Mark Twain himself used to say “One often finds notes in his book which no longer convey a meaning-they were texts, but you, but you forget what you were going to say under them” . According to Rasmussen from 1855 to 1910 and with only occasional breaks, Mark Twain kept a notebook or journal to write down details he thought he might later wish to recall. The resulting 49 journals reveal as much about Sam Clemens as they do Mark Twain; that is they contain great stores of material Twain used in his writing, but they also tell us about Twain’s social life, his feelings for his family, and his business dealings. The entries were usually made by Twain himself except in those cases where he engaged a secretary to take dictation from him. Given the diversity of Twain’s interests, the diversity of the notebook entries is not surprising. There are many cryptic notations. According to Charles Neider the Mark Twain notebooks “rarely contain off-color matter. It is as if expects his mother or his wife or his daughters or the good queen herself to peek into them.(…)

(8)Colvin, Sidney (ed.) (1911). The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson A New Edition. Rearranged in Four Volumes with 150 New Letters. London/New York: Methuen/Scribner’s. 4 vols.
(9)The original is lost. At the Mark Twain papers, Berkeley, there is only a copy of a copy made by Fred J. Hall, manager of Charles L. Webster &Co. The Hall copy was owned by his daughter, Mrs Elizabeth Mack. The letter was entirely published by “The Twainian”, September-October, 1950, number 5.
(10) Mark Twain by Charles Neider, Horizon Press New York, 1967, p.160
(11) Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and
(12)Bernard L. Stein, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, University of California Press, 1975, p.259.
(13)Rasmussen, R. Kent. Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings, Facts On File, 1995.
(14)The notebooks were first compiled and published in abridged form by Albert Bigelow Paine in 1935 as Mark Twain’s Notebook. The complete Notebook & Journals is in the process of being issued by the University of California Press; three of the four volumes have been published, with the first appearing in 1975.
(15)Mark Twain by Charles Neider, Horizon Press New York, 1967, p.160

STEVENSON'S BIRTHDAY

Tomorrow is Robert Louis Stevenson Birthday!

Mark Twain's Amazing Embargo

FROM SLATE

The brilliant brand management behind the handling of his autobiography.
By Craig Fehrman

In 1906, Mark Twain wrote to his friend and frequent correspondent, William Dean Howells, updating him on the progress of his autobiography:

To-morrow I mean to dictate a chapter which will get my heirs & assigns burned alive if they venture to print it this side of A.D. 2006—which I judge they won't. There'll be lots of such chapters if I live 3 or 4 years longer. The edition of A.D. 2006 will make a stir when it comes out. I shall be hovering around taking notice, along with other dead pals. You are invited.

Twain did live four years longer, working on the autobiography, hinting that it might be his masterpiece, and emphasizing its embargo. "In this Autobiography I shall keep in mind the fact that I am speaking from the grave," he wrote in the preface he prepared for his book. "I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for good reason: I can speak thence freely." When he died in 1910, the clock started—which means this year we finally get to feel Twain and his dead pals hovering over our shoulders.

But you probably knew that. Later this month, the Mark Twain Project will publish "the complete and authoritative edition" of Twain's autobiography. The news has been simmering all summer, and Twain's impending autobiography has occupied media outlets both high (Granta got the exclusive first excerpt) and low (Gawker investigated his "vibrating sex toy"). The coverage has gotten so thick that the Onion ran a story poking fun at it. And everyone has worked from the same set of talking points: Here, after a century of silence, we will meet a realer, darker Mark Twain. He will get his dying wish honored; we will get him uncensored and at a time when we need him more than ever.

