[Macabre Monday] "The Mysterious Stranger" - Mark Twain's Grief, as Presented Through Many Eyes
Twain's final novel is no longer truly his own, bearing the fingerprints of those who attempted to posthumously complete his last work.
When I first learned about The Mysterious Stranger, it was through pure happenstance. Some years ago, I stumbled across a video on YouTube entitled “Satan & Mark Twain - Banned Scene.” Curious, especially since one could tell this was some sort of claymation at a glance, I clicked on this low resolution video and was treated to a creepy scene which I’ve shared on previous Macabre Mondays. After getting partway through, I decided to see if I could find a better cut of this bizarre and unsettling animation. Sure enough, I found that there were more complete and higher quality clips that’d been pulled directly from the movie. I proceeded to watch in full, finding myself intrigued and a touch disturbed. It was creepy in a way that’s always been unique to the children’s movies of the late 70’s through the early 90’s, but made eerier still by both the intensity of what’s shown in this part adorable, part unsettling scene, and by its grim and fatalistic ending.
I showed the scene to a number of my friends after, and we all agreed it was both beautiful and eerie. Beautiful for the superb claymation work done on the project, courtesy of famed claymation filmmaker Will Vinton, (who is the creator of the California Raisins) and eerie for the obvious reasons we’ll touch on in time. After watching it together, we’d refer back to it from time to time, but ultimately forgot about the scene and the movie it was attached to, “The Adventures of Mark Twain”, which we never sought out. Time passed, and the Mysterious Stranger was forgotten. That is, until earlier this year, when the clip chanced to come across my YouTube feed once again. I gave it another watch, finding that it was just as creepy as I remember and that, thanks to a slew of internet animation reviewers, this scene and the movie it belongs to, albeit to a lesser extent, had something of a surge of new interest a couple years back.
Once again, I shared it with some friends who hadn’t seen it, friends whom, like myself, were able to appreciate this both for its fantastic animation and its darkly moody feel. However, this review is not about that scene. Instead, it’s about the book which inspired this scene, Mark Twain’s final novel, The Mysterious Stranger.
You see, finding this scene again had me curious to discover what inspired it. Being an American, and as such having gone to an American school, (insert your jokes about California being un-American here,) I was naturally familiar with Mark Twain through the likes of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. One or both of those books was required reading when I was in grade school, though I’ll be damned if I can remember the slightest thing about either one of them beyond a scant detail here and there. In those days, Twain’s work wasn’t something to be enjoyed. It was school work, an undesirable requirement that I had little interest in reading, particularly when faced with my preferred options of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. The Hobbit excited me when we read it in school. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn did not.
But I’m no longer the school age boy I once was, and my appreciation for a great many older writers and older stories has grown vastly over the years. I will admit, the breadth of my knowledge about Twain and his stories is still quite limited. I’ve yet to return to the tales of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, and I’ve yet to explore many of Twain’s shorter works, but I find myself wanting to do so in an attempt to discover new appreciation for his writing where my less mature younger self was unable to do so.
Nevertheless, having known of Mark Twain as one of the Great American Novelists through my entire life, I found myself recalling my surprise regarding the existence of a story like The Mysterious Stranger. It was a bit shocking for me to discover that he’d written a story which involved a child-like angel named Satan ruminating on the nature of humanity as he used his powers to play games with and amaze a group of children. In “The Adventures of Mark Twain” the children in question are his most famous - Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, and Becky Thatcher. In the book, this Satan (we’ll get into why I refer to him as “this Satan” shortly) interacts with a trio of young Austrian boys from the Middle Ages and…
Okay, we need to pause here for a moment. Before I get into this, there’s a major complication that I need to cover. As I allude to in both the title and subtitle of this essay, The Mysterious Stranger is Mark Twain’s final work and, much like with Tolkien and The Silmarillion, he was unable to finish it before his death. However, where The Silmarillion was posthumously edited and completed by the professor’s son, Christopher, The Mysterious Stranger carries a less wholesome legacy to its name, perhaps appropriately so.
Records indicate that Twain likely made four different attempts at writing this story in his twilight years. Two versions of it, the original rough idea and the novella length second attempt, Schoolhouse Hill, were set in his commonly used fictional American town, St. Petersburg. The two novel length versions of it, The Chronicle of Young Satan and No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger1, were set in the fictional Austrian village of Eseldorf, which literally translates to Ass Town or Donkey Town. In all of his attempts, it’s noted that his harsh criticisms of religion and fanaticism are thoroughly apparent. Having just finished the most commonly published version of the story, I find this a believable claim.
