The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Literature) (6 page)

The "Conclusion of the book," which has so moved and challenged readers of The Mysterious Stranger since 1916, argues the extreme Platonic view that the final and only reality resides in the individual soul, all else being illusion-or that "life is a dream." (It is a view Emerson entertained only to reject it in Nature.) Although it is a key that fits nothing in the plot of the "Schoolhouse Hill" fragment, it does fit much of the action and imagery in "Chronicle" and nearly everything in the second half of "No. 44," the manuscript which it was written to conclude. The sources and analogues for it in Clemens's earlier writings, his reading, and his experience, enmeshed with his creation of Satan figures and his speculations about dreams, are extraordinarily various and complex. Here it may suffice to suggest only the chief sources of Twain's solipsistic idea.

Mark Twain began the "St. Petersburg Fragment" and "Chronicle" about a year after the death of his beloved daughter Susy, and he finished his "Conclusion of the book," "No. 44," in the summer of his wife Olivia Clemens's death. On the first anniversary of Susy's death he wrote one friend, "I suppose it is still with you as with us-the calamity not a reality, but a dream, which will pass, -must pass."
' To another, he said six years later about Olivia's illness, "For a year and a half life, for this family, has been merely a bad dream."'
Still later, after Olivia had died, he told Susan Crane of a lovely and blessed dream of Livy who leaned her head against
his while he repeated to her, "I was perfectly sure it was a dream, I never would have believed it wasn't."
87 This persistent sense of reality-in-dreams permeates Twain's long analysis of Waking-and Dream-Selves in a notebook entry of January 1897, and gave rise in the same month to an idea for a "farce or sketch" of people who seem to have "slept backward 60 years."
88 The dream motif began to carry over into his fiction, notably "My Platonic Sweetheart." This sketch of the summer of 1898 tells of a recurrent dream of idyllic meetings between the narrator and his charming girl, both timelessly young, in settings ranging from Missouri to India and ancient Athens-each dream like "Mohammed's seventy-year dream, which began when he knocked his glass over, and ended in time for him to catch it before the water was spilled."
88 In many respects this sketch anticipates the love passages and the ending of "No. 44." Twain kept on trying variations based upon his dream donnee. He began three stories of family disaster, the first of them called "Which Was the Dream?," also in the summer of 1898.71
lie conceived of "a drama in the form of a dream"
71 which he mentioned in a speech in 1900, and a year or two later he jotted down the idea, "divorce of the McWilliamses on account of his dreamwife and family."
72

This welter of ideas in notes and fragments, this effort made over
and over ag:iin to give form to the dream motif, began to cone clear
in the spring of 1904, not long before Twain either wrote or had
firmly in mind his last chapter; it was in these months that he
probably wrote a note and he certainly wrote a letter couched in the language and imagery of the "Conclusion of the book." The note concerns "The intellectual & placid & sane-looking man whose foible is that life & God & the universe is a dream & he the only person in it-not a person, but a homeless & silly thought wandering forever in space."
" The letter, dated 28 July, is in response to Twichell's question as to how life and the world had been looking to Clemens:

(A part of each day-or night) as they have been looking to me
the past 7 years: as being NONEXISTENT. That is, that there is nothing. That there is no God and no universe; that there is only empty
space, and in it a lost and homeless and wandering and companionless
and indestructible Thought. And that I am that thought. And God,
and the Universe, and Time, and Life, and Death, and Joy and Sorrow and Pain only a grotesque and brutal dream, evolved from the
frantic imagination of that insane Thought.

By this light, the absurdities that govern life and the universe lose
their absurdity and become natural, and a thing to be expected. It
reconciles everything, makes everything lucid and understandable:
a God who has no morals, yet blandly sets Himself up as Head
Sundayschool Superintendent of the Universe; Who has no idea
of mercy, justice, or honesty, yet obtusely imagines Himself the
inventor of those things; a human race that takes Him at His own
valuation, without examining the statistics; thinks itself intelligent,
yet hasn't any more evidence of it than had Jonathan Edwards in his
wildest moments-a race which did not make itself nor its vicious
nature, yet quaintly holds itself responsible for its acts.

But-taken as unrealities; taken as the drunken dream of an idiot
Thought, drifting solitary and forlorn through the horizonless
eternities of empty Space, these monstrous sillinesses become proper
and acceptable, and lose their offensiveness.

To this point in his letter, Clemens seems almost to merge himself
into the character of the "sane-looking man" with the foible, or of
44 revealing the truth to August. But, Clemens explains to his old
friend, the idea has become a part of him for seven years, for in that
time he has been working on an unfinished story. He continues: "And so, a part of each day Livy is a dream, and has never existed. The rest of it she is real, and is gone. Then comes the ache and continues." He concludes: "How well she loved you and Harmony, as did I, and do I, also."
" Unquestionably Clemens endowed 44 with his own questionings and grievances and griefs.

It would be a mistake, however, to consider this letter unmixed autobiography. It is a moving document, written by Samuel Clemens, who suffers; it is equally a letter by Mark Twain, the long-committed artist who creates. Only a year before his death Clemens expressed elation at his discovery of a new literary form: writing untrammeled letters to his intimate friends like Howells or H. H. Rogers or Twichell and then not sending them. Ile told Howells, "When you are on fire with theology . . . you'll write it to Twichell, because"-in imagination-"it would make him writhe & squirm & break the furniture."
" So, it appears, a literary impulse as well as private sorrow underlies the crucial letter to Twichell. It would also be a mistake to think that Twain had newly discovered the sense of cosmic loneliness which the "Conclusion" brilliantly imparts. More than thirty years earlier he had written, "I felt like the Last Man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world";"
this was his sensation as he stood above a sea of clouds on the crater edge at Haleakala, on Maui.

