[begin page 1]

This collection offers Mark Twain's outspoken pieces on such large topics as God, providence, Christianity, and human nature, gathered from the unpublished writings in the Mark Twain Papers. Although Albert Bigelow Paine and Bernard DeVoto printed some of the works included here and various scholars have quoted excerpts in support of their arguments, none of these texts has ever appeared in an authoritative printing, and few are currently accessible. The volume includes the “Little Bessie” dialogues, in which a small girl horrifies her sanctimonious mother with probing questions about the Virgin Birth, and also a satirical tale, “The Second Advent,” which places the return of the Messiah in a sleepy Arkansas village and recounts the disastrous consequences of the miracles wrought by his disciples. It also presents, in “The Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire,” an expression of Clemens' philosophy of history and vision of the future. In a number of pieces, most notably “The Refuge of the Derelicts,” it gives further disclosures, clothed in fiction, of what may have been Clemens' view of the human situation.

Such merits will be deemed slight or considerable depending upon the interests of the reader. Those who are mainly concerned with literary form will find little to value: the two principal manuscripts “Derelicts” and “Eddypus,” both of which were left unfinished, [begin page 2] are decidedly lacking in integration. Many of the shorter selections are, however, either substantially or entirely complete, and two of them, in fact, were sent by Clemens to Harper's for publication. “ ‘You've Been a Dam Fool, Mary. You Always Was!’ ” was forwarded to that house in February 1904 but failed to appear in print—probably because the mildly profane title was considered unacceptable. The letters between Clemens and his publishers concerning proposed revisions of the title are discussed in the headnote to the story. “The International Lightning Trust” was fully prepared for the press in 1909 and was in the hands of Harper & Brothers when Clemens died in 1910; it was withdrawn by his literary executor, Paine, who noted that the manuscript was not up to the author's standard. One can agree that the story is not at the level of his better work and yet suspect that it was the irreverent cast of the contents, which satirized the concept of special providences as well as shady trust operations, that caused it to be judged unsuitable for print. It is fair to add that Clemens himself interdicted publication of some of his work—especially, many sections of autobiography—until a distant future time; for some parts dealing with religion, he desired a waiting period of five hundred years. “The Second Advent,” “The Holy Children,” and the “Little Bessie” chapters he no doubt considered too strong for print. Even “Mock Marriage,” much of which reads like a conventional romance, could have seemed offensive for the times: “Never mind what God can do; the matter on hand is what He has done. If He meant it for a benefaction it has miscarried, and you know it.” “The Stupendous Procession,” satirizing the condition of world civilization at the beginning of the twentieth century, is if possible even more controversial than the essays “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” and “To My Missionary Critics,” published in 1901, and it hits at more targets close to home. It was probably withheld from print not for its stylistic defects so much as for its outspoken contents. Some plaints such as “In My Bitterness” and “The Private Secretary's Diary” may have remained unpublished because he thought of them as expressions of a private grief.

A few of the selections were written relatively early—in the 1870s and 1880s. These include “The Holy Children,” “The Second Advent,” “The Lost Ear-ring,” “A Letter from the Comet,” “The Em- [begin page 3] peror -God Satire,” “Colloquy Between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor,” and “Abner L. Jackson (About to Be) Deceased.” The others, comprising about four-fifths of the total contents, were composed in the 1890s or in the first decade of the new century; most were written after 1895, or after Clemens had entered his sixties. These materials do not exhaust from the Mark Twain Papers every still unpublished story, sketch, or essay; a later volume of miscellaneous writings is planned which will incorporate such remainders.

It was only after the main body of writings had been tentatively selected in terms of evident relationships that an underlying pattern emerged. It appeared that these were mostly fantasy pieces or fables: Mark Twain had let his imagination rove freely over events that he saw as representative or symbolic of the nature and condition of man, past, present, or yet to be. And it seemed that the contents might be grouped in three sections, designated as “The Myth of Providence,” “The Dream of Brotherhood,” and “The Nightmare of History.” Generally speaking, these sections include, in the order given: (1) satirical writings on what Mark Twain saw as the outworn but still confining myths of an exploded, prescientific view of man and the universe, from which man's imagination needed to be freed; (2) representations of the dubious possibilities for a true brotherhood of man; (3) writings in which past and present conditions are seen as portending a darkened future in which a new religious myth would once more captivate and enslave man and in which still later equivalent myths, through the ages, would die and be recreated endlessly. These categories are not intended to be mutually exclusive and could not be.

Mark Twain's view of the human predicament as conveyed in the writings now published is a rather grim one, even though there are indications that he had not given himself over wholly to despair. It recognizes man as the creature of an unavailing god, a creator immensely above and remote from man—at best indifferent, at worst, vindictive. It contemplates a basely made, a destructively crafted human race that actually collaborates in its own degradation. Finally, it shows man to be on a treadmill of repeating history from which, made as he is, he is powerless to escape. What might otherwise be the unrelieved pessimism of such an outlook is mitigated by humor and irony [begin page 4] and by the tender-heartedness that is in contention with the works' tough-mindedness.

The Myth of Providence

In June 1906, Clemens explained in his Autobiographical Dictation his idea of the real God. Less than consistent, he first represented God as grandly aloof, little concerned with earthly matters, which were only a microscopic part of his immense design; but then Clemens worked himself up to a bitter denunciation of God for contriving countless afflictions for the torture of man and his fellow creatures. Both of these concepts have been given literary development in writings included in this volume. One point of “The Emperor-God Satire,” for example, is the absurdity of God's being constantly and minutely concerned with the affairs of a minor tribe inhabiting one tiny part of his realm. And one lesson of both “The Holy Children” and “The Second Advent” is that even if he were aware of people's prayers and disposed to grant them, his interventions would be catastrophic for human society. “In My Bitterness,” “The Synod of Praise,” “Little Bessie,” and “The Private Secretary's Diary” are among the works indicting God for malevolence. The God these works show is one who does nothing for the specific good of man. In time of trouble he is unavailing, either because he is remote and indifferent or because he is maliciously omnipresent.

