Mark Twain at Work [Reprint 2013 ed.] 9780674284647, 9780674280403

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MARK TWAIN AT WORK

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MARK TWAIN AT WORK BY

BERNARD DEVOTO

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1942

COPYRIGHT,

1942

B Y THE PRESIDENT AND F E L L O W S OF HARVARD COLLEGE

Ο?

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD U N I V E R S I T Y PRINTING OFFICE CAMBRIDGE, M A S S A C H U S E T T S , U . S . A .

To ROSAMOND

CHAPMAN

PREFACE the years when I was preparing to write Mark Twain's America I sometimes applied to Mr. Albert Bigelow Paine for permission to examine certain Mark Twain manuscripts. Mr. Paine always refused and so, when my book was ready, I had to include a statement cautioning the reader that some conclusions reached in it were merely tentative and that anyone else's conclusions in the same area must be merely tentative until the manuscripts should be opened to study. What I hoped to find in the manuscripts was a few reliable indications of how Mark Twain's mind worked on the material out of which his books were made — what the nature of his talent actually was. Only Mr. Paine and Mr. Van Wyck Brooks had ever said anything about the subject. I had the strongest reasons for doubting Mr. Paine's judgments and my book was in part a refutation of Mr. Brooks's. In the spring of 1938 the Mark Twain Estate appointed me Mr. Paine's successor and made me the custodian of the Mark Twain Papers. Since then I have arranged them, edited them, studied them exhaustively, published some of them as Mark Twain in Eruption, and prepared others for publication. (I have also freely opened them to study by qualified scholars.) I now publish as a sequence the three essays brought together here. Their history is explained in the Acknowledgments. There is to be said of them further only that it seems best to make them thus available to students until such time as I may be able to present at greater length the material they deal with and to incorporate their findings in an enlarged edition of my earlier book. Mark Twain's America was what a later fashion came DURING

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PREFACE

to call a "social" study of literature. It was grounded, that is, in a belief that a writer's environment is important to his work and that, specifically, much of what was great and fruitful in Mark Twain's books was an expression of a national experience. In view of the reception accorded it in certain quarters, I am happy to say that an exhaustive study of the most intimate Mark Twain papers, published, partly published, and unpublished, has supported every major conclusion of my book. An enlarged edition would not need to revise anything I said in it about Hannibal, the river, the West, or the frontier in general. After four and a half years of work in the Mark Twain Papers I regard my thesis as established. The three essays published here indicate the direction of enlargement if — as a writer who always has more books ahead of him than he will ever write — I eventually find time to enlarge it. It is now possible to speak with certainty about some aspects of Mark Twain's mind and talent and to make intelligent guesses about other aspects of them which will always elude certainty. Something about the actual writing of Tom Sawyer and the actual writing of Huckleberry Finn is said here, for the first time by any critic. What is said does outline Mark Twain's habits of work, his characteristic attack on his material, the kind of difficulties he customarily encountered, and his usual ways of dealing with them. It does outline the nature of his talent, its abundance, and its hiatuses. What is said here about the writing of those two books can be abundantly supported, by material in the Mark Twain Papers, through the repetition of these patterns in the writing of his other books. Furthermore, " T h e Symbols of Despair" outlines a theory about those unconscious portions of Mark Twain's mind which can be approached only by way of theory. This theory is grounded on a vast accumulation of data which Mr. Paine ignored and Mr. Brooks never heard about. The present essay indicates the true ordeal of

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Mark Twain. Anyone who is familiar with Mr. Brooks's book will see at once that my explanation of it differs altogether from his. " T h e Symbols of Despair" is a report only. Only the most salient parts of the relevant material are mentioned and they are only summarized. I hope that, before I enlarge Mark Tivairis America, I may be able to study at book length the material treated in this essay, printing portions of the principal documents and treating a very great many details which I have not even mentioned here. Trying to follow the unconscious workings of any writer's mind will always be a speculative pursuit but there is available to this study a far larger body of material than there is for the writing of any other book I have ever heard of. The writing of The Mysterious Stranger casts some light, however weak and intermittent, into many areas of Mark Twain's personality that have so far been dark. The Mysterious Stranger is a far more important key to Mark Twain's books than anyone can realize who has not read the material briefly described here. Uncovering and following up the clues has amounted to working on a mystery story — and I hope some day to share that fascination with students and lovers of Mark Twain's books. The circumstances of their publication has made unavoidable certain small repetitions in these essays. They will not, I think, prove very troublesome. BERNARD

Cambridge, Massachusetts February i, 1942

DEVOTO

CONTENTS T H E PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD: TOM SA WYER

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"BOY'S MANUSCRIPT" NOON AND T H E DARK: HUCKLEBERRY

3 25

FINN

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45

T H E SYMBOLS OF DESPAIR

105

APPENDIX

131

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

141

ILLUSTRATIONS MARK TWAIN NOTES FOR THE WRITING OF FINN

FRONTISPIECE

HUCKLEBERRY

NOTES FOR THE COMPLETION OF " T H E GREAT DARK"

66 122

MARK TWAIN AT WORK

The Phantasy of Boyhood: Tom Sawyer I N S E V E R A L L E T T E R S and in Mark Twain in Eruption Mark Twain has described his episodic method of working on his books. He customarily kept half a dozen literary projects under way, taking up whichever he found most stimulating and working on it till the going got difficult or his enthusiasm slackened, then laying it aside till the "tank" filled up and he could begin on it again with renewed energy. The intervals might be brief but were sometimes very long: during the 1890's he went back to several manuscripts which he had laid away in the '70's and there is one manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers to which he returned after thirty years. Most of his books show signs of having been thus sporadically composed. It is the way of inspiration, the way of genius if you like, but it is not the way of a conscientious literary workman. It resulted in some of the most brilliant improvisations in American literature — and in some of the most painful disharmonies in Mark's books. And it is one reason why we cannot determine just when he began to write The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He was working on the book as we now know it when he wrote to Dr. John Brown on September 4, 1874, ^ ^

I

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he had been producing fifty pages a day "for sometime now," and on July 5, 1875, he wrote to Howells, " I have finished the story." Fifty of his pages would be about five thousand words — ample evidence that he had not worked consecutively on it even between those dates. How long before the earlier one had he begun it in its final form? On page 23 of the manuscript there is a marginal note of some length on "the splendid jewelry that illuminated the trees on the morning of Jan. 9, '73." He was certainly working on Tom Sawyer when he made that note, but he did not necessarily make it on the date it refers to. The spectacular ice storm it describes so impressed him that he enlarged on it in notebooks years later and described it at length in Following the Equator, which was written in 1896. It may have been called up by some association in the text and the note may be a memorandum rather than a date. When he was dictating his autobiography in 1907, he said (in a still unpublished passage), "It could have been there [the Garrick Club] but I think it was at Bateman's, thirty-five years ago, that I told Irving and Wills, the playwright, about the whitewashing of the fence by Tom Sawyer, and thereby captured a chapter on cheap terms; for I wrote it out when I got back to the hotel while it was fresh in my mind." The allusion is to Mark's first trip to England in 1872, and that not altogether trustworthy recollection supplies the earliest date we can refer to, for the whitewashing belongs entirely to the book we now know. But if he did write that chapter in 1872, there is no evidence that he wrote more than that. That passage must have been Mr. Paine's reason for saying flatly that Tom Sawyer was begun in 1872. But he also says that it was begun as a play, and he publishes a facsimile 1 of the first manuscript page. That one page is all that is left of the play now, and was probably all that 1

Mark Twain: a Biography, p. JIO.

THE PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD 5 remained when Mr. Paine wrote. Probably the play did not go much farther than that page, probably it was begun after the book was written, and certainly it was not the first version of Tom's immortal adventures. Mr. Paine's sole reason for supposing the page earlier than the book is that Aunt Polly is named Aunt Winny — but the scene it begins is clearly the present opening of the book, which was written later than the whitewashing scene and was therefore not written until after the book itself had been begun. (The manuscript makes this clear.) It may have been, and I think was, part of one of Mark's several efforts to dramatize his book after it was written. The man who forgot Becky Thatcher's name between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and who called her Becky Fletcher and her father Judge Fletcher through a long section of the manuscript in which she first appears was quite capable of innocently changing Aunt Polly's name for a page. And even if we accept Mr. Paine's deduction and date, this fragment of a play was not the earliest attempt to use the material of Tom Sawyer. The earliest known attempt is the sketch published here as "Boy's Manuscript." In this there is not only no aunt (the hero's mother exercising Aunt Polly's function), there is not even a Tom Sawyer. There is a Bob Sawyer, a mere supernumerary, who appears just long enough to jeer at the love affair that will be his own a few years later. Tom's adventures are bestowed on one Billy Rogers, who will be Ben Rogers in the book, will appear in person to buy for an apple the first share in the whitewashing, and will then subside to about the status of Bob Sawyer in the sketch. Mr. Paine nowhere lists or mentions this primitive story and appears not to have realized its significance, but its opening page (numbered 3, the first two pages having been lost) bears a notation in his hand, "Boy's manuscript. Probably written about 1870." That date agrees with what slight evidence is offered by ink, paper, and hand-

6

MARK TWAIN A T WORK writing, and is probably correct. Certainly the sketch was written before 1872. There is one exasperating hint of a further stage on the way to the book. The first page of the manuscript of Tom Sawyer (of Chapter I, which was written at some now indeterminable time after Chapter II) bears a marginal note which reads, "Put in thing from Boy-lecture." It was Mark's custom to include in his lecture programs selections from books he was currently working on and he may well have done so with this one. But if he did, no trace of the lecture has survived and there is no way of guessing what the "thing" to be included was. This now nameless sketch (the title disappeared with the two lost pages) is indeed primitive — but it has in embryo much that was to be developed in the book. There is a heroine named Amy who inflicts on the hero the same agonies and ecstasies that Becky Thatcher was to inflict on Tom. Billy Rogers makes love to her in almost the same terms Tom uses, calls her his wife, seals the engagement with a kiss, and suffers physic and the water cure for her sake. Like Tom also he is "spelled down," hopes to die temporarily so that Amy will reel remorse, and does battle for her — this time with a boy called Wart Hopkins. He draws a picture of her like the one Becky admires, and at their final quarrel her rage takes the same form as Becky's. Functionally she is Becky in the sketch, though like Billy himself she was to shrink when the book was written and to come out in it, reduced and plaintive, as Amy Lawrence. (In a farcical and very bad dramatization, sometime after 1876, Mark gave Amy greater stature than she has in the book. In this play Tom's heart wavers between the two girls and Amy carries on the flirtation with Alfred Temple.) When we meet Wart Hopkins he is on his way back from a crossroads where he has buried a bean that has blood on it: from this seed the central action of Tom Sato-

T H E P H A N T A S Y OF BOYHOOD

7

yer was to grow. Before this he had been in the circus business with Billy, and that too was to have its part in the book, together with the sham battle, the tooth, the sore toe, and the posturing and parading before Amy's house. More striking is the louse which is tormented on Bill Bowen's desk. It has become a more seemly tick when we see it again and Bill Bowen, whose name in Hannibal was Will Bowen when Sam Clemens punched this same louse with a pin, has become Joe Harper, but the scene is duplicated almost exactly. Even more striking is Billy's dream of piracy, on which the slight plot turns. "Look," Billy says to Amy, "look at Captain Kydd — look at Morgan — look at Gibbs — look at the noble Lafitte — look at the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main —names that'll never die." W e are well within Tom Sawyer's mind with that sentence, and we go deeper in it when the great dream finds expression: "And then some Sunday morning I'll step into Sunday school with my long black hair and my slouch hat with a plume in it, and my long sword and high boots and a splendid belt and red satin doublet and breeches, and my black flag with skull and crossbones on it, and all the children will say, 'Look — look — that's Rogers the pirate!'" This is the dream that launches a raft on the Mississippi at midnight, carrying not only the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main but Huck Finn the Red Handed and Joe Harper the Terror of the Seas. The sketch is certainly the embryo of Tom Sawyer — but it is Tom Sawyer untouched by greatness, and Tom Sawyer without body'-snatching and midnight murder, without Jackson's Island, without the cave, without Huck Finn. It is crude and trivial, false in sentiment, clumsily farcical, an experiment in burlesque with all its standards mixed. One reads it with respect for what grew out of it but with no interest in the thing itself. Yet it has a far from slight importance in the history of American literature and even of world literature. For it precedes The

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Gilded Age and so is Mark's first attempt, except for casual anecdotes, to write fiction. And in these random and clumsy scenes a great novelist first struck the vein that was to produce his finest work. Here for the first time he wrote about the Hannibal of his boyhood. (Let psychologists determine whether his marriage or the death of his father-in-law, both of which occurred in 1870, led him to it.) This faltering crudity prophesies not Tom Sawyer only but Huckleberry Finn as well, and Pudd'nhead Wilson, The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and The Mysterious Stranger. It was characteristic of him to blunder into it by way of burlesque; there was, in fact, no other avenue that he could travel toward it. But however trivial the start, the end was sure — and from this moment on predictable. Because we are used to a Tom Sawyer told in conventional narrative form, it is something of a shock to find Tom's vicar keeping a diary and writing in the first person. But Mark wrote to Howells when he had finished the book, " I believe it would be fatal to do it [a successor to Tom Sawyer] in any shape but autobiographically — like Gil Bias. [?] I perhaps made a mistake in not writing it in the first person." Well, he actually did begin to write the book in the first person — the form established by this sketch endured that long. The manuscript from which the book was set up (years later he remembered that this was the first book ever prepared for the press on a typewriter, but it wasn't typed and the manuscript for the English edition was made by an amanuensis) is in the Riggs Memorial Library of Georgetown University. And that manuscript contains one vestigial page from an earlier beginning. Manuscript page 37 was originally page 6, and it shows not only that the whitewashing scene preceded the present opening but also that at least six pages of it were first written, as our sketch had been written and as Huckleberry Finn was to be written, in the first person. "And

THE PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD

9

when the middle of the afternoon came," Tom says, "from being a poor, poverty-stricken boy in the morning, I was literally rolling in wealth. I had, besides the things I have mentioned, 12 marbles, part of a Jew's harp, a piece of blue bottle-glass to look through . . ." and on down through the "old window sash" of the familiar text. The page ends, "I'd had a nice good idle time." And all down the page the " I " of the narrative has been crossed out and "he" has been substituted, to agree with the later beginning. . . . It was a wise change and the doubt that Mark mentioned to Ho wells was unjustified. Six months later he found a perfect medium in Huck Finn's vernacular, whose rhythm and color are straight out of the Missouri earth. But, lacking that idiom, Tom's memoirs would have been stilted and unreal. There is something essentially false in his referring to himself as "a poor, poverty-stricken boy" — and that falsity is pushed to mawkishness in the journal that Billy Rogers keeps. II Mark began writing the book as we now know it in either 1873 or 1874 (on the whole, the latter seems the likelier year), and on July 5, 1875, told Howells that he had finished it. His episodic method of composition shows in the book's handsome indifference to minutiae. Judge Thatcher's appearance as Judge Fletcher in a middle section has been mentioned. This was rectified in the manuscript but a confusion in the relationships and residence of the Thatcher family survives in the book. The Judge ends by swallowing Lawyer Thatcher, whom he is visiting when he first appears, and by the end of the book is a permanent resident of St. Petersburg, though half-way through it his home is still Constantinople, which had originally been called Coonville in the manuscript. (He is still in St. Petersburg in Huckleberry Finn, but his daughter

ΙΟ

MARK T W A I N A T WORK

Becky has become Bessie.) Mr. Dobbins's school is larger at the ceremonies of graduation than when we first see the classes reciting. Tom's enchanted summer is similarly elastic: the season is not yet over when the Widow Douglas gives her party for the boys, but if you count the weeks that have elapsed since the Fourth of July you will find that autumn should be well along. There are other incongruities, inconsistencies, and loose ends. They do not matter at all but they are the sort of thing that Arnold Bennett had in mind when he called Mark Twain "the divine amateur." Bennett was a type-specimen of the professional writer, whose pride of craft it is to leave nothing undigested, to tie all knots and sandpaper all joints till the parts are perfectly fitted in a whole. Mark Twain was at times superior to and always incapable of such discipline. He had the discipline of daily work and the sterner discipline that made his prose one of the great styles of English, but he lacked the discipline of revision and the discipline that makes a writer uneasy until his material has been completely thought through into form. That lack is his greatest defect as an artist; it is rather less evident in Tom Sawyer than in most of his novels but sometimes it shows clearly. Finishing his book, Mark was eager to submit it to his arbiter and censor, Howells.2 The letter of July 5, 1875, asks Howells to read it "and point out the most glaring defects" — and Mark is then of the opinion that "It is not a boy's book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults." Howells's summer plans deferred his reading and there was no hurry, for both the 2 H e had apparently discussed the book with Howells while he was working on the last part of it. In an unpublished letter of June 21, 1875, he wrote: "Thank you ever so much for the praises you give the story. I am going to take into consideration all you have said, and then make up m y mind b y and by. Since there is no plot to the thing, it is likely to follow its own drift, and so is as likely to drift into manhood as anywhere — I won't interpose. If I only had the Mississippi book written, I would surely venture this story in the Atlantic." Note this further revelation of his aimlessness.

T H E PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD

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English and American publishers were awaiting a more favorable time for publication. An amanuensis copy of the manuscript (now privately owned) was prepared, and this is the one which Ho wells read the following November and on which he made his annotations. On November 21, he wrote to Mark: I finished reading Tom Sawyer a week ago, sitting up till one A.M., to get to the end, simply because it was impossible to leave off. It's altogether the best boy's story I ever read. It will be an immense success. But I think you ought to treat it explicitly as a boy's story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up point of view, you'd give the wrong key to it. I have made some corrections and suggestions in faltering pencil, which you'll have to look for. They're almost all in the first third. When you fairly swing off, you had better be left alone. The adventures are enchanting. I wish I had been on that island. The treasurehunting, the loss in the cave, it's all exciting and splendid. I shouldn't think of publishing this story serially. Give me a hint when it's to be out, and I'll start the sheep to jumping in the right places. I don't seem to think I like the last chapter. I believe I would cut that.3 Mark wrote at once (November 23) "As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off and adding nothing in its place. Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point — and so the strong temptation to put Huck's life at the Widow's into detail, instead of generalizing it in a paragraph was resisted." The meaning of this is cloudy but the present stilted "Conclusion" has been added to the amanuensis copy in Mark's own hand, and that may indicate that there was another chapter — that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn began prematurely in Tom Sawyer. ' Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, Vol. I, p. 212.

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Illness kept Mark from making revisions until January, when, on the 18 th, he wrote to Ho wells: There was never a man in the world so grateful to another as I was to you day before yesterday, when I sat down (in still rather wretched health) to set myself to the dreary and hateful task of making final revision of Tom Sawyer, and discovered, upon opening the package of MS that your pencil marks were scattered all along. This was splendid, and swept away all labor. Instead of reading the MS, I simply hunted out the pencil marks and made the emendations which they suggested. I reduced the boy battle to a curt paragraph; I finally concluded to cut the Sunday school speech down to the first two sentences, leaving no suggestion of satire, since the book is to be for boys and girls [his opinion has changed since July]; I tamed the various obscenities until I judged that they no longer carried offense. So, at a single sitting I began and finished a revision which I supposed would occupy 3 or 4 days and leave me mentally and physically fagged out at the end. [Mark's conception of revision shows in this estimate.] Most of Howells's suggestions can still be made out in the margins of the amanuensis copy. Mark seems to have adopted all of them, but there are fewer than the letters suggest. At the end of Chapter III, Howells writes, "Don't like this chapter much. The sham fight is too long. Tom is either too old for that or too young for [word or words lost]. Don't like the chaps in [word or words lost]." Obediently Mark cuts some three hundred words from the sham battle, much to its improvement. (He missed one word, however, which remained a meaningless vestige in all editions of the book till 1939. Tom rode a broomstick horse in that battle, and later he made it "cavort" in front of Becky's house. At his final departure the text has hitherto inexplicably read, "Finally he rode home reluctantly with his poor head full of visions.") Mr. Walters's speech in Sunday school has been improved by its

THE PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD 13 reduction. A speech of Joe Harper's before the venture in piracy has been cleared of burlesque. Howells objects to "cussedness" as a Yankee expression and Mark makes it "Old Scratch." Howells checks Alfred Temple's "Aw — what a long tail our cat's got" (which Mark had already substituted for "Aw — go blow your nose") and it comes out "Aw — take a walk." Where Tom now says, in the next speech, that he will "bounce a rock off'n your head," Howells has objected, soundly, to "mash your mouth." There are perhaps a half-dozen further stylistic changes, as where Tom's "throes of bliss" on receiving the Barlow knife become a "convulsion of delight," and where his original intention to "gloom the air with a lurid lie" is altered to "take refuge in a lie." But more interesting and important are the mild "obscenities" that Mark mentions in his letter. Howells cannot be charged with the change of "the devil" to "Satan" toward the end of the book nor (I think — the copy is not clear) with the softening of "foul slop" to "water" where the Thatcher's maid drenched the adoring Tom, whose "reeking" garments are then made merely "drenched." Mark had also softened Injun Joe's intentions toward the Widow Douglas. His original explanation that to get revenge on a woman "you cut her nose off — and her ears" had been altered to "you slit her nostrils — you notch her ears" when the amanuensis copy was made, and where Huck now tells the Welshman that he heard "the Spaniard swear he'd spile her looks" he originally added "and cut her ears off." Perhaps Olivia Clemens or Mark's children had shrunk from these expressions, though more likely it was Mark's own nerves that flinched. But Howells's nerves required further alterations. The poodle which relieves the suffering of the congregation by sitting down on a pinchbug now goes "sailing up the aisle" and no more; but originally he sailed up that aisle "with his tail shut down like a hasp." Howells writes

i4 MARK TWAIN A T WORK in the margin, "Awfully good but a little too dirty," and an amusing phrase goes out. Much more important, by far the most important change anywhere in the manuscript is the modification of Chapter XX. Here, in the margin opposite Becky Thatcher's stolen glimpse of "a human figure, stark naked" in Mr. Dobbins's textbook of anatomy, Howells writes, "I should be afraid of this picture incident," and so cancels one of the truest moments of childhood in the manuscript. Reproached by Becky for sneaking up on her, Tom had originally said, "How could / know it wasn't a nice book? I didn't know girls ever —." Becky's apprehension of being whipped carried a postscript, "But that isn't anything — it ain't half. You'll tell everybody about the picture, and O, O, O / " Meditating on what a curious kind of fool a girl is, Tom was originally permitted to think: But that picture — is — well, now it ain't so curious she feels bad about that. No. . . [Mark's punctuation] No, I reckon it ain't. Suppose she was Mary and Alf Temple had caught her looking at such a picture as that and went around telling. She'd feel — well, I'd lick him. I bet I would. [Then, farther toward the end of the soliloquy] Then Dobbins will tell his wife about the picture. [Note the information that Dobbins is married.] And Becky was originally permitted to think, "He'll tell the scholars about that hateful picture — maybe he's told some of them before now." The omission of this, the single allusion to sex in the book (which, observe, had survived the scrutiny of Olivia Clemens), is very interesting. The omission is clearly chargeable to Howells, and yet I suspect that Mark himself would soon have felt uneasy and, in manuscript or in proof, would have deleted those sentences on his own initiative. W e are told that his anecdotes and conversation could be plentifully obscene and there is the published

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1601 as well as the unpublished speech to the Stomach Club, "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism," and several other fragments, as well as some savage satires written during his last years but not intended to be published. Nevertheless he was almost lustfully hypersensitive to sex in print; he was in fact, as a writer, rather more prudish than Howells. His timorous circumlocutions, published and unpublished, are astonishing; he once argued that there could be no such thing as an age of consent, for all seduction was essentially rape; and, in an unpublished venture of Tom and Huck into the Indian country, he was as tremulous as a Bertha M. Clay when he had to suggest what might happen to a captured heroine. Of thirty-nine notebooks kept as banks of deposit for his books, only three contain any entries at all that deal with sex, and one of these does not contemplate its use for fiction. In The Gilded Age even a false marriage (whose daring presence in the book, besides, is probably due to Charles Dudley Warner) must be atoned for with a heroine's death — and, in short, of all Mark's published fiction only Pudd'nhead Wilson is aware of sexual desire as a human motive. Certainly childhood as he depicts it is naturally sexless — and he would probably have removed this blemish without Howells's warning. Mark could not have written about boyhood as it appears in the works of Sigmund Freud even if he had thought of it in that way, but there is no evidence that he thought of it as otherwise than sexless. Boyhood existed forever in the idyll of Hannibal, and he remembered Hannibal as he was to make Eve remember Eden, as an eternal summer before the Fall. The published Autobiography makes this clear, and the Mark Twain Papers contain many unpublished manuscripts and groups of notes that embody his memories of Hannibal. One of these manuscripts, "Villagers of 1840-43," is specially pertinent here. In the course of discussing many of Mark's neighbors it notes that

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some of the Blankenship girls (they would be Huck Finn's sisters) were charged with prostitution but adds, "not proven." It chronicles one adultery, one crime of passion, and one free union. Then it summarizes the subject in a separate paragraph: Chastity. There was the utmost liberty among young people — but no young girl was ever insulted, or seduced, or even scandalously gossiped about. Such things were not even dreamed of in that society, much less spoken of and referred to as possibilities. Ever, not even dreamed, of, possibilities! Those are emphatic words but Mark meant them. Whatever the defect of experience or recognition that made him thus libel a full-blooded folk, that is how he remembered Eden. Before this essay no one, I think, had noticed the softening of Chapter X X , but Howells's remaining modification has become famous. Curiously enough, he missed the offense when he read the manuscript. He did encounter in Huck's passionate grievance against the Widow Douglas, "she'd gag when I spit," and that had to go, but he passed "they comb me all to hell" without questioning it. But Mark had already spent some concern on the phrase — writing "hell," then changing it to "thunder," and finally restoring the dreadful word — and demanded judgment from his arbiter. In the letter of January 18, 1876, already quoted he said: There was one expression which perhaps you overlooked. When Huck is complaining to Tom of the rigorous system in vogue at the widow's, he says the servants harass him with all manner of compulsory decencies, and he winds up by saying: "and they comb me all to hell." (No exclamation point.) Long ago, when I read that to Mrs. Clemens, she made no comment;4 another time I created occasion to read that 4

In his Biography (p. 549) Paine quotes from a letter which he does not print in the Letters·. "Mrs. Clemens received the mail this morning, and the next minute she lit into the study with danger in her eye and this demand on

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chapter to her aunt and her mother (both sensitive and loyal subjects of the kingdom of heaven, so to speak) and they let it pass. I was glad, for it was the most natural remark in the world for that boy to make (and he had been allowed few privileges of speech in the book); when I saw that you, too, had let it go without protest, I was glad, and afraid, too — afraid you hadn't observed it. Did you? And did you question the propriety of it? Since the book is now professedly and confessedly a boy's and girl's book, that darn word bothers me some, nights, but it never did until I had ceased to regard the volume as being for adults. Howells wrote, the next day: As to the point in your book: I'd have that swearing out in an instant. I suppose I didn't notice it because the locution was so familiar to my Western sense, and so exactly the thing that Huck would say. But it won't do for the children.5 So the expletive joined the simile about the poodle's tail and Tom's meditations about a naked figure in a textbook. Mark's own changes in the manuscript are usually stylistic and always for the best. It is interesting to discover that Injun Joe's companion in the grave-robbing was originally Old Man Finn. He became Muff Potter, no doubt, to prevent Huck's oath from putting his father's life in jeopardy. And there is one deletion which not only suggests that there was another intermediate stage of the book but also makes one thankful that, though Mark was tempted, he found grace to resist the kind of extravaher tongue: where is the profanity Mr. Howells speaks of? Then I had to miserably confess that I had left it out when reading the M S S . to her. Nothing but almost inspired lying got me out of this scrape with my scalp. Does your wife give you rats, like this, when you go a little one-sided?" This would seem to contradict the statement of January 18, 1876. Actually, however, Paine had misdated the letter and misunderstood the allusion. T h e profanity to which L i v y was objecting was not "She combs me all to hell," was not even in Tom Sawyer — it was in "Old Times on the Mississippi." 5 Letter of January 19, 1876, in the Mark T w a i n Papers; never printed in full.

