Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts: Some Questions for Textual Critics

MARK TWAIN'S MYSTERIOUS STRANGER MANUSCRIPTS: SOME QUESTIONS FOR TEXTUAL CRITICS William M. Gibson William Meniam Gibson (A.B., Princeton University; AM. and Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor of English at New York University and is Director of the Center for Editions of American Authors of the Modem Language Association. He was co-author of a Bibliography of William Dean Howells and an edition of Mark Twain-Howells Letters. The following paper was delivered at the annual meeting of the RMMLA in October 1968 at Colorado Springs. It is an abbreviation of a paper given at the Dublin meeting of the International Association of University Professors of English. If I separate my discussion of the scholarly, esthetic, and moral questions that have arisen during the course of my editing Mark Twain's "mysterious stranger" manuscripts, I trust you will accept the division as a matter of convenience in putting these complex problems clearly before you. The three sets of questions are finally inseparable. How it is that so many and various problems for the editor of these three related manuscripts arise? The chief sources of the problems are that Twain never finished any of the three stories (though he wrote a concluding chapter in advance for the third version), and that Twain's literary executor, A. B. Paine, with the help of F. A. Duneka, an editor in the firm of Harper & Brothers, manufactured a version from two of the manuscripts and published it in 1916 as The Mysterious Stranger, A Romance. This is the work that several generations of readers, students, teachers, and scholars have read and discussed as the major final work from Clemens' hand, until John S. Tuckey set forth the facts of composition of the three manuscripts in his admirable monograph, Mark Twain and Little Satan (1963J.1 Why did Paine and Duneka produce the fraudulent text? One must guess—for all the evidence that survives is Paine's declaration in 1923 that he found the essential last chapter in a great batch of manuscripts after Clemens' death in 1910. Presumably the two editors found the unfinished story moving ; clearly they considered parts of it offensive and unpublishable; certainly they wanted to get out another popular book by Mark Twain; and so they cobbled together a bowdlerized portmanteau version from Twain's manuscripts that would have enraged the writer whom they believed they were serving. Aided by Duneka, Paine produced the fraudulent text by cut- "The manuscripts will be published as they came from the author's hand this winter, making up another volume of the Mark Twain Papers from the University of California Press at Berkeley. The edition will include Twain's working notes for each of the versions, cancellations in the manuscripts, explanatory notes, and a lengthy historical or genetic introduction. 184RMMLA BulletinDecember 1968 ting and rearranging the first manuscript. He lifted the character of the astrologer from the third manuscript and attributed to the new figure the grosser acts and speeches of the bad priest, Father Adolf. He also deleted episodes and arguments that might offend Catholic and Presbyterian sensibilities . Then he grafted the final chapter of the third manuscript to the incomplete first manuscript version by cutting half a broken-off chapter, composing his own paragraph of bridge-work, and altering in his own hand the names "August" and "44" to "Theodor" and "Satan." Then-and what a depressing thing to do—he commissioned N. C. Wyeth, known largely as an illustrator of children's books, to paint illustrations for their altered text, including one of the borrowed astrologer, and he let the designer place Wyeth's fine colored engraving of this nonentity on the front cover, and, finally, he published the story serially in Harper's Magazine and issued it as a children's book for the Christmas trade. A case of sorts can be made for Paine. A professional writer himself, he thought he was acting to sustain and add to Mark Twain's reputation by bowdlerizing the explosive, melancholy, never completed fable. Certainly, he possessed enough sensibility to discover that the last chapter, though written for another version, fitted the first version to the extent that a...