Some selections even hint that the determiner of others' destiny is the ultimate predator upon the creatures he controls. In “Goose Fable,” the geese think of man as their deity, and little goslings are taught to expect every kindness and blessing from the human race. The idea of “The Victims” is that all living creatures are so made that they must feed upon other living things. The real hierarchy of existence is the order of precedence in a universal cannibalism. And in Mark Twain's view it is God who is solely responsible for so ordering things that none can decline this grisly banquet—and live. Moreover, the inescapable roles of predator and victim condition many aspects of life other than that of survival. The world and its resources are at the disposal of cynical exploiters who know the human race and how [begin page 5] to trade upon its weaknesses of fear and pride and greed. Jasper Hackett and Stephen Spaulding are such characters in “The International Lightning Trust,” and as the story ends they are well on their way to achieving economic, political, and religious control of the world. This fantasy resembles that of the creation of a world empire in “Eddypus”: in both works great power is acquired by successful, if unwitting, charlatans who contrive to put providence on a paying basis.

The foolish readiness of the race to accept myths of providence is repeatedly satirized. In the “Little Bessie” dialogues Bessie's searching questions expose her mother's unthinking acceptance of religious fables and platitudes—an inversion of a device Clemens had used much earlier in “The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child-Missionary” in which it is the child who voices Sunday school sentiments and a blasphemous adult who opposes them.1 “Colloquy Between a Slum Child and a Moral Mentor” not only satirizes middle-class “church” morality but also suggests that people are too ready to credit the Almighty for good deeds: a penniless waif in wintertime with nothing but a window shutter for a blanket acknowledges that God has indeed been taking special care of him when he realizes that not every child has a shutter to sleep under. In “The Lost Ear-ring” there is much concern over a young lady's loss of an earring of no real value, and providence gets full credit for restoring it to her when it is discovered that the trinket has fallen into her apron pocket.

Of the manuscripts satirizing the notion of special providences, the one of greatest interest is probably “The Second Advent.” It was mentioned by Paine in his discussion of Mark Twain's earlier unpublished writings:

[begin page 6]

With reference to “The Second Advent,” along with other pigeonholed manuscripts, Paine wrote, “To Howells and others, when they came along, he would read the discarded yarns, and they were delightful enough for such a purpose, as delightful as the sketches which every artist has, turned face to the wall.”3 Mark Twain's mention of the year 1881 at the end of the tale appears to provide the date of composition. “The Holy Children,” from which pages were appropriated for use in “The Second Advent,” must have been written first. “The Holy Children” has been reconstructed here, by retrieving the pages that had been incorporated in “The Second Advent” and restoring their original text. There is necessarily, then, some duplication of content in the two selections; but it has seemed worthwhile to recover the earlier sketch, since it differs considerably from “The Second Advent.” In writing “The Second Advent,” Mark Twain was probably drawing on observations he had made on board the Quaker City, which had taken him to the Holy Land in 1867. “Imagine Christ's 30 years of life in the slow village of Nazareth,”4 he wrote in his notebook at that time. His musings also included the idea that an unleashing of miraculous powers in such a village could cause trouble: “Recall infant Christ's pranks on his school-mates—striking boys dead—withering their hands—burning the dyer's cloth &c.”5 The idea of the direct and heavy consequences of fulfilled prayers had also come to him: “Orders executed with promptness & dispatch.—Particular attention given to thrones &c.”6 The impulse to comment on the Advent and the other miracles was not fully satisfied by what he wrote of “The Second Advent” and “The Holy Children,” as later notes reveal. In May or June of 1883 he noted, “Write the Second Advent, with full details—lot of Irish disciples—Paddy Ryan for Judas & other disciples.”7 Later still, in his notebook for 1901, one finds a further evolution of the story concept:

The various elements of this satiric impulse produced “The Second Advent,” “The Stupendous Procession,” “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” and “To My Missionary Critics.” In passages of “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” the earliest manuscript of The Mysterious Stranger, written between 1897 and 1900, he had already expressed some of his wrath. As the nineteenth century concluded and the twentieth began, he found the world scene darkened by military actions of the so-called Christian powers; nation preyed upon nation, the strong upon the weak. “The time is grave,” he wrote. “The future is blacker than has been any future which any person now living has tried to peer into.”9

Aspects of his personal life had darkened as well: in the mid-nineties he had been overwhelmed by the death of his daughter Susy, had faced the discovery that her sister Jean was an epileptic, and had become bankrupt. In the following years his wife, Olivia, who had never been strong, continued to fail in health. Some of the writings blaming God and nature for cruelties inflicted upon human beings were obviously prompted by these family disasters; for example, “In My Bitterness,” written in the summer of 1897 at about the time of the first anniversary of Susy's death, is a direct cry of the heart. “The Victims,” written between 1900 and 1905 and most probably in 1902—the year in which Olivia was stricken with what proved to be her final illness—is hardly less bitter in its arraignment. “The Synod of Praise,” which belongs to the same period, employs satiric indirection but arrives at the last at a sardonic jest: confronted with the proposition that God is “our loving father,” the monkey does as well as he can to be dutifully thankful, “My praise is that we have not two of him.”

