The Mysterious Stranger (1916)

I read this in the Delphi kindle product for Mark Twain, which is not clear about which of many possible versions of his unfinished last novel it is. It sounds most like the one described in Wikipedia as the “Paine-Duneka text of 1916,” which is where I get my publication date six years after Twain’s death. Most of his work on it was reportedly done between 1897 and 1900. The Paine-Duneka was slapped together from fragments and various arguably untoward editorial additions, inserted surreptitiously, and it is considered by some to be a literary fraud. So caveats, caveats. What I read more or less worked. Three boys are enchanted by a powerful figure named Satan who hates humanity, often with good cause. He claims to be an angel and a “sinless” nephew of the actual Satan. But he is often casually and astonishingly cruel. In many ways Twain’s conception of Satan here is less as a cackling hooved madman with a pitchfork and more as an irresistible seducer, which ultimately makes him an unnerving character. The three boys love him madly and miss him badly when he is gone. In his spiritual style he is more authoritarian, for example using magic to make it impossible for the boys to speak of him credibly even when they want to. They simply can’t get the words out of their mouths. I thought Twain was formally an atheist, but this is a deeply Judeo-Christian view of the universe, where God is more democratic (if still jealous), granting free will, such as it is. I like that and what I really like is how seductive Satan is. He performs simple miracles for the boys, such as filling their pockets with their favorite fruits, but he works on many readers, including me, with his utterly rational denunciations of humanity. When you’re right you’re right, amirite? Lots of great stuff going on here. Just using the name Satan is bold and effective, continually making us uncomfortable. Then his character. He’s likable. You can even see how people hope he likes them too. He’s like John Wick in his tender regard for animals and ruthless consequences for humans. His idea of mercy is to kill someone quickly. And the boys just go on liking him and liking him. The narrative itself seems to be the most unfinished part. Here it involves lost and found or stolen bags of gold coins and a criminal court trial with a callow attorney. My favorite fragment is the one called “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” where Twain’s great cynical rejections take over. He died a bitter man and there’s some explanation for that here. My sympathies remain all with him.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

“The War Prayer” (1905)

This very short story by Mark Twain is painfully obvious, although I am sympathetic with its views and have even had my own experience that resonates with it. When I say very short I mean it—under five pages. Better to call it a parable complete with readymade moral, as it was written in response to US imperial adventuring in progress for the previous decade. A preacher on a Sunday morning is giving volunteers the patriotic sendoff. War fever is in the air. Then a strange man no one knows steps up, saying he is a messenger from God sent to finish the prayer. It’s more or less a depiction of what they’re praying for from the enemy’s viewpoint—death, dismemberment, and destruction. My experience like this happened shortly after 9/11—on the following Friday, 9/14, which President Bush Jr. had designated as a “day of remembrance.” Fair enough. It also happened to be the 20th anniversary of the death of my mother, and though I had little regard for the Bush-Cheney administration I was shaken up like most people by the array of 9/11 events. I couldn’t get the thought out of my head for weeks of those thousands of people crushed under tons of rubble. And the images of that day have been branded into many of us as well—the planes hitting, the towers collapsing, people leaping to their deaths to get away from fire. They are so traumatic, and have become so sacred, that it is still considered in poor taste to speak of them. Don’t call 9/11 iconic or the greatest anything. Anyway, feeling the need to be with others on this day of remembrance, I attended a public gathering in downtown Seattle that featured a lot of political mucky-mucks who were evidently lost about how to respond. They were uniformly uninspired and uninspiring. The moments of silence were the best part. They prayed. One talked about the guns of retribution roaring, which disappointed me. I wish the strange man in “The War Prayer” had been there to speak. He had things to say to a bunch of these people that they really needed to hear. Yes, they are painfully obvious things. But even so they don’t necessarily reach anyone. Twain never published “The War Prayer” in his lifetime. Friends and loved ones urged him not to, saying it would be taken as sacrilegious. Thus has it ever been.

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“King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905)

