Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, like the novella’s inscrutable title
character himself, remains one of the humorist’s most enigmatic literary efforts. Ever since the
manuscript first came to light in the 1960s thanks to the ground-breaking research of John S.
Tuckey and William M. Gibson, the general critical view of No. 44 has resembled for the most
part the puzzled exasperation one character in the text expresses toward the story’s mysterious
visitor: “Nobody knows how to take you or what to make of you; every time a person puts his
finger on you you’re not there.”
The reasons for the enduring confusion surrounding this text are legion. There is the
strange tale itself, which Kent Rasmussen essentially describes as “the unexplained appearance
of a remarkable boy with extraordinary powers” in a drowsy medieval Austrian village called
Eseldorf (German for “Assville”). However, once this remarkable boy who calls himself FortyFour befriends the story’s narrator, August Feldner, this simple premise becomes increasingly
disjointed and surreal, culminating abruptly in a baffling conclusion that literally abandons
Feldner in an “empty and soundless place…wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.”
Another factor contributing to No. 44’s perplexing aura is the text’s convoluted version
history. Tuckey established that Twain penned three Mysterious Stranger drafts during the last
decade of his life (along with a fourth fragment). While all three main versions were similar to
each other in some ways, they were each dramatically different in overall plot, tone, and, perhaps
most significantly, the stranger’s identity. In The Chronicle of Young Satan, the earliest version
(written between 1897 and 1900), the visitor reveals that he is Satan’s amoral and possibly even
malevolent nephew; in Schoolhouse Hill, the second and briefest manuscript written in 1898, the
stranger claims to be Satan’s son Quarante-quarte, who hopes to undo the harm his father has
inflicted on humanity; in No. 44, the final and most complete manuscript written intermittently
between 1902 and 1908, the stranger’s initially obscure purpose and otherworldly identity
becomes increasingly more unintelligible as the story moves toward its apocalyptic ending.
The third complicating (and somewhat controversial) factor developed after Twain’s
death when his literary executor Albert Bigelow Paine and editor Frederick A. Duneka “cut,
cobbled together, and partially falsified” (to use Gibson’s words) these three drafts to create a
version they published in 1916 as The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance. For nearly half a
century scholars unsuspectingly accepted Paine-Duneka’s publication as Twain’s intended
version and final literary testament, building a body of scholarship often citing it as evidence that
the humorist’s later years were bleak, solipsistic, and artistically inferior to his earlier work. Such
pessimistic interpretations of Twain’s last decade persist in large part due to Paine and Duneka’s
bowdlerized text.
Given Twain’s trickster reputation, there’s something fitting about the prevailing
befuddlement still associated with No. 44. As Tuckey dryly observed in his Foreword to the
text’s initial publication in 1982, “If Mark Twain’s surviving spirit has the human scene in view,
the prank-loving humorist is probably enjoying the resulting confusion.” If so, one may now
surmise that with the publication of Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain’s No. 44, The
Mysterious Stranger, the soul of this literary man who craved acceptance as a serious author and
philosophical thinker must now finally be at rest thanks to this invaluable collection of essays.
As the title suggests, editors Joseph Csicsila and Chad Rohman intend for this volume of
13 essays (contributed by leading international Twain scholars) to reconsider the significance of
No. 44 in the 100 years since Twain finally set it aside. The collection shines new levels of
insight into (while not dissipating) the dense fog of obscurity enshrouding this text and should
inspire scholarly interest into what the editors rightly deem one of Twain’s “most deeply
philosophical works on the nature of truth and the human condition.” (1)
As this weighty designation correctly implies, however, No. 44 is not a very humorous
book. In fact, unlike many of Twain’s earlier works, it lacks the light comic veneer that often
blends inseparably with the darker and more philosophical undercurrents coursing through his
oeuvre like the Mississippi River’s strong but murky depths. The secret source underlying his
humor, as Twain once admitted, was not joy, but sorrow, a sorrow entangled in what he called
the humorist’s sharp perception of “incongruity and the dislocation of things.” In most of his
major works (such as Huckleberry Finn and Connecticut Yankee), Twain typically couched his
mournful and absurdist sensibilities within an arguably good-natured comedic talent. However,
because a grieving Twain wrote No. 44 near the end of his life with no intention of publishing it,
he seems to have felt liberated in writing this manuscript to discard the warmer, humorous
surface he often crafted and plumb these underlying somber depths that gave his humor its shape.
