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 historical 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.

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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 actually 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.

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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

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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”). Elisabeth, an unprincipled and pretentious proto-Nazi, is notorious for distorting her brother’s life and works, but about this, at least, she had no reason to lie. What was it about The Adventures of Tom Sawyer that appealed to Nietzsche and moved him to share it with his friends and family? His explicit comments do not reveal the depth of engagement we glean from other, more circumstantial sources. Nietzsche delighted in using Mark Twain’s “Americanness” as a stick with which to beat a complacent, “philistine” Germany. In the letter to Ree´ he makes Tom Sawyer’s “foolery” a counter to all things “German”; in an 1880 notebook, he writes that “American laughter makes me happy, especially this kind from rough sailors like Mark Twain. Nothing German could 15 make me laugh more.” Early German reception tended to construe

Amerikanische Humoristen series complete and that only the Tom Sawyer volume is “now missing” (quoted on p. 453; Campioni also provides information on the gift copies, gleaned from the contemporary records of booksellers and binders). 12 Nietzsche to Paul Ree,´ June 1877, Nietzsche Briefwechsel, II: 5, pp. 245–46 (I am assuming the edition’s “Gescheutheiten” is a mistranscription of “Gescheitheiten”). The book Nietzsche took to Rosenlauibad was almost certainly Tom Sawyer.Thereis a slight chance it was the Skizzenbuch, which has a title-page date of 1877; but since Nietzsche in 1879 still regards Tom Sawyer (German trans., 1876) as Twain’s “latest” (see n. 13), it seems he did not know the Skizzenbuch—of which there is no record in Campioni, Nietzsches personliche¨ Bibliothek. 13 Nietzsche to Overbeck, 14 November 1879, trans. Walter Kaufmann in The Viking Portable Nietzsche (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1976), p. 73. 14 Quoted in Campioni et al., Nietzsches personliche¨ Bibliothek, p. 453. 15 Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967–), Nachgelassene fragmente 1880–82, pp. 7, 229.

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Mark Twain’s works as crude, knockabout fare for spirits of a coarser ﬁber. Gersdorff’s letter to Nietzsche commends the most raucous parts of Roughing It, such as the slapstick of that ungovernable horse 16 The Mexican Plug (“der mexicanische Stopsel”¨ ). But if Nietzsche’s interest had really depended on belly-laughs, Tom Sawyer would hardly have been his favorite. Other, earlier works have more of the farcical in them. Some subtler afﬁnity drew him on.

Nietzsche’s Tom Sawyer period was the most critical of his life. During these years, roughly 1877 through 1879, he broke with his friend and “master” Richard Wagner and, as a consequence, with the Wagnerites, the only influential admirers he had attracted so far. He also resigned his University post. Having become a professor at twenty-four, he was now a pensioner at thirty-four. He had limited time in which to fulfill his destiny or, in his words, to “become what 17 one is.” “I have shaken off what is extraneous to me,” he wrote, 18 “people (friends and enemies), habits, comforts, books.” Nietzsche was facing the fact that he was gravely ill. He wrote to Gersdorff in January 1876 that he had suffered “something like a total collapse. I could no longer doubt that I am plagued by a serious illness of the brain, and that my stomach and eyes suffer only because of this illness in the central nervous system.” This was not just an affliction, it was a fate: “My father died at age thirty-six of an inflammation of the 19 brain: it is possible that matters will move more quickly in my case.” The consensus is that Nietzsche had syphilis; but whatever his disease, it blighted many of his days and nights with cruel headaches, seizures, and vomiting. Doctors prescribed rest; they told him to refrain from reading and writing. During the years of independence remaining to him, he would tramp, alone, from hotel to hotel, around the Alps and the Italian Riviera. He abjured Germany, the Germans, the university,

16 Gersdorff to Nietzsche, April 1875, Nietzsche Briefwechsel, II: 6/1,p.179. 17 The phrase embodies one of Nietzsche’s key ideas. See Alexander Nehamas, “‘How One Becomes What One Is,’” Philosophical Review 92:3 (July 1983): 385–417. 18 Nietzsche to Mathilde Meier, 15 July 1878,inSelected Letters of Friedrich Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Christopher Middleton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 68. 19 Quoted in David Farrell Krell and Donald Bates, The Good European (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 92–93.