However, this is also where we come to a problem. As already stated, Twain passed on before he was able to finish writing the final version of the book. As such, control of his estate changed hands upon his passing. One would think that, much like how Christopher Tolkien took up the pen to finish his father’s work, Twain’s next of kin would become the executors of his estate and do the same. Alas, this wasn’t to be, for the majority of Mark Twain’s family - his real name is Sam Clemens, by the by - had died some years before him. His firstborn son, Langdon, died as an infant from diphtheria. His eldest daughter, Suzy, passed at 24 from spinal meningitis. His third daughter, Jane, died at 29 from a heart attack which resulted from a sudden seizure.
Only his second daughter, Clara, survived him. However, on the passing of her sister, Suzy, she apparently found herself in the unenviable and exhausting position of trying to keep her family together. This ultimately proved an impossible task. With her mother in declining health and her younger sister Jane sadly being epileptic, it often fell to Clara to care for them both. Sam, which is to say Twain himself, wasn’t permitted to see his wife at all while she was sick, and since he was unequipped to assist in caring for Jane’s condition, he could offer no substantial help to Clara in this time.
When her mother died, she collapsed emotionally and, longing to spend time away from her family, chose to travel for a time and set herself on a career path that didn’t require the clout from her father’s name to get her ahead. Come 1909 she’d marry a Russian pianist and composer, bearing one daughter with him, and sometimes singing as part of his musical performances. During this time and her earlier travels, she’d split her time between traveling and returning to help care for Twain until his passing in 1910. Sadly, I couldn’t find any concrete details as to why he didn’t pass his estate to her. He may have been incensed from the time she spent away, but given the dark place the deaths of his wife and other children pushed him to, I suspect that’s not the case. It may be that she wasn’t interested, or that she did inherit it, but passed it on to people she thought would be better fits to maintain her father’s legacy. Ultimately, I’m not sure, but the estate ended up passing first to the hands of his contemporary, Albert Bigelow Paine. It was Paine, alongside one Frederick Duneka, who found, finished, and published the incomplete story.
Unfortunately, the method with which Paine and Duneka chose to complete The Mysterious Stranger would be met with criticism some 26 years after Paine’s death in 1937. Literary researchers examining his version of the story discovered that his was a patchwork, with details lifted and altered from all three of the more complete versions Twain attempted to write. More than that, they found that he and Duneka had added their own passages to the story, meaning that the most common version we have - referred to as the Paine-Duneka version - isn’t truly Mark Twain’s work. And yet, as seems to be the case based on his three manuscripts, it still holds to some of the spirit of Twain’s criticism of religion, explorations of the duality of self, (the “dream self” vs the “waking self”) his distaste for fanaticism, and the depression that marked the twilight of his life.
As you can see, the case of The Mysterious Stranger is a complex and multifaceted one. But how does the story itself fare under the weight of all of this? In short, it fares decently well. Given the stitched-together nature of this story, it’s difficult for me to say how much it truly reads like one of Mark Twain’s works. Just how much of his voice as the original author is present isn’t entirely clear, and part of that is because of how long it’s been since I last read one of his stories. I simply don’t remember if Huckleberry Finn had a similar feel to the writing or not.
What I can say is that the story, for what it is, proved engaging. Set in 1590 in the previously mentioned fictional Austrian village, Eseldorf, the story follows three young teen boys, Theodor, Nikolaus, and Seppi. Theodor takes on the role of our narrator, and the story reads as if it were a recounting of these events as written in a personal journal. All three boys are the sons of fairly influential and well-liked people in their village, with Theodor’s father specifically being their church’s organist, as well as handling myriad other duties for the church and the modest town.
