by Mark Twain
Over a year before the letter to Howells Mark wrote in a notebook, "May 23, 1897. Wrote first chapter of above story today." In his Biography (pages 1041-1042) Mr.
Paine says that the "above story" was about a man who dozes for a moment and is led, by the smell of his burning cigarette, to dream of the destruction of his family and "a long period.of years following. Awakening a few seconds later, and confronted by his wife and children, he refuses to believe in their reality, maintaining that this condition, and not the other, is the dream." He then says that Mark attempted to work out the same idea in the story published here as "The Great Dark." I am not sure, however, that Mr. Paine is right. Unless Mark Twain told him the story that was to elaborate the note (which is possible) or unless he had access to a manuscript which has since disappeared or been destroyed (which is unlikely) he both overinterprets the note and makes a serious mistake about it. The idea of the brief duration of the dream is certainly present in "The Great Dark" and a story embodying it is certainly indicated by the note.
But, although the note does not actually mention the destruction of a home by fire which Mr. Paine has got from somewhere else, it certainly has nothing to do with a sea voyage. And a more important consideration is that it is not the note next "above" the entry of May 23. Between note and entry there is another note and this one lists characters for a story about a voyage. If Mr. Paine is right about the story based on the first of the two notes, then he is certainly wrong in identifying it as the one which Mark began on May 23, 1897. And in my judgment it was not. I interpret the first of the two notes, whether or not it was ever developed into a story, as another recurrence of the idea assigned to "Which Was the Dream?" I interpret the second as relating to a quite separate story, one which Mark did indeed begin when he says he did, and one which, whether it can be identified or not, was closely related to a series of stories about voyages in more or less enchanted waters, a series which did not incorporate the other ideas that were troubling Mark's mind until he wrote "The Great Dark" in September or October, 1898.
Here it is possible to come out of the conjectural for a while. In August, 1897, Mark made a number of notes for a story about a ship that got caught in a kind of Antarctic Sargasso, an area of everlasting gales and snowstorms, in whose very center was a smaller area of everlasting calm through which other ships drifted forever. (If his letter to Howells of a year later did not speak so positively of "Which Was the Dream?" I should be fairly confident that the ten thousand words he had written during that summer were a development of these notes.) The background is extensively worked up, the earlier history of the characters is noted in detail, and preparations are made for an elaborate plot which was also to be an apologue with social and philosophical implications. These notes have an unmistakable bearing on "The Great Dark" and there is a strong temptation to associate them with the letter to Howells. Previously to writing them, moreover, he had written at least one story, and very possibly two, just as clearly related to the one he was now planning. At the end of 1896 or very early in 1897 he had written into the manuscript of Following the Equator a story that purported to be the narrative of a sailor who had once been caught in the eternal storms and the eternal calm at their center. (The storm area was called the Devil's Race Track and the central calm the Everlasting Sunday.) He called this sketch "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness"
but did not finish it and had to omit it from his book.
I cannot prove that the second story was written when I believe it was, immediately after Following the Equator. Proof, if it is possible at all, must await a prolonged study of many other manuscripts and notes that cannot be considered here.
But my present belief is that it developed from the second of two notebook entries I have already mentioned, that it was the story whose "first chapter" Mark wrote on May 23, 1897. It is called "An Adventure in Remote Seas," and in it a sealing ship is driven far into the Antarctic by long-continued storms. It has nothing to do with the Devil's Race Track, but half of the ship's company are abandoned on an uncharted island when another storm drives the vessel out to sea. The theme of "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness," which is also one of the themes of "The Great Dark," is thus repeated in variation -- and in a cave on the island the crew find an enormous treasure of gold coins (note the treasure carried by the Two Darlings). That is as far as the manuscript goes but the notes for its continuation show that, like the story outlined by the notes of August, 1897, it was to be a fable. It was to embody a sermon in intrinsic value and a tract favoring the free coinage of silver!
We have so far, then, the sailor's story about the Everlasting Sunday and the ships becalmed in it and manned by corpses, the sealing-ship story in which the Antarctic waste holds a vast treasure (if my guess about its date may be accepted), and the notes of August, 1897, which outline an intricately wrought story of a ship's company living out their lives in the Everlasting Sunday. It is important to note that none of these stories is told as a dream, that in fact no dream enters into any of them. That is what makes Mark's letter to Howells so baffling. If he had been writing a story about the confusion of dream and reality, there is no unequivocal evidence that it also concerned a voyage in enchanted seas or had any other direct bearing on "The Great Dark."
Both "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness" and the final notes for "The Great Dark"
develop the idea of being eternally becalmed and encountering the mummified bodies of earlier voyagers who had met the same fate. It had been working in Mark's mind for a long time. As far back as 1882, when he revisited the Mississippi, he made a notebook entry in which the idea appears. Here, however, the scene is a balloon caught in a level of the upper air from which there is no escape. Mr. Willis Wager informs me that a short burlesque worked up from this note was actually written into the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi. I have some reason for believing that it may go back further than that --
to the early stages of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," in the late 1860's. Without attaching too much importance to the similarity, one may remember that the famous cave at Hannibal contained a copper cylinder in which an eccentric physician had preserved his daughter's body in alcohol. But whatever its private meaning to Mark, the idea had so firmly taken hold of him that, though only the Antarctic cold can rationally explain the mummies, he carries it over to "The Great Dark" and explains that the heat of the Great Glare has preserved them.
