The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1912-11-07
MARK TWAIN DTCTATING.
How the Humorist Related His Me naoirs for His Biographer's
 Benefit

 On Tuesday, January g. 1906, was on hand with a capable stenographer, one who had successfvely and success fully held secretarial positions with Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs fore peculiarly qualified for the work in hand
 Mark Twain, meantime; had. been revolving ourl 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 au- tobiographfcaI chapters. begun in 1885 and continued later in Vienna and Florence. He said he did not think he could follow definite enron olog- ica1 program; that he would like to wander about, picking up this point and that, as memory or Nancy prompt ed, without any particular biograph hi- jects for dictation, and ask particu- lars of any special episode or period. An arrangement which did not re- Qu1re~ more than five minutes, and we set to work without further proIog.
 He dictated that morning of mat ters connected with the history of the Comstock mine: then he drifted back to his childhood returning again to the more modern period, and closed, think. with some comments on cur rent affairs. It was a.bsorbingly in teresting; his quaint unhurried fash ion of speech, the unconscious move ment 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 pro cess Of his architecture. We conSti- tuted about the most select audience in the world enjoying what was, like ly enough it's most remarka ble en- tertainm ent When he turned at last and inquired the time, we were all amazed that two hours and more had slipped away.
 The .dictations thus begun contin- ued steadily from week to week, and always with increasing charm. We never knew what he was going to talk about and 1t was seldom that he knew until the moment of beginnf fhg; then he went drifting among episodes incidents and periods in his irrespon- sibIe- fashion = the fashion of table conversation. as he said--t11e method less method of the human mind
 It was not for several weeks tha I began to realize that these mar vicious "reminiscences bore only an at- mospheric relation to history; that they were aspects of biography rather than it's veritable narrative, and built argely-sometfmes wholly-fron imagination that. with age, had dom mated memory. creating details, even reversing them, yet with a perfect the narrator to set down the literal and unvarnished~ truth It was his constant effort to be frank and faith ful to fact, to record, to confess and wanted to know the worst of Mark Twain you had only to ask him for it. He would give it, to the last syI- lable-worse than the worst for his imagination would magnify it and adorn it with new iniquities, and if he gave It again, or 8 dozen times he would improve upon it each time, until the thread or history was almost impossible to trace through the mar vel of that fabric; and he would do the same for another person just as willingly. Those yiyidlV real person a1ties that he marched and counter marched before us were the most con vincing creatures in the world, the most entertaining, the most excrueiat- ingly hum orous, or wicked eor tragic; but. alas, they were not always safe to include in a record that must bear a. certain sem blaHce to history. They often disagreed in their peri formance, and even in their characters, with the documents in the next room, as learned by and byswnen those records disentangIed, began to 7 rebuild the structure of the yearS.-Albert- Bige- low Paine in Harper's Magazine.