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ganza that defaces the last quarter of Huckleberry Finn. At the end of Chapter III, Tom, saddened by Aunt Polly's cruelty, goes down to the river, where he sits on a raft in the darkness, takes out his wilted flower, and thinks of Becky with the melancholy that made Burton diagnose love as a neurosis. And "at last," the text says, "he rose up sighing and departed in the darkness." Until Mark crossed out the passage, the manuscript went on, " A dimly defined, stalwart figure emerged from behind a bundle of shingles upon the raft, muttering 'There's something desperate breeding here,' and then dropped stealthily into the boy's wake." There is no telling what wild notion was in Mark's mind but he was beginning to burlesque a passage already strained to the breaking-point and, remembering such passages elsewhere that he did not strike out, one is overjoyed to see heavy ink cancelling this one in time. Ill With Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer stands at the head of Mark Twain's work. Both are masterpieces, both transcend their own weaknesses, both belong to the exceedingly small number of American books that have permanently enriched world literature, both are among the common possessions of even unliterary readers everywhere, both have the simple but mysterious attribute of mythology that makes permanence sure, both are compacted of literary truth. This one is the lesser of the two, it is not so profound nor so fine a book as Huckleberry Finn, its plane of greatness is a lower plane. But it is true to itself and it has qualities that its more mature companion piece does not share. Its limitations have already been suggested herein. The gravest of them is that the boys are of no particular age and therefore much that they do and feel is psychological

THE PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD 19 anachronism. Howells's partly indecipherable comment on Chapter III, "Tom is either too old for that or too young for . . . " i s true of the book as a whole. Precisely as the story takes place in a year that has no anchorage in time (well, if pedants must, it is not later than 1845 — and therefore, since Mark was born in 1835, Tom has not yet reached his tenth birthday), so the emotions of boyhood swing through half a dozen ages. The sham battle, the forest outlawry, the mischief of the school scenes, the treasure-digging and the cure of warts are proper to the age of eight or nine. But Tom's adoration of Becky is nearer adolescence, and the boys who camp on Jackson's Island, shadow Injun Joe, want to take a drink when forbidden by the pledge, minister to Muff Potter in jail, and save the Widow Douglas are twelve or thirteen. Surely Tom can be no younger than that, may even be older, when he testifies in court and comforts Becky in the cave. . . . Throughout the book time curves back on itself and boyhood is something more than realism, it is a distillation, a generalization, a myth. It is not itself but its own essence and a wish for the merely statistical would be impertinent. Precisely as the voltage of Huck Finn makes ridiculous any mundane doubt of his ability to live forever on handouts and in hogsheads, so in the bared presence of what all boys wish and dread it is silly to ask how old Tom and Huck are when they crouch behind the elms that spread over Hoss Williams's grave. Structurally Tom Sawyer is a better job than most of Mark's fiction. Only The Prince and the Pauper, whose form was determined by the simple contrast of its formula, moves so smoothly in its own medium. Nevertheless one is sometimes troubled by Mark's lordly improvisations. When Injun Joe cherishes a five years' grudge against Dr. Robinson he is well within belief, for he is half Indian and half white — "two," so Eugene Rhodes says, "two bad breeds." But belief grows reluctant when this vindictive

MARK TWAIN A T WORK mind is found to be meditating a second revenge. The horsewhipping inflicted on him by the Widow Douglas's husband reduces him from truth to mere plot. In the same way, the boys are sick too much. Tom's earlier illnesses are acceptable but when anxiety inflicts on Huck Finn a fever not to be distinguished from any early Victorian heroine's and Tom also is overcome, the illusion weakens: this is a mere device, time must be found for Injun Joe to starve. And it would be comforting if the time scheme were less arbitrary. A Missouri summer may indeed begin in April but it cannot last so long as it is made to here. Art trespasses on relativity. Finally, though the book is more profoundly true to the phantasies of boyhood than any other ever written, and to maturity's nostalgia for what it once was, though it has forged the symbols that seem likely to express boyhood more permanently than any other in literature, it cannot be thought of as comprehensive or profound realism. The term is dangerous; certainly the forged symbol transcends literalism and the truth of Tom Sawyer is the kind of truth that only symbols can express — like the symbols of Antigone or those of Macbeth. But you need only differentiate boyhood from its symbols to perceive how much of it Mark ignores. There is, we have seen, no sex — none of the curiosity, the shame, the torment, the compulsion of young ignorance groping in mystery. Becky and Tom in the empty schoolroom do not belong in the same world with any pair of ten-year-olds in a hayloft, and though Tom thinking of her by the dark river is profoundly true he never goes on to think of her as any boy must in the years when girls are at last known to be females. "Such things were not even dreamed of in that society." Furthermore, Tom's immortal daydreams never get much above the childish level. Piracy, highway robbery, the outlaws of the forest, the circus, the vagabondage of Jackson's Island — yes, thank God. But was there no glance 20

THE PHANTASY OF BOYHOOD

21

forward as well, had he no nebulous, inarticulate vision of growing up, did he get no nearer than this to the threshold of ambition and desire, where boyhood darkly flowers in frustrated poetry? Has a boy no griefs and losses outside of phantasy, no satisfactions and no achievements more real than these? Is a boy's mind no wider and no deeper than Tom's? Where are the brutalities, the sternnesses, the strengths, the perceptions, and the failures that will eventually make a man? Well, in part Mark's will was to ignore such things, as when he denies us the entire struggle of fear, pity, and horror out of which Tom's decision to reveal what he had seen in the graveyard issues, in order to give us the simple melodrama of the revelation. And in part he was incapable of the analysis which the probing of motives and psychological intricacies requires: his understanding was intuitive and concrete and he was sure only of behavior, fumbling when he had to be introspective. So with St. Petersburg, the society in which Tom's summer is played out. What is asserted of it is all memorably true but much has been left out. Mark was to go on and tell the rest in other books, but here the society was formed out of nostalgia and the book became a pastoral poem, an idyll of an America that had already vanished when it was written. . . . And by now it must be clear that, though there is also a direct answer to the doubts we have expressed, this discussion has so far been conducted on false premises. For the discussion leaves out what millions of readers have experienced in the sixty-six years since Tom Sawyer was published. No book can become world literature, as this one has become, unless it has authority over the imagination of mankind, and such authority makes merely idle the kind of doubt expressed here. It is a complex thing but the basis of it is that it embodies universal phantasies. When Tom triumphs in the whitewashing, enacts the death of Robin Hood, is punished for his beloved's fault, estab-

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lishes his pirates' den on Jackson's Island, and dramatically insures justice to Muff Potter, the dreams of all childhood everywhere are fulfilled in him. " I wish / had been on that island," Ho wells said and the same wish, known or only felt, has been wakened and gratified in everyone who ever read the book.6 It is a deep wish — for natural beauty and daring and adventure, for dawn and midnight storm and the flowing river, and underneath that for all the freedoms that the soul needs. It is at the very core of desire. But darker needs are also voiced and allayed. The book's enchantment is so strong that it beguiles one into forgetting how much of the spell issues from dread and horror. The story pivots on body-snatching, revenge, murder, robbery, drowning, starvation, and the fear of death. It exists in a medium darkened by witchcraft and demonology; ghosts are only an amulet's width away; the malevolence of the unseen world is everywhere a danger as tangible as Injun Joe. All these give it primary drama — but also they crystallize, more perfectly than anywhere else in literature, the terrors that are as indissolubly a part of boyhood as the reflex of freedom. If Mark could not analyze the ferments of the mind's dark side, he has given them enduring symbols. Tom writhing with guilt during a thunderstorm; Tom and Huck cowering behind the trees while murder is done and then, in darkness and moonlight, hearing Bull Harbison howl above Muff Potter who will surely die; Tom and Huck preserved from death only by the collapse of a stairway that Injun Joe is mounting; Tom and Becky wandering in the cave with a dwindling candle and then awaiting death in darkness; the halfbreed chipping at the sill in the knowledge that he must die — these and many other images are an ecstasy from the soul's fear, and boy' " Y o u have stirred in me the longing to go back to. the seclusion of Jackson's Island and give up the futilities of life. I suppose w e all have a Jackson's Island somewhere and dream of it when we are tired." (From an unpublished letter of Feb. 22, 1898, to Sir Walter Besant.)

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hood finds in them a richer, deeper expression than literature has elsewhere given it. The symbols speak for millions out of the shadow of unbodied dread. In this way Tom Sawyer transcends realism, transcends its narrative, transcends its characters and becomes mythology. N o actual boy ever filled his pockets with fees paid for the privilege of whitewashing a fence, or followed the pathway of terror from an opened grave to treasure buried under a cross. The way of fact is the curve of an arc; myth, like poetry, travels straight across, on the chord. Millions have assented as Tom Sawyer moves along the chord, and millions more will assent. He is a universal myth, a part of the small store of truth that American literature has added to the treasury of mankind. And mythological truth has another facet. St. Petersburg, I have said, is an idyll, the enchanted village of Mark's remembrance. It has the quality of the phrase from an old song, "Over the hills and far away," which he could never think of without tears. This village, though violence underlies its tranquillity as it underlies most dreams of beauty, is withdrawn from the pettiness, the greed, the cruelty, the spiritual squalor, the human worthlessness that Huck Finn was to travel through ten years later, that are the fabric of Hadleyburg and Dawson's Landing. There is indeed no abdication of Mark's perceptions: for all the tenderness that draws the portrait of Aunt Polly she is clearly seen, and the trivial concerns of the village personages are rendered with calm finality. Minor realisms about provincial society are here engraved for all time. But in spite of them the village is really a part of Lyonnesse, sunk forever under waters more limpid than the Mississippi that flows beside it. As such it perfectly preserves something of the American experience, more of American dreaming, and still more of the beauty that was our heritage and that still conditions both our national memory and our phantasy. On one side of it is Cardiff Hill, a remnant of the great forest,

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on the other side is the great river: both at the very base of our awareness. Between these beauties the village is sleepy, peaceful, and secure. The world invades it only as romance and adventure; the energies of the age are over the horizon. Time has stopped short; the frontier has passed by and the industrial revolution is not yet born. Life is confident and untroubled, moves serenely at an unhurried pace, fulfills itself in peace. Islanded in security, in natural beauty, St. Petersburg is an idyll of what we once were, of what it is now more than ever necessary to remember we once were. Here also the book captures and will keep secure forever a part of America . . . of America over the hills and far away.

"Boy's Manuscript" me that put the apple there. I don't know how long I waited, but it was very long. I didn't mind it, because I was fixing up what I was going to say, and so it was delicious. First I thought I would call her Dear Amy, though I was a little afraid; but soon I got used to it and it was beautiful. Then I changed it to Sweet Amy — which was better — and then I changed it again, to Darling Amy — which was bliss. When I got it all fixed at last, I was going to say, "Darling Amy, if you found an apple on the doorstep, which I think you did find one there, it was me that done it, and I hope you'll think of me sometimes, if you can — only a little" — and I said that over ever so many times and got it all by heart so I could say it right off without ever thinking at all. And directly I saw a blue ribbon and a white frock — my heart began to beat again and my head began to swim and I began to choke — it got worse and worse the closer she came — and so, just in time I jumped behind the lumber and she went by. I only had the strength to sing out "APPLES!" and then I shinned it through the lumber yard and hid. How I did wish she knew my voice! And then I got chicken-hearted and all in a tremble for fear she did know it. But I got easy after a while, when I came to remember that she didn't know me, and so perhaps she wouldn't know my voice either. When I said my prayers at night, I prayed for her. And I prayed the good God not to let the apple make her sick, and to bless her every way for the sake of Christ the Lord. Note. The title of this sketch is the label put on it by Albert Bigelow Paine when he filed it in the Mark Twain Papers. The first two pages have been lost.

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And then I tried to go to sleep but I was troubled about Jimmy Riley, though she don't know him, and I said the first chance I got I would lick him again. Which I will. Tuesday. — I played hookey yesterday morning, and stayed around about her street pretending I wasn't doing it for anything, but I was looking out sideways at her window all the time, because I was sure I knew which one it was — and when people came along I turned away and sneaked off a piece when they looked at me, because I was dead sure from the way they looked that they knew what I was up to — but I watched out, and when they had got far away I went back again. Once I saw part of a dress flutter in that window, and O, how I felt! I was so happy as long as it was in sight — and so awful miserable when it went away — and so happy again when it came back. I could have staid there a year. Once I was watching it so close I didn't notice, and kept getting further and further out in the street, till a man hollered " H i ! " and nearly ran over me with his wagon. I wished he had, because then I would have been crippled and they would have carried me into her house all bloody and busted up, and she would have cried, and I would have been per-fectly happy, because I would have had to stay there till I got well, which I wish I never would get well. But by and bye it turned out that that was the nigger chambermaid fluttering her dress at the window, and then I felt so down-hearted I wished I had never found it out. But I know which is her window now, because she came to it all of a sudden, and I thought my heart was going to burst with happiness — but I turned my back and pretended I didn't know she was there, and I went to shouting at some boys (there wasn't any in sight,) and "showing o f f " all I could. But when I sort of glanced around to see if she was taking notice of me she was gone — and then I wished I hadn't been such a fool, and had looked at her when I had a chance. Maybe

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she thought I was cold towards her? It made me feel awful to think of it. Our torchlight procession came off last night. There was nearly eleven of us, and we had a lantern. It was splendid. It was John Wagner's uncle's lantern. I walked right alongside of John Wagner all the evening. Once he let me carry the lantern myself a little piece. Not when we were going by her house, but if she was where she could see us she could see easy enough that I knowed the boy that had the lantern. It was the best torchlight procession the boys ever got up — all the boys said so. I only wish I could find out what she thinks of it. I got them to go by her house four times. T h e y didn't want to go, because it is in a back street, but I hired them with marbles. I had twenty-two commas and a white alley when I started out, but I went home dead broke. Suppose I grieved any? N o . I said I didn't mind any expense when her happiness was concerned. I shouted all the time we were going by her house, and ordered the procession around lively, and so I don't make any doubt but she thinks I was the captain of it — that is, if she knows me and my voice. I expect she does. I've got acquainted with her brother Tom, and I expect he tells her about me. I'm always hanging around him, and giving him things, and following him home and waiting outside the gate for him. I gave him a fish-hook yesterday; and last night I showed him my sore toe where I stumped it — and to-day I let him take my tooth that was pulled out New-Year's to show to his mother. I hope she seen it. I was a-playing for that, anyway. H o w awful it is to meet her father and mother! T h e y seem like kings and queens to me. And her brother T o m — I can hardly understand how it can be — but he can hug her and kiss her whenever he wants to. I wish I was her brother. But it can't be, I don't reckon. Wednesday. — I don't take any pleasure, nights, now, but carrying on with the boys out in the street before her

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house, and talking loud and shouting, so she can hear me and know I'm there. And after school I go by about three times, all in a flutter and afraid to hardly glance over, and always letting on that I am in an awful hurry — going after the doctor or something. But about the fourth time I only get in sight of the house, and then I weaken — because I am afraid the people in the houses along will know what I am about. I am all the time wishing that a wild bull or an Injun would get after her so I could save her, but somehow it don't happen so. It happens so in the books, but it don't seem to happen so to me. After I go to bed, I think all the time of big boys insulting her and me a-licking them. Here lately, sometimes I feel ever so happy, and then again, dreadful often, too, I feel mighty bad. Then I don't take any interest in anything. I don't care for apples, I don't care for molasses candy, swinging on the gate don't do me no good, and even sliding on the cellar door don't seem like it used to did. I just go around hankering after something I don't know what. I've put away my kite. I don't care for kites now. I saw the cat pull the tail off of it without a pang. I don't seem to want to go in a-swimming, even when Ma don't allow me to. I don't try to catch flies any more. I don't take any interest in flies. Even when they light right where I could nab them easy, I don't pay any attention to them. And I don't take any interest in property. To-day I took everything out of my pockets, and looked at them — and the very things I thought the most of I don't think the least about now. There was a ball, and a top, and a piece of chalk, and two fish hooks, and a buckskin string, and a long piece of twine, and two slate pencils, and a sure-enough china, and three white alleys, and a spool cannon, and a wooden soldier with his leg broke, and a real Barlow, and a hunk of maple sugar, and a jews harp, and a dead frog, and a jaybird's egg, and a door knob, and a glass thing that's broke off of the top of a decanter (I traded two fish-hooks and a tin injun for it,)

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and a penny, and a potato-gun, and two grasshoppers which their legs was pulled off, and a spectacle glass, and a picture of Adam and Eve without a rag. I took them all upstairs and put them away. And I know I shall never care anything about property any more. I had all that trouble accumulating a fortune, and now I am not as happy as I was when I was poor. Joe Baldwin's cat is dead, and they are expecting me to go to the funeral, but I shall not go. I don't take any interest in funerals any more. I don't wish to do anything but just go off by myself and think of her. I wish I was dead — that is what I wish I was. Then maybe she would be sorry. Friday. — My mother don't understand it. And I can't tell her. She worries about me, and asks me if I'm sick, and where it hurts me — and I have to say that I ain't sick and nothing don't hurt me, but she says she knows better, because it's the measles. So she gave me ipecac, and calomel, and all that sort of stuff and made me awful sick. And I had to go to bed, and she gave me a mug of hot sage tea and a mug of hot saffron tea, and covered me up with blankets and said that that would sweat me and bring it to the surface. I suffered. But I couldn't tell her. Then she said I had bile. And so she gave me some warm salt water and I heaved up everything that was in me. But she wasn't satisfied. She said there wasn't any bile in that. So she gave me two blue mass pills, and after that a tumbler of Epsom salts to work them off — which it did work them off. I felt that what was left of me was dying, but still I couldn't tell. The measles wouldn't come to the surface and so it wasn't measles; there wasn't any bile, and so it wasn't bile. Then she said she was stumped — but there was something the matter, and so there was nothing to do but tackle it in a sort of a general way. I was too weak and miserable to care much. And so she put bottles of hot water to my feet, and socks full of hot ashes on my

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breast, and a poultice on my head. But they didn't work, and so she gave me some rhubarb to regulate my bowels, and put a mustard plaster on my back. But at last she said she was satisfied it wasn't a cold on the chest. It must be general stagnation of the blood, and then I knew what was coming. But I couldn't tell, and so, with her name on my lips I delivered myself up and went through the water treatment — douche, sitz, wet-sheet and showerbath (awful,) — and came out all weak, and sick, and played out. Does she — ah, no, she knows nothing of it. And all the time that I lay suffering, I did so want to hear somebody only mention her name — and I hated them because they thought of everything else to please me but that. And when at last somebody did mention it my face and my eyes lit up so that my mother clasped her hands and said: — "Thanks, Ο thanks, the pills are operating!" Saturday Night — This was a blessed day. Mrs. Johnson came to call and as she passed through the hall I saw — O, I like to jumped out of bed! — I saw the flash of a little red dress, and I knew who was in it. Mrs. Johnson is her aunt. And when they came in with Ma to see me I was perfectly happy. I was perfectly happy but I was afraid to look at her except when she was not looking at me. Ma said I had been very sick, but was looking ever so much better now. Mrs. Johnson said it was a dangerous time, because children got hold of so much fruit. Now she said Amy found an apple [I started,] on the doorstep [Oh!] last Sunday, [Oh, geeminy, the very, very one!] and ate it all up, [Bless her heart! ] and it gave her the colic. [Dern that apple!] And so she had been sick, too, poor dear, and it was her Billy that did it — though she couldn't know that, of course. I wanted to take her in my arms and tell her all about it and ask her to forgive me, but I was afraid to even speak to her. But she had suffered for my sake, and I was happy. By and bye she came near the

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bed and looked at me with her big blue eyes, and never flinched. It gave me some spunk. Then she said: "What's your name? — Eddie, or Joe?" I said, "It ain't neither — it's Billy." "Billy what?" "Billy Rogers." "Has your sister got a doll?" " I ain't got any sister." "It ain't a pretty name I don't think — much." "Which?" " W h y Billy Rogers — Rogers ain't, but Billy is. Did you ever see two cats fighting? — / have." "Well I reckon I have. I've made 'em fight. More'n a thousand times. I've fit 'em over close-lines, and in boxes, and under barrels — every way. — But the most fun is to tie fire-crackers to their tails and see 'em scatter for home. Your name's Amy, ain't it? — and you're 8 years old, ain't you?" "Yes, I'll be nine, ten months and a half from now, and I've got two dolls, and one of 'em can cry and the other's got its head broke and all the sawdust is out of its legs — it don't make no difference, though — I've give all its dresses to the other. Is this the first time you ever been sick?" "No\ I've had the scarlet fever and the mumps, and the hoop'n cough, and ever so many things. H'mph! / don't consider it anything to be sick." " M y mother don't, either. She's been sick maybe a thousand times — and once, would you believe it, they thought she was going to die." "They always think /'m going to die. The doctors always gives me up and has the family crying and snuffling round here. But I only think it's bully." "Bully is naughty, my mother says, and she don't 'low Tom to say it. Who do you go to school to?" "Peg-leg Bliven. That's what the boys calls him, cause he's got a cork leg."

