Lot 195: CONWAY, MONCURE DANIEL

N/A Autobiography: Memories and Experiences. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904 2 volumes, in 8s (8Â x 5Ê in.; 219 x 149 mm). Photogravure frontispiece portraits of Conway, 11 plates, 9 facsimiles of letters to Conway. Publisher's blue cloth, spines gilt-lettered, top edges gilt; neatly rebacked, preserving original spines. Blue cloth slipcase. First edition; association copy, from Clemens's library, signed and extensively annotated. Moncure Conway was an author and clergyman who was born in Virginia but spent the most productive period of his career at the Unitarian South Place Chapel, London. In that city, Conway met Clemens in 1872, and they remained friends and associates?Conway acted as Clemens's English agent from 1876 until 1881?for several decades. In chapter 287 ("Mark Twain's Reading") of his monumental life of Mark Twain, Albert Bigelow Paine specifically mentions Conway's memoir as a book that gave Clemens enjoyment. Isabel Lyon's journal for 30 November 1904 noted that "Tonight at dinner Mr. Clemens was talking of Moncure D. Conway. He is reading Conway's autobiography just published, and it made him hark back to the days in London 25 years ago" ( Mark Twain Papers, quoted in Gribben). "One of the most autobiographically revealing of all Clemens' annotated books" (Gribben). Clemens has signed the front pastedown of each volume ("SL. Clemens, Oct. 1905") and made more than 45 separate annotations (totalling some 530 words) on 30 pages. A further 58 pages are marked with marginal rules, underlinings, and other marking, chiefly in pencil. The attraction of Conway's book to the seventy-year-old Clemens is not difficult to divine: as he notes on page 1:277, "I seem to have met the most of the people mentioned in this book." This is especially true of the second volume, which includes narratives on Conway's return visits to the United States. Several marginalia comment on specific persons discussed in the text: Ford Madox Brown is characterized on page 2:135 as "A fine & lovable person, & yet did not believe in hell & its inventor"; Thomas Carlyle's description of his marriage causes Clemens to write, page 1:108, "It is as if he were speaking of Livy, & of me"; adjacent to an encomium on Edward Everett, Clemens queries, page 1:286, "Is this the idiot I talk about in 'A Tramp Abroad' on the steamboat on a Swiss Lake? But that ass seemed to be a son or grandson." On page 2:137, with running-head "The Savage Club," Clemens remarks, "The Prince of Wales, (Ed. VII) Nansen, Stanley & I were the (in 1898) then only honorary members of the Savage Club." Conway's reminiscence of an 1867 "dinner ? given in Freemason Hall to Charles Dickens, about to visit America," causes Clemens to comment, on page 2:140, "(a memorable visit for me!) I met Livy at the St. Nicholas, & took her to the reading (toward end of December) on Mrs. Hooker's ticket." Livy is mentioned four pages later, where Conway relates Clemens's scheme of frustrating an autograph hound by having Mrs. Clemens write his replies. This Clemens denies: "No. She never dealt in deception." The true importance of Conway's Autobiography may have been to inspire Clemens's own. As Gribben points out, "Conway's book obviously must have influenced Mark Twain's eventual choice of a narrative mode for his own autobiography, which he would launch in earnest (following earlier, sporadic attempts) in 1906. Conway soon discarded the strictly chronological organization of his first chapters in favor of a thematic approach. ?" Indeed, some of Clemens's annotations do not deal with characters from Conway's books, but those from his own life. On page 2:138 he lists some of his literary contemporaries, "Sir Thomas Hardy ? Charles Kingsley. Browning. George Dolby & Ch. Warren Stoddard, Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller & imitator of Harte's Condensed Novels?perished in a canoe. Now I recall his name?Prentice Milford." The top and bottom margins of page 2:147 are filled with the names of companions from Clemens's childhood in Hannibal; on the fore-edge margin he writes: "They are all gone; why were they created?" Reference: Gribben 1:157