Fame & Folly

by Cynthia Ozick

  But there was another side to fin-de-siècle Vienna: its underside. Vienna was (then and later) notoriously, stingingly, passionately antisemitic. The familiar impulses that jubilantly welcomed Hitler’s Anschluss in 1938, and defiantly elected Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, as president of Austria in 1986, were acted upon with equal vigor (and venom) in 1898, when the demagogue Karl Lueger held office as Vienna’s popular mayor; and Lueger was a preparatory template for the Nazi politics that burgeoned in Vienna only two and a half decades on. In Mark Twain’s Vienna, the cultural elite included prominent Jewish musicians and writers, among whom he flourished companionably; his daughter Clara married Ossip Gabrilowitsch, a Russian Jewish composer-pianist and fellow music student. These warm Viennese associations did not escape the noisome antisemitic press, which vulgarly denounced Mark Twain either as Jew-lover or as himself a secret Jew.

  In 1898, the European press in general—whether in Paris or Brussels or Berlin or Vienna or even Moscow—was inflamed by an international controversy: the fever of the Dreyfus Affair was erupting well beyond France itself, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, had been falsely incriminated on a charge of treason. Polity after polity was split between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards; and in Vienna, Mark Twain boldly stood for Dreyfus’s innocence. In 1898, Zola published his great J’Accuse, and escaped arrest by fleeing to England. It was the year of a vast European poisoning, by insidious sloganeering and hideous posters and caricatures; no single country went unsullied.

  And it was in this atmosphere that Mark Twain sat down to write “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”—a story about a town in which moral poisoning widens and widens, until no single person remains unsullied. No one can claim that the Dreyfus Affair, a conspiracy to entrap the innocent, impinged explicitly on Mark Twain’s tale of a citizenry brought down by revenge and spreading greed. But the notion of a society—even one in microcosm, like Hadleyburg—sliding deeper and deeper (and individual by individual) into ethical perversion and contamination was not far from a portrait of a Europe undergoing the contagion of its great communal lie. The commanding theme of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is contagion; and also the smugness that arises out of self-righteousness, however rooted in lie it may be.

  Hadleyburg’s lie is its belief in its own honesty; it has, in fact, sheltered itself against the possibility of corruption, teaching “the principles of honest dealing to its babies in the cradle,” and insulating its young people from temptation, “so that their honesty could have every chance to harden and solidify, and become a part of their very bone.” Yet the absence of temptation is commonly no more than the absence of a testing occasion, and when temptation finally does come to Hadleyburg, no citizen, despite stringent prior training, can withstand it. Dishonest money-lust creeps over the town, first infiltrating a respectable old couple, then moving from household to household of nineteen of the town’s most esteemed worthies. An archetypal narrative, it goes without saying: the devil tempting the seemingly pure, who turn out to be as flawed as the ordinary human article usually is. The Faustian bargain trades innocence for gold.

  A first reading of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”—i.e., a first reading now, nearly a century after its composition—is apt to disappoint through overfamiliarity. It is not that familiarity lessens art; not in the least; more often it intensifies art. The experience of one Hamlet augments a second and a third, and this is as true of Iolanthe as it is of Shakespeare; but surely we don’t go to Hamlet or Iolanthe for the plot. In the last several decades Hadleyburg, as the avatar of a corrupted town, has reappeared in short stories by Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”) and I. B. Singer (“The Gentleman from Cracow”), and in The Visit, a chilling drama by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. And not only through such literary means: in the hundred years since Mark Twain invented Hadleyburg, a proliferation of story-appliances (radio, film, television, and video-recorders), spilling out scores of Hadleyburgs, has acquainted us with (and doubtless hardened us against) the stealthy despoliation of an idyllic town by a cunning stranger. Hadleyburg, for us, is largely a cinematic cliché worn down, by now, to a parody of itself; nor do we have any defense against our belatedness (to use a critical term made famous by Harold Bloom).

  But all that applies only to a first reading, when what will stand out is, mainly, the lineaments of the narrative itself. Behind the recognizable Faustian frame are two unlikely categories of ingenuity. The first touches on the identity of the tempter. Hadleyburg, we are told, “had the ill luck to offend a passing stranger … a bitter man and vengeful.”

  All through his wanderings during a whole year he kept his injury in mind, and gave all his leisure moments to trying to invent a compensating satisfaction for it. He contrived many plans, and all of them were good, but none of them was quite sweeping enough; the poorest of them would hurt a great many individuals, but what he wanted was a plan which would comprehend the entire town, and not let so much as one person escape unhurt. At last he had a fortunate idea, and when it fell into his brain it lit up his whole head with an evil joy.

