The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (4 page)

In the "St. Petersburg Fragment," for example, Tom Sawyer and
Huck Finn were the chums of "Pole" before the author made the names appropriately Austrian-Theodor, Nikolaus, and Seppi. Very likely the name "Pole" was derived from Napoleon Pavey, the son of a Hannibal hotel-keeper. In "Villagers" he "went to St. Louis. Gone six months-came back a striker, with wages, the envy of everybody." He "became second engineer. . . . Got drowned." Sam Clemens had lodged with a Pavey family as a young jour printer in St. Louis from 1852 to 1853.16
Similarly, "Mr. Black" (Father Peter in "Chronicle" and "No. 44") is inspired by Orion Clemens, the good-hearted, dreamy, older brother who vacillated for a lifetime in his religions, jobs, and moods and who had no unkindness in him. Clemens for many years helped support Orion and his wife Molly; they aroused in him both sympathy and acute exasperation. In "Schoolhouse Hill" Oli•ier Hotchkiss, a more complex figure based on Orion, is still sympathetic but often comic. Twain identified him in a marginal note thus: "0 had mental perception but no mental proportion."
16

. Contemporary events in Vienna as well as family and Hannibal history provided Mark Twain with ideas for characters in "Chronicle." Deputies Wohlmeyer and Fuchs in the Austrian parliament during the autumn of 1897 furnished only their names. Father Adolf, however, originally Father Lueger in the manuscript, derived distinct and unpleasant traits from Twain's repeated impressions of Dr. Karl Lueger, Burgomeister of Vienna and leader of the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists.17
The priest's bull voice and gross physique come to mind in descriptions of Deputy Schonerer-"vast and muscular, and endowed with the most powerful voice in the Reichsrath."
18

"Schoolhouse Hill" is closely related to "Villagers" and to Hannibal people other than Orion and Pamela Clemens. Tom and Sid Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Becky Thatcher reappear at a second remove from the humorist's boyhood friends. But the Scottish
schoolmaster, Archibald Ferguson, is a semifictional representation of Sam Clemens's teacher, William O. Cross,"
and the school bully, Henry Bascom, owes a substantial debt to the son of a Hannibal slave-trader, I Beebe, who "kept that envied slaughterhouse" and to whom "Joe Craig sold . . . cats to kill in it."
2° Perhaps the most vital of all the characters is the elderly slave-woman Aunt Rachel, who reports so tellingly the offstage feats of 44. Though Twain may have been drawing on his memories of Aunt Hanner and Uncle Dan'l, his uncle John Quarles's slaves, who had served him more than once as models, he probably was thinking of Aunty Cord, a Negro servant in the Crane household at Elmira, whom he described to Howells in 1877 as "cook, aged 62, turbaned, very tall, very broad, very fine every way."
21 It was Aunty Cord, in the character of Aunt Rachel, whose "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It" Twain sent to the Atlantic in 1874. Of the "Villagers" characters in "Schoolhouse Hill," one more remains whose past life was to affect the plot. Crazy Meadows, whom 44 rescues from the blizzard, is identified in Twain's working notes as "Crazy Fields [who] lost wife, then child; because wife nursed sm. [small] pox patient who had no friend." Further notes linking "C. F." to Dr. James Radcliff of I whose three sons went mad, indicate that Twain intended to present Fields's life history as a paradigm and a commentary on the Moral Sense.`2

Mark Twain carried Father Peter and Father Adolf over from
"Chronicle" to "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," but assigned
them minor roles. Father Peter's niece, renamed Gretchen, quickly
disappears. The magician, in contrast to his predecessor Merlin in
A Connecticut Yankee, serves merely as a cog in the plot. And most
of the compositors in Stein's print shop are present simply to
torment 44 and August Feldner. Four important characters, however, are new: Katrina, Doangivadam, the narrator August Feldner, and Johann Brinker. Each possesses some vitality. All four are related to Clemens's youth or to his early experience as a printer's devil. Twain may have drawn Katrina (who is "swarthy") from his memory of the Negro cook who fed him and two other apprentices in the printing-shop kitchen of Joseph Ament, editor of the Hannibal Missouri Courier.23
Unquestionably he modeled Doangivadam upon Wales McCormick, a fellow apprentice in Ament's shop. As Clemens remembered McCormick, he was a giant of seventeen or eighteen, a "reckless, hilarious, admirable creature," high-spirited and irreverent without limit-and therefore well suited to the fictional role of defending his abused juniors
24 For the most part, August Feldner, the young narrator, is as fearful as his champion is bold, and he comes to life most poignantly when he confesses that the tough compositors fastened upon him a nickname so humiliating he could only hint at its meaning by an abbreviation: "B.-A." he says in the text; "bottle-a'd" Twain writes in a marginal note; "bottle-assed" is the word in printer's jargon. It is a fair guess that August speaks for the youthful Clemens when he says that this "small thing" shamed him "as few things have done since." Brinker's years as a blind and paralyzed deaf-mute-with the suffering they bring for his mother and sisters-follow his performance of a generous deed. His is the fate which Nikolaus Baumann in "Chronicle" escaped by his early death, and it is similar to that of Tom Nash of Hannibal.

Satan, alias "No. 44," is the primary character in all three manuscripts and the most complex in his acts, his satirical bent, the "fatal
music of his voice," his Socratic way of speaking, and his origins.
To adapt Whitman's figure, he forms one side of a Square Deific.25
In Mark Twain's theology, he is the truth-speaker momentarily banished from heaven, the preacher Koheleth, the new Prometheus who is "courteous to whores and niggers."
29 He thus usurps certain functions of Christ the consoler who, says the head clerk in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," has saved as many worlds as there are gates into heaven-"none can count them." The Father of the Old Testament and Missouri Presbyterianism forms the second side of the square-severe, jealous, and vengeful. He is distinct from but sometimes shades into the eternal Creator, the third side, of whom Clemens thought in astronomical terms-a supernal Power not so much indifferent to men as wholly unaware of them. FortyFour is speaking for this last, greatest deity when he tells Theodor that "Man is to me as the red spider is to the elephant."

Of the Quadernity, it is Satan the rebel, nonetheless, who figures most often in Twain's writings and who exhibits the richest development.-'
Young Clemens's first impression of the devil, recorded sixty years later, was so strong that, he says, he tried at age seven to write Satan's biography-only to be frustrated by the paucity of facts and his Sundayschool teacher's shocked resistance.28
If this yarn seems something less than petrified fact, one must credit Clemens's claim that he had read the entire Bible by the time he entered his teens, and take seriously his remembered fear during a thunderstorm that the devil was coming to claim the soul of the original Injun Joe. Even more significant is his recollection of how he and others conspired to abuse the character of Satan in his mother's presence to see how she would react. As they had ex
pected, Jane Clemens was "beguiled into saying a soft word for the devil himself." She could not remain silent or passive when "hurt or shame [was] inflicted upon some defenseless person or creature"not even the arch-sinner
29 Years later, when as a cub pilot on the Mississippi he was reading Shakespeare and Milton, Clemens wrote in a letter to Orion, "What is the grandest thing in 'Paradise Lost' -the Arch-Fiend's terrible energy!"
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Then in 1867, shortly before-be sailed for the Holy Land, the journalist Clemens encountered in a New York library another memorable figure in the apocryphal books of the New Testament. For his Alta California readers he quoted: "Jesus and other boys play together and make clay figures of animals. Jesus causes them to walk; also clay birds which he causes to fly, and eat and drink. The children's parents are alarmed and take Jesus for a sorcerer...." The resemblance of the boy Jesus to Philip Traum is unmistakable."