Yet there was likely to be fun as well as fury behind even the thrusts that were at the expense of an unavailing providence. And it is worth noting that one of the “Little Bessie” chapters was written while [begin page 8] Clemens was on a yachting trip with his friend and financial adviser, Henry H. Rogers. While lazing about on the commodious Kanawha off Bermuda, he wrote “Little Bessie Would Assist Providence.” The cover sheet of his typescript copy is dated “On shipboard, Feb. 22, 1908,” below which Clemens added in ink, “(It is dull, & I need wholesome excitements & distractions; so I will go lightly excursioning along the primrose path of theology.)” The circumstances under which he wrote are strikingly incongruous: we see Clemens surrounded by luxury and beauty—even dulled, sated, with these—lounging in his deck chair while writing about the persecutions of providence. Such sidelights should not be ignored if we are to have a balanced view of Mark Twain's work. And it would be perilous, especially in the present instance, to assume that he did not see and relish these contrasts.

The Dream of Brotherhood

The concern with providence carries over into this section, and indeed through the following one, but with differing emphases. Here we see Clemens primarily concerned with man's own efforts to provide for his fellow man in the absence of assistance from a higher providence. Lacking a benevolent Heavenly Father, might not the Brotherhood of Man suffice for the betterment of the human condition? Clemens was not at all sure that it could, although he was willing to look at evidence. As Louis J. Budd has noticed, in the early 1900s Clemens had much in mind the phrase “the brotherhood of man” and the ideal that it expressed.10 Recent military action in China, South Africa, Cuba, and the Philippines had, however, deepened his skepticism, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904/1905 gave him no basis for reviving hope. War was the antithesis of brotherhood; and so, he believed, was the kind of patriotism that was praised and demanded in times of war. In “The Lowest Animal” he observed: “For many centuries ‘the common brotherhood of man’ has been urged—on Sundays—and ‘patriotism’ on Sundays and weekdays both. Yet patriotism contemplates the opposite of a common brotherhood.”11 [begin page 9] Man would, he feared, continue to make war over lands and boundaries. And he saw that people were also denying the brotherly ideal in enforcing boundaries of race or class; this must have been the point of a brief sketch, now lost, called “The Brotherhood of Man,” probably written in the spring of 1905 at about the time that he was beginning work upon “The Refuge of the Derelicts.” A good deal of background information about the composition of “Derelicts” may be found in the journal of his secretary, Miss Isabel V. Lyon, who was often his listener for manuscript readings. On March 21 Miss Lyon noted:

The particular relevance of this missing manuscript to “Derelicts” may be seen from Mark Twain's working notes for the latter, in which he wrote, “John T. Lewis is the Brotherhood Man,” subsequently changing the name from the actual one of Lewis to the fictional one of 'Rastus Timson. Lewis, a Negro farmhand, had at great risk saved the lives of Mrs. Charles Langdon, her daughter, and a nursemaid in an incident like the one narrated in “Derelicts.” The rescue occurred when their horse ran away near the home of Susan Crane, Mrs. Clemens' sister and owner of the farm where Lewis worked. He was handsomely rewarded with about fifteen hundred dollars, as well as other gifts, and later received, through the agency of Clemens, some pension funds from Henry H. Rogers. It appears that he accepted these tributes graciously and with gratitude and that he never claimed—as Aunty Phyllis does in the story—that he had been paid only for saving the horse and buggy, not for saving three lives. But of course Lewis, after being feted and rewarded, inescapably remained a Negro farmhand; his status had not essentially changed, though his poverty had been alleviated. Perhaps “the old darkey's vision” did apply to the situation [begin page 10] of Lewis—and that of the fictional 'Rastus—showing how impossible it was, even in the most favorable circumstances, for the black man to have social equality. This was the darker side of the matter, even if comically treated, that obtruded itself into a story bent upon examining into the possibilities for human brotherhood—for unselfish sharing and refusal to exploit others which run counter to the doctrine of human selfishness advanced in What Is Man?

The strong, generous, profane, and garrulous old Admiral Stormfield maintains a home that is fitted out like a ship and is run like one. He lets this place serve as a haven for human derelicts. These are persons who are no longer contending for power, prestige, and success, who are not seeking to take advantage of others. They have declined the role of predator, or tried to, and are considered failures—and some have at length regretted not having been less altruistic and more successful. A major theme of “The Refuge of the Derelicts” is the failure of the just—a reversal of the Puritan ethic. Riches and human fulfillment are seen as the reward not of virtue but of wickedness. Or rather, of being human, for it is man's nature to feed upon and otherwise exploit others. Ironically, even the derelicts, resigned and harmless as they seem to be, are still among the devourers. They are feeding upon the Admiral's bounty, and it is fitting that on the occasion of their Plum Duff, an entertainment night with “intellectual raisins in it,” they are shown in an illustrated lecture how parasites necessarily treat their host. In this last part of the manuscript a sequence of horrific motion-picture close-ups (relatively new in 1906) is projected before the assembled derelicts while a sanctimonious lecturer develops the topic of the bounty and goodness of providence (later Mark Twain substituted “Nature” in this episode wherever he had first written “Providence”). The illustrative pictures have been gathered together at the last moment, and it turns out that they are wildly out of keeping with the reassuring text of the speaker. A mother spider is shown trusting happily that food will be provided for her numerous brood of spiderlings—only to find that she is their food as they suddenly rush upon her and begin to devour her. A wasp then stings the mother spider to provide food for her young—and so on. Mark Twain's working notes envision that even the Admiral will eventually fail, and it is [begin page 11] possible that if the story had been completed it would have shown Stormfield finally “eaten out of house and home.” At any rate, the Plum Duff Night incident implies that everyone lives by destroying others, that no one can abstain from the general carnage.