  We know no more than this about the injured stranger and never will know more. (Here the illustrator has supplied a gloating figure in overcoat, top hat, and cravat, rubbing his hands together and hooking his feet around the legs of a chair. Ears, nose, and chin are each pointedly pointed, and you almost expect to catch the point of a tail lashing behind.) There is no shred of a hint concerning the nature of the offense, or exactly who committed it. This forcefully suggests the Demiurge, who hates the human race simply for its independent existence, especially when that existence is embroidered by moral striving; the devil requires no motive. And as the powerful sovereign of a great and greatly populated kingdom, he has no need of revenge. The Demiurge’s first and last urge is gluttony—the lust to fatten his kingdom with more and more souls. Vengeance is clearly a human trait, not the devil’s; so we may conclude that the “passing stranger” is, in truth, no different in kind from any indigenous citizen of Hadleyburg, and that the vengeful outlander and the honest native are, in potential and surely in outcome, identical.

  And, indeed, at the end of the day, when Hadleyburg has been fully corrupted, there is nothing to choose between the “evil joy” of the schemer and the greedy dreams of the townsfolk who scheme to enrich themselves through lies. The contest is not between the devil and man, but between man and man.* And it is not so much a contest as a confluence. In other words, we may be induced to imagine that all the citizens of Hadleyburg are “passing strangers”: strangers to themselves. They have believed that they are one thing—pure hearts burnished and enameled by honesty—and they learn that they are another thing: corruptible, degraded, profoundly exposed.

  Then is the corrupter of Hadleyburg not the devil? And if he is not, is there, after all, no Faustian frame? Is what we have, instead, the textual equivalent of the sort of optical illusion that permits you to perceive, with unqualified clarity, two different pictures, but never at the same instant? Nearly everyone has experienced the elusive vase that suddenly shows itself as a pair of silhouettes, and the maddening human profiles that unaccountably flash out of sight to reveal a vase: is this the conceptual design of Mark Twain’s narrative? That the outline of the corrupter is inseparable from the outline of the corrupted—that they are one and the same, ineluctably and horribly fused—but that our gaze is barred from absorbing this metaphorical simultaneity? A far more subtle invention than the Faustian scaffold on which this tale has always been said to depend.

  On the other hand, Hadleyburg’s tempter (whether or not he is intended to be a Mephistophelean emblem) does have a palpable identity of another kind—one we can easily grasp; and this is Mark Twain’s second category of ingenuity. The stranger is a man who relishes the manipulation of words: certain phrases must be reproduced, and they must be precisely the right phrases, every syllable perfected. When a sack is deposited at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Richards, an explanatory note is
attached. The note is far from brief; it has a plot, a trajectory, a climactic purpose; it promises as much as the opening of a fairy tale. The sack, it claims, “contains gold coin weighing a hundred and sixty pounds four ounces,” and should be given as a reward of gratitude to the unknown Hadleyburg citizen who long ago unwittingly earned it. The sack’s donor was once a gambler who was spurred to reform because a man of the town gave him twenty dollars and spoke a sentence that “saved the remnant of my morals.” That man, the schemer’s note continues—and we have understood from the beginning that all this is a spurious concoction—that man “can be identified by the remark he made to me; I feel persuaded that he will remember it.”

  This is a story, then, that hangs on a set of words—fictitious, invented words—and as the narrative flies on with increasing complexity, devising painful joke after painful joke, it soon becomes clear that “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is less about gold than it is about language. A sentence that is almost “correct” but contains a vagrant “very,” is deemed fraudulent; eventually all versions of the elusive remark fall under a cloud of fraudulence, and threaten the town, and expose its infamous heart. And ultimately even hard gold coin is converted into language, in the form of written checks. It is language itself, even language subjected to comedy, that is revealed as the danger, as a conduit to greed, as an entangler in shame and sin and derision.

  Which probably does return us to the devil. And why not? Mark Twain, early and late, is always preoccupied with the devil and his precincts: the devil is certainly the hero of The Mysterious Stranger (a work that is also a product of Vienna), where he is a grand imaginer who appears under the name of Dream, though his dreams are human nightmares, and his poetry destroys. In this view (and who will separate it from Mark Twain’s metaphysical laughter?), the devil is a writer, and the corrupter of Hadleyburg a soulless figure who comprehends that words can carry more horror, and spread more evil joy, than any number of coveted treasures in a sack: even in the saving light of ridicule.

  AND IF WE are returned to the devil and his precincts, we are also returned to Vienna. Under the purposefully ambiguous title “Stirring Times in Vienna,” Mark Twain published in Harper’s, in the latter part of 1897, four pieces of journalism reporting on sessions of the parliament of the Hapsburg empire, then known as Austria-Hungary—a political amalgam of nineteen national enclaves that endured for fifty-one years until its dissolution after the First World War. The Austrian parliament, situated in Vienna, and conducted in German (the empire’s official language), is, in Mark Twain’s rendering, a non-homogeneous Hadleyburg corrupted well past mere greed into the contagion of chaos and contumely. The Hadleyburg townsfolk are uniformly named Richards and Burgess and Goodson and Wilson and Billson; and yet their interests conflict as if they held nothing in common. In the Austrian parliament it is certain that nothing is held in common: the native languages of the members are Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, German, etc., and the motley names correspond to their speakers’ origins. What is at issue, in December of 1897, is a language dispute. The Bohemians are demanding that Czech replace German as Bohemia’s official language; the government (i.e., the majority party) has acceded. But the German-speaking Austrians, who comprise only one-fourth of the empire’s entire population, are enraged, and are determined to prevent the government from pursuing all other business—including the ratification of the indispensable Ausgleich, the renewable treaty of confederation linking Austria and Hungary—unless and until German is restored in Bohemia.