Wow, what a crazy long piece from Mark Twain this is. Published originally as a pamphlet, it presents itself as a first-person ranting defense by Belgium’s King Leopold II of his colonial adventuring and the Congo Free State. Everything about the Congo Free State I know I basically learned by reading this. Of course I know how terribly Europe has treated Africa for quite some time. The Congo Free State was chiefly about harvesting rubber. Leopold and his private corporate entity enslaved natives for the purpose, and they were brutal about it. My Delphi kindle product version of the pamphlet includes at least some of the original illustrations, which include photos of men, women, and children with amputated hands and other limbs—punishment for not working quickly enough or to quota or whatever. As political satire, this piece is far more bitter than witty. Leopold is an empty vessel of pompous rationalizing. He claims some advances in the quality of native lives, but has no defense for the brutality beyond being within his rights. I should also mention that the piece is a mess on my kindle version. Also, full disclosure, after reading all of the Twain material I’ve written about (and a couple more) the dang kindle product froze up on me and has never worked since. Another $2.99 wasted! (actually, the majority of these invaluable Delphi “shelf” products that I’ve picked up—everything in public domain by a single author in one place—have been very useful and worth every nickel and penny of the $2.99) Some of the text from the pamphlet was printed as sidebars in text-boxes, which were incorrectly converted into largely illegible pictures and thus mostly lost. Not to worry—the online Gutenberg version is correct and available in numerous formats. The HTML looked good. But to the point, I appreciate Twain’s outrage here. The things he describes are terrible, and arguably even more terrible because the Congo Free State for whatever reasons was left out of my education. Twain’s piece is more a long, bludgeoning rant than true satire. You’re likely to imagine some spittle landing on you as you go. Say it, don’t spray it, Mark Twain. Now to find out a little more about the Congo Free State.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

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“Eve’s Diary” (1905)

I must say I am mystified by Mark Twain’s relationship with religion. I understand he despised it. Perhaps that’s too strong. He returns to Bible themes all the time, sometimes mockingly, sometimes piously. He’s fascinated by Joan of Arc. Satan is a wonderful character in his unfinished Mysterious Stranger. Whole sections of the travel books are devoted, in hushed spiritual tones, to “the Holy Land.” Et cetera. Then there’s the question of comedy. Is it even funny? I’m not sure. I read “Eve’s Diary” somewhat under duress, also known as being in a bad mood for no particular reason. It did not change my mood. It seems to have feminist sympathies more than not, or at least Adam is something of a surly caveman lout. Eve is part flower child, part curious intelligent interesting person. The problem is more the situation itself. For example, they are naming things: “fire,” “smoke,” etc. It just seemed dumb, not funny. Dinosaurs are around—I liked that, it felt like one place where he is thumbing his nose at religion. I didn’t get the idea from nowhere that he’s hostile to religion. Adam and Eve have no sense of perspective, apparently. Eve thinks she can knock stars out of the sky by hitting them with clods of dirt. I don’t know what to make of some of it: “I found some tigers and nestled in among them and was most adorably comfortable, and their breath was sweet and pleasant, because they live on strawberries.” Say what? Most of all it feels like Twain is just not trying very hard, or worse—trying too hard plagued by writer’s block, which was possible. There’s a clumsy insertion of an Adam passage and a no-warning transition back to Eve. It hops about in time, though at least it is always moving forward and I guess a diary gives him license. I generally like Twain’s folksy voice, but it can grate. At least no racism I could detect here! That was a surprise for me in his earlier work. Racism is rarely a main feature but it's usually there. Here we have dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden, a comic point that does wear well I must admit. Adam at Eve’s funeral acting like Dick Nixon at Pat’s was a jarring shift in tone, but I understand Twain lost his own wife the year before this story was written and published so that probably accounts for it. I wouldn’t call this one of his best.

Mark Twain, “Eve’s Diary” (Library of America)
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Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte (1896)

I was tiring of Mark Twain somewhat after diligently reading a fair portion of his work, mostly chronologically, I almost skipped this gem and its strangely reverent fictionalized treatment of the life of Joan of Arc. The narrator of the formal long title, Sieur Louis de Conte, is based on a real person who grew up with Joan. She is a historical figure I never learned much about, only what I know from the epic silent movie of 1928, The Passion of Joan of Arc, which is only about her trial and death. This novel tells the whole weird, glorious story—tells it well, too—of the illiterate country girl of 17 who restored France’s faith in itself and was burnt at the stake for her troubles two years later, at 19. She has “Visions” (Twain’s capitalization). Sure, here in the 21st century we may be more inclined to account for a lot of it as mental illness. As if to shore up her credibility, Twain includes anecdotes that seem to indicate supernatural powers. Not sure how true some of these stories are. It’s fair to call the Joan of Arc story, even in its simplest terms, amazing—and of course it gets better when you make up miracles to go along with it. But it seems unlikely to me that Twain made up the apparent miracles we see here. He did have long-honed journalistic instincts, after all, although he is also plainly smitten with Joan, so maybe gullible in his readings. The same story about seeing through a ruse to correctly identify the king of France on her first meeting with him, for example, also appears in the 1999 Luc Besson movie The Messenger, but it’s not corroborated in Wikipedia. Now I want to seek out a good biography. Anyway, I found it interesting that Twain considered this his best novel, which is saying something considering the high general regard in the 20th century for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. But I’m inclined to agree. Huck Finn, the only other contender (or maybe The Mysterious Stranger?), has beautiful passages that cement it with American experience in unusually pure ways, but as a novel it is deeply flawed. Even its most ardent advocates tend to dismiss the last third wholesale. Twain spent much of his career mocking and excoriating Romantic literature, yet here he betrays certain affinities with it. At the same time, Twain has much latitude to exercise his misgivings and prejudices about organized religion, as the trials of Joan of Arc represent a low point (among many) for the Catholic Church. A lot of the most annoying yarn-spinning tics of Twain are restrained here, though they do appear. It is historical fiction and a swooning romantic story, but it’s easily the most competent novel Twain ever wrote. If it doesn’t hit the heights of some of those Huck Finn passages, the voice that made them work commands this whole novel.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