Mark Twain nevertheless recognizes man's attempts to rise above the conditions of life imposed by his maker. In “Derelicts” there are several characters who display attributes of true brotherliness. There is Smith, who in reading daily newspaper accounts of tragedies suffered by strangers grieves for them as much as a person ordinarily would for his own loved ones. Smith is following the law of his nature, which is to be transcendently sensitive. As the bos'n, the Admiral's right-hand man, explains to the narrator George Sterling, “Smith, he can't help the way he's made. Land, he takes the whole suffering world into his heart. . . . Why, Mr. Sterling, that man takes into his inside enough of the human race's miseries in a day to last a real manly man thirty years!” One recalls Clemens' own sensitivity to the news, as confided to William Dean Howells: “I have been reading the morning paper. I do it every morning—well knowing that I shall find in it the usual depravities and basenesses & hypocricies & cruelties that make up Civilization, & cause me to put in the rest of the day pleading for the damnation of the human race.”13 It should not be overlooked that it was immediate sympathetic responsiveness like Smith's that would prompt Clemens' later blasphemous outbursts. There is likewise a good deal of Clemens in Sterling, who learns that there are no insignificant people and who learns to care enough about others of the brotherhood to seek out the important events, the news, of their lives. As an artist, Sterling not only makes physical portraits of the derelicts but while doing so obtains their “psychographs”:

Sterling finds himself in the situation of a young shipmate receiving instructions from the bos'n regarding the universal brotherhood of the human race. By such tutelage he has been learning that everyone matters. He has, for example, become aware of the tenderhearted Smith as a person worth knowing:

The disaster of Smith's life had been that, living beyond his means, he had fallen to stealing and had been caught and imprisoned. Mark Twain's progress in the composition of “Derelicts” can be measured by his use of the mail-theft incident, which was drawn from actual life. On 2 April 1905 Miss Lyon noted in her journal that she had been “searching through the multitudinous letters in the study for the one that gives the true history of ‘the Postman who stole from the Mails,’ and to furnish the material for the chapter in the Admiral Story.” By that time the author had apparently reached page 122 of the 309-page manuscript.

The premise that every life contains an important story also underlies the other tragedies of the lowly in “Derelicts.” On this subject the writing flowed easily. Miss Lyon noted on April 10, “Mr. Clemens reads to Jean & me in the evenings, his ms of the Admiral Story. . . . Mr. Clemens does probe so into understandings of humanity. He appreciates the beauty of many lives, the fearful tragedies of them, but he won't admit that they're anything but machines.” The latest mention of work on the story that spring was Miss Lyon's entry of April 27: “Tonight Mr. Clemens read more of the Admiral Story.”

In May of 1905 Clemens settled at Dublin, New Hampshire, for a [begin page 13] long summer stay that was to include much literary work. He wrote “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes” between May 20 and June 23, then composed his “Apostrophe to Death” and at the end of June continued work on the manuscript of The Mysterious Stranger that had occupied him in Florence during the preceding year. Discontinuing work on the latter story by about July 12, he wrote “Eve's Diary” and revised the earlier “Adam's Diary.” Thereafter the pace of composition slackened, but during the remainder of the stay at Dublin, which lasted into October, he did a little more work on What Is Man? and wrote “Interpreting the Deity” and “A Horse's Tale.” There is no indication of any more work on the “Derelicts” manuscript, however, until Clemens returned to Dublin for the summer of 1906. The latter part of the manuscript was written that June, when he was spending his mornings in autobiographical dictation and some of his afternoons in work with pen and paper. On 9 June 1906, he wrote to his daughter Clara:

Clemens was determined to escape the dreariness, but the battle was evidently one he had to fight daily. His morning dictation of June 11 analyzed his problem: the house he had taken for that summer stood in the middle of a “spacious paradise,” but there was “the defect of loneliness. We have not a single neighbor, who is a neighbor. . . . My social life has to be limited to the friends who come to me. I can't very well go to them, because I don't like driving, and I am much too indolent to walk. The rest of the household walk and drive, daily, and thereby they survive. But I am not surviving. I am in a trance. When I have dictated a couple of hours in the forenoon I don't know what to do with myself until ten o'clock next day. Sometimes the household [begin page 14] are so melancholy that it ceases to be pathetic and becomes funny. Some member of it has given the house a masonic name, The Lodge of Sorrow.” With a characteristic blending of irony and pathos, he added, “The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change—anything for society.”

It appears that the desire to work on “Derelicts” had not been strong enough to keep on filling those empty afternoons. Within the next two days, he had turned for the moment to another pigeonholed piece. Miss Lyon's journal reveals that on June 13 he “read from a ms. he wrote 30 years ago: ‘Captain Stormfield's visit to Heaven’ ” and on June 14 “read the most readable part of the second part.” It was an easy transition for Clemens' thoughts—from his story of Admiral Stormfield to that of the captain of the same name who soul-journeys through heaven. But he probably continued writing “Derelicts” at least intermittently during the middle part of June. The need that his composition was helping to meet is evident in George Sterling's insistence that life is not empty:

Lesser insights expressed by a creative artist about his work have passed for profundity, but Clemens seldom took the trouble to seem profound. There is something impressive and touching about this seventy-year-old man's attempt to charge the dust of an empty room with life by will and imagination; or in his ability to find the hot heart's truth of life in a dusty packet of forgotten letters—as Miss Lyon reported in her journal, “In an old sack of letters sent . . . from Keokuk about 5 [begin page 15] years ago he unearthed a batch of 5 letters this morning which are a romance & a tragedy.” These letters had apparently been turned over to him by Mollie Clemens, the widow of his brother Orion. The five selected letters unfolded the story of a pregnant young woman who had been deserted by her married lover. In his dictation of that morning of June 18 he said:

Here Clemens may be seen taking the character he projected for Smith, the sympathizer for his race, as he was its spokesman when he put into “Derelicts” little biographies of the failed and the voiceless.

