Review: Mark Twain: The Fate of Primitivity

Author(s): Jay Martin

Review by: Jay Martin
Source: The Southern Literary Journal, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Fall, 1969), pp. 123-137
Published by: University of North Carolina Press
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REVIEWS 123

Mark Twain: The Fate

of Primitivity

by Jay Martin

Though Mark Twain, as Arthur L. Scott writes, was never

"a systematic thinker," there was system in his thought; two
recent critical studies and three volumes of the California Edition
of the Mark Twain Papers* separately reveal aspects of Twain's
habits of mind and patterns of responsiveness. Allison Ensor's
Mark Twain and the Bible summarizes Twain's use of Biblical
allusions, imagery, and myth. Ensor writes well and almost en
tirely avoids the pedantry which such studies threaten. In par
ticular, his third chapter, "Three Biblical Images," is suggestive.
fails to the
However, he explore crucial question which his book
raises?why Twain used the Bible with greatest frequency during
two widely separated periods of his life, 1867-70 and 1893-1909.

*Mark Twain's Hannibal, Huck ?r Tom, edited with an Introduction

by Walter Blair. and Los Angeles: of California Press,
Berkeley University
1969. $12.50.
Mark Twain's Mysterious edited with an Intro
Stranger Manuscripts,
duction by William M. Gibson. and Los Angeles: of
Berkeley University
California Press, 1969. $12.50.
Mark Twain's Correspondence with Henry Huttleston 1893-1909,
Rogers
edited with an Introduction and Los Angeles:
by Lewis Leary. Berkeley Uni
versity of California Press, 1969. $15.
Mark Twain At Large, by Arthur L. Scott. Chicago: Henry Regnery
Company, 1969. $7.50.
Mark Twain and the Bible, by Allison Ensor. Lexington, Kentucky:
University of Press, 1969. $4.75.
Kentucky

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 124 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

Perhaps he cannot do so because his account of Twain as a

consistent naturalist is misleading and his argument that Twain
suppressed his irreverences to sustain his is
popular appeal
distorted.
Arthur L. Scott's Mark Twain At Large offers a remarkably
detailed not only of Twain's
account travel writing, but also
of the special place which the non-American scene occupied
in his imagination. Though Twain's Quaker City cruise has been
thoroughly studied (by Dewey Ganzel, in 1968) and Twain's
image of Europe explored in two book-length studies by Euro
peans, Scott's book gives the best general evidence of Twain's
complex attitudes toward the non-American world. Unfortu
nately, Scott's desire to record Twain's response in detail leads
him to represent the context of response?Twain's imagi
nation?too simply. There is reason to suspect that he has not
the recent Mark Twain studies?his notes refer
kept pace with
to few works published after 1960?which have made his simple
view an old-fashioned one. For instance, he regards Twain as a
"Western pragmatist" in his satires of Europe, even though it
is now clear that Twain followed such Eastern writers as Cooper
and John DeForest seems unaware that Twain imitates
(Scott
European Acquaintance) and that the mockery of Europe was
a Federalist which Twain inherited and made
preoccupation
comical. A more serious simplification is Scott's reiterated and
sententious descriptions of Twain's love of the "ordinary man":
"Twain's reading and informed associations had deepened Mark
Twain's insight, but nothing had been needed to deepen his

compassion or broaden his love for the common man." At best,

this could be said only equivocally of a writer who argued
against universal suffrage and for a Tyranny of the Elite (in
The Curious Republic of Gondour), whose Federalist suspicions
of mass democracy are everywhere apparent, and who created
the maxim, "The is in the Scott can
majority always wrong."
summarize Twain's attitude toward the human race
accurately
in "The Czar's Soliloquy" as contemptuous; but freed from
texts, his generalizations become unreliable, often critical baga
telles and clich?s.
The editors of the Mark Twain Papers have successfully
undertaken the difficult task of making Twain's creative com