It's all very exciting. It's also nonsense. There have been three previous editions of Twain's autobiography—published in 1924, 1940, and 1959—and each of them has selectively ignored Twain's 100-year embargo. This makes sense—first, because Twain's instructions remain confusing and contradictory; he wrote 50 years by some passages, 75 by others, and even, by the stuff he warned Howells about, 500 years. But it also makes sense from a marketing standpoint. In fact, each edition of Twain's autobiography, thanks in large part to Twain's embargo, has become a literary event, with scads of reviews, bestseller status, and a side-helping of scandal. With the new edition parked on the top of Amazon's sales rankings, it looks like Twain will go 4 for 4. Never mind speaking from the grave: Twain is probably laughing in it, pleased to see some cagey brand management—and the American public—go his way yet again.

From the beginning, Twain knew his material would sell. "I have never yet allowed an interviewer or biographer-sketcher to get out of me any circumstance of history which I thought might be worth putting some day into my AUTObiography," he told his brother in 1887. Twain had been working on his autobiography, off and on, since 1870, and money was never far from his mind. In 1906, Twain commissioned Albert Paine to write an authorized biography, and, privately, he agreed with Paine that the autobiography's less inflammatory sections might be "published sooner, either serially or in book form." In fact, that same year, Twain authorized publishing 25 "Chapters from My Autobiography" in the North American Review. Already, Twain was walking back his own rules, but with good reason: The Review paid him $30,000.

In 1912, when Paine finished his biography of Twain, he folded in some juicy extracts from the autobiography—including, 498 years early, some of the stuff Twain had mentioned to Howells, which turned out to be a series of chapters detailing Twain's problems with organized religion. Paine had the power to do so because Twain's will specified that he, along with Clara Gabrilowitsch, Twain's surviving daughter, would handle his "literary productions." Paine also had the power, 12 years later, to publish the first edition of the autobiography—and to quietly hold back some of its nastier social and political criticisms, as well as the chapters on religion.

The Los Angeles Times predicted Twain's autobiography would be "the season's most widely discussed book." That didn't quite come true, but most reviewers praised it—and just about all of them mentioned Twain's mysterious embargo. In fact, the embargo worked a little too well, stirring up suspicions that Paine had pulled some of the dead author's punches. "Are there still further candors to be expected?" one reviewer asked. "Or was Mark Twain really so cautious that the occasional objurgations of this book seemed to him untempered violence?"

Further candors did await, though Paine wasn't interested in sharing them. When Bernard DeVoto, a novelist and critic writing a book about Twain, asked to look at the author's papers, Paine told him they were "refuse" and that "nothing more need ever be written about Mark Twain." DeVoto's book, Mark Twain's America, came out a few years later, and in it he described the whole exchange, deadpanning that "public benevolence constrains me to offer the [Twain Estate] my services."

After Paine's death in 1937, Clara took DeVoto up on his offer, then promptly set about making his life miserable. The Twain estate had become a big business, selling the rights to so many Mark Twain movies, musicals, comic books, translations, and radio programs that its lawyers had trouble keeping them all straight. DeVoto planned to do his part—and to start correcting Paine's portrait of Twain as grandfatherly humorist—by forging two new books from the "refuse": Letters From the Earth, a collection of short fiction and satire, and Mark Twain in Eruption, a new edition of the autobiography compiled from everything Paine had left out. When DeVoto showed Clara the manuscript for Letters From the Earth, though, she demanded he remove the title piece, which Twain had written from Satan's point of view. DeVoto could not sway her, and Harper's had to scrap the book.

With his first project dead, DeVoto turned to Mark Twain in Eruption. Again, Harper's told him to piece together the best book possible. Paine had used about half of Twain's autobiographical material; DeVoto planned to use about half of what remained and to organize it topically, under sections like "Theodore Roosevelt" and "The Plutocracy." Soon after the publisher signed off on the manuscript, however, Clara was overcome by "insurmountable objections." She refused to approve anything attacking anyone "whose relatives are still living." (DeVoto's exasperated response: "On that basis half or more than half of our book is suppressed.") And she refused to include Twain's chapters on religion.

For the first (but not the last) time, DeVoto angrily offered his resignation. After calming down, he decided to write Clara a long letter, appealing to her ability to see beyond Harper's "lowly commercial" motives and, most of all, to her patriotism. In 1940, DeVoto pointed out, when the liberty they enjoyed was "becoming increasingly impossible elsewhere in the world, we are all the more constrained to hold by it and facilitate it in America."