There is a further parallel between his morning dictation and his afternoon writing. Beginning on the following day, June 19, he held forth for several mornings “About the Character of God, as represented in the New and the Old Testaments”; on “The defects about Bibles—Remarks about the Immaculate Conception” (June 20); on “Evil influence of the Bible upon children” (June 22); and “Concerning the Character of the real God” (June 23). These preoccupations go far to explain the abrupt shift in tone and subject when “Derelicts” reaches the episode of the Plum Duff Night. The dictation of June 23 had in part dealt with such cruelties. In it he had spoken of the spider “so contrived” that she “must catch flies and such things, and inflict a slow and horrible death upon them, unaware that her turn would come next,” and of the wasp “so contrived that he also would . . . stab the spider, not conferring upon her a swift and merciful death but merely half paralyzing her, then ramming her down into the wasp den, there to live and suffer for days while the wasp babies should chew her legs off at their leisure.” There is a good chance that such things in “Derelicts” were written on the same afternoon. Quite possibly he [begin page 16] wrote on June 23 all eighteen pages of the final episode of his manuscript, for he was still capable of producing that much (about 2,000 words) when he was full of something that demanded expression. The last part of the story provides an ironic reversal that springs a tragedy-trap upon the derelicts (and also upon the reader). It is possible that he had at this point fulfilled his satiric intention and had thus satisfied one of the main impulses for composition.

The evidence regarding the chances for brotherhood was not, however, all negative. Just as in “Derelicts” there are characters who feel for others as for themselves, there are in other of these writings figures who are capable of altruism. In “Newhouse's Jew Story” and “Randall's Jew Story” a Jewish stranger risks his own life to save a worthy planter from ruin and death at the hands of a cutthroat gambler. In “ ‘You've Been a Dam Fool, Mary. You Always Was!’ ” an “honest rebel” refuses to take advantage of a former partner, a Northerner, when it would be easy and extremely profitable to do so. But these instances are minority reports; they go against the main body of testimony. They amount to lesser analogues of the exception Mark Twain had made for Joan of Arc as “that sublime personality, that spirit which in one regard has had no peer and will have none—this: its purity from all alloy of self-seeking, self-interest, personal ambition. In it no trace of these motives can be found, search as you may, and this cannot be said of any other person whose name appears in profane history.”15 Except for such rare spirits, the common condition of man was one of impurity and selfishness. Clemens saw the members of the human “brotherhood” as true children of the original Adam in their ignorance, folly, and perversity—qualities which usually proved stronger than their wistful good-heartedness. And Adam, it should be noted, figures in a secondary theme of “Derelicts”; in fact, the story has been known to scholars as the “Adam Monument Manuscript.” The particular foible of George Sterling is his dream of building a monument to Adam. Clemens was here making literary capital of a proposal that he had once conceived, certainly as a hoax: in the 1880s he had persuaded the town of Elmira, New York, to request that the Congress [begin page 17] of the United States grant their town the exclusive right to erect such a monument to the founder of the race. Clemens must have relished the petition as a revealing instance of human folly in which the very figure that should symbolize the united family of man, the universal brotherhood, had been made the object of a contentious local patriotism. The brotherhood of man, he believed, could not survive where there was boundary-enforcing selfishness. The point of Clemens' rueful joke is seen, finally, in the reasons for which Adam is said to deserve a monument. When Sterling tries to interest Smith in the monument scheme, the latter responds to the mention of Adam in a way worthy of Clemens himself:

According to the working notes, however, at least one character in “Derelicts” was not to accept the idea of the monument; the lowly 'Rastus, the hero of the runaway horse incident, was to say, “Father er de Brotherhood? Buil' a monument to him? No s'r!”

There was another aspect to the monument joke; man's natural selfishness resists voluntary subscriptions for such tributes—and will also resist being taxed for them. In “Concerning Martyrs' Day” Mark Twain made the tongue-in-cheek proposal that everyone “be required by Congress to contribute” a “day's earnings to an annual Monument” [begin page 18] and then carried the idea to full absurdity: “I would have the government architect plan a prodigious Monument which could go on climbing toward the sky, stage by stage and year by year, for a thousand years.” In the earlier of the two endings that Mark Twain wrote for “Abner L. Jackson (About to Be) Deceased,” the hypocritical Jackson, whose answer to the swindle of life is an insurance swindle based upon his own death, includes in his will a sum for a monument to Adam. In his willingness to spend the money of others for this purpose he was acting according to his make and in Clemens' view was showing himself to be a true son of the father of the brotherhood.