“How to Tell a Story” (1895)

This short piece is the title essay in a collection Mark Twain published in 1897. It’s an interesting look specifically at the various problems of the humor piece, abstracted as such. He uses a joke as illustration that is actually funny—literally made me laugh. “There are several kinds of stories,” he writes, “but only one difficult kind—the humorous.” He discusses the problem awhile, turning to Artemis Ward for his example (“considered to be America’s first stand-up comedian,” per Wikipedia), along with the joke, called “The Wounded Soldier.” Twain describes his own approach perhaps better than anyone could, which he used all his career: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art [of storytelling].” Then he gets into timing, which he calls “the pause,” a deadly and delicate matter. This leads to “The Golden Arm.” Twain illustrates the utility and technique of “the pause,” but unfortunately indulges dialect in a way here that too readily suggests racism. A 19th-century African-American from Missouri tells the story, complete with the prized pause. “You must get the pause right,” Twain concludes; “and you will find it the most troublesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.” It’s true, and Twain is too modest—which is not really like him—to mention it’s even harder to capture in writing. I’ve been thinking through these difficulties a lot as I go through Twain because his humor is my single favorite thing about his work. He doesn’t always pull off his various gags but his comic instincts always seem solid and I often appreciate even his misses. His humor makes a lot of his miscues worth bearing, though it’s not always easy. Reading across his career, it’s plain that he learned and changed and became reasonably more enlightened in his old age. Indeed, he was probably considered radical by contemporaries. His outrage about things like US foreign policy, however, was not a bit unreasonable. But he may have lost some of his comic instincts then and become more humorless. This piece suggests he spent most of his career knowing well what he was doing as a humorist.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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“The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885)

Wikipedia describes this piece as “one of Mark Twain’s sketches, a short, highly fictionalized memoir of his two-week stint in the pro-Confederate Missouri State Guard.” While it has many comical passages about the group’s incompetence, “memoir” is indeed probably the better way to think of it, with its turn to the solemn or even tragic with one incident. It was written 20 years after the end of the Civil War, 25 years after the incidents it recounts. This band of some 15 “Marion Rangers,” roams the Missouri countryside responding to rumors that the enemy is nearby, usually by retreating (ha ha). They barely can control their horses and mules (ha ha), let alone their firearms. They eventually encounter a stranger and shoot him dead. It’s never certain he was an enemy combatant and seems likely he wasn’t. This is sobering for Twain, the memoirist, and for us as readers too. After a short time—it feels longer than two weeks but not by much—the group disbands and Twain evidently never participates in the war again. The piece has something of the feel of a confession—that he deserted his military obligations, that he participated in killing an innocent man, or both. The humor of the early part of it feels at odds with the rest. The things he might be confessing to are serious breaches and in retrospect the humor seems out of place. It’s also interesting as a look at how the war was experienced early, before battle lines were drawn and the conflict fully engaged. It feels less like desertion when they return home and more like a false alarm about war, although Twain mentions that some of his comrades on these escapades later fought and died in the war. To me it feels like an antiwar piece, though also conflicted about duty. The death of the stranger is no kind of victory in any way. It’s a moment of shame and contrition. Combined with the ineptitude of the group as well as that of the greater war effort, Twain seems torn between something like his own shame and the malevolent lunacy of war. I often find Twain’s humor enjoyable, but I think I like this side of him best—the one who is outraged and sickened by the stupidity of humanity.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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“The Stolen White Elephant” (1882)

