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following list.
Chap I
Written in 1877. Describes Clemens’s home until aged 4, when the family moved to Hannibal.
Chap II
Written in 1897–98. “My Autobiography [Random Extracts from It].” Clemens aged 7 to 12.
Chap IV
Written in 1903. “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IV.” Transcribed in ADs, 1 and 2 Dec 1906. Clemens aged 14.
Chap IX
Written in 1900. “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IX.” Clemens aged 14, 38, and 61.
Chap XII
Not found, but written after 1898 since it refers to Vienna. Clemens aged 62. Mentioned in chapter XVII.
Chap XIV
Written in 1898. “My Debut as a Literary Person.” Clemens aged 30.
Chap XVII
Written in 1903. “From Chapter XVII.” Transcribed in AD, 3 Dec 1906. Clemens aged 62.
    Although some additional numbered chapters may have been written and subsequently lost or destroyed, it is highly unlikely that in 1903, when Clemens labeled a text “Chapter XVII,” he had actually written seventeen chapters. But the numbers assigned to the chapters that do survive correspond roughly to the chronology of their topics, even though they do not accurately reflect the lapse of time: Clemens was fourteen in both Chapter IV and Chapter IX, but between Chapter IX and Chapter XIV he aged from fourteen to thirty, and then to age sixty-two by Chapter XVII. Still, this rough approximation is exactly what one would expect if the chapter numbers were only
estimates
, intended to place the chapters in approximate chronological order. Together they again suggest that although he was not writing about his life in the order of its occurrences, he was still trying to maintain an overall chronology, even as late as 1903.
    The text numbered “Chapter IX” (“Scraps from My Autobiography,” written in 1900) is suggestive in a related way. The chapter number would place it relatively early in his life. It recounts two stories from Clemens’s youth, when he was fourteen (1849–50), but it concludes each story with much later events—the first in Calcutta in 1896 when he was sixty-one, and the second in London in 1873 when he was thirty-eight. In both cases it seems that to follow the stories to what Clemens regarded as their natural conclusion, it was necessary to skip over several decades of his life. So whatever else “Chapter IX” was in 1900, it was not a purely chronological account—even though the chapter number placed it toward the beginning of the narrative.
    A similar tension occurs in the two manuscripts with chapter numbers written in 1903 but revised in 1906 after Clemens had settled on discursiveness as the principle for the whole autobiography: both were inserted into the dictations for 1, 2, and 3 December 1906. In 1903 he titled the first one “Scraps from My Autobiography. From Chapter IV,” and began it with a marginal date (“1849–51”). It concerns his youthful encounters with mesmerism in Hannibal. The second 1903 manuscript, paginated separately but probably written at the same time (they share the same ink and paper), brought this story to its conclusion. It is another story about mesmerism, in which a haughty aristocrat is embarrassed by being hypnotized and ordered to undress, in retaliation for his incredulity. Clemens originally titled it “From Chapter XVII.” But when he decided to use the manuscripts in the December dictations, he removed all reference to chapter numbers. So the first mesmerism story was originally assigned to Chapter IV, and its natural conclusion to Chapter XVII, separated by some twelve putative chapters. Their revision shows that in 1903 Clemens was still wrestling with the compulsion to maintain some semblance of his life’s chronology, while in 1906, when he made the manuscripts into one continuous narrative, he had clearly shed that compulsion.
    On 15 October 1900 the family arrived in New York City, where they soon rented a house at 14 West 10th Street. “Jean is learning to type-write,” Clemens wrote a friend,