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the nineteenth century, and (repeatedly and never quite successfully) his family. He also abjured the romantic philosophy of his youth and under- took a critique of human morals. The early Nietzsche had taken it for granted that mankind urgently needed transfiguring, through the epochal establishment of a transfiguring art. He now began to ask why our minds are as they are and how we came to need transfiguring in the first place. The first fruits of his new philosophy were collected in Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (1878). That book, together with its pendant volumes (1879 and 1880) and the sequels Daybreak (1881) and The Gay Science (1882), can be grouped together as Nietzsche’s second, or “middle,” period. This group remains, unfortunately, the less-read Nietzsche. Here we have Nietzsche without the Overman, without the transvaluation of all values, and without the tone of prophetic desperation that disfigures his later works. Here is a Nietzsche who swears by reason and the spirit of the Enlightenment; Nietzsche the genealogist, searching out the origins of morality in a series of daring psychological explorations. In addition to the satisfying “foolery” of Tom Sawyer, some of its aspects must have interested him on another level: a personal level, which would have been impossible to communicate in his published work except by suggestion. Tom, like Nietzsche, is a boy without a father. “Fritz” Nietzsche had been four years old when his father, the pastor of the village of Rocken¨ in Saxony, died of “softening of the brain,” a euphemistic diagnosis that certainly suggests, as Claudia 20 Pierpont has written, “untold harrowing scenes.” The sadness of losing his father seems to have grown rather than diminished as Fritz 21 matured. In Tom Sawyer, by contrast, the loss of the father leaves no marks of sorrow or resentment, leaves, in fact, no marks of any kind. The circumstance does not trouble him (or the book); it seems, rather, to have set him free. The reader never learns—and it is telling that few think to wonder—how Tom lost his parents. His guardian, Aunt Polly, refers to him as her “dead sister’s boy.” Indeed, that Tom ever had a father is merely inference, and the utterly unproblematic way in which his crucial absence is rendered—or not rendered— results in a certain escapist appeal. Where Tom is a street urchin, Nietzsche had been the “model boy” Tom knows and detests. Where Tom plays hooky, Nietzsche was so

20 Claudia Pierpont, “After God,” New Yorker, 8 April 2002. 21 Krell and Bates, The Good European, pp. 9–15.

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diligent that he worried even his teachers at Schulpforta, a presti- gious boarding school that imposed fifteen-hour days of Latin and Greek. The boys, when feuding, did not scuffle or throw dirt clods 22 but satirized each other in improvised Latin hexameters. The soul- shriveling quality of this life was not lost on Nietzsche. The “squan- dering” of youth on “so-called ‘classical education,’” he would write, 23 “can no longer be made good—so far as we are concerned!” Tom Sawyer is eternal boyhood; Nietzsche missed boyhood altogether. Only as an adult did he make the sad discovery that he “was old at 24 the beginning of [his] life.” In an 1879 aphorism he wrote of his new desire to “throw aside for a while that which one now has, and 25 to dream oneself a child, beggar and fool.” For Nietzsche, part of the pleasure of reading Tom Sawyer would be the fantasy of reliving a village childhood—this time as a child. If that aspect was emotionally satisfying, others were philosophically stimulating. Throughout the book, Tom makes a series of “discover- ies,” some of which parallel Nietzsche’s philosophical insights. When Tom tricks the village boys into whitewashing a fence by convincing them that the chore will be supremely pleasurable, Mark Twain edito- rializes that Tom “had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it: that the ‘difficult to attain’ is an object of desire simply because it is difficult, and the readily available is disprized on no other basis.” Actually, Tom has discovered an infinitely more radical principle: that all values are imposed by the human will on a world that is in itself without values; and that these values can therefore, potentially, be reversed—by a strong enough will. This, the key principle of Niet- zsche’s moral science, is first stated in the works of his middle period. And Nietzsche’s dictum that “Subjection to morality can be slavish or vain or self-interested or resigned or gloomily enthusiastic” recalls Tom’s half-brother Sid, a “good” boy who, not content with toeing 26 the line himself, keeps an envious watch on Tom’s transgressions.