To this end, the essays in Centenary Reflections delve into these raw currents that cut more
closely to the surface in No. 44 than in many of his earlier works, lightning-rod topics such as:
race, class, and national identity; personal experience versus religious and political orthodoxies;
and epistemological questions concerning the nature of truth and our perceptions of reality.
The book organizes these slippery topics into three broadly defined categories: “CrossCultural and Transnational Mappings in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”; “Prophecy, Pleasure,
Pain, and Redemption in the Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts”; and “Structural, Temporal, and
Philosophical Paradox” in No. 44. While these section titles may sound dry and overly academic,
the thought-provoking essays themselves are sure to engage Twain researchers and literary
scholars of all stripes. Demonstrating the many different angles and various levels of depth that
infuse Twain’s relatively short narrative, the essays offer radically diverse interpretations of No.
44, with the authors appearing to be in dialogue with one another, complementing and
contradicting aspects of each other’s perspective. The Afterword by Alan Gribben provides a
thoughtful and comprehensive overview of the history of the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts
and their overall relevance within Twain’s literary canon.
As Gribben points out in his Afterword, the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts have often
been dismissed by critics as “almost incoherent fragments of a despairing and deteriorating
mind” (238) that was increasingly sinking into solipsism. With the book’s sleepy setting and
often surreal plot, it is tempting to see it, as many scholars have, as an example of Twain’s sad
escape from overwhelming personal tragedy (his bankruptcy, the deaths of his wife and two of
his daughters) into dreamlike fantasy. However, the first three essays in the first section of
Centenary Reflections wrenches No. 44 from the ethereal sphere it typically inhabits in and
subjects it to the very real and earthly realm of race, class, and national identity, issues with
which Twain was clearly engaged as he wrote the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts.
Sharon D. McCoy and Henry B. Wonham explore in their essays the significance of one
of No. 44’s most jarringly anachronistic moments: the character Forty-Four’s outlandish
appearance in blackface, performing songs and routines from 19th century American minstrel
shows the appearance in fifteenth-century Austria. Twain’s fondness for minstrelsy has long
been a topic of controversy in Twain studies. Eric Lott (in “Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow: Twain,
Race, and Blackface”, 1995) perhaps best summed up the general ambivalence toward Twain’s
views on blackface with his conclusion that it provided the humorist with a language on race
“riddled with ambiguities Twain did not so much illuminate as reiterate.”
In “ ‘I ain’ no dread being’: The Minstrel Mask as Alter Ego”, McCoy broadens the
discussion beyond Lott’s perimeters of American race relations and argues that Twain’s
understanding of blackface was more nuanced than Lott suggests. “Twain’s use of blackface
imagery throughout the novel suggests that he understood blackface as an expression of both
rebellion and social control,” she writes (16). In connecting the minstrelsy of Twain’s era to No.
44’s medieval setting with her informative discussion of blackface’s folk roots in European
“charivari” rituals, she asserts that the
Disruption of Forty-Four’s exuberant blackface performance explicitly
complicates themes of identity, social class, rebellion, and social control while it
exposes the ways in which these issues are inescapably racialized in American
culture, the ways in which a ‘real or fabricated Africanist presence [is] crucial’ to
understanding our constructions of white identity. (14)
Where McCoy sees Twain’s use of blackface ultimately failing to generate
racial/psychological catharsis and collapsing instead into despairing burlesque, Wonham posits
in “Mark Twain’s Last Cakewalk” that Twain uses the burlesque of minstrelsy in No. 44 to
subvert false notions of a mediated, socially constructed self and initiate “an identity unlimited
by consciousness, training, or bias.” (50) Echoing Lott’s contention that blackface provided
Twain with a flawed racial language, Wonham sees Twain relishing minstrelsy “for its ability to
set in motion an uncertain relationship between reality and representation, authenticity and
imitation…” (48) In having Forty-Four dress and behave in stereotypical blackface, Wonham
makes the intriguing case that Twain is not resorting to a kind of antebellum nostalgia, but is
consciously upsetting August Feldner’s “and our own assumptions about simple differentiability
of an essential self from its manifold representations.” (48)
In the next essay, Peter Messent dismisses the possibility of finding any significance in
the racial episodes in No. 44, referring to Forty-Four’s minstrel performance as “something of an