On August 10, 1898, Mark writes in his notebook:
Last night dreamed of a whaling cruise in a drop of water. Not by microscope, but actually. This would mean a reduction of the participants to a minuteness which would make them nearly invisible to God and he wouldn't be interested in them any longer.
Lying, thinking about this, concluded to write a dispute between a microscope and a telescope --
one can pull a moral out of that.
This entry is crucial in the development we are following. It has one discordant --
and exasperating -- implication. The second sentence might imply that he had been thinking about a whaling cruise in a drop of water previously to this date, and that the voyage was to be made by microscope. If he had been, no evidence has survived, and if he wrote anything embodying the idea the manuscript is not in the Mark Twain Papers. However that may be, six days later than the note, Mark writes to Howells that he has now found the right way to write the story he had been unable to finish a year ago. It is now sliding from the pen "with ease and confidence." Was this story some version of "The Great Dark"? If it was, what was the version which he had been unable to write in the summer of 1897 and had abandoned at the end of ten thousand words?
Several notations may be made here. In the first place, the second sentence of the note does not absolutely require the inference I have suggested above, and in fact I do not believe that he had been thinking about a voyage in a drop of water before this dream. My present hypothesis is that this dream was the stimulus which, in the course of the next six weeks, fu
sed his three principal ideas in "The Great Dark" but that, when he wrote to Howells, that fusion was not yet complete. I think that the story which now began to slide so easily from his pen was at first a variant of either our X ("Which Was the Dream?," mentioned in the letter to Howells) or our Y, the story presumably written from the notes of August, 1897. I think, that is, that it was not an immediately related variant of "The Great Dark." And I think, furthermore, that Mark's letter to Howells shows either a faulty memory of what he had done the year before or an as yet unclarified understanding of what he was doing now.
(That last hypothesis is not so wild as it may seem at first glance. As I have shown, Mark did not remember the name of Henry's child from the actual draft of his story to the notes for its completion. Tom Sawyer's name is Bob Sawyer in the first sketch of the story [Mark Twain Papers] and though that alteration may have been deliberate, the published text of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer shows an insoluble confusion about Becky Thatcher's family relationships and even about her home town, a confusion which is increased in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. What is more striking, when he came to write Huckleberry Finn Mark did not remember the name of Tom's sweetheart and did not even pick up a copy of Tom Sawyer to verify it in, so that she has always been Bessie Thatcher in Huck's story. There is even some evidence that between the two books he had forgotten who had undertaken to break Huck to gentility, that he assigned that function to Miss Watson, and that, later remembering the Widow Douglas, he had to make his newly invented character her sister [Mark Twain Papers].
Whatever he may have written with such ease and confidence following the dream and the letter to Howells, we again emerge from speculation and conjecture on September 21, 1898. On that day he made another long series of notes which are obviously related to the dream and even more obviously related to "The Great Dark."
The dream had dealt with a cruise in a drop of water and so do these notes. It is important that a few of the early ones are concerned with the dimensions necessitated by the reduced scale -- and clearly state that this voyage is to occur under a microscope. It is even more important that they take the material of the notes made thirteen months before, in August, 1897, and convert it to the action of a dream story.
This is the first time that the voyage in enchanted waters, with its related tableaus of mummified corpses, has occurred in a dream. That is the crucial step in the development of the story: it seemed to solve the difficulty that had probably made him abandon both "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness" and "An Adventure in Remote Seas"; it provided a way of getting the ship out of the Antarctic waste. What is equally important, it captured by attraction the two other ideas he had been trying to work out, the brief duration of dreams in which many years seem to elapse and the confusion of dream and reality. And, I think, it followed directly from Mark's own dream of August 9. (If I am right, then the scholarly need not play with the theorem that Mark was "influenced" by Fitz-James O'Brien's "The Diamond Lens," though I must conscientiously record that Thomas Bailey Aldrich was a friend of O'Brien's and once told Mark an amusing anecdote about him which was duly deposited in the notebooks.) There remained one further transformation and Mark made it in another, later set of notes, those which accompany the manuscript of "The Great Dark" and from which the story was written. One of the ships in this dream was to carry a great treasure, such as there had been in "An Adventure in Remote Seas" and in the note which is the sole demonstrable reference to a story called "Which Was the Dream?" The story he had been trying to tell in so many apparently unrelated ways now seemed clear in his mind.
Henry Edwards was to dream briefly -- for a few seconds or a few minutes. He was to dream of a voyage in a drop of water which would take him to a place of everlasting darkness and storm. He was to be caught there for many years, during which he was to have many horrible experiences, among them a maddened pursuit of a treasure-ship.
He was to succumb to the dream and, on waking from it, was to believe not only that many years had passed but also that the reality to which he had awakened was a hallucination and his dream was the reality.
