Olivia Clemens's "Editing" Reviewed

Abstract

N ARK TWAIN WAS MORE PRONE than most authors to seek and take advice about his writing. He could indeed be shamelessly open to suggestion. He was known to have accepted counsel from friends, family, and neighbors, no less than from editors, publishers, and fellow writers, drawing miscellaneously on-or allowing editorial liberties to-such persons as Mary Fairbanks, Emeline Beach, Emily Severence, Bret Harte, Joe Goodman, Orion Clemens, James Redpath, Elisha Bliss, Frank Bliss, William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, Charles L. Webster, George Washington Cable, Richard Watson Gilder, James R. Osgood, Henry M. Alden, George Harvey, Edmund C. Stedman, Andrew Chatto, Frederick Duneka, Henry H. Rogers, Joseph Twichell, Edwin C. Parker, and Mrs. Clemens and the children. One suspects he would have stopped the proverbial man in the street for comment if he thought the man could have done him any good. one person who went over his manuscripts more regularlysome would also say more rigorously-than anyone else was, of course, Olivia Clemens. The darling little Mentor, who from courtship on scanned his manuscripts with the far from tacit understanding that they were to be pruned of crudities and excesses, had even been delegated by Twain to edit his works for him-chilling thought-after his death.1 Twain made no secret of Livy's handiwork. She edited everything I wrote, he told Archibald Henderson. And what is more-she not only edited my works, she edited me!2 One might have predicted that Van Wyck Brooks would lick his chops over that morsel3: one more link in the fatal chain that was to strangle the artist and make the man over into a candidate for grasping business success and bourgeois respectability-in about that order. Among the more picturesque malefactions with which