The Nightmare of History

Well before the end of the last century the author had come to suspect that the brotherhood of man was unattainable; that man's desire for power was stronger than his desire for love; that selfishness, not altruism, determined human actions. In the grim finale of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Mark Twain had pictured the fatal unleashing of these aggressive tendencies. Thereafter, in the “Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts, he presented nightmare views of the pageant of human events, as well as Satan's prophecy that the race would keep on repeating its follies and depravities for the next million years. But perhaps it is in the only-now-published “Eddypus” manuscripts that he most fully discloses his historical vision. The focus here is on the sweep of human history, from the time of the original Adam to a time when he shall have turned into a myth and Mark Twain shall have become the new Adam, the earliest man on record—the Father of History. The latter venerable figure appears in “Eddypus” as the reverently quoted authority on that most ancient and fabled time, the nineteenth century—the time of a great civilization that had suddenly risen and flourished and had just as suddenly been followed by a new Age of Darkness. Clemens had come to share with Henry Adams and others a cyclical view of history. Was he not seeing in his own lifetime the whole round that would endessly repeat itself—mankind struggling out of ignorance and slavery to gain freedom and knowledge, only to be led by its own cowardice and greed into fooling away its chances and being returned to its chains? We find in “ Ed- [begin page 19] dypus ” a dull and plodding scribe of the future nighttime of the world looking back to “the century called the Nineteenth by the Christians” as “the most remarkable century the world had ever seen” and gropingly attempting to “piece together a panorama of that ancient period out of odds and ends of history and tradition.” That time, he says, “exhibits to us life in a dream, as it were, so different is it from life as we know it and live it. It is amazingly complex and wonderful, a sort of glorified and flashing and splendid nightmare, and frantic and tumultuous beyond belief.” The one surviving great work of that period, he explains, that miraculously escaped the inevitable book-burnings, is “Old Comrades,” by Mark Twain, Bishop of New Jersey. It becomes evident that “Old Comrades” is a fictional equivalent of Mark Twain's Autobiography. Also mentioned is the venerable bishop's Gospel, which corresponds to What Is Man? Mark Twain is thus the holy figure upon which a new faith is to be based—one which will supplant the triumphant Eddyism, the established religion of the time in which the scribe is clandestinely copying and annotating the sacred book, “Old Comrades.” By this far-ranging fantasy, the hope for mankind in the future is to rest upon the example and teachings of Mark Twain. Probably there were moments when Clemens believed—or almost did—that it would all come to pass. Even allowing for humorous overstatement and mock-seriousness, the dream can be seen full-blown in his letter to Henry H. Rogers of ?17 June 1906: “Howells thinks the Auto will outlive the Innocents Abroad a thousand years, and I know it will. I would like the literary world to see (as Howells says) that the form of this book is one of the most memorable literary inventions of the ages.”16 He also delighted in Howells' praise of the parts of the autobiography that he had read as among “the humanest and richest pages in the history of man” and his comment, “You are nakeder than Adam and Eve put together, and truer than sin.”17 Similarly, he rejoicingly reported the judgment of George Harvey, head of Harper & Brothers: “He says it is the ‘greatest book of the age,’ and has in it ‘the finest literature.’ ”18

Yet he could hardly have been confident that the force of even [begin page 20] his words' enduring through the ages would ever afford man a chance to escape the doom of the historic process. It was extremely doubtful that the chance was even there: made as he was, an inborn coward and a lord-loving worshiper of spurious titles, the average man was bound to be enslaved by a gilded minority who, like the providence-trading swindlers in “The International Lightning Trust,” knew how to profit from “the assfulness of the human race.” It would all keep being repeated, without end. In “Passage from a Lecture,” the “distinguished Professor of the Science of Historical Forecast” propounds the “Law of Periodical Repetition” and conjectures:

There are a good many indications that, as the new century began to unroll, Clemens believed he had already seen it all. Like Faulkner's Dilsey, he had seen the beginning and the end. His own times had embraced the possibilities of human experience. He had been around the world—and around in the world—and knew its peoples, its places. And within himself he found, in some measure, all the qualities that were present in the make-up of any member of his race. He was the representative man, the race in singular—Adam. And the times invited his taking the role of spokesman for humanity.

The beginning of a new century was inevitably a time for historical survey, evaluation, and prophecy. Not surprisingly, Clemens, who had always been interested in history, made his own try at a summation, writing “Eddypus” in 1901 and 1902. A notebook item of 3 February 1901 reads, “Write Introduction to 100-Year book,”19 and another of three days later identifies this book as the “Eddypus” story: “Introduction 100-year. Gov't in hands of Xn Sci, or R. Catholic? Whole suffrage introduced to save Protestantism in 1950, but too late; R C & XSc ahead—got the field.”20 It may be seen that he was not yet very far [begin page 21] into the story, in which it is soon established that Christian Science and Roman Catholicism have long ago (as viewed from a perspective of 1,000 years hence) joined forces to form a world-dominating, absolutist church-state. The notion that the pope could seize power in America, like other “ideas seemingly hatched in cigar smoke over Twain's billiard table . . . reflected a common attitude,”21 as Louis J. Budd has pointed out. The idea was a component of the nightmare of catastrophic expectation that ran far back in Clemens' thought. In 1883 he had noted an idea “For a play: America in 1985. The Pope here & an Inquisition. The age of darkness back again. Pope is temporal despot, too. A titled aristocracy & primogeniture. Europe is republican & full of science & invention—none allowed here.”22 The play was never written, but the concept found its way into “Eddypus” with some modifications: Mrs. Eddy and her religion were to have a large share in the envisioned despotic sway, and the new age of darkness was to overshadow not just America but all of Western civilization, leaving only China standing once again in an Age of Light.