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"Goody! I'm going to him, too." "Oh, that's bul - . I like that. When?" "To-morrow. Will you play with me?" "You bet!" Then Mrs. Johnson called her and she said "Goodbye, Billy" — she called me Billy — and then she went away and left me so happy. And she gave me a chunk of molasses candy, and I put it next my heart, and it got warm and stuck, and it won't come off, and I can't get my shirt off, but I don't mind it. I'm only glad. But won't I be out of this and at school Monday? I should think so. Thursday. — They've been plaguing us. We've been playing together three days, and to-day I asked her if she would be my little wife and she said she would, and just then Jim Riley and Bob Sawyer jumped up from behind the fence where they'd been listening, and begun to holler at the other scholars and told them all about it. So she went away crying, and I felt bad enough to cry myself. I licked Jim Riley, and Bob Sawyer licked me, and Jo Bryant licked Sawyer, and Peg-leg licked all of us. But nothing could make me happy. I was too dreadful miserable on account of seeing her cry. Friday. — She didn't come to school this morning, and I felt awful. I couldn't study, I couldn't do anything. I got a black mark because I couldn't tell if a man had five apples and divided them equally among himself and gave the rest away, how much it was — or something like that. I didn't know how many parts of speech there was, and I didn't care. I was head of the spelling class and I spellt baker with two k's and got turned down foot. I got lathered for drawing a picture of her on the slate, though it looked more like women's hoops with a hatchet on top than it looked like her. But I didn't care for sufferings. Bill Williams bent a pin and I sat down on it, but I never

"BOY'S MANUSCRIPT" 33 even squirmed. Jake Warner hit me with a spit-ball, but I never took any notice of it. The world was all dark to me. The first hour that morning was awful. Something told me she wouldn't be there. I don't know what, but something told me. And my heart sunk away down when I looked among all the girls and didn't find her. No matter what was going on, that first hour, I was watching the door. I wouldn't hear the teacher sometimes, and then I got scolded. I kept on hoping and hoping — and starting, a little, every time the door opened — till it was no use — she wasn't coming. And when she came in the afternoon, it was all bright again. But she passed by me and never even looked at me. I felt so bad. I tried to catch her eye, but I couldn't. She always looked the other way. At last she set up close to Jimmy Riley and whispered to him a long, long time — five minutes, I should think. I wished that I could die right in my tracks. And I said to myself I would lick Jim Riley till he couldn't stand. Presently she looked at me — for the first time — but she didn't smile. She laid something as far as she could toward the end of the bench and motioned that it was for me. Soon as the teacher turned I rushed there and got it. It was wrote on a piece of copybook, and so the first line wasn't hers. This is the letter: "Time and Tide wait for no Man. "mister william rogers i do not love you dont come about me any more i will not speak to you" I cried all the afternoon, nearly, and I hated her. She passed by me two or three times, but I never noticed her. At recess I licked three of the boys and put my arms around May Warner's neck, and she saw me do it, too, and she didn't play with anybody at all. Once she came near me and said very low, "Billy, I — Vm sorry." But I went away and wouldn't look at her. But pretty soon I was sorry myself. I was scared, then. I jumped up and

34 MARK TWAIN AT WORK ran, but school was just taking in and she was already gone to her seat. I thought what a fool I was; and I wished it was to do over again, I wouldn't go away. She had said she was sorry — and I wouldn't notice her. I wished the house would fall on me. I felt so mean for treating her so when she wanted to be friendly. How I did wish I could catch her eye! — I would look a look that she would understand. But she never, never looked at me. She sat with her head down, looking sad, poor thing. She never spoke but once during the afternoon, and then it was to that hateful Jim Riley. I will pay him for this conduct. Saturday. — Going home from school Friday evening, she went with the girls all around her, and though I walked on the outside, and talked loud, and ran ahead sometimes, and cavorted around, and said all sorts of funny things that made the other girls laugh, she wouldn't laugh, and wouldn't take any notice of me at all. At her gate I was close enough to her to touch her, and she knew it, but she wouldn't look around, but just went straight in and straight to the door, without ever turning. And Oh, how I felt! I said the world was a mean, sad place, and had nothing for me to love or care for in it — and life, life was only misery. It was then that it first came into my head to take my life. I don't know why I wanted to do that, except that I thought it would make her feel sorry. I liked that, but then she could only feel sorry a little while, because she would forget it, but I would be dead for always. I did not like that. If she would be sorry as long as I would be dead, it would be different. But anyway, I felt so dreadful that I said at last that it was better to die than to live. So I wrote a letter like this: "Darling Amy "I take my pen in hand to inform you that I am in good health and hope these fiew lines will find you injoying the

"BOY'S MANUSCRIPT

35 same god's blessing. I love you. I cannot live and see you hate me and talk to that Jim riley which I will lick every time I ketch him and have done so already. I do not wish to live any more as we must part. I will pisen myself when I am done writing this and that is the last you will ever see of your poor Billy forever. I enclose my tooth which was pulled out newyears, keep it always to remember me by, I wish it was larger. Your dyeing B I L L Y ROGERS." I directed it to her and took it and put it under her father's door. Then I looked up at her window a long time, and prayed that she might be forgiven for what I was going to do — and then cried and kissed the ground where she used to step out at the door, and took a pinch of the dirt and put it next my heart where the candy was, and started away to die. — But I had forgotten to get any poison. Something else had to be done. I went down to the river, but it would not do, for I remembered that there was no place there but was over my head. I went home and thought I would jump off of the kitchen, but every time, just [as] I had clumb nearly to the eaves I slipped and fell, and it was plain to be seen that it was dangerous — so I gave up that plan. I thought of hanging, and started up stairs, because I knew where there was a new bed-cord, but I recollected my father telling me if he ever caught me meddling with that bed-cord he would thrash me in an inch of my life — and so I had to give that up. So there was nothing for it but poison. I found a bottle in the closet, labeled laudanum on one side and castor oil on the other. I didn't know which it was, but I drank it all. I think it was oil. I was dreadful sick all night, and not constipated, my mother says, and this morning I had lost all interest in things, and didn't care whether I lived or died. But Oh, by nine o'clock she was here, and came right in — how my heart did beat and my face flush when I saw her dress go by the window! — she came right in and came right up to the bed, before

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Ma, and kissed me, and the tears were in her eyes, and she said, "Oh, Billy, how could you be so naughty! — and Bingo is going to die, too, because another dog's bit him behind and all over, and Oh, I shan't have anybody to love!" —and she cried and cried. But I told her I was not going to die and / would love her, always — and then her face brightened up, and she laughed and clapped her hands and said now as Ma was gone out, we'd talk all about it. So I kissed her and she kissed me, and she promised to be my little wife and love me forever and never love anybody else; and I promised just the same to her. And then I asked her if she had any plans, and she said No, she hadn't thought of that — no doubt I could plan everything. I said I could, and it would be my place, being the husband, to always plan and direct, and look out for her, and protect her all the time. — She said that was right. But I said she could make suggestions — she ought to say what kind of a house she would rather live in. So she said she would prefer to have a little cosy cottage, with vines running over the windows and a four-story brick attached where she could receive company and give parties — that was all. And we talked a long time about what profession I had better follow. — I wished to be a pirate, but she said that would be horrid. I said there was nothing horrid about it — it was grand. She said pirates killed people. I said of course they did — what would you have a pirate do? — it's in his line. She said, But just think of the blood! I said I loved blood and carnage. She shuddered. She said, well, perhaps it was best, and she hoped I would be great. Great! I said, where was there ever a pirate that wasn't great? Look at Capt. Kydd — look at Morgan — look at Gibbs — look at the noble Lafitte — look at the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main! — names that'll never die. That pleased her, and so she said, let it be so. And then we talked about what she should do. She wanted to keep a milliner shop, because then she could have all the

"BOY'S MANUSCRIPT"

37

fine clothes she wanted; and on Sundays, when the shop was closed, she would be a teacher in Sunday-school. And she said I could help her teach her class Sundays when I was in port. So it was all fixed that as soon as ever we grow up we'll be married, and I am to be a pirate and she's to keep a milliner shop. Oh, it is splendid. I wish we were grown up now. Time does drag along so! But won't it be glorious! I will be away a long time cruising, and then some Sunday morning I'll step into Sunday School with my long black hair, and my slouch hat with a plume in it, and my long sword and high boots and a splendid belt and red satin doublet and breeches, and my black flag with scull and cross-bones on it, and all the children will say, "Look — look — that's Rogers the pirate!" Oh, I wish time would move along faster. Tuesday. — I was disgraced in school before her yesterday. These long summer days are awful. I couldn't study. I couldn't think of anything but being free and far away on the bounding billow. I hate school, anyway. It is so dull. I sat looking out of the window and listening to the buzz, buzz, buzzing of the scholars learning their lessons, till I was drowsy and did want to be out of that place so much. I could see idle boys playing on the hill-side, and catching butterflies whose fathers ain't able to send them to school, and I wondered what I had done that God should pick me out more than any other boy and give me a father able to send me to school. But I never could have any luck. There wasn't anything I could do to pass off the time. I caught some flies, but I got tired of that. I couldn't see Amy, because they've moved her seat. I got mad looking out of the window at those boys. By and bye, my chum, Bill Bowen, he bought a louse from Archy Thompson — he's got millions of them — bought him for a white alley and put him on the slate in front of him on the desk and begun to stir him up with a pin. He made him travel a

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while in one direction, and then he headed him off and made him go some other way. It was glorious fun. I wanted one, but I hadn't any white alley. Bill kept him a-moving — this way — that way — every way — and I did wish I could get a chance at him myself, and I begged for it. Well, Bill made a mark down the middle of the slate, and he says, "Now when he is on my side, I'll stir him up — and I'll try to keep him from getting over the line, but if he does get over it, then you can stir him up as long as he's over there." So he kept stirring him up, and two or three times he was so near getting over the line that I was in a perfect fever; but Bill always headed him off again. But at last he got on the line and all Bill could do he couldn't turn him — he made a dead set to come over, and presently over he did come, head over heels, upside down, a-reaching for things and a-clawing the air with all his hands! I snatched a pin out of my jacket and began to waltz him around, and I made him git up and git — it was splendid fun — but at last, I kept him on my side so long that Bill couldn't stand it any longer, he was so excited, and he reached out to stir him up himself. I told him to let him alone, and behave himself. He said he wouldn't. I said "You've got to — he's on my side, now, and you haven't got any right to punch him." He said, "I haven't, haven't I? By George he's my louse — I bought him for a white alley, and I'll do just as I blame please with him!" And then I felt somebody nip me by the ear, and I saw a hand nip Bill by the ear. It was Peg-leg the schoolmaster. He had sneaked up behind, just in his natural mean way, and seen it all and heard it all, and we had been so taken up with our circus that we hadn't noticed that the buzzing was all still and the scholars watching Peg-leg and us. He took us up to his throne by the ears

"BOY'S MANUSCRIPT" 39 and thrashed us good, and Amy saw it all. I felt so mean that I sneaked away from school without speaking to her, and at night when I said my prayers I prayed that I might be taken away from school and kept at home until I was old enough to be a pirate.* Tuesday Week. — For six whole days she has been gone to the country. The first three days, I played hookey all the time, and got licked for it as much as a dozen times. But I didn't care. I was desperate. I didn't care for anything. Last Saturday was the day for the battle between our school and Hog Davis's school (that is the boys's name for their teacher). I'm captain of a company of the littlest boys in our school. I came on the ground without any paper hat and without any wooden sword, and with my jacket on my arm. The Colonel said I was a fool — said I had kept both armies waiting for me a half an hour, and now to come looking like that — and I better not let the General see me. I said him and the General both could lump it if they didn't like it. Then he put me under arrest — under arrest of that Jim Riley — and I just licked Jim Riley and got out out [of?] arrest —and then I waltzed into Hog Davis's infant department and the way I made the fur fly was awful. I wished Amy could see me then. W e drove the whole army over the hill and down by the slaughter house and lathered them good, and then they surrendered till next Saturday. I was made a lieutenantcolonel for desperate conduct in the field and now I am almost the youngest lieutenant-colonel we've got. I reckon I ain't no slouch. We've got thirty-two officers and fourteen men in our army, and we can take that Hog Davis crowd and do for them any time, even if they have got two more men than we have, and eleven more officers. But nobody knew what made me fight so — nobody but * Every detail of the above incident is strictly true, as I have excellent reason to remember. — [M.T.

4° MARK TWAIN A T WORK two or three, I guess. They never thought of Amy. Going home, Wart Hopkins overtook me (that's his nickname — because he's all over warts). He'd been out to the crossroads burying a bean that he'd bloodied with a wart to make them go away and he was going home, now. I was in business with him once, and we had fell out. W e had a circus and both of us wanted to be clown, and he wouldn't give up. He was always contrary that way. And he wanted to do the zam, and I wanted to do the zam (which the zam means the zampillerostation), and there it was again. He knocked a barrel from under me when I was a-standing on my head one night, and once when we were playing Jack the Giant Killer I tripped his stilts up and pretty near broke him in two. W e charged two pins admission for big boys and one pin for little ones — and when we came to divide up he wanted to shove off all the pins on me that hadn't any heads on. That was the kind of a boy he was — always mean. He always tied the little boys' clothes when they went in a-swimming. I was with him in the niggershow business once, too, and he wanted to be bones all the time himself. He would sneak around and nip marbles with his toes and carry them off when the boys were playing Knucks, or anything like that; and when he was playing himself he always poked or he always hunched. He always throwed his nutshells under some small boy's bench in school and let him get lammed. He used to put shoemaker's wax in the teacher's seat and then play hookey and let some other fellow catch it. I hated Wart Hopkins. But now he was in the same fix as myself, and I did want somebody to talk to so bad, who was in that fix. He loved Susan Hawkins and she was gone to the country too. I could see he was suffering, and he could see I was. I wanted to talk, and he wanted to talk, though we hadn't spoken for a long, long time. Both of us was full. So he said let by gones be by gones let's make up and be good friends, because we'd ought to be, fixed as we were. I just overflowed, and took him around the neck and went

"BOY'S M A N U S C R I P T "

41

to crying, and he took me around the neck and went to crying, and we were perfectly happy because we were so miserable together. And I said I would always love him and Susan, and he said he would always love me and A m y — beautiful, beautiful A m y , he called her, which made me feel good and proud; but not quite so beautiful as Susan, he said, and I said it was a lie and he said I was another and a fighting one and darsn't take it up; and I hit him and he hit me back, and then we had a fight and rolled down a gulley into the mud and gouged and bit and hit and scratched, and neither of us was whipped; and then we got out and commenced it all over again and he put a chip on his shoulder and dared me to knock it off and I did, and so we had it again, and then he went home and I went home, and Ma asked me how I got my clothes all tore off and was so ragged and bloody and bruised up, and I told her I fell down, and then she black-snaked me and I was all right. And the very next day I got a letter from A m y ! Mrs. Johnson brought it to me. It said: "mister william rogers dear billy i have took on so i am all Wore out a crying becos i Want to see you so bad the cat has got kittens but it Dont make me happy i Want to see you all the Hens lays eggs excep the old Rooster and mother and me Went to church Sunday and had hooklebeary pie for Dinner i think of you Always and love you no more from your amy at present. AMY." I read it over and over and over again, and kissed it, and studied out new meanings in it, and carried it to bed with me and read it again first thing in the morning. And I did feel so delicious I wanted to lay there and think of her hours and hours and never get up. But they made me. The first chance I got I wrote to her, and this is it:

"Darling Amy " I have had lots of fights and I love you all the same. I have changed my dog which his name was Bull and now

42 MARK TWAIN A T WORK his name is Amy. I think its splendid and so does he I reckon because he always comes when I call him Amy though he'd come anyhow ruther than be walloped, which I would wallop him if he didn't. I send you my picture. The things on the lower side are the legs, the head is on the other end, the horable thing which its got in its hand is you though not so pretty by a long sight. I didn't mean to put only one eye in your face but there wasn't room. I have been thinking sometimes I'll be a pirate and sometimes I'll keep grocery on account of candy. And I would like ever so much to be a brigadire General or a deck hand on a steamboat because they have fun you know and go everywheres. But a fellow cant be everything I dont reckon. I have traded off my Sunday school book and Ma's hatchet for a pup and I reckon I'm going to ketch it, maybe. Its a good pup though. It nipped a chicken yesterday and goes around raising cain all the time. I love you to destruction Amy and I can't live if you dont come back. I had the branch dammed up beautiful for water-mills, but I dont care for water mills when you are away so I traded the dam to Jo Whipple for a squirt gun though if you was here I wouldnt give a dam for a squirt gun because we could have water mills. So no more from your own true love. My pen is bad my ink is pale Roses is red the violets blue But my love for you shall never change. WILLIAM T. ROGERS

"P.S. I learnt that poetry from Sarah Mackleroy — its beautiful." Tuesday Fortnight. — I'm thankful that I'm free. I've come to my self. — I'll never love another girl again. There's no dependence in them. If I was going to hunt up a wife I would just go in amongst a crowd of girls and say

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43

"Eggs, cheese, butter, bread, Stick, stock, stone. — deadl" and take the one it lit on just the same as if I was choosing up for fox or haste or three-cornered cat or hide 'n' whoop or anything like that. I'd get along just as well as byselecting them out and falling in love with them the way I did with — with — I can't write her name, for the tears will come. But she has treated me Shameful. The first thing she did when she got back from the country was to begin to object to me being a pirate — because some of her kin is down on pirates I reckon — though she said it was because I would be away from home so much. A likely story, indeed — if she knowed anything about pirates she'd know that they go and come just whenever they please, which other people can't. Well I'll be a pirate now, in spite of all the girls in the world. And next she didn't want me to be a deck hand on a steamboat, or else it was a judge she didn't want me to be, because one of them wasn't respectable, she didn't know which — some more bosh from relations I reckon. And then she said she didn't want to keep a milliner shop, she want to clerk in a toy-shop, and have an open barouche and she'd like me to sell peanuts and papers on the railroad so she could ride without it costing anything. "What!" I said, "and not be a pirate at all?" She said yes. I was disgusted. I told her so. Then she cried, and said I didn't love her, and wouldn't do anything to please her, and wanted to break her heart and have some other girl when she was dead, and then I cried, too, and told her I did love her, and nobody but her, and I'd do anything she wanted me to and I was sorry, Oh, so sorry. But she shook her head, and pouted — and I begged again, and she turned her back — and I went on pleading and she wouldn't answer — only pouted — and at last when I was getting mad, she slammed the jewsharp, and the tin locomotive and the spool-cannon and everything I'd given her,

44 MARK TWAIN AT WORK on the floor, and flourished out mad and crying like sin, and said I was a mean, good-for-nothing thing and I might go and be a pirate and welcome! — she never wanted to see me any more! And I was mad and crying, too, and I said By George I would be a pirate, and an awful bloody one, too, or my name warn't Bill Rogers! And so it's all over between us. But now that it is all over, I feel mighty, mighty bad. The whole school knowed we were engaged, and they think strange to see us flirting with other boys and girls, but we can't help that. I flirt with other girls, but I don't care anything about them. And I see her lip quiver sometimes and the tears come in her eyes when she looks my way when she's flirting with some other boy — and then I do want to rush there and grab her in my arms and be friends again! Saturday. — I am happy again, and forever, this time. I've seen her! I've seen the girl that is my doom. I shall die if I cannot get her. The first time I looked at her I fell in love with her. She looked at me twice in church yesterday, and Oh how I felt. She was with her mother and her brother. When they came out of church I followed them, and twice she looked back and smiled, and I would have smiled too, but there was a tall young man by my side and I was afraid he would notice. At last she dropped a leaf of a flower — rose geranium Ma calls it — and I could see by the way she looked that she meant it for me, and when I stooped to pick it up the tall young man stooped too. I got it, but I felt awful sheepish, and I think he did, too, because he blushed. He asked me for it, and I had to give it to him, though I'd rather given him my bleeding heart, but I pinched off just a little piece and kept it, and shall keep it forever. Oh, she is so lovely! And she loves me. I know it. I could see it, easy. Her name's Laura Miller. She's nineteen years old, Christmas. I never, never, never will part with this one! NEVER.

Noon and the Dark:

Huckleberry Finn I N J U L Y 5, 1875, Mark Twain wrote to Ho wells that he had finished the book which was published the next year as The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. He asked Howells to read the manuscript and he made a number of comments on it which looked toward the future. He had decided, he said, not to "take the chap beyond boyhood," for ". . . If I went on now and took him into manhood, he would just lie like all the one-horse men in literature and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him." At the moment he believed that it was not at all a boys' book, that he had written it only for adults. (He soon changed his mind. See the preceding essay.) He had, he thought, made a mistake in not telling the story in the first person, and he went on to promise: " B y and by I shall take a boy of twelve and run him on through life (in the first person) but not Tom Sawyer — he would not be a good character for it."

O

Note. The manuscript referred to throughout this essay is owned by the Buffalo Public Library. I am indebted to the Library for an opportunity to study it in detail over a period of several weeks, and to Mr. Alexander Gait, the Librarian, for much help. It is, unfortunately, not complete. It shows several "states," which I have been able at least partly to determine and identify by reason of what I have learned from other Mark Twain manuscripts and by comparing it with the notes described herein, with the

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In the manuscript of Tom Sawyer as it stood then there were three passages relevant to its sequel. One was the final chapter, which Howells, when he read it, thought out of key with the book. He wrote to Mark, on November 2i, 1875, "I don't seem to think I like the last chapter. I believe I would cut that." Mark replied, on November 23, "As to that last chapter, I think of just leaving it off and adding nothing in its place. Something told me that the book was done when I got to that point — and so the strong temptation to put Huck's life at the Widow's into detail, instead of generalizing it in a paragraph was resisted." The meaning of this is not clear, since even in the last chapter that survives Huck's life at the Widow's is detailed considerably beyond a paragraph. There is some evidence, however, notably the fact that in the amanuensis copy which was sent to England for publication the last page is in Mark's own handwriting, that both Howells and Mark were referring to an additional chapter, which Howells wanted omitted and for which Mark substituted the "Conclusion" that now ends the book. If so, then, as I have said earlier, probably Adventures of Huckleberry Finn began in that chapter. And in the "Conclusion" Mark says, "Some day it may seem worth while to take up the story of the younger [characters] again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be." When we last see the boys in Tom Sawyer, Tom has induced Huck to return to the civilizing discipline of the Widow Douglas by threatening to refuse him membership first edition, and with other relevant material. There is reason to believe that other manuscripts of portions of the book at one time existed — in fact, they may still exist. Various clues, so far unfruitful, may eventually lead me to some of them. I also have reason to believe that Mark T w a i n letters so far unknown to scholarship may exist and may cast some light on the writing of Huckleberry Finn. For these reasons and for other reasons explained in my text, I am constrained to disagree with a number of the conclusions reached by Mr. DeLancey Ferguson in the only study of the manuscript previously written. (Colophon, Spring, 1938.)

NOON AND THE DARK

47

in Tom Sawyer's Gang unless he acquires the necessary education and worldly polish. It is with the activities of this aristocracy of highwaymen that the action of Huckleberry Finn gets under way in Chapter II. Moreover, in Chapter X X V of Tom Sawyer, a more important seed was waiting to germinate. Tom and Huck set out to dig for buried treasure and a likely place seems to be "that old dead-limb tree on the hill t'other side of Still-House branch." (There was a stream of that name in Hannibal as well as in St. Petersburg.) Reaching this likely hunting ground, they fall to talking about the uses and benefits of wealth, and Huck resolves not to save any of the money he expects to find. Tom protests on the ground that Huck ought to have something to live on by and by. But Huck's ingrained pessimism demurs. "Oh, that ain't any use," he says, "Pap would come back to thish yer town some day and get his claws on it, if I didn't hurry up, and I tell you he'd clean it out pretty quick." The original impetus that launched Mark's masterpiece seems to have been that possibility plus the chance he saw to burlesque once more a species of romantic fiction. In Tom Sawyer Mark Twain brought to their first full expression the themes and feelings that meant most to him as a literary artist: the society in which he had grown up, the freedom and security and happiness of his boyhood, the reveries of all boyhood, and also a darker, deeper phantasy, the insecurity and dread and terror of all boyhood. He had taken his first step toward this consummation when, probably in 1870, he wrote the sketch now known as "Boy's Manuscript" out of which the book developed. He had gone much farther, had in fact fused the material into fiction of a high order in The Gilded Age, though that book is marred by less fortunate characteristics of his thinking as well as by weaknesses inherent in the collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner. In Tom Sawyer, however, the thing is done: the book exists as literature because Mark

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found a way of harmonizing his deepest impulses as a novelist. Moreover, in Tom and Huck he had created figures which thereafter were to appear over and over again in his work. I have no space to describe the actual appearances of those boys in later books, still less their symbolical appearances. As time went on, Mark was to bring them back in Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective, and in other ambitious projects which he did not finish. Huckleberry Finn ends with a suggestion that the boys may seek adventure in the Indian country, and not long after he finished the book Mark did indeed begin a sequel called "Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians." He soon abandoned it, though he had what he had written set up in twenty-six galleys of six-point on the famous Paige typesetting machine that bankrupted him. Later he carried to much greater length an experiment with a paralyzingly intricate plot called "Tom's Conspiracy." Both ventures try to use the stuff of which the great books are made, but in both of them it is counterfeit. They are weakly imagined, aimless, and rambling, and large parts of the longer one are from the irritating no man's land between fiction and extravaganza into which Mark Twain usually strayed when he found that a literary idea would move no farther on its own momentum. Two other short fragments survive in the Mark Twain Papers, both in Huck's vernacular. In one Mark is trying to utilize a memory of Hannibal which disturbed him and which he worked into various other stories, none of which was ever finished; a girl (who in a group of notes for his autobiography is identified as Roberta Jones) made up a skull and doughface into an apparition and so frightened an old woman that she went crazy. In the other Tom Sawyer sets out to be Lord Nelson and has the St. Petersburg boys build two fleets of rafts for a naval battle on the Mississippi. Both these fragments are trivial and even perfunctory, and the second, with its in-

NOON AND T H E D A R K

49 evitable notation that Tom is eventually to signal "England expects" and to murmur "Kiss me, Hardy," is actually painful. Each is only a few pages long. Besides them, there is another fragment of one page. It is late, at least as late as 1902, and is a mere note. It records an idea which Mark had jotted down elsewhere years before. John Briggs (a true name, out of Hannibal), a friend of Tom and Huck, allows a slave boy to take the blame for some shameful act of his, runs away in remorse, and "The lad, very old, comes back in 02 and he and John meet, with the others left alive." This last idea, of having the boys come back to St. Petersburg as old men, drowsed uneasily in Mark's mind over many years. It is recorded in the notebooks and Mark once wrote about it to Howells, who thought it promising. I have found no evidence that he ever began to write it — and Howells was wrong. Mark would certainly have marred that story too.1 He made several attempts to dramatize Tom Sawyer2 and in at least one of them he introduced material from 1

One momentary impulse toward this story is recorded on an otherwise blank page, in handwriting which shows that the date is very near the end of Mark's life. The page reads: "Notes. 50 yr. after, [space] Tom hears the laughing martin after 50 years! talks [?] martin-box, gourd, blue-bird &c. How judge pistoled the pirate blue-birds. Yet martin considered brave." There is also another fragmentary note, perhaps a little earlier than this but also only a very few years before Mark's death, which shows the material which he had used in his Autobiography still obsessing him and still mingled with the images of the boys. "Marion City [probably the lynching of the histrionic Abolitionist]. Steal skiff. Turning Huck black & sell him. [This grotesque idea had appeared in notebook entries many years before. The idea was apparently to threaten Jim with enslavement again and to have Huck wear blackface and substitute for him.] Stranger from Scipio. Mesmerizer. Nigger-show. Cadets." If ever a writer was imprisoned in his boyhood, clearly Mark Twain was. 2 But he wrote to an inquirer that it was a book "which cannot be dramatized. One might as well try to dramatize any other hymn. Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." (Mark Twain's Letters, p. 477.) This is a bit of criticism whose accuracy is almost unique in what Mark had to say about his work.