The story was begun, I think, soon after the notes of September 21, 1898. I have no way of knowing how long he worked on it, but eventually this version also proved unwritable. The idea had been urgent to the verge of obsession, but this attempt like the others had to be given up. I have mentioned his frequent inability to think the material of fiction into appropriate form, and that inability is evident here. Reasons why it may have been increased at this time will occur to anyone who knows Mark Twain's personal history during the 1890's. And there is one other reason for this particular failure: in spite of his interest in the ideas of the story, in spite of their obvious importance to him, he at no time clearly phrased to himself what he was trying to do with it. As always, his fertile imagination produced many kinds of scenes, many characters, and much action, but he was vague about the ultimate bearing of the story. Why? The answer is to be found not in the story itself but in the plain bearing of its materials. Quite clearly, "The Great Dark"
was, psychologically, a stage on the way to The Mysterious Stranger.
In the early part of the story Mark tries to sustain the feeling of dream imagery.
The confusion of nautical terms is appropriate to the half-aware irrelevance of a dream, and so is the striking combination of a sea chantey and a Negro spiritual which the sailors sing when they are "sheeting home." More striking is the figure of the Superintendent of Dreams. (Kipling's "Brushwood Boy" was published in the Century for December, 1895, but I cannot see that it had the slightest influence on this story.) The Superintendent's appearances and disappearances, his antics and moods, his mysterious balefulness are all dreamlike. He first comes into the notes (those of September, 1898) as a footprint that sometimes appears on the deck, always as an omen of some terrible event to come. Later he is conceived as the architect and stage manager of the dream, which is what he is in the story actually written. But other notes assign him a still more prominent role and he is clearly an unconscious anticipation of Satan in The Mysterious Stranger.
Mark's ambivalent thinking about the Superintendent is characteristic. Here was a very usable character, but exactly what use to make of him was never certain, was something to be worked out by trial and error. He is abandoned entirely in Book II except for the note that has him, in the continuation which Mark did not write, holding the needle of the telltale in a false bearing when Bradshaw brings the crew into Henry's cabin. And the use actually made of him shows another confusion that is typical of Mark's literary thinking. (I have discussed it at length in Mark Twain's America.) His horseplay with the mate's coffee is no doubt true to the emotions of the dream state but it is also wildly out of tune with this story. It introduces burlesque into a somber, even terrible narrative. Henry's boxing and fencing with George similarly threaten, and for some readers must destroy, the illusion that has been so carefully built up. They suggest some of the apparent improvisations of the last quarter of Huckleberry Finn, and, like them, were carefully and enthusiastically planned. [Mark Twain Papers.] Mark says in the letter to Howells already quoted, "I feel sure that all of the first half of the story -- and I hope three-fourths -- will be comedy; but by the former plan the whole of it (except the first 3 chapters) would have been tragedy and unendurable, almost. I think I can carry the reader a long way before he suspects that I am laying a tragedy trap."
This attempt to combine burlesque with "unendurable" tragedy was a serious error in aesthetic judgment but was absolutely in character, for the same error had damaged much of his fiction before this. In effect, whenever he failed to think a conception through its own terms his usual instinct was to turn to burlesque.
There was one further uncertainty and, reaching it, I must account for the editing I have done on the manuscript. I have said that Mark did not clearly understand what he was trying to do with the various themes and situations that went into this story. All except one of them
are fused in it as it is published here. That one was not successfully combined with the others until The Mysterious Stranger but he tried to combine it with them in "The Great Dark."
In "An Adventure in Remote Seas" and in the notes of August, 1897, there is an intermittent but clear intention to provide the story with satirical comments on manners, morals, customs, superstitions, and injustices in society. Mark was afflicted with the same intention when he began to write "The Great Dark" and it was not until he became dissatisfied with the satire that he went back, removed it, and rewrote the story as the pure fantasy it now is.
The vehicle of this social satire was the Mad Passenger (sometimes called the Crazy Passenger in the earliest notes), who is the "stranger at my side" when the company sit down to dinner near the present end of Book I. Following the captain's rebuke to his daughter, which is where the rewritten version begins to diverge from the original one, Henry becomes friendly with the Mad Passenger and forms the habit of dropping into his cabin for conversation. He is a native of one of the floating Empires that circle drifting forever "outside the Great White Glare and just the right distance away from it." It is through him that Henry begins to learn more about Dreamland, one of whose unreal planets, the World, Henry appears to have visited. All "dreamlands were nothing but imitations of real countries created out of the dreamer's own imagination and experience, with some help perhaps from the Superintendent of Dreams." ( The Mysterious Stranger quivers toward birth in that assertion.) In the opinion of the Mad Passenger, the crew and officers are mad, for they are trying to steer the ship by a chart of Dreamland, very likely one of the World. From the conversation on shipboard he has come to understand that civilization in that part of Dreamland is not much different from what it is in his Empire. But there are interesting differences. In his native language, for instance, there are no words for ideas he has encountered here: modesty, immodesty, decency, indecency, right, wrong, etc. And the World is unique among dreamlands, he says, in having what "they term Religions; also curious systems of government and an interesting but most odd code of morals."