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REVIEWS 125

plexity obvious by providing Twain's complete texts, accurate

annotations, working notes or marginalia, and unbiased intro
ductions. Walter Blair's Hannibal, Huck ir Tom includes several
interesting pieces, notably Villagers of 1840-3, Huck Finn and
Tom Sawyer among the Indians as an
(especially interesting
instance of Twain's almost absolute reticence about sex), and
Tom Sawyer's Conspiracy. For a full account of Twain's use
of what Nash Smith has named the "Matter of Hannibal,"
Henry
of course, this volume should be accompanied by Blair's Mark
Twain irHuck Finn (1960).
In his edition of Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manu
scripts William M. Gibson repudiates the Paine text of The
Mysterious Stranger as an "editorial fraud," even this
though
text has been for a and become a fixed
accepted half-century
part in our view of Twain. To be sure, in Mark Twain and
Little Satan (1963), John S. Tuckey had demonstrated this by
dating the four "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts; but Gibson
is the first to print Twain's versions "as they came from their
author's hand." He shifts our attention from satis
successfully
faction with a "finished" work to fascination with Twain's at
tempts to it?from aesthetic delight to wonder over the
complete
complex process of literary creativity.
Along with Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain's Letters to his Pub
lishers 1867-1894, Lewis Leary's edition of Mark Twain's Cor
respondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers 1893-1909 provides
the materials for a fairly complete and continuous history of
Twain's negotiations with his publishers and his shifting views
of the function of art, the role of the artist, and the nature of
his audience. His with Rogers shows Twain
correspondence
entangled in the economics and legalities of and
publishing
other business, fascinated and Ben
by technology delighting,
Franklin-like, in elaborate statistical computations, and ab
sorbed by even the smallest details of
grand speculations. Though
once
widely known as a leading executive force in Standard Oil,
Rogers, whom Twain called "the most useful man I know," has
never had a his were
biographical study; papers destroyed. Lewis
Leary's introductory sketch, though necessarily drawn from muck
rakers (like Ida Tarbell and Thomas W. and other
Lawson)

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 126 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

biased sources, is a miracle of judicious reconstruction. His notes

to the letters are remarkably
complete.
Dealing for the most part with the period between 1890
and 1909, the California editions provide a rich context in which
to judge the critical accuracy of studies such as those
by Ensor
and Scott. They allow us to get inside the public Twain pre
sented in those books by providing detailed to the
guidelines
imagination which moved the outer man. Such an accurate con
text is essential because Twain's responses were contradictory
from period to and make without
period generalization periodi
zation virtually impossible. Contraries were hateful to him, he
was of entertaining ideas simultaneous
incapable contradictory
ly, and he drove himself into narrow conscious that
positions
falsify his imaginative complexity. Twain's conception of the
function of his art provides an obvious example. Ensor, Scott and
Walter all tend to emphasize Twain's
Blair literary entrepreneur
ship; Blair describes him as an "author-entrepreneur" who
turned his "urge to write about Hannibal characters . . .
[into]
the urge to make his writings pay well." To explain three sepa
rate
typescripts of Tom Sawyer: A Play, he concludes: "I suspect
the author had his manuscript a so that he could
typed in hurry
quickly get the play staged and start earning vast sums of money."
Scott emphasizes the profit-motive in Twain's travel-writing?a
popular mode in the nineteenth century?and associates this
impulse a time when wealth and worth were easily equated)
(at
with Twain's for status, a yearning so intense it would
yearning
eventually lead him to denounce his own Innocents Abroad as

"cheap, ungrammatical, & not fit for a gentleman's library." En

sor argues that due to "his desire to be and admired
respected
by the reading public" Twain suppressed his "less respectable,
less orthodox [religious] ideas."
Much of this picture of Twain's attitudes toward his art
is true?all is true to statements which Twain himself made.
But it is equally true (as Blair shows elsewhere) that Twain
was more compelled to write, to see his words recorded, than
to see his works sell; he seems to have had a deep need to see
his words written down, whether or not.
subsequently published
He told Howells he was "indifferent to nearly everything but

