The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (81 page)

Mark Twain had written in his notebook on 6 January
1897 an idea for a farce or sketch involving a backward
shift in time, a dream backward in time, in which Chaucer was to appear (Notebook 31, TS pp. 41-43).

1 MTSatan.

2 "Introduction," DE, XXVII, ix-x.

p. 130.

r ---
' After suggesting that the generalized source for The Mysterious Stranger was
chapter 20, "L'Hermite," of Voltaire's Zadig, and that Goethe's Faust might have
contributed picturesque events, Cowper wrote in a footnote: "When he was over
seventy, Mark Twain was going over with Paine a number of incomplete manuscripts. They found three forms of The Mysterious Stranger and agreed that one
could early be made ready for publication. Seemingly nothing was done to complete it. Twain died in 1910 and the story was not published until 1916. It is
evidently not a finished work." His analysis appears in "The Hermit Story, as
Used by Voltaire and Mark Twain," In Honor of the Ninetieth Birthday of
Charles Frederick Johnson, ed. Odell Shepard and Arthur Adams (Hartford,
1928), p. 333. Fussell perceived a constant conflict in the published story between the author's "emotional reactions" and "his theoretical formulations,"-a
conflict partially inherent in the manuscript on which the posthumous edition
is based, it may be noted, and partially caused by Paine's editorial tampering
("The Structural Problem of The Mysterious Stranger," Studies in Philology,
XLIX [January 1952], 103).

s "Introduction," DE, XXVII, X.

• The reference here is to the original, clothbound edition (University of California
Press, 1969).

MTSatan, pp. 14-15.

7 In the present text, the sequence runs through chapters 1 and 2, the opening
of chapter 3, and part of chapter 10. See MTSatan, pp. 38-39.

O The reference to arr's grandmother, who "cured bad headaches by kneading the person's head and neck with her fingers," places the writing of this
passage some time after July 1899. See Explanatory Notes.

8 written in London and in Sanna,LSweden, constitute chapThese episodes,
ters 3 through 5 of the resent text.

10 MTSatan, pp. 49-50.

11 Notebook 32, TS p. 50. MT's holograph manuscript of this and all other
notebooks cited are in MTP. The entry is printed with Mark Twain's workingnotes in Appendix B of this volume. Passages enclosed in angle brackets are
canceled in the original.

12 Notebook 32, TS p. 25.

13 "Mark Twain's Images of Hannibal: From St. Petersburg to Eseldorf,"
Texas Studies in English, XXXVII (1958), 3-23.

14 "Villagers of 1840-3" is included in HH&T. See also SCH, p. 128.

16 Orion Clemens had died on 11 December 1897.

15 SLC to Frank E. Burrough, 15 December 1900 (TS in MTP).

17 MTSatan,_pp.J17-23.

l6 "Stirring lies in Austria," Hadleyburg, p. 323.

Appendix B, SCH, pp. 131-133; HH&T, Appendix A.

20 ark Twain's Letters to Will Bowen, ed. Theodore Hornberger (Austin,
1941), p. 18. Even Dr. Wheelwright, "the stately old First-Family Virginian and
imposing Thinker of the village,' is probably a sketch from life of the "aged
Virginian physician Dr. [Humphrey] Peake" as Wecter notes in SCH, p. 67; see
also HH&T, Appendix A.

22 Notebook 35, TS p. 12 (10 May 1902); MT's workingnotes, in Appendix
B; "Villagers," HH&T.

21 MTHL, p, 195.

23 Probably in the summer of 1848 according to Wecter, SCH, p. 202. The
fictional Moses Haas, "never good for 600 on a fat take," sounds like the compositor-editor of Clemens's boyhood, "full of blessed egotism and placid selfimportance," who would "smouch all the poetry" on the day before publication
and 'leave the rest to 'jeff' for the solid takes,' described in "The Compositor,"
Hartford Courant, 20 January 1886.

24 Autobiographical Dictation, 29 March 1906, TS in MTP; MTA, II, 276282; SCH, pp. 204-205, where Dixon Wecter notes the similarity.

25I am expanding the trinity defined by Coleman 0. Parsons in his "The Devil
and Samuel Clemens," Virginia Quarterly Review, XXIII (Autumn 1947), 595600. Much the fullest summary and discussion of influences in literature and life
before Tuckey is Parsons's "The Background of The Mysterious Stranger,"
American Literature, XXXII (March 1960), 55-74. Behind Philip Traum, Parsons shows the figures of Pausanias in Adolf Wilbrandt's The Master of Palmyra,
Goethe's Mephistopheles, the angel Jesrad in Voltaire's Zadig, and of course the
boy Savior of the Apocryphal New Testament.

28 "Is Shakespeare Dead?." What Is Man?, pp. 307-310.