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Huckleberry Finn. An occasional notebook entry and several allusions in letters show still other impulses to make further use of Tom and Huck — impulses which did not carry over into action. But there is one further appearance that will seem important to the eventual biographer. In the terrible period following Susy's death when Mark's mind was strained to the limit and when he was writing compulsively, in a half-conscious fear that his talent had been destroyed, he again returned to the immortal boys. The agonized effort, which extended through several years and ended by producing The Mysterious Stranger, at one stage brought young Satan to St. Petersburg, where it was Tom Sawyer who befriended him. In the final version Eseldorf is, of course, St. Petersburg under a different name, and the boys who watch the miracles are just Tom Sawyer's Gang in costume — but in the earlier version there was no disguise. At any rate, after Mark revised Tom Sawyer in accordance with Howells's suggestions, in January, 1876, his mind went on playing with the two boys. Seven months later, on August 9, he writes to Howells from his study at Quarry Farm, in Elmira. It is a rambling letter. Mark is disturbed by Mr. Tilden's campaign, which looks alarmingly effective. He has started to keep a record of the children's sayings. The lazy, peaceful life of the farm delights him. "The double-barreled novel lies torpid" — Mark cannot go on with it now but may take it up again next winter. I cannot identify that novel, but recalcitrant and unfinished manuscripts were no novelty to him. Then, with truly immense casualness he says that when he gave up that story a month ago he "began another boys' book — more to be at work than anything else." Thus he began writing his masterpiece in July of 1876, and a month later he did not think much of it. "I have written 400 pages on it — therefore it is nearly half done. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done."

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The quotation shows Mark's massive inability to evaluate his work but it does not, I think, indicate that we were in danger of losing Huckleberry Finn. He could pigeonhole an unfinished manuscript but there is no evidence that he could burn one. Several whose destruction he promised survived to be printed, and the Mark Twain Papers contain scores which only thrift or boundless optimism would have held on to. But the July day when, mainly to be working at something on the hillside overlooking the summer landscape of southern New York, he began a boys' book, the autobiography of Huck Finn — that date is momentous in the history of American literature. "You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain't no matter." With that opening sentence Mark had established the first of the book's numerous superiorities to its predecessor, and the American language was first used as the medium of great fiction. And with that letter of August 9, 1876, criticism reaches the first of many ambiguities associated with this book. Mark told Howells that he had written four hundred pages. How nearly exact is that number? How much more did he write before he put the book away? How much survives in the book as we know it? It is fairly certain that he stopped working on it soon after August 9. There is no further mention of it in any surviving letter of 1876, 3 the proportions of the finished book make it unlikely that much more was written in 1876, and soon Mark was furiously busy with other projects — among them "The Canvasser's Tale," which elaborates a trivial wheeze and which he thought excellent. In any event, before the summer was over the momentum which had carried him to four hundred manuscript pages ran down and he pigeonholed the manuscript. That was the way he worked. "As long as a book would write itself," he "Unless it is mentioned in the letters alluded to in my prefatory note, those whose existence I suspect but have not yet been able to establish.

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says, " I was a faithful and interested amanuensis and my industry did not flag, but the minute that the book tried to shift to my head the labor of contriving its situations, inventing its adventures and conducting its conversations, I put it away and dropped it out of my mind. . . . The reason was very simple — my tank had run dry; it was empty; the stock of materials in it was exhausted; the story could not go on without materials; it could not be wrought out of nothing." 4 This ingenuous admission defines the nature and limitation of his genius. He wrote on impulse, and when impulse was in circuit with the deeper levels of his phantasy things went well, but when the circuit was broken he could only improvise. Improvisation was responsible for the worst and commonest blemishes in his books — and, because he could not long sustain it, for the breakingoff of many manuscripts. He had little ability to impose structure on his material; he could not think and feel it through to its own implicit form. He got "ideas" for books, stories, or sketches and jotted them down in his notebooks where they survive by the hundred, promising or feeble but almost always undeveloped. He caught fire easily and when an "idea" inflamed him, he attacked it with verve and enthusiasm, trusting to luck, providence, or his demon to make it good. Sometimes the demon justified the trust; more often he found himself floundering, began to plunge aimlessly, and presently put the job aside. Later a new variation might occur to him — sometimes it was the exact opposite of the original "idea" — and he would take up the abandoned manuscript either with renewed enthusiasm or with a dogged will to make it go somehow, by introducing new themes or characters, by changing the situation, or by burlesquing the original intention. (That is why most Mark Twain manuscripts, that of Huckleberry Finn among them, contain several or many passages in which the pages have been renumbered several or many times.) Usually 1

Mark Twain in Eruption, pp. 196-197.

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the new inspiration proved no more lasting than the old; the same floundering and improvisation shortly appeared, the text fell off into burlesque or extravaganza, and the thing had to be put away again to await another whim of his demon. Sometimes he gave up after the second attempt but sometimes he came back to it again and again; there are some manuscripts, Captain Stormfield is one, which he tinkered with at intervals for thirty years. At some time during the summer of 1876 the "tank" ran dry and Mark laid Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (probably so named from the beginning) away. Four hundred manuscript pages would be about forty thousand words and would mark the place in the narrative where Huck's raft is rammed by a steamboat. I think he had reached that very place when he broke off, or had come so close to it that he realized he must find a new kind of adventure for Huck. But I think also that, when he stopped writing, the manuscript included some material that does not survive in the book. The Buffalo manuscript begins with the visit to the wreck of the Walter Scott, this passage was certainly written after he returned to the manuscript in 1882, and there is a disparity of what would amount to perhaps ten printed pages, or thirty pages in manuscript. In addition, I think, he wrote some incidents following the wreck of the raft, which he later discarded. As will presently appear, I assume that he had a typescript made in 1882 and left out of it whatever he found irrelevant to his renewed purpose. W h y did he stop writing in 1876? The truth is that the original "idea" for Huckleberry Finn was little more than a continuation of Tom Sawyer. He had the two boys, there was a chance for humor in exploiting Tom's romantic reading (Mark always found that temptation irresistible — the realist's bloodstream forming antibodies against the romantic who lived in the same skin), and to bring back Huck's Pap would open up a number of possibilities. Add Nigger Jim (who is no relative of Jim, the Negro boy in

54 MARK TWAIN AT WORK Tom Sawyer) and his hope of freedom — and you couldn't help getting a book out of the combination. So at least it must have seemed. But there is no dynamic purpose in this scheme, no particular course of action which would make the core of a book. Tom Sawyer's Gang proved to be pretty feeble stuff — and I suspect that most of the discarded portion of the manuscript consisted of incidents like the attack on the Sunday School picnic and equally footless. Old Man Finn was a tremendous character, but he could contribute little to the narrative. Once he has taken Huck to the cabin there is little more he can do, and once Huck has escaped from him there is nothing more — he has to be killed. The threat to Jim and his effort to reach free soil had more in them, but Mark seems neither to have anticipated the great moments he later made of them nor to have seen the clue they held to the later narrative. He made the most of the irresponsibility, peace, and natural beauty of life on Jackson's Island — the pastoral theme and the nostalgia for the past that are always recurring in his work. He developed the rich vein of superstition and terror he had struck in Tom Sawyer. He got the flight and pursuit in motion and launched the raft on its voyage. He wrought an additional triumph out of his nostalgia, the passage on the raftsmen which was later uprooted from Huckleberry Finn and transplanted in Life on the Mississippi. He wrote such excellent small bits as the scene in the fog and he made good but inconclusive use of the journey toward freedom. (Here and later there is a lordly disregard of the fact that Jim did not need to get to Cairo or the Ohio River, that he could have reached free soil by simply paddling to the Illinois shore from Jackson's Island.) And then, I judge, after writing some forty thousand words, or as he told Ho wells, about half of a fair-sized book (double-leaded and with wide margins, for the subscription trade), he suddenly realized that he wasn't getting anywhere. There was narrative but there was no narrative purpose,

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no end toward which his story was moving. There was sequence but there was no development and no intensification. The book so far was a series of episodes, pointed in no particular direction and without much relationship to one another. We have his word that he had felt no deep interest at the start and was now beginning to be bored. Probably he lost his touch, produced some scenes wholly at random, and fell off into improvisation. He had the superb vernacular and in the stuff already written there was latent the purpose he subsequently found, to make the raft's journey a procession through the society of the middle South. But he had gone about as far as an idea ever carried him in the first sprint, his wind was failing, and he had not been very enthusiastic to begin with. He probably felt that the book was getting tired. He had reached the stage when, habitually, "I examined my unfinished properties to see if among them there might not be one whose interest in itself had revived through a couple of years' restful idleness and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis." There seems to have been no such property on hand at the moment, so it may be that Huck got lost in the obscenities of Queen Elizabeth's cupbearer. For Mark was reading his way through history toward a book which was to interest him — and Livy, whose taste in details was extraordinarily good but whose preferences in theme were just those of her time and class — a good deal more than Huckleberry Finn had been able to. The realist intended to make some powerful assaults on romance in The Prince and the Pauper but the romantic gorged himself with the archaic language of its sources. So, one summer day in 1876, in the study where Huck was languishing (in great American speech) toward a seven years' extinction, Mark sat down to write to Joe Twichell and produced 1601. Soon he was at work on "The Canvasser's Story." A few months later he was collaborating with Bret Harte on "Ah

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Sin," and in December he made the famous speech on the weather, which does not contain the still more famous line usually attributed to it. Huckleberry Finn gathered dust for six years. During this period Mark Twain wrote two full-length books, A Tramp Abroad, a personalized travel sketch on the model of The Innocents Abroad which has some excellent passages but is uneven and frequently dull, and The Prince and the Pauper, which has not kept the splendor that Mark and his family found in it. They are mediocre and nothing else written in the period rises so high. It was essentially an uncreative time: Mark devoted himself to burlesques which are mostly painful reading now, such as "Simon Wheeler, Detective" (unpublished), "The Loves of Alonzo FitzClarence and Rosannah Ethelton," "The Gambetta Duel," "The Great Revolution in Pitcairn," "The Stolen White Elephant," "Mrs. McWilliams and the Lightning," and "Burlesque Etiquette" (unpublished). T o this time also belong "Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion," the oncescandalous speech at the Whittier birthday dinner, the proposal for a monument to Adam, and a large bulk of random humor. It was, I think, the happiest period of Mark's life. He was rich and famous, his house at Hartford was the center of a large circle of friends, and these years are the untroubled ones in his family life. But there was no development in his literary personality and no direction in his literary activity. He was drifting, writing pleasurably but aimlessly, making money, enjoying life — and laying up trouble, for events were setting toward his venture into publishing and the financing of the Paige machine that were to bankrupt him. It was, in fact, financial pressure that recalled the literary artist from the pleasant but trivial activity of the humorist. There had been no full-length book for the canvassers for some time, and a number of speculations (some of them described in Mark Twain in Eruption) which came to the

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usual end of such ventures were straining his resources. James Osgood, his good friend who was not doing well as his publisher, suggested that this was the proper time to keep a promise which Mark had frequently made. In 1874, when the tank ran dry after pouring out the first half of Tom Sawyer, Mark had written "Old Times on the Mississippi," which the Atlantic had serialized. Like all his best work, this had flowered from roots that went back to his boyhood. It had had a great success in the Atlantic and Mark had promised to extend it to book length. Osgood now told him that the time had come and he caught fire. He would revisit the scenes of his splendor, he would go down the Mississippi again, and then he would finish his book. In early April of 1882, with Osgood and a secretary (Roswell Phelps of Hartford), he started out.5 Life on the Mississippi resulted from this trip, but it had a greater importance in that it turned him back to Huckleberry Finn. The voyage down the river brought flooding back all the intense emotions of his piloting. He sat in the pilot-house of a steamboat; once more he took the wheel in his hands and felt the boat answer his will. By day or night the river and its dim banks worked a powerful enchantment. He met Horace Bixby, who had taught him the trade, and he heard stories about other companions of that golden time. He heard other stories too, some of them new, some forgotten long ago and now remembered — stories of mystery, violence, farce, or romance quite as gaudy as any of Tom Sawyer's dreams. He had in his 5

Paine says that Mark worked on Huckleberry Finn in 1880. His evidence is a line in a letter of that year which alludes to an unfinished manuscript but not by name, and a line in a letter of 1883 in which Mark speaks of his having half-finished the book two or three years ago. There is no reason to suppose that the unnamed manuscript was Huckleberry Finn — it could have been any of a dozen, or several dozen, unfinished jobs — and no need to take the " t w o or three years" literally, since we know that he half-finished the book in 1876. There is no other evidence for Paine's assertion, and all the evidence of the notebooks and of the manuscript is against it.

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pocket one of the memorandum books which he had invented and patented, and into this and the stenographic notebook which the secretary carried these stories went — and with them many entries which record the reawakening of old moods or purposes. In these notebooks one can see the river reasserting its power over him; they are close to the center of his phantasy. But still more important is the fact that, on his way up the river, a man of forty-seven revisiting his boyhood home, quick with memories of companions now dead or scattered over the earth, he stopped off at Hannibal. Hannibal was the true center of his phantasy — of his idyll and of his dread. It now became inevitable that he would finish Huckleberry Finn. The second half of Life on the Mississippi, which he began to write soon after getting home again in May, 1882, falls far short of the first half, the "Old Times" which the Atlantic had published. Mark had exhausted his personal experiences on the river in the earlier part and had no clear idea of how to fill the remaining space. It became a job of padding and while doing it he loosed several explosions of intolerable irritation. What came out of the effort was another personalized travel sketch, this time more like Roughing It than The Innocents Abroad. It is episodic and done with unconcealed haste and inattention. But it is a kind of rehearsal for Huckleberry Finn. In Chapter X X V I the Darnell-Watson feud appears; it was probably the spark that lighted the fuse, for it becomes the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud with which the book at last finds its purpose. Chapter X X X V I I I opens with a passage on the interior ornamentation of genteel houses that is scored more briskly in the description of Colonel Grangerford's mansion. In Chapter LI occurs a brief memory of the cheap theater which was to bear fruit in the later book. The town drunkard borrows Old Man Finn's name in Chapter LVI. And so on — frequently either the mood or the text is well on the way to Huckleberry Finn. All these things are

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reproduced from the two notebooks I have mentioned, which also contain many other jottings — on Southern manners, on violence or mystery, on the squatters or the traditions of the river or the simpler society of the early days — that Huck Finn was to make use of very soon. Through the summer and autumn of 1882 Mark labored, profane and frustrated, at Life on the Mississippi. One problem was to sketch a background for the opening passages of "Old Times." Part of the solution was to illustrate a vanished phase of river life, the folkways of the raftsmen, by inserting the passage from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn that has ever since appeared in Chapter III of Life on the Mississippi. I do not pretend to fix the date but I judge that the typescript of the Huck Finn manuscript was made at this time or shortly afterward. W e arrive at that typescript by deduction and the time has come to explain my hypothesis. As I have said above, the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn at the Buffalo Public Library opens abruptly four and a half pages along in Chapter XII. The earlier portion was gone from the manuscript when James Fräser Gluck got it for the Library, presumably from Mark Twain. Had it merely been lost or had it been discarded? T o begin with, the first page of the Buffalo manuscript is numbered " 8 1 - 1 . " On such a numeration the episode it deals with would be far out of place both in the printed book and in a manuscript of some four hundred pages such as Mark told Howells in August, 1876, that he had written. Whereas it would come out exactly at such a page number if portions of the four-hundred-page manuscript sufficient to compose what goes before this episode in the printed book had been typed. While he was finishing Huckleberry Finn in the summer of 1883, Mark was also working on "1002," a lengthy burlesque of the Arabian Nights. Characteristically, he was more enthusiastic about this than about Huck, though fortunately Howells disliked it when

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he read it, the following autumn. (Superlatives are risky but " 1 0 0 2 " is probably the dullest of all Mark's work; it is almost lethal.) T w o typescripts of it, certainly made at the time, survive in the Mark Twain Papers. It is done in large type and in double space on legal-size paper (fourteen inches long) and the page length can be averaged at two hundred and sixty words. This typescript provides the key assumption of my hypothesis. Pages of such a length would not account for the page numbers of the Buffalo manuscript, but if the same machine had been used to type the manuscript on paper of the same length in single space, there would have resulted a typescript of exactly the length necessary to cover in eighty pages what comes in the finished book before the wreck of the Walter Scott. Some remarks by the typist herself which were pinned to the typescript of " 1 0 0 2 " are in single space, and though double spacing is usual in the Papers (so, for that matter is letter-size paper, eleven inches long), there are a number of manuscripts in single space. At any rate, the assumption of a single-spaced typescript on legal-size paper accounts for the paging of the Buffalo manuscript and for page references in the notebooks and in notes for the composition of the book — none of which can be accounted for in any other way. The notes and notebooks contain weighty evidence for the hypothesis. In the notebooks which I have numbered 17 and 18 6 — covering portions of 1883, 1884, and 1885 — there are, besides a few entries obviously made during the writing of Huckleberry Finn, a number of notes for proposed readings from the book, probably the ones which Mark used while barnstorming with George W . Cable in 1884. Some of these refer to certain pages by number. Thus an entry in Notebook 17 reads: " 1 & 2d of Huck Finn ° When the Mark T w a i n Papers were turned over to me for arrangement and editing, they included thirty-nine notebooks covering the years 18651905, with 1869-1876 missing.

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very good for reading aloud. [Space] Ditto — waking Jim. [Space] [Ditto mark] Raftsmen fight —89 ^ 7 [Space] [Ditto mark] Troubled conscience & small pox — 90. [Space] [Ditto mark] Art & Bible — 105, 106." There are similar entries in Notebook 18, and they are on exactly the same scale as these. All of these numbers clearly refer to episodes in the book and to pages on which those episodes occur. But they cannot possibly be manuscript pages or proof pages — the numbers are altogether wrong. But in such a typescript as I have described the indicated passages would come at approximately such page numbers. Finally, I have found in the Mark Twain Papers scattered and discontinuous notes — not in the notebooks — which have a direct bearing on Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Paine had not brought them together, and in fact had not perceived their importance. After much study it proved possible to arrange them in four groups, one set of notes for an author's reading from the book and three sets of notes made at different times for the writing of the book. In the notes for the reading and in one of the other groups references are made by page number to specific passages, which again can be exactly accounted for by assuming that there was such a typescript. Some of these page numbers work out exactly right for a typescript made straightforwardly from the 1876 manuscript. Certain others give trouble. But that trouble becomes the strongest evidence of all when the proper adjustments are made at the proper places. The raftsmen passage was part of the 1876 manuscript but was not part of the finished book, nor even an integrated part of the typescript, and the passage dealing 7

It w a s Mark's custom to number interpolated pages with a series of

fractions. I interpret this entry to mean that he first intended not to include the raftsmen passage in the typescript, then later changed his mind and numbered it with fractions. T h i s reference alone is strong evidence f o r the existence of the typescript — allowing f o r the episode of the Walter

Scott,

which

w a s not a part of the 1876 manuscript but w a s run in later, the raftsmen episode w o u l d come at just this place.

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with the wrecked Walter Scott was written after Mark came back to the manuscript. A working typescript (and one would be made absolutely necessary by the involved state of the manuscript when Mark got to work on it again) would contain the parts he had decided to keep down to the place where the interpolated episode of the Walter Scott occurs, and its page numbers would work out proportionately in the book as we know it today. Here, however, the proportion between book and typescript pages would be thrown out by the number of book pages necessary to reproduce the sixty manuscript pages of the Walter Scott episode. See, for example, the ninetieth page alluded to in the quotation above, "Troubled conscience & small pox — 90." When that correction is made, the page references come out right again. This, then, is the hypothesis in full. When Mark Twain returned to the manuscript in 1882 (to consult it for Life on the Mississippi — he did not begin writing again until 1883), it ended with, or shortly after, the wreck of the raft. (See the note in Group A , "Back a little change [doubly underscored] — raft only crippled by steamer.") That was where the book had got tired in 1876. The destruction of the raft had stopped him short; he had not known what to do with the story. He may have written a little more, but if so it was a random improvisation and, I think, none of its survives in the book. Also, it did not include the episode of the Walter Scott — and that episode includes not only the exploration of the wreck and the talk with the captain of the ferryboat but the chapter numbered X I V and called "Was Solomon Wise?" (In fact, Chapter X I V contains the reason for the whole episode: Mark had decided to introduce the king and the duke, and so invented the wrecked Walter Scott in order to provide Huck with books of history which he could read to Jim.) When he read the manuscript over in 1882 he found that the tank had filled again, that the book's "interest in itself had revived

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through a couple of years' restful idleness and was ready to take me on again as amanuensis." His trip down the river had refilled the tank; he was ready to work again. He had the feud, he had at least the germ of Colonel Sherburn and the mob (in the various notes on lynching and other violence), and he had the two immortal vagabonds, though he had not yet given them noble blood. What was perhaps even more important, he had a unifying principle: his own trip had touched many cultural strata, and similarly he would conduct Huck through a cross-section of the pre-war Mississippi South. At this time (I think) he made the notes in Group A — and at this time (necessarily), in order to straighten out the manuscript and put it in working order, he had it typed. In 1883, perhaps early but probably not until summer, he began to write. He had some trouble getting started. Finally, however, he gathered momentum and assurance and went straight ahead. A secretary typed the new manuscript (except for the episode of the Walter Scott) as he completed it, up through Chapter X X I , but in irregular "takes." (The last three sentences rest on a study of page numbers and renumbered passages — a study too minute to be detailed here.) Let us now turn to the notes. They cast a flood of light on the writing of Huckleberry Finn, in fact they reveal more about the working of Mark's mind and talent than anything previously submitted to students. Group

A.

This group consists of eleven pages, the last one larger than the rest, all written in violet ink. (Mark used such ink frequently during the 1870's, less often during the early 1880's, and hardly at all thereafter. But the internal evidence proves conclusively that these notes were written after he came back from his river trip in 1882.) Mark Twain numbered only the first two pages. I have numbered the other pages myself and do not guarantee the sequence I

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have put them in. The page I have numbered 7, which itemizes the ages of the Grangerford family, is written with a finer pen than the one used for the others. It may possibly be later in time than the other notes of this group, but is certainly earlier than the other groups. Interpolations in pencil, which were made after the notes were written, are starred. A n addition made in blue ink and with a different pen is double-starred. Material cancelled by a line drawn through it is inclosed in pointed brackets. ι

Negro campmeeting & sermon — "See dat sinner how he run." Swell Sunday costumes of negros.8 Poor white family & cabin at woodyard in Walnut Bend. Capt. Ed. Montgomery.9 boys give bill of sale of Jim. The Burning Shame at Napoleon, Ark. Legend of No. 1 ο Earthquake. Describe Lara. 10 8 From the Stenographic Notebook kept by Roswell Phelps on the river trip of 1882: "Apl.30. . . . Colored church Sunday eve'g. Opened with singing of a choir. 12th Chap. Daniel read by black clergyman, during which an aged deacon back by the door chided some young dusky damsels saying 'Takes yo' long time get seated. Settle yo' d'rectly ef yo do' get seated.' Clergyman then lined a hymn. Offered prayer very well, — better than some white ministers because it was short. The whole thing was a failure because too good for literature. White woman preached." 9 Ed. Montgomery had been a companion of Mark's during the period of his piloting. (See Life on the Mississippi.) From the Stenographic Notebook: "Apl.2ist. . . . Ed. Montgomery, who was commodore of the rebel fleet in the battle of Memphis has lost his eyesight in a large measure. . . ." Also, later, just before the boat reaches Memphis, April 23: "One time I mistook Capt. Ed. Montgomery's coat hanging on the big bell for the Capt. himself and waiting for him to tell me to back I ran into a steamboat at New Orleans." 10 From the Stenographic Notebook: "Below Bayou Lara the plantation buildings & most of the cabins are white-washed. Occasionally painted brick color. These buildings are over behind the levee and lower than our boat."

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Rich III - 1 5 ^ - B . S . 50c Being in a close place, Huck boldly offers to sell Jim—the latter turns pale but dasn't speak — secretly is supported in the trial by firm belief that Huck is incapable of betraying him. Huck gets decent suit of jeans. They go down a bayou into Reelfoot Lake? Up a bayou where are alligators. Tow-linen shirts or naked. 3 Let some old liar of a keel-boatman on a raft tell about the earthquake of 1811. that raised No. 1 ο — & made Reelfoot Lake &c. & about Carpenter & Mike Fink — & Murrell's gang (darkly hint he belonged to it) — No. 37 & Devil's race-track Shabby families. 4 Mrs. Halliday, The trading scow & family. The scow with theatre aboard. Ruffian burnt up in Calaboose. A house-raising. Village school — they haze Huck, the first day — describe Dawsons or Miss N.'s school. Fire in village — buckets & "Big Mo." engine & swell village fire Co. Dog fight — describe in detail.11 The country cotillion. The horse-trade. Country quilting. Candy-pulling.

5

11 Students of Mark T w a i n will recognize a congenial theme. In the fragment mentioned earlier, the abortive attempt to have Huck and T o m burlesque Lord Nelson, the one memorable line describes a character, Dick Fisher.: ". . . There wasnt anything serious in life to him, he would interrupt a dog-fight if he took the notion."

66

MARK T W A I N A T WORK Country funeral. Describe aunt Patsy's house. & Uncle Dan, aunt Hanner, & the 90-year blind negress. (Jim has fever & is in concealment while Huck makes these observations.) (Keep 'em along.) &c. The two printers deliver temp, lectures, teach dancing, elocution, feel heads, distribute tracts, preach, fiddle, doctor (quack) 6

The Circus — Huck's astonishment when the drunkard invades the ring, scuffles with clown & ring-master, then rides & strips. Can't he escape from somewhere on the elephant? An overflowed Arkansaw town. River booms up in the night. 7

George Jackson (Huck) Shepherdsons. Bob & Tom Grangerford Old man (Saul) Col. " Betsy (negro) " Old lady (Rachel) " Buck " Emmeline (dead) " Charlotte (proud & grand) " Sophia (sweet & gentle) " Harney Shepherdson

28 & 30.

60 12-14 25 20

8

Dinner manners at the tavern with a crowd. Drunken man rides in the circus. How junny the clown was — quote his jokes. & how the people received them — Huck envies him. * * Duel with rifles.* A village graveyard

r~·

r

thifa, 7

is Notes for the Writing of Huckleberry

Finn

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67

9 When did the raft pass St. Louis? Is there any mention of it? • Yes Negro Sermons. Burning Shame * Do the mesmeric foolishness, with Huck for performer Jim sawed in two. po' $2 2-nigger will set in Heaven wid de $1500 niggers. Back a little,

CHANGE —

10 raft only crippled by steamer.

