Clara is calling for me—­we have to go into town and pay calls.

Mark.

In Florence, that winter, Clemens began dictating to his secretary some autobiographical chapters.  This was the work which was “not to see print until I am dead.”  He found it a pleasant, lazy occupation and wrote his delight in it to Howells in a letter which seems not to have survived.  In his reply, Howells wrote:  “You do stir me mightily with the hope of dictating and I will try it when I get the chance.  But there is the tempermental difference.  You are dramatic and unconscious; you count the thing more than yourself; I am cursed with consciousness to the core, and can’t say myself out; I am always saying myself in, and setting myself above all that I say, as of more worth.  Lately I have felt as if I were rotting with egotism.  I don’t admire myself; I am sick of myself; but I can’t think of anything else.  Here I am at it now, when I ought to be rejoicing with you at the blessing you have found ....  I’d like, immensely, to read your autobiography.  You always rather bewildered me by your veracity, and I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself.  But all of it?  The black truth which we all know of ourselves in our hearts, or only the whity-brown truth of the pericardium, or the nice, whitened truth of the shirtfront?  Even you won’t tell the black heart’s—­truth.  The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shone upon.”

We gather from Mark Twain’s answer that he was not deceiving himself
in the matter of his confessions.

To W. D. Howells, in New York: 

Villadi Quarto, Florence,
March 14, ’04. 
Dear Howells,—­Yes, I set up the safeguards, in the first day’s dictating; taking this position:  that an autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author is raking dust upon it, the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

The summer in England! you can’t ask better luck than that.  Then you will run over to Florence; we shall all be hungry to see you-all.  We are hunting for another villa, (this one is plenty large enough but has no room in it) but even if we find it I am afraid it will be months before we can move Mrs. Clemens.  Of course it will.  But it comforts us to let on that we think otherwise, and these pretensions help to keep hope alive in her. 
                    Good-bye, with love, Amen. 
                              Yours ever
          
                              mark.