Mark Twain sets his sights on cliches of detective fiction, even before Sherlock Holmes was around to explain everything. “The Stolen White Elephant” is obvious and probably longer than it needs to be, but I think it still works. Humor pieces are so hit and miss, among the hardest to do, that you can’t ever guarantee anything for anyone about them. Perhaps I should be less critical of the various miscues because he can also be pretty good at this. The case involves a white elephant that is a gift from Siam to Queen Victoria. The storyteller accompanied the elephant on the voyage, which for some reason requires a layover in New York. The elephant is put up in New Jersey but stolen in due order. Thus begins the investigation and the parody. First, a detailed description of the elephant is required by police investigators. It’s not enough that the elephant is white and an elephant. One of their questions, for example, is “Parents living?” A team of detectives descends on the case, all with many different theories. The side of the barn where the elephant was kept has been destroyed, but none of the detectives think that’s how the elephant was taken. Most of them, in fact, think the broken-down wall is a ruse intended to distract them. And so forth. They refuse to believe anything credible but eventually find the carcass of the beast. And yet, even still, some of them stay on the case. One tracks footprints across the North American continent into Canada. He’s still working the case as the story ends, reporting in from the road. So that’s how it goes. Twain is once again mocking literature, but this time it’s mystery fiction instead of Romantic literature, his usual hobbyhorse. He is prolix about it. It’s another era and a much slower pace. And he’s obvious, for example with the cretinous police demanding a detailed description of a white elephant. But this piece does go on a long time. Every good comic element is protracted and tortured within an inch. I’d still call it a good one. Twain’s voice carries it when nothing else does. He often stays in character well and the jokes land because it can all be so deadpan. Worth remembering for any dips into Twain you may be contemplating.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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“A Literary Nightmare” (1876)

Here’s another humor piece by Mark Twain. It has an intriguingly modern aspect in that it is essentially about earworms—decades ahead of radio. Our outraged helpless narrator (presumably Twain) has run across a little poem that now haunts him. He saw it in the newspaper. The poem is the first thing presented in this piece and, yes, I can see how it works. It has an irresistible rhythm once it has been impressed upon you a couple times, along with eccentric spellings based on dialect-like pronunciation, as if to burnish the stickiness. The poem is apparently intended as a mnemonic for train conductors: “Conductor, when you receive a fare / Punch in the presence of the passenjare! / A blue trip slip for an eight-cent fare, / A buff trip slip for a six-cent fare …” And it goes on. This piece later traveled under the title of “Punch, Brothers, Punch” for the line in the chorus, “Punch, brothers! punch with care!” If you are like Mark Twain or me your brain is now mentioning to you, perhaps repeatedly, “Punch in the presence of the passenjare!” Here we find, of course, the Mark Twain who chipped in to the development of Daffy Duck—exasperated, quick to fly off the handle, and something of a fool. If I’m in the right mood, this is a Mark Twain I love. Note the original title, the better title. Or: “I returned home, and suffered all the afternoon; suffered all through an unconscious and unrefreshing dinner; suffered and cried, and jingled all through the evening; went to bed and rolled, tossed, and jingled right along, the same as ever; got up at midnight frantic, and tried to read; but there was nothing visible upon the whirling page except ‘Punch! punch in the presence of the passenjare.’ By sunrise I was out of my mind, and everybody marveled and was distressed at the idiotic burden of my ravings.” Every time he shares his misery he makes it a little more your own. Between the prescience about the earworm problem and Twain’s general good form here—and the brevity, an asset in humor as well as horror—I’d call this one of his better humor pieces. For one thing, it’s actually pretty funny. See also “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences.”

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches (Library of America)
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“About Barbers” (1871)

This short piece by Mark Twain is another one that seems strange to call a short story or an essay. Humor piece will do, I guess, as implied by Twain’s title. I imagined it would be about overly talkative and/or obnoxious barbers, or perhaps some antics from patrons. It has some of those things, but more goes off in a sitcom direction. Our guy is there for a shave, maybe a haircut. The barbershop has three barbers. By coincidence, by the chance of letting someone else into the shop first as they arrive, he sees the worst of the three barbers will be his. He tries to switch this up by leaving for a 15-minute stroll, but alas, when he returns he sees that this worst barber will still be his. It’s a short piece, but Twain elaborates these scenes with a good deal of detail that verges on tedious. He also details the reading choices available to him as he waits. Finally he’s called to the chair and of course it’s the barber he was trying to avoid. Things go like this: “Then he lathered one side of my face thoroughly, and was about to lather the other, when a dog-fight attracted his attention, and he ran to the window and stayed and saw it out, losing two shillings on the result in bets with the other barbers, a thing which gave me great satisfaction.” As far as essay forms go, I like the ones that are “About” something specific or general or mundane or whatever. It suggests a meditative approach, but of course we have nothing like that here. Twain is merely riffing up anecdotes that happen to involve a barber or barbers. I mean, that’s OK too. Another essay form that I like is the much more difficult humor piece. I have laughed very hard at humor pieces by Woody Allen and Ian Frazier, and then been baffled by them on later rereading—or vice versa, puzzled the first time. I include Twain as someone worth trying on humor pieces. He has the instincts and sense of timing, and his stuff has worked for me / not worked for me that way. He’s worth a try. You never know. But you should be at least a little inclined to like it before you start, or don’t even bother.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches
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“A Ghost Story” (1870)