interpretive dead end.” (56) While this statement is highly debatable considering McCoy and
Wonham’s essays, Messent’s “transnational reading” of No. 44 and The Chronicle of Young
Satan moves the discussion away from American racial identity and offers and interesting
exploration of “the cultural intersections and exchanges that take place between nations, and the
way we can then read (in this case) American literature, and Twain’s writing, as a series of
negotiations between national and international spaces.” (52) Such an approach, according to
Messent, allows us “to ask questions about—and thus loosen any unthinking acceptance of—one
particular nation’s ideological assumptions and power relationships.” (52) His approach is
especially interesting in terms of shedding light on the influence Twain’s long expatriation in
Europe may have had on what Messent calls the “epistemological and ontological uncertainty
that inhabits these manuscripts.” (52) He contends that although Twain’s transnational
perspective contributed to a “spiraling cosmic relativism” in both manuscripts, it also
convincingly demonstrates that “Twain was still living in, and actively engaging with, the world
rather than wandering about in some solipsistic haze.” (67)
The section’s fourth and final essay by Horst Kruse, “Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl and
Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger,” carries forward Messent’s transnational analysis by tracing
the possible influence of German literature on Twain’s motivations behind creating the strange
figure of the Mysterious Stranger. After persuasively establishing Twain’s detailed knowledge of
Adelbert von Chamisso’s 1814 fable Peter Schlemihls wundersam Geschiche (The Shadowless
Man; or, The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl), Horst draws parallels between Forty-Four
and the magical stranger who inhabits Peter Schlemihl. As with Twain’s stranger, for example,
Chamisso’s otherworldly visitor performs various tricks that amaze and even enrich his human
friend. Horst also argues that both Twain and Chamisso before him were concerned with writing
a moral fable in which their respective strangers were ambiguously satanic. Rather than
indicating Twain’s nihilistic despair at the end of his life (as De Voto and others have
suggested), Horst sees Chamisso’s influence on him contributing to Twain using “his craft in
writing the Mysterious Stranger story…to devise a viable philosophy that would accommodate
disparate experience while receiving much-needed consolation from this exercise of his powers
of imagination.” (71)
The common thread uniting the four opening essays in this section (as well as throughout
the rest of the collection) is how the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts (and particularly No. 44)
demonstrate to some extent Twain’s strong creative vitality and active engagement with the
larger world during his final decade. Even so, with the exception of Wonham, the other authors
in this section all promote the idea that Twain’s last years were characterized by a despairing
relativism they see reflected in No. 44’s central character and difficult concluding chapters.
Although acknowledging Forty-Four’s ambiguous nature, for instance, Horst sees him as
“just another devil.” (79) McCoy refers to the novel’s “despairing conclusion” (34) while
Messent sees also sees Forty-Four as satanic and the story itself “swamped by a pessimistic
vision of history.” (65) While these points are well taken, it is far from the definitive
interpretation of Forty-Four. A relatively small but growing number of scholars (of which I am
one) see a more positive, perhaps even divine light radiating from within the theological
complexity of Forty-Four’s character as well as in the novel’s apocalyptic (in the sense of
revelatory) ending.
The remaining two sections of the collection explore aspects of this ongoing discussion
concerning the possible theological and epistemological influences on the Mysterious Stranger
manuscripts, and what they have to say about Twain’s state of mind at the end of his life.
In “The Prophetic Imagination, the Liberal Self, and the Ending of No. 44, The
Mysterious Stranger,” Harold K. Bush focuses on the mixed results of the emerging liberal ethos
of Twain’s era that he finds in the ending of No. 44. The book’s conclusion, he asserts, expresses
“a surprisingly prescient understanding of the logical effects (both good and bad)” (98) of the
European Reformation and Transcendentalism in America. Bush frames much of his argument
within the context of the contemporary culture wars (a theme he develops in his 2007 book Mark
Twain and the Spiritual Crisis of His Age). While this context and Bush’s reliance on
contemporary evangelical writers and their critique of modern liberalism seem out of place in
this study, Bush nonetheless makes a compelling case for seeing the ending of No. 44 as Twain
prophetically cautioning against liberalism’s hyperindividualism while also extolling the
possibilities inherent in the theologically liberated self.
In perhaps the most poignant essay in the collection, Michael J. Kiskis explores in “Mark
Twain and the Accusing Angel” how Twain conveys a terrible Job-like wisdom in The Chronicle
of Young Satan as he struggled to make sense of tremendous personal loss in a seemingly absurd
and indifferent universe. In drawing parallels between Twain’s Young Satan and Job’s Accuser,
Kiskis sees the former as coming not as a satanic adversary but “as a friend…who undoes the
naïve belief in the rightness and order of God’s plan.” (115) Young Satan does this through
showing the power of derisive laughter. Kiskis posits that for a time, perhaps, as he coped with
the death of his beloved daughter Susy, this insight provided Twain with some solace. However,
with the ensuing loneliness wrought by his wife Livy’s death, Kiskis believes the aging humorist
turned “from laughter and recognized that there was no universe to challenge,” (124) a sentiment
informing Forty-Four’s dour concluding words about nothing existing and wandering forlorn
among the empty eternities.
Gregg Camfield’s “Transcendental Hedonism?”, on the other hand, sees a theology
underlying No. 44 that is much more life affirming. In agreeing with Bruce Michaelson’s view
that in the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts “Twain’s theology moved gradually from a position
of seriousness to one of comic play,” (139) Camfield sees Twain’s final version rejecting
Christian orthodoxy as insane while offering in its place a “carnival of possibilities as open to
change and growth and creativity as a child’s play.” (139) To support his contention, Camfield
contrasts the “assertions of transcendent spirituality” (130) found in “My Platonic Sweetheart”
with the sensuality Twain explores in No. 44 (e.g., allusions to food, wine, and the sexual arousal
when August’s spirit self merges momentarily with his beloved Marget Regen). Rather than
embodying Twain’s icy resignation to loneliness, Camfield argues that Forty-Four introduces
August to numerous pleasures that serve ultimately as conduits to community and friendship.
The second section ends with Randall Knoper’s essay on the seeming contradiction
between No. 44’s dream ending and Twain’s interest nineteenth-century materialist psychology.
For Knoper, the contradiction is resolved in Twain’s twinning of this form of psychology with
“spiritist strands, which Twain followed as he grappled with his ideas of telepathy (or mental
telegraphy) and wordless communication” (146) through his involvement with the Society for
Psychical Research. In this complex and fascinating essay, Knoper concludes that the ending of
No. 44 is an example of Twain integrating the “territory of the spiritual” with “the terms and
conundrums of materialist understanding.” (153) Hence, as Forty-Four reveals before vanishing,
August is a “vagrant Thought” in a materialist universe that is “hysterically insane,” one in
which “subjective experience is shaped by unconscious mechanisms which decenter selfexperience and are beyond one’s control.” (154)
James S. Leonard’s essay “The Final Soliloquy of a ‘Littery Man’” clears the
metaphysical palate in Section 3 with a call to stop “psychologizing and polemicizing” about No.
44 and return instead to straightforward literary analysis of the text. (162) According to Leonard,
Twain’s manuscript was the nothing more than the final statement of a literary naturalist who
was essentially coming to terms with the unshakeable awareness that “no revelation is possible
beyond our unalterable ignorance.” (165) He draws thematic similarities between other naturalist
works of the era, such as Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat”, to show how Twain as a “littery
man” fully engaged in his literary time. When No. 44 is seen in this light, metaphysical questions
about Forty-Four’s satanic or divine nature or whether he is August’s complex psychological
projection are moot. Twain is asserting that our bug-like human consciousness is far too limited
to perceive let alone make any enduring sense of the magnitude of an aloof and indifferent
universe.
David Lionel Smith’s analysis in “Samuel Clemens, Duality, and Time Travel” takes a
close look at the vexing questions he finds arising from Twain’s text. What are we to make of the
novel’s “abrupt solipsism”, “cheerful nihilism”, and “atheist implications”? (187) Whatever
answers we may attempt, Smith concludes that the primary audience for No. 44 was Twain
himself, a literary performance in which he exorcizes personal demons and “breaks the binary
paradigm that had always characterized his work.” (192) For Smith, the self-indulgence of FortyFour’s time travel and the appearance of duplicate selves reflect Twain’s inner struggle to
resolve at last the Clemens/Twain duality within himself.