Something must be said of Clemens' attitudes toward Mary Baker Eddy and Christian Science. He was both fascinated and exasperated by what he knew of Mrs. Eddy herself, and in criticizing her he was inclined to go to extremes, as in this passage from a letter of 21 March 1901?:

In the same letter, he was careful to indicate that he was not also heaping ridicule on the religion of which Mrs. Eddy was the founder: “To me the respectibility of a religion does not depend on the religion's [begin page 22] authenticity but only upon the sincerity of the disciple's belief in it. These people are sincere.”24 He generally made this distinction. It is hard to escape the impression that Clemens' aversion to Mrs. Eddy had behind it something of the feeling one has toward a successful rival. He had in What Is Man? written his own “gospel,” which he had not at the time of writing “Eddypus” had the courage to publish. What Is Man? was, like the record of Mark Twain the Bishop of New Jersey in “Eddypus,” a suppressed work; Mrs. Eddy had had the needed boldness, and it was her new religion and not Clemens' that “took the field.” Much too coy for the role of a messiah, Clemens, in printing a limited edition of What Is Man? in 1906, refused to associate his name with it. He even took the precaution of having the copyright registered in the name of an agent (his printer's superintendent). Christian Science, even though written as an exposé, was another work that Clemens was for a time persuaded to suppress—as he recalled it.25 The concern with suppression that is so evident in “Eddypus” relates also to the Autobiography. Even as Clemens felt obliged to withhold much of the latter from publication until the remote future in order to avoid giving offense, so in “Eddypus” the Bishop Mark Twain has wanted his “Old Comrades” to remain “securely guarded” against publication of its “remorseless truth” about them while any might survive to be hurt by it.

There are other parallels. Clemens was confident that the Autobiography would eventually be a literary property of great value; the Bishop had thought the same of his manuscript:

The Bishop, wanting “his book to be readable by the common people without necessity of translation” and finding that “the English of a period 450 years back in the past was quite fairly readable as in Malory's Morte d'Arthur ‘by Tom, Dick and Harry,’ ” had “appointed his book to be published after the lapse of five centuries.” But as the scribe explains, the repository for “Old Comrades”—a vault beneath “the new Presidential palace” in Washington—has become lost and forgotten with the disappearance of the capital city long before the five hundred years have passed. So the manuscript remains buried for a thousand years before being discovered by some “shepherds digging for water”; the book, in nineteenth-century English, is “Beowulf over again. No one could spell out its meanings but our half-dozen ripest philologists.” Ironically, the work is unearthed at a time when Mother Eddy's Christian Science is in control of everything. The Bishop's “Old Comrades” must remain suppressed. Only a few heretics know of it; risking their lives to correspond about it, they write in a cipher and sometimes in invisible ink.

Of course Clemens did not go to such lengths to conceal his own manuscripts, but he did store those materials that he intended only for posthumous publication. And when the 1906 edition of What Is Man? was printed, he advised his publisher, “Keep the 250 copies safe and secure . . . until the edition is rare and people are willing to pay $300. a copy for it. That is the price, or we hold on and wait ten years—you and my daughters.”26 Again, the life situation curiously parallels “Eddypus”: the Gospel of Mark Twain is to be hidden away in a vault until after his death (he envisions being survived by his daughters and [begin page 24] by the publisher F. N. Doubleday), with the expectation that it will become extremely valuable. And it is probably no mere coincidence that he makes a firm point of having this Gospel of Mark sell for three hundred dollars, exactly the price that Mrs. Eddy charged for her course of instruction in Christian Science.

After the notebook entry about planned work on the introduction to the “100-Year book,” made in February 1901, he probably soon wrote much of the existing manuscript. The passage on phrenology which he brought into Book 2, Chapter 2, aids in dating the composition. This passage is not well integrated with what precedes and follows, and it appears to have been thrown into “Eddypus” for no better reason than that Clemens was interested in phrenology at the time. That time may very well have been shortly after 7 March 1901, a date on which he had a phrenological examination by the prominent firm of Fowler and Wells—the Briggs and Pollard of “Eddypus.”27 The part of the passage on phrenology that explains the basic system of ratings “on the brain-chart of the science” by numbers from 1 to 7 was taken almost verbatim from O. S. and L. N. Fowler's book, New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology. 28 At the time of Clemens' death a copy of this book, signed “Clemens, 1901,” was in his library, as the 1911 sale catalog of Clemens' library reveals. The indication is, then, that he was well past the middle point of the existing manuscript by some time in March 1901. It is likely that in that month he also wrote through Chapter 5 of Book 2, less than four days' work at his ordinary pace of something like twelve manuscript pages a day.

It may be established that he did not, however, write the remainder of the work until the following year. On 16 February 1902 he wrote to F. A. Duneka of Harper & Brothers asking for a copy of Andrew D. [begin page 25] White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom and also for “any up-to-date books” he might have “on the half-dozen great sciences, by experts. Not big books, but condensations or small school-textbooks.”29 He added, “You will begin to think the large book I am writing is going to be a mine of learning. Well it is—a little bit distorted, a trifle out of focus, recognizably drunk. But interesting, and don't you forget it!” It can be deduced that he was here referring to “Eddypus,” for his copy of White's book, which is in the Mark Twain Papers, shows by Clemens' marginalia and by the contents, from which he borrowed extensively, that he used this as a main source for his recapitulation of scientific discoveries in the final chapters of Book 2. He also borrowed from White—and fancifully embellished—the incident of the hoax in which college boys “planted” small manufactured clay animal figures which were accepted by their mentor (Martin Luther in the Mark Twain version) as the original models used for the Creation.30 After writing the last three chapters, [begin page 26] Mark Twain apparently abandoned “Eddypus.” The chapters were not typed, and Paine filed them as a separate work under the title “On Science.” They are, nevertheless, clearly a continuation of Book 2 and here have been restored to “Eddypus.”