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REVIEWS 127

work," and added: "I do it without purpose & without ambition,

for the love of it." He was puzzled to "know what it is
merely
in me that writes, & that has comedy-fancies & finds pleasure in
them"; and, while his books sold "just like the Bible,"
phrasing
he could describe this, in the fashion of Nook Farm, as the
motive. But the Nineties, even he had to
profit by privately
it as a His business failure related in his
recognize compulsion.
mind to possible literary failure. "A man who is on the down
he told "must not too often?he must keep
grade," Rogers, print
out of the public view." Certainly, the number of works which
he abandoned or refused to publish, his deliberate composition
would "never be
of works which he believed (he told Howells)
the history of his vacillation over the anonymous
published,"
publication of The Personal History of Joan of Arc, and his
consistent of lucrative editorial offers from S. S. Mc
rejection
Clure and others, all show that the deepest needs of his ego were
related more to production than to publication. His incessant
seems to have been compelled by the same impulse?
travelling
essentially the need for invention, novelty, change. He spent
his whole life traveling: in 1867 he declared: "All I do know
or feel is that I am wild with impatience to move?move?move";
and in 1895 he told Rogers of his plan "to go around the world
on a lecture was in debt),
trip," adding (though he heavily
"This is not for money, but to get Mrs. Clemens and myself
from the . . ."
away phantoms.

Certainly, too, Ensor is misleading both about Twain's

and his of his audience. Twain had
skepticism understanding
very early recognized that unorthodoxy was marketable in Ameri
ca. He remarked of Innocents Abroad: "The irreverence of the
volume appears to be a tip-top good feature of it (financially)
. . ."
diplomatically speaking. By the Eighties, when he began
to suppress his unorthodox opinions, they would have been
inoffensive to his public, who respected Robert Ingersoll, ap
Darwin and Huxley, the books of Herbert
plauded purchased
Spencer, made Andrew White (author of The Warfare of Sci
ence With of Cornell, and embraced natu
Theology) president
ralism in economics, and psychology. Twain's ir
philosophy,
reverences, he well knew in Innocents or in Huck's rejection
(as

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 128 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

of the Moral Sense in Huckleberry Finn), always proved popu

lar. Contrary to the image he liked to was less
project, Twain
skeptical than a large part of his audience; and he satisfied him
self, not them, in suppressing his irreverences. He was artistically
wise to do so. All his books show that he was bent on creating
the effect of reverence, making a myth of secular holiness. While
he found this easy to achieve through biblical parody
or carica
ture, he was always uneasy about this device, sensing, perhaps,
that at best, he conveyed secular reverence through vernacular
speech. Yet he also appears to have feared that his books would
reveal his na?vet??what Joel Chandler Harris (who felt similar
ly) called "my inner?my inner?oh well! my inner spezerink
tum . . . the other fellow inside of me." In an important letter
to Rogers, Twain exulted that "the common notion that a book
reveals the man ... is a mistake. This book [Following
infallibly
the Equator] has not (revealed) exposed me." Beginning with
his Alta California letters?which attributed the thoughts of
Twain's to "Mr. Brown"?and Innocents Abroad,
"spezerinktum"
which suppressed Brown altogether, Twain deliberately avoided
exposure.

What he most hesitated to have

revealed to the civilized
world, where hesought acceptance, was his attachment to his
own youthful his of attitude.
experience, continuing primitivity
Of course, he might admit this privately, as in a letter of 1890
where he claimed he could not "go away from the boyhood
on other
period & write novels" subjects because mere adult
experience "is not sufficient by itself & I lack the other essential:
interest. . . ." he was not confined to the Hannibal
Certainly
scene; but he was restricted to the point of view of primitivity.

(Earlier than any anthropologist except Lewis Henry Morgan,

Twain knew how complex primitivity could be.) His basic
imaginative subject was the fate of primitivity in history (or
Time) and civilized institutions (or Space). Genuinely en
gaged by primitivity, Twain tried in novels like Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn to imagine true in
primitivity enduring
civilization. He was preoccupied with primitive races and in
1879 wrote a 46-page manuscript the customs of the
outlining
Chinook Indians, Kaffirs, Abyssinians, and Zulus. In Huck Finn

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REVIEWS 129

and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, he attributed Indian reli

gious beliefs to his hero, Brace Johnson. He idealized the Ameri
can Negro
(his wife advised him to try to consider every man
black until he was proven white), and in his correspondence with
Rogers frequently alluded to Frank Craig, the Negro fighter. Al
most immediately after learning from Rogers that he was bank
rupt, Twain impulsively "went to a masked ball blacked up as
Uncle Remus." It was less a disguise than an assertion of his own

primitivity and freedom from civilization. He called himself

"a groping savage in the college of the learned." But though
his essential was the fate of primitivity, he con
subject usually
cealed this, even from himself, in every possible way, and sought
ways to relieve (or avoid) the tensions created by his involve
ment with this subject.