In approximately 1870 everybody wanted to write a ghost story—it was a lifelong side obsession for snob Henry James, who envied Sheridan Le Fanu. How could Mark Twain be any different? He was as skeptical and above ghosts as James but more forthright. Paradoxically, he lets himself go for the effects, which work better than anything James did (except, maybe, The Turn of the Screw and “The Jolly Corner”). Twain makes it clear where he stands on the paranormal by making this the ghost of the Cardiff Giant, which hoax and all attendant hysteria had happened just the year before, in 1869. A worthy target for excoriation, no doubt. What may be most interesting in this story is the way Twain’s first-person narrator describes all the abandoned buildings and homes in New York City, where he takes up residence. He writes, “I took a large room, far up Broadway, in a huge old building whose upper stories had been wholly unoccupied for years until I came.” Another word for it might be “squatting”—it’s hard to tell. But it’s all spooky and there are cobwebs and such. He comes home to “a cheery fire in the grate.” Not sure how that happens. It’s really pretty strange the way the story goes and makes me wonder how much Twain was aware of Poe. I would guess he knew Hawthorne and Irving. The strange scene-setting is part of what makes the effects work—remember, Twain is formally skeptical of the whole thing. But he is committed to the ghostly air even though his ghost is explicitly the ghost of a hoax, of a nonentity by definition. The ghost manifests as heavy footsteps and something pulling his blankets off him in bed—not bad! It continues as “night in a haunted house” stuff until our guy is face to face with the ghost or thing or whatever, at which point it becomes very silly as intended. It’s interesting to me how reputable writers approach horror, as a surprising number of them have done. On one level it’s about the commercial success, the reason James envied Le Fanu. But I also think horror can be more palpably, vitally experienced than most literature, and of course that’s a fascination to many writers. Charles Dickens was absolutely a master at it, as is Joyce Carol Oates going on 200 years later. Henry James missed more often than he hit. As far as I know—am I missing something?—Twain never did much more with it. His main targets remained the authors of the Romantic era, of which fantasy and horror may nonetheless be considered subsets.

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“Journalism in Tennessee” (1869)

This very short piece by Mark Twain, even as relatively early as it is in his writing career, feels typical of his humorous sketches. Calling it an essay seems a little misleading—it’s all obvious lies, basically. But, perhaps because of the way it’s presented, “short story” doesn’t really do the job either. The first-person narrator who gives it more the feel of a memoir tells of his experience working for a small-town newspaper in Tennessee. The editor gives him a stack of press releases and tells him to make a story out of them from the highlights. He does so, with polite summaries. The editor goes to work on the typescript as soon as our guy hands it off to him. At that point the ridiculous action starts. Someone fires a shot through the window. A hand grenade comes rolling down the stovepipe. The rewrite is an obvious specimen of yellow advocacy journalism. “The inveterate liars at ... “ it begins. The seams are showing, but in a general way it works. It’s the deadpan quality Twain manages so well. As the extremes of violence ratchet higher, it starts to feel like a Buster Keaton picture. Here’s this guy trying to do his job—he came to the South in the first place on doctor’s orders, for his health. Now: “Both pistols rang out their fierce clamor at the same instant. The chief lost a lock of his hair, and the Colonel’s bullet ended its career in the fleshy part of my thigh.” It piles on until finally our guy tenders his resignation to the vicious, fightin’ editor. “After which we parted with mutual regret, and I took apartments at the hospital.” That’s how the piece ends. It's short but eventful and silly. It’s also weirdly constructed, lurching about randomly across the through-line of mounting violence. “Journalism in Tennessee” has the sloppy anecdotal structure that makes me hesitate to call it a story. Does “humorous sketch” fall within the definition of an essay? Oh, whatever. It’s entertaining and a reasonably good jolt of Twain for beginners and everyone. Much better, in fact, than that jumping frog thing we were forced to read in school.

Mark Twain, Humorous Stories & Sketches. (Library of America)
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“The $30,000 Bequest” (1904)

This Mark Twain story seemed a little humdrum and forced to me, although it deals with one of his favorite themes, the comical madness of greed and all the wreck a little bit of money can cause. The two principals here—husband Sally and wife Aleck, gender confusion noted by Twain himself, though not really to what end intended—catch wind that a long-lost uncle will be leaving them money on his death (amount per title) on the condition they never make inquiries of him. As it happens, he dies early in the story, but the couple never learns of it because they know they don’t dare ask after him. This story is about what their fevered imaginations dream up, which ultimately are amusing and harmless. There’s not really any story to this story to drive it home, as in the similarly minded “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” In fact, Sally and Aleck are often charming, if maybe a little pathetic. Another (or perhaps the same) mystifying gender inversion, or maybe not one at all, is that Aleck is the responsible manager of finances whereas Sally only wants to know how much he can spend. Aleck keeps plowing the (imaginary) money into investments, as capital. She starts from the day they hear of the bequest—which, as fate would have it, was only a week before they should have gotten it outright. Over the years she puts the money here, moves it there. And over the years they actually become billionaires, though Twain expresses it rather oddly as “twenty-four hundred millionaires”—as if the idea itself of a billionaire were ludicrous (as out of reach as a trillionaire would seem to be now, perhaps, here in this second gilded age). Anyway, Aleck finally slips up late in the game and loses everything, which, as a fantasy, just isn’t a tragedy. There’s still the real bequest, if they ever hear of it, let alone get it. At story’s end they haven’t, so we’re left at sea about what the story is about. They are greedy but they are also harmless and kind. Perhaps they wasted portions of their lives, but who hasn’t done that and isn’t it in the eye of the beholder anyway? To me, they look like an exceptionally compatible and loving couple, but that’s not what this story is about either.