DeVoto never made clear how ignoring Twain's embargo struck a blow for freedom of speech. But Clara was partly convinced. She gave in on much of the social and political stuff, though not on the chapters on religion. The new edition of the autobiography came out in 1940, and, again, the reviewers loved it. "Mark Twain in Eruption ends forever the legend of the genial Mark, the lovable, cigar-smoking humorist," Clifton Fadiman wrote in The New Yorker. In particular, Fadiman praised DeVoto for uncovering what Twain really thought of his contemporaries—for allowing Andrew Carnegie to be "the repulsive windbag of conceit he undoubtedly was." DeVoto had to smile at a line like that. He also had to think of those chapters on religion, still sitting in a safe, now with his note: "Edited, for publication in Mark Twain in Eruption, by BDV, but omitted at the request of Mme. Gabrilowitsch."

A few years later, Clara's protective approach backfired in a big way, bringing Twain's autobiography the most publicity yet. Charles Neider, another novelist and critic, was preparing a new edition of Twain's autobiography for the Twain estate—this one more reader-friendly, with a chronological organization in place of Twain's intentional chaos. Clara gave Neider permission to publish another 40,000 words, but held firm on the chapters on religion. At least Clara updated her reasons: "We certainly are not going to place my blessed father and superior character on the side of the all-good-destroying Communists."

While Neider got exactly what he wanted—his 1959 edition of Twain's autobiography has become the most widely read and even made the Modern Library's list of the100 best nonfiction books—Clara got exactly what she didn't. Throughout the Cold War, Twain remained enormously popular in the Soviet Union, where 11 million copies of his books were in print. The Soviets prized Twain both for his criticisms of America and for the opportunity he provided to attack his country's literary establishment. Neider's new edition of the autobiography gave the Soviets a perfect opening.

And so, in August of 1959, Literaturnaya Gazeta, the official organ of the Union of Soviet Writers, ran Yan Bereznitsky's short but brutal review of Neider's edition. Seizing on his omissions of Twain's sociopolitical views and his chapters on religion (which, of course, were Clara's omissions), Bereznitsky argued that this was yet another example of "the relationship of official America to its greatest writer."

Neider decided it was his patriotic duty to respond. After appealing directly to Premier Khrushchev, Neider got the go-ahead to write a rebuttal in the Gazeta. It wasn't a fair fight—Bereznitsky got a second essay, twice as long as Neider's first—but it was something. Neider became the first American writer to publish his uncensored views in a Soviet organ, and the exchange made front-page news throughout the United States. Harper's even included the two men's essays as an appendix to the autobiography's paperback edition.

Mark Twain didn't end the Cold War, but this skirmish, along with some more patriotic prodding from Neider, finally convinced Clara to lift the ban on her father's unpublished writings. Harper's published Letters From the Earth in 1962, seven years after DeVoto's death (and two months before Clara's). Neider prepared to update his edition of the autobiography with Twain's chapters on religion—only to have a Harper's editor step in and say the publisher wanted it to remain "a family book."

The Hudson Review agreed to publish the chapters in its Autumn 1963 issue. Even in the pages of a literary quarterly, they became national news. The AP and UPI both covered the story, and their dispatches ran across the country, complete with headlines like "Twain's Attack on God, Written as Sick, Bitter Old Man." Reporters pressed various clergy for a reaction. The best one came from Norman Vincent Peale, himself an author (The Power of Positive Thinking). "It is a highly emotionalized outburst by a man sick with hate and anger," Peale said of Twain. "The disappointing thing is his spinelessness; his pathetic lack of guts to publish this diatribe in his lifetime."

That's one way to spin "speaking from the grave." It's also the kind of publicity you can't buy, which brings us back to the latest edition of Twain's autobiography. The editors at the Mark Twain Project have happily played along with the excitement surrounding Twain's embargo—even though, at this point, it's been violated so many times that only 5 percent of this "new" volume will be unpublished material. (The project's next two volumes will contain more unpublished material, but they're still five years away.) In the midst of another squabble with Clara, DeVoto wrote that "if Mark Twain is to go on selling, he must go on being discussed, and if he is to be discussed books about him, especially controversial books, must continue to be written." It seems they must continue to be edited, as well. The cultural amnesia greeting this latest edition of Twain's autobiography only underscores that the book has not become a major part of his canon. Maybe this time around, the hype will take.

NEWS ABOUT TWAIN

Photographs by Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times
First French-built pipe organ in New York City is installed at Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue between 10th and 11th Street in New York, Tuesday, October 12, 2010. French organ builders came from France to install the organ

FROM NY TIMES
October 24, 2010, 11:00 am
Importing an Impressive Machine of Sound
By JAMES BARRON

Dennis Keene has been learning some new French words lately. The forklift parked in the center aisle of the church where he is the music director is a “chariot electrique.” The hoist above the altar is a “palans electrique.”

And the packing boxes in the back corner of the sanctuary? They hold more than 5,000 “tuyaux,” the essential parts for what he described as the city’s first French-made pipe organ—“l’orgue à tuyaux.”

“We’ve got quite a mess going on,” he said, leading the way into the sanctuary at the Church of the Ascension, on Fifth Avenue at West 11th Street. (No French on the door: The sign warning that it was a construction site where hard hats were to be warn was in no-nonsense English.)

Organ installers were climbing where the pipes will soon go. A welder was working on scaffolding above where one of two new consoles will end up. A painter was working on columns behind the pulpit, which was covered in protective plywood, as was the famous mural of the ascension above the altar.

French organ builder Jean Francois Charrier.The church is spending $2 million on renovations to its building, Mr. Keene said. The organ was a gift from the Manton Foundation, set up by Sir Edwin A.G. Manton and Lady Manton, who were longtime members of the church. Sir Edwin was an executive of the insurance giant American International Group who died in 2005 at age 96.

Mr. Keene said the organ was typical of an instrument in the $3 million-to-$4 million range. He said the organ’s official inauguration would be in May.

The church itself dates to the 1840s, “when this was the upper suburbs” of a city that was crowded into Lower Manhattan. The church underwent a transformation in the 1880s at the hands of such well-known figures as the architects Stanford White and Charles Follen McKim and the artists Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John LaFarge. It was LaFarge who painted the mural over the altar.

Mr. Keene said Mark Twain had lived around the corner when he moved to New York at the beginning of the 20th century and would sit in the church, looking up at the mural. Someone asked what he was doing. Twain said, “I was trying to figure out how they did it.”

“What, the painting?” the person asked.

“No,” Twain said, “the ascension.’”

Mr. Keene said the organ would be the sixth in the sanctuary’s history. “The idea was to make an instrument that was as eclectic as possible,” he said. “I wanted an organ that could play early music really well, but could also play Messiaen.” The prolific 20th century composer Olivier Messiaen was, Mr. Keene said, “the most important organ composer after Bach.”

A teacher with whom Mr. Keene had studied in the 1970s advised him to look up Pascal Quoirin of St. Didier, France. Mr. Quoirin is known in organ circles for his restoration of a Dom Bédos organ in Bordeaux that is considered one of the two or three greatest 18th century French organs that still exist.

“I knew in two minutes he was the one,” Mr. Keene said. “I couldn’t have an American company build a French-style organ. The best American organs remind me of an overblown California cabernet. They have a huge tone, but it just isn’t balanced. This will be nuanced, but it will have fire. It will roar.”

Several dozen pipes have already been installed, among them an orange-yellow set that Mr. Keene said would produce “a really low trombone sound.”

The longest, and potentially the loudest, of that group is right against the rectory wall.

“I doubt I’ll be playing it late at night,” he said.