Religious myth and travel, the concerns of Ensor and Scott,

two major modes for dealing with the fate of
provided Twain
Ensor's account of Twain's use of the Prodigal Son,
primitivity.
Adam, and Noah as analogues for his own sense of experience
us of the readiness with which Twain
reminds could
usefully
alternate his youthful fictions?of Huck or Tom?with biblical
fictions, to convey the same attitudes. "A figure that interested
Twain greatly," Ensor writes, "was the exile from Paradise?
the man who once knew joy and happiness and lived in an ideal
world but who now finds himself in an evil one. . . . Twain
found in the Bible two men like this: the Prodigal Son and
Adam. . . .Noah, too, left behind the world that he had known.
. . ." a way of understanding the
Religious myth gave Twain
of Time; his travel books, a way of acknowledging
simultaneity
the similarity of Space, and so of affirming the same sad fate of

anywhere,anytime. His Adam Family Papers, his

primitivity
Book," Eve's Diary
"Noah's Ark (all written between
proposed
the early Seventies and 1908), and the "Mysterious Stranger"
manuscripts of 1897-1908 edited by Gibson (The Chronicle of
Young Satan, Schoolhouse Hill, and No. 44, The Mysterious
Stranger) set figures of myth in history, implicating Adam and
his descendants in Time, which, by Reginald Selkirk's "Law of
Periodical Repetition," parallels "present" time. By proceeding
rapidly from the creation of Adam to the apocalypse which Shem

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 130 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

awaits or No. 44 illustrates, Twain makes a vernacular bible

in which there is only an instant between and cor
primitivity
ruption. The "Mysterious Stranger" are set alternately
episodes
in St. Petersburg and Eseldorf, Austria?in Huck Finn's primi
tive, Adamic world and Hank Morgan's corrupt, apocalyptic
middle ages. Huck becomes Nikolaus, Tom, Theodor Fischer.
The vistas of progress promised by the creation were simultaneous
in Twain's imagination with the catastrophe in which they
culminate, and gave him an historical way of man's
understanding
entrapment.

Spaces, too, are interchangeable. Twain's imagination seems

to have been and affected by the form of
deeply permanently
the historical pageant, popular in the later Nineteench Century,
in which Time and Space are radically compressed. He adapted
this form in general for his travel books and specifically used
it in such short pieces as "Stupendous International Procession."
It provides the viewpoint from which he regarded the Bible
as symbolic and is the structural basis of No. 44, The
history,
Mysterious Stranger, with its rapid shifts from Austria to China
to France. And of course it becomes and surrealistic
grotesque
in Chapter 33 of No. 44, in the brilliant historical pageant of
skeletons: "Pharaoh was there, and David and Goliah . . . and
Adam and Eve . . . and kings and kings till you couldn't count
them. . . .And there were skeletons whom I had known, myself,
and been at their funerals, only three or four years before?
men and women, and . . . For hours and hours
boys girls.
the dead passed by in continental masses. . . ." Even in much
earlier books, spaces are merged: Europe reminds Twain of the
West (in Innocents Abroad) or the West, of Europe (in Rough
ing It). In Following the Equator Twain strikingly collapses
both Time and Space: Bombay, which seems "the
paradisal,
Arabian Nights come again," suddenly brings another time,
another place to his mind: "For just one second, all that goes
to make the me in me was in a Missourian village, on the other
side of the globe, vividly seeing again these forgotten pictures
of fifty years ago . . . and in the next second I was back in
. . . Back to
Bombay. boyhood?fifty years; back to age again,
another fifty; and a flight equal to the circumference of the

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REVIEWS 131

globe?and all in two seconds by the watch!" The manuscripts

of Which Was the Dream? show that such travel, which could
truly go nowhere, became nightmarish in the Nineties for Twain.
In Schoolhouse Hill Satan explains why Time and Space
are simultaneous; in all times and places man has been morally
corrupted?his corruption, indeed, is his uniqueness. "No Adam
in any of the millions of other planets has ever disobeyed and
eaten of the sacred fruit," he announces, and continues:

"Consider the passage which says man is prone

to evil as the
sparks to fly upward. Is that true?
Is that really the nature of man??I mean your
man?the man of this
planet?"
"Indeed it is?nothing could be truer."
"It is not true of the men of any other planet.
. . . The fruit's office was not confined to con
ferring the mere knowledge of good and evil, it con
ferred also the passionate and eager and hungry
disposition to DO evil."

Taken together, the "Mysterious Stranger" manuscripts edited

by Gibson and the Hannibal episodes edited by Blair show
Twain moving compulsively from failed parables of primitivity
to apocalyptic parables of the Moral Sense. The fate of even
Huck, who could overcome his Moral Sense on the river, was
to be overcome by it.
Only in Satan is the Moral Sense absent; and that Satan,
unlike man, was therefore free from Time and Space explains
his attraction for Twain. Gibson records that in a notebook
entry of 1898 Twain proposed to write of a descendant of Lilith
whose family crest shows "a plain, clean slate, since he has no
knowledge of good and evil, whereas the descendants of the
Eve-branch bear the design of an apple-core with the motto,
"
'Alas!' Twain himself was, he declared in What Is Man?, "the
whole human race, without a detail lacking." He might take
Adam, the Prodigal or Noah as melancholy for him
analogues
self, but he could never resemble Satan (or Christ of the Apo
crypha, with whom he associated Satan). But he could, like
Blake, imagine a Bible of Hell. He approached closer and closer
to it. Twain's account of his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens,
edited by Blair, shows her being into a soft
"beguiled saying

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 132 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

word for the devil himself," and associates her "gentle spirit"
with her defense of Satan. Hearing about Satan in his Hannibal
Sunday school, Twain reports in Is Shakespeare Dead?, he had
determined to write a biography of the devil, until his teacher's
the project. Later, when he was a cub
disapproval squelched
not read Blake?he inquired of his
pilot?certainly having
brother Orion: "What is the grandest thing in 'Paradise Lost'?
wrote in his
the Arch-Fiend's energy!" In June, 1898, he
terrible
notebook: "If Satan is around, and so much more intelligent
and powerful than God, why doesn't He write a Bible?" It is no
accident that in The Chronicle of Young Satan, Twain records
a conversation concerning the Satan-figure:

"Hedoesn't need any better profession than

. . .That is his intention, isn't it?"
[weaving].
"No," said my sister, "he looks higher."
"Higher? What is he going to be?"
"An author."

of the Schoolhouse Hill

Twain's plan for the completion frag
ment included 44's founding an "Anti-Moral-Sense Sunday
school" and the printing of his own catechism with the aid
of "slathers of little red devils" brought up from Hell. This
hint suggests why No. 44, The is so elab
Mysterious Stranger
orately set in a printing shop. But, of course, Twain's "Mysterious
Stranger" pieces are themselves full reports of the Satanic cate
chism. One of Twain's notes for The Chronicle of Young Satan
to be his intention:
clearly shows this
Satan shall proclaim & fully set forth the doc
trine of SELFISHNESS whether it be printable or
not.
And the rest of it. Moral Sense &c.

A note to Schoolhouse Hill indicates that Satan will give a ser

mon whose text is "Everything is insane?upside down." Twain's
Bible of Hell, however, provided him no satisfactory resolution
to his concern with the fate of primitivity in Time and Space;
Satan was merely a reminder of the inevitable sadness of the
human condition.
Twain sought to avoid the tensions generated by his basic
modes of imagination that were anti
subject through adopting