11 * A lynching scene. * A wake. Put in. * Scrub race L. A. punished her child several days for refusing to answer? & inattention (5 yr old) then while punishing discovered it was deaf & dumb! (from scarlet fever). It showed no reproachfulness for the whippings — kissed the punisher & showed non-comprehension of what it was all about. Obviously, these notes were made earlier than our other two groups. Mark is fresh from the scenes of his river trip and he intends to take up work on Huckleberry Finn again, but he has not yet made a close study of the manuscript. Rather, he is making notes during a hurried reading of the manuscript — apparently while going through it in connection with Life on the Mississippi. He has conceived the king and the duke as functional characters in his story but has not yet given them their titles. They are "the two printers." (Paine says that the younger one, who became the Duke of Bilgewater, was modeled on a journeyman printer whom Mark had known in Nevada. I do not know what Paine's evidence was, unless Mark had personally told him, and quite clearly the duke has nothing to do with Steve Gillis.) He is going to have them perform "The Tragedy of the Burning Shame," the obscene drama which

MARK TWAIN AT WORK

68

appears under that title in the Buffalo manuscript but is changed to "The Royal Nonesuch" in the book. Mark says 12 that this was one of Jim Gillis's "impromptu tales" which he heard at Jackass Gulch and that he "had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print." (Actually, he had to suppress all details of its content.) 13 Professor Walter Blair of the University of Chicago, a leading authority on Mark Twain, believes that it was related to a widespread folk yarn of the old southwestern frontier which had to do with the fabulous creature known as the gyascutus, apparently a very phallic beast. In connection with the printers' theatricals, Jim is to be sawed in two. Then later, after one of the printers has become the king, Mark comes back to these notes and adds an intention to use the "mesmeric foolishness," which he describes in Mark Twain in Eruption,14 Mark has also invented Huck's visit to the circus, which comes out in the book very much as it is imagined here.15 (Note, however, how indissolubly his instinct for the true movement of fiction is twinned with his instinct for extravaganza. It would be a gorgeous idea to have Huck escape from somewhere — from anywhere — on an elephant! This amazing anesthesia — it amounts to paralysis of the critical faculty — is to create the worst blemish on the book. When Mark improvised, he nearly always wrote extravaganza. Mark Twain in Eruption, p. 361. A letter of 1870 to Jim Gillis (Letters, pp. 170-171) suggests that the story was really Dick Stoker's. ". . . And wouldn't I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn't I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of 'Rinalds' in the 'Burning Shame!' Where is Dick and what is he doing? . . ." " P p . 118 ff. 1B The circus scenes have a certain resemblance to the chapter called "Great Attraction!" in Major Jones's Chronicles of Pineville by William Tappan Thompson, and various notebook entries made while Mark was working on the Library of Humor (some of them as early as 1880) show that he was thoroughly familiar with Thompson's work. The idea, however, which is basically that of the rustic at the play, is an ancient formula of fiction and humor. 12

13

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Watch for the elephant: it will be back again.) The deeper stroke of Jim's punishing the deaf child rests on some incident which Mark had heard. Besides this note, it appears in Notebook 16 (1882), shortly after an entry dated September 20. The notebook reads: "Some rhymes about the little child whose mother boxed its ears for inattention & presently when it did not notice the heavy slamming of a door, perceived that it was deaf." He has also conceived the Shepherdson-Grangerford feud (following the Darnell-Watson feud of the stenographic notebook 1 6 ), has worked out the ages of the Grangerfords, and has so clearly foreseen the end of the episode that he reminds himself to go back and change the manuscript so that Huck and Jim can continue their voyage on the raft. He must also make clear that the raft has passed St. Louis. Later, he examines the manuscript again and finds that he has already done so. Aunt Patsy, whose house is to be described, is Mrs. John A . Quarles, a sister of Mark's mother. " I have never used him [Quarles] or his wife in a book," Mark says in the Autobiography, "but his farm has come very handy to me in literature once or

twice. In Huck Finn and in Tom Sawyer, Detective I

moved it down to Arkansas." 17 What is most interesting in Group A , however, is the evidence that Mark has found the true purpose of his book. He is going to exhibit the rich variety of life in the great central valley as his trip down the river has recalled it to him and as he remembers it from boyhood and young manhood. Tom Sawyer glints again in the intention to have " T h i s notebook is the richest source on Mark's trip d o w n the river and I rely on it f o r m a n y statements made in this essay. I have omitted it f r o m the sequence of iMark's personal notebooks and so have not numbered it. It also contains several letters and some entries in shorthand, w h i c h

two

skilled stenographers I have put to w o r k on it have been able to translate in part. It is one of the most interesting of all the notebooks and I hope some day to publish it in full. 17

V o l . I, p. 96.

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MARK T W A I N A T

WORK

H u c k hazed at either of two schools which Mark went to as ä boy, and a painful memory, which was to be recorded in Life on the Mississippi and again in the Autobiography, prompts the note about the fire in the Hannibal jail. Huck is to explore a bayou and encounter alligators, he is to meet t w o typical specimens of river life on a trading scow and a tiny showboat, he is to attend a houseraising and a performance of a volunteer fire company, he is to observe a country dance, a quilting party, a candypulling, a horse trade, and a funeral. T h e last with some entries in earlier notebooks, is to flower in Chapter X X V I I . 1 8 Observe that H u c k is to meet some "shabby families." A n d observe that fiction lost a character w h o might have joined the fellowship of the king and the duke if Mark had followed up his impulse to present "some old liar of a keel-boatman" w h o would have been an eyewitness of the great earthquake, a member of the Murrell conspiracy, and a companion of Carpenter and Mike Fink. I diffidently call this note to the attention of certain critics who go on explaining that I was mistaken in putting Mike Fink into Mark Twain''s America. Group B. This consists of two pages in pencil, of different size. T h e y have no relation to each other and clearly were written at different times. T h e y are later than G r o u p A , though one is the same kind of note, and earlier than Group C. A later interpolation is starred. Material cancelled b y a line drawn through it is inclosed in pointed brackets. ι * Baby & barrel — 350 — Poetry 420 Remarks at a funeral 18 One of the some experience widely separated tion, "He had a

finest touches in the funeral of Peter Wilks comes from Mark had had or some anecdote he had heard. Several notebook entries consist of the single, unelaborated quotarat!"

NOON A N D T H E DARK Negro sermon — & the shouts. Child with rusty unloaded gun always kills.

71

2

2/ Ah, she's W D's sister. — old spinster 218 — the dead man is Huck's father. 223 the " " again 244 more about Finn — his disappearance. 270 (overflowed banks?) 273 — river "pretty high yet" but maybe not overflowed. Let Jim say putty for "pretty" & nuvver for "never" The first of these pages shows Mark repeating two suggestions he had made in the earlier group. The first line on this page was added in the top margin at some time after the rest of the page was written, and by that time Mark had returned to the manuscript to study it, as he was doing in Group C. ("Baby & barrel" is a reference to the raftsmen passage.) In fact, he had begun writing again if I am right in believing that the 1876 manuscript ended with the wreck of the raft, for "Poetry" means the verses preserved in Emmeline Grangerford's scrapbook. In that event, this single line is later than some of Group C. The second page shows Mark reorienting himself in the manuscript of 1876. All the page numbers refer to that manuscript. B y allowing three manuscript pages per page of the ordinary trade edition, however, one can use them not only to locate the position of the incidents but also to determine how much of the original manuscript was not carried over in the typescript. The most revealing item is Mark's inability to identify Miss Watson, which shows how much he had forgotten. (His mind was even foggier when he ripped out the raftsmen passage to insert it in Life on the Mississippi. In an explanatory note he said that Jim was the Widow's slave.) I think that there was probably a confusion, as well, in his original intention.

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There is no Miss Watson in Tom Sawyer, where the Widow Douglas first appears. She has some technical function as a sterner foil to the Widow's softness toward Huck, but that is not sufficient reason for her introduction. Probably Mark first invented her because it would be out of character for the Widow to sell Jim south. Group C. This group consists of nine single sheets (cut from folders), half of another sheet (on the back of which appear notes for "1002"), and two folders of the same kind of paper, each of which has the second and third pages blank. All this paper is of the kind used in the Buffalo manuscript (as none is in the other two groups of notes) but the fact that all but a small portion of the Buffalo manuscript has been bound in calf prevents me from determining how much of it was written on cut-up folders. (Nearly all the Mark Twain manuscripts I have ever seen, in the Papers and elsewhere, are written on single sheets of note paper size, sometimes obviously cut from folders, sometimes torn out of tablets or composition books, but sometimes, and from the middle 1880's on usually, machine-cut. During the 1870's the sheet is sometimes a little smaller than the one that may be called standard, and in that decade lined paper is not uncommon. But throughout his life Mark kept remarkably close to an average of one hundred words per page.) These notes are written in pencil. The various sheets do not form a sequence and show little relation to one another. The page numbers are mine and the reader must be careful not to take the arrangement as chronological — it is made for convenience in discussion. It is certain that all these notes were written later than the other two groups and probable that they roughly represent three different periods. The page numbered 1 (on the back of which are notes for "1002") was written before Mark resumed

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writing; after he got started and while the new material was being typed, he came back to it and added more notes in the upper right-hand corner, some of which refer to the new material. This and several other pages, including, I think, the notes on Jim's dialect, belong to a period when he was closely studying the typescript made from the manuscript of 1876. Several other pages, which are readily identifiable, contain notes made while he was writing and after his secretary had begun to type the new manuscript. T h e y refer to both the old and the new material, and they probably represent some initial uncertainty before the book was moving well again. I believe that all the notes about delivering Jim from prison except the one on the page numbered 5 were made after Mark had actually reached that part of the story. The one on page 5 is an anticipation, after he had conceived the idea but before he had begun to work it out. The others show him elaborating the idea, after he had been forced to do so by the exhaustion of the more integral action of the book. Later interpolations and additions are starred. Material cancelled by a line drawn through it is inclosed by pointed brackets. Material written along margins is double-starred.

Mary, Tom's sister Sid & Aunt Polly " aunt Widow Douglas. Judge Thatcher

Jim has wife & 2 children. — 90. $40 from men — 95. Betsy — 100 Shepherdson — 101 Grangerford — 109 Duke & K - 136 Another ref — 147.

Becky " (or Bessie?) Miss Watson, (goggles) sister to W d Douglas. " " 's nigger Jim. Jo Harper, Ben Rogers (tan yard)

74

MARK T W A I N A T W O R K Little Tommy Barnes Deacon Winn ( Sold $6000 to Judge — p. 19.) Plank raft 1 2 x 1 6 . Huck's father in floating house — 62. — 64. — 70.19 2

raff Jim — ? considable hund'd Nuffn

"He don't run everage" 22 In several places the manuscript is corrected to agree with these renderings. There is also some attempt to differentiate speakers by their use of them. See Chapter X L I . " Mark has had this idea for years — it appears in an early notebook and elsewhere. But he did not make use of it until some years later, when it appeared as " T h e Californian's Tale," now a part of The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories.

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interlard this & powder thrown in fire by Silas Phelps. Farmer has bought an elephant at auction. Gives him to Tom Huck & Jim & they go about the country on him & make no end of trouble. 9 Tools too handy. * (How'll we get this pen to him?) in a cake by Aunt Sally. He ain't satisfied. Ought to be a watchman. Nonnymous note to recommend it. This when they are nearly ready. * Get tin plates for Jim * Dig a moat. Objects because tools & everything so handy. * (Spend many nights in cabin with Jim.) Saw there, too. 3 weeks getting him out. * make the pens — Huck. Make rope ladder, now, hiding it as they work. * Butter melts night of escape. * Ladder in pie The dogs come in through the diggings — 11. *And themselves as ghosts. Nigger watchman faints. Swallow the sawdust — Huck has to — & Jim. Gives them stomach ache. Blow up cabin? * * aunt misses brass candlestick, shirt, sheet, flour &c (for they build the pie.) Uncle reads anonymous notes at table. 10 I fetched away a dog, part of the way — I had him by his teeth in my britches, behind. * Brass in a biscuit — uncle Silas got it. (cut em off. behind) * Children bring in tin plates (with marks) Jim must disguise in nigger woman's dress & they in aunt S to get away. Men won't shoot at women. * Scares them away, & then coolly paddles the raft home — & explains. Steal guns & get away under a volley of blank cartridges. Smuggle a dirk to Jim — yaghtagan — Uncle S wishes he would escape — if it warn't wrong, he'd set him free — but it's a too gushy generosity with another man's property. They always take along a lunch. Smuggle powder by Si — he throws it in kitchen fire.

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MARK T W A I N A T WORK I I

They correspond through dog & marrow bone. 12 T o fall in the dust makes a good disguise dog-bone messenger. Wouldn't give a cent for an adventure that ain't done in disguise.

Got an eye like a door-knob (dragonfly snake doctor) the only creatur of the bird specie that can dart straight sideways & straight backwards.

r in defterunce j how to pronounce it. line & coffin In a f e w of these notes Mark's intention is obscure and cannot be clarified b y anything in the book or manuscript. W i t h most of them, however, anyone w h o knows the book will have no trouble. Mark's sublime negligence shows in his twice-recorded uncertainty about Becky Thatcher's name. H e could have found out what it was b y taking down Tom Sawyer from the shelf but it survives as Bessie in the book — where also her father is a resident of St.

NOON AND THE DARK 79 Petersburg, though originally he had been only a visitor there. There are several uncertainties about the future course of the narrative. It being determined that the vagabonds are going to claim a reward for returning Jim as a runaway slave, just what instigation shall they have? Mark suggests that maybe they can turn Jim over to the authorities in revenge for Huck's having at last exposed them; the eventual solution, mere need of money, is much sounder. Again — and this must be before Mark conceived the final burlesque — the journey is southward and how is he to get Jim to free soil? Maybe he can be smuggled north (from New Orleans?) in a ship; but that would be pretty farfetched — so, "no, steamboat." It was a central problem in the action, of course, and a more careful novelist would have shaped the action so that the solution would have flowed out of it. Mark did not, in fact could not; in the end he solves it by way of the improvisations at Silas Phelps's plantation. When the true Harvey and William Wilks appear, how are they to prove their identity? There can be something in their baggage which will prove it and the baggage can be delayed, but just what shall the evidence consist of? Mark suggests that maybe a letter can have mentioned a certain glass eye which can be left in a trunk; his eventual device was cumbersome enough but better than this. A number of suggestions made in the earlier notes are repeated in this group. Jim may be sawed in two, presumably in the "mesmeric nonsense." Huck may teach history to the Negroes, and, grotesquely, that circus elephant has been bought by a farmer and the boys may "go about the country on him & make no end of trouble." The intention to chart the book's course through the heart of mid-continental life is strengthened. It veers toward Tom Sawyer in the jottings about the Cadets of Temperance, the Masons, the Odd Fellows, and the militia, but it returns to Mark's steady delight in the spectacle of his

8o

MARK TWAIN AT WORK

people. A house-raising (repeated from the earlier notes) would be good; so would a beef-shooting; so would a debating society, the lynching of a free nigger, some toughs shooting up a town, and a group of relatives of Arkansas rolling a snuff-stick while they tranquilly talk about family affairs. W e could have used those scenes, if Mark had found a way of using them. And fiction's loss and something fundamental in Mark Twain's genius show in two notes that drive deep into the realities of American experience. He must hear some Arkansas women, over their pipes & knitting (spitting from between teeth), swap reminiscences of Sister this & Brother that, & "what become of so & so? — what was his first wife's name? ["] Very religious people. Ride ι ο or 15 m to church & tie horses to trees. Let em drop in ignorant remarks about monarchs in Europe & mix them up with Biblical monarchs. There is a great deal of Mark Twain in that note — and, let it be pointed out, a great deal of the American novel which, as a new embodiment of experience, he and his contemporaries were forging. There is still more in another, related note: Quilting. The world of gossip of 75 yrs ago, that lies silent stitched into quilt by hands that long ago lost their taper & silkiness & eyes & face their beauty, & all gone down to dust & silence & to indifference to all gossip. A pretty fair essay on the best qualities of Mark Twain as a novelist could be based on those two notes alone. Then, if one wanted to extend the essay to cover most of his limitations as a literary artist, he need only take up the elephant which, in the midst of a novel that is almost ecstatic with the finest reality fiction can have, is to go charging across the countryside with Huck and T o m and Jim on its back — and add to it the climactic note, so com-

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pact, so true to the man, and so irrevocable, "Look through notebook & turn everything in." I cannot determine, I doubt if anyone can, the exact dates in 1883 when Mark was working on Huckleberry Finn. The letters are vague, and the evidence of the notebooks is ambiguous. On July 20, he wrote to Howells that he was averaging from 2,600 to 4,000 words a day and that, besides working on other projects, he was "away along in a big one that I half-finished two or three years ago. . . . It's a kind of companion to Tom Sawyer. There's a raft episode from it in second or third chapter of life on the Mississippi." Paine, who prints the letter only in part, bases his belief that Mark worked on it in 1880 on this "two or three years ago," though the book had been halffinished seven years before. On August 2 2 he again writes to Howells, "I've written eight or nine hundred MS pages in such a brief space of time that I mustn't name the number of days; / shouldn't believe it myself, and of course couldn't expect you to." Once more Paine interprets the eight or nine hundred pages as referring only to Huckleberry Finn, but he is probably wrong. The quotations do show, however, that Mark was working furiously on Huckleberry Finn during this summer. If he had written steadily on it at the rate he boasts, he could have completed it in the four and a half weeks between the two letters to Howells, but he was working on other things concurrently. It seems most likely that he did not begin to write before he went to Quarry Farm ("in June," Paine says), began at that time, and finished the book before the summer was over. The manuscript, if I may trust what I have learned from other Mark Twain manuscripts, indicates that for the most part he wrote steadily and easily. In order to write the other things which he is known to have written during that summer, however, he must sometimes have put it aside. At a guess, the longest interruption came when he had to work out the details of Jim's delivery from prison.

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Apparently Mark did not submit the manuscript to Howells, as he had done with Tom Sawyer, but he dreaded reading the proofs — " I would not read the proof of one of my books for any fair and reasonable sum whatever, if I could get out of it" — and complained so pointedly that on April 8, 1884, he was able to thank Howells for his offer to read them. He added, "The proof-reading on the Ρ & Ρ cost me the last rags of my religion." Then, on August 7, " I have no doubt I am doing a most criminal & outrageous thing — for I am sending you these infernal Huck Finn proofs — but the very last vestige of my patience has gone to the Devil, & I cannot bear the sight of another slip of them. My hair turns white with rage at sight of the mere outside of the package . . . " Howells read them, apparently in August, but anything he may have said about them has not been found. He may have suggested changes but, if he did, none of them were important. Nor is there any record that Livy Clemens worked on the book any of the bowdlerization sometimes attributed to her. There is, however, one suggestion that Mark anticipated trouble from her. In Chapter XXIII, in his account of striking his deaf child, Jim says, "De Lord God Amighty fo'give po'ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to fo'give hissef as long's he live!" In the manuscript Mark underlines "Lord God Amighty" and writes in the margin, "This expression shall not be changed." Nevertheless, Mr. DeLancey Ferguson's finding, in his Colophon article, that no propriety was inflicted on the text will not hold. The Buffalo manuscript is less than threequarters of the published book but I count thirty-seven differences between them which can fairly be called softenings of what Mark wrote. (These in addition to changes in the manuscript itself.) Most of them are single words, none goes beyond a phrase, and they are not important — except that thirty-seven is a sizable sum. The changes are made in the direction of contemporary good

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taste, and most of them either diminish a violence or avoid an unpleasantness. "Dam" is reduced to "blame'," "dum'd" to "derned," and even "derned" to "ornery." In a single passage, "drunker," "drunk," and "drunk," are lessened to "tighter," "mellow," and "mellow," and the specific "gin-mill" becomes the euphemistic "doggery." Possible offenses against piety are also detoured. At the circus, the horse "going like a house afire" was originally "going like sin"; when the king dresses up he originally looked as if "he had walked right out of the Bible and maybe was old Leviticus himself," and the effectiveness of "Leviticus" is lost when "ark" is substituted for "Bible"; "Judas Iscarott" is halved to "Judus"; "up towards the Throne" becomes "up towards the sky"; Tom's rejection of Huck's plan for the jail-delivery was first "as mild as Sunday School" and is much weaker when rendered "as mild as goose-milk." More annoying is the avoidance of words which could be objected to only on the ground that they were strong. Where the crowd gathers to break up the last performance of "The Royal Nonesuch," the text originally read, " I smelt rotten eggs by the barrel, and rotten cabbages and such things; and if I know the smell of a dead cat, and I bet I do, there was sixty-four of them went in. I shoved in there for a minute, but it was too rancid for me . . ." The substitution of "sickly" for the first "rotten" is defensible but "signs" for "smell" and "various" for "rancid" are obvious evasions. "Putrid," "rotten," "rot," "cuss," and "cussed" are deleted or replaced in contexts where they would certainly help. Huck originally wrote that a conscience "takes up more room than all the rest of a person's bowels," and the substitution of "insides" for "bowels" is quite as bad as Mr. Paine's celebrated rendering of "they eats 'em innards and all" in the Autobiography for Mark's "guts and all." Tom's recipe for prisoner's ink, now "iron-rust and tears," was originally and more truly "iron-rust and spit" — and there is

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no hope of attributing this change to L i v y for in Chapter X I V Mark, of his own will, went to the cumbersome extreme of having Huck pretend to hear a steamboat and get up and investigate, in order to avoid the word "spitting." Jim disguised as an A-rab originally "didn't look like he was dead, he looked like he was mortified"; it came out "looked considerably more than that." Where Huck is lying about the affliction of Hanner Proctor, the mumps she suffers from originally included "dysentery" but "erysipelas" was what eventually appeared. Finally, the duke originally ended his denunciation of the king at the end of Chapter X X X with an epithet that does not survive in type, "you unsatisfiable, tunnel-bellied old sewer." Probably the compunctions of L i v y Clemens did produce some of these changes but, even more probably, others were Mark's own. And I am morally certain that several bits of sexual queasiness are his unprompted act. Thus kings are not permitted to "wallow round the harem," as he originally wrote, but instead must more decorously "hang around." Where the vagabonds are preparing " T h e Royal Nonesuch," the duke originally said "he judged he could caper to their base instincts" but the phrase was deleted. Huck's modest suggestion about the king's costume was a faint shade less modest before Mark cut out "it was just outrageous." Similarly, in three different passages the king's satisfaction in kissing the Wilks girls is deleted and Mary Jane is not even permitted to kiss him "on the mouth." More flagrant — and more characteristic of Mark's prudery — is a change in Colonel Sherburn's derision of the mob that comes to lynch him. T h e text now reads, "Because you're brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here . . ." The single adjective "cast-out" is notable as one of the very few admissions in all Mark's work that prostitution exists, but he felt that the original sentence was too specific or too suggestive and cut out the com-

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pleting phrase which he had written, "lowering themselves to your level to earn a bite of bitter bread to eat." The whole question of the bowdlerization of Mark Twain's texts is in dispute and need not be adjudicated here. It is to be said that, in the sum, there was considerably less bowdlerization than critics have sometimes asserted, and that much the greater part of it was Mark's voluntary act, in obedience to his own judgment and his own conception of propriety and public taste. As I show in my essay on Tom Sawyer, he asked advice of Howells and his squeamishness was greater than Howells's. He also accepted without protest Richard Watson Gilder's further modification of Huckleberry Finn when parts of it ran in the Century .24 I grant pedants the further possibility that he may have accepted suggestions from Cable, who toured with him while he was reading from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn and was his guest at Hartford while it was being prepared for the press. Although Cable could speak frankly and directly about miscegenation, which Mark could mention only once and not too frankly, he had an infinitely timorous mind. He protested as suggestive the title of one of Mark's readings from the book in which, after solemn thought, I cannot even make out what he thought it suggested. It is barely possible that he is responsible for some of the softenings mentioned above, but I doubt it. I have come to believe that Mark himself was responsible for many of the euphemisms and avoidances which, after due search, can be found in his work, and I am satisfied that the sexual timidities were his. I believe that even the obscenities of his conversation and after-dinner speeches have been overemphasized. I am sure that his conception of what was proper to written literature was more prudish than that of his mentors — it was demonstrably more prudish than Howells's. He resented Livy's correction of vivid expressions that were not sexual ** See my analysis in Mark Twain's America, pp. 212 ff.

MARK TWAIN A T WORK — he enjoyed "wallow," "smell," "bowels," and the like, and felt a sound and justifiable anger at her "weakening the English language," though she did not weaken it much. But the taboo of sex was his own. I think that anyone who reads the published works with an open mind must come to that conclusion. And certainly no one can read the notebooks, which are more than seventy-five per cent unpublished, and other personal documents in the Papers without finding the conclusion proved to the hilt. A detailed study is called for and I hope some day to make one. Huckleberry Finn got diligent advance publicity when Mark gave platform-readings from it during his tour with Cable beginning in November, 1884, and when Gilder ran portions of it in the Century for December, 1884, and January and February, 1885. It was published in England on December 4, 1884, and in the United States (by Mark's own publishing firm) the following February. Determining the various states and printings of the first American edition has ever since been one of the happiest absorptions of collectors. Merle Johnson says that "Bibliographically, Huckleberry Finn presents what is probably the most amazing and mystifying problem of any American publication." 25 I am not qualified to venture even casually into that joy of bibliophiles. I have had patient and prolonged instruction from Mr. Franklin Meine, but I happily relinquish the problem to his skilled hands. It is essential to note, however, that part of the amazement and mystery of which Mr. Johnson speaks originated in the illustration which appears on page 283 of the first edition. When copies of the book had been delivered to the canvassers and when a large quantity had been run off in the printing house of Mr. J. J. Little, it was discovered that, by accident or design, an alteration in the plate had made the illustration 86

"A Bibliography of the Works of Mark Twain, Harper & Brothers, 1935. P· 44·

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obscene. Mr. Meine believes that thirty thousand copies had been printed. Few copies have ever found their way into the hands of collectors, but photographs of the offense have been preserved. II When the Heritage Press asked fifty literary critics to name the ten leading American books, thirty-eight out of the forty-two who replied merged Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and the book thus rather violently created appeared on five more lists than its nearest rival.26 At about the same time a Harvard boy came to consult me about a thesis which he proposed to write and which he wanted to call "Mark Twain and the Pursuit of the White Whale." He was not thinking of Huckleberry Finn and in what he was thinking of I should not finally agree with him, but, like the verdict of the thirty-eight critics, his title seemed portentous. Although at the same time Mr. Van Wyck Brooks repeated the opinion he had expressed as a young man, that it is a book for boys out of the mind of a boy, it seemed to me that an era of weird nonsense in criticism was clearly ended. It was at last natural to think of a great artist as an artist. Huckleberry Finn has offended the amenities of various critical fashions, probably because it will not fit the neat categories that criticism likes, but most of the charges brought against it have been as silly as Mr. Brooks's inability to find adult emotions in it. The Concord, Massachusetts, Library forbade it circulation on the ground that it set a bad example for boys 27 — and already it was secure 26 A s a publisher, Mark T w a i n once anticipated them. From Notebook 17: "Publish Huck & Sawyer in one vol. for $4." 21 A n d moved Mark to write this memorandum for the manager of his publishing firm: "Dear Charley — T h e Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass, have given us a rattling tip-top puff which will go into every paper in the country. T h e y have expelled Huck from their library as 'trash & suitable only for the slums.' That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure. Yrs, S.L.C." (Dated March 18, 1885.)

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in the admiration of the people for whom literature exists. Fifteen years passed and the ersatz Brahmin snob, Barrett Wendell, conceded with qualifications out of Henry James and complacence out of heaven that it was "a book which, in certain moods, one is disposed, for all its eccentricity to call the most admirable work of literary art as yet produced on this continent" — and already a second generation of readers knew that it was immortal. Twenty years later Mr. Brooks slew it with a silver bullet — and by that time it had a stature in world literature considerably greater than any other American book has ever had. It is fifty-seven years old now, more than half a century, that stature has increased, and the replies to the Heritage Press indicate that the controversy is closed, that only Mr. Brooks cares to disparage it. Perhaps even he would no longer fail to understand its emotions if he would read it. If critical terms had precision, we should have to call Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a historical novel. All fiction, of course, exists in past time, but Mark's fiction (even that which pretends to be contemporary) is historical in the proper sense, that its era has ended. Its era is the time of Mark's boyhood and one can even set a date: it does not come past 1845. The Mexican War has not occurred, the great migration has not got under way, the mid-continental society does not show the earliest fissures that mark its setting toward the Civil War. Biographical emotions confirm the date. Neither the storms of puberty nor the languors of adolescence have affected this past; it is the time and the society of Sam Clemens's tenth year. That year, in fact, closed the period in which he found fecundity as a writer of fiction. He wrote travel books, humor, dialectical and derisive essays about the world of his maturity, but all his fiction is out of Hannibal before 1846. The title he gave to some notes for his autobiography, "Villagers of 1840—3," defines his fiction. As a novelist he lived forever in a village, in a village of the northern tier of slave states beside

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the Mississippi, in the pause between the westward passage of the frontier and the coming of the industrial revolution, before the society of the great valley began to break up along the lines of force that produced the Civil War. . . . The prime difference between Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer is that in the later book he brings mature judgment to this society. Society is passed through the mind of a boy, as before, but this time there is a man of fifty speaking. Another critical term, picaresque novel, is suggestive but not precise. When he was finishing Tom Sawyer, Mark spoke of it — inaccurately — in terms of Gil Bias. Huckleberry Finn has less structure and less unity than its predecessor; its "idea" is less self-defining and its action has no set problem to solve. Like all his novels except Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper, in fact like most of his books, it is episodic, discontinuous, a succession of incidents. It is controlled from within only by Huck's escape from his father, Jim's flight toward freedom, and the voyage of the raft downstream. The movement is desultory and aimless till the raft is wrecked; from that point on it has direction and economy till the end of the Wilks family episode; the rest of the book is a separate episode, unrelated to the rest, self-contained but improvised. The time runs through two summers. One of them is the remainder of the summer in Tom Sawyer (which thus becomes one of fiction's longest and most crowded seasons) and Huck floats down the river as the June rise is subsiding, the following year. Mark always found time a relative dimension but in this book the boys have an age: Huck is "about as old as" Buck Grangerford, "thirteen or fourteen or along there." Before the end of the book he is called on to feel emotions considerably more adult, as Tom had been before him. But his creator lightly regarded the minor consistencies. With Howells and Henry James, he was bringing the modern American novel into being; it got rigorous

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form from the other two. It did not matter to him that he was continuing Becky as Bessie or that various threads were tied in crudely or left dangling. Remnants of two separate beginnings seem to be preserved — is the sequence of Huck's bad luck begun by his shriveling a spider in Chapter I or by his spilling salt in Chapter IV? In the need to get from here to there Mark sometimes extemporizes devices which a more disciplined workman would have evolved out of the action instead of patching them on it. It is unlikely that the tumbledown cabin to which Old Man Finn takes Huck would have a lock, but if it had had the traditional bar and latch Huck could not have surrounded his escape with the essential gore and mystery. The wreck of the Walter Scott exists solely to furnish Huck with books of history so that he can prepare the coming of the vagabonds, but the house of death, already in the book, was surely as likely a place to find them. When Huck, in Chapter XVI, decides not to expose Jim as a runaway and so invents his lie about smallpox, why does he not inquire about Cairo? A page or so farther on, he and Jim notice the clear water of the Ohio, but we have Mark's word for it that they passed Cairo during the fog and so why hadn't they noticed that clear water the day before? The home of the Grangerfords is a "big old-fashioned double log house" when Huck reaches it, but before he leaves it is a rich man's mansion capable of entertaining "a stack of people" for five or six days at a time. The imposture at the Wilks's is kept going by a series of devices which creak painfully and are believed only because the vitality of the characters overcomes them. Such things as these are trivial. More important is the essential unreliability of Mark's impulses. The footless burlesque of the scenes devoted to Tom Sawyer's Gang is out of harmony with the exquisite truth of Huck's discomfort at the Widow's and his superstitions and night fears. From the arrival of Pap on the mood is clear, and

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beginning with the Walter Scott the book moves purposefully. But mastery lapses again when Huck reaches Silas Phelps's plantation, and though the last fifth of the book is not footless, it is again inharmonious burlesque. Precisely there is the central limitation of Mark Twain's genius. He felt no difference in value between the highest truths of fiction and merely literary burlesque — if in fact he could at all discriminate between them. The truth is that he was usually better pleased with himself when broad farce was tumbling from his pen. He was in the antique sense a genius: he wrote in obedience to an inner drive, he exercised little voluntary control over it, and he was unable to criticize what he had written. Our fortune is that so much of his drive came out right. He was quite capable of repeating Thackeray's exultant " B y God, that's genius!" when he blotted the last line of the duke's Shakespearian soliloquy. He certainly thought it first-rate, for he used it on the lecture platform; that it is a shabby repetition of a cliche already worn out by his predecessors did not trouble him, and he was not even aware that it painfully breaks the reality, personal and literary, of an immortal character. It gave him another chance to make fun of a literary absurdity and no other value counted at the moment. He went similarly astray at the camp-meeting, where the reality of a fine scene is tarnished by the king's passing himself off as a pirate. The Hannibal of his boyhood, which was abominably fond of Sir Walter Scott, had also romanticized pirates, and so here was another gorgeous opening. Johnson J . Hooper had known better than that. When Simon Suggs, another rogue, fakes conversion at another camp-meeting, he does so in imagery and from motives that are credible to the audience, and so both they and he make better fiction. The same indifference or anesthesia governs the last fifth of the book. Group C of the notes would show how enthusiastically Mark worked up the details, if the text did

92 MARK T W A I N A T WORK not carry sufficient evidence of his delight. He did not perceive that at this point his masterpiece altered in kind, and if he had perceived the change would have felt no repugnance at mixing his kinds. The momentum that had carried the narrative with careless magnificence from the wreck of the raft up to here suddenly ran out; he no longer had a purpose to write to. He began to improvise and, as always when he improvised, cut across lots into burlesque. A few pages earlier he had written the scene in which many readers have found his highest reach, Huck's struggle with the imperatives of his upbringing and his decision to stand for decency against the moral law of slavery with, "All right, then, I'll go to hell." Just before that he had concluded the episode of the vagabonds at the Wilks home. It is both a rapture of social history and an illustration of why Huck is ashamed of the human race as final as anything Swift ever wrote. And now, without any awareness that he was muddying the waters of great fiction, he plunges into a trivial extravaganza on a theme he had exhausted years before. In the whole reach of the English novel there is no more abrupt or more chilling descent. Even so, we may count ourselves fortunate. "Farmer has bought an elephant at auction. Gives him to Tom, Huck and Jim and they go about the country on him and make no end of trouble." That elephant might easily have wandered into Huckleberry Finn. So much having been said, it becomes necessary to point out, as criticism has usually failed to point out, how excellent in its own kind this concluding episode is. Granted the "idea," a straight-faced application of the conventions of romantic fiction, the working-out has admirable liveliness and invention. Tom's fidelity to his sources while all the time he knows that Jim is free, Jim's slipping out at night to assist in the ritual of his deliverers, Tom's insistence on maintaining the ceremonial forms when he has to compromise with the means — such things are excellently

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imagined. To the despair of criticism, also, the passage contains incidental brushwork equal to anything in the book. Some of the happiest effects of Huck's language are produced here, and some of the richest grain of Huck's skepticism. The passage in Chapter XLI where Old Mrs. Hotchkiss, Sister Damrell, and Brer Hightower discuss the evening's marvels is in Mark's best style, and we must not forget that Silas Phelps and Aunt Sally are perfectly felt and splendidly drawn. In short, the passage is like TomSawyer Abroad, grotesque in conception but rich in detail. What is principally wrong with it is the fact that Mark's innocent pleasure thrust it into a great novel. The novel's greatness need not be argued. The framework is faulty, the joinery is unskillful, the movement is sometimes aimless, and from time to time Mark's lack of self-criticism betrays him into errors of esthetics. Surely — and all that has little bearing on the fact that Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has a vigor, a depth, and a multiplicity which no other American novel surpasses, if in fact any equals them. It has the authority over the imagination which only great fiction can have. The boast of Walt Whitman's poetry is fulfilled by this treatise on the society of mid-continental America: it contains multitudes, of the mind and spirit as well as of the flesh. It is the best, the final expression of a great man's personality working on the life out of which he came. And it is an expression of a great democrat's judgment on the energies of democracy and on the limits that confine them. On the first page one encounters a new medium of fiction. Mark came to the American vulgate from the dialects he had begun writing in The Jumping Frog. It must be sharply set off from the practices of his predecessors and practices of his own which stemmed from them. The orthography of humor, that is, must be distinguished from the American language. In the misspellings of Artemus Ward and Josh Billings, for instance, there is no attempt to

94 MARK TWAIN A T WORK render speech, still less to record the habit or personality of thought, but only to produce the laughter of incongruity. As a youth, Mark had worked in the same convention, in the Snodgrass papers. Sam Slick the Clockmaker, Major Jack Downing, and a good many of the Southwestern humorists who were Mark's true forerunners had come closer to using the vulgate as a literary instrument. They had, however, used it as a characterizing device, almost always confining it to dialogue, where it was effective, or to letters to the editor, where it was inept. In dialogue it was useful to the developing realism of our fiction, though few had enough subtlety of ear to make it more than a device. William Tappan Thompson, Johnson J. Hooper, and most of all George W . Harris (whom Mark once accused of stealing "Jim Wolf and the Cats" from him) had done most with it. They were not only smaller men but more primitive artists. The dialect of Sut Lovingood is a phonetic approximation of a language no doubt spoken but it is inflexible, though it is rich as humor it is sometimes implausible even as speech, and it is in no way a carrier of the rhythms and shadings of thought. It is employed in formal monologues and it does not become a true medium, remaining merely an accessory. In his earliest use of the vulgate for dialogue Mark had gone farther than such men ever reached. The opening pages of The Gilded Age show a live speech that is more precise and more flexible than anything in Thompson, Hooper, or Harris — just as, a few pages later, Uncle Dan'l speaks a truer dialect than any Negro in our fiction before him. Earlier still, in The Jumping Frog, Mark had anticipated the triumph of Huck Finn's vernacular. Simon Wheeler is formally introduced to tell his story, as in the convention of Thompson and Harris, but his language, once he begins to speak, is an integral part of the effect which the immortal conte produces: you cannot separate the man from his speech nor his story from the personality

NOON AND THE DARK 95 which his speech expresses. Exactly that, on a much higher level, is the achievement of Huckleberry Finn. The American langnage, perceived with a sensitiveness and used with a skill nowhere else equalled, is proved competent for all the effects of fiction. Yet Mark's greatest ability as a novelist was precisely the one most important to novelists: the life-giving power. Huckleberry Finn swarms with life. Voices come out of a fog, or a pair of anonymous nigger-chasers drift by in a skiff, or Sister Hotchkiss gabbles in the kitchen — and something alive and true has been set down. Mrs. Judith Loftus is only a few pages of dialogue but she is complete. Uncle Silas and Aunt Sally are full-length and individual, but they have more economical companions in Colonel Sherburn, the old fool Boggs, and even the "long, lanky man with long hair and a big white fur stovepipe hat," who reenacts the murder. This last figure is only half a paragraph of type and speaks three words, but there he is. You need ask no more about him. But a significant limitation must be noted. Mark could create women of only a certain age and class. All but one of his principal heroines are pasteboard, and the exception underscores the fact: she is Roxana, in Fudd'nhead Wilson, a Negro slave. He could do Aunt Polly and Aunt Sally from the life, he could create many middle-aged women from a rural, frontier society — recall the note in Group C which sketches the entire image. But young women, women of marriageable age, women who could be objects of desire, would not live for him. Laura Hawkins of The Gilded Age, for instance, is just bisque and Joan of Arc is no more than tears. So in Huckleberry Finn the Grangerford girls are mere stage props, one designed to suffer and the other to look proud as in any melodrama played on such showboats as the notes mention, and Mary Jane is nubility breaking Huck's heart with a feeling of unworthiness. This inability appears to be rooted in a more fundamental fact of

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Mark's nature which I have already mentioned: that, so far as literature was concerned, sex was tabooed. It is not only that there is almost no sexual motivation in his books, there is almost no sex at all, no recognition of it as experience. Again we must except Pudd'nhead Wilson, and again the exception is significant: sex exists in the forbidden world of the slaves. Elsewhere the area is blank — and this is not true of the novels of his great contemporaries, Howells and James. Is it conceivable that a boy of Huck's upbringing, age, and curiosity would be totally unaware of sex? Is it conceivable that such a character exploring the society of mid-America, would encounter sex only in Sherburn's censored allusion to prostitutes and in the undescribed codpiece which the king wears in "The Royal Nonesuch"? Nigger Jim is, of course, the book's heroic character — and Mark created only two other heroes, Pudd'nhead Wilson and Joan of Arc. Jim has all the virtues Mark admired. He is kind, staunch, and faithful, a brave man, a friend who risks his life and sacrifices his freedom for a friend. There is greatness in him. "Dat truck dah is trash; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." Here is a tremendous rebuke from the humble to the human race whose cruelty was the strongest pressure in Mark's discontent. It is Swiftian — and Swift never rose so high as Mark does when he has Huck meditate on Jim's intention to have an abolitionist steal his children if their owner will not sell them: It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn't ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, "Give a nigger an inch and he'll take an ell." Thinks /, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I

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had as good as helped to run away, coming right out fiatfooted and saying he would steal his children — children that belonged to a man I didn't even know, a man that hadn't ever done me no harm. In such a passage literature does what it can to repay the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil. It is part of the humanity of Nigger Jim, and part of Mark's exultation in exploring his patient, groping mind. "Niggers is always talking about witches in the dark by the kitchen fire" — in Jim's discussions of witches, dreams, spells, and omen there is set down a whole folklore, black and white. Jim talking about Sollermun and other kings, his speculations about the stars, his arguments with Huck which triumphantly oppose his experience to the ideas and logic of a better intelligence (but the best of these is in Tom Sawyer Abroad) — such things are great fiction. T o set the scale of their achievement, recall Cable's honest but pedestrian sketches of Negroes, contemporary with Jim, or Uncle Remus who, though he greatly tells the great fables of his race, is himself false-face and crepe hair. Or think of the faithful slaves whose function in literature has been to croon in the honeysuckle while the Old South dies and whose apparently endless line began in April, 1884, when Thomas Nelson Page published "Marse Chan" in the Century, two months after Huckleberry Finn appeared there. And remember that it is through the mind of Jim that Huckleberry Finn imparts its perception of the tragedy of human life. Criticism has tended to think of Huck himself as an instrument of literary satire, realism deflating romance, a young Sancho Panza to Tom's Don Quixote. Considering how dull and lifeless Mark found Cervantes's masterpiece, this judgment has its irony — but there is something in it. Tom mentions Don Quixote in Chapter III and Huck promptly brings his skepticism to bear on Tom's sources.

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He resumes the function in the last fifth of the book, when Scott and Dumas and the phantasies of the Southern gentry come under fire. Throughout he admits his admiration of Tom's correct ideas, but he holds to what he knows. He is a practising empiricist: experience is his only test. This, however, is the smallest part of Huck. He is an individual. There is enough boy left in him — left over, that is, from the hymn to boyhood that is Tom Sawyer — to show him small, frail, and helpless against the world's evil. That evil is intensified in that it has given a boy the habit of disbelief. Huck has learned to go warily among the human race; he has found vileness and violence everywhere on a hair trigger, ready to be loosed. He has learned the necessity of protecting himself against belief or confidence and against too lavish use of the truth. "Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it," Pudd'nhead AVilson's New Calendar says, and Huck has found that when an emergency comes it is wise to practise that frugality. He lies to Judith Loftus, to the raftsmen, to the ferryboat captain, to the nigger-hunters, to the Grangerfords, to the vagabonds, to everybody in whose interest or curiosity may lurk a threat to his private purposes. He erects round his privacy ramparts of protective untruth. He has learned that the Levite who passed by on the other side was practising the bitter wisdom of reality. But also he makes his own assertion of the decencies, fights and wins the battle of his conscience that ends in his protecting Jim's freedom in spite of hell itself, and always vindicates the realities of friendship, loyalty, and courage. (I doubt if Mark could have asserted them except in the belief of a boy.) His creed is simple but inviolable. You have friends, you stand by them, you back them up; against the teaching of experience you have faith in the moral order; though you face the reality of human vileness, you act in the belief that we are members one of another — and that many of us are children of pity and misfortune. It is not an undignified

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99 creed: if the book makes a statement through Nigger Jim that human life is tragic, it also asserts through Huck that human life is noble . . . noble enough for the likes of us. Still, one does not often think of Huck as a boy. Rather he is a distillation of the humble minds of humble folk. In him the shrewdness, common sense, skepticism, endurance, staunchness, and realism of the ordinary man, the great mass of Americans of that era and society, find expression — as well as areas of darkness, superstition, fear, ignorance, and suspicion. The word "folk" is an excellent word for criticism to avoid, but in so far as it may suggest the perceptions and emotions that underlie the thinking of many people not gifted at formulating thought, it is useful. Be it said, then, that fundamentally Huck is an expression — a magnificent expression, a unique expression — of the folk mind. The folk mind, that is, in mid-America in the period of the frontier and immediately following, the folk mind shaped for use by the tremendous realities of conquering a hostile wilderness and yet shadowed by the unseen world. He is one of the highest reaches of American fiction. But if Huck expresses the folk mind, he is also Mark Twain's surrogate, he is charged with transmitting what that dark, sensitive, and complex consciousness felt about America and the human race. Come back to the Harvard boy who wanted to write an essay to be called "Mark Twain and the Pursuit of the White Whale." Mark Twain was not a systematic thinker. Customarily, like the creature of fable who was his brother Orion, he held in succession all possible opinions about every subject he tried to analyze, held none of them long, and was able to drive none very deep beneath the surface. Especially as a metaphysician he was as feeble a novice as ever ventured into that stormy sea. But in what he perceived, in what he felt, in the nerve-ends of emotion, in the mysterious ferments of art which transform experience, he was a great

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mind — there has been no greater in American literature. Be it said once more and ever so wearily: insufficiencies and defects prevented him from ever completely implementing the artist throughout the whole course of a book. That does not matter — in Huckleberry Finn we get the finest expression of a great artist, the fullest report on what life meant to him. It is a dark book, as dark a book as Moby Dick, which my consultant's title tosses into comparison with it. And it is a different kind of book. Melville sought to chart the metaphysical evils of existence, and to chart them by means of symbols. I do not wish to disparage his achievement — though, surely, it is more defective, frustrated, broken off, and basically chaotic than anything in Mark Twain. But there is a type of mind, and the lovers of Hiickleberry Finn belong to it, which prefers experience to metaphysical abstractions and the thing to its symbol. Such minds think of Huckleberry Finn as the greatest work of nineteenth century fiction in America precisely because it is not a voyage in pursuit of a white whale but a voyage among feudists, mobbers, thieves, rogues, nigger-hunters, and murderers, precisely because Huck never encounters a symbol but always some actual human being working out an actual destiny. We are a long way from the world of Tom Sawyer. Instead of St. Petersburg, essentially a part of the American idyll, we are, as I have said elsewhere, in Dawson's Landing, the town that broke the life of Pudd'nhead Wilson — though we are still in Hannibal. Like its predecessor, the book speaks to a deep level of American desire in the passages that deal with Jackson's Island, night and dawn and storm, and the great river flowing forever through our memory as truly as through our continent. This is the loveliness of our natural heritage and the image of freedom in our dream. But it is the smaller part of the book. Mostly we are exploring a society, from the Grangerfords at the

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top, through the many-personed middle class, down to the squatters and the river-drifters, and below them to the raw stuff of mobs and such creatures of scum as Old Man Finn and such creatures of darkness and dream as the two rogues. An exploration made dangerous by the unseen powers which the ghosts cry about out of the midnight woods and which are forever hinting their menace in signs and portents — but made much more dangerous by the human violence that is always threatening to break through. So much power is focussed on each separate incident that the reader seldom realizes how great that violence is when the sum is totalled. Huck is kidnapped to the Illinois shore, where he witnesses a fit of delirium tremens, keeps a rifle pointed at his father through a night of horror, and makes his escape by simulating a murder. Thereafter he is seldom out of touch with violence. There is a murdered man in the floating house — his father's corpse. He touches robbery and contemplated murder on the Walter Scott, and then all three of the criminals are drowned. The Grangerfords carry their guns to church and the feud ends in wholesale slaughter, including the murder of boys. The rogues are fleeing from a mob when Huck meets them and, after robbery and the betrayal of innocence, a mob gets them in the end. Sherburn murders the drunken, bragging Boggs, a mob rises, and Sherburn defies it with a gun. Huck himself twice fears that he will be mobbed and once there is reason for his fear. Death by accident, the maltreatment of slaves, the impromptu violence to be expected in any casual meeting, are always lurking just offstage. And the notes show that Mark had at hand other material of the same kind. Some of this must be written off as only Mark relying, when a problem of technique had to be solved, on the cliches of the cheap theatre which he frequently fell back on. (And which, to the vulgarization of his material, he

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invariably used when trying to write plays.) More of it will have to be studied in the book that someone must eventually devote to the bases of Mark's mind. Perhaps the central effort of that book will be to determine why death, the images and humors and disgusts of death, the fear of death, and the threat of death colored his phantasy from childhood on. And perhaps the answer, if it is ever found, will show that the threat of death was twinned in his phantasy, as it often is, with the fear of women's sex. But rather more of the violence that overlays and interpenetrates Huckleberry Finn is just what it seems to be, a component of a society recently emerged from the frontier, still in the era of slavery, and dominated by Southern sentiments and folkways. It is Mark's report on the fruits of his experience, buttressed by his final judgment on the nature of man. The book was published in 1885, his fiftieth year, twenty years after the Civil War ended, fifteen years before the century ended, contemporary with The Bostonians and The Rise of Silas Lapham. The date is significant in his biography and in our history. He had been born in the year when our greatest social force, western expansion, leaped the last barrier that had confined it, the Missouri frontier, and began to work toward Oregon. He had lived through the decades that transformed the First Republic into the Empire, the Forties, the Fifties, the Sixties, and the Seventies. He had been a part of the imperial energies and had grown mature in the imperial culture. And — he had acquired a dread and foreboding which were to endure throughout his life. In a sense they mean only that he had seen the St. Petersburg of his golden years become the Hartford of the Gilded Age — he had seen personal security and happiness transformed into a splendor that was insecure. But in another sense they mean that he perceived, and in him American literature perceived for the first time, a limitation of the democratic hope. I have said elsewhere

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that Huckleberry Finn shows the collision of that hope with the reality-principle. It is not a book of despair but rather of realistic acceptance. It accepts democracy not as a journey which will end only at the stars but rather as the terms of arbitration between what is best and what is worst in the damned human race. Mark's heart was with the best but his genius illuminated its handicaps against the worst. He and his book had their doubts, and the rest of his life showed the doubt growing. This is God's plenty, but there is more still, for we have not mentioned the mythological quality without which, it seems probable, no book ever transcends nationality to take a permanent place in world literature. In Huckleberry Finn some part of that quality is associated with the river, the downstream voyage of the raft which the mind easily accepts as a metaphor, and the personality of Huck Finn. But the larger part of it comes from the three great imaginative creations, Old Man Finn, the Duke of Bridgewater, and the pore disappeared Dauphin, Looy the Seventeen, son of Looy the Sixteen and Marry Antonette. With these the book escapes altogether from time and geography and enters the universals of comedy. Pap Finn is more earthbound than the other two, and therefore is more sharply drawn, a character in a realistic novel who, in a surprisingly few pages, concentrates more of the worthless class to which he belongs, and at a higher potential, than our literature has ever again got out of that class, though it has tried more than often enough. He exists partly in myth, however, and the other two exist there altogether — in inspiration, at the world's crossroads, in the domain of ecstasy. I will not discuss them here but quote from what I said about them ten years ago: They have begotten hordes of successors since 188$ but none that joins their immortality. They belong with Colonel Sellers: they are the pure stuff of comedy. Their

io4 MARK TWAIN AT WORK destiny is guile: to collect the tax which freedom and wit levy on respectability. Their voyage is down a river deep in the American continent; they are born of a purely American scene. Yet the river becomes one of the world's roads and these disreputables join, of right, a select fellowship. They are Diana's foresters: the brotherhood that receives them, approving their passage, is immortal in the assenting dreams of literature. Such freed spirits as Pamirge, Falstaff, Gil Bias, and the Abbe Coignard are of that fellowship; no Americans except the Duke and the Dauphin have joined it. None seems likely to. No book, however, was ever read piecemeal or loved analytically. Such a discussion as this, which violently separates the parts, necessarily misses the enchantment which the book has worked for fifty-seven years. Its whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and different from any of them. A quality of great fiction, a characteristic probably sufficient to define great fiction, is that it moves simultaneously on many levels of significance. Criticism can never completely state the thirst which Huckleberry Finn slakes. The raft with its proprietors moves downstream through strangeness tinged with beauty and horror. It is an adventure story, but beneath the adventure story are stratified layers of recognition and response, national and personal, of memory and of desire. Many voices are speaking, from our past, from our reverie, and from our dream. It is best to accept that harmony without trying to analyze it further. No book has more of America in it, or more delight. Like all great works of art it is unique. All the world reads it for the first time.