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Letters From the Earth (1904-1909)

Here’s another of those Mark Twain pieces, like The Mysterious Stranger (which I am calling his last), cobbled together after his death from fragments of his writing and notes. The cobbler in this case is the historian and man of letters Bernard DeVoto, who published this in 1962 after one of Twain’s daughters finally relented and gave permission. It’s much like The Mysterious Stranger in many ways—jagged and inconsistent and focused with keen interest on the character of Satan, with whom Twain has obvious sympathies. Not for Satan’s love of evil but for his rejection by such a flawed God. At approximately this stage in Twain's career—call it the 20th century, or date it from the death of his wife in 1904—Twain is consumed and cannot really mask his contempt for God. These fragments boil with rage. This is a side of Twain I only dimly knew even existed, though of course his general mockery of Christianity often surfaced elsewhere. I generally took it as irreverence for effect, but I’m starting to think these issues were more important to him than I knew. He is scathing about the foolishness and contradictions of both Christianity and theism at large. He argues for the capriciousness and petty jealous character of the biblical God, mocking his omniscience and omnipotence as proof he hates us and does us all evil. The letters—barely connected fragments—are from the fallen Satan (lounging on Earth) to his former archangel companions Gabriel and Michael. Obviously Satan has some beef with God, but that doesn’t mean he’s not making good points. He focuses mainly on Adam and Eve and the Fall, and also on Noah and the flood, and a little on the contrasts and conflicts between the Old Testament and New, either one working to undermine the other, and adding up to nothing in Satan’s or Twain’s estimation. I’ve had discussions or arguments with Christians that resemble Twain’s here (like what was the big problem with Cain anyway?). They seem to tend to cite isolated passages in the Bible elsewhere. Twain gives us long passages of extreme violence he dredged from the Bible—I didn’t double-check him but I assume DeVoto did—as examples of God’s hypocrisy and low moral values. My sympathies are all with Twain here, on a cerebral level. But the intensity of his hatred is bracing and can be hard to take. He’s right and he's wrong too, just like those he criticizes. What a world, what a world!

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)

Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896)

I can be as impatient as anyone with the way Sherlock Holmes is portrayed as capable of the most uncanny feats of deduction. Look close in those stories and you see it’s usually a bunch of lucky guesses, though yes based on close observation. We don’t even get that much in Mark Twain’s sendup, just the wild guesses served in a lukewarm stew of familiar tropes: twins separated at birth, riverboat culture up and down the Mississippi River, and Huck Finn narrating admiring stories of that rascal, dreamy-headed Tom Sawyer. This was one I meant to get to as a kid (the cover above was on the on the copy I had). Somehow along the line I got the impression Tom was grown up in it, an adult. Turns out that’s not the case. It’s Huck and Tom at home in St. Petersburg (based of course on Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri), and unfortunately it is the worst of all the Huck and Tom novels and/or stories I’ve seen so far. Tom Sawyer Abroad at least has some charming moments. Tom Sawyer, Detective just felt tired and uninspired. At this point, I resent a little the way I imagine Twain must have rationalized things like outrageous coincidence as just part of the parody. It’s more like just part of the laziness. One good thing here is that Jim is spared the indignities he suffers in most of the other Huck and Tom tales. Detective feels like a hurry-up job in many ways. The last chapter is four times longer than any other and intent on tying up all loose ends, unconvincingly—because that’s part of the parody! It just seems empty of any goodwill. It’s also quite short—maybe 70 or 80 pages?—and I’m a little mystified to see it referred to as a novel. But then I’m the one usually complaining about designations like “novella” and “novelette.” Maybe Twain was jealous of Arthur Conan Doyle’s success with Sherlock Holmes (note to self: read a Twain biography). Because it fails so abjectly at it, Tom Sawyer, Detective is a practical demonstration in how difficult it actually is to construct a mystery story that passes the smell test. Never mind that it doesn’t seem to understand the appeal of them at all, let alone Sherlock Holmes. Disappointing in every way.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894)

