The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) Read online

  As I have suggested, Nikolaus Baumann's futile attempt in "Chronicle" to save Lisa Brandt from drowning anticipates Johann Brinker's rescue of Father Adolf from the icy river in "No. 44." Both events bring disease, paralysis, or crushing disaster to the rescuers and their families. Both stem from memories of the writer's boyhood. In 1906 Clemens recalled how he and Tom Nash had been skating on the Mississippi one frigid winter night when the ice broke up; how he reached the shore safely, whereas the perspiring Nash boy had fallen into the icy water near shore; and how Tom had contracted scarlet fever as a result of the drenching, which left him stone-deaf and with impaired speech. He also remembered in 1898:

  I knew a man who when in his second year in college jumped into an ice-cold stream when he was overheated and rescued a priest of God from drowning; suffered partial paralysis, lay in his bed 38 years, unable to speak, unable to feed himself, unable to write; not even the small charity of quenching his mind was doled out to him-he lay and thought and brooded and mourned and begged for death 38 years"

  Similarly, in 1902, Twain made a note about Crazy Fields, whom he had presented briefly in "Schoolhouse Hill" as Crazy Meadows. Crazy Fields was associated by Clemens with old Dr. Radcliff in "Villagers" who declared on his deathbed: "Don't cry; rejoiceshout. This is the only valuable day I have known in my 65 years." Two sons of Dr. Radcliff of Hannibal had been bom mad, and the third had gone mad after a career as a fine physician." Late notes for "No. 44" add five more examples of blasted lives to these parables of good men's suffering." Clemens's reaction to all these events, real and imaginary, was angry and rebellious. But the countermood of bitter resignation in Mark Twain is never very far away: as Theodor Fischer muses after the death of Lisa and Nikolaus, "Many a time, since then, I have heard people pray to God to spare the life of sick persons, but I have never done it."

  Mob cowardice and mob cruelty, often abetted by the orthodox, figure again and again in the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Eleven girls of Eseldorf are burned together as witches because of "witch signs," or fleabites, on their bodies. The grandmother of Gottfried Narr is burned as a witch because she relieves pain by massage. Lisa Brandt's mother bums at the stake for blasphemy after her daughter drowns. A Scottish mob will stone and crush a gentlewoman to death, Satan informs Theodor out of his foreknowledge, because she is suspected of having Catholic sympathies."' Johann Brinker's mother, also suspected of witchcraft, is condemned to the stake by Father Adolf, whose life Brinker had saved at the cost of his own paralysis. Frau Brinker's decision to die in the fire rather than endure ostracism and starvation is moving and fitting in its context, no less so for the author's having found the germ of the episode in Cotton Mather's The Wonders of the Invisible World." Other particular sources for some of these witchcraft episodes may yet be found in the histories Clemens read and reread; but no reader of "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again," which reports boys and policemen stoning and beating the Chinese in San Francisco, or of The Prince and the Pauper or Huckleberry Finn or A Connecticut Yankee or "The United States of Lyncherdom" would be surprised to find scenes of mob violence in these manuscripts.

  Seeking to account for the special impact of these scenes, one remembers two scarifying events in Sam Clemens's early life. He once gave matches to a drunken tramp in the Hannibal jail so that he might smoke. During the night, before the jailer could unlock the door, he had to watch the man at the bars burning to death. I also sat helplessly by in St. Louis while his beloved younger brother, Henry, slowly died of burns from a steamboat explosion."

  The most striking action in all three tales is Philip Traum's creating and destroying a race of Lilliputians, apparently for the sole purpose of amusing the three boys of the "Chronicle" storythe "Creation minimized," as I have called it. If, as John Hay once wrote Clemens, memory and imagination are the great gifts in a writer, they are nowhere more evident than in this demonstration by Satan. Here, in 1897 Mark Twain developed a donnee that he had noted only briefly thirty years earlier, when for his California newspaper readers he quoted from the Apocrypha: the youthful Savior in those books, like Philip Traum, often crippled or killed those who opposed his will.' So, from the apocryphal anecdote and his memory of Gulliver's Travels Twain developed his own version of the Creation, the Fall, and the Day of Doom, in which the unfallen angel and nephew of Satan acts the part of God. The Fall, it must be noted, is due in Twain's "Bible" to a quarrel between two workmen, who grapple like Cain and Abel in "a life and death struggle" until Satan crushes them with his fingers. As for the Judgment Day, it arrives by Satan's whim. Annoyed by the lamentation of the fingerling mourners around the two bodies, Satan mashes them into the ground, and then wipes out the whole race by fire and earthquake for the boys' entertainment. "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods;/They kill us for their sport," cries Gloucester in King Lear. The analogy is close.