Mark Twain had spoken of making a large book, but once he had used up the ideas gleaned from White's history, he probably did not know where to go next—and followed his practice of pigeonholing. A yachting trip with Henry H. Rogers in the latter part of March and through a part of April could also have interrupted work on the book. Although composition was never resumed, he may have kept his intention of completing “Eddypus” alive for a time. At the end of July 1902 he noted that he had been asked to consider selling one of several of his books “in ms,” among which he listed “the 1000 Years Hence.”31 Instead of renewing work upon “Eddypus,” however, he turned within the next year to his other Eddy-inspired writings, those dealing specifically with Christian Science and with Mrs. Eddy as the founder and head of that religion and the author of Science and Health, with Key to the Scriptures. He published “Christian Science” serially in the North American Review of December 1902 and January and February 1903. For the first two parts he used materials written “Four years ago (1898–9)”; in the remaining part he presented “Eddypus”-related material in a section headed “V.—(later still.)—a thousand years ago. Passages from the Introduction to the ‘Secret History of Eddypus, the World-Empire.’”32 In the parts written four years earlier he had credited Christian Science with certain positive values but had found fault with Mrs. Eddy's own motives and actions in establishing and maintaining her church; in the later part he summarized his historical viewpoint and the essential fable of “Eddypus.” The article prompted a defense of Mrs. Eddy by W. D. McCrackan, “Mrs. Eddy's Relation [begin page 27] to Christian Science,” in the March issue of the Review. Undertaking to examine the work's arguments “with the sole object of separating fact from fiction,” he implied that Mark Twain's use of both past and future viewpoints had introduced an aspect of unreality: “There are certain disadvantages about treating a present day subject either from four years back or from nine hundred and ninety-nine years ahead, which I feel certain the reader will appreciate.” McCrackan charged that these writings had tended “to draw out of line the discovery and life motive of Mrs. Eddy, to swell to preposterous proportions the regular business affairs of the Christian Science denomination which she has founded, and to magnify the imperfections, while minimizing the merits, of the methods used for preserving the purity of Christian Science before the world.”33 Mark Twain replied in the following month, reaffirming his charges: in “Mrs. Eddy in Error,” he asserted, “In simple truth, she is the only absolute sovereign in all Christendom.”34 In the closing part of the “Later Still” section, he envisioned that her religion would eventually rule the entire world; it was to keep on “growing, ceaselessly growing. . . . When it numbered 50,000,000, it began to take a hand—quietly; when it numbered half the country's population, it lifted up its chin and began to dictate”:

Perhaps the publication of this projected ending for “Eddypus” satisfied or vitiated any urge toward further work on the story, and he had stolen his own thunder.

Some other pieces in this section, all relatively brief, provide alternate versions of Mark Twain's historical fantasy. “Passage from ‘Glances at History’ (suppressed.)” offers what is purportedly a speech “made [begin page 28] more than 500 years ago, and which has come down to us intact,” which develops the idea that the Great Republic, involved in an unjust war, had sold its honor in the name of a misguided patriotism. As Bernard DeVoto recognized, Clemens had in mind the occupation of the Philippines.36 In “The Stupendous Procession” the view of the times is widened to include not just the Great Republic (the United States) but Western civilization. As Philip S. Foner has written, this satire is noteworthy for “linking all imperialist powers together,” showing “their common brutalities and their common resort to sanctimonious hypocrisies.”37 “Flies and Russians,” written at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, marks the disappointment of Clemens' hopes for a timely overthrow of the czarist regime. The piece may be read as another indication that he was still looking for positive evidence that man could somehow rise above the common weaknesses of human character—and not finding it. “The Fable of the Yellow Terror” looks beyond America and Europe to see the Far East becoming once again dominant: after the decline of the West, China is to enjoy another Age of Light, as envisioned in “Eddypus,” with great economic and political power. “A Letter from the Comet” and “Ancients in Modern Dress” emphasize again the cyclical aspect of history and dwell upon Adam as the human archetype. “The Recurrent Major and Minor Compliment” relates Clemens' historical view to his personal life. In responding to the recurring comment, “I believe that at bottom you are a serious man,” he must have had in mind some of his own darker times: “When was the first time you ever saw a man of fifty who had never known dread, fear, defeat, disaster, sleepless nights, the paralysis of despair and the longing for death? . . . When did you ever see any sane man of fifty who was not—and by awful compulsion—at bottom serious?”

One might expect Clemens to have specified sixty rather than fifty, for it was in the mid-nineties—and he reached sixty in 1895—that he had suffered failure and disaster; but he was here generalizing his own case as that of everyman and may have been taking the half-century [begin page 29] point as a roundly representative one. Or had he already in his own life touched such depths by the year in which he had also reached the height of his achievement by publishing Huckleberry Finn? Only he could speak for the nightmare side of his own personal history. From the summit of seventy years, at the time of his birthday in 1905, he saw that history as a “foolish dream” in which he had arrived at a place of desolation: “Old Age, white-headed, the temple empty, the idols broken, the worshippers in their graves, nothing left but You, a remnant, a tradition, belated fag-end of a foolish dream, a dream that was so ingeniously dreamed that it seemed real all the time; nothing left but You, centre of a snowy desolation, perched on the ice-summit, gazing out over the stages of that long trek and asking Yourself ‘would you do it again if you had the chance?’ ”

Pondering his question, one who considers Clemens' view of the human predicament and then thinks of his Stormfieldlike qualities of irascibility, compassion, and resoluteness can only imagine what, given such a chance, he would have answered.