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REVIEWS 133

Adamic and anti-Satanic. More and more he took up

literary
subjects which he could base on
research, rather than
explore
personal responses, even when his own would have
experience
been adequate. Blair brilliantly shows that Twain was unable
to finish Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians be
cause, putting aside his own familiarity with Western life, he
relied upon source materials which so far varied from his own
impulses that at last he could find no way to reconcile the two
and broke off in the middle of a sentence. Dependence on literary
sources, Blair writes, "may have become a habitual procedure: he
had drawn upon many books in writing The Prince and the
Pauper (1881) and Zi/e on the Mississippi (1883); in the winter of
1883 and 1884 he had collected in his billiard room great piles
of books and notes for a story on the Sandwich Islands;
projected
and soon he would embark on A Connecticut Yankee, based
upon much research concerning the Middle Ages." His cor
respondence with Rogers shows the volume of research he had
done for Joan of Arc. Even for a Hannibal sketch?Tom Saw
yer's Gang Plans a Naval Battle?Twain had Osgood send him
several Harper dime novels concerning sailors. His Villagers of
1840-3 suggests that he was attempting to transmute his
personal
memory into source materials?the Matter of Hannibal?as if
it were usable only in chronicle form. With their careful and
extensive annotations, the California editions provide a sub
stantial account of the ways that Twain schooled himself to
make the materials of history substitutes for his personal attach
ments.

Quick and flexible, readily adopting identities, Twain

easily found other substitutes. As Leary's book strikingly shows,
not only in his involvement with the Paige typesetter, but
throughout his correspondence with Rogers, Twain was at
tempting to define himself through the image of the successful
businessman and "Christian Steward," as an anti-primitive form
of achievement which might persist from childhood through to
adulthood, in civilization as well as In his tribute
primitivity.
to Rogers he
spoke not of his business rapacity, but of his "super
human sweet[ness]" and "lovable An adult Huck
qualities."
Finn, Rogers "was born serene (tranquil), patient, all enduring.

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 134 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

..." In the course of his correspondence with Rogers, Twain even

began to see himself as Rogers. a man about an
Questioning
invention, he told Rogers, "I had to imitate you, the Master
of the Art, . . . and he said he didn't mind it. Said I could get
my living as a financier if should fail me?a
authorship very
nice compliment and quite true, too, though you probably don't
believe it." Advising Rogers to take stock in one of Twain's
adventures, he can even be ironically condescending ("I am
trying to take care of you, lest you forget to do it yourself"). He
worked out Standard Oil-like monopolistic visions ("Competi
tion would be at an end ... on this . . .When the
planet.
patents died the Company would be so powerful that it could
still keep the whole business in its hands and strangle com
. And at last he would even
petition") (by 1905) imagine
changing places with Rogers ("Suppose you had gone into humor
instead of oil?where would I be?" The implicit answer: in oil
instead of humor.)

Another way of avoiding the pressures of his basic subject

was in his preoccupation with mental telepathy, since this seemed
to provide an escape from the space and time across which it
could reach. Associated with the youthful Matter of Hannibal,
Clairvoyant and A Human Bloodhound, in Blair, stress
printed
the peculiar Satanic freedom which the human being with
extra-sensory perception possesses. This is particularly clear in
the "Godkin Fragment"; "Godkin possessed one marvelous
gift.
. . . He claimed that all godkins had wonderful vision, and
that it was part of their divine inheritance; that no genuine
godkin was without it; that it was one of their trade marks, and
a sure identifier." It is not surprising that Twain should have
claimed intimations of "Mental Telegraphy"
lifelong (as he
called it), written an article about it in 1895, to use
attempted
it in a Hannibal tale, and then used it in Satan's feats of clair
voyance in the "Mysterious Stranger" papers. "I am forced to
believe," he wrote in his essay, "that one human mind (still
inhabiting the flesh) can communicate with another, over any
sort of a distance."

His preoccupation with the fate of innocence in time and

space was so strong, of course, that none of these could give

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REVIEWS 135

him permanent ways of avoiding the contrast between the in

evitability of human corruption and the unattainability of Satanic
freedom. Neither could his adoption of the role of satirist, in
which he pretended not to care about the contrast. In fact, he
cared so much that his satire?which requires
a certain distance
and indifference?soon sharpened into invective, the product
of outrage. He wrote to Howells: "I wish I could give those
on life which you mention, but of course
sharp satires European
a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm
judicial good humor?whereas I hate travel and I hate hotels,
& I hate the opera & I hate the Old Masters?in truth I don't
ever seem to be in a to
good enough humor with ANYthing
satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it & curse it & foam
at the mouth,?or take a club & pound it to rags & pulp."