Where Smith sees this movement as ultimately affirming Twain’s descent into the
solipsism that so many see characterizing Twain’s later years, John Bird defines it as nothing
short of the humorist’s heroically redeeming quest into the unconscious. Interpreting No 44
through the lens of Lacanian theory, which posits that one’s “self” is a fiction divided from one’s
deeper unconsciousness, Bird sees the text as expressing Twain’s “heroic battle to come to terms
with his own unconscious, to win a philosophic battle he had been fighting for much of his
career.” (200) In this context, the duplicate selves and Dream-Self/Waking-Self divide exemplify
“Twain delving into the implications of dreams for our inner workings, revealing the power of
metaphorically structured dreams to free us from the nightmare of existence.” (201) In this
regard, Bird unequivocally declares No. 44 an artistic triumph in which Twain provokes us to
take a similar journey to the dark center of our interior dreamscape in order to live out FortyFour’s final exhortation to “dream other dreams, and better!”
David E. E. Sloane, on the other hand, not only disagrees with Bird’s assessment, but
expresses the lone critical voice in the collection flatly dismissing the manuscript’s overall
literary value. In “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger as Literary Comedy,” Sloane argues that
Twain is applying the same comic techniques in this manuscript (e.g., his use of irony, naïf
voice, vulgarism, dialect, etc.) that he had always used in attacking his satirical targets, only here
he is using these weapons to resolve or come to terms with the existential crisis of his later years.
However, in Sloane’s view; by this time in his life, Twain was simply not up to the challenge. He
concludes that although “Twain is scrambling for his weapons in sight of big game,” the
resulting literary output is “not closely enough tied to a meaningful message to succeed.” (186)
With the far-reaching diversity of opinion expressed throughout Centenary Reflection, it
is obvious that No. 44, as with many of Twain’s enduring classics, is something of a literary
Rorschach test. Appropriately, then, Bruce Michelson’s concluding essay “Mark Twain’s
Mysterious Strangers and the Motions of the Mind,” applies insights from contemporary
cognitive studies to find that in studying these manuscripts, “we don’t spin the tale, the tale spins
us.” (218) In his intriguing review, Michelson reads the fragmentary Mysterious Stranger texts as
one complete narrative that reveals “the steps and stages by which a human author, graced or
burdened with a physical body and aging, struggling, active brain, constructs and sustains a
personal and professional identity by interrogating his own validity.” (219) Michelson asserts
that such a reading indicates Twain was actively engaged in a vital and imaginative process of
“letting go, of trusting the intuitive faculty, and ultimately of allowing the story to dream the
storyteller.” (229)
In terms of Twain’s legacy, Michelson also muses that a similar process is at work in
how we constantly revise our own collective understanding of Twain’s “identity, his major
themes, his cultural work, and his evolving role in the creation and survival of something like a
collective American consciousness.” (233) That, ultimately, is the enduring relevance of the
Mysterious Stranger manuscripts. As David Smith observes in his essay, these manuscripts play
a significant role in this ongoing process not by providing definitive answers but through raising
an assortment of irresolvable questions and dilemmas. “Even if we cannot eliminate the
mysteriousness of No. 44,” he writes, “we can at least attempt to provide an account of its
workings that may enhance our pleasure in contemplating it.” (188)
That is precisely what Centenary Reflections on Mark Twain’s No. 44, The Mysterious
Stranger does. Like Forty-Four, this collection of essays leads us on a journey into fathomless
depths that present us with as many confounding conundrums as it does the promise of
undreamed of possibilities. The essays in this book establish a fresh starting point from which to
continue this inquiry into the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts well into the next one hundred
years.
And a starting point it is, because just as one cannot pour the starred and shoreless
expanses of the universe into a jug, one cannot hope to capture every level of meaning flowing
through these texts within a single book, however comprehensive. Nonetheless, Centenary
Reflections provides a clarifying lens through which we can begin to peer more closely into a
seemingly boundless literary cosmos that will certainly reveal new insights, appalling and
otherwise, into Mark Twain and into ourselves as well.
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BIO:
Dwayne Eutsey is an independent scholar in Mark Twain studies whose research focuses on
Twain’s religious views especially late in life. Currently writing a book on the influence of
liberal religion throughout Twain’s life and writing, he is also a writer/editor for a non-profit
organization on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he lives with his wife and three children.