  As for the motif-in-action of quarreling and warfare, in all three versions of the story a sequence of personal fights and national battles substantiates Twain's contention that if the human race is not already damned, it ought to be. In 1897 Pudd'nhead Wilson observed that "The universal brotherhood of man is our most precious possession, what there is of it." B1 In 1899 Clemens said that he had proposed to the Emperor Franz Joseph "a plan to exterminate the human race by withdrawing the oxygen from the air for a period of two minutes." 52 Behind these bits of mockery, one so sad and one so savage, is an old animus reawakened by contemporary wars. This same animus underlies many sardonic references in "Chronicle" and "No. 44" to Christian nations warring against other Christian nations and overwhelming pagan countries by conquest.

  To illustrate: in "Chronicle," Theodor promises to tell, by and by, why Satan "chose China for this excursion." In 1897 Twain was defending the Emperor of China, and in 1899 he clearly sided with the "cautious Chinaman" as against "the Western missionary." ' By 1900 he was writing his friend the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, "It is all China, now, and my sympathies are with the Chinese. They have," he said, "been villainously dealt with by the sceptred thieves of Europe, and I hope they will drive all the foreigners out and keep them out for good." ' Quite apparently Twain intended to make some exemplary use of the Chinese Boxers' struggle against the Powers, East and West. Satan develops the war-motif fully by showing the boys a theatrical or visionary "history of the progress of the human race" from Cain and Abel down through the sixty wars fought during the reign of Queen Victoria. Twain's last cinematic frames show England fighting what he called elsewhere a "sordid & criminal war" 5s against the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State in South Africa, and Europe "swallowing China"-proof, he explained, that "all the competent killers are Christian." Even Satan and Theodor's adventure with the "foreigner in white linen and sun-helmet," who cuffs the native juggler and thereby destroys the many-fruited tree and brings a fearful penalty upon himself, is a parable and prediction about British imperialism in India." Finally, toward the end of the "No. 44" manuscript, Mark Twain attempts simultaneously to satirize Mary Baker Eddy and Czarist Russia. Mrs. Eddy had published a telegram instructing her followers in the "Christian Silence dialect" to "cease from praying for peace and take hold of something nearer our size," as Twain put it. He was bitterly disappointed when the peace treaty between Russia and Japan was concluded at Portsmouth in August 1905: as his recent article "The Czar's Soliloquy" showed, he had hoped that Japan would win and the Czar be overthrown.

  The author's frame of mind, so often reflected in these war scenes and "stupendous processions," may be summed up in a statement that he made in the summer of 1900: "The time is grave. The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into." `° Small wonder, then, that Philip Traum should recount an up-to-date history of private and public murder in "Chronicle" or that 44 should drag in by the heels Mary Baker Eddy's proclamation about the Russo-Japanese War.58

  Bitter and sad as the three "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts may be, they are not wi
thout affirmations: humor of all shades, the love of music, and the power of imagination. Perhaps it was the contrast of bitter and affirmative strains that wrung from Livy Clemens, after she had heard her husband read the opening chapters of "Chronicle," the tribute, "It is perfectly horrible-and perfectly beautiful!" "' The kind and quality of the humor vary greatly, as one might expect in Twain's unfinished work. When Philip Traum composes a narrative poem and a musical setting for it at the piano, he seems amateurish and boastful, whereas the antic dancing and singing presented by 44's Mister Bones mix humor and pathos effectively, perhaps because of Twain's lifelong delight in the Negro minstrel show. In the same way, 44's long talks with Mary Florence Fortescue Baker G. Nightingale (the chambermaid whom he has turned into a cat) represent burlesque spun out thin. But Aunt Rachel's amazed report of how 44 pacified and fed and talked to the fierce Hotchkiss cat, Sanctified Sal, is dramatic and finely humorous in the style of Uncle Remus or of Twain's own jumping-frog and blue-jay yams. For all the slapstick Twain's avatars indulge in, they are the agents of a master humorist who is especially skilled in "black humor." I have already cited an instance in which Traum ridicules the doctrine of papal infallibility-a section Paine deleted from the published book. In a well known passage, Traum cries:

  Power, Money, Persuasion, Supplication, Persecution-these can lift at a colossal humbug,-push it a little-crowd it a little-weaken it a little, century by century: but only Laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of Laughter nothing can stand.

  But Twain's illustrations never reached print. His account of how Robert Burns broke the back of the Presbyterian church and set Scotland free was to prove laughter's power. The general failure of readers to detect "the funniness of Papal Infallibility" would demonstrate how rarely mankind used that power.

  Humor and music as catharsis and satire as correction are omnipresent in Mark Twain's theory and writings. The citizens of Hadleyburg, for example, restore their town's reputation for hon esty by laughing down their "incorruptible" leading citizens, whom another mysterious stranger has exposed. But in these stories and other late writings Twain could never quite decide whether laughter was divine or only human. Pudd'nhead Wilson in 1897 insisted: "Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven." 80 Five years later Clemens observed, "We grant God the possession of all the qualities of mind except the one that keeps the others healthy; that watches over their dignity; that focuses their vision truehumor." 81 Of all the paradoxes in the three Mysterious Stranger stories, none is more paradoxical, or more sanative, than Twain's demonstrations of the power of laughter-was it merely human?in the empty spaces of the universe.

  Mark twain put the concepts and actions thus far distinguished to real dramatic use in the plots of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. Only in "No. 44," the last, longest, and most diffuse version, did he develop a concept that resisted incorporation into the plot: that is, his speculative distinctions between Waking-Self, DreamSelf, and Immortal Soul and the resulting rather farcical incarnation of Emil Schwarz (Feldner's doppelganger) and the printer's crew of Duplicates or Dream-Selves. How Twain arrived at this psychology is therefore as much a biographical question as it is a matter of literary genetics. Although Clemens in maturity was a champion of eighteenth-century rationalism, he grew up at a time when spiritualism and faith-cures roused widespread and lively interest, and he had long collected instances of "mental telegraphy," a power with which he endowed 44. In 1886 he and Howells collaborated in writing an absurd play, Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, in which one of Sellers's great schemes is to materialize the dead in order to build up a great supply of free labor (free, since the "materializees" neither slept nor ate).

  By the early 1890's Clemens was taking an increasing interest in mind-cures, which he associated with hypnotism, the work of J. H. Charcot's pupils, and the reports of the Society for Psychical Research.' Characteristically, his interest took two forms in alternation: a rational and satiric view and a speculative and psychological view. The first is exemplified earlier in the King's remark in Huckleberry Finn, "Layin' on o' hands is my best holt-for cancer and paralysis, and sich things"; Twain develops it amusingly at length in "Schoolhouse Hill" when Oliver Hotchkiss holds a seance. The second appears in Twain's sketch of 1876, "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut," a brilliant narration of the conflict between "Twain" and his conscience or superego, which ends by his murdering his conscience and enjoying the same exhilarating, amoral freedom that Schwarz enjoys in "No. 44."

