The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (3 page)

Four versions of the narrative are to be distinguished in the three manuscripts:

Version A. The first may be called the "St. Petersburg Fragment" (Tuckey's "Pre-Eseldorf" pages). It consists of nineteen manuscript pages preserved from a version of the story which was
set in St. Petersburg. They were written after Mark Twain's arrival
in Vienna in late September 1897 and were revised and worked
into the early part of Version B. A number of canceled references
to St. Petersburg identify the original setting. For black walnuts
(which are Missouri trees) Twain later substituted chestnuts, for
dollars he later substituted ducats, and for the village bank he wrote
in the name of Solomon Isaacs, the moneylender. He substituted
Nikolaus for Huck, Theodor for George (Tom in the notes),
Father Peter for Mr. Black, Seppi for Pole, and Wilhelm Meidling
for Tom Andrews "of good Kentucky stock." References that
placed the story in the 1840's of the author's boyhood were deleted.
The action includes Satan's lecture on the Moral Sense, Mr.
Black's finding of the dollars, and the stir this discovery makes in
the village.

Version B. "The Chronicle of Young Satan" ("Eseldorf," as
DeVoto referred to it) is Mark Twain's own title for a story of some
423 manuscript pages which breaks off in mid-chapter in the court
of an Indian rajah, where Satan is competing with the court magician. The main setting is Eseldorf, an Austrian village, in 1702; the
action begins in May. The chief characters are the narrator Theodor Fischer and his youthful companions Seppi Wohlmeyer and
Nikolaus Baumann; Father Peter and Father Adolf, the good and
evil priests; Marget, the niece of Father Peter, and Ursula, their
servant; Wilhelm Meidling, Marget's suitor; Lisa Brandt and her
mother. Finally there is the stranger, known to the villagers as
Philip Traum, although at home he is called Satan, after his uncle.

Mark Twain wrote "Chronicle" in three periods between November 1897 and September 1900, not long before he returned to
the United States from Europe, free from his "long nightmare" of
debt. In the first period from November 1897 through January
1898 in Vienna, Twain reworked the "St. Petersburg Fragment"
into a plot sequence which develops the character of Father Adolf
and then tells of the boys' first encounter with Satan, Father Peter's
trial on the charge of stealing Father Adolf's gold, and Father
Peter's vindication.'
Twain concluded in the following months, however, that he had resolved the conflict between the priests too rapidly, and apparently he decided that for Satan to drive Father Peter into a state of "happy insanity" at the very moment when the old man was proved innocent would provide the true ending he was seeking. So, returning to his manuscript between May and October 1899, Twain put aside the trial scene and developed further episodes, mixing into them Socratic dialogues on the workings of the Moral Sense.'
Theodor recalls the story of the girls burned as witches because of fleabite "signs" and tells how Gottfried Narr's grandmother had suffered the same fate in their village.'
The village is forced to choose between charging Father Adolf with witchcraft and suffering an Interdict. Fuchs and Meidling suffer pangs of jealousy because Lilly Fischer and Marget become infatuated with Satan and his knowledge and creative skills. This spurt of sustained composition ended approximately with Twain's summary passage early in chapter 6:

What a lot of dismal haps had befallen the village, and certainly Satan seemed to be the father of the whole of them: Father Peter in prison . . . Marget's household shunned . . . Father Adolf acquiring a frightful and odious reputation . . . my parents worried ... Joseph crushed . . . Wilhelm's heart broken . . . Marget gone silly, and our Lilly following after; the whole village prodded and pestered into a pathetic delirium about nonexistent witches . . . the whole wide wreck and desolation . . . the work of Satan's enthusiastic diligence and morbid passion for business.

Twain wrote the remaining half of "Chronicle" from June through August 1900, in London and at nearby Dollis Hill. His hatred of cruelty (which would lead him to begin a book about lynchings in the United States) continued to manifest itself in
passages that showed the burning of Frau Brandt at the stake for
blasphemy, the punishment of the gamekeepers, Theodor 's presence at the pressing to death of a gentlewoman in Scotland, and the
Eseldorf mob's stoning and hanging of the "born lady."