Ten years after Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain went ahead and wrote another novel with Tom Sawyer and Jim the slave, narrated by Huck. I didn’t even know this existed until recently. It’s very short, under 200 pages, and another parody of European romantic literature. This time the target is specifically Jules Verne, who was only seven years older than Twain and alive at the time. Full disclosure, I have never read Verne, not even when I was a kid and slogging through Robert Louis Stevenson adventure books for kids, so I can’t speak to how well Tom Sawyer Abroad works that way. It looks more to me like Twain put his favorite characters in a balloon and that was supposed to be enough. They step into the thing in a carnival passing through Missouri, it breaks loose, and here we are. It is reminiscent to me in many ways of the Wizard of Oz story too, but that came later. Twain’s balloon is a finely tuned machine, much like a steamboat. It ranges up high for cooler temperatures and can practically scud along at ground level. But it takes even Tom Sawyer some time to figure out all the controls. There’s also a mad scientist on the scene, and food and water to last for months. That’s handy, because they’re crossing the Atlantic before Tom figures out how to control the balloon. They end up over the Sahara Desert for retellings of stories from Arabian Nights along with raft loads of American innocence. It’s supposed to be funny but it’s not really, and the treatment of Jim is at least as bad as in Huck Finn. I enjoyed Tom Sawyer Abroad more than I expected but I didn’t expect much. It’s certainly for completists only. I like Huck’s voice, which is more or less Twain but with more dialect. Are we seeing Twain run out of ideas as he approaches the age of 60? Or was this the only thing he could get publishers and/or the reading public to go for? It’s his second book with “Tom Sawyer” in the title, his third book with “Abroad,” and the umpteenth parodying European literature. At least there is no plot point about babies being switched at birth. Tom Sawyer Abroad does have the virtue of being short and quick and who knows? Maybe some will like the chance to hang out more with Tom, Huck, and Jim. I’ll admit it was probably what I liked most about it. But then there’s the problem of Jim’s continuing mistreatment, which is unfortunate enough to torpedo the whole fragile vessel. File under I read it so you don’t have to.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over.

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901)

I appreciate Mark Twain’s anti-imperialist rant, which reminds me of nothing so much as the most passionate bloggers (on either side, I guess) during the Bush/Cheney era. That’s not exactly a compliment because it’s also acknowledgment of spittle-flecked incoherence and, sadly, more than anything, of powerlessness. Twain may have been able to kick up some fuss about the Boer War, Spanish-American War, etc. But it didn’t change what happened, such as the betrayals of Filipinos. Putting the best light on this piece (and on bloggers from the 2000s too) it may have had some effect on policy going forward. Certainly being right is not worth nothing. But in another era with great depredations occurring and too little to be done about it, Twain’s complaints make me sad more than anything. Terrible things had been going on already for a long time in 1901, and the US was hardly innocent of some of the worst even then. The problem is that he’s so angry he shifts often into sarcasm and invective that does not much help his case. I like this piece as an early example of the blogging style but, as with so much op-ed on outrage, the first draft should be a venting exercise and then set aside or at least carefully cherry-picked. But sometimes you’re just too mad to do even that. I write this as someone prone to such screeds myself—and publishing them too, on my blog and elsewhere if I could. What’s to be done? People are terrible. They are good too but way too often terrible. The Boxer Rebellion in China is also an event of importance in this rant. He roams about among the three—Boxer Rebellion, Boer War, Spanish-American War—and there is plenty to be outraged about, as the modern American foreign policy was beginning to take shape, among other things. There’s always plenty to be outraged about, isn’t there? I like the way this ties Twain to people like Hunter Thompson and Matt Taibbi (in his better days) as ranters of renown. But Thompson and certainly Taibbi—and a lot of those bloggers—aren’t always looking so good these days. Ineffectual, at best, or it’s tempting to look at it that way. For what it’s worth Twain was older than I am now when he wrote this. I appreciate it but have you seen the one I did about Trump and “The Snake”? Some really choice outrage there. And nothing changed. Or very little. I’ll be over here crying now.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over (Library of America).
Read essay online.

"Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences" (1895)