  The analogy with Hadleyburg is not gratuitous. Here again the crux is language. In Hadleyburg there are nineteen worthies complicit in the turmoil of communal shame; in the Austrian parliament there are nineteen states. And just as the nineteen leading citizens of Hadleyburg furiously compete, so do the Austrian parliamentarians: “Broadly speaking, all the nations in the empire hate the government—but they all hate each other too, and with devoted and enthusiastic bitterness; no two of them can combine; the nation that rises must rise alone.” And if we can recognize in Hadleyburg the dissolving Austria-Hungary of the 1890’s, we can surely recognize the disintegrated components of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990’s. Hadleyburg may be emblematic of the imperial parliament in Vienna seventeen years before the outbreak of war in Sarajevo in 1914; even more inescapably, it presages the fin-de-siècle Sarajevo of our own moment.

  Yet there is a difference—of reportage—between Mark Twain’s Vienna and contemporary Bosnia that turns out to be not quite what we would expect. The facsimile volume presents us with a pair of century-old photographs, one showing the exterior of the parliament, the other a violent interior scene. The parliament buildings appear to stretch over three or four city blocks, with all the majesty of a row of imperial palaces. The interior—“its panelled sweep relieved by fluted columns of distinguished grace and dignity, which glow softly and frostily in the electric light”—offers a mob of unruly screamers, a good number of them clubbing their desks with wooden planks. The photographs are necessarily static and silent, and we might be induced to feel technologically superior in a news-gathering way to a generation that perforce had to do without CNN or Court TV (not omitting the impact of the Army-McCarthy hearings of the 1950’s); whereas we have television (and the prose of Peter Arnett). Vienna in 1897 had only Mark Twain; and imagination confirms which medium overpowers (or, as we are wont to put it, “outperforms”) which. What TV anchor, accompanied by what “brilliant camerawork,” can match this introspective portrait of the parliament’s Polish president?

  He is a gray-haired, long, slender man, with a colorless long face, which, in repose, suggests a death-mask; but when not in repose is tossed and rippled by a turbulent smile which washes this way and that, and is not easy to keep up with—a pious smile, a beseeching and supplicating smile; and when it is at work the large mouth opens, and the flexible lips crumple, and unfold, and crumple again, and move around in a genial and persuasive and angelic way, and expose large glimpses of teeth; and that interrupts the sacredness of the smile and gives it momentarily a mixed worldly and political and satanic cast.

  As for the rest of the assembly, they are “religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews.”

  Mark Twain’s dispatches reached New York without tampering. The imperial press was subject to a heavy and capricious censorship; so it is possible that the readers of Harper’s were more intimately informed of the degradation of an allegedly democratic parliament than the citizens of Austria or of its eighteen coequal provinces. The tactics of the Opposition—i.e., of the Germans who refuse to allow the Czechs their own tongue—begin reasonably enough, in parliamentary fashion, with a heroic one-man filibuster lasting twelve hours. At the speaker’s first words, however, decorum instantly and repeatedly gives way to yells, the beating of desks with long boards, and the clamor of threats and name-calling astonishingly gutter-bred. (The members of the assembly include princes, counts, barons, priests, lawyers, judges, physicians, professors, merchants, bankers—and also “that distinguished religious expert, Dr. Lueger, Bürgermeister of Vienna.”) A number of these shouted declarations vibrate with a dread familiarity, as if a recording of the sounds of the Vienna of 1938 are somehow being hurled back into that earlier time, forty years before: “The Germans of Austria will neither surrender nor die!” “It’s a pity that such a man [one willing to grant language rights to the Czechs] should be a leader of the Germans; he disgraces the German name!” “And these shameless creatures are the leaders of the German People’s Party!” “You Jew, you!” “I would rather take my hat off to a Jew!” “Jew flunky! Here we have been fighting the Jews for ten years and now you are helping them to power again. How much do you get for it?” “You Judas!” “Schmeel Leeb Kohn! Schmeel Leeb Kohn!”

  But let us not misrepresent by overselection. Tainting their opponents with “Jew” may be the most scurrilous offense these princes, counts, barons, priests, judges, etc.,
can settle on, but it is not the most imaginative. There are also the following: “Brothel-knight!” “East German offal-tub!” “Infamous louse-brat!” “Cowardly blatherskite!”—along with such lesser epithets as “Polish dog,” “miserable cur,” and “Die Grossmutter auf dem Misthaufen erzeugt worden” (which Mark Twain declines to translate from the original).

  In short: a parliamentary riot that is soon to turn into street riots. The fourth and last dispatch records the arrival of the militia:

  And now we see what history will be talking of five centuries hence: a uniformed and helmeted battalion of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the floor of the House—a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force!… They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the door.