One of the first things he may have penned was “Conversations with Satan.” It could have been his initial attempt at “The Mysterious Stranger” stories, one of several false starts since he had first thought of the idea two years previously in New Zealand. Earlier that year he had wondered in his journal why the world was not full of books “that scoff at the pitiful world, and the useless universe and violent, contemptible human race” and had concluded that writing such a book would amount to authorial suicide. He had a family to support, a responsibility that he felt all the more keenly in the wake of his financial problems. In the next few years he would publish a great deal of what he confessed were “potboilers.” Since he couldn’t afford to alienate his readers, he would write the other kinds of books—the kinds he sensed the world needed but would not accept—for his amusement only.
In “Conversations with Satan,” looking down from his hotel room he spots “the figure of a slender and shapely gentleman in black coming leisurely across the empty square” in front of the hotel. The time was somewhat “past midnight,” and Twain was standing before the window of his “work-room high aloft on the third floor of the hotel, and was looking down upon . . . the great vacant stone-paved square of Morzin Platz with its sleeping file of cab-horses and drivers counterfeiting the stillness and solemnity of death.” “It was being whispered around,” he wrote, “that Satan was in Vienna incognito.” The prince of evil was dressed like an “Anglican Bishop.”6 After a brief but intriguing beginning, however, this narrative disintegrates into a boring discussion about German stoves and cigars. Twain next shifted the scene to Hannibal, but only briefly before cannibalizing what is now labeled as the “St. Petersburg Fragment” and using it as part of the first extant draft of “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” Here the scene is the Austrian village of Eseldorf, and the Mysterious Stranger is Satan’s nephew, who, Twain noted elsewhere, begs his uncle for more Christians to gobble up. “The Chronicle of Young Satan” is the second longest (at some sixty thousand words) of the three major versions of the story of the mysterious stranger, including the one called “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” This last, which is also known as the “Print Shop” version, is the longest at 523 manuscript pages. When Paine prepared a version in 1916 for Harper’s, which retailed it as a children’s tale, he silently bowdlerized, cut, and rewrote parts of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” grafting on to it the final chapter of “No. 44.”
Vienna was working its way into Twain’s literary imagination. The lure of the Viennese theater encouraged him to collaborate with the Austrian playwright Siegmund Schlesinger. Apparently, none of their collaborations was successful, and no fragments of their joint authorship survive. The experience did, however, briefly reawaken Twain’s lifelong desire to become a successful dramatist. By early February 1898 he had completed a farce entitled Is He Dead? Based on his short story, “Is He Living or Dead?” which had appeared in Cosmopolitan for September 1893, it concerns the painter Jean-François Millet, who fakes his own death in order increase the value of his paintings. By August 1898 Twain was convinced that the play was best consigned to the fire. “I started in to convince myself that I could write a play or couldn’t,” he told Rogers. “I’m convinced. Nothing can disturb that conviction.” Like Colonel Sellers, this play needed the skills of a better dramatist. In the case of Is He Dead? its production had to wait more than a century—for David Ives’s embellishment, upon which the play opened on Broadway in 2007 and ran for four months.7
The family’s social schedule was filled with dinners and recitals. Livy, probably for health reasons, limited her socializing, though she did host regular receptions in their quarters at the Metropole. Clara accompanied her father to the other events while Jean stayed home with her mother and Katy Leary, the Irish maid who had been with them for so many years in Hartford. By then Jean was indisposed, having already suffered six epileptic attacks. Her parents, as they confessed to the first Viennese neurologist they consulted, were afraid to tell her the real cause of her difficulty, saying instead that the attacks were merely ordinary fainting spells.8 Besides going to social events, Twain also took an interest in the city’s political situation, which was never dull.