  The germ for Mark Twain'S analysis of multiple selves in "No. 44," as Tuckey has observed, is a long notebook entry made in January 1897. In it Twain states that he has found "a new 'solution' of a haunting mystery." He had made a promising beginning himself in the "Carnival of Crime"; then Robert Louis Stevenson had come closer with Jekyll and I but, Twain continued, upon learning of a distinction which the French had been drawing between the waking person and the person under hypnosis, he had arrived at a new concept of duality. "My dream-self, is merely my ordinary body and mind freed from clogging flesh and become a spiritualized body and mind and with the ordinary powers of both enlarged in all particulars a little, and in some particulars prodigiously." The DreamSelf, he believes, is free in time and space, and "When my physical body dies my dream body will doubtless continue its excursion and activities without change, forever." B4

  No more than the image of the DreamSelf "as insubstantial as a dim blue smoke" finds its way into "Chronicle," in Philip Traum's lovely trick of thinning out like a soap bubble and vanishing. Many of the other distinctions and powers reappear directly and with embellishments, however, in the various incarnated Dream-Selves of "No. 44." Two of these distinctions are neither fantastic nor farcical. Schwarz pleads eloquently with August and then with Number 44: "Oh, free me from . . . these bonds of flesh . . . this loathsome sack of corruption in which my spirit is imprisoned, her white wings bruised and soiled-oh, be merciful and set her free!" For the moment, Twain is able to take his idea of duality seriously and to lend Schwarz fictional life. The second distinction-that the dream body will continue on its excursion forever-foreshadows the "Conclusion of the book" and the prospect of August, as a "homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

  The "Conclusion of the book," which has so moved and challenged readers of The Mysterious Stranger since 1916, argues the extreme Platonic view that the final and only reality resides in the individual soul, all else being illusion-or that "life is a dream." (It is a view Emerson entertained only to reject it in Nature.) Although it is a key that fits nothing in the plot of the "Schoolhouse Hill" fragment, it does fit much of the action and imagery in "Chronicle" and nearly everything in the second half of "No. 44," the manuscript which it was written to conclude. The sources and analogues for it in Clemens's earlier writings, his reading, and his experience, enmeshed with his creation of Satan figures and his speculations about dreams, are extraordinarily various and complex. Here it may suffice to suggest only the chief sources of Twain's solipsistic idea.

  Mark Twain began the "St. Petersburg Fragment" and "Chronicle" about a year after the death of his beloved daughter Susy, and he finished his "Conclusion of the book," "No. 44," in the summer of his wife Olivia Clemens's death. On the first anniversary of Susy's death he wrote one friend, "I suppose it is still with you as with us-the calamity not a reality, but a dream, which will pass, -must pass." ' To another, he said six years later about Olivia's illness, "For a year and a half life, for this family, has been merely a bad dream."' Still later, after Olivia had died, he told Susan Crane of a lovely and blessed dream of Livy who leaned her head against his while he repeated to her, "I was perfectly sure it was a dream, I never would have believed it wasn't." 87 This persistent sense of reality-in-dreams permeates Twain's long analysis of Waking-and Dream-Selves in a notebook entry of January 1897, and gave rise in the same mont
h to an idea for a "farce or sketch" of people who seem to have "slept backward 60 years." 88 The dream motif began to carry over into his fiction, notably "My Platonic Sweetheart." This sketch of the summer of 1898 tells of a recurrent dream of idyllic meetings between the narrator and his charming girl, both timelessly young, in settings ranging from Missouri to India and ancient Athens-each dream like "Mohammed's seventy-year dream, which began when he knocked his glass over, and ended in time for him to catch it before the water was spilled." 88 In many respects this sketch anticipates the love passages and the ending of "No. 44." Twain kept on trying variations based upon his dream donnee. He began three stories of family disaster, the first of them called "Which Was the Dream?," also in the summer of 1898.71 lie conceived of "a drama in the form of a dream" 71 which he mentioned in a speech in 1900, and a year or two later he jotted down the idea, "divorce of the McWilliamses on account of his dreamwife and family." 72

  This welter of ideas in notes and fragments, this effort made over and over ag:iin to give form to the dream motif, began to cone clear in the spring of 1904, not long before Twain either wrote or had firmly in mind his last chapter; it was in these months that he probably wrote a note and he certainly wrote a letter couched in the language and imagery of the "Conclusion of the book." The note concerns "The intellectual & placid & sane-looking man whose foible is that life & God & the universe is a dream & he the only person in it-not a person, but a homeless & silly thought wandering forever in space." " The letter, dated 28 July, is in response to Twichell's question as to how life and the world had been looking to Clemens: