Memoranda and Documents

Memoranda and Documents “AMERICAN LAUGHTER”: NIETZSCHE READS TOM SAWYER benjamin griffin “ have not read Nietzsche,” said Mark Twain in 1907, “nor any other philosopher, and have not needed to do it, and have I 1 not desired to do it.” He was responding to a letter outlining the similarity between his world view and that of the posthumously pop- ular German philosopher. Mark Twain—Samuel L. Clemens—was seventy-one years old. His philosophy had crystallized long before the vogue of Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844–1900), who had stopped writing eighteen years earlier. But Clemens’s personal secretary, Isabel Lyon, was a convert to the new cult. She pelted her employer with aphorisms from Thus Spake Zarathustra and tried to take his rude dismissals (“Damn Nietzsche!”) as evidences of a la- tent kinship. “Somehow I am glad he doesn’t like Zarathustra,” Lyon rationalized. “Very, very glad—but I shall be able to quote some passages to him—some telling passages—for Nietzsche is too much like 2 himself.” Clemens himself was having none of it. “A minute ago, Miss Lyon opened up on Nietsche [sic]; I can’t stand Nietsche, so I dismissed her,” he wrote to a friend, “& I think there won’t be any 3 more Nietsche to-day.” Lyon was one of the first to seek to identify a kinship between Mark Twain and Nietzsche, but she was not the last. Since the histor- ical record precludes the German philosopher from having had any 1 Mark Twain, Autobiographical Dictation, 4 September 1907, typescript in the Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter “MTP”); reprinted in A Pen Warmed-up in Hell: Mark Twain in Protest, ed. Frederick Anderson (New York: Harper, 1972), p. 176. 2 Isabel V. Lyon, “1906 Daily Reminder Book” (1st of 2 vols.), in MTP; entries for 8 and 10 August. 3 Letter from Samuel Langhorne Clemens to Mary B. Rogers, 25, 26, 27,and 28 August 1906; reprinted in Mark Twain’s Letters to Mary, ed. Lewis Leary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 47. The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIII, no. 1 (March 2010). C 2010 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 129 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.1.129 by guest on 29 September 2021 130 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY direct influence on the American humorist, claims for a connection have tended to fall back on the vague notion of “kindred spirits.” It is true that the two share similarities of outlook. Both are, in the words of a recent essay, “moralists given to immoralist masquer- 4 ades.” Nietzsche and Mark Twain agree, admittedly on rather dif- ferent grounds, that Wagner’s music makes them ill. Both are unbe- lievers who nevertheless struggle with “the death of God.” But many of their common preoccupations are those of their day, shared with 5 countless contemporaries. If all we are doing is placing Nietzsche and Mark Twain within the zeitgeist, we may as well be comparing their moustaches as their philosophies. There is, however, a relationship. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was not the novelist who was drawn to the philosopher, but the reverse: Friedrich Nietzsche was a Mark Twain fan. Long before there was a Nietzsche vogue in the English-speaking world, there was a Mark Twain vogue among Germans; and Nietzsche was among its earli- est adherents. That this enthusiasm is not better known is largely because Nietzsche, although a nonconformist in many things, was not prepared to be seen mentioning Mark Twain in his published works. Despite his frequent tributes to the power and importance of laughter, in the field of literature Nietzsche paid tribute only to those figures who satisfied contemporary German criteria of high seri- ousness, such as Goethe, Schiller, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. This self-consciousness sometimes makes Nietzsche praise writers he actu- ally found uncongenial (his comments on Shakespeare are uniformly unenlightening) and conceal enthusiasms that were, by the standards of his day, unsuited to the dignity of print. His reading, however, was far more catholic, and frequently less highbrow, than his public philosophy would suggest. Consequently, Nietzsche’s passion for Mark Twain has to be traced in his personal library, his correspondence, and his friends’ recol- lections. Our first glimpse comes from the memoirs of his friend Ida von Miaskowski, who remembers Nietzsche obtaining “a simply magnificent book to read aloud from: it was Mark Twain’s humorous 4 Gabriel Noah Brahm and Forrest G. Robinson, “The Jester and the Sage: Twain and Nietzsche,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 60:2 (September 2005): 140. Brahm and Robinson’s article is valuable, but methodologically it compares a hypostatized Twain with a homogenized Nietzsche, taking little account of the discrete stages of Nietzsche’s thought. Moreover, it seriously underestimates the extent of, and the evi- dence for, Nietzsche’s interest in Mark Twain (p. 140,n.8). 5 An article relevant to the study of “influences” on Nietzsche—or anybody else— is Robert C. Holub, “Nietzsche and the Paradigm of Influence Studies,” Modern Language Review 100:4 (October 2005): 1043–53. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.1.129 by guest on 29 September 2021 MEMORANDA AND DOCUMENTS 131 6 short stories, which had just been published.” That text was undoubt- edly the 1874 German edition of parts of Roughing It together with other stories and sketches, translated under the title of Jim Smileys 7 Beruhmter¨ Springfrosch (“. notorious jumping frog”). That volume was part of the series Amerikanische Humoristen, published by the Leipzig firm of Grunow, which also included works by Bret Harte as well as Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s The Story of a Bad Boy, a juvenile anti-autobiography which Nietzsche read with relish and which, in its original language, had been an important inspiration for The Adven- 8 tures of Tom Sawyer. In 1875 Nietzsche recommended the series to his friend Carl von Gersdorff, who replied that “the American Hu- morists, Mark Twain in particular, move me to ringing laughter.” List- ing his favorite parts of the Springfrosch volume, Gersdorff thanked Nietzsche for introducing him to “such good books.” A few weeks later he wrote again: “Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad is priceless.— 9 Who is ‘Ch. D. Warner,’ his collaborator on the next volume?” By 1876, all Mark Twain’s major works to date had been published 10 in the Amerikanische Humoristen. Nietzsche purchased them 11 all—some more than once, to give as presents. In 1876 the series 6 Ida von Miaskowski, quoted in Conversations with Nietzsche: A Life in the Words of His Contemporaries, ed. Sander L. Gilman, trans. David J. Parent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 51–52. 7 Information about Nietzsche’s reading and library is from Nietzsches personliche¨ Bibliothek, ed. Giuliano Campioni et al. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003). 8 Nietzsche to his sister Elisabeth, 22 February 1875,inNietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 3 divisions (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975–84), division 2,vol.5,p.25 (notated hereafter in the form “II: 5, p. 25”); and annotation at II: 7/3,p.1. The German translator of Twain’s works, Moritz Busch, brought some highly improbable qualifications to his task. He had traveled down the Mississippi River in 1851–52, when Clemens was a teenager in Hannibal, Missouri. Busch had also written a book about the Mormons and a travelogue of the Holy Land, subjects he would translate from Mark Twain’s perspective in Roughing It and The Innocents Abroad. A personal secretary and confidant of Bismarck’s, Busch made sure that a copy of Tom Sawyer landed on the great man’s desk. See the introduction to Busch’s Travels between the Hudson and the Mississippi, 1851–52, ed. and trans. Norman H. Binger (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971), pp. xi–xii; and Busch’s biographical entry in Meyers Konversations-Lexikon, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Bibliographischen Instituts, 1885–90). For Bismarck and Tom Sawyer, see Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 325. Translations from the German are my own where not otherwise specified. 9 Carl von Gersdorff to Friedrich Nietzsche, April 1875, Nietzsche Briefwechsel, II: 6/1, pp. 104–5, 179. 10 For the German publications, see Robert M. Rodney, ed., Mark Twain Interna- tional (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1982). 11 See Campioni et al., Nietzsches personliche¨ Bibliothek, s.v. Twain, Harte, Aldrich. In Elisabeth Nietzsche’s account of her brother’s library, she says that he had the Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.1.129 by guest on 29 September 2021 132 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY incorporated Tom Sawyer, and in June 1877 Nietzsche wrote to his friend the philosopher Paul Ree´ that he had brought with him to the Swiss resort of Rosenlauibad three books: Plato’s Laws, a book-length manuscript of Ree’s,´ and “something new by the American, Mark 12 Twain: (I love his fooleries more than any German clevernesses).” In the autumn of 1879, Nietzsche stayed at his mother’s house and, to ease the strain on his overworked eyes, she read to him. Nietzsche reeled off the season’s highlights in a letter to his Basel friend Franz Overbeck: My mother read to me: Gogol, Lermontov, Bret Harte, M. Twain, E. A. Poe. If you do not yet know the latest book by Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, it would be a pleasure for me to make you a little present of it.13 After Nietzsche’s death, his sister Elisabeth recalled that Tom Sawyer 14 had been his special favorite (“besonderer Liebling”).

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