As he noted in “Stirring Times in Austria,” a longish essay he published in Harper’s in March 1898, the Austro-Hungarian nation was a “patchwork quilt” of at least nineteen smaller nations or peoples who spoke different languages and held their so-called brothers of the empire at a distance and often in contempt. Twain was prompted to write his essay after witnessing a near riot in the Reichsrath on November 26, 1897. Noting that the legislators came from all walks of life and social levels—“princes, counts, barons, priests, peasants, mechanics, laborers, lawyers, judges, physicians,” and so on—he concluded with this shocker: “They are religious men, they are earnest, sincere, devoted, and they hate the Jews.”9 As a result of this public comment and possibly others, Mark Twain was often mistaken for a Jew in Vienna, an identification that was exacerbated by his essay in Harper’s for September 1898 entitled “Concerning the Jews.” It was around the time of the Dreyfus Affair in Paris, about which Twain unsuccessfully proposed to write a book (even drafting its first chapter), and the anti-Semitism in Vienna was more virulent than anywhere else in Europe.
Forty years down the road, Vienna became the Austrian center for Hitler’s Gestapo, which was in fact headquartered at the Hotel Metropole (blown up by a U.S. bomb in 1945). Vienna, indirectly at least, became the birthplace of the “Final Solution,” in which six million European Jews perished, for it was while Hitler was working as a laborer in Vienna that the “danger of Judaism” had abruptly dawned on him. In the words of his architect and chief of armaments, “Many of the workers with whom he was thrown together had been intensely anti-Semitic.” In fact, one of Hitler’s principal mentors later on was Dr. Karl Lueger, who as mayor of Vienna during Twain’s stay in the city engaged in anti-Semitic propaganda.10
Twain’s defense of the Jewish people contained certain prejudices readily noticed today. Yes, he wrote, the Jew was smarter than everyone else (the central basis for hostility toward him, Twain added, not the Crucifixion), always took care of his own in need, and never required state welfare, but, because he had been systematically shut out of most professions, became the most professional at making money (“They all worship money,” wrote the man who had once envisioned himself one of the richest in the world with the success of the Paige typesetter). Moreover, Twain continued, the Jew did not fully participate in the improvements of society (“When the Revolution set him free in France it was an act of grace—the grace of other people; he does not appear in it as a helper”) but tended instead to be a parasite on it. Twain never used the word “parasite” in “Concerning the Jews,” but this prejudicial commonplace of its day among Gentiles was implied when he wrote that few had participated in the military defense of the countries they inhabited. He was quickly challenged on this point and readily conceded it in a later postscript. In his essay he voiced some of the predictable canards against Jews. For the most part, however, such statements were overlooked because of the otherwise positive spin Twain put on the subject. These types of defenses were difficult to produce without incurring criticism. When Theodore Dreiser echoed some of the same sentiments in his defense of Jews during the 1930s, when anti-Semitism was turning deadly in Germany, he was roundly excoriated in the American press. (Ironically, his books had been banned in Germany because its censors thought “Dreiser” a Jewish name.)11
It becomes clear in Twain’s essay that, to this Gentile, the Jewish people were an alien force. They were a force that he admired but did not altogether trust—the way the residents of a small Missouri town are wary of strangers—for example, David Wilson in Pudd’nhead Wilson. While saying that the Jew “seems to be very comfortably situated” in Viennese society, Twain wrote, he is nevertheless “substantially a foreigner wherever he may be, and even the angels dislike a foreigner.”
He was using the word “foreigner,” he said, “in the German sense—stranger. Nearly all of us have an antipathy to a stranger, even of our own nationality.”12 Just as the Jew was a stranger in whatever country he called home, the Mysterious Stranger was alien among humankind—with souls to be harvested on the grandest scale. Neither the Jew nor the Stranger was condemned by Twain; in fact, both were applauded for bringing more good into the world than the supposed do-gooders or reformers.
