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THE CAPTAIN STORMFIELD CHARACTER IN THE PUBLISHED

AND UNPUBLISHED WORKS OF MARK TWAIN

DISSERTATION

Presented to the Graduate Council of the

North Texas State University in Partial

Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Helen Hanicak, B. A., M. A.

Denton, Texas

May, 1976 Hanicak, Helen A., The Captain Stormfield Character in the Published and Unpublished Works of Mark Twain.

Doctor of Philosophy (English) December, 1975, 148 pp., bibliography, 77 titles.

Captain Stormf ield, the main character in Mark Twain's last book, Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven (1909), and in Dixon Wecter's restored posthumous edition of this work, entitled "Captain Stormfield's Visit

to Heaven" (1952), appears numerous times--under either the

Stormfield name or some other--in Twain's published and

unpublished works. His presence throughout the Twain

canon--from soon after 1868 when Twain sailed from San

Francisco to Panama with Stormfield's original, Captain

Edgar (Ned) Wakeman, until 1909, the publication date of

Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven--demon-

strates Twain's preoccupation with this important character.

Works, listed by real or approximate date of composition,

as diverse as Roughing It (1872), the "Simon Wheeler

Sequence" (c. 1870), Simon Wheeler: Amateur Detective

(1878-c. 1898), "Some Random Notes on an Idle Excursion"

(1877), "The Great Dark" (1897), and another posthumous

work, "Refuge of the Derelicts" (1905-1906), all have 2

Stormfieldian characters, and they all reflect the complex personality of Mark Twain. Most important, Stormfield and represents Twain's ambivalence toward theological philosophical questions of existence.

The blending of Mark Twain's disposition with that of an intrepid sea captain who dares the gates of heaven results in a mild satire of fundamentalist Christian beliefs,

a satire handled with verve and humor in "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Yet the Captain also appears

in "The Great Dark," an unfinished story among Twain's most

pessimistic. When the Captain is present in a story, tale,

or play, so are human aspirations; when the Captain is

absent--for example in "Letters from the Earth"--Twain's

satire degenerates into invective, and human hope turns

into despair.

The sources of the Stormfield character were many.

Twain explained the origin of Stormfield and his dream

adventure as having come from an encounter with Captain

Wakeman and from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar

(1868). Other sources, however, were Twain's Calvinistic

heritage, his interest in astronomy, his experiences with

tyrannical pilots on the Mississippi River. Subject matter 3

nightmare and attitudes in "Letters from the Earth" and the arrangement of "The Great Dark" suggest that Captain

Stormfield's dream should be grouped with the pessimistic writings of Twain's later years. Angels in "Captain in Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" resemble Milton's angels

Paradise Lost (1667), but Twain's heaven is reordered from

the versions of the Bible and Milton's art to be more nearly

consonant with human nature. DeVoto suggested parallels

for Captain Stormfield in the humorous literature of Mark

Twain's day; Wecter cited George Woodward's The Cities of

the Sun (1901) as a possible source. Twain's mature

attitudes toward blacks, Jews, extraterrestrial beings, and

humanity as a whole found their way into "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The final source is the

most nebulous but the most significant of all: a combi-

nation of Mark Twain's deep-seated fear of death and

dissolution and Mark Twain's strain of indomitable optimism.

Scholars since Twain's death have given only passing or

may slight notice to the Stormfield character, who indeed

seem insignificant if only his prototypal story, "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," is examined. His 4

numerous appearances, however, his pivotal function among several unfinished works, and his essential optimism must lead to an awareness of his significant role in Twain's fiction. Above all, this character throws new light on the ambivalent nature of Mark Twain the artist. PREFACE

The primary vehicle for the Stormfield character in

Mark Twain's literary productions, "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," had a peculiar history in its composition. Receiving its impetus from a dream Mark

Twain heard a garrulous sea captain tell in 1868, the long pigeonholed story finally appeared among Twain' s last 2 published pieces in 1907. In the intervening years evidence from letters and notebooks shows Twain's preoccupation with the story. In addition, the Stormfield character type appears in several of Twain's other published works. After the editorship of the Mark Twain

Papers had passed from Twain's official biographer,

A. B. Paine, to Bernard DeVoto, it came to Dixon Wecter who collected two more chapters of the "Visit," added them to the two published chapters, appended an introduction, and published "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" in

1952.

The Stormfield of "Extract from Captain Stormfield' s

Visit to Heaven" may be termed the prototype Stormfield because of his early appearance among all the Stormfield

i creations. The Stormfield of the first two chapters of the 1952 "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" may have existed as long as the Stormfield of Chapters III and IV, but the former does not carry with him the force of

Mark Twain's intent to publish. Yet considered together, these revisions of the Stormfield prototype suggest two key elements in my study and raise by implication a third.

The possibility that Twain wrote himself into the

Stormfield character is the first of three key elements.

All of the Stormfield characters contain two major personal characteristics, both of which may be considered a reflection of Mark Twain's own temperament. First, there is the attractive and humorous side of the captain's character. Second, there is the angry, wrong-headed aspect, present to a marked degree in every Stormfield character except the prototype, where the old fellow has a quality of deference rather than divisiveness. The second key element of the three is found in the prototype Stormfield's native milieu, heaven. The setting for the captain's adventures in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" suggests kinship with that of a certain amount of Mark

Twain's work which treats the ends and expectations of human existence. The third and final element is the

ii implication that Mark Twain's impulse to satirize fundamentalist Christianity through the captain's story may have arisen from a deep-seated discomfort with the tenets of a belief he could neither accept nor ignore.

If all the examples of the Captain Stormfield character in their delineations, settings, and adventures can be shown to be representative of the divided personality of

Mark Twain, then the Stormfield character becomes a vehicle for Mark Twain, the artist, in a new fashion. In the prototype story, Stormfield demonstrates his common humanity in a setting of finality. He is a believing, orthodox

Christian who discovers the Supreme Power did not mean the messages of the Bible as tradition has interpreted them; rather the Supreme Power is all-understanding of human differences of race, creed, and places of origin. Even aliens are welcomed in Stormfield's heaven. Stormfield's

God accepts individuality, humor, human failings, and even

impatience, the latter illustrated by Adam's lack of interest

in being wept upon by heavenly newcomers. Although

Stormfield is illustrative of the optimistic Twain, he is a character met in the most pessimistic of Twain's works.

Stormfield's experience in heaven is not duplicated by

iii Twainian characters on earth, a point which suggests utopia cannot exist here. In brief, the Stormfield character, because of its pervasiveness, its significance to Mark Twain, and its contradictory nature, may be seen as one that is far weightier than Twain scholars have admitted and as one that provides access to some of Mark Twain's artistic, religious, and philosophical thinking.

The length of time alone spent on the composition of

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" would

justify a study of the artist at work. No other book was begun so early in Twain's writing career, worked on inter- mittently over so many decades, and published so close to the end of his life. For forty years before publication,3

Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven existed

in manuscript form in a variety of drafts; the story of

the reworking is the subject of a study in itself. My

interest here, however, lies in the portrait of the blustery old sea captain, Eli Stormfield, also called Ben Stormfield

in his primary work,4 and does not lie presently in the history of the composition of the novella. Captain

Stormfield's character, though infrequently his name, appears

elsewhere in the body of Mark Twain's work. The approach of

this study, consequently, is first to examine the sources of

iv to the Stormfield story. A second province of interest is describe all appearances of the Stormfield character in the published and unpublished works of Mark Twain. Having shown the character's occurrences and types, I then draw conclusions which differ largely from conventional criticism on the unfinished short story. I close with a consideration of the meaning of the Stormfield character, of Stormfield's heaven, and of Mark Twain's ambivalence toward final things.

The two extant, and differing, published revisions of

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" first alerted me to the need for closer study of Captain

Stormfield. Discovery of the composition history and recog- nition of a certain hostility--a certain unwillingness to allow the old fellow any merit--among certain scholars gave added impetus to the continuation of my project. Finally,

close investigation of the corpus of Mark Twain's writings

indicated Captain Stormfield is a far more significant

creation than anyone among the critics has recognized.

Stormfield's existence draws attention to Mark Twain's

own affirmations which co-existed with Twain's raging

pessimisms. This essentially cheerful and positive char-

acter may reflect Mark Twain's own personality, always one

of diametrically opposing temperaments. Stormfield's v existence suggests the powerful lure to Twain of a character who could remain human even in death. Stormfield's existence calls for explanation when, for the past twenty-five years, scholars have dismissed or ignored the old sea captain.

The footnoting rationale of this study is determined by the printing history of "Extracts from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Before Mark Twain's death, the story appeared in book form in October, 1909, as Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven after initial magazine publication in December, 1907, and January, 1908, under the title "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."5 Under the same title and with the same text,

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" was included in the complete works editions of the next three decades (1916, 1922, 1929, the Author's National Edition, the rare Definitive Edition, and the Stormfield Edition, whose last volumes were dated in the 1930's). Dixon Wecter published a four-chapter version, adding two chapters to

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," and titled this short piece "Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven." Wecter combined "Stormfield" with an unpublished satire, "Letter from the Recording Angel," to make a new

vi book by Mark Twain, Report from Paradise (1952). In

1909 and 1952, two popular printings had appeared: Samuel

L. Clemens, The Famil Mark Twain (New York: Harpers,

1935), and M. Fisher and R. Humphries, eds., Pause to

Wonder (New York: Messner, 1944). After Wecter's edition,

Charles Neider printed the first edition version of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," reprinted from the Author's National Edition or from the two later

Complete Works, in Neider's The Complete Short Stories of

Mark Twain (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company,

Inc., 1957).

Normally, footnoting would refer to the text closest

to the author's intent; that is, in this case, reference

would be made to Mark Twain's book of 1909. However,

Wecter's printing in 1952 involved a re-examining of the

manuscripts, many of which are still extant and intact,

and the rejoining of the missing chapters with their orig-

inal. Therefore, Wecter's version seems to be the better

choice. The titles and differences in content between the

first edition and Wecter's revision should sufficiently

distinguish which part of the Stormfield visit is under

discussion. Prior to the recent publication of the first

volumes of the new definitive edition from the Iowa Center

vii for Textual Studies (Berkeley: University of California

Press), scholars cited the old Definitive Edition (1922-

1925). Consequently both editions are used here.

viii FOOTNOTES

'Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912), I, 362.

2 Samuel L. Clemens, "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," Harper's Monthly, 116 (December, 1907, and January, 1908), 41-49; 266-276.

3 Scholars differ on the date of composition. Several agree on 1868. See Henry Seidel Canby, Turn West, Turn East: Mark Twain and Henry James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951), p. 243, for a case in point. "One story which protected the religious mythology of the nineteenth century, he did write and it was among his best. He wrote it about 1868, and did not dare (or was not allowed) to publish it until forty years later."

4 Samuel L. Clemens, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," Report from Paradise, edited by Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952), p. 7.

5Clemens, "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," pp. 41-49; 266-276.

ix TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page PREFACE ...... -.-..-.-.-.-. .-.-..

Chapter

I. THE STORMFIELD PROTOTYPE...... 1

II. SOURCES FOR "EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN" AND "CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S VISIT TO HEAVEN"...... -..-.-. ... 23

III. APPEARANCES OF THE STORMFIELD CHARACTER...... 61

IV. STORMFIELD AMONG THE CRITICS ...... 98

V. STORMFIELD IN THE GREAT DARK ...... 119

VI. CONCLUSION...... 140

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... -.....-.. 142

1- -1 1 I A-M%.ul-lobau, Ataft CHAPTER I

THE STORMFIELD PROTOTYPE

Mark Twain's last years produced pieces of uneven achievement, the usual cause being attributed to Twain's disillusionment and despair. Henry Nash Smith traces the breakdown of optimism to the composition period of A

Connecticut Yankee (1889), believing Twain's strongest

feelings against "the damned human race" grew from that

time.1 An earlier critic than Smith, Henry Seidel Canby,

opined,

But when the creative memories of this youth dimmed and dulled, a brooding over a human race which simply did not, and would not, behave like a boy's dream but was stupid when it was not vicious, mean in its pre- tensions, hopeless in its future, captured a mind which under its gay fictions must have been sensitive to disillusion from the start. . . . He was born neurotic, which accounts for the brilliant sensitivity which makes his two finest books [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] master- pieces. Yet in the end neuroticism destroyed him as a creative artist. 2

In Hamlin Hill's recent work on the last ten years of Mark

Twain's life, Mark Twain: God's Fool, one finds Twain's

life worse than imagined and better than thought possible,

considering his many difficulties. Hill traces the feverish

1 2

activities of the aging Twain from the last years of

Olivia's life to Twain's peaceful death on April 21, 1910.

In Hill's final chapter certain illuminating generalizations about the problem decade (1900-1910) appear, dis- closing that the new picture of Mark Twain is in reality only an exaggeration of personality traits observable throughout his life, both in his artistic and imaginative worlds:

He was a man of contradictory impulses all his life. His business instincts, his literary activities, and his domestic relationships had always thrived in spite of tensions and anxieties which kept him guiltily introspective for decades and decades. An indisput- able and almost overwhelming sense of inferiority competed inside him with a vanity and an aggressive- ness that compelled him to seek the public spotlight whenever he could. . . . He moved insecurely in all the worlds he inhabited, much like the mysterious stranger in a dream world who obsessed him in his fiction. 3

Hill touches on the Twainian characteristics which may

have found their outlet in Captain Stormfield: "As they

grew older but no less dependent, his daughters became

more aware of his vanity, his unpredictable rages, and

his expectations for 'Mark Twain's daughters.''" Hill adds,

"His volatile temperament could explode without warning

and inflict exactly the injuries he attempted so stren- 4 uously to avoid." Speaking of Twain's interest in the 3

common man, Hill specifies three characteristics which

could apply to Captain Stormfield as well as to Twain:

"honest, unsophisticated, and imperfect."5 Yet after 1900,

"deaths, disloyalties and . . . old age" made him "crippled."

And "his vanity, fed by his court of worshippers, deflected

his energies"; "he was adrift like the derelict ship of

his poem and late fiction." 6

Hill has recently recommended fresh scholarship on

Mark Twain.7 Surveying the major areas of Twain's life

and art and the major critics of each, Hill fervently calls

for studies of dark periods and of the last period now that

new letters are available in The Mark Twain Papers and now

that enough time has elapsed: "The next generation of

Mark Twain scholars and critics ought to take nothing for

granted and should be able to reassess practically every

facet of their subject's life and work."8 He cites in

particular the very area this study undertakes to examine

in part: "Clemens's religious and philosophical ideas."9

Although "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" was published late in Mark Twain's life, its prin-

cipal character and its wit have been seen as more

emblematic of the younger Twain's religious ideas than the

older, an objection raised by some critics against 4

considering this work with "The Mysterious Stranger" or

"Letters from the Earth," for example, as a representative production of the last years. Hamlin Hill's new bio- graphical work has quashed that objection with his evidence

that the younger Clemens and the older Clemens shared

essential traits. Not only is it appropriate to consider

the "Extract" and its fuller version, "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven," along with the later works, but there is

also additional evidence of similarities among the late works in the recurrence of the witty sally in those works

generally accepted as pessimistic. Just as "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is predominantly humorous,

though its depiction of death and its resolution are not

particularly amusing, so such late works as "The Great

Dark," "Letters from the Earth," and "The Mysterious

Stranger" are predominantly pessimistic though they contain

witty elements.

The relationship between tears and laughter is as

central to Mark Twain's art as it is to humor itself. The

combination of pessimistic and optimistic elements in a

group of apparently unrelated works can be partly explained

through the Captain Stormfield character. If he is, as

this study attempts to show, a vehicle for good will, humor,

.:.. 5

and charitable impulses and if Mark Twain periodically chose to interpose these'character elements fictionally between man and fate, then the cause for the incomplete- ness of several works, including "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven," may be understood: Mark Twain never resolved his ambivalent views toward the nature of man,

God, and the universe. He could not finish a picture of utopia, and he could not write out polemics of bitterness to their finish.

Captain Ben or Eli Stormfield is based on a real seaman, Captain Edgar (Ned) Wakeman, the captain of the ship America, the ship on which Mark Twain cruised from

San Francisco to Central America on his way to New York in 1866.10 Twain was intrigued by the yarns of the old fellow, and probably on the return voyage to San Francisco between January and May, 1968,11 Mark Twain heard Wakeman' s dream, which inspired "Extract from Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven."

I knew Captain Stormfield well. I made three long sea-voyages with him in his ship. He was a rugged, weather-tanned sailor, with a picked-up education, a sterling good heart, an iron will, abundant pluck, unshakable beliefs and convictions, and a confidence in himself which had no discoverable limits. He was open, frank, communicative 6

affectionate, and as honest, simple, genuine as a dog. He was deeply religious, by nature and by the training of his mother, and a fluent and desolating swearer by the training of his father and by the necessities of his occupation. He was born in his father's ship, he had spent his entire life at sea, and had seen the edges of all lands and the interiors of none, and when I first knew him he was sixty-five years old and his glossy black hair and whiskers were beginning to show threads of gray; but there was no trace of age in his body, yet, nor in his determined spirit, and the fires that burned in his eyes were the fires of youth. He was a lovable man when people pleased him, but a tough person to deal with when the case was otherwise. He had a good deal of imagination, and it probably colored his statements of fact; but if this was so, he was not aware of it. He made no statement which he did not believe to be true. When he told me about his strange and uncanny adventures in the Devil's Race-Track--a vast area in the solitudes of the South Pacific where the needle of the compass is powerless to exercise its office and whizzes madly and continuously around--I spared him the hurt of suggesting he had dreamed the tale, for I saw that he was in earnest; but in secret I believed it was only a vision, a dream. Privately I think his visit to the Other World was a dream, also, but I did not 1 2 wound him with the expression of the thought.

This description provides the touchstone for finding other

Stormfieldian characters--despite certain variants that crept in over the years.

Stormfield is drawn from a tradition, developed in a large part by Mark Twain and his fellow humorists, of using a vernacular spokesman to comment on genteel society. 7

Henry Nash Smith, discussing this tradition, describes such figures as

indifferent to the competitive self-consciousness of an acquisitive society. They represent a gesture of escape from the pale negations and paler affirmations of the genteel tradition; they are the beginnings of an effort to express something worth expressing behind its back.1 3

In his own work Stormfield provides a cosmic prospective toward earthly society, its manners and mores, its religious practices and assumptions. He is a common man with uncommon confidence. Drawn from Mark Twain's own class of common men, Stormfield is refreshingly free from false piety or awe; at the same time, he trustingly sub- scribes to orthodox Christian dogma about heaven and the afterlife. The prototypal Stormfield meets an unorthodox heaven, and he adjusts his beliefs accordingly. This one example of Stormfield's flexibility is unique among the

Stormfield creations--with one exception when a

Stormfieldian Admiral, retired from captaincy but not from

sea voyages, is bested in an argument. That captain

retires from the fray but not with good grace.14 More

typical Stormfield behavior, in those versions of Stormfield

other than "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," is a

forceful unwillingness to be anything but right. 8

The Captain Stormfield of all versions shares some of Mark Twain's established personality traits. He is lovable yet fierce, given to rages and swearing. He loves talk, most of all when he is the author of it. He has a lifelong interest in Christianity and the Bible, simul- taneously feeling respect toward sacred matters and disrespect toward the Christian reluctance to challenge received opinion on theological truths. As a Twain surrogate in matters of personality, Stormfield represents the affirmative side of the writer's ambivalent nature.

The old Captain must be examined in his prototypal versions for evidence of his representativeness of Mark

Twain's nature, for evidence of his significance to Twain, and for evidence of his peculiar combination of affirmative views and angry rudeness.