On one fateful day, the trio have an encounter with a handsome and well dressed teen whom they’ve never seen before. Curious to meet him but too shy to say hello, Theodor thinks about introducing himself but opts not to. However, to the amazement of all three boys, the stranger introduces himself to them as if he heard Theodor ask his name, even though he didn’t. Introducing himself as an angel named Satan, the three boys naturally become wary once they hear his name. However, their wariness fades once Satan shows them some of the incredible feats he can do, then goes on to clarify that though he bears that name, he’s not the Satan they’re all thinking of. Rather, he’s that Satan’s nephew, and still a true angel, thus making him sinless.2
What follows from here are tales from across the village as narrated by Theodor. All of them involve his presence, and most involve Sappi and Nikolaus as well. At first, these tales seem to have a touch of wondrousness to them, and a slight sense of adventure or hope. However, similar to old fairy tales like The Pied Piper, those feelings are soon undermined with a sense of unease and wrongness as the boys begin to see the unexpected consequences of the gifts Satan bestows on the people of Eseldorf at their behest. Misfortune seems to follow in the wake of Satan’s gifts, though this never seems to be something done out of malice. Rather, Satan is presented as entirely indifferent to humankind, as they’re a species so wholly beneath them that it’s not possible for him to feel any true malice towards them.3
As the boys, mainly Theodor, interact with Satan across the story, he uses his abilities to show them a myriad of things. Like with most of the story, these things seem wondrous at first, such as taking Theodor from his small Austrian village to places like China or India, or showing him things from humanity’s distant future or past. However, in each case, Satan relates these to the undesirable folly of humans, constantly shaming them as the most lesser of beasts for the cruel things that their “moral sense” causes them to do. Ignorance, cruelty, fanaticism, false accusation, witch trials, and the like are all put on full display in this story, quickly turning it from a strange and slightly uncomfortable adventure to a story that’s both surprising and unnerving in its bleakness.
Throughout, Satan presents a myriad of ideas to Theodor that highlight his ignorance as a human. The gifts he gives to people change the predetermined courses of their lives, something which he says is impossible for a human to do on his own as every action we take is predetermined by whatever our very first action as a baby is. This thread on which we travel can be broken, but never by us, because we’re both unaware of it and unable to muster up the will needed to change it. However, he can change it, because he isn’t human. Thing is, these gifts always seem to wreak more tragedy than anything, most commonly leading to people dying or going mad.
Theodor often questions Satan when these things happen, and Satan is almost always ready and willing to answer his questions without hesitation. He reveals the fates the people would’ve had if he hadn’t changed their life’s course, rationalizing their new fates against the old with a cold logic that dictates how what he does is a mercy compared to the suffering most of them would endure for decades had he not intervened. It’s an eerie sense of manipulation that simultaneously criticizes the rampant zealotry and fanaticism of events such as witch trials, the worst tendencies of humanity and its organizations and leaders, and what I believe is Twain’s conception of a manipulative nature inherent to the idea of higher beings. All of this ultimately culminates in the ending, where after long stints of absence from Theodor’s life, Satan gives him one last visit and is finally spurred to reveal the bleak, fatalistic truth, which is partly quoted at the end of the Mysterious Stranger scene in “The Adventures of Mark Twain”:
“Life itself is only a vision, a dream. Nothing exists save empty space and you, and you are but a thought.”
How much of this ending truly encapsulates the feelings of Twain in his final years, versus how much of it bears the fingerprints of Paine and Duneka is uncertain. However, it seems as though this ending was adapted from the most recent version of the story, No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,4 though I haven’t been able to fully confirm whether this is the case. All the same, though they may not be an exact representation of his thoughts and ideas, it does appear as though these dark and, frankly, tragic sentiments are reflective of Twain’s feelings at the final stages of his life. It’s noted that Twain held antireligious sentiments through a good portion of his life, and is purported to have said the following:
“Stripping away the irrational, the illogical, and the impossible, I am left with atheism. I can live with that.”
Again, I haven’t been able to confirm with absolute certainty that this is truly one of his quotes, but while working on this essay I have run across a number of sources that support him having held such a view. It’s of little surprise then, given the numerous tragedies that occurred within his family, that he would not only be given over to such a heavy depression at the end of his life, as The Mysterious Stranger clearly hints at, but also hold the harsh views of religion that are displayed in this story.
Given that this is the case, and I can confirm that The Mysterious Stranger is indeed unabashed in its criticisms of the worst tendencies of religious organizations and humanity on the whole, I imagine this would be a divisive and uncomfortable work for many of my contemporaries on Substack to read. I know a good many of you are some denomination of Christian yourselves. Yet uncomfortable though it may be, I still find myself wanting to recommend this story.
Part of it is because of its strange history, the fact that what we ultimately got is a lens into the thoughts of an ailing and depressed Mark Twain that were undoubtedly altered by the fingerprints of the men who edited and published the book after his death.