He had no prejudices against the Jew, he declared in the opening of “Concerning the Jews”: “I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse. I have no special regard for Satan [either]; but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him.” And indeed he hadn’t, ever since—as noted earlier—he had sat at his mother’s knee as a boy and heard her ask, “Who prays for Satan—the one sinner that needed it most?” Ten years later, in one of his many statements that have become marketed as “Mark Twain Quotes,” he told Henry W. Ruoff, another stranger, who was compiling a list of those who had most influenced the world, “Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is the lightning that does the work.” Ruoff had left off of his list Christ and Satan, who were the thunder and lightning of the Twain quote. In other words, Christ saved only one Christian in a hundred. Satan intimidated the other ninety-nine into heaven: “Satan’s influence was worth very nearly a hundred times as much to the business as was the influence of all the rest of the Holy Family put together.”13
By the time Twain began writing “Concerning the Jews,” he had already launched “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” His work and his social life were interrupted by Orion’s death in Keokuk on December 11, 1897. The surviving brother added a one-time bonus of fifty dollars to the fifty he had been sending Orion and Mollie for years, even through his worst financial times. “Clara and I had started into society,” he told Rogers, “and were dining and lunching and going to operas, and were getting at times cheerful once more; . . . but we are all once more under a cloud, through the death of my brother, and have resumed our former seclusion.”14; This period of confinement no doubt allowed him not only to make good progress on “Young Satan” but also begin “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” about a town where there is yet another stranger.
48 Winter Fantasies
“Yes, sir, there is a Devil,” Twain told one of his “closest friends”; “but you must not speak disrespectfully of him, for he is an uncle of mine.”1 “The Chronicle of Young Satan” is a dreamlike sequence of events. Little Satan tells the boys to call him Philip Traum, the surname being German for “dream.” It seems almost intentional that the narrative, like most dreams, remains a fragment, for Twain was writing a number of them in Vienna and even just before. They were lazy recollections of his childhood in Hannibal, which had now become invested with the supernatural. In July 1897 he wrote out what amounts to an annotated list of the people, events, and social customs he remembered from Hannibal, calling the manuscript “Villagers of 1840–[5]3.” Never intended for publication, it was a feat of remarkable memory and a way of collecting and organizing material for further fiction. A month later he wrote, or began, “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” a story about a tomboy who performs a nearly miraculous rescue of a schoolmate who resembles Orion in his awkwardness. These works bled into the “St. Petersburg Fragment” and “The Chronicle of Young Satan.” Twain was thrashing about, telling Frank Bliss of the American Publishing Company that he would be surprised to finish another book “within the next three years.” To Rogers he announced, on November 10, 1897, the beginning of a new book (probably “The Chronicle of Young Satan”), but he added that of all the work “which I have begun since last August I have finished not one single thing.”2 “The Chronicle,” which he put down for an extended period at least once, breaks off suddenly.
A year earlier he had very likely been reading William James’s Principles of Psychology— either the 1890 first edition or, more probably, the considerably shortened Psychology: Briefer Course (1892). He clearly did not read William James until 1896, for in 1894 he had told his wife that, while he had been visiting the Howellses in New York City, Eleanor Howells had “convinced” him that James was “right” about “hypnotism & mindcure,” the latter a remedy he then hoped would aid his daughter Susy. He ordered his own copy of James’s “psychological book” while in London in 1896.3 He may have met Sigmund Freud in the winter of 1898, whose Interpretation of Dreams was published in Europe a year later (though postdated 1900). When Twain gave his first public lecture in Vienna, on February 9, 1898, Freud was in the audience to hear “our old friend Mark Twain in person,” as he told a colleague. Twain, doing bits and pieces from his world tour material, that night included “The First Melon I Ever Stole.” Years later Freud alluded to the telling of this story in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), recalling that, as Twain began the tale, he stopped and feigned doubt as to whether it was the first watermelon he had ever stolen.4 It is plausible that Freud, on the brink of world fame, had a similarly direct impact on Twain, who consulted eminent physicians in Vienna about Jean and certainly could have encountered Freud in the process.