Satan's freedom in time and space and his godlike powers also make possible two new strands of action: he changes the lives of Nick and Lisa to bring on their drowning, and he refers to future -that is, contemporary-events. In the spring and summer of 1900, Clemens was increasingly angered by the role of the European powers in the Boxer Rebellion; and, despite his admiration for the British and their institutions, he became increasingly committed to the cause of the Boer Republics. Satan refers sardonically to both situations in chapters 6 and 8.

Nearly all the episodes thus far lead to the deferred episode wherein Father Peter is exonerated and goes mad, the conclusion toward which Twain presumably had been working. But the pressure of world events and Twain's sense that he probably would not publish this book in his lifetime carried him on. King Humbert the Good of Italy was assassinated by an anarchist at Monza on 29 July 1900 and died excommunicated. Pope Leo XIII subsequently forbade priests to recite a "tender prayer" composed by Queen Margherita that already had been widely repeated in Italy and the Catholic world. Twain must almost at once have seized upon this as "proof" of the doctrine of papal infallibility.10
His version of the event probably inspired the famous generalization on the power of laughter-and the failure of the human race to make use of its one great weapon. Then Twain added a parable on the price the British might have to pay for their tenure in India; and the Indian setting inspired him to begin another "adventure" of Satan and Theodor in the court of a rajah. At this point the manuscript ends.

Version C. "Schoolhouse Hill," or the Hannibal version, a fragment of 16,000 words, is first adumbrated in Mark Twain's notebook in November 1898. His entry begins:

Story of little Satan, jr, who came to (Petersburg (Hannibal)) went to school, was popular and greatly liked by (Huck and Tom) who knew his secret. The others were jealous, and the girls didn't like him because he smelt of brimstone. This is the Admirable Crichton He was always doing miracles-his pals knew they were miracles, the(y) others thought them mysteries. He is a good little devil; but swears, and breaks the Sabbath. By and by he is converted, and becomes a Methodist. and quits miracling. . . . As he does no more miracles, even his pals(s) fall away and disbelieve in him. When his fortunes and his miseries are at the worst, his papa arrives in state in a glory of hellfire and attended by a multitude of old-fashioned and showy fiends-and then everybody is at the boy-devil's feet at once and want to curry favor.

Little Satan, Jr., is also to perform tricks at jugglery shows, to try to win Mississippi raftsmen to Christ, and to take Tom and Huck to stay with him over Sunday in hell.11
The complete entry, with Mark Twain's working notes, shows that for the moment he had put the trial sequence of "Chronicle" aside and was making a fresh start in a mood of comedy. Whereas "Chronicle" is the first-person narrative of young Fischer, the six chapters of November and December 1898 are told by an omniscient narrator. Apparently, it was to be both an essay in the correction of ideas and a comedy set in the world of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, whose boyhero would like to reform and save it.

The miraculous boy, now renamed 44, appears one winter morning in the St. Petersburg school and performs marvels by reading books at a glance and learning languages in minutes. With Tom and Huck on his side, he fights and puts down the school bully. The Hotchkiss family take him into their home, where he feeds and talks to the savage family cat. And, after saving Crazy Meadows and others from a blinding blizzard, he appears miraculously at a seance. Here the manuscript ends.

In the rest of the story, Twain's notes suggest that he intended to
picture once more some of the life of his own I boyhood as a background for 44's tricks and miracles and reforms. But he also planned to introduce two serious actions. Forty-four was to fall in love with "Hellfire Hotchkiss" and to discover how tame, how "purely intellectual," was the happiness of hell compared to this mortal love. He was also to form an Anti-Moral-Sense Sundayschool and to print his own catechism with the aid of "slathers of little red . . . devils" specially brought up from hell. ("If Satan is around, and so much more intelligent and powerful than God, why doesn't lie write a Bible?" Twain wrote in his notebook in June 1898).12

Why Mark Twain let this story lapse after a moderately promising beginning when he had dozens of ideas for continuing it is
problematical. Perhaps certain inherent contradictions within the
character of 44 and in his projected actions proved too great for
Twain to resolve. Apparently he wanted to make his stranger both
a boy and an angel, both a companion to Tom and Huck and a
Prometheus-figure who was to enlighten the citizens of St. Petersbur; concerning the damnable Moral Sense. The strain of this
double purpose, only a little evident in "Chronicle," appears more
clearly here.