While Mark Twain wrestled with his final chapter-the only final chapter in the three manuscripts-he was attempting to cope with dream experiences and a haunting sense of isolation that had for long lain deep in his inner life. As Coleman Parsons first suggested, in completing the chapter Mark Twain evidently found powerful catalytic aid in The Tempest."
Schwarz's plea to the "magician" for freedom from the bonds of "this odious flesh" recalls
Ariel's eloquent pleas to Prospero for his release. Moreover, Traum
and 44 share with Ariel the ability to enchant with music, the
globe-girdling swiftness, the antic and mercurial moods (untroubled by any Moral Sense), and the power of melting "into air, into
thin air," as none of their progenitors do-not Satan nor the child
Jesus nor Pan nor the Admirable Crichton nor Twain's own Superintendent of Dreams. Prospero says:

Prospero's tone of great authority and reassurance as he speaks to
the troubled young Ferdinand has its counterpart in the "gush of thankfulness" which 44 releases in August and the "blessed and
hopeful feeling" that his words will prove true. Satan's voice, like
Prospero's, has "that fatal music" in it. Above all, what 44 reveals to
August about the character of human life in the cosmos echoes and
reechoes from Prospero's conclusion: life is as insubstantial as a
dream.

If the similarities are strong, differences and difficulties (apart
from The Tempest's superiority) remain in Mark Twain's "Conclusion of the book." The almost unrelievedly dark tenor of his
letter to Twichell is only half lightened in the "Conclusion" by
blessed and hopeful feelings. Although 44's parting speech is credible insofar as one accepts his authority as a character and his
premises in the argument, what is one to make of his urging August
to "Dream other dreams, and better!"? Does the command to dream
signify a command to create that "so potent art" of which Prospero
and Shakespeare were masters? It is desirable here to repeat that
Clemens valued the creative life above all other lives; it is a vulgar
error to suppose he did not. The difficulty is that 44's injunction,
whether in this or another meaning, cannot easily be assigned to a
God hostile to men in an unmanageable or nonexistent universe.
Of course, Clemens might have revised his manuscripts and this
draft of a chapter, but as the chapter stands, the paradox remains:
mold your life nearer to the heart's desire; life is at best a dream and
at worst a nightmare from which you cannot escape.

The "Mysterious Strangers"

Almost universally, readers have accepted The Mysterious
Stranger, A Romance as a finished, posthumously published work,
and students of Twain have likewise credited Paine's story that his
discovery of the last chapter enabled him to publish the complete
tale. Only when John Tuckey published Mark Twain and Little
Satan in 1963 were these readers and students disillusioned-although recently at least one critic, James M. Cox, has insisted that
this posthumous edition of Mark Twain's last work "is not going to
be superseded by any future text" and that it "is the closest thing to
Mark Twain's intention that we shall ever have."
78 But what Mark Twain actually wrote inevitably supersedes the Paine-Duneka patchwork text, and Mark Twain's "intention"-if by that we mean his effort to achieve a total effect in a completed work-was never fulfilled.

This is not to deny that the cut, cobbled-together, partially falsified text has the power to move and to satisfy esthetically despite its flaws. Perhaps it will last among some readers in preference to the unfinished fragmentary tales here published. But I think it possible that a writer or editor who is more sympathetic to Twain's divided mind and creative dilemma in his late life may, in the future, produce a better version than that pieced together by Paine and Duneka. Perhaps such a writer will imagine a new, wholly satisfying ending to "The Chronicle of Young Satan," or perhaps he will be able to condense, rework, and strengthen "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger" and end it with Twain's last chapter in its proper place. To carry on, flesh out, and conclude "Schoolhouse Hill" would probably be even more difficult, and yet scarcely less rewarding. In any event, such a writer will begin with the texts that Mark Twain wrote in the form in which he left them, acknowledging openly when he selects or modifies or creates or concludes. Finally it must be said that these incomplete texts are Mark Twain's own fragments, large and small, with their own value and interest; and if he produced no finished narrative frieze, he did succeed in creating a multitude of various, memorable figures in the half-sculptured stones.

T WAS 1702-May. Austria was far away from the world, and
asleep; it was still the Middle Ages in Austria, and promised to
remain so forever. Some even set it away back centuries upon
centuries and said that by the mental and spiritual clock it was still
the Age of Faith in Austria. But they meant it as a compliment, not
a slur, and it was so taken, and we were all proud of it. I remember
it well, although I was only a boy; and I remember, too, the
pleasure it gave me.

Yes, Austria was far from the world, and asleep, and our village
was in the middle of that sleep, being in the middle of Austria. It
drowsed in peace in the deep privacy of a hilly and woodsy solitude
where news from the world hardly ever came to disturb its dreams,
and was infinitely content. At its front flowed the tranquil river, its
surface painted with cloud-forms and the reflections of drifting arks
and stone-boats; behind it rose the woody steeps to the base of the
lofty precipice; from the top of the precipice frowned the vast
castle, its long stretch of towers and bastions mailed in vines;
beyond the river, to the left, was a tumbled expanse of forestclothed hills cloven by winding gorges where the sun never pene trated; and to the right, lay a far-reaching plain dotted with little
homesteads nested among orchards and-shade-trees.