At last, the true Twain revealed. I enjoyed writing this piece as it appeals my nihilistic tendencies. During class study on this work, I mentioned that I had read this work when I was 14, and based my world view on the famous quote from the end of the book. The class laughed in shock, and a classmate patted me on the back and said “You’re not just an idea!” I think that’s the problem.
I just found a typo. And I ended the last paragraph with a preposition. Bah.
“….he might be … a mysterious
stranger who was a god and stood face to face with God above the clouds…”
–Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad
In 1835, the year of Samuel
Clemens birth, the skies above Florida, Missouri were aglow with the spectacle
of Haleys Comet. Comets had long foretold coming disaster; the very word
“disaster” refers to the evil influence of the stars. Samuel Clemens would face
more than his share of success in his life, but it was disappointment and
despair that marked the end of his life.
Mark Twain’s posthumous work
The Mysterious Stranger has been shrouded in controversy since it was first
published in 1916. Twain wrote at least four different stories in three
manuscripts that could have been his intended version of this work. The heavily
edited 1916 serialization is the most often read, though many modern scholars
claim that No. 44 is the work Twain intended. These versions of differing lengths
and plots had one thing in common: a conclusion of utter despair and
disillusionment.
Though each had its own
different structure and style, they each described a man or boy with divine
powers who apparently regards humanity as nothing more than playthings. Each
work ends with the same striking passage:
"It is true, that which I have revealed to
you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven,
no hell. It is all a dream -- a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but
you. And you are but a thought -- a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a
homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"
He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.
Mark Twain had lived an
enviable life of wealth and world travel, and still he wrote that all is
nothing. Though he only held this opinion at the darkest moments of his life,
these moments became more frequent at the dawn of the twentieth century and the
close of his life.
Mark Twain’s cynical nature
is apparent in his earliest big success, Innocents Abroad. His attacks
on hypocrisy and organized religion appealed to his readers and contributed
greatly to his success. While his famous novels show playful disrespect toward
clergy and worship, his lectures, essays and letters depict Twain unfurled…with
religion, government, and society besieged by his razor wit. Christianity,
which attained new levels of pomposity during the Victorian era, vexed Twain to
the extreme. “If Christ were here there is one thing he would not be–a
Christian,” he says in his Mark Twain’s Notebook. Despite his oft-quoted
anti-Christian proclamations, Mark Twain was not an atheist. Throughout his
life he referred to God and man’s immortal soul as extant. In Mark Twain, A
Biography, Twain is quoted as saying “I have never seen what to me seemed
an atom of proof that there is a future life. And yet – I am inclined to expect
one.” He was able to separate his criticisms from his somewhat limited
spirituality throughout most of his adult life. In his later years, events
caused him to harden.
Twain’s success in the
1880’s left him a wealthy man, but the 1890’s saw not only the collapse of the
Gilded Age, but the fall of Twain’s fortune. His massive investments in the
Paige Typsetter and the Charles L. Webb company were lost when both ventures
failed in 1894. Nearly destitute, he sold his Hartford home and many of his
belongings. In the end, he was forced to begin a world lecture tour that would
last two years. The tour was extremely successful and Twain’s wealth was
restored. Unfortunately, other events would weigh heavily on his mind. During
the trip home from England, Twain’s daughter and biographer, Susy, died. Her
death was gruesome and protracted, culminating in blindness and paranoid
delusion. Twain had endured the death of other family members stoically, but he
blamed himself for Susy’s lonely death. In letters to his wife, he expressed
his hope that Susy had kind words for him towards the end. He searched the house
in vain for some evidence of her love for him, but in the end, there was
nothing to comfort him.
In the world at large,
fighting in Russia and the Philippines frustrated him. With sarcastic rage he
wrote letters and essays railing against the tyranny of aristocracy and the
injustice of capitalism. His commercial writing suffered, with only the
disappointing Joan of Arc and Following the Equator published.
In 1900, Twain published a
collection of short stories lead by The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg. Like The
Mysterious Stranger, this story features a mysterious stranger with unusual
powers who comes to town and exposes the weaknesses in human character. Unlike
The Mysterious Stranger, some of the townspeople redeem themselves through
charitable actions towards their fellow man, and the reader is left with a
small sense of hope.
After this work very little
is published, but Twain’s letters to friends and family show that he was a
troubled man. In 1902, his wife Livy became and ill and steadily worsened over
the next two years. Two weeks before her death in 1904, Twain wrote his friend
and mentor William Dean Howells the following:
What I have been wanting is a chance to write a
book without reserves - a book which should take account of no one's feelings,
and no one's prejudices, opinions, beliefs, hopes, illusions, delusions; a book
which should say my say, right out of my heart, in the plainest language and
without a limitation of any sort. I
judged that that would be an unimaginable luxury, heaven on earth.
It is under way, now, and it is a luxury! an
intellectual drunk. Twice I didn't
start it right; and got pretty far in, both times, before I found it out. But I am sure it is started right this
time. It is in tale-form. I believe I
can make it tell what I think of Man, and how he is constructed, and what a
shabby poor ridiculous thing he is, and how mistaken he is in his estimate of
his character and powers and qualities and his place among the animals.
The book he is almost
certainly referring to is The Mysterious Stranger. Twain’s excursion into
self-indulgence, written “right out of (his) heart,” is a book of despair and
nihilism. For the first time, he let his “dark twin” loose. He was no longer
simply poking fun at organized religion, but preaching a new religion of
nothingness. Only in the collection of works called The Mysterious Stranger do
we see this side of Twain so fully.
Tragedy
continued to influence Twain throughout the time he worked on The Mysterious
Stranger. Not long after Livy dies, his daughter Jean is sent to a sanitarium
for her epilepsy. Years later, after returning to Twain’s new home, she dies
suddenly during a bath time seizure. Though these events had a tremendous
impact on Twain, he never wrote another work as dark as The Mysterious
Stranger.
Twain spent his career
furthering the cause of the realist movement as evidenced by his life-long
correspondence with William Dean Howells, the father of American realism. While
the realist movement contained a message of morality, many realist writers
leaned towards the amoral naturalism. While Twain’s letters show that he never
completely abandoned the moral aspects of the realist movement, his “luxury” in
The Mysterious Stranger is a brief visit to this nihilistic worldview. A world with
no God, no meaning and no afterlife is perhaps comforting to a man who has seen
his family suffer and die, his dreams collapse, and his world continue down a
path of cruelty. To people of faith his message is shocking. To those in pain
and despair, his message is hopeful that someday, the pain will end. Twain’s
brief message of nihilism was a salve to his wounds.
Ultimately, Twain restrained
himself from indulging in solipsism. Though not as prolific as his earlier
years, he continued writing right up to his death in 1910, often through
dictation. His last published book, Christian Science, was reminiscent of his
earlier The Literary Offenses of Fenimore Cooper, where he takes a sarcastic
and humorous approach to criticizing another’s work. He also continued to play
billiards and steadfastly nurtured his friendships through frequent letters.
These actions do not seem appropriate for a man in utter despair.
When Haleys Comet returned in 1910, it spelled the end of Mark Twain. His dark years had passed, and his long string of personal tragedies was finally at an end. During his life, he wrote often about hope. His hopes for racial equality, for caring government and goodwill towards fellow man have forever been imprinted on the American experience. Having written about hope and despair, it is the hope that he is most remembered for.