22 On the hexameters, see the remarks of Paul Deussen, in Conversations with Nietzsche, pp. 12–13; on Nietzsche’s school life generally, see Krell and Bates, The Good European, and Ronald Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (New York: Penguin, 1982). 23 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. Roger Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), sec. 195. 24 Quoted in Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 191. 25 Nietzsche, Daybreak, sec. 531. 26 Nietzsche, Daybreak, sec. 97. Brahm and Robinson write perceptively on Sid as the Nietzschean man of ressentiment: “The Jester and the Sage,” pp. 160–61.

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But the shared obsession of Mark Twain and Nietzsche in their respective middle periods is the aggressive and offensive nature of the conscience. “If I had the remaking of man,” Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee declares, “he wouldn’t have any conscience . . . although it certainly does a great deal of good, it cannot be said to pay, in the long run; it would be much better to have less good and 27 more comfort.” In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche wrote:

The content of our conscience is everything that was during the years of our childhood regularly demanded of us without reason by people we honored or feared. . . . The belief in authorities is the source of the conscience: it is therefore not the voice of God in the heart of man but the voice of some men in man.28

For Nietzsche, the conscience, which appears to be part of the self, is really external authority introjected. It must be placated, or we cannot function; yet in placating it, we bow to an unknown and illegitimate authority that longs to tyrannize over us. Tom Sawyer ﬁgures that concept in the relation of Injun Joe to his guileless associate, the town drunkard Muff Potter. Joe murders a young doctor and frames Potter for the crime. Potter himself believes Injun Joe’s accusation; like the unprotected ego, he is incapable of resisting the accusation of his vicious “conscience.” Tom eventually exposes the deceit, and Injun Joe is driven out of the community toward his death. In that movement of plot, Tom Sawyer celebrates the victory of the “free spirit” over a conscience whose dictates torment the innocent. “The bite of conscience,” wrote Nietzsche, “like the bite of a dog into a 29 stone, is a stupidity.” In the same year in which Tom Sawyer appeared, Mark Twain published a more explicit tale about that fundamental human struggle. In “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” the narrator extrojects his introjected conscience, which appears as a “shriveled, shabby dwarf” covered with a “fuzzy, greenish mold.” The dwarf mercilessly taunts the protagonist until, seizing an opportunity, he slaughters it, dismembers and burns its “shreds and fragments,”

27 Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ed. Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp. 209–10. 28 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Roger Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), part II:1,sec.52. 29 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, II:2,sec.38; Kaufmann’s translation, from Portable Nietzsche, p. 68.

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and is, finally, free to be his true self. But the true self that is un- leashed is a terror: Since that day my life is all bliss. ...Ikilled thirty-eight persons during the first two weeks—all of them on account of ancient grudges.30 Nietzsche, too, plotted the destruction of the conscience, but he notoriously failed to explain why the conscienceless person should refrain from such monstrous acts. In his later writings, he looks upon self-interested violence with disturbing equanimity, implying that the monster’s remorse, not the monstrous act, is the real crime. If it is tempting to ask what Nietzsche would have made of “The Carnival of Crime,” it is impossible not to speculate on his response to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, in which a “progres- sive,” democratic American citizen of 1879 imports modern culture into Camelot. Trying to make knight and serf alike “useful” (a concept deplored by the anti-utilitarian Nietzsche), he ends up destroying civilization itself in an appalling mechanized genocide: It was a neat thing, very neat and pretty to see....Duringthenextfifteen minutes we stood under a steady drizzle of microscopic fragments of knights and hardware and horseflesh.31 This disturbing mood, hanging uncertainly between farce and night- mare, condemning or gloating or both, also characterizes the works Nietzsche wrote while Clemens was working on A Connecticut Yan- kee. Upon the novel’s publication in 1889, Clemens, increasingly putting his energy into inventions and investments, said he hoped not to write any more books. Nietzsche had written his last.