In the latest version of the Stormfield story, known to the public in Report from Paradise, entitled "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," the Captain Stormfield of the first two chapters, those Twain suppressed, is a more aggressive, angry sort than the Captain Stormfield of the

last two chapters. He shows sympathy, remorse, and empathy, but he also shows prejudice and his familiar rude decisiveness. 9

The Captain's original story opens with the Captain's dying almost casually and setting off for parts unknown, though he firmly believes he knows his destination: Hell.

The earthly deathbed watchers--the mate and the carpenter-- both agree that the Captain's beliefs about his ultimate destination are correct. Chips, the carpenter, comments,

"He always said he judged he was booked for there." The

Captain, far from being dismayed at the beginning of his journey, is "pleased as a child, and wished I had something to race with."' 5

After his death, Captain Ben Stormfield's first human encounter is with a Jew, Solomon Goldstein. When the old

Captain sees the Jew crying, the seafarer naturally, being a Christian "trained to a prejudice against Jews," assumes the worst:

"Just like a Jew! he has promised some hayseed or other a coat for four dollars, and now he has made up his mind that if he was back he could work off a worse one on him for five. They haven't any heart-- that race--nor any principles." 1 6

When Stormfield confronts Goldstein about the imaginary coat, Goldstein tells him in dialect, "I wasn't crying about a goat"; instead, Goldstein has just realized he will never see his daughter again. Good-hearted Stormfield responds, 10

By God, it went through me like a knife! I wouldn't feel so mean again, and so grieved, not for a fleet of ships. And I spoke out and said what I felt; and went on damning myself for a hound till he was so distressed I had to stop; but I wasn't half through. He begged me not to talk so, and said I oughtn't to make so much of what I had done; he said it was only a mistake and a mistake wasn't a crime.1 7

The fictional culpability of the old sea captain described here is a reverberation of Huck's feeling at having wronged Jim or of Theodore's.feelings at being afraid to refuse to throw a stone at the old woman or at being fearful of visiting Marget when the townsfolk believe her bewitched. As evidence of Mark Twain's preoccupation with his own guilt over his real or imagined wrongs, this passage may be as important as others of the same tenor cited from his works. As evidence of excessive senti- mentality, this passage may qualify; but as evidence of a father's pain at his involvement in the disappearance or death of a daughter, this excerpt can hardly be ignored.

The suffering Goldstein ends the first chapter of the

Captain's adventures in space by saying,

"Poor little Minnie--and Poor me." And to myself [adds Stormfield] I said the same-- "Poor little Minnie--and poor me." That feeling stayed by me, and never left me.1 8 11

In a characteristic Twainian switch in tone, Chapter

II introduces Bailey from Oshkosh, a Republican to excess.

As Bailey's history unfolds, Stormfield and Goldstein hear the news that the newcomer has committed suicide.

Stormfield remarks, "You know, we had suspected it; he had a hole through his forehead that you couldn't have plugged with a marlinespike."19 Bailey has done away with himself over thwarted love, but he makes sure the upcoming election will not be lost to the Democrats by arranging a suicide pact with an honorable Democratic friend. Then, when

Bailey's Presbyterian conscience is bothering him, Goldstein forgets his own sorrows in the fun of the story:

But Solomon admired him, and thought it was an amazingly smart idea, and just gloated over him with envy, and grinned that Jew grin of intense satisfaction, you know, and slapped his thigh and said-- "Py Chorge, Pailey, almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian." 2 0

This group's fun is short-lived, however, when a newcomer,

Tom Wilson, flies alongside the three and reports that he wrote the letter Bailey received from Candace Miller,

Bailey's intended wife. The whole business had been a practical joke. When Wilson saw what Bailey had done,

Wilson too became a suicide. Bailey's lamentations at 12

his hasty behavior make everyone sorrowful. The Captain

comments about Bailey's wish to live again:

All no good, of course, and made us miserable to hear it, for he couldn't ever have his chance again forever--we realized that, and the whole ghastliness of the situation. Some people think you are at rest when you die. Let them wait, they'll see.2 1

Stormfield closes down the second chapter of the

portion Twain did not pass for print with general remarks

about the human nature of the company that has joined him.

Sam, the black man, voices concern repeatedly over

Stormfield's conviction that Stormfield's ultimate desti-

nation is hell:

He was as grieved about it as my best friend could be, and tried his best to believe it wouldn't be as hot there as people said. . . . He was a good chap, and like his race: I have seen but few [black men] that hadn't their hearts in the right place.2 2

Some of the other visitors Stormfield meets in Chapter II

during his first year of travel are not such attractive

people.

Some that were troublesome and disagreeable, and always raising Cain over any little thing that didn't suit them, I ordered off the course, with a competent cursing and a warning to stand clear.2 3

The man who runs off the "troublesome" ones with a

"competent cursing" is more nearly like the Abner Stormfield of Refuge of the Derelicts or the unnamed Stormfield of 13

"The Great Dark" than he is like the Eli Stormfield of the first edition, "Extract from Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven" (Chapters III and IV of Wecter's edition).

The course of the narrative changes in two major ways between Chapters II and III. First, the narrator changes from the dead sea Captain to the same Captain recounting his adventures to one Peters, a device implying that the visit has occurred sometime in the past without necessarily involving the death of the Captain. Second, the viewpoint of the narration is from the old Captain exclusively, not from an omniscient author.

The story is resumed after the journey has been in progress thirty years.24 The old Captain, now identified as Eli Stormfield, is traveling alone. He meets and races a comet carrying a cargo of passengers whom Twain euphemis- ,25 tically describes as heading for the "Everlasting Tropics."

The Captain finally sees lights in the distance and faints in his expectation that he has reached hell, only to awake at the portals of heaven. In the course of the head clerk's questions about the traveler's origin, Captain Eli

Stormfield demonstrates some humility of spirit, a quality visible in the earlier portion only in his admission of mistaken prejudice. After the surprising news that earth 14

is unknown here and that the largest planet of our solar system is known not as Jupiter but as "the Wart,"

Captain Stormfield finds his proper gate and is admitted.2 6

Captain Eli Stormfield of Chapters III and IV of

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is a good deal more gentle and deferential in his heavenly surroundings than his earlier characterization in Chapters I and II would have led one to believe possible. He quietly takes instruction in the rules of heaven from an old friend, Sam

Bartlett, and he as cheerfully abandons his preconceptions about eternal harping, singing, and praising as he abandons his assumptions about the necessary inactivity of heaven and even about its eternal bliss.27

Stormfield encounters choice about aging in heaven shortly after he meets his second instructor, Sandy

McWilliams. Sandy is an older angel who confesses to seventy-two years, an age he had held to since he took the option of changing ages shortly after he arrived in heaven twenty-seven years before. Sandy has discovered that the insights and wisdom of great age make youthful inexperience intolerable to him. Consequently, after three weeks of youthfulness, he returned, as he maintains all new angels do, to his age of greatest physical and emotional comfort. 15

"[A man] sticks at the place where his mind was last at its best, for there's where his enjoyment is best, and his ways most set and established." "Does a chap of twenty-five stay always twenty- five, and look it?" [asks Stormfield] "If he is a fool, yes. But if he is bright, and ambitious and industrious, the knowledge he gains. . . . [makes] him find his best pleasure in the people above that age; so he . . . will be bald and wrinkled outside, and wise and deep within."2 8

This utopian concept of agelessness has implications beyond its purpose in the Stormfieldian heaven. Sandy comments on age that

"Neither a man nor a boy ever thinks the age he has is exactly the best one--he puts the right age a few years older or a few years younger than he is. Then he makes that ideal age the general age of the heavenly people."29

Human discontent with what cannot be changed is universal. Heaven is described in several passages of

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" as the repository of mankind's ideals. Sandy McWilliams believes the concept of agelessness to be one of these.

Another ideal Sandy explains to Stormfield is eternal happiness. Twain portrays happiness as possible only if it exists in contrast to unhappiness--in short, as a relative experience. For that reason, suffering--one instance of which is described30--occurs in heaven so that its inhabitants can perceive the bliss of lack of suffering. 16

Religious beliefs pervade the Stormfield dream vision; so do politics. Stormfield himself, being a typical American, comes with the preconception that absolute equality would be the rule of external existence.

Sandy set him straight.

"Captain, you are happier than you would be, the other way. These old patriarchs and prophets have got ages the start of you; they know more in two minutes than you know in a year. . . . You would bore the patriarchs when you talked, and when they talked they would shoot over your head." 3 l

As an outgrowth of the inequality of the inhabitants of heaven, there are the divisions by rank in the benevolent

Kingdom. Sandy corrects Stormfield's erroneous beliefs in this area, also:

"You have got the same mixed-up idea about these things that everybody has down there. I had it once, but I got over it. Down there they talk of the heavenly King--and that is right--but then they go right on speaking as if this was a republic and everybody was on a dead level with everybody else, and privileged to . . . be hail-fellow-well-met with all the elect, from the highest down. . . . How are you going to have a republic at all, where the head of government is absolute, holds his place forever, and has no parliament, no council to meddle or make in his affairs, nobody voted for, nobody elected, nobody in the whole universe with a voice in government . . . ? Fine republic, ain't it?"3 2

The heavenly order of life is exactly reflective of the earthly human experience in that human fate is not controlled by human institutions, in that the inexorable 17

forces of the universe move on despite human hopes and wishes, and in that human beings must live in a world whose natural laws they never made. Even though the political order of power can alter the condition of some members of a given society, it had not, in Twain's time, brought about utopia or even equality for all. Under- lying this whimsical, unfinished tale is a degree of irony.

The closing passages of the story and of Chapter IV are devoted in part to the heavenly ranking of one

Billings, a tailor from Tennessee. He was unknown, unappreciated, and ignored when not mistreated on earth.

The heavenly authorities recognized his poetic productions, which were superior to Shakespeare's and Homer's, and prepared a place of honor for him in the heavenly procession, a parade by ranks. Several other examples of the contrast between earthly and heavenly importance of indi- viduals are mentioned, the last being the barkeeper whose arrival closes the tale. Because of his last-hour con- verson, the barkeeper expects great rejoicing in heaven and a torchlight procession. He receives both, and, in his honor, the appearance of two prophets, Esau and

Moses. 18

The gentle deference of the old Captain is particularly visible in the last two chapters; in contrast with the first two chapters, he seems less believable because he seems more than human. By virtue of the story's structure, Stormfield of the last two chapters is subordinated to the account of heaven. Yet it is the suppressed Stormfield who shares some easily recognizable personal qualities with Mark Twain.

The Stormfield prototype is emblematic of the Clemens personality in the longer version of the Stormfield story as published by Dixon Wecter, a combination of Mark Twain's approved section and two suppressed chapters, entitled

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The Captain Ben

Stormfield of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" (Wecter's Chapters I and II) matches the touchstone description of the old Captain34 as does the Captain

Eli Stormfield of Twain's version (Wecter's Chapters III and IV). In his flexibility and willingness to adjust his erroneous beliefs, he is a refreshing character; in his lovable yet fierce nature, his desire for talk, his interest in Christianity--in all these ways he reflects

Mark Twain. The prototypal story is amusing, gently satiric 19 of fundamentalist Christianity, and full of firm character and the Captain's heavenly experience. Representative of some of Mark Twain' s beliefs about religion and politics, race and human nature, this short novella can provide new insight into Mark Twain the artist. 20

FOOTNOTES

Henry Nash Smith, "Mark Twain's Images of Hannibal," Texas Studies in English, 37 (1958), 104.

2 Henry Seidel Canby, Turn West, Turn East: Mark Twain and Henry James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951), p. 251.

3 Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God's Fool (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 269.

4Ibid., pp. 270-271.

5Ibid., p. 272.

6Ibid., p. 273.

7Hamlin Hill, "Who Killed Mark Twain?" American Literary Realism, 7 (1974), 119-124.

8Ibid., p. 124.

9Ibid.

10 See Ray B. Brown, "Mark Twain and Captain Wakeman," American Literature, 33 (1961), 320-329.

11 See Chapter IV, p. 1.

1 2 Dixon Wecter, editor, Report from Paradise (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), pp. 1-2. 21

13 Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1962), p. 11.

14, Samuel L. Clemens, Roughing It in The Works of Mark Twain, Vol. II (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 403.

15 Wecter, pp. 4, 7.

1 6 Ibid., pp. 8-9.

1 7 Ibid., p. 9.

18 p. 10.

p. 12.

2 0 Ibid.

2 1 1bid p. 14.

2 2 Ibid, p. 16.

2 3 Ibid., p. 17. 22 2 4 Ibid,, p. 18.

2 5 Ibid. pp. 19-22.

26 Ibid., pp. 22-27.

2 7 Ibid., pp. 37-43.

2 8 Ibid., p. 47.

2 9 Ibid., pp. 48-49. 22

30Teoeisato The one instance of suffering described is that of an older woman seeking her child who died young. The cause of her despair is that the child has chosen to grow away from childish concerns and now has no interest in the mother. See pp. 49-53.

3 1 Ibid., p. 66.

3 2 Ibid., pp. 64-65.

3 Ibid., pp. 59-60; 82-84.

3 4 See above, pp. 5-6. CHAPTER II

SOURCES FOR "EXTRACT FROM CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S

VISIT TO HEAVEN" AND "CAPTAIN STORMFIELD'S

VISIT TO HEAVEN"

Mark Twain himself is the first but not necessarily the most reliable spokesman for what went into the making of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

Discussing the piece during the course of the autobiographical dictations (1906-1908), Twain said,

I was never willing to destroy "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Now and then, in the past thirty years, I have overhauled my literary stock and transferred some of it to the fire, but "Stormfield's Visit" always escaped. I am obliged to suspect that the hand of providence was in it. Secretly and privately I like it. I couldn't help it. . . .1

Twain had explained on another day that he "first knew

Captain Wakeman thirty-nine years ago. I made two voyages 2 with him and we became fast friends." Having described the Captain's notable characteristics and having referred to the places where he appears in Twain's work, Twain gave the Captain his just due for the idea of "Extract from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven":

23 24

Captain Wakeman had a fine large imagination, and he once told me of a visit which he had made to heaven. I kept it in my mind, and a month or two later I put it on paper--this was the first quarter of 1868, I think. It made a small book of about forty thousand words, and I called it Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. Five or six years afterward I showed the manuscript to Howells and he said, "Publish it." But I didn't. I had turned it into a burlesque of The Gates Ajar, a book which had imagined a mean little ten-cent heaven about the size of Rhode Island--a heaven large enough to accommodate about a tenth of one per cent of the Christian billions who had died in the past nineteen centuries. . . .3

Twain added about himself and the story of Stormfield that he "always concluded to let it rest." Where he thought

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" might see print was in the autobiography because "it is not likely to see the light for fifty years yet, and at that time I shall have been so long under the sod that I shan't care about the results."4 In a footnote to this same dictation,

Twain claimed to have burned the Stormfield manuscript three hours after dictation,5 but Bernard DeVoto explained that Twain, although he saw the piece as potentially shocking, never burned any of it.6

Twain's specific statement that he burlesqued

Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar is referred to by Helen Sootin Smith in a recent edition of Phelps's book: 25

Mark Twain carries the premises of The Gates Ajar to their logical conclusion, and builds a heaven far more democratic and international, if less genteel, than that of Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. The American section of Captain Stormfield's heaven is peopled largely by Indians. 7

Smith adds that "Mark Twain was the last writer to take

the book [The Gates Ajar] seriously enough for parody.""8

The Gates Ajar has a simple enough plot. Mary, the

narrator and sufferer, has her beloved brother killed in

the Civil War. As a result, much to the concern of her

spiritual advisors, Deacon Quirk and Dr. Bland, Mary has

lost her faith in a God who kills. Winifred Forceythe,

Mary's aunt and wife of a deceased minister, comes to visit

and stays to make a new home with Mary for herself and her

daughter, Faith. Winifred's learned and fervent discus-

sions of the Bible, the commentators, and the theologians

represent telling criticisms against believing in a literal

interpretation of the biblical description of heaven and

hell. Mary abandons fundamentalism and disbelief for

Winifred's unorthodoxy and belief.

Only one critic, Robert Rees, has documented extensive

similarities between Winifred's and Twain's portrayals of

heaven.9 Noting Franklin R. Rogers's work on "Extract from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" in Mark Twain's 26

Satires and Burlesques (1967), Rees agrees with Rogers's conviction that Twain did not produce a burlesque of The

Gates Ajar in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven";10 his thesis is that Twain borrowed concepts from the Phelps book in order to formulate his own utopian conception of heaven. Rees points out that the activities of the sainted are similar in The Gates Ajar and "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," that interest in astronomy occurs in both versions, and (an idea that Twain may have taken some delight in) that the great on earth would march in the heavenly parade far behind those who were only potentially great, an idea which very well could have come from Winifred Forceythe's "'To whomsoever a talent is given, it will be given him wherewith to use it.'" 1 1

Rees does not, however, identify other specific elements from The Gates Ajar, particularly Dr. Bland's sermon, which is organized in the traditional three-part structure so common to Protestant tradition:

"Heaven is an eternal state. Heaven is a state of holiness. Heaven is a state of happiness." 1 2

Mary reports in part the doctor's elaboration: 27

"What will be the employments of heaven?" "We shall study the character of God." He felt at moments, in reflecting on this theme, that the good brother who, on being asked if he expected to see the dead wife of his youth in heaven, replied, "I expect to be so overwhelmed by the glory of the presence of God, that it may be thousands of years before I shall think of my wife."--he felt that perhaps this brother was near the truth.1 3

Poor Mrs. Bland looked exceedingly uncomfortable.

Mary unsympathetically gives another part of the minister's explanation of the activities of the sanctified:

There was something about adoration, and the harpers harping with their harps, and the sea of glass, and crying, 'Worthy is the Lamb' and a great deal more that bewildered and disheartened me so that I could scarcely listen to it. I did not doubt that we shall glorify God primarily and happily, but can we not do it in some way other than by harping and praying?'4

While Dr. Bland represents the fundamentalist or orthodox view of heaven and Winifred represents the liberal, anti-Calvinist view, Mary, the recipient of both views during the time she loses her faith in God (the author of death) and regains her faith in God (the author of a utopian heaven) represents a skepticism towards any degree of God's love for man. Twain seems to use Dr. Bland's fundamentalism for burlesque and Mary's skepticism, perhaps for a reflection of his similar feelings, to be illustrated bitterly in his later years. 28

Captain Stormfield is portrayed, after all, as

expecting and receiving his halo, white robe, palm branch,

harp, hymnal, and wings as soon as he enters his proper

gate.15 It does not take the Captain long to see the ridi-

culousness of his singing and harping, and he, along with

millions of others, abandons his paraphernalia, except his

wings. Stormfield meets an old friend, Sam Bartlett,1 6

who explains the presence of the choir:

I'll set you straight on that point very quick. People take the figurative language of the Bible and the allegories for literal, and the first thing they ask for when they get here is a halo and a harp, and so on. Nothing that's harmless and reasonable is refused a body here, if he asks for it in the right spirit. So they are outfitted with these things without a word. They go and sing and play just about one day, and that's the last you'll ever see them in the choir. They don't need anybody to tell them that sort of thing wouldn't make a heaven--at least not a heaven that a sane man could stand a week and remain sane. .. *.17

The satiric connection among Stormfield's experience

with the choir, Sam Bartlett's explanation of heaven's

nature, and Dr. Bland's eschatology is clear. Not only

Mary's and Winifred's objections to Dr. Bland's sermon may have furnished Twain material for "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"; Bland's version of heaven could have prompted Twain's satire as well. 29

Mark Twain's impatience with the Protestant orthodoxy

in The Gates Ajar does not account in toto for his

satirical impulse. Early childhood religious training had

a strong, often negative, effect on Samuel Clemens, as

Dixon Wecter summarizes:

Presbyterianism and the Moral Sense it fostered-- with its morbid preoccupations about sin, the last judgment, and eternal punishment--entered early into the boy's soul, leaving their traces of fascination and repulsion, their afterglow of hell-fire and terror, through all the years of his adult "emancipation." He did not believe in Hell, but he was afraid of it. Even as a sensitive boy, harrowed by the stern ser- mons of those times . . . Sam Clemens appears to have been a silent rebel withal.18

Any boy habitually exposed to the orthodox view of

hell must have been equally familiar with the orthodox view of heaven. The passages from the Bible frequently

cited by fundamentalists account for the garb, activities

and situations of the sainted; Chapters four and five of

St. John's vision of heaven provide a case in point:

After this I looked, and, behold, a door was opened in heaven; and the first voice which I heard was as if it were of a trumpet talking with me; which said, Come up hither, and I will shew thee things which must be hereafter. And immediately I was in the spirit; and, behold, a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne. And he that sat was to look upon like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was a rainbow about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald. 30

And round about the throne were four and twenty seats: and upon the seats I saw four and twenty elders sitting, clothed in white raiment; and they had on their heads crowns of gold. . . . And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal. . . . And the four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying, Thou are worthy, 0 Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: . . . And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands: Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honor, and glory, and blessing.19

Mark Twain's resistance to an eternal life of harping and praising God the King, a stance so delightfully described in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven," may very well be related to those democratic impulses which made Twain oppose monarchy in any form.

