The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (2 page)

This bit of editorial and publishing history will serve to explain
my good fortune in having had two sets of editors to advise me and
inspect my copy. My debt to the editorial board of The Papersto Walter Blair and Henry Nash Smith-and to the Series Editor,
Frederick Anderson, is large, and I am grateful to these scholars. I
also owe particular thanks to John C. Gerber and Paul Baender,
editors of the Iowa-California edition, who gave me professional
counsel for several years prior to the decision to place this volume in
The Papers, and to John S. Tuckey, who laid the foundation for this edition in his monograph, Mark Twain and Little Satan, The
Writing of The Mysterious Stranger.

It is a pleasure to record a debt of a somewhat different kind,
equally real, to three former students: John A. Costello, Priscilla H.
Costello, and Miriam Kotzin. Mr. and Mrs. Costello, who typed the
"No. 44" narrative from photocopy of the manuscript, deciphered
and bracketed into their typescript many of Mark Twain's cancellations out of their own interest in the work. Miss Kotzin did me the
service of retyping and checking against photocopy my own heavily
corrected typescript of Twain's working notes for the three manuscripts. I owe these young scholars thanks. I am fortunate to have
had the professional help of Bernard L. Stein for more than two
years and of Victor Fischer for several months in establishing cancellations and completing the textual apparatus. And I appreciate
assistance in proofreading from Mariam Kagan, Bruce T. Hamilton,
Theodore Guberman, and Robert Hirst.

Barbara C. Gibson, my wife, at nearly every stage in the preparation of this edition invested hours and days in verifying copy against
typescript and photocopy-only she knows how many-and in helping me "break" words or phrases heavily overscored.

Finally, I am grateful to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation for the fellowship during which I began the editorial work;
and to the Office of Education, Department of Health, Education
and Welfare, and the National Endowment for the Humanities
for providing me with indispensable travel and research assistance.
The Office of Education has been the chief supporter of the Iowa
edition; the National Endowment, the chief support of The Mark
Twain Papers through the Center for Editions of American Authors, Modern Language Association of America.

WILLIAM M. GIBSON

March 1968

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

THE TEXTS

The Chronicle of Young Satan

Schoolhouse Hill

No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

APPENDIXES

A: Marginal Notes

B: Working Notes and Related Matter

EXPLANATORY NOTES

MARK TWAIN's The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance, as published in 1916 and reprinted since that date, is an editorial fraud perpetrated by Twain's official biographer and literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and Frederick A. Duneka of Harper & Brothers publishing company. When I first read the three manuscript versions of the narrative in the Mark Twain Papers, like other scholars who had seen them, I found this dismaying conclusion to be inescapable. John S. Tuckey first demonstrated the fact in 1963 in an admirable monograph in which he dated the composition of the manuscripts;1
this publication of the texts themselves offers additional proof. Thus, half a century after a spurious version was delivered to an unsuspecting public in the form of a children's Christmas gift book, the manuscripts are presented here for the first time as they came from their author's hand.

Paine was able to publish the "final complete work"-he said in 1923-because he turned up its essential last chapter in a great batch of unfinished stories and fragments several years after Clemens died in 1910.2
On the basis of incomplete evidence and wrong
dating of manuscripts, Paine's successor as literary editor, Bernard DeVoto, argued that in completing The Mysterious Stranger, Mark Twain "came back from the edge of insanity, and found as much peace as any man may find in his last years, and brought his talent into fruition and made it whole again."'
Two generations of readers have found the published tale as moving as DeVoto did. Although a very few readers and critics, notably Frederick A. G. Cowper and Edwin S. Fussell,'
have been troubled by inconsistencies, especially in the final chapter, most have agreed that the melancholy fable, Twain's last important fiction, formed a kind of Nunc Dimittis.

The truth is that Mark Twain attempted at least four versions of
the story, which survive in three manuscripts. The Mysterious
Stranger represents, partially, the first manuscript in order of composition rather than the last, as DeVoto thought. None of the three
is a finished work, although Twain did draft a "Conclusion of the
book" for the third manuscript with the intent-never fulfilled-of
completing this last version. Further, it is now clear that Paine,
aided by Duneka, cut and bowdlerized the first manuscript heavily.
He borrowed the character of the astrologer from the third manuscript and attributed to the new figure the grosser acts and speeches
of a priest. Then he grafted the final chapter of the third manuscript to the broken-off first manuscript version by cutting half a
chapter, composing a paragraph of bridgework, and altering characters' names. Speaking of his great discovery among the confusion of papers, Paine said, "Happily, it was the ending of the story in its first form."
° Although Paine's loyalty to Mark Twain was great and his rich accumulation of data about Mark Twain's life in Mark Twain: A Biography will always be valuable, two facts must be recorded here. Ile altered the manuscript of the book in a fashion that almost certainly would have enraged Clemens, and he concealed his tampering and his grafting-on of the last chapter, presumably to create the illusion that Twain had completed the story, but never published it. One bit of evidence proves this conclusively: in the all-important final chapter, on the manuscript the names "August" and "44," which Twain had given characters in the last version, are canceled, and "Theodor" and "Satan," characters in the first version, are substituted in Paine's hand.

A case can be made for Paine. When he and Duneka lifted the
magician from the third manuscript, developed this figure into the
astrologer, and used him as a kind of scapegoat, they thought they
were acting to sustain and add to Mark Twain's reputation. They
cut passages that they believed would offend Catholics, Presbyterians, and others for the same reason, and in cutting they did eliminate burlesque passages that clog the story. Moreover, as the experience of thousands of readers attests, the last chapter, although it
was written for another version, does fit this version remarkably
well. Certain "dream-marks" do suggest a dream-conclusion. But
the major and inescapable charge in the indictment of Paine as
editor of The Mysterious Stranger stands-he secretly tried to fill
Mark Twain's shoes, and he tampered with the faith of Mark
Twain's readers.

It follows that the serial text in Harper's Monthly Magazine
(May through November 1916) and the text of the book (published in late October) possess no authority in the preparation of
this edition. The text of the first edition remains chiefly an exhibition of the self-confident taste of the editor and his associate, Duneka-and, it seems likely, of their desire to get out another
book by "Mark Twain." One depressing aspect of their misrepre-sentational editorial work is that they commissioned N. C. Wyeth,
a well-known illustrator of children's books, to illustrate their
altered text, and they let the designer place a fine color engraving of
that nonentity, the "borrowed" astrologer, on the front cover.

The Order of the Manuscripts

Three of Twain's holograph manuscripts in the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California in Berkeley provide the copy-text of this edition. Typescripts of the first and third manuscripts, with a few authorial corrections, possess subsidiary authority. Mark Twain's titles for each, in the order of composition, were "The Chronicle of Young Satan," "Schoolhouse Hill," and "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger." His manuscript workingnotes for the three versions, a long notebook entry about "little Satan, jr.," and a single discarded page of manuscript surviving from revision are included entire in appendixes. Explanatory notes follow.'The
Textual Apparatus describes the texts, sets forth the editorial principles observed, lists the recovered cancellations, and gives all editorial choices or emendations. Here, as elsewhere in the University of California Press edition of The Mark Twain Papers, the intention is to set forth all the evidence for the making of the text.

The present dating of these works follows closely the conclusions of Tuckey, who in Mark Twain and Little Satan made a thorough examination not only of the manuscripts but of the whole body of documents in the Mark Twain Papers from 1897 through 1908, comparing papers, inks, and handwriting for dating clues and making skilled use of internal evidence as well.'
Other literary evidence to be cited supports Tuckey's dating at every point.