Perhaps it was inevitable, considering the way they were both en- ergetically scrambling around Europe in 1878–79, that they should cross paths. Although they never met, for a few days during his “Tom Sawyer period,” Nietzsche and Clemens were both breathing the mountain air of Switzerland. Sailing for Europe on 11 April 1878,

30 Mark Twain, “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” Atlantic Monthly, June 1876, reprinted in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 1852–1890, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), pp. 644–60. “Ancient grudges” is one of Clemens’s frequent echoes of Shylock (The Merchant of Venice, 1.2.47). 31 A Connecticut Yankee, p. 355.

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Clemens told reporters, “I am going to the most out-of-the-way place in Germany I can find, fifty miles away from any railroad, where I can 32 sleep more than half the time.” Clemens liked to affect an indolent disposition, but he had deeper reasons for touring the Continent. “The fact is,” he wrote in his notebook, “I am spoiled by 10 years’ petting.—I needed to come to a country where I was unknown to 33 get the tuck taken out of my self-complacency.” In addition to his project of self-improvement, Clemens was pursuing literary and com- mercial ends. The sales of Tom Sawyer had disappointed him, and he 34 considered the novel a flop. He was preparing to reprise his early successes by returning to the genre of the travelogue. Accompanying Clemens were his wife Livy, their daughters Susy, aged six, and Clara, aged three, the children’s nurse Rosina Hay, and family friend Clara Spaulding. Arriving at Hamburg, they made their 35 way gradually to Heidelberg, where they settled for a few weeks. On 30 May 1878—the centenary of Voltaire’s death, and the day Nietzsche had placed on the title page of Human, All Too Human to 36 enrage the francophobe Wagnerites —Clemens was at Mannheim, attending Wagner’s Lohengrin and making spidery notes. He was more interested in the dimmable house lights (American theaters still kept lights up during performances) than in “the racking and pitiless pain” of the opera. In his notebook he anatomized his thoughts on classical music:

The simple truth is, I detest it. Not mildly, but with all my heart. . . . If base music gives me wings, why should I want any other? But I do. I want to like the higher music because the higher & better like it.37 Meanwhile, he was ﬁnding his new anonymity more vexing than stimulating. “In New York or London I am courteously invited into the banker’s private ofﬁce when I have business.—Here I am utterly unknown & must stand around & wait with Tom Dick & Harry—&

32 New York Times, 12 April 1878,p.8. 33 Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, vol. 2, ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), p. 163. 34 Kaplan, Mr. Clemens, pp. 200, 213. 35 Information about Clemens’s movements around Europe in 1878 is drawn from Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, vol. 2, and from materials in the Mark Twain Papers. For critically edited texts of letters 1876–80, see Mark Twain Project Online: . 36 See William H. Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon: A Publication History and Bib- liography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 57 and 62,ﬁg.16. 37 Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, 2:139.

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38 lucky if not received at last with rude impertinence.” Yet if Clemens was “utterly unknown,” Mark Twain was not: half a dozen of his volumes were in print in German translation, and the correspondence of Nietzsche and his friends clearly implies more than name recognition. There were two German editions of Tom Sawyer before it had even 39 been published in America. Clemens and his party traveled in style, staying at first-class hotels and shopping along the way for art and antique furnishings. In late July they headed for Baden-Baden, where the Clemenses were joined by their close friend the Reverend Joseph H. Twichell. On 21 August the whole crew traveled to Interlaken, in Switzerland. Nietzsche had 40 arrived at Interlaken a few days earlier. The 1876 Thomas Cook guide to Switzerland warns that Interlaken is not to all tastes: “While one traveller of a merry, social, fashion-loving turn of mind will revel in its promenades, billiard-rooms, and concert-halls, and such like, the thoughtful, meditative man will turn aside, glad to find a more 41 secluded spot elsewhere.” This in fact is exactly what happened: Clemens’s party descended on Interlaken’s Hotel Jungfrau, a first- class behemoth, and prepared to sample the town’s attractions, while Nietzsche sought repose at a modest pension in the adjacent village 42 of Unterseen. Clemens and Twichell left Interlaken on 23 August to begin a five- day Alpine expedition, which was expected to be good fun (and good copy), but due to Clemens’s rheumatism, their walking tour quickly became a walking-and-riding tour. Going by coach to Kandersteg, the two men hiked over the Gemmi Pass to Leukerbad and along the Rhone Valley, taking in Visp, Saint Niklaus, and the Matterhorn. In a letter home, Twichell described Clemens’s joy as he chased after some driftwood thrown into a stream:

Mark was running down-stream after it as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over

38 Mark Twain’s Notebooks and Journals, 2:163. 39 In addition to the Grunow edition (in German), the Tauchnitz (English-language) edition. See Rodney, Mark Twain International. 40 The ﬁrst letter addressed to him at Interlaken this year is datelined 17 August (from Elisabeth). 41 Cook’s Tourist’s Handbook for Switzerland (London: Thomas Cook and Son, 1876), pp. 93–94. 42 See Baedeker’s Switzerland, 6th ed. (Coblenz and Leipsig: Baedeker, 1873), p. 105.

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a fall and emerged to view in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell.43

On the subjects of joy, childlikeness, and mountain heights, Nietzsche talked a good game; but it was not for him to be, in this sense, so free a spirit as Clemens was. Twichell reﬂected on his friend’s character: “He acted just like a boy; another feature of his extreme sensitiveness in certain directions. . . . His sensitive regard for others extends to animals. When we are driving his concern is all about the horse. He 44 can’t bear to see the whip used.” After more adventures, including a memorable moment when Clemens’s “sensitiveness in certain directions” forced him to confess to Twichell—who was his pastor as well as his friend—that he did 45 not believe in the Christian God or the authority of the Bible, the pair rejoined the Clemens family, who had moved on to Ouchy, on 31 August. Nietzsche was still at Unterseen, working on an “annex” of aphorisms he wanted to add to Human, All Too Human and reading 46 Wagner’s attack on the book in the Bayreuther-Blatter.¨ The rupture between Wagner and Nietzsche was now public, and even though he expected as much, it unnerved Nietzsche, and his health collapsed. He knew that he could no longer stay at Unterseen: “I feel as if I 47 were on the run, and scarcely know where to lay my head.” He ﬂed to Basel, where Franz Overbeck and his wife were alarmed by his condition. Works of great brilliance, albeit compromised by stridency and the loss of his middle-period humaneness, were still to come from his pen, but by the end of 1888 Nietzsche’s output consisted of messianic postcards sent to friends, enemies, and the crowned heads of Europe. On 3 January 1889, in Turin, Nietzsche saw a coachman violently beating his horse. He ran to the animal, threw his arms around its neck, and collapsed. He would never regain lucidity. He lived ten years more in an increasingly vegetative state. Neurologists released him into his mother’s care. On his good days, she took him

43 Twichell’s letter is excerpted in Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, 3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1912), p. 629. Paine’s biography has been issued in sets of varying numbers of volumes, but the pagination is identical. 44 Paine, Mark Twain, p. 629. 45 Paine, Mark Twain, pp. 631–32. 46 On Nietzsche’s Interlaken activities, see Curtis Cate, Nietzsche (Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook Press, 2005), p. 272; on reading Wagner: Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 206. 47 Letter from Nietzsche to Franz Overbeck, 17 September 1878, quoted in Hayman, Nietzsche, p. 206.

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for walks and let him play the piano. Sometimes she read to him, “in 48 a soothing monotone,” from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

48 The quoted phrase is from Krell and Bates, The Good European, p. 51.

Benjamin Grifﬁn, Ph.D., is an editor at the Mark Twain Project, University of California, Berkeley. He has written articles for New Literary History, Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900, English Literary Renaissance, and Huntington Li- brary Quarterly and a book, Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama (2001). He is an associate editor of the ﬁrst volume of the Autobiography of Mark Twain, forthcoming in 2010.

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