The Symbols of Despair HIS ESSAY is a chapter, hitherto unwritten, in the biography of Mark Twain. Mr. Paine's Mark Twain: a Biography lists some of the manuscripts dealt with here and even devotes a few sentences of description to a few of them. But it is clear that Mr. Paine did not understand their significance and, if he had understood them, I think he would have regarded it as his duty to say nothing about them. Certainly as one reads his Biography one gets no proper sense of the effect on Mark Twain of the disasters which these manuscripts deal with. Those disasters are agonizing as personal history. Our interest, however, is in the manuscripts which came out of them — we are concerned with them as a series of literary episodes. Those episodes occur in the life of a literary genius and by chance, a fortunate chance for criticism, they partly open up an area of literature which is usually closed. They make it possible to document, and so in some small degree to analyze, certain processes of creation. Criticism is usually altogether unable to say how a writer's experience is transformed into works of art. In these manuscripts we can actually see that transformation while it is occurring. W e are able to watch Mark Twain while he repeatedly tries and repeatedly fails to make something of experiences that were vitally important to him — and finally we are able to see him fuse and transform them in a work of art. W e are able to see the yeasts and ferments actually at work. In the end they do not justify us in saying much about how creative processes may work in other writers. But I think that even a single exposition of how they once worked in one writer is worth making.

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One caution. Both psychology and literary criticism are highly speculative fields. This inquiry is more speculative still, in that it is carried on in the no man's land between them. The findings I bring in here are essentially speculative: I cannot prove them. That being said, I may also say that throughout the essay my reference is to demonstrable fact wherever possible. The facts that support my findings are far more numerous, and my argument has a much more solid base, and much stronger links, than there is room even to suggest in the course of a single essay. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in December, 1889. It is the last of Mark Twain's books which we can call certainly of the first rank, and its publication furnishes a convenient date. He was then the most widely known and admired writer in America, and very likely in the world. He was at the summit of his personal happiness. His books had won him not only world-wide fame but a fortune as well. He was the husband of a greatly loved wife, the father of three delightful children, the master of a house famous for the warmth of its hospitality, the center of a small cosmos of beloved friends, an intimate of the famous men and women of his time, courted, praised, sought after, universally loved. His life had a splendor that marked him as the darling of the gods, and that and the splendor of his imagination made more than one person think of him as a mysterious sojourner from somewhere outside the orbit of this earth. The backwoods boy, the tramp printer, the Mississippi pilot, the silver miner, the San Francisco bohemian had become one of the great men of the earth, the hero of a story more romantic than any of Tom Sawyer's dreams. Our first concern is the series of catastrophes that came in the 1890's. Some years before, he had established his own publishing firm, to publish his books. He had expanded it in order to publish the memoirs of General Grant, and the over-extended business required better management

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than Mark could give it, better management than anyone could give it whom he hired. T h e firm faltered, the going got worse, and finally, as a result of the freezing of credit in the panic of 1893, it had to go into receivership. It could have been saved — except that a greater loss had drained Mark's fortune and his wife's as well. Always a speculator, a Colonel Sellers who dreamed of millions but was a predestinate sucker for all salesmen of gold bricks, he had poured nearly a quarter of a million dollars into the development of an invention that was going to make him many times a millionaire. This was the Paige typesetting machine, and his grandiose dream was not absurd, considering the millions which the Mergenthaler Linotype has made. But the Mergenthaler machine succeeded, whereas the Paige machine failed altogether and carried Mark Twain down with it, just at the time when his publishing firm went bankrupt. Furthermore, these same years saw a mysterious alteration in the personality of his youngest daughter, Jean, and finally the terrible mystery was cleared up by the discovery of the still more terrible truth, that she was an epilept. During these years also his capricious but usually exuberant health failed. He was racked by the bronchitis which he was never again to lose, by the rheumatism which was the inheritance of his frontier youth, and by other ailments which were the result of the enormous strain he was under. So, in 1895, a bankrupt, little better than an invalid, four months short of sixty years old, Mark Twain started on a lecturing tour which was to take him round the world and pay off his creditors dollar for dollar. His wife and one of his daughters went with him, but they left behind them in America their youngest daughter and their oldest one, Susy, the one who Mark felt was nearest him in mind and spirit. Just a year later, the exhausting trip ended in London, and the children were to join them there. T h e y did not. Across the Atlantic from her parents, Susy died of

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meningitis. And in the months following, Mark's wife began to decline into the invalidism that was to last through the remaining eight years of her life. The gods had turned against their darling. Such a sequence of calamities might well drive a man mad; there would be little to wonder at if Mark Twain had broken under them. And the truth is that for a time he lived perilously close to the indefinable line between sanity and madness. Passages of his private anguish in the unpublished papers show to what a tautness the membrane of the mind was stretched, and come near breaking the reader's heart. But we are concerned, not with the man's grief but rather with the use the artist made of it. For, of course, it is obvious that such events as these cannot occur to the man without happening to the artist as well. The rich man had been bankrupted, and the threatened poverty had imperilled his wife and children. The man of great fame had, or so to the tortured ego it must seem, been somehow toppled from his high place, and always thereafter Mark Twain must carry in his heart some remnant feeling of disgrace. Necessarily, his image of himself had been impaired. These blows which had fallen on him, which had been struck at him, had made him something other than he had been — or at least something other than he had believed and seemed. A man's position in the world, his various successes, his public reputation are interstitial with his ego; an injury to any one injures all and so injures his secret image of himself. But also interstitial with that image is a writer's talent. In the deepest psychological sense, even in a biological sense, a man's work is his life. That is to say, the sources of his talent are inseparably a part of his feeling of wholeness, of his identity, and even, quite nakedly, of his power. An injury to the man must necessarily be an injury on this deep level of personal power — a blow at his virility. And equally, an injury to the inner picture of the man by which

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life is sustained, must be an injury working outward to impair his work as well. In the dark areas where the roots of life go down, the threatened soul cannot easily distinguish among the parts and organs of personality, and if one of them is endangered then the dim mind knows that all have come in peril. A l l this is the merest commonplace of experience. Remembering it, we should expect the series of disasters to have a powerful effect on Mark Twain's writing. A n d also, remembering that it is the nature of writers to forge their art out of the materials of their lives, we should expect to find in his writing some effort to grapple with the disasters. A r t is the terms of an armistice signed with fate. Or, if you like the words better, art is experience appraised, completed, neutralized, or overcome. . . . So let us see. It was July, 1896, when the lecture tour ended in London. T h e lectures had made almost enough money to clear Mark's debts but not quite, and there remained to write the book about his trip, Following the Equator, which was to complete his task. It was in August, 1896, that Susy died. H e began the book in October. A n d he wrote to his friend Twichell: I am working, but it is for the sake of the work — the "surcease of sorrow" that is found there. I work all the days, and trouble vanishes away when I use that magic. This book will not long stand between it and me, now; but that is no matter, I have many unwritten books to fly to for my preservation; the interval between the finishing of this one and the beginning of the next will not be more than an hour.1 Observe that he was relying on work, on writing, to hold his grief at arm's length, the grief of Susy's death. But, besides that pitiful purpose, are we not already entitled to see something else? There seems to me already a hint of what was soon to be plainer, that part of his necessity 1

Letter o f Jan. 19, 1897.

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to write was to vindicate himself as a writer, to restore the image that had been impaired. He had to write: he was compelled to. Following the Equator is the dullest of his books, and writing it was a laborious and sometimes agonizing task. He rebelled at writing it for money. He rebelled at the meaninglessness of the pursuit, which was part of the meaninglessness of life. For, with Susy dead, life seemed to have no meaning except loss and cruelty. But he kept at work and on April 13, 1897 a notebook entry says, " I finished my book today." But it needed revising and on May 18, the notebook says, "Finished the book again." Several pages of notes follow, some of them for a story I shall be describing in a moment, and then on May 23, five days after the end of the book, the notebook says, "Wrote first chapter of above story today." The interval had been a little longer than the hour he predicted to Twichell, but not much. With that first chapter, Mark had begun the series of experiments and failures that are our central interest. And also he began other experiments and other failures not closely related to them. What the next months show is a man writing in the grip of a compulsion, driven to write, flogged and scourged to write by the fierce drive within him — a man under compulsion to write for "surcease of sorrow," but still more to reintegrate a blasted talent, and most of all to restore his image of himself after the intolerable impairment it had suffered. But also this compulsive need to write is constantly blocked, displaced, and distorted. It is so frenzied that it seems aimless — and also it is perpetually frustrated. " I couldn't get along without work now," he wrote to Howells. " I bury myself in it up to the ears. Long hours — 8 and 9 at a stretch, sometimes." 2 That shows the compulsiveness, and we get a glimpse of the frustration when he writes to Howells in 2

Letter of Jan. 22, 1898.

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August, 1898, fifteen months after that confident notebook entry, "Last summer I started 16 things wrong — 3 books and 13 mag. articles — and could only make 2 little wee things, 1500 words altogether, succeed — only that out of piles and stacks of diligently-wrought MS., the labor of 6 weeks' unremitting effort." But the truth was more startling and more serious than this glimpse shows, for the inability to make more than on an average two little wee things come out of sixteen starts was to last longer than he thought. It was to last through 1898 and on to 1899, to 1900, to 1904 —and in fact the jobs that he completed from 1897 o n through the rest of his life represent only a small fraction of the jobs he began. From 1897 on there are scores of manuscripts in the Mark Twain Papers which begin bravely enough and then peter out, some of them after only a few pages, some of them only after many hundred pages of stubborn and obviously heart-wrenching work. N o w it is certain that, as Mark grew older, he did not intend to finish some of them —that he began them merely to amuse himself or to jot down a passing observation or perception, or to find release from some mood in the only remedy he was able to depend on. But other manuscripts, especially those we are to deal with, he meant and desperately wanted to complete. He was impelled to come back to them time after time, take them up again, try some other beginning or some other set of characters, impose some other form on them or some new outcome or some other meaning or some other moral — but get on with them, sweat them through, mould them to an end. So time after time he came back to them. And time after time he failed. He could not finish them. Such a frustration is a striking thing. There must be a significant reason for the repeated failure of a practiced literary artist, a man who had been writing all his life with marked success. True, Mark Twain had always been

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subject to enthusiasms and his enthusiasms were short-lived, so that normally he began a good many manuscripts which he never bothered to finish after the going got hard. But this is something else, a repeated and habitual failure, and he did try to finish them — he tried repeatedly, under the compulsion that had enslaved him. He kept coming back to them — and always he failed. This is no casual or meaningless failure; it is obviously closely interwrought with the fundamental energies of his personality. T h e end of our search will come in 1905 but we are most concerned with the two and a half years following that notebook entry of May 18, 1897. During that period he wrote so much that, turning the manuscripts over in my hands and trying to make out their relationships, I have frequently told myself that some of them could not possibly belong to these years, that no man could write so much. But there they are, manuscript after manuscript, a staggering number of them, a still more staggering grand total of words. He actually wrote them during these years. During the same years of course, he also wrote other essays, sketches, reminiscences, newspaper articles, which he succeeded in completing and which were published. But here is a many times greater number of manuscripts which he could not finish. T h e force that was impelling him to write was, clearly, both desperate and remorseless. Only a man who was hellridden could write so much. Think of the inner desperation this indicates — and think how that desperation must have grown and spread when time after time he was forced to realize that he could not finish what he had begun. His invention ran out, he could not solve the ordinary problems of structure and technique, he could not overcome the ordinary difficulties of his own intentions, he could not push the thing through to an end. Apart from the manuscripts themselves there is little record of his distress, but surely it was a long agony. Secretly, in the

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hours of black brooding which had become habitual since Susy died, he must have been forever grappling with the most terrible fear that any artist can feel: the fear that his talent has been drained away, that his spark has been quenched, that his achievement is over forever. It is a poison which acts two ways, spreading back to reinforce the poison that begot it. For the failure of the artist must strike close to the deepest identity and potency of the man — and that identity and potency had already been challenged and grievously impaired by the catastrophes we have glanced at. Of course, it must have proceeded out of those catastrophes, or at least been set in motion by them, and few would doubt that his new impotence was related to the impairment he had suffered or that these literary failures issued from the complex sense of failure that had been created in him. Much of this heap of manuscript is at random. I disregard that part and consider now only what seems significant in the end. And the first support of what I have just said about impairment comes from Mark's attempts to make use once more of the immortal boys who had conferred immortality on his two finest books — and whom he had called upon again, during the anxieties of the early '90's, for those two lesser stories, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. So now he put them to work again, involving them in a long conspiracy of Tom's invention more preposterous and much drearier than the one that turns the last part of Huckleberry Finn into burlesque.3 It is a maze of romance and rank improvisation that is trivial to begin with and speedily becomes disheartening. It is wholly without structure and moves without plan by dint of a feverish extemporization which gets more mechanical and improbable as it goes on. It is dull, humorless, without the enchantment of the great originals. Mark's "This is "Tom's Conspiracy," referred to in "Noon and the Dark: Huckleberry Finn" within.

ii4 MARK TWAIN AT WORK touch is altogether gone from it and, what points most vividly to the truth, even the prose is dead. It is pitiful to see a great writer turning back, in such a desperate mood, to the works of his greatness. And this effort to repeat what he had done at the height of his power, summoning ghosts from his earlier books, shows the strength of his fear that power had departed from him. It is the more pitiful that the effort to save himself does not save him: the book is a merciless parody of the great books it turns back to. He must have realized the true nature of the effort he was making, and certainly its failure could not be hidden from him. Few more bitter experiences can happen to an artist. Nor is this manuscript the only one in which he tried to use the two boys, as we shall see, nor are Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer the only earlier books he called on in his need. Through much of the unfinished work of this period runs a diluted strain of other books, PudiVnhead Wilson in particular, and of ideas, devices, stock themes and treatments which he had found effective in his great days but which were not effective now when he needed them most. It was at this time, also, that Mark began to think seriously about his autobiography. He had written fragments of it before, notably the account of his publication of Grant's memoirs contained in the first volume of the published portions. But now he wrote a number of more or less systematic sketches and planned to buckle down and write the book. He made many pages of notes for it — lists of people, character sketches, memoranda of exciting or important or amusing events. These jottings run through all the notebooks he kept during this period, a long sequence of them in one book shows a comprehensive plan for the book, and there is a forty-page catalogue of Hannibal people which is well along toward actual biography.4 Of all this autobiographical material, by far the largest 4

"Villagers of 1840-43."

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part concerns two periods of his life. Scattering memoranda cover many years, but most of them deal either with the dead child Susy or with the Hannibal of his boyhood. One long section of a notebook describes the agonizing details of Susy's illness and death, and yearns over the little, trivial, pitiful incidents of her childhood, the promise of her life, the loss and stunning cruelty of her death. These notes he actually worked up into a biographical sketch of Susy; but he could not finish it. He was to come back to it some years later, and to work much of it into the Autobiography. But there is even more about Hannibal, and the friends and neighbors of the Clemenses, than there is about Susy. What is the importance of these facts for our inquiry? Well, it is significant that, in this time of impotence and failure, his mind was constantly turning over not only his memories of his dead daughter, but also his memories of his boyhood. For we know from his books that boyhood was his golden time and that Hannibal was his lost, immortal idyll, not of boyhood only but of home as well. It meant whatever home means of peace, happiness, fulfillment, and especially of security. In the time of desolation whose symbol he was not yet able to forge, he turned back to the years and the place that meant safety. Presently we shall understand why. Finally, it was at this time that he began to write what he called his Gospel. Twenty years ago or more he had read a paper on philosophical determinism to a club in Hartford, and from time to time thereafter he had shown that the idea was working in him. N o w suddenly it began to demand expression — and it was to go on demanding it until he died. A large part of the Mark Twain Papers consists of argumentative or analytical chapters, dialogues, letters, some of them finished, more abandoned, which develop and embroider the twinned themes: man's complete helplessness in the grip of the inexorable forces of the

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universe, and man's essential cowardice, pettiness, and evil. He went on writing them until within a few months of his death, but actually he began to write them, and wrote the most consecutive of them, in the period we are dealing with. Probably the greater part of those which he privately printed in 1904 as What Is Man? were written during these years. The importance of What Is Man? to our inquiry is that it provides the first dependable indication, very possibly the earliest one, of what was going on in the ferments that were at work. We have asked what was the result on the artist of the calamities that had all but broken the man, and with this book we may make a start toward an answer. For What Is Man? is not only a treatise on man's instability, weakness, cowardice, cruelty, and degradation. It is not only an assault on the illusions of free will, integrity, decency, and virtue with which mankind makes tolerable its estate. It is not only an assertion of the familiar logic of determinism, the fixed universe, the infrangible sequence of cause and effect from the beginning of time, holding man helpless, and unalterable by will or wish or effort. If that were all there were to it, surely there would be significance in its getting itself written at this particular period. But it is much more than that. For clearly What Is Man? is also a plea for pardon. In describing man's helplessness, it pleads that man cannot be blamed. In asserting man's cowardice, it asserts also that man is not responsible. In painting man as enslaved and dominated by inexorable circumstance, it argues that the omnipotence of circumstance must answer for what Mark is inwardly afraid he is being held to answer for. If man is weak, cowardly, and sentenced to defeat, then one who feels himself weak, cowardly, and defeated cannot be to blame. If man is not responsible, then no man can be held responsible. N o one, I think, can read this wearisomely repeated argument without feeling the terrible force of an inner cry: Do not blame me, for it was not my fault.

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That theme, which is to be repeated in many forms, is struck clearly in What Is Man? So we may now move on to the three groups of manuscripts from whose chaos was to be resolved the answer to that troubled cry. I cannot be sure that my arrangement is chronological — I cannot date all of them in relation to one another. But that does not matter much, for they are variations on themes common to them all, the themes come together in the end, and I can date most of the significant steps in the evolution that is really a debate. We will follow them rather by idea than by manuscript. A number of ideas are repeated over and over in the various manuscripts, modulated, changed, adapted, blended, and in the end, harmonized. One of these ideas, and probably the earliest, is that of the great stretch of time which may seem to elapse in a dream whose actual duration, in waking time, is only a few minutes or perhaps a few seconds. And mingled with this idea is another one, which holds the germ of the eventual conclusion, the idea of confusing dream with reality. The notebook entry I have quoted, which says that Mark began the "above story" on a certain day, proposes a story in which a man is to nod for a moment over a cigarette, dream a sequence of events which he thinks has lasted for seventeen years, and on waking from his momentary sleep, so have confused the dream with the reality that he cannot recognize his wife. Accompanying this entry is a list of characters for the story which identifies many of them as actual persons from Mark Twain's past. The significance of this is made greater by the fact that, as I have said, Mark was making plans for his autobiography at exactly the same time. But the story which he actually began to write, though it preserves the framework of the dream, mostly disregards it in favor of another idea, a different theme, whose significance is apparent at sight and which was to arouse, following this story, his most persistent effort. It is the story

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of a world-famous personage who is cast down from his high estate. The time is shortly after the Mexican War of 1846, and the hero is the youngest major-general in the American army, whose heroism and gallantry have made him a world figure and destined him for the Presidency as soon as he shall be old enough to hold that office. He is not only world famous but very rich as well, fortunate and happy, married to a beautiful woman whom he worships, the father of two small girls whom he adores, one of whom is talented and promising. He falls asleep over his cigarette and in his dream the family's magnificent house is burned down and, following that, a greater catastrophe swiftly engulfs them. A trusted relative of the general's wife, who has been trusted with the management of their fortune, proves not only to have dissipated the fortune but to have become involved in widespread chicanery and fraud as well. The general's reputation is blackened, he and his beloved family are plunged not only into abject poverty but into overwhelming disgrace as well, and in all ways he and they are ruined. He sinks into unconsciousness, wakes from that a year and a half later, finds himself and his family living in a squalid log cabin in California, learns the bitter struggle his wife has made to support them — and here the manuscript breaks off. It had broken off before this and been resumed, but this time the break was final. Mark Twain could go no farther. Already my point must be clear; it hardly needs my assurance that the story is crowded with undisguised autobiographical material — lifelong friends of Mark Twain, members of his family, enemies, incidents that had happened to him, scenes and speeches straight from his life. Notice the starkness of the theme: a great and fine personage of unimpeachable integrity is struck down by catastrophe and disgraced in the eyes of all the world. Notice also how it is made clear that the personage was innocently betrayed, that the catastrophe was not his fault.

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Following this story, Mark separated out the dream idea and confined it to a sequence which I will describe in a moment, while proceeding to carry the theme of the virtuous man cast down from his high estate into a series of manuscripts which together represent the strongest and most persistent effort in our whole cycle. He kept coming back to this story not only during 1898 and 1899 but as late as 1904. How many different essays he made I cannot say, I can only say that he made them repeatedly. The thing obsessed him and he must get it out. But time after time he found himself blocked and had to quit. It is much too long a story and, as his efforts crisscrossed and failed, much too complex a story for me to tell here. It concerns the leading citizen of a town which hardly differs from the St. Petersburg of Tom Sawyer and the Hannibal of the Autobiography, and not only the squire but another citizen, formerly wealthy, who had suffered the loss of his fortune and is now reduced to poverty but everywhere respected for his virtue and integrity. Through an intricate series of circumstances the virtuous man is led by his own weakness to commit murder, and other intricately wrought circumstances throw suspicion on the squire. The theme is frequently lost sight of in the melodramatic incidents that Mark frantically invented to get it told somehow, or anyhow, and in a flood of other themes from all the other ventures of this period. But the theme is the moral cowardice and hypocrisy of mankind, the liability of everyone, even the most virtuous, to yield to his secret weakness, provided only he is tempted, or there is some seeming necessity, or mere chance comes his way. Back and forth across this theme play related themes from What Is Man? N o w see what has happened. The theme of catastrophe has been modulated. The protagonist has been split in two. The victim of catastrophe is no longer innocent, as in the major-general's story, he is guilty and knows he is

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guilty, and a large part of the story is his effort to appease and justify himself. But, though he is guilty, the plea is made for him that he cannot be blamed. In different attempts different reasons are given but they all come to the same thing in the end — that circumstance is omnipotent and what happens must happen, alike to all men. If all men would sin in the given circumstance, then none can be blamed for sinning —the responsibility must be turned back to impersonal fate or to the malevolent God who designed it. But notice that there is here a psychic admission, or an accusation, which the earlier story did not contain. The major-general was betrayed by one he had trusted, but the virtuous man of this cycle, though the plea is made that he was not responsible, is cast down by his own act. This cycle too is crowded with unmistakable portraits and events from the actual world of Mark's own experience. A greater effort is made to transform and adapt them, but they are there. And it should be clear that they are there by the same compulsion that put the admission or accusation there. Bear in mind that none of the expedients, new starts, or changed devices had worked: Mark had proved unable to bring any version of his story to fruition. Not even when he went back and borrowed from its predecessor. He tried, that is, telling the same story of the virtuous man made murderer and coward and hypocrite by calamity, as something that happened in a dream — in a dream, furthermore, that was to last for a few minutes only, though it seemed to consume many years. So what began as an independent story became essentially the same story, though with the modulation I have pointed out. And that modulation, I think, discloses the secret self-accusation as it is met by a counter assertion that all men are guilty as circumstances compel them to be. W e have now got far along in our period and must go

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back, to where the idea of the dream began a different evolution. A number of apparently aimless sketches which have no surface relationship to our inquiry had dealt with sailors or other people marooned in the vast Antarctic waste of ice and darkness. In one of these there had been introduced a legend of an enchanted sea wilderness in the midst of this eternal winter where ships were caught in a central place of calm, circumscribed by the ice and snow, and held drifting forever there with the dead bodies of their crews and passengers preserved by the unearthly cold. Various components of this idea run back farther in Mark's thinking than I can trace them here, but now they have come together in a striking and terrible symbol of desolation. Mark had not been able to complete any of these casual sketches, but, whether consciously or not, they led to a re-entry and flashed across his mind the bright hope that he had found a variation of the story that tormented him which, this time, he would be able to complete. Again we have the happily married man who is the father of two delightful daughters and again he falls asleep and is to waken after a few minutes, believing that years have passed. But this time, before he falls asleep he looks through a microscope at a drop of water — and that item changes and immensely deepens the story. For in his dream, he and his family are on a mysterious ship sailing they know not where in a perpetual darkness filled with storms of snow and ice. This proves to be an Antarctic waste in the drop of water which he had looked at in the microscope, and in that tortured dream the voyage progresses in mystery and terror — and also in what I feel to be significance. N o one knows where they are, no one knows where they are going or for what purpose or under whose command, but they are in the Great Dark at the edge of the microscope's field, a place of unimaginable desolation, and somewhere far off is the horror of the Great White Glare, which is

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really the beam cast through the microscope's field by the reflector. Moreover, on this ship there is some recollection of waking life — the world of reality outside both the microscope and the dream. But this fades, and one comes to doubt it, one comes in the end to believe that the reality one remembers was a dream after all, and that the dream one lives in is the reality. Furthermore, there is a supernatural being on board the ship, the Superintendent of Dreams, who has power over both the ship and the minds of its passengers, who steadily, vindictively, cultivates in their minds the doubt of reality which becomes the belief in dream.6 And in the terrible darkness, monsters roam the freezing ocean, threatening to snatch victims from the ship and devour them. And finally, there is mutiny and betrayal on this ship, trusted officers who will be untrue and produce catastrophe. This story also Mark could not finish. He came back to it several times, trying to find an effective outcome for it, trying to give it this slant or that, trying to crystallize round these symbols a coherent expression of the dread they had for him. The frustration still held and he could not do it, but what he did write is markedly superior to anything I have previously mentioned. It is a strange, powerful, and moving story, this uncompleted fragment, which holds you fascinated despite some crudities of construction. There is significance for us in the fact that he was able to make it better literature. And there is more significance in the notes that show how he wanted to finish it. For as the voyage went on, still greater afflictions were to visit the ship. It was to meet other ships caught in the same terrible enchantment. One of them was to contain a fabulous treasure in gold, and this was to madden certain of the already mutinous crew. The baby who had B I need not point out that the Superintendent of Dreams exactly corresponds to G o d in What Is Man? W a t c h him become Satan.