Always the individualist and always a man conscious of his origins, Twain was fiercely an American in spirit.

Primary evidence from "Extract from Captain's

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" illustrates Twain's interest in astronomy, a science which attracted Twain in his last years. Albert Bigelow Paine explains: 31

He talked astronomy a-great deal--marvel astronomy. He had no real knowledge of the subject, and I had none of any kind, which made its ungraspable facts all the more thrilling. He was always thrown into a sort of ecstasy by the unthinkable distances of space--the supreme drama of the universe. . . . The astronomical light year--that is to say, the distance which light travels in a year--was one of the things which he loved to contemplate. . . .20

In Chapter I Captain Stormfield dies and sets out at a rapid pace which he soon knows is the speed of light. In

Chapter II he and his new associate, Goldstein, are astonished on waking the second day to see that they have not arrived:

"How far is it that ve haf come, Captain Stormfield?" "Eleven or twelve hundred million miles." "Ach Gott, it is a speed!" "Right you are. There isn't anything that can pass us but thought. It would take the lightning express twenty-four or twenty-five days to fly around the globe; we could do it four times in a second--yes sir, and do it easy." 2 1

In a book owned by Twain, two marginal notations seem directly related to Twain's plans for the Wakeman character. Jupiter is mentioned by Stormfield when he is trying to acquaint the authorities with the solar system of his origin; Twain's first related marginal note in The

Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy reads, 32

Wakeman finds that . . . these various worlds, except Jupiter . . . are no denser than water, the people . . . are very light, & able to walk on water. Jupiter offers a foothold as good as thick mud.2 3

The clerk vaguely recognizes the name of Jupiter, and it is

that piece of information that arouses the official's sus-

picion that Stormfield did not travel on his set course.

Stormfield dissembles but must own that he was racing with

a comet.24 Twain's related note appears next to a remark

in the text of Guillemin's book that comets slow to barely

three yards a second at aphelion:

Let W. meet it. W. look out for this slowing down in speed.2 5

The alembic of Twain's humor transformed a chance

encounter with a comet into a race reminiscent of the steam- boat races on the Mississippi. And Twain's heaven is so

far from earth in astronomical terms that Captain

Stormfield has been on his way thirty years before the race occurs.26 The Captain of the comet sequence is another rude, decisive person, but for all his nautical language27 he is not so much a reflection of Stormfield as he is of the tyrannical pilots of the Mississippi steamboats.2 8

Stormfield hears the curses of the crew and the billion passengers and the bets being taken on the winner, when, 33

fittingly enough, perhaps, the comet's captain shouts the

news that he is heading for the "Everlasting Tropics"

as he leaves Stormfield behind.

Twain's statement that Captain Ned Wakeman's character

and dream suggested "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"

and that Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Gates Ajar triggered

his scorn of the sentimental writer's "ten-cent heaven"

may explain in part the origins of "Captain Sotrmfield's

Visit to Heaven," but it may not be the entire truth. One

cannot ignore two short fantasies which neither Twain nor

Paine allowed to see print, and which Clara Clemens

Samossoud did not release for publication until 1962.30

"Letters from the Earth" and "The Great Dark" present two

additional related pieces of information on Twain's life-

long interest in dreams, death, and immortality. The

framework of "Letters from the Earth" gives the opening

setting in heaven for the purpose of the creation of man

and the "Law of God."31 The scene soon moves to earth, where Satan is taking his brief exile of a day (a celestial day of a thousand years) for exercising his impudent tongue.

From that vantage point Satan sends letters back to St.

Michael and St. Gabriel on "the Human-Race experiment."3 2 34

These letters present man's idea of himself, of God, of

heaven, and of hell from Satan's bias, a viewpoint which

the tone of the letters at first suggests is God's and the

other angels' as well. Satan, Twain's spokesman, finds man

severely lacking in any real conceptions of his nature,

God's nature, or man's ultimate fate. Satan's sarcastic

description of man portrays a race of ignoble beings doomed

to a life of evil and corrupting illusion. This nature of

the "damned human race" presupposes the creation (by man,

not God) of the fundamentalist heaven and the pursuit,

"beyond the tomb,"33 of hell. But Twain's satire of man

breaks off. Beginning with Letter IV, more and more space

is devoted to the injustices that God has perpetrated on

man according to the Christian record of His behavior, the

Bible, and according to man's bloody history. Satan shakes

his fist at God, the author of evil, disease, and

devastation.3 4

In contrast to Captain Stormfield's reverent opinion

that he is from the world "the Savior saved,"35 Satan in

"Letters from the Earth" holds only the Deity of the New

Testament responsible for the concept of hell.36 The Deity of the Old Testament is the exemplar, in his acts in Jewish

_ 35

history, of every vengeful act man is forbidden to do by

the Ten Commandments. 37 And the ultimate joy of man,

sexual intercourse, is denied him in the heavenly life in

any quantity to match female capacity and male interest by

a God who forbids adultery.3 8

What is the specific relationship of "Letters from

the Earth" to "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven"? While the former ridicules the orthodox concepts of man's nature, of God's nature, and of prospects for immortality, the latter depicts a utopian heaven. Insofar as Twain must have had an ideal from which he satirized man's inabilities or failures (or even God's), "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" attempts to delineate that ideal of an afterlife, though, it must be noted, Twain carefully omitted sexual congress from the joys of the blessed in the version of heaven which he published. Such an omission from "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" gains significance once its inclusion is observed in "Letters from the Earth." For a contemporary audience Twain voluntarily censored his views; for posterity he thought he could tell the truth.

"The Great Dark" is the second short fantasy which contains material related to the plot of "Captain Stormfield's 36

Visit to Heaven." The printing history of "The Great Dark"

is tangled. Bernard DeVoto completed editing several

unpublished Twain manuscripts for book publication by 1939; the title of the volume, Letters from the Earth, is also the title of the first selection. And "The Great Dark"

appears last. However, because of Clara Clemens Samossoud's

objections, the manuscript of the book was held up for twenty years. By 1962, Twain's daughter gave her permis-

sion, and the book was published. In the meantime, DeVoto had obtained permission to use "about 2,800 words" of "The

Great Dark" in Mark Twain at Work (1942). The first edition volume of Letters from the Earth carries the copyright date of 1962, and this posthumous volume contains a preface by

Henry Nash Smith dated 1962. "The Great Dark" with

additional editorial work is one of the eleven pieces John Tuckey prints in Which Was the Dream? (1967). These pieces have several characteristics in common: a man dreams for a short while and awakens believing as much as seventeen years have passed; his dream existence has become more real than his conscious existence, so much so that in some versions or in notes planning other unfinished versions, the main character, now white-haired, cannot recognize his

_ - 37

family when he awakens:39 a repetition of the familiar

Rip Van Winkle motif.

The dream arrangement of "The Great Dark," one of the two elements which relate the piece to "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven," does not match in specific content the adventures of the Captain in his own dream. The main character of "The Great Dark," Henry Edwards, believes that a mysterious personage, The Superintendent of Dreams, has appeared in Henry's bedroom and invited him to become small enough to sail on a whaler in a drop of water. The Super- intendent cautions Henry about the dangers of the trip, but

4 0 Henry is determined to make the trip with his family.

The adventures of captain, crew, and passengers on a whaler sailing in a cold darkness and beset by monsters compose the bare plot, but Henry's attempt to determine if he is dreaming or not and his encounters with The Superintendent of Dreams occupy a good portion of Henry's time and energy.

Brief character developments are given Henry's family, butler, nurse; and from the ship's personnel, the captain,

the second mate, Mr. Turner, and the ship's carpenter.41

Captain Stormfield's character, the second of the two

similar elements, is echoed by the second mate in Book I42 38

and repeated by the captain in Book II. Twain ascribes

to the Captain certain obvious Stormfield characteristics:

But a speech from the captain was the best entertainment the ship's talent could furnish. There was a character back of his oratory. He was all sailor. He was sixty years old, and had known no life but sea life. He had no grey hairs, his beard was full and black and shiny; he wore no mustache, therefore his lips were exposed to view; they fitted together like box and lid, and expressed the pluck and resolution that were in him. He had bright black eyes in his old bronze face and they eloquently interpreted all his moods, and his moods were many: . . He was fond of oratory, and thought he had the gift of it; and so did it with easy confidence. He was a charming man and a manly man, with a right heart and a fine and daring spirit.4 4

In addition to these two resemblances, "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "The Great Dark" can both

be seen as part of the attempts Twain made between 1896 and

1905 to relieve his despair. Associating "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" with the manuscripts of the

pessimistic period may seem doubtful at first because of

chronology; however, many manuscripts written in the dark

period contain ideas whose origins appeared long before.

Tuckey makes clear that a notebook entry for August, 1884,

foreshadowed "Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,"

which was written in 1905.45 DeVoto sees "The Great Dark"

concept as one of the significant and prevalent ideas of

Twain's artistic career: 39

It had been working in Mark's mind for a long time. As far back as 1882, when he revisited the Mississippi, he made a notebook entry in which the idea appears. Here, however, the scene is a balloon caught in a level of the upper air from which there is no escape. . . . I have some reason for believing that it may go back further than that--to the early stages of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." 4 6

DeVoto does not give specific reasons for this belief, but

the characteristics of the two pieces seem to give reasons

enough. "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "The

Great Dark" both deal in dreams and death or a deathlike

state, where darkness and cold are present. Whereas the

latter has abandonment and a foreboding of doom, the former

has a tone of optimism characteristic of Twain's early work;

yet both may have arisen from Twain's preoccupation with

dreams, the unconscious, and death. Such preoccupations

become central in the period of "The Great Dark"; 47 however,

death and violence are inescapably part of the material of

all of Mark Twain's work. Perhaps no critic has explained

Twain's interest in dreams more succinctly than Bernard

DeVoto, who spoke of Twain's hope that "reality may fade

into a Death and fate (the inexorable forces of

the universe) are treated in these two unfinished tales.

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is humorous; "The

Great Dark" is not. 4 9 40

Sources for "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" are not exhausted by examination of a dream related to Twain by

Captain Ned Wakeman in 1868, the distaste Twain experienced

while reading The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,

the resistance of the adult Clemens to the Calvinism of his childhood, and the related pieces, "Letters from the Earth" and "The Great Dark." Mark Twain's reading of Milton's Paradise Lost may well have furnished his idea of ranks

of angels and the concept of the undemocratic nature of heaven. The hierarchy of angels which Stormfield hears

of from his friend Sandy consists of many ranks:

There's not the shadow of a republic about heaven anywhere. There are ranks, here. There are viceroys, princes, governors, sub-governors, sub- sub-governors, and a hundred orders of nobility, grading along down from granducal archangels, stage by stage, till the general level is struck, where there ain't any titles.5 1

Scattered throughout Paradise Lost are passages that may have been recalled by Twain when he developed his idea of heaven. In Book V, Milton describes the orders: listing first "Ensigns," he adds "Orders and Degrees." After an "Imperial summons" sounds, Milton gives additonal titles:

Hear all ye Angels, Progeny of Light, Thrones, Denominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers. . . .52 41

Other members of Milton's heavenly hierarchy include "Regent powers" (V, 1. 697), "Seraphim" (V, 1. 804), and "Cherubim"

(V, 1. 102). Paradise Lost and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" share the common source of information about heaven, The King James Version of the Bible; but Milton, as he did with his portrait of Satan, elaborated on the limited description of heaven. Exercising his own artistic license,

Twain too took an essentially biblical version and reordered it to be more nearly consonant with human nature. The prospect of eternal bliss Twain saw as monotonous; the relative nature of happiness Twain saw as necessary; and the cultural bias that mythologized a heaven primarily for the earthly white man Twain skillfully exposed in "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven."

Elements of the Stormfield personality may be drawn from real and imagined people other than Captain Edward

(Ned) Wakeman. Bernard DeVoto in Mark Twain's America

suggested other related figures from the humorous literature of Twain's day, in the author's prior published work, and

in the dictations which awaited Twain's death for publication. A Captain Summons of the "Dr. Franklin" in A

Quarter Race in Kentucky by Sol Smith (1846); Ned Blakely 42

and Hurricane Jones, discussed in Chapter III; the

tyrannical pilots of Life on the Mississippi and the

softened pilots of the Autobiography: all these may be a

"foretaste of Captain Stormfield. "53

There is evidence that Mark Twain's lifelong interest

in equality prompted him to enlarge heaven for all those

who have died since mankind has been on earth and for all

living beings in the universe. Dixon Wecter's "Introduction"

to Report from Paradise begins with an unpublished review

Twain wrote of George Woodward Warder's book The Cities of

the Sun in 1901.54 Mr. Warder's placing of heaven in the

sun was evidently not to Twain's taste,55 but a heaven for

Americans about the size of the United States (not the

Phelps's Rhode Island size) was. Wecter comments, "This last detail Mark Twain applauded. Enlarging heaven to make room for billions, not just an elite corps of sectarians, always appealed to him."56 Not only was Twain' s heaven enlarged to admit all sects; part of its utopian nature is in its openness to all races and creeds, in fact to all extraterrestrial creatures. Captain Stormfield sees some of the latter when he arrives at the wrong gate: 43

Next! That meant for me to stand aside. I done so, and a skyblue man with seven heads and only one leg hopped into my place. I took a walk. It just occurred to me, then, that all the myriads I had seen swarming up to that gate, up to this time, were just like that creature.5 7

Another marginal notation in Guillemin's book seems to

relate to Twain's plans for Stormfield's meeting with other-

worldly creatures:

Let Wakeman visit the moon and find groveling beings who go naked, eat lava, don't breathe or drink-- are capable of sleeping through their night of a fortnight's length--or let them be intelligent and with strength to escape and well informed [sic] about us, whom they despise.5 8

The Frenchman, the black man, and the Jew all appear in

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," as do represen- tatives of other American minorities--Indians, Eskimos, and Chinese. Their presence gives additional evidence of

Mark Twain's utopian thinking: egalitarianism was one of his ideals, though he himself was not wholly free from prejudice. Consequently, a notable exception among living beings who are acceptable is the French. Mark Twain has his crusty Stormfield listen to a kind of alter ego who has been in heaven long enough to know its rules; Sandy

McWilliams tells Stormfield of his occasional visit to the

European section of heaven, where he seeks white company, 44

the American section being naturally a place where the white man over the ages had died a minority. Sandy notes the language barrier and says,

I even like to look at a Frenchman if I ever have the luck to catch him engaged in anything that ain't indelicate--but looking don't cure the hunger--what you want is talk.59

Mark Twain had an ingrained distaste for the French, and his many notebook entries on the subject usually treat the

Frenchman's moral laxity. An undated notebook entry near

January 31, 1897, comments acerbically: "The race consists 60onFbur19187Twi of human beings and French." On February 19, 1897, Twain

added: "Money cannot do everything. It failed to find the

6 1 man who could explain how the French lost their tails."

Nearly twenty years earlier, Twain had noted "Frenchman

speaking admiringly of a little girl--'What! Seven years 62 old and still virtuous? The little angel!'" Sprinkled

throughout the notebooks are disparaging references to the

French, providing evidence that Twain harbored an intense

and lifelong dislike for Frenchmen. Speculation has pro-

vided a reason: Twain did not care for their reputed

sexual laxity. And their engagement in supposed indeli-

cacies appears in one of the earliest and one of the 45

latest works of his writing career, "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

Contemporary America has been far more interested in

Mark Twain's attitude toward the black American than it has

in his peculiar prejudice toward the Frenchman. Arthur

Pettit has published three articles on that subject,

finding that Mark Twain was both a product of his age and

its attitudes, and enlightened for his time. Since

Captain Stormfield in the Wecter version encounters a

black man also heading for heaven, it is relevant to

examine some of Mark Twain's attitudes toward the largest

American minority. In a series of three articles divided

into chronological units of Mark Twain's early writing career, 1835-1860, 1861-1867, 1867-1869, Pettit has found that Samuel Clemens grew up with the typical racist attitudes of a Southerner, but Mark Twain, whom Pettit calls the most masterful creation among Clemens's characters, began seriously altering his prejudices in 1867.63 The beginning Mark Twain made toward "personal reconstruction" was never entirely successful, but, as Pettit points out,

"Mark Twain did try rather hard to at least publicly alter, if not privately abolish, some of his earlier prejudices."6 4 46

A strong index of Mark Twain's changing attitude is his

public use and later disuse of the pejorative nigger.

Privately in letters and notebooks he continued use of it

or its diminutive, "nigs.," but "on 15 March 1867 he used

'nigs.' for the last time in public print." 6 5 Changing

from "Repetitious, contrived, tedious, sophomoric, and

unconvincing" essays in the Alta California and the St.

Louis Daily Missouri Democrat on the humor of the black

man's character, Mark Twain began producing a different

kind of story for the Buffalo Express, writing columns

that demonstrated the writer was now committed to "at

least a modicum of physical justice for the Negro."66 And

it was the physical violence enacted against black humanity

that aroused Clemens's ire. Thus the additional

selections added by Wecter to "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" not surprisingly have Captain

Stormfield saying, "He was a good chap, and like his race:

I have seen but few niggers that hadn't their hearts in the right place." 67 Mark Twain, like nearly all white

Americans of his time, was paternalistic at best; yet he was also the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Since a Jew appears in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven," it is of interest to see the lack of Twainian 47

prejudice toward the world's most maligned group; in his essay "Concerning the Jews," Twain said he could think of no harsher comment he could make about the Jews than to say

they were members of the human race. Susy Clemens explained her father's feeling about Jews through an anecdote; when

Mark Twain was asked why he had never used Jews for comedy,

Susy gives his answer:

Papa, at first did not know himself why it was that he had never spoken unkindly of the Jews in any of his books, but after thinking awhile he decided that, the Jews had always seemed to him, a race much to be respected; also they had suffered much, and had been greatly persecuted, so to ridicule or make fun of them, seemed to be like attacking a man that was already down and of course that fact took away whatever there was funny in the ridicule of a Jew.6 8

The last source to be examined in the search for the

origins of Captain Stormfield and his adventure in heaven

is the one least amenable to documentation. This source

is in Mark Twain's mind, his attitude toward dreams (night-

mares), and his view of the great dark of death.

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" repeats a

familiar sentiment of Mark Twain's on dreams.

We had to stop and think a minute, when we woke, before we came fully to ourselves and realized our situation, for we thought we had been dreaming. In fact it was hard to get rid of the idea that it was all a dream. But we had to get rid of it, and we did. Then a ghastly cold shock went through 6 9 us--we remembered where we were pointed for. 48

Stormfield and his traveling companion believe their

current situation to be a bad dream; Mark Twain returned

again and again to the hope that life itself is a night-

mare from which one can awake to find the worst horrors are

not true. John Tuckey draws.on the familiar Twain imagery

in two of his chapter titles in Mark Twain's Fables of Man:

"The Dream of Brotherhood" and "The Nightmare of History."