See Appendix 9.

27 Satan's genealogy in Mark Twain's thought has been brilliantly outlined by
Coleman Parsons; see note 25 above.

29 HH&T, pp. 44-45.

80 MTB, p 146;Parsons, The Devil and Samuel Clemens, p; 593.

H3 MT-TB, pp. 252-253. This key source was first noted by Gladys Bellamy in
Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman, Oklahoma, 1950), pp. 352-353. See
1. Infancy, Chapter XV, 1-7 and Chapter XIX, 3 and II. Infancy, Chapter I in
The Apocryphal New Testament, 2d ed. (London: William Hone, 1820).

82 Notebook 28, TS pp. 34-35 (10 November 1895). Clemens had long since
learned the art of scoffing satire under the pseudonym Mark Twain, and also
under the convention of a foreigner's writing letters home on his first visit to a new country-for example, Ah Song Hi's letters to Ching-Foo in Twain's early
sketch, "Goldsmith's Friend Abroad Again" (The Curious Republic of Candour
[New York, 19191, pp. 75-109). Satan's "Letters from the Earth" is only one of
several series that show Mark Twain an expert in the convention.

88 J4adleyburg, pp. 215-25 1.

33 Notebook 28, TS y. 51 (8 December'1895). One of the things that Satan
said, "with discontent,' was, "The trouble with you Chicago people is that you
think you are the best people in hell-whereas you are merely the most numerous"
(MTN, p. 324). The entry was made about I January 1897.

'* Euro,e,.pp _211-220..

NotetoolC ,32a, TS p. 37; MTSatan, p. 31.

"Tuckey lists the dales of composition for all the manuscripts in a very useful
table; MTSatan, p. 76. ^ ^'^ T

37 The manuscript, Paine 255 in MTP, has Mark Twain's room at the
Metropole for its settin._

42 "The Stupendous Procession," a "fearful document" indeed as Paine called
it, presents a pageant of warring nations, slaughter, and corpses presided over by
a 'Frivolous Stranger." The piece was intended for New Year's Day, 1902;
MTB, pp. 1149-1150 prints a few paragraphs; MS is in MTP (DV345). "Sold
to Satan' conjures up the devil, glowing with radium and clothed in a skin of
polonium (Europe, pp. 326-338, written 1903-1904). "That Day in Eden
(Passage from Satan s Diary)" sadly explicates man's acquisition of the Moral
Sense as the saddest result of the Fall (Europe, pp. 339-346). The offensive
stranger in "The Dervish and the Offensive Stranger' uneasily explains the downfall of the American Indians, the Filipinos, the Boers, and the Chinese (Europe,
P f. 310-314). By 1905, the "aged stranger" of "The War Prayer" takes the
place of a minister in a cathedral to pray for the total annihilation of the enemy in the name of the "spirit of love" (Europe, pp. 394-398). As late as 1909
Mark Twain assumed the mask of Satan once again in the eleven "Letters from
the Earth"-published in Letters from the Earth, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New
York, 1962), pp. 3-55. ^, w -11

89 Hadleyburg, V. 2, 3, 67, 81. Twain offered the manuscript to a publisher
on 2 November 1898 (Notebook 32, TS p. 48).

40 Notebook 32, TS pp. 39-40 (September 1898). This descendant of Lilith
may be the germ for Orrin Lloyd Godkin, one more disparager of the human race,
in "Indiantown" (WWD, pp. 163-166).

*i Literary Essays, "Definitive Edition" (New York, 1923), XXII, 264, 265.

'° Notebook 30, TS p. 53 (post 19 June 1896).

"MTN, p..363.

48 "Villagers" in HH&T.

" See Appendix B.

47 Several parallels exist in W. E. H. Lecky's account of how a Scottish mob
stoned to death a certain Jane Corphar in 1704-1705. Accused of witchcraft, she
had been released by the magistrates; but the minister of the town incited the
mob to beat her in the presence of her two daughters. Eventually the mob had
forced "a man with a sledge and horse to drive several times over her head" (A
History of England in the Eighteenth Century [New York, 1892], II, 331-333).
Mark Twain owned Lecky's History.

48 Mather included in his book the report of a woman's confession at the
stake, in Scotland in 1649:

As I must make answer to the God of Heaven, I declare I am as free from
Witchcraft as any Child, but being accused by a Malicious Woman, and Imprisoned under the Name of a Witch, my Husband and Friends disowned me,
and seeing no hope of ever being in Credit again, through the Temptation of
the Devil, I made that Confession to destroy my own Life, being weary of it,
and chusing rather to Die than to Live (Mr. Sinclare's Invisible World, cited
in The Wonders of the Invisible World [London, 1862], p. 278; original
edition, Boston, 1693).