Satan in the Bible and Paradise Lost and the youthful Jesus of the Apocrypha are thus essential components of the matrix in which Mark Twain shaped his mysterious stranger. Thirty years later, the figure began to take form. The process began, it seems, with Clemens's bankruptcy, the death of • Susy, and Jean's first epileptic seizures, and it continued during Olivia Clemens's decline into invalidism. In 1895 Twain recorded a dominant mood and a ruling idea in this notebook entry: "It is the strangest thing, that the world is not full of books that scoff at the pitiful world, and the useless universe and the vile and contemptible human race-books that laugh at the whole paltry scheme and deride it. . . . Why don't I write such a book? Because I have a family. There is no other reason."
32 That this question relates to the Mysterious
Stranger tales as well as to Twain's "gospel," What Is Man? (which he would begin in 1898), is hinted at in a cryptic entry made a month later, "What uncle Satan said."
'3 By the summer of 1897 Twain was writing "Letters to Satan" inviting His Grace to "make a pleasure tour through the world," assuring Him, "You have many friends in the world; more than you think," particularly Cecil Rhodes and the European Concert."
Then comes the notation late in June, "Satan's boyhood-going around with other boys and surprising them with devilish miracles," and in these words the "St. Petersburg Fragment" and "The Chronicle of Young Satan" were born."

During the next seven years while Mark Twain worked intermittently on the three related manuscripts,36
he also composed a stream of notes and shorter pieces, finished and incomplete, published and unpublished, all concerning some diabolic or angelic stranger. Some time before the Clemens family left the Hotel Metropole in Vienna in the spring of 1898, Twain wrote "Conversations with Satan," a fragment in which the devil appears, dressed like an Anglican bishop, with the features of "Don Quixotte," Richelieu, or Sir Henry Irving playing Mephistopheles, to discuss cigars with Twain.97
Later in 1898 Twain commented on or created three cognate characters. The first is the silent, august, black-clad figure of Death in Adolf Wilbrandt's "remarkable play," The Master of Palmyra, which Mark Twain saw at the Burg Theatre and praised warmly to American readers in the essay "About Play-Acting."
3a
The second is the big, mysterious "passing stranger" of "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," whom Richards in his delirium links to Satan and the "hell-brand."
" The third is Twain's notebook hero-in-embryo, a descendant of Lilith, whose family escutcheon is a plain, clean slate, since he has no knowledge of good and evil, whereas the descendants of the Eve-branch bear the design of an apple core with the motto, "Alas!"40

Twain's opening allegation in "Concerning the Jews," published in September 1899, is that he has no prejudices of race, color, caste, or creed-not even a prejudice against Satan, "on account of his not having a fair show." A crucial passage follows in which he strongly defends Captain Dreyfus, announces that he will undertake Satan's rehabilitation himself-if he can get at the facts and find an unpolitic publisher-and concludes that "A person who has for untold centuries maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilities of the loftiest order."
't This brilliant ironic passage, which may refer to "Chronicle" in the phrase about Satan's rehabilitation, ends most of Twain's peripheral attempts to sketch Satan or to use him for secondary argumentative ends. From the autumn of 1899 on, Twain concentrated his attention upon full, imaginative portraits of Satan and of 44 in the Mysterious Stranger stories."

Mark Twain began many other fables and fictions in the last decade of his writing life and completed a few. But the Satanic stranger who visits the earth and pities and judges men, dominated his imagination and guided his pen in those years, trailing dozens of lesser characters in his angelic wake.

Acts and Concepts

Just as one may glimpse in Clemens's own experience the origins of many characters in "Chronicle," "Schoolhouse Hill," and "No. 44," one may also find in the records of his life adumbrations of acts and concepts in the three stories. Four of these may be termed, by a kind of bastard shorthand, protracted death by water, mob cowardice and cruelty, the Creation minimized, and quarrels and warfare. By developing such motifs, with varying degrees of success, Mark Twain was suggesting that men and women have no need of any hell "except the one we live in from the cradle to the grave."
`e The cause, he argued, was that the race was damned irrevocably, either by an indifferent-because-unconscious God or by the race's own defective nature-he never could decide which. Three other of Twain's concepts may be identified as the powers of laughter, music, and thought; the hierarchy of selves within the self; and the consoling view that life is a dream. These three qualify or explain the first four.

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"