Before the twentieth century, points out Tuckey,

the author had come to suspect that the brotherhood of man was unattainable; that man's desire for power was stronger than his desire for love; that selfishness, not altruism, determined human actions.70

In brief, Twain pessimistically believed human history

would repeat itself because of the nature of man. Yet in

the late work containing another Stormfieldian, Admiral

Stormfield of Refuge of the Derelicts, Twain put in a

character conscious of the possiblities of brotherhood:

George Sterling. The Admiral himself is caring for the

derelicts in a brotherly fashion, irascible as he may be while going about it. 7 1

The dream motif is of an ideal, even of an utopia, as

is "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The nightmare is of human nature, damning mankind to repeat his errors through foolishness, greed for money and power, and simple

. 49

hatred. The nightmarish portion of human existence includes

death with its prospect of nothingness and release from

life, a hell on earth, or with its prospect of eternal

punishment, the "pursuit beyond the tomb."

Yet Tuckey sees evidence that Mark Twain was not

wholly given over to despair:

What might otherwise be the unrelieved pessimism of [his] outlook is mitigated by humor and irony and by the tenderheartedness that is in contention with the work's tough-mindedness.72

Mark Twain dreamed of utopia but lived with ordinary

human existence. Whether he believed his own existence

to be wholly nightmarish, Tuckey, in pondering this question,

observes,

One who considers Twain's view of the human predicament and then thinks of his Stormfield-like qualities of irascibility, compassion, and resoluteness can only imagine what [given the chance to live again] he would have [done]. 7 3

Though "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is a light piece of writing, its elements of death, religion, dream sequence, and the nature of the human condition tie it firmly to the body of Mark Twain's better work, just as the variety of appearances of the Captain Stormfield prototype shows the crusty old seaman to be as much a Twain favorite as Huck and Tom. 50

In his essay "Noon and Dark," Bernard DeVoto describes

Huck as a

distillation of the humble minds of humble folk. In him the shrewdness, common sense, skepticism, endurance, staunchness, and realism of the ordinary man, the great man of Americans of that era and society, find expression--as well as areas of darkness superstition, fear, ignorance, and suspicion. . Huck is also Mark Twain's surrogate, he is charged with transmitting what that dark, sensitive, and complex consciousness felt about America and the human race.

Setting the Captain Stormfield character alongside

Huckleberry Finn in the pantheon of Mark Twain's most

successful character delineations may seem unwarranted if

not plainly mistaken. If Stormfield's appearances were

limited to a single work dealing only, as "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" seems to do, with an imagi-

nary dream of heaven, then the character could be more

easily dismissed. If his appearances were confined to the

human interest and entertainment of Mark Twain's early

letters to the Alta California, travel letters describing

"characters," possibly in the Theophrastian and eighteenth century tradition, one could still find him interesting but not significant. However, whether the Stormfield persona is Wakeman, Ned Blakely, Hurricane Jones, Eli or Abner

Stormfield, he is also Simon Wheeler and the unnamed

- - 51

Captain of the ship in "The Great Dark." Simon Wheeler of

one characterization is in "The Jumping Frog," done before

Twain met Edgar (Ned) Wakeman; but the Simon Wheeler of the

Captain Stormfield tradition occurs later75 and is an

example of the Stormfield prototype. The multiplicity of

examples of his occurrences, the numerous notebook entries

about him or "Si Wheeler," and the functions of the char-

acter in the pieces named all indicate a portrait that

deserves close study. If, indeed, Stormfield is, like

Huck, a Mark Twain surrogate, his characteristics of good

will, good humor, resolution, confidence, and righteous

anger at human behavior make him a happy choice to con-

front the great dark of death. Ignorant and prejudiced,

honest and stubborn, the Stormfield character in his best

delineations interposes some of humanity's best impulses

between man and the great dark of death and dissolution.

The basic ambivalence of Mark Twain toward the nature of existence, so amply illustrated in his working notes for "The Great Dark" and in elements of burlesque in the unfinished story itself,76 has been soundly denigrated by the critics as a story of wishy-washy behavior on the part of an unlearned man, not as the humanity flesh is heir to.

The subtle suggestion underlying "Extract from Captain

, _- 52

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" that the joke is, after all,

about death and its resolution keeps the small story from

being always laughable; the nihilistic portions of "The

Great Dark," another dream sequence about death, represent

some of the parts of Clemens's artistic psyche only now

being more fully documented by Twain scholars: those parts

that tragically underlie all great humor.

Twain explained the origin of Stormfield and his dream

adventure as having come from an encounter with Captain

Edgar (Ned) Wakeman and from Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's

The Gates Ajar. My research indicates that ideas about

heaven in Dr. Bland's sermon in The Gates Ajar may have

been specifically burlesqued by Twain, a point not men-

tioned by Rees. Other sources are evident in Mark Twain's

Calvinistic heritage, in his late-developing interest in

astronomy (as documented by marginalia in his scientific books), and in his experiences with the tyrannical pilots on the Mississippi River. Material in "Letters from the

Earth" and characters in "The Great Dark" as well as attitudes in "Letters from the Earth" and the nightmare arrangement of "The Great Dark" suggest that Captain

Stormfield's dream should be grouped with the pessimistic manuscripts of Twain's later years. Angels arrange 53

themselves in a fashion similar to the hierarchy in Milton's

Paradise Lost, but Twain reorders the heaven of the King

James version of the Bible and of Milton's art to be more

nearly consonant with human nature. DeVoto suggested par-

allels for Captain Stormfield in the humorous literature

of Mark Twain's day; Wecter cited George Woodward's The

Cities of the Sun as a possible source. Twain's mature

attitudes toward blacks, Jews, extraterrestrial beings,

and humanity as a whole found their way into "Extract from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The final source discussed here is the most nebulous but the most signif-

icant of all: a combination of Mark Twain's deep-seated

fear of death and dissolution and Mark Twain' s strain of

indomitable optimism. 54

FOOTNOTES

'Autobiographical Dictations, August 30, 1906. Mark Twain's dictations to various stenographers began in 1885. Bernard DeVoto, "Introduction," Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), pp. vii-viii, xxii, characterizes the complete typescript of the dictations, from whose pages he chose parts which A. B. Paine did not print in Mark Twain's Autobiography, as "interspersed . . . with trivialities, irrelevances, newspaper clippings, and unimportant letters . . . [yet] decorated with his prejudices and enhanced by the precision of his prose." The quoted passage in my text was cancelled in typescript by Twain but is still legible. Bernard DeVoto omitted this dictation on "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" in 1906. See below. I examined and recorded this material, which is in The Mark Twain Papers, University of California, Berkeley. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

2 Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), p. 244.

3Ibid., pp. 246-247.

4lbid., p. 248.

5Autobiographical Dictations, August 29, 1906. Examined and recorded at The Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley.

6 De Voto, Mark Twain in Eruption, p. 248n.

7Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Gates Ajar, edited by Helen Sootin Smith (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press, 1964), p. xxiiin. 55

8 bd 8Ibid.

9 Robert A. Rees, "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven and The Gates Ajar," English Language Notes, 8 (1970), 197-202.

10 Rees, p. 197, citing Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain's Satires and-Burlesgues (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 32.

1 Ibid., p. 199, citing Phelps, p. 107. Rees sees similarity in this passage by Phelps and Twain's arrangement of Billings' marching ahead of Shakespeare and others.

12 Phelps, p. 49.

13lbid.

'4 Ibid.

'5 Samuel L. Clemens, Report from Paradise, edited by Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1952), pp. 33- 34.

16 Rees, p. 202, points out that Twain and Winifred, the liberal aunt, both portray friends as reunited.

17 Wecter, p. 41.

18Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952), p. 88.

Revelation 4:1-4, 6, 10-11; 5:11-12 (A.V.) Minnie Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1964), p. 207, accepts Twain at his word, as reported by Paine, when the writer claims to have "'read the Bible Through before I was fifteen.'" 56

2 0 Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography, III, 1500.

21 Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 7, 11.

AAmedie Guillemin, The Heavens: An Illustrated Handbook of Popular Astronomy (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1878). These marginalia were examined and recorded at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

23 Ibid., p. 234.

24 Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 26-27; 18-22.

25 Guillemin, p. 252.

26 Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 20-22.

27 Ibid., p. 22.

28 Cf. Samuel L. Clemens, Life on the Mississippi, (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923), pp. 164-170.

29 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 22.

3 0 Samuel L. Clemens, "Letters from the Earth" and "The Great Dark" in Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962), pp. 3-55; 235-284. See the preface by Henry Nash Smith, dated 1962, in Bernard DeVoto, editor, Letters from the Earth (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1942), pp. vii-ix and the "Bibliographical Note," p. 303.

3 1 "Letters from the Earth," p. 4.

32 Ibid., p. 7.

33 Ibid., p. 45. 57

34 Ibid., 30-34.

35 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 25.

36 "Letters from the Earth," pp. 44-45.

37 Ibid., p. 51.

38Ibid., pp. 39-42.

39 Samuel L. Clemens, Which Was the Dream? edited with an introduction by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 1-24.

40 Ibid., pp. 102-150.

4 1 Letters from the Earth, pp. 238-254.

42 See Chapter III, pp. 70-71.

43 Tuckey, p. 19.

44 Letters from the Earth, pp. 280-281.

45 Tuckey, pp. 1, 430.

46 Bernard DeVoto, ed., Letters from the Earth, editorial notes, p. 296.

7Tuckey, p. 17.

4 8 Bernard DeVoto, "Symbols of Despair," Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 155. 58

4 9 Burlesque elements are in "The Great Dark" as they are in so many of Twain's works, even including Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in "The Great Dark" there are, for example, the miscalling of the nautical terms and the coffee cup business with The Superintendent of Dreams. However, "The Great Dark" was not meant to be a comic story. See Tuckey, Which Was the Dream? p. 19. 50 Minnie M. Brashear, Mark Twain: Son of Missouri (New York: Russell & Russell, Inc., 1964), p. 213, cites Twain's river reading of Milton's Paradise Lost.

51 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 65. 52 John Milton, Complete Poems and Major Prose, edited by Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957), Book V, 11. 587, 591, 600-601. Further references are in the text.

5 3 Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain's America (Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1932), p. 258.

54 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. ix. 55 However, in the dream of heaven which appears in Simon Wheeler, Detective, Simon goes into the sun immediately after death. See III, p. 68.

56 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. ix.

57 Ibid., p. 25.

58 Guillemin, pp. 144-145.

5 9 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 78. 59

60 Typescript Notebook 32a, January 31 and February 19, 1897, in The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

6 1Ibid., February 19, 1897.

6 2 Typescript Notebook 14, February 26, 1879-September 8, 1879. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

63 Arthur G. Pettit, "Mark Twain's Attitude Toward the Negro in the West, 1861-1867," The Western Historical Quarterly, 1 (January 1970), 51-62; "Mark Twain, Unrecon- structed Southerner, and His View of the Negro, 1835-1860," The Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal, 7 (April 1970), 17-28; "Mark Twain and the Negro, 1867-1869," Journal of Negro History, 56 (April 1971), 88-96.

64 "Mark Twain and the Negro, 1867-1869," p. 88.

65 Ibid., p. 89.

66 Ibid., pp. 91, 95, 93. Pettit cites "Only a Nigger," Buffalo Express, August 26, 1869, as typical of Twain's changed journalism. The use of "Nigger" in the title of that work does not invalidate Pettit's generalization. Twain is not using the term in his own voice.

67 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 16.

68 "Susy Biography of SLC," unpublished papers, p. 121. Examined and recorded at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

6 9 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 11. 60

7 0 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Fables of Man, edited with an introduction by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972) , "Introduction," p. 16.

71 Ibid., "Refuge of the Derelicts," pp. 157-196.

7 2Ibid., pp. 3-4.

73. Ibid., p. 29.

74 Bernard DeVoto, "Noon and Dark," Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 99.

75See Chapter III, p. 85.

7 6Tuct Tckey, Which Was the Dream? p. 19. CHAPTER III

APPEARANCES OF THE STORMFIELD CHARACTER

In order to demonstrate the significance of the

Stormfield character, it is necessary to examine his appearances in the published and unpublished journalism and fiction, in some manuscripts never approved for print, and in certain writings relating to the Stormfield adventures. The existence of the Stormfield character in the fertile Twainian imagination can be traced through notebooks and letters. Stormfield reappears in the late dictations.

Finally he saw print in the last years of Twain's life.

Although Twain kept back "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" because the work was probably proscribed by Olivia Clemens,1 she did not suppress his other published versions of the Stormfield character. In

Mark Twain's Alta California and Chicago Republican letters, vivid descriptions are given of the Captain Ned Wakeman of the ship America:

61 62

With his strong, cheery voice, animated countenance, quaint phraseology, defiance of grammar and extra- ordinary vim in the matter of gesture and emphasis, he makes a most effective story out of very unprom- ising material. . . . He is fifty years old, and as rough as a bear in voice and action, and yet as kind- hearted and tender as a woman. He is a burly, hairy, sun-burned, stormy-voiced old salt, who mixes strange oaths with incomprehensible sailor phraseology and the gentlest and most touching pathos, and is tattooed from head to foot like a Fejee Islander.

His tongue is forever going when he has no business on his hands, and though he knows nothing of policy or the ways of the world, he can cheer up any company of passengers that ever travelled in a ship, and keep them cheered up. He never swears where a lady or a child may chance to hear him--but with all things consonant with the occasion he soars into flights of fancy swearing that fill the listener with admiration.2

Anchored in the harbor of Panama, we found in the opposition steamer, America, in command of Captain Ned Wakeman, 'Mariner for forty years.' I made voyage with him once. . . .

He was as tempestuous of exterior, as hearty of manner and as stormy of voice as ever--and just as good a man as exists anywhere. His legs, and arms, and back, and breast, were just as splendid as ever with grand red and blue anchors, and ships and flags and goddesses of liberty, done in the perfection of the tattooing art. . . .3

Minnie Wakeman Curtis published her father's log in

1878; in the introduction, she describes her father, quotes from Twain's letter on Wakeman to the Alta California, and elaborates Twain's description: 63

Upright and honest in work and deed, simple and pure in heart and habits, he was yet not a believer in the Christian creeds; he had faith neither in the supernatural nor the miraculous, and would accept no man's demonstration where he could not solve the problem with his own reason; but he held faith in a future life, and in a Great Unknowable; or rather, like the Indian, as he himself would prefer to say, he believed in the Great Spirit of whom save through nature, he knew nothing. . .5

Citing Twain's description that ends with the expression,

"tattooed from head to foot like a Fejee Islander," Minnie Wakeman Curtis explains in a footnote her father's tattoos:

Between the knee and ankle of one leg was tattooed in colors a figure of the Goddess of Liberty, holding the American flag and standing beside a cannon; between the knee and ankle of the other was a large ship under full sail; upon his arms were the names of his wife and each of his children, that of the baby whom he lost being upon a tombstone with a tree bending over it; he had a figure of Christ upon the cross and various Masonic symbols, besides numerous wristlets, bracelets, anklets, garlands, and other devices.6

Mrs. Curtis's observation that the real Captain Wakeman was not a believer in miracles was borne out in the Stormfield yarns; in the Stormfield character's actions, however, there is indication of a belief in the supernatural, as Mr.

Curtis admits in averring that Wakeman subscribed to a

"Great Unknowable."

In Roughing It (1872) the character type appears, but

Wakeman has here been transmuted into Captain Ned Blakely. 64

Twain introduces him as the hero of a story that illustrates

primitive justice. Blakely finds his "pet" black man

killed by a bully in the Chincha Islands, one Bill Noakes, who thinks himself the "best man in the islands."7 When

Blakely sees that no other man is willing to apprehend,

try, and execute Noakes for a crime all have witnessed, he cheerfully does the task himself, reading four chapters from

Genesis to the man with a noose around his neck. Twain closes the tale with the news of its reception in California:

It did not diminish the captain's popularity in any degree. It increased it, indeed. California had a population then that 'inflicted' justice after a fashion that was simplicity and primitiveness itself, and could therefore admire appreciatively when the same fashion was followed elsewhere.9

The "simplicity and primitiveness" of Captain Blakely's behavior is characteristic of Ned Wakeman and Captain

Stormfield. The bluff, hearty, nautical language of the man certainly recalls Wakeman:

Lad, you are about to go aloft and give an account of yourself; and the lighter a man's manifest is, as far as sin's concerned, the better for him. Make a clean breast, man, and carry a log with you that'll bear inspection. You killed the nigger?1 0

And Twain's description of Blakely cinches the similarity: 65

Capt. Ned Blakely--that name will answer as well as any other fictitious one (for he was still living at last accounts, and may not desire to be famous)-- sailed ships out of the harbor of San Francisco for many years. He was a stalwart, warm-hearted, eagle- eyed veteran, who had been a sailor from early boyhood. He was a rough, honest creature, full of pluck and just as full of hard-headed simplicity, too."

Also appearing in Roughing It is a retired Admiral whose demeanor and attachment to yarns strongly suggest

Stormfield. But the admiral's most Stormfieldian characteristic is his unwillingness to be bested in any argument.

When he meets his match, however, he uncomfortably with- draws from debate.1 2

Some years later (1877) Twain published three pieces entitled "Some Random Notes of an Idle Excursion" in the

October, November, and December, 1877 Atlantic Monthly.

In one of the installments Captain Hurricane Jones is described by the narrator (Twain), who had traveled with him four times. Once again the essential Wakeman is given:

He is a very remarkable man. He was born in a ship; he picked up what little education he had among his shipmates; he began life in the forecastle, and climbed grade by grade to the captaincy. More than fifty years of his sixty-five were spent at sea. He had sailed all oceans, seen all lands, and borrowed a tint from all climates. When a man has been fifty years at sea he necessarily knows nothing of men, nothing of the world by its surface, nothing of the world's learning by its A B C, and that blurred and 66

distorted by the unfocused lens of an untrained mind. Such a man is only a gray and bearded child. That is what old Hurricane Jones was--simply an innocent lovable old infant. When his spirit was in repose he was sweet and gentle as a girl; when his wrath was up he was a hurricane that made his nickname seem tamely descriptive. He was formidable in a fight, for he was of powerful build and dauntless courage. He was frescoed from head to heel with pictures and mottoes tattooed in red and blue India ink.

He was deeply and sincerely pious and swore like a fisherwoman. He considered swearing blameless, because sailors would not understand an order unillu- mined by it. He was a profound biblical scholar-- that is, he thought he was. He believed everything in the Bible, but he had his own methods of arriving at his beliefs.]l3

For example, Captain Hurricane Jones has a wrongheaded explanation for the story of Isaac14 and the priests of

Baal: Isaac burned the wood and water by using petroleum and a match. This story is told to a Reverend Peters; 1 5 interestingly enough, the unidentified auditor in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" is named Peters also.

Franklin R. Rogers's printing of Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques (1967) collects several bits and pieces into "The Simon Wheeler Sequence." The main character of the drama "Simon Wheeler: Detective," which is part of the sequence, resembles Captain Stormfield in two respects: his guise and his innocence. Simon Wheeler is the leading 67

character in a farce which turns on Wheeler's naivete.

During the course of the play, he masquerades as an old sailor,16 a Negro, and an Irish washerwoman, all trans- parent covers for his detecting. The innocence of Ned

Wakeman and Captain Stormfield is apparent in this character.

Earlier in the 1960's Rogers edited the novelistic version of the same character's story, Simon Wheeler:

Detective.17 Chapter Ten of the piece contains "Si Wheeler's dream visit to Heaven"8 and, according to Roger's careful dating of the respective manuscripts, postdates the aborted play which appeared in Roger's "Simon Wheeler Sequence." 1 9

Roger's research bears out the fact that Simon Wheeler closely resembles Ned Wakeman, who is in turn the basis for Captain Stormfield. William Dean Howells wrote Twain on October 31, 1877, "Why not fairly and squarely retire an old sea-dog, and let him take to detecting in the ennui of the country? This is what you first tho't of doing. ."20 Rogers points out that after losing interest for a time, Twain returned to the idea of completing

Simon Wheeler by September 15, 1879, when he wrote Howells to suggest they join in writing a play with "'Old Wakeman

(Amateur Detective) ' in it." 2 ' 68

But the undeniable evidence of Wakeman's dream being

used by Twain for Simon Wheeler is in Chapter Ten itself.

The man now named Captain Simon Wheeler has religious views

similar to those of the Captain Stormfield character:

The Captain had profound religious views, and their breadth equaled their profundity. He did not get his system from the pulpit, but thought it out by himself, after methods of his own. One may get an idea of it from a dream which he professed to have had once, and which he was very fond of telling about.2 2

Specific similarities and dissimilarities between "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and the dream sequence of

Simon Wheeler, Detective can be isolated. Though Captain

Stormfield dies, travels to heaven, and remains there to

describe the customs and the country, Simon Wheeler dies,

travels, and gains only the heavenly portals. Both char-

acters are "whizzing"23 off at an extremely rapid rate

shortly after dying. In the later piece Twain gives the

rate as the speed of light.24 While Captain Stormfield

first finds himself "in the sun,"25 Simon Wheeler "pass[es]

a sun."26 Each character continues in space for a long while, but Captain Stormfield uses part of his thirty years racing a comet;27 Simon Wheeler takes seven years

simply passing many suns and comets.28 Each arrives at heaven alone, Stormfield having inexplicably lost Solomon 69

Goldstein and a black man named Sam, who kept him company

in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,"29 and Wheeler

having traveled alone since death.30 At the heavenly

portals, Stormfield sees jeweled gates and an infinitely

long gold wall; 31Wheeler finds only a jeweled wall.32

There is a good deal of difficulty in Stormfield's getting

admitted, but not because of the state of his spiritual

health;33 Wheeler's dream climaxes with his being admitted

without the proper papers identifying him as a certified

member of a religious sect.34 Finally, both captains had

expected another, more fiery conclusion.35

Rogers notes the "obvious connection" between "Extract

from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," the title of

the version published before Wecter prepared Report from

Paradise, and "Simon Wheeler's dream visit to heaven." 36

The additional points of similarity and dissimilarity between the chapters Wecter added and the Simon Wheeler story which are here noted have not been mentioned elsewhere.

Another example of the Stormfield prototype appears in the captain of the ship in "The Great Dark." He shares characteristics with Ned Blakely as well as Ned Wakeman and Captain Stormfield in that he is able to affect 70

circumstances drastically with the force of his personality.

In his speech to would-be mutineers, his imagery resembles

that of Colonel Sherburn's speech in Huckleberry Finn when

the lynch mob loses its force, although the imagery is used

to a different purpose here:

You have mutinied two or three times, boys. It is all right--up to now. I would have done it myself in my common-seaman days, I reckon, if my ship was bewitched and I didn't know where I was. Now then can you be trusted with the facts? Are we rational men, manly men, men who can stand up and face hard luck and a big difficulty that has been brought about by nobody's fault, and say live or die, survive or perish, we are in for it, for good or bad, and we'll stand by the ship if she goes to hell! . . . Are we men--grown men--salt-sea men--men nursed upon dangers and cradled in storms--men made in the image of God and ready to do when He commands and die when He calls--or are we just sneaks and curs and carpenters! (This brought both cheers and laughter, and the captain was happy.) 3 7

The second mate, Turner, picks up other Stormfield char-

acteristics. In his respect for the supernatural, he

portrays Captain Stormfield. For example, in describing

the monsters the ship keeps encountering, the mate speaks

thus:

Lord, it's good to be in the light, sir, said Turner, rustling comfortably in his yellow oilskins, it lifts a person's spirits right up. I've noticed that these cussed jimjam blatherskites ain't as apt to show up in the light as they are in the dark, except when you've got the trouble in your attic pretty bad. . . . Land, hear the wind, don't she sing! And

_ ; , _ 71

not a sign of motion!--rip goes the sleet again! . . . Dern that jimjam, if I had him in here once I bet you I'd sweat him. Because I don't mind saying that I don't grab at him as earnest as I want to, outside there, and ain't as disappointed as I ought to be when I don't get him, but here in the light I ain't afraid of no jimjam.3 8

Stormfield had little patience with miracles but great

respect for the Heavenly Authorities--a form of supernatural

belief.

The longest and most recently published piece related

to the Stormfield character is "The Refuge of the

Derelicts."39 Admiral Abner Stormfield is the main char-

acter, and Twain himself identifies his relationship to the

Stormfield prototype in his dictation of August 30, 1906:

I have mentioned an unfinished book which might be entitled "The Refuge of the Derelicts." In the manuscript the story has no title but begins with a pretty brusque remark by an ancient admiral who is Captin Ned Wakefield [sic] under a borrowed name. 40

The "brusque remark" is given elsewhere by Twain as "Tell him to go to hell!""4 1

Admiral Abner Stormfield embodies certain of the

Stormfield characteristics. George Sterling, a poet who hopes to raise a monument to Adam, finds out about old

Stormfield from David Shipman, a man whose presence in the 72

story is not explained, after George had been roughly

cursed at the beginning of Chapter I:

Now I will post you about the Admiral. He is a fine and bluff old sailor, honest, unworldly, simple, innocent as a child--but doesn't know it, of course-- knows not a thing outside his profession, but thinks he knows a lot--you must humor that superstition of course--and he does know his Bible, (just well enough to misquote it with confidence,) and frankly thinks he can beat the band at explaining it, whereas his explanations simply make the listener dizzy, they are so astronomically wide of the mark; he is profoundly religious, sincerely religious, but swears a good deal and competently--you mustn't notice that; drinks like a fish, but is a fervent and honest advocate and supporter of the temperance cause . . . ; he thinks he is deep, and worldly-wise, . . . and not to be seen through by any art, whereas he is just glass, for transparency--and lovable? he is the most lovable old thing in the universe. 4 2

In a change of viewpoint, an omniscient narrator relates

that now the character is aged: he is eighty, having spent

seventy years at sea. Born at sea, he had no formal education. Decided in his opinions, he gives way very little, but Twain notes that what his opinions "lacked in soundness they generally made up in originality.43 Varying some from the earlier descriptions of Stormfield and from Ned

Wakeman, this old fellow drinks grog and loves his pipe.

The Captain Stormfield of Wecter's edition wishes to lghta ppe,44 to light a pipe,4 and in the version Twain selected from his manuscripts, "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit 73

to Heaven," "an old baldheaded angel by the name of Sandy

McWilliams" and Stormfield "used to lay around, warm after-

noons, in the shade . . . to talk about all kinds of things

and smoke pipes." 4 5 Thus the Stormfield prototype is a

smoker not a blasphemer; Ned Wakeman swore but did not

drink or smoke; and Admiral Stormfield swears, drinks, and

smokes.

The Admiral's retirement with his cousin, Aunt Martha,

and an orphaned grand-niece, Jimmy, is preoccupied with

collecting derelicts--failures in life who need a home;

David Shipman explains the situation to George Sterling:

Life's failures. Shipwrecks. Derelicts, old and battered and broken, that wander the ocean of life lonely and forlorn. They all drift to him; and are made welcome. . . . They drop in on him, whenever they please, and he comforts them. A poor old pathetic lot.4 6

Some derelicts the Admiral feeds, some he helps financially, but for the most part he simply provides the shipwrecks with a place to go for socializing. Running his home like a ship, the Admiral retains a boatswain for a "sailor-butler."4 7

The Admiral's kindliness is as strong as in the earlier versions of the Stormfield character, but in certain passages his pathos becomes maudlin and his good cheer has almost escaped him. He is still a great talker, not 74

comfortable sharing the spotlight; however, his essential

humor is not so apparent. His great interest is his black

cat, Bagheera, and his entertainment is exercising a por-

tentous judgment on arguments or debates that develop among

the house's company. A humorous device used by Twain years

before in "Some Random Notes of an Idle Excursion" reap-

pears in "The Refuge of the Derelicts." In the former piece

"an ancient whale-ship master" begins a tale of shipping

out with a man who later becomes governor. Years later,

the old sailor wins a handy bet by claiming he can approach

the governor at an inn, be recognized, and be asked to sit

down. The company's enjoyment of the story is stopped by

a pale young innocent who asks, "Had you ever met the

governor before?"48 As the company gathers at other times

for talk, the innocent each time breaks the spell of the yarns by his "death blow to further conversation,"49 asking questions of equal import. Finally, another old sea captain,

Captain Tom Bowling, begins a Jim Smiley kind of story, eventually fetching up at a good metaphor. Twain says,

Everybody, landsmen and all, recognized the descriptive neatness of that figure, and applauded, which greatly pleased the old man. A moment later, the meek eyes of the pale young fellow heretofore mentioned came up slowly, rested upon the old man's face a moment, and the meek mouth began to open. 75

"Shet your head!" shouted the old mariner. It was a rather startling surprise to everybody, but it was effective in the matter of its purpose.5 0

In "The Refuge of the Derelicts," Admiral Stormfield

is as garrulous as these old sea captains. After dinner he

holds forth on Satan as a sacred personage. Gathered

around him are Cousin Mary, Jimmy, the Marchesa di Bianca--

a derelict--and George Sterling, the poet-narrator. As the

Admiral inexorably presses his logical argument that the

Bible is holy, that Satan is in the Bible, and that Satan must then be holy, the marchesa says unpleasantly, "Putting

buttons in the contribution plate don't make them holy."5 1

The grand-niece smooths over the remark, and the Admiral begins again on Satan. A second time the marchesa speaks rudely, and

the Admiral turned a warning eye upon her and put the ends of his thumbs and of his middle fingers together in the form of an open mouth--for a moment, then impressively brought the parts together, thus closing that mouth. The marchesa closed hers. The Admiral resumed.5 2

"The Refuge of the Derelicts" is related to other pieces on Stormfield and heaven or "The Great Dark" in ways other than similar language and events. Before the story breaks off, Mark Twain springs his "tragedy-trap." Having again changed the point of view, this time to George's diary, 76

Twain gives George's account of "Plum Duff"53 night in his

last chapter. A tolerated but disliked minister, called

"Lo-What-God-Hath-Wrought" by the bosun (Lo for short),

reads a story about the benevolence of nature while Edgar

Billings, an amateur naturalist, shows "living pictures'' for

illustration. The pictures strike the audience with horror,

for a hungry female spider is kindly provided by nature with

her mate for food. When her offspring hatch, they begin

their first meal on her. Before they finish, a wasp immo-

bilizes her with a sting and stuffs her in a hole for baby

wasps to feed on. The spider remains alive while the wasps

gain their nourishment.

Straightway the revolting banquet was pictured upon the screen, the larva munching its way, most comfortable and content, into the spider's vitals, and the helpless spider feebly working its legs and probably trying to think of a grateful sentiment to utter [to benevolent Nature] that would not sound too grossly insincere.5 4

The "view of the human situation"i55mplicit in the

spider-wasp parable marks a similarity between "The Refuge of the Derelicts" and "The Great Dark" manuscripts; as well, as Tuckey notes,56 the story of a ship's captain's foregoing grog for three years on a temperance pledge, only to find on his return to shore that the temperance group had 77

blackballed him, appears in "The Refuge of the Derelicts" and in "The Great Dark" itself.57 The idea of the derelicts' drifting purposelessly to the Admiral evokes the whole body of unfinished writing Twain did on the general theme of "The

Enchanted Sea-Wilderness," a story that treats "the region of endlessly circling storm in the center of which there is perpetual calm--and stagnation and death." 5 8

Among the unpublished manuscripts59 in The Mark Twain

Papers is "Captain Stormfield Resumes," a piece which sheds additional light on Stormfield. Sandy, who is in the extant published "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," converses with Stormfield in "Captain Stormfield Resumes" after

Stormfield and Sandy "had been in heaven some time." By taking thought, they "whiz" wherever they want to go. The distances in heaven are so great, Sandy explains, that they cannot be expressed in miles; even Professor Higgins cannot do it. Sandy identifies Higgins as a former astronomy professor at Harvard. Twain has Stormfield interrupt to ask whether that were the man's job when he died. Sandy answers yes and reproves Stormfield for the density of his question, adding that the man could not have had the job after death. Stormfield replies that soldiers remain soldiers 78

after death and that they even breed. "There's eleven million dead soldiers drawing pensions at home, now--some

that's been dead 125 years--& we've never had these millions on the payroll since the first Fourth of July." 60

The manuscripts are in some measure repetitious, and between Twain and Wecter the best portions have probably already been printed. Two related unpublished manuscripts shed additional light on the Twainian preoccupation with

Captain Stormfield. "Mental Telegraphy?",61 a separate work from the one of the same title that appears in In

Defense of Harriet Shelley and Other Literary Sketches, records another of the seemingly extrasensory experiences

Mark Twain had during his lifetime. In this account, Twain relates having his memory jogged on hearing Bernard Shaw read a piece later to be published in Collier's Weekly.

Twain explains that "[i]t was an account of the translation to heaven of a dissipated old woman of the hard-working class, and some of her experiences there."62 Twain had thought of his own writing about heaven in "Extract from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.t " Briefly reviewing the composition of the "account of the translation to heaven of an uneducated and uncultivated old seaman, and certain of his experiences there," Twain explains that Shaw's

_ _ 79

article "reminded me several times of my own, particularly in treatment--a flowing free-handed treatment, not much embarrassed by shopworn conventions." However, on examining his story, Twain discovered the expected similarities were not present. He added,

The answer presently dawned dimly above the horizon of my memory, then rose bright and clear: they were in a never-printed extravaganza which I wrote in Germany seventeen years ago, entitled "The Late Rev. Sam Jones's Reception in Heaven" . . I was ever so fond of that "Reception" article, and dearly wanted to print it, but it was hilarious and extravagant to the very verge of impropriety, and I could not beguile my wife into consenting to its publication. 63

The headnote on the manuscript of "Mental Telegraphy?",

"written in 1907,"64 is in a handwriting different from that of Twain, yet internal evidence from "Mental Telegraphy?" sets the final time of rewriting of "Extract From Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" close to the time of publication and implies confirmation of the headnote date on the manuscript of "Mental Telegraphy?":

Several months ago I examined "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" again. It seemed to be about ripe, so I sent it to Harper's Monthly [sic] for the Christmas number, labeling it "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Three weeks ago I read and revised the proofs, and struck out one or two of the Captain's 80

adventures and by today the magazine is printed and waiting for delivery day.6 5

"The Late Rev. Sam Jones's Reception in Heaven" was

a result of the peregrinations of a real Sam Jones in the

American South, where he was, according to Twain, "converting

the unconverted here and there and everywhere with his

thundering torrents of piety and slang." Twain just begins

to discuss content before breaking off:

I represented him as approaching the new Jerusalem in the through express, and in the same pullman in which he and his feet together were occupying two chairs, sat his grace the late Archbishop of Canterbury (Mr. Tail) and I.66

Franklin R. Rogers cites one additional related piece,

"The Story of Mamie Grant, the Child Missionary" (1868) .67

First printed by Rogers in 1967, "Mamie Grant" was composed

about the same time as the first draft of "Extract from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Rogers cites the

autobiographical dictation dated August 29, 1906, where

Twain gives the composition date of "first quarter of 1868"

for "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," but Rogers questions this date because of Twain's letter

to Orion, on March 23, 1878: "'Nine years ago I mapped out my Journey to Heaven.'" Thus, "Extract" would have been composed first in 1869. "Mamie Grant" was certainly 81

composed in 1868,69 and Twain may have confused this work

with "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"

when he spoke of those early writings so many years later.

"Mamie Grant" is based on The Gates Ajar by Elizabeth Phelps

in specific ways; "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit

to Heaven" is not:

The essential structure is the same in both works: Mamie Grant seizes every opportunity to whip out a tract and summarize its contents; Auntie Winifred can scarcely mention a subject without immediately fortifying her position with a passage or a work from an apparently quite complete library of religious and theological works.7 0

Edith Colgate Salsbury has printed Susy Clemens's precocious biography of her father along with a running account of Mark Twain's life, many times using Twain's words from his letters. About 1886, or perhaps late 1885, Susy, in her eccentric spelling, discussed her father's writing:

He said he had written more than he had ever expected to, and the only book "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" that he had been partickularly [sic] anxious to write was one locked up in the safe downstairs, not yet published.7 1

The one reference in a letter to Orion about "Journey to Heaven" (an earlier title for "Extract from Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven") is supplemented by ten letters to Howells, letters which refer to Stormfield, Wheeler, or 82

Wakeman, and one letter of pertinence to the Stormfield

story from Howells to Twain.

Mark Twain told Orion in the letter of March 23, 1878,

that he had given the story

a deal of thought from time to time. After a year or more I wrote it up. It was not a success. Five years ago I wrote it again, altering the plan. That MS is at my elbow now. It was a considerable improvement on the first attempt, but still it wouldn't do--last year and year before I talked frequently with Howells about the subject, and he kept urging me to do it again. . . . Mind I have never altered the ideas, from the first--the plan was the difficulty.7 2

Selected letters from the exchange between Twain and

Howells on Stormfield, Wakeman, or the character's other

appellations, or on derelicts and Twain's plans for a disaster story can be grouped with the letter ot Orion

Clemens: all attest to the growth of the Stormfield character and the Stormfield material.

Three letters from Twain to Howells treat the specific manuscript that became "Extract from Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven" or the development of Wakeman-Wheeler into Stormfield. The first, of June 27, 1878, quotes in a slightly changed form Twain's notebook plans for a piece on Wakeman in heaven: 83

"Have all sorts of heavens--have a gate for each sort. Wakeman visits these various heavens. One gate where they receive a barkeeper with artillery salutes, swarms of angels in the sky, & a noble torchlight procession. He thinks he is the lion of Heaven. Pro- cession over, he drops at once into solid obscurity. But the roughest part of it is, that he has to do 30 weeks' penance--day & night he must carry a torch and shout himself hoarse to do honor to some poor scrub whom he wishes had gone to hell." 7 3

Twain adds that he wishes he were "writing that Wakeman

book." Smith and Gibson explain editorially that Twain broke

off "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" with

the barkeeper and that "there is no indication that he ever continued it." 74 The strong connection between Wakeman, who became Stormfield, and Wheeler is evident in a later letter from Twain to Howells, dated September 15, 1879, the second of the three that discuss the manuscript or the character:

Say--a friend of mine wants to write a play with me, I to furnish the broad-comedy cuss.--I don't know anything about his ability, but his letter serves to remind me of our old projects. If you haven't used Orion and Old Wakeman (Amateur Detective), don't you think you & I can get together & grind out a play with one of those fellows in it? 7 5

The fumbling, ineffective nature of Orion, described so exasperatedly by Twain in another letter to Howells,7 6 may account for the less than dynamic aspect of Simon

Wheeler as a detective; the assertive, old yarn-teller 84

Wakeman may account for the Stormfield character's

confidence, even in his wrong-headedness. The third letter,

the one that cites a specific manuscript of "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, " is a late letter of June 17,

1906. After expatiating on the joys of dictating, Twain

speaks of the "fat" he plans to enter in his autobiography,

"fat" which I or editors didn't das't to print. For instance, I am dumping in the little old book which I read to you in Hartford about 30 years ago & which you said "publish--& ask Dean Stanley to furnish an introduction; he'll do it." 78

Four letters from Twain to Howells and one from Howells

to Twain deal with the writing of "Cap'n Simon Wheeler,

The Amateur Detective,"79 and one notes the incident from

"Some Random Notes of an Idle Excursion." The first of the group from Twain to Howells is dated June 27, 1877, and contains Twain's brief comments that he had begun a comedy that day, "principal character, that old detective." 8 0

The second, of July 4, 1877, reports on progress and pre- maturely claims the play is finished in a postscript dated

July 6, 1877; a second postscript contains the sentence,

"I meant it for a comedy--but it is only a long farce. "81

In the first part of the letter, Twain speaks to his enthusiasm: "Never had so much fun over anything in my

. - - - - 85

life--never such consuming interest & delight."82 Franklin

R. Rogers's comments on the composition of the play and of

the novel, both of which have Simon Wheeler as the main

character, are pertinent here: "The surviving documents do

not indicate whether Twain's faith in his play was shaken

by the adverse reactions of the producers and actors to

whom he showed it."83 The third letter of the "Cap'n Simon

Wheeler" group, July 11, 1877, announces the real completion

of the play, and this letter describes "altering, amending,

rewriting, cutting down."84 Henry Nash Smith comments

editorially that Twain's enthusiasm for the play was to

undergo diminution later; the manuscript indicates "much

more cancellation and revision than Clemens's MSS usually

do."85 Smith also speaks to the development of the Simon

Wheeler character, finding similarities with the "good-

natured, garrulous old man in the ghost town of Angel's

Camp who tells the story of the jumping frog" and with

"Clemens's conception of his brother Orion."86 Though the

name "Simon Wheeler" was used in "Jumping Frog," Mark Twain had not yet met Captain Edgar (Ned) Wakeman when he named his first Simon Wheeler.87 Twain closes the letter by explaining his title for the play: "My wife won't have

Balaam Ass: therefore I call the piece 'Cap'n Simon Wheeler, 86

the 8 8 Amateur Detective.'" In the fourth letter of the

Wheeler group Twain identifies the source of the amateur

detective's name: "My Wheeler's name is taken from the

old Jumping Frog sketch."89 While the name is the same,

Simon Wheeler of play and novel owes something of his

making to Wakeman and perhaps, as Henry Nash Smith suggests,

to Orion, as well as to the fictional windbag of Angel's camp.

The Howells letter, frequently cited by Mark Twain

scholars who have worked at all with the Captain Stormfield

character, speaks of Twain's further plans for the sea-

captain characters:

I've thought somewhat about your amateur detective, since I came home. It seems to me he ought to be as like Capt. Wakeman as you can make him. Why not fairly and squarely retire an old sea-dog, and let him take to detecting in the ennui of the country? This is what you first tho't of doing, and I don't believe you can think of anything better. I want the story for the Atlantic.9 0

Howells evidently saw value in the character of Simon Wheeler-

Wakeman, even though Twain's play was not a successful treatment of Wakeman's inherent possibilities.

Mark Twain's interest in Wakeman's dream and Wakeman's character continued. On October 15, 1881, Twain wrote

Howells: 87

I am hard at work on Capt. Ned Wakeman's adventures in heaven--merely for the love of it; for laws bless you, it can't ever be published. At least not unless I trim it like everything & then father it on some good man--say Osgood. This is my purpose at present.9 1

This same letter contains observations about outer space,

remarks that seem related to material that found its way

into "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven":

[ Twichell] mentioned that a Yale scientist believes we shall contrive a way to communicate with the people in other planets by & by--(by my system of Mental Telegraphy, maybe.) No other way will be possible, because only thoughts could be trans- mitted-- not language, since neither of us could understand the other. As for myself, I have no difficulty in believing that our newspapers will by and by contain news, not 24 hours old, from Jupiter et al--mainly astronomical corrections & weather indi- cations; with now & then a sarcastic fling at the only true religion.9 2

The Twain marginalia in Amedie Guillemin's book on astron- omy93 concerned plans to have Wakeman visit Jupiter. Jupiter

figures in the Twain version of the admission to heaven

scene. Also the rapidity of movement over astronomical distances94 and the use of psychic powers are both in "Extract

from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Stormfield moves to his own sector of heaven by wishing himself there.9 5

Finally, Twain seemed to have believed there was a

K 88

"sarcastic fling at the only true religion" in this book

that could never be published.

Nearly two years later Twain may have been working at

the Wakeman adventure again. On March 1, 1883, Twain wrote

Howells on the pains of living in Europe and included a few

sentences unrelated to the topic of the paragraph, except

that the Clemens's European life was full of "hellishnesses":

Do you forget that heaven is packed with a multitude of all nations and that these people are on the most familiar how-the-hell-are-you footing with Talmadge swinging around the circle to all eternity hugging the saints and patriarchs and archangels, and forcing you to do the same unless you choose to make yourself an object to remark if you refrain? Then why do you try to get to heaven? Be warned in time.96

Talmadge "hugging the saints" is also in "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven."

The last of the group of letters to Howells referring to Wakeman, Wheeler, Stormfield, or Stormfield material is a far sadder letter of January 22, 1898, 97 after the several catastrophic experiences of Mark Twain's life. The first must have been his brother's death, the second his son's death, the third his bankruptcy, and next the death of his daughter Susy:

About the last time I saw you I described to you the culminating disaster in a book I was going to write (& will yet when the stroke is further away)-- a man's dead daughter brought to him when he had been 89

through all other possible misfortunes--& I said it couldn't be done as it ought to be done except by a man who had lived it--it must be written with the blood out of a man's heart. I could not know, then, before leaving [on the globe-encircling lecture tour] how soon I was to be made competent. I have thought of it many a time since. If you were here, I think we could cry down each other's necks, as in your dream. For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in (total) eclipse. 9 8

Appearances of Captain Stormfield under his own name or different appellations occur throughout the works. Pre- occupation with the character can be traced through the letters, notebooks and unpublished manuscripts. Some appearances of the character have remained unnoticed.

Isolating the delineations that fit the basic description of the Captain suggests Twain gave far more attention to the character than critics have noticed.

,..... ,.. tia;.4; . ;W - .,m-- . 90

FOOTNOTES

Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. xx.

2 Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane, Mark Twain Travels with Mr. Brown (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), Letter II, December 20, 1868, p. 22.

3 Photostat of "A Genuine Old Salt," The Chicago Republican (August 23, 1868), col. 4, examined at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley. The newspaper page number was not available.

4. Minnie Wakeman Curtis, The Log of an Ancient Mariner, Being the Life and Adventures of Captain Edgar Wakeman Written by Himself and Edited by His Daughter (San Francisco: A. L. Bancroft, 1878).

5lbid., p. 6.

6Ibid., p. 7.

7 Samuel L. Clemens, Roughing It (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1922), IV, 69.

8 Wecter, p. xi, describes the source as "random chapters" from the Bible.

9 Roughing It, p. 75.

1 0 Ibid., p. 74.

1 Ibid., p. 68.

1 2 Ibid., p. 403. 91

1 3 Samuel L. Clemens, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923) , XIX, 261-262.

14 Twain explains in a footnote that Isaac is "The captain's own mistake." Elijah (I Kings 18) called down heavenly fire.

15"Some Random Notes," Tom Sawyer Abroad, p. 263.

16 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, edited with an introduction by Franklin R. Rogers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 248.

1 7 Samuel L. Clemens, Simon Wheeler, Detective, edited and with an introduction by Franklin R. Rogers (New York: New York Public Library, 1965). Rogers reprints this work in Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, pp. 312-444.

18 Ibid., p. xii.

9 l Ibid.., pp. xvi-xxi.

2 OIbid., p. xvi.

2 1 Ibid., p. xix.

22 Ibid., p. 137.

23 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 4; Rogers, ed., Simon Wheeler, Detective, p. 138.

2 4 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 7.

26 Rogers, p. 138. 92

2 7Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 18-22.

28 Rogers, p. 139.

2 9Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 23; the extra characters are not in the version Twain prepared for publication.

30 Rogers, pp. 138-142.

3 1Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 23.

32 Rogers, p. 139.

3 3Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 23-33.

34 Rogers, pp. 138-142.

3 5Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 23; Rogers, p. 140.

3 6Rogers, notes, p. 189.

3 7 Tuckey, Mark Twain's Which Was the Dream?, p. 150. Tuckey, p. 19, sees a similarity between this speech and Huck Finn's "I'll go to hell!" Samuel L. Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Gabriel Wells, 1923), XIII, 297.

38 Ibid., p. 113.

3 9 Samuel L. Clemens, "The Refuge of the Derelicts," Mark Twain's Fables of Man, edited with an introduction by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 166-248. 93

4 0 Autobiographical Dictations in The Mark Twain Papers, August 29, 1906, University of California at Berkeley, p. 1195. This material adds to the dictation of the same date in Bernard DeVoto, Mark Twain in Eruption (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), p. 198. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manufacturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

41 Ibid., p. 1196.

4 2 "The Refuge of the Derelicts," p. 166.

3Ibid.,p. 167.

4 4 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 15.

5Ibid.,p. 43.

4 6 "The Refuge of the Derelicts," p. 186.

47 Ibid., p. 190.

4 8 "Some Random Notes of an Idle Excursion," in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories, pp. 247-250.

4 9Ibid., p. 256.

50 Ibid., p. 258.

5 1 "The Refuge of the Derelicts," p. 193.

5 2Ibid., pp. 193-194.

Ibid., p. 244. 94

4Ibid.,pp. 247-248.

55 Tuckey, editor's headnote to "The Refuge of the Derelicts," p. 161.

5 6 Ibid., pp. 159-160.

57 Ibid., p. 159.

58 Ibid., p. 161.

59 Among the unpublished Mark Twain Papers at The University of California at Berkeley reside the holograph, typescript, xerox, or photostated versions of published and unpublished Captain Stormfield manuscripts. Material found complete or coherent enough for publication is scheduled to appear in the series issued by the University of California Press. The manuscripts boxed together under Stormfield's name are, exactly as they are titled, 1) "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," twenty-six holographs pages, Wecter's Chapters I and II; 2) "Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," sixty-six photostated, holograph pages (original manuscript is at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City); 3) "From Captain Stormfield's . Reminiscences," nineteen holograph pages; 4) "Capt. Stormfield Resumes," eleven holograph pages; 5) "Capt. Wakeman's Travels in Heaven," photostat of one holograph title page; 6) "Extract from Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," seventy-eight typescript pages; 7) "Christmas Story for Harper's Monthly, 1907," one holograph title page; and 8) "Extract from Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," followed by "related to" in a different handwriting, presumably A. B. Paine's, three holograph pages. A typescript version of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," (#1 above) which comprises Dixon Wecter's Chapters I and II in Report from Paradise, has at the top of its first page a note in Mark Twain's handwriting, "& Hell." Paine added an additional note, "About 1900. A later beginning. Not used." The contents of each of these specific manuscripts are largely available through published 95

versions, with the exception of "Captain Stormfield Resumes." The long manuscripts of sixty-six and seventy- eight pages are versions of the first edition, with minor changes of wording and punctuation. Presumably, the histories of the title pages and short false starts will be cleared up by the textual scholars at the Mark Twain Papers. I examined the material at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

60 "Captain Stormfield Resumes," pp. 2-4. See above, manuscript #4. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manu- facturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

61 Unpublished manuscript, DV#254, "Mental Telegraphy?", examined at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley. c 1976 by Thomas G. Chamberlain and Manu- facturers Hanover Trust Company as Trustees under the Will of Clara Clemens Samossoud.

6 2 Ibid., p. 1.

63 Ibid., pp. 1-2.

64 Ibid., p. 1.

6 SIbid.

66 Ibid., p. 2.

67 Rogers, Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, pp. 33-39.

6 8 Ibid., Headnote to "Mamie Grant," p. 31 and p. 31n.

69 Ibid. Rogers cites the location of the manuscript in Typescript Notebook 10, pp. 1-9, dated between July 6, 1868, and July 13, 1868. 96

70 Ibid., p. 32. For the specific Twainian use of The Gates Ajar, see Chapter II.

71 Edith Colgate Salsbury, Susy and Mark Twain (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 219.

7 2 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert B. Paine (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917), I, 323.

73 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872-1910, edited by Henry Nash Smith and William Gibson (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960), 1, 236.

4Ibid.,pp. 237-238.

75p. 269.

76 Ibid., pp. 252-259.

77 Ibid., II, 810-812.

Ibid., p. 811.

79 Rogers, Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, pp. 220-289.

80 Smith and Gibson, I, 184.

81 Ibid., pp. 186-188.

82 Ibid., p. 187.

8 3 Rogers, Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques, p. 307. 97

8 4 Smith and Gibson, I, 189.

85 Ibid.

8 6 1bid Ii

87 See above p. 78.

88Smith and Gibson, 1, 189.

89 Ibid., p. 200.

90Ibd2 Ibd, p. 209.

91Ii.9 2Ibid., p. 376.

Ibid., I, 376-377. The diamonds enclose cancelled material.

93 See above, pp. 31-32.

94 See above, p. 31.

9 5 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 33.

96Smt Smith andn Gibson, I, 427.

SIbid.,II, 669-670.

9 8 Ibi Idw, p. 670. CHAPTER IV

STORMFIELD AMONG THE CRITICS

Books and articles pertinent to the Captain Stormfield material are rare, and studies of Twain's religion and religious philosophy are not numerous. Works which mention the Stormfield prototype in passing are the most common.

Throughout Twain scholarship since Twain's death, one can see treatments of his typical humorous devices and analyses of his literary purposes and attitudes toward the institutions of humanity. Additions to the biography of Twain have continued to appear, culminating most recently with

Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool (1973). The interest in Samuel Clemens's life has produced support for the conclusion that Mark Twain was an ambivalent person to the end of his daysA He fluctuated between optimism and despair, with the latter being more noticeable in his closing years.

What has not been visible in criticism is the specific isolation of the Stormfield character as emblematic of

Mark Twain's ambivalence toward belief and disbelief, the task this study proposes to perform.

98 99

A logical point of departure in a survey of the

pertinent Stormfield criticism is from the reception of

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Mark

Twain kept the story from publication for decades because

he feared it might arouse furor among orthodox folk; but

when it did appear, the representative notices did not

observed the serious note underlying the fiction:

First on the list of recent humorous pieces must be placed Mark Twain's capital piece of half-serious drollery, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven. . . . In heaven his experiences are of a sort to make the orthodox gasp and the self-satisfied crave some new means of inflation. The humor depends mainly upon the juxtaposition of incongruous ideas--the method upon which Mark Twain has always depended for his effects. But underneath the drollery of Captain Stormfield's forms of expression there is an immense lot of philosophy of a shrewd and homely sort concerning the future life.1

The reviewer in Bookman noticed the same comic device--"the juxtaposition of obvious incongruities"--and implied a certain lack of interest by answering the question "whether

Twain was as funny as he was years ago" in this way: "The one opinion or the other may be voiced without precipitating a controversy. "2 DeLancy Ferguson's observation holds true:

"The work which Mark Twain had held back for thirty 100

years, because he thought it would shock the public, created

a mild ripple of amusement and that was all."3

If little comment appeared in print on the first

publishing of the prototype Stormfield story, the literary

public responded to Dixon Wecter's printing of a version

twice as long in 1952. Henry Nash Smith described the work as "an unusually charming volume."4 Edward Wagenknecht perceptively spoke to the real object of satire in the piece:

Why Mark Twain should have thought Stormfield such a dangerous piece is difficult to understand today, for it is a tender thing for all its talk of "light years," with no real irreverence in it. For the burlesque is all directed against man's ludicrously limited conceptions of the spiritual world, not against paradise itself, and not against the pitiful longing and aspirations of the heart.5

Smith again saw less tenderness and more of the element that the New York Times writer had already observed:

"Though on a grand scale, the over-all effect is that of a prank, which, in spite of its high humor, was not entirely motivated by a good natured love of fun."6 Mark Van Doren was not impressed:

It is the work of a village philosopher who has read a few scientific books and thinks he is free. Of course it is a vigorous work, and sometimes it is amusing; but mildly so at best, and for the most part it has the feeling of being forced.7 101

A review from the Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican

says Twain was reputed to have worked on the piece for

forty-three years, on and off, and "to have considered it

his masterpiece. It wasn't." The review ended,

It is very funny at times, especially where Capt. Stormfield on his way to heaven is hunting races with comets, but Mark was not too successful in his mission, no matter how worthy it was, of pointing out this chasm between preachments and practices.8

Joseph Henry Jackson found the satire of "Letter from the

Recording Angel" "worth all the rest of the book twice over,"

though he spends most of his review on the Stormfield

portion of Report from Paradise. Jackson's comments on

Mark Twain and the Captain are significant:

It's no news that you only need to scratch a humorist in order to find a serious man underneath. . . . Twain, among other things, had serious notions about religion. Because he was a humorist he put these in his own form, but he did not publish everything he wrote. Most of his audience would have been startled, and not altogether pleased, to realize that beneath his humor he was so often savage. A case in point is the story "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven . . ." Twain was hitting out at the often sadly literal religious beliefs of his time, and his satire is to the point.9

Jackson, however, did not seem to make the distinction

Wagenknecht made between mankind and mankind's beliefs, 102

a distinction Twain sometimes also failed to make. In fact,

the angrier Twain became about human fallibility, the more

he blamed humanity (when he was not blaming God).

These eight reviews just surveyed serve as a sampling

of newspaper and contemporary opinion on Extracts from

Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven and "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." The first significant comment

in book form on Stormfield after Twain's death came from the

authorized biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine.

In the third volume of his biography of Twain, Paine mentions the forty-year period since Twain began "Extract

from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and the reasons

Twain finally published it:

The Christian religion in its more orthodox aspects had undergone some large modifications. It was no longer regarded as dangerous to speak lightly of hell, or even to suggest that the golden streets and jeweled architecture of the sky might be regarded as symbols of hope rather than exhibits of actual bullion and lapidary construction. Clemens reread his extravaganza, Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, gave it a modernizing touch here and there, and handed it to his publishers, who must have agreed that it was no longer dangerous, for it was promptly accepted and appeared in the December and January numbers (1907-08) of Harper's Magazine, and was also issued as a small book. If there were any readers who found it blasphemous, or even irrev- erent, they did not say so; the letters that came-- 103

and they were a good many--expressed enjoyment and approval, also (some of them) a good deal of satisfaction that Mark Twain had returned to his earlier form.1 0

Paine did not concern himself with the literary value of the work; he did speak to the interest the character held for Twain over the forty years between meeting Captain Edgar

(Ned) Wakeman, author of a dream visit to heaven, and publishing "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven."

He became a distinct personality in Mark Twain's work--the memory of him was an unfailing delight.l

Paine goes on to list the places Wakeman-Stormfield appears, acknowledging that this is only a partial list. He omits the Admiral of Roughing It, Simon Wheeler of play and novel, the captain of "The Great Dark," and the Admiral of "Refuge of the Derelicts."'2

Brander Matthews, a respected critic and professor during Mark Twain's last years, met Twain and wrote posi- tively of the man and his work. His essay, "Memories of

Mark Twain," does not mention Captain Stormfield, but it does refer to Captain Hurricane Jones of "Some Rambling

Notes of an Idle Excursion" and the real sea captain on whom he is based: 104

When Professor William Lyon Phelps wrote to inform Mark that the explanation of Elijah's miracle in calling down fire from Heaven to ignite the water- soaked logs on the altar, put in the mouth of Captain Hurricane Jones in the "Rambling Notes of an Idle Excursion," had been anticipated by Sir Thomas Browne in his "Religio Medici," Mark promptly replied that he had got the story from an actual sea-captain Ned Wakeman.1 3

Matthews observes elsewhere that "the richest humor .

is rooted in the profoundest melancholy,"14 a mode of

explaining the serious, sometimes didactic Mark Twain of

the last decade or so. Taking account of the serious

element in Twain's early work and his pounding by fate in

the 1890's and the first years of the 1900's, Matthews says,

Mark Twain was a humorist beyond all question and one of the mightiest of humorists; but Samuel L. Clemens was immitigably serious and the universe seemed to him undeniably and inexplicably futile.1 5

Van Wyck Brooks published in the twenties a sort of

Freudian analysis of Mark Twain's despair. Rejecting the notion that Twain was a preternatural melancholic who masked his condition with humor, until financial losses and death intruded, Brooks found the roots of pessimism in the frustrated artist within Clemens:

Consider . . . the story of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which lay in Mark Twain's safe for forty years before he dared to publish it. That little tale was slight enough in itself, but 105

he was always tinkering with it: As the years went on, it assumed in his eyes an abnormal importance as the symbol of what he wished to do and was pro- hibited from doing.

Just as Joseph Henry Jackson and the anonymous New

York Times reviewer noted the serious elements underlying the humor of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven," a serious Samuel Clemens underlies the Stormfield character in all guises. Stormfield is the optimist, but with one exception the settings of the works he is involved in are not. Once it has been observed that Stormfield is the eternal optimist, but that Twain put him in "The Great

Dark," one begins to see that the whole question of whether

Mark Twain was essentially an affirmer or a negator has not been settled, for the simple reason that he was both.

Van Wyck Brooks condemned Bernard DeVoto's and Mark

Twain's Western culture in The Ordeal of Mark Twain.17

DeVoto later defended the West and Mark Twain from Brooks's criticisms in Mark Twain's America, an angry but informative book. Each of Brooks's points of contention--the West was anti-intellectual, anti-artistic, and anti-Twain--DeVoto found evidence to refute. Yet later, when DeVoto became editior of The Mark Twain Papers, he wrote another work

.. .. 106

related to the issue of Mark Twain's ordeal, this time in a vein much closer to Van Wyck Brooks' ideas. There in

"Symbols of Despair" DeVoto examined the themes of the unfinished manuscripts, including "The Great Dark" but not the published unfinished works, a group which includes

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." In the period of great writing activity following 1897, there were, said

DeVoto,

twinned themes: man's complete helplessness in the grip of the inexorable forces of the universe, and man's essential cowardice, pettiness and evil. He went on writing these kinds of works until within a few months of his death. . . .18

The posthumous manuscripts now being published through the joint efforts of the University of California and Iowa

Center for Editions of American Authors were called by

DeVoto "The Great Dark Manuscripts." In them he found four central ideas:

1) A great stretch of time which may seem to elapse in a dream whose actual duration, in waking time, is only a few minutes or perhaps a few seconds. . . . 2) A man of high estate is brought low through no fault of his own but through an unnaturally extended dream. While he sleeps, his world crumbles. . . 3) A virtuous squire in a small town through a reversal of fortune is led to commit murder. Though he is guilty, a plea is made that he cannot be blamed. 107

4) Sailors or other people [are] marooned in the vast Antarctic waste of ice and darkness. . . . It is eternal winter where ships are caught in a central place of calm, circumscribed by ice and snow--drifting there forever. 1 9

The first and the fourth ideas are found in "The Great

Dark." The great lapse of time occurs in the dream of

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." "Refuge of the

Derelicts" contains two of the elements DeVoto described:

1) the Admiral and his crew are derelicts; 2) a poet is brought low by following his moral sense. "The Great Dark" is a nightmare of being cast adrift: its derelicts are in

a dream. Despairing dreams are part and parcel of the

production of the late years.20

Edward Wagenknecht wrote in the 1930's of Captain

Stormfield's significance. He did agree with many others

that the remainder of "the last books [was] quite

unimportant.."21 Edgar M. Branch believed as Wagenknecht

and DeVoto did. His book was not published until the

fifties, and even then, Branch's sole reference to the

Stormfield character occurs in his preface; yet it is a

significant remark: Mark Twain's early writings "are to

Huckleberry Finn and Captain Stormfield as the boy is to

the man. " 22

_ =- - -- _ 108

A significant study by Canby appeared in the early

fifties, a study that includes a chapter on Mark Twain's pessimism. In Canby's overall survey of the works he

praised "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" as one of

Mark Twain's best works. When he came chronologically to

the time of publication of the Captain's story, Canby dis-

cussed it in a section called, "Mark Fears the Loss of his

Popularity":

To shock [the public] morally, to disturb the religious-ethical code of America--the oldtime religion, in which he grew up with daily doses from his mother--was, to put it mildly, incompatible with popularity. . . . The audience that Twain had gathered he was sure would not stand it--not for a single book.2 3

In the late fifties Phillip Foner noted the "universal

brotherhood of man" present in "Captain Stormfield's Visit

to Heaven," finding political interest in Mark Twain' s

open-doored heaven.24 There Twain found room for "American

Indians, Negroes, Chinese, Jews, Mohammedans, and white

Christians," 25 a fact that reinforces the idea of Mark

Twain as an egalitarian. Yet Foner's interest was not in

the literary value of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" and the significance of the Stormfield character,

two items of prime concern in this study. 109

With a purpose akin to Foner's, Louis J. Budd found

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" emblematic of Mark

Twain's social philosophy:

As Twain kept refining his vision of Captain Stormfield's great voyage, he made room in paradise for everybody--Negroes of course and Chinese, Arabs, Incas and even white men. . . . The American Indians also stalked into the circle of his sympathy as [Twain] became capable of realizing how the pioneer had pre-empted their lands and smashed their culture.2 6

Budd closed his comments about Stormfield by a last obser-

vation on the Captain's "truly universal tolerance." 2 7

Pascal Covici published a book on Mark Twain's humor

in the early sixties, a passage from which is pertinent

to the significance of the Stormfield character. The

uneducated and unsophisticated narrator, in the late 19th century,

began to capture the imagination of the very authors who looked down on him. At the same time that the boob was a social threat and therefore the object of scornful literary lampoon, his irresponsible adven- turings seemed to express wistful envy of the educated literati. More and more, the lout was allowed to talk for himself, partly because of the sheer aesthetic delight in setting down his strange language, and partly because his talk would by itself illustrate the uncouth ignorance of the frontier.2 8

Part of Stormfield's success as a comic narrator is in his language, his ignorance and his naivete. Covici 110

noted elsewhere Twain's characteristic use of an

unconsciously humorous figure for a serious purpose. The

"lout" and the "buffoon" in the Stormfield character are

softpeddled in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."29

In Simon Wheeler of play and novel that characteristic gets

broader development.

Of the significant books published in the sixties, an

important one was Justin Kaplan's Mr. Clemens and Mark

Twain. This one-volume biography took as its thesis the

split between the private Clemens and the public work of

art, Mark Twain. And the only reference to Stormfield is

a description of Twain's telling the Captain's adventures

at a dinner party.30 Clemens's dream life Kaplan treated

separately and interestingly. At the beginning of the

period of prodigious output and limited publishing (about

1897),

[Clemens] explored his dream life, and in brief notes or in long unfinished manuscripts, he tried to artic- ulate his fantasies into fiction. In the nocturnal and irrational he found material which seemed richer, more suggestive, and more disturbing than anything he could find on the level of consciousness.3 1

The dream manuscript of "The Great Dark," akin to the dream of heaven, is both "nocturnal and irrational." 111

Among all the critics who have treated the literary

value of "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and the

significance (or lack of significance) of the Stormfield character, Lewis Leary's must be the harshest voice. He broadened his attack to include nearly all the work after

Connecticut Yankee:

Hardly anything that Clemens wrote after 1890 is moving or aesthetically right, not even "Eve's Diary," which is marred as he submits even his grief over the death of his wife to conventional poses and what he must have recognized as sentimental silliness. He continued to write occasionally well, for he was a professional who knew his business, and he became perhaps even a little more popular than he had been before, and that may be because he wrote what other people thought, or what other people thought he should write. . . . And of course his writing suffered, for one does not write well under duress, even when one accepts and is partly pleased by the conditions of duress. Surely it was the humanitarian rather than the critic in Leslie Fiedler which allowed him to name Pudd'nhead Wilson as Mark Twain's second best book. The Mysterious Stranger was put together from what Clemens never quite finished; What is Man? turned out to be as jejune in its way as Captain Stormfield's Visit was in its; and the writings that were so bitter that they could not be made public for a hundred years, as now issued, turned out to be Mark Twain's last joke--just more of the same com- plaints of man's inadequacy, with only a snigger of sex added and just a little excrement.3 2

Leary's comments about the late works seem to demonstrate an offended sensibility, an impatience with Mark Twain. 112

One wishes to ask him by what standard Pudd'nhead Wilson is not Mark Twain's second best book and by what qualities

What is Man? and "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" merit the opprobrium "jejune." Leary's closing statement about Mark Twain's "last joke" must be a reference to

Letters from the Earth, not "What is Man?" or "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven."

The fulminations of the last years, the desertion of the art of [uck and Tom, the giving way to the didactic impulses--these seem to have caused critics to become hostile toward America's beloved writer and to produce fulminations of their own. By the time of the centennial in 1935, many voices were raised against Mark Twain, and the tradition of debunking has contiued until our own time.

Discovery of the Captain Stormfield character may cause reassessment of some of these criticisms so loudly voiced.

Robert Rees wrote on the Stormfield piece and the selection Twain claimed he was satirizing, The Gates Ajar, in 1970: his work is treated at length in Chapter II of this study.

A fairly recent article was addressed to the subject of

Twain, Satan, and despair. Stanley Brodwin published "Mark 113

Twain's Masks of Satan: The Final Phase" in 1973. "Letters from the Earth" and the "Refuge of the Derelicts" appeared

in his pages for the purpose of discussing Satan's appearances in "Letters" and Admiral Stormfield's discussion of Satan in "Refuge." Brodwin too focused on the binary

Twain. In discussing The Mysterious Stranger complex of

stories, Brodwin said,

It is in this group of stories that Twain reached an identification of himself as a creative artist with the divine-like creative powers of an unfallen Satan. It is here we receive his final condemnation of the damned human race and attempt to describe the nature of the universe. And as DeVoto originally suggested, these works reflect Twain's striving for some salvational ideal.33

The "Satan-masks" did not provide a "salvational ideal."

Brodwin added that "this may also be the reason why Twain was never able to achieve an esthetically and intellectually

complete version of "The Mysterious Stranger."34 Why do

the masks not work? They do not answer "the massive moral

and theological problems inherent in 'the human condition.'"

Brodwin labels the two-part Twain as "'earthy' man" and

"'divine' artist."35 The attraction of Satan was his

freedom from the condition of the fallen or mud-image man;

the failure of Satan to provide salvation was part of the

"'Cosmic Contradiction'" at the heart of things. 3 6 114

Brodwin did not omit dream imagery, solipsism, determinism:

The universe . .. comes closest to the nature of a dream-nightmare. The awakening from the nightmare of the fall was no doubt a desperate wish fulfillment for Mark Twain. Ultimate salvation is to be set free from the con- sequences of the fall and to become a god.3 7

And, paraphrased, Brodwin saw Twain as believing freedom from determinism in an unreal or dream solipsistic universe lay outside of the human condition. Divine artistry, creative, resembled godlike freedom. Mortal man must continue to suffer from the fall. And the causes for Mark

Twain's inability to complete "The Mysterious Stranger" are somewhat akin to the reasons Mark Twain did not finish some other works. Mark Twain could not solve his theological problems.

The significance of the Stormfield character and the

Stormfield material, then, has been approached by the critics but not deeply explored. Brief notice, detraction, and faint praise seem to be more representative of the critics' response than serious treatment. Further and more serious critical attention to Stormfield must emerge to show that the works containing the Captain reach some 115

revealing conclusions about Twain the artist and Clemens the man. These works seem to affirm that the reasons for

Mark Twain's despair are ultimately theological, that the split in the man was never healed, and that the double

Twain, critics still maintain, was convincing as a nihilist and finally "a poor relation" among the great. There is some critical doubt whether exuberance was even in him in the final phase. 116

FOOTNOTES

New York Times, November 6, 1909, p. 689, section 14.

2 "Chronicle and Comment," Bookman, 30 (December, 1909), 323-324.

3 DeLancy Ferguson, Mark Twain: Man and Legend (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1943), p. 312. Ferguson's assessment of the holding-back period differs from that of most scholars on the subject by ten years.

4 "Report from Paradise," Kirkus Review, 20 (1952), 394-395.

5Edward Wagenknecht, New York Herald Tribune Booklist, November 15, 1952, p. 102.

6 Henry Nash Smith, "Boyhood of Mark Twain," Nation, 175 (September 27, 1952), 274-275.

7 Mark Van Doren, New Republic, 18 (December 1, 1952), 127.

8Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, September 21, 1952, p. 26A, col. 6.

9 Joseph Henry Jackson, "Twain's View of Heaven," San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 1952, p. 17, cols. 6 and 7.

1 0 Albert B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912), III, 1430-1431.

1 Ibid., I, 305.

4?x '9t -_ -- Y - _ 117

12 Ibid.

3 1 Brander Matthews, "Memories of Mark Twain," The Tocsin of Revolt and Other Essays (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), p. 269.

14 Ibid., p. 282.

15 Ibid., p. 284.

16 Van Wyck Brooks, "Mark Twain's Despair," The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920), pp. 124-125.

1 7 Ibid. These generalizations apply to the entire thrust of the book.

8 1 Bernard DeVoto, "Symbols of Despair," Mark Twain at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1942), p. 147.

19 Ibid., p. 148.

2 0 Samuel L. Clemens, Mark Twain's Fables of Man, edited with an introduction by John S. Tuckey (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 157-440.

21 Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935), p. 15.

22 Edgar M. Branch, The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), p. viii.

2 3 Henry Seidel Canby, "Decline and Fall: Mark Twain," Turn West, Turn East: Mark Twain and Henry James (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951), p. 243. 118

2 4 Phillip S. Foner, Mark Twain: Social Critic (New York: International Publishers, 1958), p. 238.

25Ibid.

26 Louis J. Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1962), pp. 189-190.

27 Ibid., p. 215.

28 Pascal Covici, Mark Twain's Humor: The Image of a World (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1962), p. 40.

29 Close examination of the texts proves this generalization.

30 Justin Kaplin, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), p. 3 2 5 .

31Ibid., pp. 340-341.

3 2 Lewis Leary, "The Bankruptcy of Mark Twain," Southern Excursions (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971), pp. 84-86.

33 Stanley Brodwin, "Mark Twain's Masks of Satan: The Final Phase," American Literature, 45 (May 1973), 217.

3 4 Ibid., p. 218.

3 5 Ibid.

3 6 Ibid., p. 225.

7Ibid.,pp. 226,225,227.

,. ,-- -- u CHAPTER V

STORMFIELD IN THE GREAT DARK

Among its other merits, "Captain Stormfield's Visit

to Heaven" sheds light on Mark Twain's closing decade by

suggesting another possible cause for the unfinished

nature of selected last works. The character of Captain

Stormfield, as has been shown, provides an example of the

affirmative Twain. "The Great Dark," however, containing

the Stormfield character, is full of archetypical symbols

of despair. When Twain reached the Captain's performance

in this work, he strangely broke off. These two works

and others related to them, in fact, are all incomplete.

One can safely assume that Twain never resolved the issues

he fumed about and thus was unable to proceed with his

characterization of Stormfield. Twain's convictions that

life was arranged hopelessly, that man was damned, and that

God was vengeful were balanced at some level by his will

to disbelieve in such a dreary arrangement. Even "The

Mysterious Stranger," we now know, exists in three forms, all unfinished. Rather than accepting an angry or caustic

119 120

statement in a given work as representative of the essential

Clemens or even a humorous sally as the essence of Twain,

one should remember Mark Twain the artist was essentially

angry, humorous, and optimistic about the future of mankind.

The five works selected for illustration of combined

affirmative and pessimistic elements are "Captain

Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," "The Great Dark," "Letters

from the Earth," "The Mysterious Stranger," and "Refuge of

the Derelicts." Stormfield appears as himself in the first

and the last, and unnamed in "The Great Dark." "Letters

from the Earth" continues the story of heavenly "life."

"The Mysterious Stranger" is grouped with the others because

of its fable--an attempt, DeVoto said, by Mark Twain to

tie all the puzzling theological threads into a whole

fabric..1

The binary nature of Mark Twain is as apparent within

each of these works as it is in the juxtaposition of these

works against one another. "Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" contains signs of the familiar, "safe" Twainian

humor, notwithstanding Twain's reluctance to publish. The

satire in the story works through the sensibility of the

naive Captain who is led through the mysteries of the

heavenly arrangements by a "Pi Ute Indian," next by an 121

earthly friend, Sam Bartlett, and finally and most fully by an old hand in heaven, Sandy McWilliams. The old

Captain was as uncritical of his old society and of religious fundamentalism as he is pleased with his new society and its religion. No longer blind to certain assumptions of earthly society, Captain Stormfield adjusts to the new arrangements with surprising alacrity. He may have reservations about being ruled by an absolute monarch, but his

sense of injustice is mollified by the news that the all-

powerful if not present authority has good sense. Outside

of the humorous diminution of earthly prejudices,

Stormfield discovers one must earn one's happiness. Sandy

explains to Stormfield:

Oh, hold on; there's plenty of pain here--but it don't kill. There's plenty of suffering here but it don't last. You see, happiness ain't a thing in itself-- it's only a contrast with something that ain't pleasant.3

One positive plot element in "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven" is the mitigatory power of companions.

The fearfulness of the great void of space which the

Captain enters immediately after death is relieved by the

human companionship of Goldstein, Bailey, Wilson, and Sam.4

There are others, unnamed, but a good number of these are 122

not fit companions, anyway. The same function of humans together in the same boat, so to speak, appears in "The

Great Dark."

Henry, the main character of "The Great Dark," voyages

in this unfinished fable on an unnamed ship through uncharted seas beset by cold and monsters. Accompanying

him are his wife, Alice, and family, servants, crew, and

the Captain. The closeness of the family in the light and warmth of the ship's cabins provides almost the only

affirmative plot element in this piece. As if cold and

monsters and uncertainty were not sufficient sources of

difficulties, there is another, not altogether human

presence on shipboard. Invisible to all but Henry and even

with Henry capable of sudden appearances and disappearances

is the Superintendent of Dreams. Though this supernatural

creature seems to bear the same malice as the Mysterious

Stranger, Phillip Traum, the Superintendent's being aloof

from the tiny concerns of humanity is less malicious than

godlike. The Superintendent brings Henry and his family

on this adventure into a drop of water under a microscope;

yet he does not offer these folk salvation from their

eternal plight, a godlike function. Instead he remains

uninvolved in their difficulties. 123

Here lies the archetypical metaphor for life, its course, and its conclusion. The presence of an omnipotent figure who could use his powers benignly but who for some inexplicable reason does not correlates with the Twainian concept of God. Though Twain could never quite bring himself to the alternative concept either way--that is, to the concept that we are entirely alone or the concept that we cannot understand the divine workings of God's mind and should simply accept God's will--he could become enraged at the universal arrangement as humanity experiences it, and he could say so in print.

Bernard DeVoto saw the Superintendent of Dreams not as a godlike creature but as a traditional, ominous devil;

DeVoto reviewed Twain's working notes for "The Great Dark":

The Superintendent's antics and moods, his mysterious balefulness are all dream-like. He first comes into the notes as a footprint that sometimes appears on deck, always as an omen of some terrible event to come. Later he is conceived as the archi- tect and stage manager of the dream, which is what he is in the story actually written.5

The feeling of security in the ship's cabins poses the only answer to the endless drifting, the cold, the monsters.

The affability of the family and crew even furnished Twain an opportunity (inappropriate as it may be in tone) for 124

some stage business with a cup of coffee. This very clash of tone against tone is indicative of the curious dichotomy present in the arrangement of one work against another, and, undoubtedly, within the mind of Twain. A bit of the same

sort of burlesque turns up in every other work among the

five as well; and these are the works considered as

unrelievedly pessimistic and as symptomatic of Mark Twain

the nihilist.

