The Birmingham age-herald., 1912-10-24


 HOW TWAIN HELPED BIOGRAPHER
 Writing of his association with Mark Twain In Harper's for November, AL bert Bigelow Paine, the authorized bio grapher of the great humorist tells of how he began the work and the part which Mark Twain himself played in it.
 "On Tuesday, January g, 1906, l was on hand with a capable stenographer, one who had successively and success fully held secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Mary Mapes Dodge. and was therefore pe- culiarly qualified for the work in hand.
 Mark Twain meantime. had been re- volving our plans and adding some features of his own He proposed to double the value and interest of our employment by letting his dictations continue the form of some earlier auto biographical chapters, begun in 1885, and continued later in Vienna and Florence He said he did not think he could follow definite chronological programme; that he would like to wan der about, picking up this point and that, as memory or fancy prompted, without any particular biographical or der I could also suggest subjects for dictation and ask particulars of any special episode or period. I believe this covered the whole arrangement, which did not require more than five minutes, and we set to work without further prologue.
 He dictated that morning of matters connected with the history of the Com stock mine; then he drifted back to his childhood. returning again to the more modern period, and closed, l think, with some comments on cur rent affairs. It was absorbingly inter esting; his quaint, unhurried fashion of speech, the unconscious movement of his hands, the play of his features as his fancies and phrases passed in mental review and were accepted or waved aside. We were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his archt- lecture. We constituted about the most select audience in the world en- toying what was, likely enough, It's most remarkable entertainment. When he turned at last and inquired the time we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away.
 ",rhe dictations thus begun continued steadily from week to week, and al ways with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk about, and it was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginning; then he went drifting among episodes, incl dents and periods in his irresponsible fashion-the fashion of table conversa- tion, as he said-the methodless method of the human mind.
 "It was not for several weeks that I began to realize that these marvel ous "reminiscences bore only an at mospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than it's veritable narrative, and built large ly-sometimes wholly-from an imagi- nation that, with age, had dominated memory, creating details, even revers- ing them, yet with perfect sincerity of purpose on the part of the narra- tor to set down the literal and unvar- nished truth. 1t was his constant ef- fort to be frank and faithful to fact, to record, to confess. and to condemn without stint. If you wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it., He would give 1t, to the Mast syllable-worse than the worst, for his imagination would mag nifty 1t and adorn 1t with new iniquities, and if he gave it again, or dozen times he would improve upon 1t each time until the thread of history was almost impossible to trace through the marvel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another just as willingly. | Those vividly real personalities that he marched and counter marched before Us were the most convincing creatures | in the world the most entertaining | the most excruciatingly humorous, oI wicked, or tragic; but. alas they were 1 not always safe to include in record that must bear a certain semblance tc history. They often disagreed in theii performance, and even in their char acters, with the documents in the neX; room. as I learned by and by when those records disentangled, began to rebuild the structure of the years