Version D. "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger," or "Print Shop"
version, is a story of 530 manuscript pages, set like "Chronicle" in
Austria, but in 1490, not long after the invention of printing. Late
in 1902 Mark Twain altered the first chapter of his "Chronicle"
manuscript to fit this new setting; but, intending to revise further,
he left the linkages to his new version loose and imperfect. Father
Adolf and Father Peter, for example, who are important in "Chronicle," play only minor roles in the new plot, and Marget and
Wilhelm Mcidling never reappear. Between November 1902 and
October 1903, while in Florence for his wife's health, Twain wrote
chapters 2 through 7 or 8, which represent the trials of No. 44 as a
printer's devil in a "mouldering" castle. Most of the printers abuse
him, but Katrina, the cook, and Heinrich Stein, the master, openly support him, and August Feldner, the young narrator, secretly
sympathizes with him. These chapters reach their climax when 44
masters the printing trade in a few hours, and, just as a major
printing job is nearing completion, the compositors call a strike
against the master.

Twain completed the next sequence, from chapters 8 or 9
through 25, in the first six months of 1904. In this stretch of
narrative, 44 saves Stein from ruin with the help of the wandering
jour printer Doangivadam and Katrina and August. He completes
the Bible-printing contract by creating invisible Duplicates of the
printing force (shades of Colonel Sellers as a scientist!), creates
havoc in the castle by incarnating the Duplicates, and immolates
himself before the entire group. In this fashion, the print-shop
action comes to an end. Except for the parable of human suffering
embodied in the plight of Johann Brinker and his family, Twain's
new plot complications tend to be either fantastic or feeble. FortyFour plays tricks on Balthasar Hoffman, the magician, and on
Father Adolf, and he explains the difference in the human psyche
between the Workaday-Self and the DreamSelf. By the time August Feldner/Martin von Giesbach falls in love with Marget Regen/Elisabeth von Arnim and grows jealous of Emil Schwarz, his
DreamSelf's embodiment, Mark Twain has turned the idea of double personality into the triad of Waking-Self, DreamSelf, and Immortal Spirit and has even endowed Schwarz with some of the
powers of 44. All these developments take place in something like
a dramatic vacuum.

When Twain returned to the story in June and July 1905 in
Dublin, New Hampshire, he evidently saw that his grip on the plot
had weakened, for he destroyed some of the most recent pages and
"Burned the rest (30,000 words) of the book this morning. Too
diffusive"-that is, a block of the story following chapter 19. He
managed to make his new matter (chapters 26 through 32) considerably livelier than his love story, although it is still "diffusive" and
disjointed. FortyFour transforms Marget's maid into a cat, plays
Mister Bones in a Christy minstrel show, simultaneously attacks
Mary Baker Eddy and Imperial Russia, undergoes a second apotheosis, and releases Emil Schwarz from the bonds of flesh. He satirizes a sentimental poem and turns time backward. Somehow, in the midst of this farrago of burlesque and satire, Twain created a minstrel-show vignette memorable for its humor and sentiment, and composed Schwarz's eloquent, serious, and startling plea for release from the bonds of "this odious flesh."

The plea of Schwarz to his alter ego for freedom also prefigures the "empty and soundless world" in which August is left after 44's historical pageant of skeletons has passed by. This episode, placed here as chapter 33, was written last, in 1908, and Twain may have intended it as an alternate ending to the whole. The "Conclusion of the book," however, is his own notation at the head of the dreamending-the six manuscript pages written in the spring of 1904 and placed in this text as chapter 34. It seems more likely therefore that he wrote the pageant chapter as part of an effort-never fulfilled -to link the body of his story to the "Conclusion of the book."

Characters

Twice Mark Twain tried to place his fable of man's meanness and misery in "St. Petersburg" and the years of his boyhood, and twice he found it necessary to move it to Austria and a remoter era. Though he tended to regard time and place as unimportant and easily changeable, his effort to reuse the "Matter of Hannibal," as Henry Nash Smith has called it,19
suggests that he may have been drawing characters from memory. The likelihood grows as one reads "Villagers of 1840-3," a manuscript of late 1897 which was written shortly before Twain composed the "St. Petersburg Fragment," the first sequence of "Chronicle," and "Schoolhouse Hill." For "Villagers" is an impressive set of thumbnail biographies of persons in Hannibal that suggests total recall, modified by black humor. Most of the names, as Dixon Wecter and Walter Blair have shown, were names of real persons, though a few, including the Clemenses', were disguised."