In the spring of 1897 Twain had begun writing “Which Was the Dream?” It employed his own recent life story to suggest that reality and the dream world are arbitrary and indistinguishable. The following year he started “The Great Dark,” another family romance gone sour. He framed the idea in a notebook entry: “Last night [I] 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 & he wouldn’t be interested in them any longer.”5 Not only did this focus on tragedy in miniature anticipate “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” but it also reflected the sentiments of Little Satan in his “Chronicle.” While doing magic tricks for the boys Theodor Fischer (the narrator) and Seppi Wohlmeyer, Philip Traum creates clay workmen who construct a castle. When they act like humans and quarrel amongst themselves, their creator casually reaches out and crushes them, to the shock of the two boys. Subsequently, the workers cry over “the crushed and shapeless bodies” as Little Satan ignores them. “Often you would think he was talking about flies,” the narrator observes.6
Echoing the thesis of What Is Man? (also begun, or recommenced, in the winter of 1898), Satan’s nephew insists that man deserves everything that happens to him. This is because he is at bottom utterly selfish—and guilty because of his Moral Sense, or knowledge of right and wrong. All other animal life, characterized here by the “brute,” inflicts pain innocently because it possesses no distinction between right and wrong, Little Satan tells the boys. But man with his Moral Sense does know the difference and thus inflicts “pain for the pleasure of inflicting it.” With the Moral Sense, we are told, man can choose, and “in nine cases out of ten he prefers the wrong.”7 This idea, however, clashes head-on with the insistence that man lives in a deterministic world in which every move, however slight, is already planned out by God. The quandary we are left with is whether or not man is guilty in a world in which he ultimately cannot choose.
That same winter, in the midst of all his dreamscapes and philosophical pondering, Twain produced the one small masterpiece to emerge out of his twenty months in Vienna—“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” In a town like St. Petersburg or Dawson’s Landing, Had leyburg’s nineteen leading citizens wake up to the fact that they are primarily motivated by greed. Two real-life events helped to crystallize this tale for him. The first was the parliamentary riot in the Reichsrath, where—as Twain noted in “Stirring Times”—roughly nineteen different states were represented.8 This raucous event was merely transferred to the Hadleyburg town hall. The second was the death of Orion. Edward and Mary Richards, the principal characters in the Hadleyburg story, remind us of that ever impoverished couple in Keokuk, Orion and Mollie Clemens. The stranger in the story is simpl
y on furlough from the realm of “The Mysterious Stranger,” here a vengeful adult. He is probably imagined as European, perhaps even that “slender and shapely gentleman in black” described in “Conversations with Satan,” for he calls himself a foreigner “grateful to America” and he says he will soon go “back to my own country.”
The mood of the story is decidedly Austrian in the formal way the characters react to one another. The town hall is draped in “festoons of flags.” Its seating capacity is five hundred or more, not exactly the typical forum for a small American town like Hadleyburg. One night the stranger, who has led a dissolute life, drops off a sack of fake gold coins at the Richards household, saying that it should be given to the unknown person who helped him in a time of need when he passed through the town a year or two earlier. Since he does not know the name of this Good Samaritan, that person must identify himself by revealing what he said to the stranger when he helped him with a twenty-dollar loan (“You are far from being a bad man; go, and reform”). These words are contained in an envelope inside the sack. The stranger asks the Richardses to entrust it to the Reverend Burgess. Soon word of this visitation to a town that cherishes its reputation for honesty gets published in the local paper, and all the pre-chosen “Nineteeners” (as they are called) show up at a packed town hall, each with an envelope containing the words alleged to have been said to the stranger. In the interim the stranger has sent a second letter containing the winning phrase not only to Richards but secretly to the other eighteen leading citizens as well. One by one, at a meeting as disruptive as the one Twain witnessed in Vienna, Burgess opens the envelopes of the first eighteen to reveal the same statement and the obvious fraud.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 44