Mark Twain’s full-throated takedown of the US novelist James Fenimore Cooper is often funny, but nearly as often lame. Full disclosure, I have never read any Cooper. Notable victims of Twain’s attack are The Deerslayer and The Pathfinder, from Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales series of five novels. I think I share Twain’s sense of Cooper and other early American writers as soporific and a little ridiculous. But mocking old books for being stupid is not a good look and it is a well you can go to only so often. In many ways, certainly by the 1890s, it was running dry for Twain as his stock in trade. He gave the treatment to Walter Scott (many times), Jane Austen, Jules Verne, and Arthur Conan Doyle, to name a few. This spittle-flecked Daffy Duck indictment of Cooper is funny and bracing, anticipating the rip-roaring style of New Journalists and rock critics, making a lot of hay from the splenetic rant. The piece lurches into a list of 18 points that doesn’t hold up under its own weight. It is fatally lazy in the section criticizing word choice, by never giving us the full sentences where these words live. Giving us 20 or 30 isolated word pairs didn’t strike me as that funny. But compare the section just before that, on Cooper’s exaggerations, which worked well because it did include passages by Cooper. My favorite riff was on twig-snapping in the woods because I remember it as a common recurring element in frontier tales I read when I was a kid. Maybe I have read Cooper! “It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around,” Twain writes. “Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig.” There’s more to this rant, which hits the howling high note of anyone writing at top speed—the nice throwaway “worth four dollars a minute” is the tell in this case. But too often he stumbles again and wallows too long in some bog. His jokes miss at least as often as they hit. Still, I did laugh pretty hard more than once so “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” is probably worth checking out. You just have to put up with the mockery of someone whose own bare ass is sticking out there a lot of the time.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)
Read essay online.

Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

I admit I enjoyed this short novel by Mark Twain for the usual reasons, including that it has a lot of fun with European culture, but I believe it may be the fourth novel or story I've read by Twain that uses the plot device of babies switched at birth. So, to start, I'm not sure how much Twain has to say about European literary cliches. It's set in a Missouri town on the Mississippi River. It also has a pair of Italian twins who claim to be disinherited noblemen, which doesn't seem entirely improbable. The problem with the babies switched at birth story is it involves a lot of uncomfortable detail about race, with the story set in 1850 reminding us that Twain was raised in a slaveholding society and never quite transcended it all the way. One of the babies is white, of old First Families of Virginia (FFV) stock, and the other is Black. Or "so you say," as we go down the hatch of "passing" and mulattos and octoroons. Twain uses none of these words, but does tell us the Black baby's mother is 1/16 Black, which makes the baby 1/32 Black, and aiyiyi, I don't want to know anymore. It's all about explaining how such a switch could happen credibly but it's fatally flawed at conception except as a measure of racism. Everyone who reads this should know it's incredible and ridiculous to assign someone a social identity based on a solitary great-great-great-great-grandparent But here we are, "if you ain't white you Black." All this was in the air Twain breathed. He mocks it, gently, but he is obviously steeped in it. He rejects slavery but in the tepid way many of us reject capitalism nowadays, if we do. At any rate, as charming as Twain's tale here is generally—and it's not bad for Twain fans—it didn't really seem good enough to me to transcend its nagging problems. It was serialized, but a note by Twain at the end (not in all editions) talks about the way he came to write it. He originally had the Italian twins physically conjoined and it was mainly about them. But evidently David "Pudd'nhead" Wilson and his fingerprinting ways, along with Roxanne the slave and her baby-switching ways, just demanded the attention, and thus Puddn'head Wilson. That probably accounts for some of the lack of focus here, and certainly for the fleeting sensation I had that the Italian twins were conjoined. Twain has obviously had practice at this as the story is put together really well. If you like baby switching stories, don't miss this one.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over (Library of America).

The American Claimant (1892)

This short comic novel by Mark Twain treads familiar ground. The Prince and the Pauper might be the earliest and better model, but it's a tired old story rooted in high romanticism tropes, with vaguely medieval trappings, involving mistaken identities and lost lineages of nobility, set into a tiresome context of USA vs. Europe (and/or democracy vs. monarchy). The plot is detailed enough to hold water, and maybe even sturdy enough to sail, but for me most of the elements are merely hackneyed, stale for Twain and in general too. It's got enough to hold interest, especially if you are already inclined toward Twain. I have unfortunately lost some of my enthusiasm by reading more of him, but I am soldiering on. Twain liked to claim this was the world's first dictated novel, using some recording device, so there is that too. Seems legit. But it doesn't make much difference—he likely had a shot at revisions from a transcription, and his literary voice always was garrulous and natural. The jokes are so familiar they tend to be more pro forma than funny—about the foibles of people, the inanity of bureaucracy, and all the hypocrites and buncos cluttering things up everywhere. I can appreciate a lot of it—especially the railing against religion and aristocracy—because I'm generally in agreement with it. But he rambles often beyond my PC limits. At the moment I shudder at every casual use of the N-word I see or hear by a white person and unfortunately it shows up again here too. He is often not funny at all, which I don't have to tell you is a fatal flaw in a comic novel. Another interesting and jarring point of Twain that intrudes here is his fascination with business and making money. His characters often seem to be negotiating complex contracts with business jargon suddenly all over the place. Not surprising, perhaps, given that among other things Twain was also a failed businessman a few times over. The American Claimant is short and charming enough and with enough of his themes that you could package it up with some of his other stuff, as Library of America has, for a decent collection down at his secondary level. Not sure I'm interested in any levels below that, but I still enjoy reading him even when he's kind of an idiot.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic (Library of America).