Part of it is for this glimpse into the mind of someone who was clearly a very pained man. Mark Twain, as I mentioned earlier, is someone we think of as one of the Great American Novelists. We all know him for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. One of those two books is likely something all of us who went through the American school system read at one point or another, and though I still need to reread them for myself, I get the distinct feeling that The Mysterious Stranger is quite a different beast compared to these best known novels of Twain’s.
And part of it is because, short though it is, there is something genuinely scary about this story. It sticks in the mind, evoking powerful imagery and emotions despite being written in a relatively simple manner. It’s genuinely eerie and unsettling, and does an excellent job of presenting an idea of what it might be like to interact with a being so completely removed from our experiences as to be genuinely indifferent to it. But more than that, it’s legitimately the most macabre thing I’ve read in quite a long time, and really, what could be more appropriate for Macabre Monday than that?
Full title: No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger: Being an Ancient Tale Found in a Jug and Freely Translated from the Jug
The distinction of The Mysterious Stranger’s version of Satan as not being the true Satan is something that “The Adventures of Mark Twain” animated film doesn’t touch on.
At one point, he likens this difference to that of an elephant and a red spider. The red spider, being so small, is infinitely beneath the notice of the elephant. The elephant would never pay it mind, for in the elephant’s world, the red spider may as well not exist. Satan relates the difference between himself and humans a being like that, but with a divide between them that’s even greater.
An interesting note is that one of the reasons researchers later realized that Paine and Duneka constructed their version from all three of Twain’s major attempts is because the characters were referred to by various names from the various versions, including Satan himself, who was instead called No. 44 in the last version Twain himself wrote.
Interesting and detailed analysis!
Twain's writing did become progressively darker. Tom Sawyer is fairly early, Huck Finn a bit later and less light-hearted. Another tidbit from Twain's unpublished papers is a very late period, draft short story in which T and H meet up on the Mississippi one last time when they are in their 80s. They conclude that their entire lives have been a complete waste of time. Needless to say, that fragment never gets anthologized.
With regard to Huck Finn not fitting your literary tastes, the last part, in which Twain totally went off the rails, could actually be very easily repurposed as a horror story. In the original, Tom (who is supposed to be the smart one), insists that his and Huck's efforts to save Jim have to be set up like the medieval adventure stories Tom has been reading. So even though security is low on the Phelps farm, and Jim could almost literally walk away at any time, Tom makes him jump through all kinds of hoops to liberate himself. Jim, who loves Huck and Tom despite their shortcomings, plays along even though he knows, uneducated though he is, that the whole thing is nonsense. This sorry mess is followed by one of the best moments in the novel, in which Tom is shot during the rescue attempt. Jim stays with him until the doctor arrives (in the process risking his own life, since an escaped slave could conceivably be executed). But after Tom is saved, Aunt Polly arrives and reveals that the Miss Watson has died--and has freed Jim in her will. Tom admits knowing that but withholding the information so that he could rescue Jim in style. WTAF! In what universe is this even funny? Tom basically risks Jim's life to have a better game. Much as Ernest Hemingway valued the novel, he believed that the ending was a mess. Other critics argued for the merit of Jim's sacrifice, with which I concur, but the surrounding material is still a mess.
Think about the horror possibilities, though. Tom could easily be rewritten as a sadistic master manipulator who dupes the simple Huck and the overly-affectionate Jim. neither one of them knows who he really is inside. He puts Jim through all kinds of psychological torture, culminating in getting himself shot. He then sets up Jim to take the blame for the shooting. Jim is condemned to hang. Huck decides to save him, but Tom lures him to a meeting by the river, during which Huck "accidentally" drowns. The next day, Tom, with an evil smile on his face, leaves town to the sounds of Jim being hanged. Cue credits!
I think it's in "Ghost Story" that Peter Straub has the line, "Scarlet Letter is a ghost story in which the ghost never appears." I wonder how many classic tales have little hints of horror we never notice.
Despair is a poison, and though understandable, it's always a shame when a great writer succumbs and leaves behind a grimoire of wounds for later generations. Still, if one is sound in mind and spirit, one can weep with the dead, there's degrees of these works and some are still worth reading, but such works are by nature dangerous.
As said, despair is poison.
Many stare into the abyss, never piercing it's lies. The trick is to stare through the abyss, for all the world's evils exist for little more than to get you to despair, surrender.
Why would there be a need for your despair if there was not something it hides?