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been born to our married couple was to be carried off on another ship, the search for the child was to mingle with the crew's mad lust for the treasure, the wife's heart was to break, her hair was to turn white, and she was finally to go mad with grief, during the ten fruitless years while they tried to find the child. They were to catch up with the other ship at last — but in the Great White Glare, where the child and all the crew and passengers of the second ship were to be killed by the merciless heat. And the Glare was to further madden the gold-maddened mutineers and to dry up the sea, the monsters were to gather, and in a final, apocalyptic phantasy of destruction, the two beloved daughters were to be killed, the grief-crazed wife was to die, all remaining survivors of the first ship were to die also, leaving only the helpless narrator and the loyal negro who was his servant. Once more, a great part of the detail of this story was from Mark's experience. Most of the characters are identifiable from his life, or correspond to characters elsewhere in our material who are identifiable. The children's parties, the servants, the arguments can be annotated. The girl who is so loved and who is killed with such cruelty dies in exactly the delirium that the faithful notebooks record of Susy Clemens's fatal illness. And so on. The pattern had now been repeated many times. We have seen Mark's compulsion to write it and the inhibition that withheld him from working it out to an end. So now, I think, we may make some judgments. W e have seen in fiction the shape of the imprint left on Mark Twain's mind and heart by the series of catastrophes I began by describing. For essentially they are the catastrophes that obsess him in these uncompleted stories, nor can there be any doubt what great personage is cast down from his high place, what beloved wife is maddened by despair, what beloved daughter dies in agony. But if we recognize all that, then we must also recognize the terrible accusation that

124 MARK TWAIN A T WORK had risen in his heart. I said, far back, that he walked the narrow edge between sanity and madness. How close he came to madness may be understood in this cry, "It must have been my fault!" W e need neither the anthropology of primitive religions nor the psychology of the unconscious mind to understand, for in all of us a similar fear and accusation hover about the margin of the mind, to come forward a little and lose some of their vagueness in moments when discouragement is on us or the menace of living has suddenly sharpened. That primal guilt is of one tissue with our primal despair, but happily those are brief moments when we are in health. Yet we all know, of our own experience or experience near to us, that the shocks of life may sometimes prolong those moments, bring the accusation into the center of the mind, delay the healthy reaction from it — and then we have at best despair and at worst insanity. This close had Mark Twain come: that there had been set up in him a contention, an accusation he could not bear, a repudiation he could not make. In the yeasty darkness at the mind's base, he had, of his own fault, brought on himself this disgrace and degradation and humiliation. In the phantasy that underlay both his grief and his rebellion, he was the author of his own fall, and the author also of his wife's and daughters' illness, of his daughter's death, of the unabated agony that had come upon his family. So now he had found the symbols of despair. Through stormy darkness and hemmed in by ice, directed by some unknown and malevolent will, a ship sails a terrible sea where no chart can be had and where monsters lurk that may strike and destroy at any moment. The ship sails there forever, there is no plan or sense to its voyage and no hope that the agony will end, and the helpless passengers are menaced not only by the Great Dark without but by mutiny and greed and maniac revenge within. And quite surely there will come to them bereavement, the death of

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their loved ones, the triumph of an idle and unmitigated malevolence whose terrible decoys are love and hope and human warmth, to lure humanity to destruction. The artist is driven to make what he can of experience, and art is the terms of an armistice made with fate. Yet the compulsiveness he shows and above all his frustration make clear that here we are dealing with more than the comparatively simple w a y of art. The impact of calamity had been too great, he had taken one step too near the edge, and there is evident a struggle not only to make terms with his experience but also to vindicate himself. And not only to vindicate himself but, quite literally, by that vindication to integrate a mind that had been blasted and restore a talent that had been blown asunder. W e have seen his first attempt to still that accusation: the "It was not my fault" of the story where the majorgeneral is betrayed by a trusted relative. That would not suffice: the excuse was too transparent. There followed the assertion in What Is Man? that no one can be blamed since the chain of circumstance holds him fast in a plan determined by a vindictive God. That would not move the judge's heart, nor could the voice be stilled by the argument of the cycle to which he returned so often (in the stories of the virtuous man turned murderer) that all men are weak and all men fall when tempted. But important modulations had been made in the dream story. And let me add that at one time, as his notes show, he contemplated going back to the disgraced major-general and setting him out also on the dreambound ship in the eternal ice, together with a company of fellow-victims living out their diverse fates in the same predestined anguish and despair. He did not write it. If he had begun it, he would not have finished it. For though this addition to the idea had hope in it, he had not yet found the reconciliation. But he had come close to it. There was a grotesque

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hope, or at least an alleviation, in the position he had now reached. For this dream idea has two parts, one that dreams are brief though their agony may seem to last forever, and the deeper one that the reality may fade into the dream, that one may not be sure, that as one wakes from dream so perhaps one may wake from a lesser to a greater dream. Here the perturbed spirit finds comfort, though not quite enough, in the simple thought, so direct and inevitable, so characteristic of the helplessness of our deepest selves: "It may not be true after all. It may be a dream. Maybe I have dreamed the whole agony. Maybe loss and suffering and despair are false, are only a dream." Remember that this compulsive writing had produced other manuscripts, apparently at random and without relation to this bitter debate. Among them was a story about T o m Sawyer and Huck Finn, which I briefly described. But that story could not have been altogether aimless and at random. It was, in a way, a premonition. For in his winnowing of his own books and his lost years, he happened upon a mysterious stranger in the town of Hannibal. I do not know much about this man, for he takes various forms, but the important thing is his secret, the fact that there is noble or perhaps royal blood in his veins. This made him kin to Mark Twain, in whose veins ran the blood of an English earldom as well as that of a regicide. And was not Mark, besides, that most mysterious of strangers on this earth, a genius, a man born unlike other men, to a strange destiny? Somehow the image of this unrecognized nobleman blends with another image that has fascinated Mark all his life long, the figure of Satan. And this was a fruitful time to remember Satan, for Satan is an angel and angels are exempt from loss and pain and all mortal suffering, they are exempt from guilt and conscience and selfcondemnation also, and temptation has no meaning for them and they have no moral sense, and neither humiliation nor death nor the suffering of anyone affects them in

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the least. Moreover, of the angels who were all that Mark needed most to be, he felt nearest to Satan, the one who had revolted against the inexorable laws of the universe stated in What Is Man? and the one whose insatiable curiosity about the ways of man kept him going up and down on the earth and to and fro therein. So it is not surprising when, presently, young Satan, a son of the fallen angel, comes to Hannibal and falls in with Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. This first manuscript is not remarkable, being little more than a succession of marvelous works done by the young angel for the admiration and stupefaction of the village. It was fumbling and tentative and it frayed out. But in it and in the notes made for carrying it on Mark found the vital clues, the seeds that were to bear fruit at last. At first young Satan was no more than a vehicle for Mark's derision of the God whose vengefulness creates human pain and for his scorn of the ant-like race pain is inflicted on, and an identification, infantile at base, with a supernatural being who can perform wonders that make him distinguished and envied, a being also of irresistible strength. But he became more than that, and the way out of the basic frustration was his miracles. So another manuscript begins with Tom and Huck and young Satan in Hannibal, but this soon breaks off and a longer, better, and more deeply wrought one begins. The same story has been transferred to Eseldorf, in Austria, centuries ago — but if we needed any clue by now, note that this story includes a print-shop such as young Sam Clemens worked in when he was the age of these boys. I will say nothing of this manuscript except that it led directly to the one that came through to triumph at last, the book which, after it had been painfully written over and changed and adjusted and transformed, was to achieve the completion denied its many predecessors, the book which we know as The Mysterious Stranger. In those tortured revisions and adjustments, which are

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part of the same desperate effort to make the story go somehow that I have traced in other sequences, we see the thing finding expression at last. Or, if I may so phrase it, we see the psychic block removed, the dilemma solved, the inhibition broken, the accusation stilled, and Mark Twain's mind given peace at last and his talent restored. The miracles, which at first are just an idle game for the amusement of the boys and the astonishment of the villagers, become finally a spectacle of human life in miniature, with the suffering diminished to the vanishing point since these are just puppets, unreal creatures moving in a shadow-play, and they are seen with the detachment of an immortal spirit, passionless and untouched. And so from a spectacle they become a dream — the symbolic dream of human experience that Mark had been trying to write in such travail for so many years. So an unrecognized purpose had dominated the chaos of those efforts, after all, and out of it had come The Mysterious Stranger, a minor masterpiece, with its clear, subdued colors, its autumnal pity and compassion, its fine, silvery echo of mortality and of hope destroyed and of man's pettiness somehow given the nobility of suffering, the thread of pain binding all living things together. But what is it? Eseldorf — Assville — is just Hannibal, seen far away, softened by the mist of centuries. The boys who are eager and cowardly, aspiring and cruel, are just Tom and Huck once more, which is to say they are what Mark had found best in himself and his long phantasies. The villagers, the human race in little, are just his friends and neighbors, his detractors and enemies and those who had undone him. The deaths died, the injuries suffered and agonies endured — we do not need to inquire what they are, after the innumerable times he had tried to give them meaning in art. Nor can there be any doubt who the immortal Antagonist is, the enemy of God, which is to say the rebel against law — and so against responsibility. Here

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the dreadful things alleged against mankind, and so made as a confession, in What Is Man? are said again, but now they are tolerable, conformable, acceptable, for they have been removed far away, over them broods the peace of distant dream. And now we know that the dream had closed the arc and permitted him to say what he must say and enabled him at last to live at peace with himself. You perceive, now [Satan says, just before he vanishes and the book ends] that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks — in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. . . . It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream — a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought, — a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities! The dream, that is, was the answer and the proof. He had tried to say: it was not my fault, I was betrayed. But the accusation could not be stayed so easily. He had tried to say: it was not my fault, for the fixed universe of inescapable law intended from the beginning that this should happen. But that was too easily exposed as subterfuge. He had tried to say: it was not my fault, for anyone would have done the same, but the remorseless feet that follow, follow after had driven him from that refuge. He had tried to say: it is just a delusion, a dream I will wake from — and that had almost served, but not quite. Susy's delirium was not his delusion and there could be no waking from it — and if that was so, then the terrible accusation still held. But there was still an answer. If nothing existed but a homeless thought wandering forlorn among the empty eternities, then his smaller agony and his personal guilt

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were also a dream. If everything was dream, then clearly the accused prisoner might be discharged. The accusation begotten by his experience could be stilled by destroying all experience. It was possible to uproot terror and guilt and responsibility from his little world, by detonating the universe. He could end his contention with the vengeful God and put away remorse forever by reducing all contention, vengeance, pain, degradation, guilt, sin, and panic to a lonely dream. That was the price he paid for peace. It seems a high price. But art is the terms of an armistice signed with fate, and the terms one makes are the terms one can make. At this cost the fallen angel of our literature, the mysterious stranger who seemed only a sojourner in the cramped spaces of our mortal world, saved himself in the end, and came back from the edge of insanity, and found as much peace as any man may find in his last years, and brought his talent into fruition and made it whole again.

APPENDIX

THE following is the beginning of one of the unfinished manuscripts described in "The Symbols of Despair." It belongs to a group all of which deal with the ice and darkness of the Antarctic and is the one which my essay speaks of as the best. Mark Twain did not give it a title. Paine filed it under a title of his own, "Statement of the Edwardses," but I have preferred to call it "The Great Dark," using a phrase from the story itself. I print enough of it here to show several things common not only to the group it is taken from but to many other manuscripts described in my essay. The dream-framework, the mood of mystery and terror, the ill-fated family, and the confusion of dream and reality, themes which recur many times in the manuscripts my essay describes, are all present in this excerpt. The asterisks are Mark Twain's, not mine, and represent his separation of parts of the story, not elisions.

The Great Dark BEFORE I T HAPPENED

Statement by Mrs. Edwards in no way prepared for this dreadful thing. We were a happy family, we had been happy from the beginning; we did not know what trouble was, we were not thinking of it nor expecting it. M y husband was thirty-five years old, and seemed ten years younger, for he was one of those fortunate people who by nature are overcharged with breezy spirits and vigorous health, and from whom cares and troubles slide off without making any impression. He was my ideal, and indeed my idol. In my eyes he was everything that a man ought to be, and in spirit and body beautiful. W e were married when I was a girl of sixteen, and we now had two children, comely and dear little creatures: Jessie, eight years old, and Bessie, six. The house had been in a pleasant turmoil all day, this nineteenth of March, for it was Jessie's birthday. Henry (my husband) had romped with the children till I was afraid he would tire them out and unfit them for their party in the evening, which was to be a children's fancy dress dance; and so I was glad when at last in the edge of the evening he took them to our bedroom to show them the grandest of all the presents, the microscope. I allowed them fifteen minutes for this show. I would put the children into their costumes, then, and have them ready to receive their flock of little friends and the accompanying parents. Henry would then be free to jot down in shorthand (he was a past-master in that art) an essay which he W E WERE

134 APPENDIX was to read at the social club the next night. I would show the children to him in their smart costumes when the party should be over and the good-night kisses due. I left the three in a state of great excitement over the microscope, and at the end of the fifteen minutes I returned for the children. They and their papa were examining the wonders of a drop of water through a powerful lens. I delivered the children to a maid and they went away. Henry said — "I will take forty winks and then go to work. But I will make a new experiment with the drop of water first. Won't you please strengthen the drop with the merest touch of Scotch whisky and stir up the animals?" Then he threw himself on the sofa and before I could speak he uttered a snore. That came of romping the whole day. In reaching for the whisky decanter I knocked off the one that contained brandy and it broke. The noise stopped the snore. I stooped and gathered up the broken glass hurriedly in a towel, and when I rose to put it out of the way he was gone. I dipped a broomstraw in the Scotch whisky and let a wee drop fall upon the glass slide where the water-drop was, then I crossed to the glass door to tell him it was ready. But he had lit the gas and was at his table writing. It was the rule of the house not to disturb him when he was at work; so I went about my affairs in the picture-gallery, which was over our house's ballroom.1

Statement by Mr. Edwards W e were experimenting with the microscope. And pretty ignorantly. Among the little glass slides in the box we found one labeled "section of a fly's eye." In its centre was faintly visible a dot. We put it under a low-power lens and it showed up like a fragment of honey-comb. We 1 T h e original idea of this story, as of others in the cycle, was that the entire narrative which follows was to take place in the f e w seconds between the time when Mr. Edwards stretched out on the sofa and the time when Mrs. Edwards knocked over the decanter.

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put it under a stronger lens and it became a window-sash. We put it under the most powerful lens of all, then there was room in the field for only one pane of the several hundred. We were childishly delighted and astonished at the magnifying capacities of that lens, and said " N o w we can find out if there really are living animals in a drop of water, as the books say." We brought some stale water from a puddle in the carriage-house where some rotten hay lay soaking, sucked up a dropperful and allowed a tear of it to fall on a glass slide. Then we worked the screws and brought the lens down until it almost touched the water;7 then shut an eve and peered eagerly down through the barrel. A disappointment — nothing showed. Then we worked the screws again and made the lens touch the water. Another disappointment — nothing visible. Once more we worked the screws and projected the lens hard against the glass slide itself. Then we saw the animals! Not frequently, but now and then. For a time there would be a great empty blank; then a monster would enter one horizon of this great white sea made so splendidly luminous by the reflector and go plowing across and disappear beyond the opposite horizon. Others would come and go at intervals and disappear. The lens was pressing against the glass slide; therefore how could those bulky creatures crowd through between and not get stuck? Yet they swam with perfect freedom; it was plain that they had all the room and all the water that they needed. Then how unimaginably little they must be! Moreover, that wide circular sea which they were traversing was only a small part of our drop of stale water; it was not as big as the head of a pin; whereas the entire drop, flattened out on the glass, was as big around as a child's finger-ring. If we could have gotten the whole drop under the lens we could have seen those gruesome fishes swim leagues before they dwindled out of sight at the further shore! t!

*

*

*

i3 6 APPENDIX I threw myself on the sofa profoundly impressed by what I had seen, and oppressed with thinkings. An ocean in a drop of water — and unknown, uncharted, unexplored by man! By man, who gives all his time to the Africas and the poles, with this unsearched marvelous world right at his elbow. Then the Superintendent of Dreams appeared at my side, and we talked it over. He was willing to provide a ship and crew, but said — "It will be like any other voyage of the sort — not altogether a holiday excursion." "That is all right; it is not an objection." "You and your crew will be much diminished, as to size, but you need not trouble about that, as you will not be aware of it. Your ship itself, stuck upon the point of a needle, would not be discoverable except through a microscope of very high power." "I do not mind these things. Get a crew of whalers. It will be well to have men who will know what to do in case we have trouble with these creatures." "Better still if you avoid them." "I shall avoid them if I can, for they have done me no harm, and I would not wantonly hurt any creature, but I shan't run from them. They have an ugly look, but I thank God I am not afraid of the ugliest that ever plowed a drop of water." "You think so now, with your five feet eight, but it will be a different matter when the mote that floats in a sunbeam is Mont Blanc compared to you." "It is no matter; you have seen me face dangers before - " "Finish with your orders — the night is slipping away." "Very well, then. Provide me a naturalist to tell me the names of the creatures we see; and let the ship be a comfortable one and perfectly appointed and provisioned, for I take my family with me."

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Half a minute later (as it seemed to me), a hoarse voice broke on my ear — "Topsails all — let go the lee brace — sheet home the stuns'l boom —hearty, now, and all together!" I turned out, washed the sleep out of my eyes with a dash of cold water, and stepped out of my cabin, leaving Alice quietly sleeping in her berth. It was a blustering night and dark, and the air was thick with a driving mist out of which the tall masts and bellying clouds of sail towered spectrally, faintly flecked here and there aloft by the smothered signal lanterns. The ship was heaving and wallowing in the heavy seas, and it was hard to keep one's footing on the moist deck. Everything was dimmed to obliteration, almost; the only thing sharply defined was the foamy mane of white water, sprinkled with phosphorescent sparks, which broke away from the lee bow. Men were within twenty steps of me, but I could not make out their figures; I only knew they were there by their voices. I heard the quartermaster report to the second mate — "Eight bells, sir." " V e r y well — make it so." Then I heard the muffled sound of the distant bell, followed by a far-off cry — "Eight bells and a cloudy morning — anchor watch turn out!" I saw the glow of a match photograph a pipe and part of a face against a solid bank of darkness, and groped my way thither and found the second mate. "What of the weather, mate?" " I don't see that it's any better, sir, than it was the first day out, ten days ago; if anything it's worse — thicker and blacker, I mean. Y o u remember the splitting snow-flurries we had that night?" "Yes." "Well, we've had them again to-night. And hail and sleet besides, b'George! And here it comes again."

138 APPENDIX We stepped into the sheltering lee of the galley, and stood there listening to the lashing of the hail along the deck and the singing of the wind in the cordage. The mate said — "I've been at sea thirty years, man and boy, but for a level ten-day stretch of unholy weather this bangs anything I ever struck, north of the Horn — if we are north of it. For I'm blest if I know where we are — do you?" It was an embarrassing question. I had been asked it very confidentially by my captain, long ago, and had been able to state that I didn't know; and had been discreet enough not to go into any particulars; but this was the first time that any officer of the ship had approached me with the matter. I said — "Well, no, I'm not a sailor, but I am surprised to hear you say you don't know where we are." He was caught. It was his turn to be embarrassed. First he began to hedge, and vaguely let on that perhaps he did know, after all; but he made a lame fist of it, and presently gave it up and concluded to be frank and take me into his confidence. "I'm going to be honest with you, sir — and don't give me away." He put his mouth close to my ear and sheltered it against the howling wind with his hand to keep from having to shout, and said impressively, "Not only I don't know where we are, sir, but by God the captain himself don't know." I had met the captain's confession by pretending to be frightened and distressed at having engaged a man who was ignorant of his business; and then he had changed his note and told me he had only meant that he had lost his bearings in the thick weather —a thing which would rectify itself as soon as he could get a glimpse of the sun. But I was willing to let the mate tell me all he would, so long as I was not to "give it away." "No, sir, he don't know where he is; lets on to, but he

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don't. I mean, he lets on to the crew, and his daughters, and young Phillips the purser, and of course to you and your family, but here lately he don't let on any more to the chief mate and me. And worried? I tell you he's worried plumb to his vitals." "I must say I don't much like the look of this, Mr. Turner." "Well, don't let on, sir; keep it to yourself — maybe it'll come out all right; hope it will. But you look at the facts — just look at the facts. We sail north — see? North-andby-east-half-east, to be exact. Noon the fourth day out, heading for Sable island — ought to see it, weather rather thin for this voyage. Don't see it. Think the dead reckoning ain't right, maybe. We bang straight along, all the afternoon. N o Sable island. Damned if we didn't run straight over it! It warn't there. What do you think of that?" "Dear me, it is awful — awful — if true." "If true. Well, it is true. True as anything that ever was, I take my oath on it. And then Greenland. W e three banked our hopes on Greenland. Night before last we couldn't sleep for uneasiness, just anxiety, you know, to see if Greenland was going to be there. B y the dead reckoning she was due to be in sight along anywhere from five to seven in the morning, if clear enough. But we staid on deck all night. Of course two of us had no business there, and had to scuttle out of the way whenever a man came along, or they would have been suspicious. But five o'clock came, seven o'clock, eight o'clock, ten o'clock, and at last twelve — and then the captain groaned and gave in! He knew well enough that if there had been any Greenland left we'd have knocked a corner off of it long before that." "This is appalling." "You may hunt out a bigger word than that and it won't cover it, sir. And Lord, to see the captain, gray as ashes, sweating and worrying over his chart all day yesterday

Ho

APPENDIX

and all day to-day, and spreading his compasses here and spreading them there, and getting suspicious of his chronometer, and damning the dead-reckoning — just suffering death and taxes, you know, and me and the chief mate helping and suffering, and that purser and the captain's oldest girl spooning and cackling around, just in heaven! I'm a poor man, sir, but if I could buy out half of each of 'em's ignorance and put it together and make it a whole, blamed if I wouldn't put up my last nickel to do it, you hear me. Now — " A wild gust of wind drowned the rest of his remark and smothered us in a fierce flurry of snow and sleet. He darted away and disappeared in the gloom, but first I heard his voice hoarsely shouting — "Turn out, all hands, shorten sail!"

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS "The Symbols of Despair" was the William Vaughn Moody Lecture at the University of Chicago, in March, 1940. In printing it here for the first time, I have made a half-dozen small changes in phraseology, to eliminate expressions more appropriate to the lecture form. "The Phantasy of Boyhood" and "Noon and the Dark" have previously been printed as introductions to editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn published by The Limited Editions Club, the former in 1939, the latter in April, 1942. Here too I have made a few small changes in the texts and have omitted details of interest only to bibliographers. Those editions were very small and, since they were illustrated by Thomas Hart Benton, promptly began to sell on the second-hand market at a prohibitive premium. The desire to make the material which they contain available to students, who cannot often afford such editions, is the principal reason for the publication of this book. I am indebted to The Limited Editions Club and to Mr. George Macy, its president and editor, for permission to reprint my introductions. The publication here of all material used from the Mark Twain Papers is by permission of The Estate of Samuel L. Clemens, Inc. I am indebted to the Buffalo Public Library and Mr. Alexander Gait for opportunity to use the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn; to the Riggs Memorial Library of Georgetown University and Father Wilfrid Parsons for a microfilm of the manuscript of Tom Sawyer; and to Scribner's Bookstore, New York, for the use of the amanuensis copy of Tom Sawyer. The letter to Sir Walter Besant quoted on page 2 2 is in

i44 MARK TWAIN A T WORK the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library. My thanks to Dr. John D. Gordan for permission to examine it. The writing of these three essays has involved a long, laborious, exhausting and fantastically minute study of innumerable manuscripts. I can admire that labor the more objectively in that most of it was done by Rosamond Chapman. Her insatiable curiosity in research, her ingenuity, and her vehement passion for accuracy in detail have sometimes appalled me but they form the basis of my confidence that what is said here about Mark Twain's mind will stand. I am indebted to Elaine Breed for similarly painstaking work in transcribing and proofreading several states of the essay on Huckleberry Finn. Finally, my sincere thanks to Mr. Carl P. Rollins, whose typographical arrangement of Mark Twain's notes for the writing of Huckleberry Finn is reproduced in this edition.

B. DV.