In Harvests of Change given an account of Twain's

I have
solution. In his
Autobiography he invented an anti-Adamic,
anti-Satanic form by making free association the principle of
his art. Since the creative mind, he saw, was free from Time
and Space, the author could "wander whenever [or wherever]
I please and come back when I get ready." Twain thus turned
his terror over the fate of primitivity in Time and Space into a
form which gave the self Satanic freedom from both, yet still
centered upon the distinctly human creativity of art. The
pageant, Twain saw, could exist in his imagination; and the
artist could select from the streaming creatures of its cast. "The
only thing possible for me," Twain said in 1906, "is to talk
about the thing that something suggests at the moment?some
in the middle of my life, or that hap
thing perhaps, something
only a few months ago." The "form and method" of
pened
his autobiography was, he said, one "whereby the past and the
present are constantly brought face to face."

Though this solution is somewhat beyond the scope of the

volumes under consideration, there are intimations of it in them.
Twain's endless manipulation of Huck and Tom?both in
Hannibal and as the prototypes of the boys in the "Mysterious
Stranger" papers?suggests his growing sense of the malleability
of the actual for the creative imagination. Villagers of 1840-3,
too, shows Twain modifying the factual chronicle with fiction

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 136 THE SOUTHERN LITERARY JOURNAL

whenever he chooses. In No. 44, The Mysterious he

Stranger
denied to man the kind of creativity he was Satan
practicing;
declares:

"A man originates nothing in his head, he merely

observes exterior things, and combines them in his
head?puts several observed things together and
draws a conclusion. His mind is merely a machine,
that is all?an automatic one, and he has no control
over it, it cannot conceive of a new thing, an
origi
nal thing, it can only gather material from the
outside and combine it into new forms and patterns.
But it always has to have the materials from the
outside, for it can't make them itself. That is to
a man's mind cannot create?a can, and
say, god's
my race can. That is the difference. We need no
contributed materials, we create them?out of

thought. All things that exist were made out of

thought?and out of else."
nothing
But Twain had absorbed his Bible of Satan into his definition
of the artist. He creates "out of thought." Twain was probably
able to do this through working out
(in No. 44) the distinction
between "The Waking-self" and "The Dream-self." Twain gave
up the Waking-self to its fate in Time and Space and wrote
from the marvellous perspective of the Dream-self, the Satanic
Adam, free from Space and Time. Huck, Tom, Hannibal, his
tory, the Bible, Europe and America?these and other materials
at last became aspects of his imagination, testaments to the

fertility of the Dream-self who had created them. They were

his creatures; he was not theirs. "All our lives," the nar
rator of No. 44 writes of his Dream-Duplicate, "we had been
. . . in one chamber: aware of each other's existence
lodgers
but not interested in each other's affairs, and never encountering
each other save for a dim and hazy and sleepy half-moment on
the threshold, and never in any case halting to make a bow or
pass a greeting." Now Twain crossed the threshold and occu
pied the territory of his Duplicate, exulting in the freedom
of dreams. He had learned how to make a myth of the human
for imagination, and to travel in that.
capacity
Reviewing Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mr. Twain
in the Nation, I remarked that the book was seriously over

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REVIEWS 137

balanced toward life of Mr. Clemens

the exterior at the expense
of the life of Mr. Twain's art. The books by Scott and Ensor
are both highly useful, parts of each will be invaluable to future
students of Twain, but both show the same imbalance; the one
neglects the reasons for Twain's attraction at various periods
to different mythical analogues for himself, the other ignores
the compulsions which drove Twain to "move?move?move"
and to write of his restlessness. The California Editions of Mark
Twain's papers, on the other hand, begin to make ac
possible
curate periodization and provide the texts, working notes, and
marginalia which are essential to the biography of Mr. Twain.
The volumes by Gibson, Blair, Leary and their fellow editors,
all completed with enormous care, offer the exciting possibility
that we may yet have a biography of the whole man and of the
fate which he could at last choose for himself.

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