It is important to pay more than lip service to the

disclaimer nearly every critic concerned with the religious

philosophies mentions. No one disagrees with the statement

that Twain was not a systematic thinker in philosophy and

religion; but, having said or implied such was the case,

some treatments of the issues assume he was. A case in

point is the Brodwin article:

In ["The Mysterious Stranger"] [f]or Mark Twain-Satan the Kingdom to come ends in nothing but an escape into solipsistic idealism, a consequence of a meta- physical irreconcilability in a universe in which the primal drama has always been strife between Flesh and Spirit.6

Elsewhere Brodwin, in explaining Mark Twain's definition of

salvation--ironically the Christian sin of pride--adds,

"This concept is best understood as a revelation of Mark

Twain's spiritual and philosophical anguish in his final 125

years, rather than serious metaphysics. " Even if Brodwin's use of philosophical terminology in treating the writer's religious ideas cannot be considered as suggesting Brodwin has given Mark Twain the status of a philosopher, one must

still account for the specific--and sometimes curious--

contents of the works themselves. The janglingly inappro-

priate passages have received little comment and no

explanation.

In "The Great Dark" there is, in addition to the

coffee-cup business, the miscalling of the nautical terms

before the situation changes. Henry comes then to a con-

viction already believed in by Alice, that the voyage is real

and the former life a dream. And this "real" voyage becomes

a nightmare. A Captain Stormfield character breaks into

the dark formlessness with purpose and human will. It was

just here that Twain wrote no more, a fact about Twain's

behavior suggestive of the writer's ambivalence about the

dark side of his fantasy. This Captain Davis is of the

same resilient character as his ancestor, suffers seemingly

from no indecision, and acts through his speech to the crew.

And he is the vehicle of purpose, perhaps in some measure

a cause for his attractiveness to Twain. 126

"The Great Dark" presents an amalgam of pessimism and optimism, though tipped toward pessimism in its effect.

This aborted story is a paradigm of the thesis of this dissertation. When the great dark awaiting man is cold, uncharted, filled with unseen but hostile monsters, it

becomes symbolic archetypically of death, purposelessness,

and, most fearfully, of stasis. Heaven itself, as Twain

wisely knew, would become intolerable if happiness were not

sometimes relieved. "The Great Dark" is a portrayal of

immobile uncertainty, which is even worse. Further,

however, taking "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and

"The Great Dark" together, one sees that an absolute con-

dition of any sort is inimical to life. Just so, perhaps,

is the need for Mark Twain to couple belief and disbelief--

in man, in God, in order.

One comes to deal with Satan in "Letters from the

Earth," because that fallen angel is narrator. Captain

Stormfield is affected by the "Authorities"9 in heaven,

but hell appears only in the chapters which Wecter added.

Satan as a character appears in no piece containing

Stormfield. Stormfield mentions hell on his way to heaven

in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," argues for the 127

and must have holiness of Satan in Refuge of the Derelicts, in frequently used his name and place of punishment

admirable swearing. Twain omitted the actual substantiation In "Letters of Stormfield's cursing vocabulary, of course.

from the Earth," however, the reader meets Old Scratch, the

any supernatural creature more attractive to Twain than

other.

DeVoto explains Twain's interest:

Satan is an angel and angels are exempt from loss and pain and all mortal suffering; they are exempt from guilt and conscience and self-condemnation also, and temptation has no meaning for them. [T]hey have no moral sense, and neither humiliation nor death, nor does the suffering of anyone affect them in the least.10

Twain's own comments about the angelic life appear perhaps

most candidly in "Letters from the Earth":

Man concedes that God made angels perfect, without blemish, and immune from pain and death, and that he could have been similarly kind to man if he had wanted to, but denies that he was under any moral obligation to do it.ll

Hamlin Hill has recently pointed out what every reader

of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and "Letters from

the Earth" perceives: the latter is "a serious and straight-

1 2 forward continuation of the Captain Stormfield story." 128

"Letters from the Earth" begins humorously, portraying human foibles through the inevitably satiric eye of a foreigner; it ends castigating God for man's ills. The setting is earth but the view is cosmic, as it is in

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Satan describes man through heavenly eyes--at first; later he describes heavenly behavior through jaundiced human eyes.

Certain elements in "Letters from the Earth" do echo

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." In Letter II Satan denigrates man, not God, for the biblical concept of heaven; he begins with a point about heaven which Twain omitted

from "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven'":

Man has imagined a heaven, and has left entirely out of it the supremest of all his delights, the one ecstasy that stands first and foremost in the heart of every individual of his race--and of ours--sexual intercourse!13

Twain has his Satan-speaker comment on man's utopian vision:

His heaven is like himself: strange, interesting, astonishing, grotesque. I give you my word, it has not a single feature in it that he actually values. It consists--utterly and entirely--of diversions which he cares next to nothing about, here in the 1 4 earth, yet is quite sure he will like in heaven.

In "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" the- characteristic

trappings of the orthodox heaven are altered to be more

nearly consonant with human nature; herein lies a certain 129

significance. While Twain could and did write What is Man?,

"Reflections on Religion," and "Letters from the Earth," all three bitterly maligning God as the author of man's evil moral sense, he could also write of--and must have occasionally believed in--paradise, noticeably not on earth, however.

How does this paradise answer the Satan of "Letters from the Earth"? The sole Christian ritual of worship which is kept is the implicit acknowledgment of the power who organizes the afterlife. All peoples and all creatures--earthly or alien--are admitted. Stormfield does meet a group on its way to the "Everlasting Tropics"15 while he is on his way to heaven; once he is in heaven, however, he finds a goodly sample of both the just and the unjust present.

Satan's scoffing description of heaven in "Letters from the Earth" best illustrates Twain's criticisms of the fundamental view of the place:

Most men do not sing, most men cannot sing, most men will not stay where others are singing if it be continued more than two hours. . . Only about two men in a hundred can play upon a musical instrument, and not four in a hundred have any wish to learn how. . . Many men pray, not many of them like to do it. 130

To forty-nine men in fifty the Sabbath Day is a dreary, dreary bore. . . All nations look down on other nations. All nations dislike other nations. All white nations despise all colored nations, of whatever hue, and oppress them when they can. White men will not associate with "niggers," nor marry them. They will not allow them in their schools and churches. All the world hates the Jew, and will not endure him except when he is rich. . . . All sane people detest noise. All people, sane or insane, like to have variety in their life. Monotony quickly wearies them. Every man, according to the mental equipment that has fallen to his share, exercises his intellect constantly, ceaselessly, and this exercise makes up a vast and valued and essential part of his life.1 6

In "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" Twain makes clear that intellect most assuredly will have its place in an eternal existence from which Twain has eliminated eternal praise. What, after all, is humanity to do,

forever? In fact, Mark Twain, through Captain Stormfield, acquaints the reader with a heaven man could abide, a heaven that answers most of Satan's criticisms. Not only

is heaven a place with practically an open-door policy;

"even the French" are admitted. The activities of the

sanctified do not include singing, harping, praising, and adoring. Instead the exalted expand their intellects, change 131

ages, and occasionally suffer disappointments and unhappiness in order to appreciate happiness.

Sandy McWilliams, one of Stormfield's informants in heaven, explains the age option the inhabitants have; in doing so he discloses that the wisdom and knowledge of maturity become more and more attractive to the heavenly

hosts, at whatever age they entered the golden gates. Just

then in the narrative a weeping mother passes by, and Sandy

cautions Stormfield against pity for the mother who looks

as if she has lost her child:

"Stormfield, maybe she hasn't found the child, but I think she has. Looks so to me. I've seen cases before. You see, she's kept that child in her head just the same as it was when she jounced it in her arms a little chubby thing. But here it didn't elect to stay a child. No, it elected to grow up, which it did. And in these twenty-seven years it has learned all the deep scientific learning there is to learn, and is studying and studying and learning and learning more and more, all the time, and don't give a damn for anything but learning; just learning, and discussing gigantic problems with people like herself." "Well?" "Stormfield, don't you see? Her mother knows cranberries . . . and not another blamed thing ! Her and her daughter can't be any more company for each 1 7 other now than a mud turtle and bird o'paradise."

"Letters from the Earth" also remains unfinished. In

the passage describing the biblical God, Twain's anger

overpowers his art: 132

It is most difficult to understand the disposition of the Bible God, it is such a confusion of contra- dictions; of watery instabilities and iron firmnesses; of goody-goody abstract morals made out of wonder, and concreted hell-born ones made out of acts; of fleeting kindnesses repented of in permanent malignities.-18

Jealously guarding his omniscience and omnipotence, the biblical God described by Twain's Satan suffered such a

shock at Adam and Eve's gaining knowledge that

to this day his reason has never recovered . . .; a wild nightmare of vengefulness has possessed him ever since, and he has almost bankrupted his native inge- nuities in inventing pains and miseries and humiliations and heartbreaks wherewith to embitter the brief lives of Adam's descendants.1 9

Only in the mitigatory context of "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven," a corrective to "Letters from the Earth,"

can any truly optimistic elements be found in this post-

humous piece. Though the text is amusing at first, control

soon slips away from the angry artist. John Gerber, in

reviewing "Letters from the Earth," commented mildly that

"Twain fails to maintain his point of view."20 The failure

is more serious than that. But Twain's optimism could still

overpower his rages.

In "The Mysterious Stranger," for example, less than

twenty pages after the first Learlike passage, Satan's

ominously aloof behavior is again reported: 133

And always when [Satan] was talking about men and women here in the earth and their doings--even their grandest and sublimest--we were secretly ashamed, for his manner showed that to him they and their doings were of paltry poor consequence; often you would think he was talking about flies, if you didn't know.21

Twain's tone here is hardly facetious.. However, in

the sometimes maddening but always recognizable Twainian mode, a passage of humor creeps in; Marget is questioning

the (innocent) nephew Satan about his uncle Satan:

"[D]oes he travel much?" "Oh, yes, he goes all about; he has business everywhere." "Then he may come here--I hope he will. I should be glad to see him. What is his business?" "Souls." "Shoe-soles?" "Yes. He trades in them. Buys them."

She asks where he lives; but Phillip, pseudonym for

Satan, generalizes on that, and merely says it is a foreign

country:

"Is he a foreigner himself? Was he born there?" "Well, no. No, he was an emigrant.'" "Is it a trying climate?" "For some--yes; but he doesn't mind it." "Acclimated, I suppose." "Is it a colony?" "Yes." "What nationality?" "Mixed. But mainly French." "And so that is the language in use?" "It is the official language." 2 2 134

Twain certainly intends the reader to understand the foreign country is hell, and it is the place to which Twain assigns the French. The very hyperbole involved in Twain's preoccupation with the inferiority of the French attests to his rather constant need to include these inevitable heavy- handed jibes. And having the "indelicate" French in heaven and also in hell continues a convention of the Mark Twain humor, present in most unlikely places, of breaking into jokes amid seriousness and breaking into seriousness amid jokes.

The character of the Captain himself shows more than cheer and goodwill. Only in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to

Heaven" does the Captain show some humility of spirit. In most of his several appearances, the Stormfield character insists that other human beings shape their wills to fit his--whether he is requiring unremitting. attention to a yarn ("Refuge of the Derelicts," "Simon Wheeler Sequence"), insisting on a wrong-headed solution to a biblical miracle

(Travels with Mr. Brown, "Some Notes from an Idle Excursion,"

Roughing It) or a solution to a mysterious crime (Simon

Wheeler, Amateur Detective), or convincing a crew to abandon mutiny ("The Great Dark"). The abounding confidence and

-- - - .. , 3. .: 135

honest generosity of spirit seen in "Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven" do not seem altogether credible in light

of the Captain's other appearances. Yet the old Captain

is believable. Perhaps a many-faceted character is more

nearly human than a paragon of virtue would be.

"Refuge of the Derelicts" has the least attractive

version of the Captain just as it seems to be one of the

weaker productions from Mark Twain's pen. Twain did not

choose to publish it, perhaps suggesting he was a better

critic than his critics sometimes believe. The main

character is an aged derelict, Admiral Abner Stormfield,

comfortably fixed but lonely even among friends and some

relatives. The parallel with Clemens's last decade is

obvious.2 3

The characteristic Stormfieldian humor of hyperbolic

loquacity seen in all of the earlier Stormfieldian appear-

ances has somewhat palled; the dramatic interest has

lessened. It is as if even the anger that lasted beyond

the jokes has begun to play out. At the close of the

unfinished novella, the springing of the tragedy-trap on

Plum Duff night has some of the familiar Twain vitriol.

With these reservations, however, the piece is a recog-

nizable Captain Stormfield vehicle. In the self- 136

assertiveness of the Admiral on biblical matters, a

characteristic element is visible. In the kindness of

running a house ship for derelicts, the Captain's good-

heartedness once again emerges. In the Admiral's

to professed interest in the poet's project for a monument

Adam, the old interest in human concerns rather than God's

concerns reappears. And finally, in the narrative

structure of the story, the Admiral is not permitted a role

in the tragedy-trap.

The Captain's character is more complex than it seems

if one examines "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"

alone. Just as Captain Stormfield shows the mildness of

an ideal person in "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven,"

he shows the irascibility of a Twain in "Refuge of the

Derelicts." In the selected works containing Stormfield

or elements of his adventures, optimism and humor appear

next to pessimism and bitterness. In balancing the works

one against another, the same dichotomy is present; the

good will of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven"

balances against the ill will in portions of "Letters from

the Earth" and "The Mysterious Stranger" (now known in one

version as "The Chronicle of Young Satan") and the long

passages of the archetypically frightening voyage in "The

: ,a .. 137

Great Dark." "Refuge of the Derelicts" is less easily classified, yet it has the characteristic elements of optimism and pessimism. That continuing recurrence suggests a reason why Mark Twain left off finishing works related to the Captain, a character whose original and whose portrayal in "Extract from Captain Stormfield's

Visit to Heaven" both demonstrated great cheer and confidence. Twain had too much of the Captain in himself to be able to resolve the Captain' s ambivalence. 138

FOOTNOTES

'DeVoto, Mark Twain at Work, p. 213.

2Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 33, 41, 42.

3Ibid., pp. 11-17.

4Ibid., pp. 7-14.

5Samuel L. Clemens, "The Great Dark," in Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), editor's notes, p. 299.

6Brodwin, "Mark Twain's Masks of Satan," p. 220.

7lbid., p. 227.

8Wecter, Report from Paradise, pp. 42--43.

9Ibid., p. xviii. Wecter cites an unpublished fragment about the "Authorities'" creation of man--" as witnessed by an angel named Slattery."

10 Bernard DeVoto, "Symbols of Despair," Mark Twain at Work (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), pp. 126-127.

1 1 Samuel L. Clemens, "Letters from the Earth," Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard DeVoto (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), p. 37.

1 2 Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God's Fool (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 59. 139

1 3 DeVoto, "Letters from the Earth," p. 8.

4 1 Ibid.

1 5 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 22.

1 6 DeVoto, "Letters from the Earth," p. 9.

1 7 Wecter, Report from Paradise, p. 51.

8 26. 1 DeVoto, "Letters from the Earth," p.

19 9Ibid.

2 0 John C. Gerber, "Review of Letters from the Earth 1964), 221. by Mark Twain," American Literature, 36 (May,

2 1 Samuel L. Clemens, The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, edited with an introduction by William Gibson 1970), p. 51. (Berkeley: University of California Press,

22 Ibid., pp. 68-69.

2 3 See Hill, pp. 270-273. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

Evidence abounds to demonstrate the centrality of

Captain Stormfield in the mind and imagination of Mark

Twain. This crusty old gentleman shared specific personality characteristics with his creator, yet these are not only stubborn resolution and amazing confidence.

Stormfield is also a vehicle of affirmative purpose, an interpretation strongly suggested by his prototypal stories

"Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven" and

"Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," but also by his appearance in "The Great Dark" and "Refuge of the

Derelicts." In addition to these works, Stormfield's milieu--heaven--is treated more caustically in "Letters from the Earth," and Stormfield's message of affirmation through humor even finds its way into that most pessimistic of works, "Chronicle of Young Satan."

The Captain has largely been overlooked by the critics, or discussed in order to chide Twain, or dismissed for insignificance. This study has shown through examination

140 141

of Stormfield's sources, through isolation of his appearances, and through a survey of critical work on these matters that the character deserves notice and

interpretation. He is an aspect of Mark Twain's imagination of an utopia containing brotherly love and good will. He is also a derivation of Mark Twain's rage at human potentiality becoming fallibility.

Finally, the Captain is as lovable as George Sterling hears in "Refuge of the Derelicts," and he is lovable because he is human, imaginary character though he may be.

Captain Eli Stormfield, based on the real Captain Edgar

A. Wakeman and the real Samuel L. Clemens, is one of Mark

Twain's magnificent creations.

- :. BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose, Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York: The Odyssey Press, 1957.

Paine, Albert B. Mark Twain: A Biography. 3 vols. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1912.

Paine, Albert B. Mark Twain's Autobiography. 2 vols. New York: P. F. Collier and Son Company, 1925.

Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar. Ed. Helen Sootin Smith. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1964. 145

Smith, Henry Nash. Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Salsbury, Edith Colgate. Susy and Mark Twain. New York: Harper & Row, 1965.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Mark Twain: The Man and his Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1935.

Walker, Franklin, and G. Ezra Dane. Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

Wecter, Dixon. Sam Clemens of Hannibal. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1952.

Periodicals

Brodwin, Stanley. "Mark Twain's Marks of Satan: The Final Phase." American Literature, 45 (1973), 206-227.

Brown, Ray B. "Mark Twain and Captain Wakeman." American Literature, 33 (1961), 320-329.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." Harper's Monthly, 116 (December 1907 and January 1908) , 41-49; 226-276.

Gerber, John C. "Review of Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain." American Literature, 36 (1964), 221.

Hill, Hamlin. "Who Killed Mark Twain?" American Literary Realism, 7 (1974), 119-124.

Parsons, Coleman 0. "The Devil and Samuel Clemens." The Virginia Quarterly Review, 23 (1974), 582-606.

Pettit, Arthur G. "Mark Twain and the Negro, 1867-1869." Journal of Negro History, 56 (1971), 88-96.

"Mark Twain's Attitude Toward the Negro in the West, 1861-1867." The Western Historical Quarterly, 1 (1970) , 51-62. 146

"Mark Twain: Unreconstructed Southerner, and his View of the Negro, 1835-1860." The Rocky Mountain Social Science Journal, 7 (1970), 17-28.

and Rees, Robert A. "Captain Stormfield' s Visit to Heaven The Gates Ajar." English Language Notes, 8 (1970), 197-202.

Smith, Henry Nash. "Boyhood of Mark Twain." Nation, 175 (September, 1952) , 274-275.

Van Doren, Mark. "Review of Report from Paradise. " New Republic, 18 (December, 1952), 127.

Newspapers

"A Genuine Old Salt," The Chicago Republican, August 23, 1868, col. 4,, page number not available.

"Chronicle and Comment," Bookman, 30 (December, 1909), 323-324.

Jackson, Joseph Henry, "Twain' s View of Heaven," San Francisco Chronicle, October 9, 1952, p. 17, cols. 6 and 7.

New York Times, November 6, 1909, p. 689, section 14.

"Report from Paradise," Kirkus Review, 20 (1952), 394-395.

Springfield Republican, September 21, 1952, p. 26A, col. 6.

Wagenknecht, Edward, "Review of Report from Paradise Lost," New York Herald Tribune Booklist, November 5, 1952, p. 10:2. 147

Unpublished Material

Autobiographical Dictations, August 30, 1906. This unpublished material was examined and recorded at the Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Autobiographical Dictations, August 30, 1906. This unpublished material was examined and recorded at the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." 26 holograph pages. Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers. The University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Christmas Story for Harper's Monthly; 1907." 1 holograph title page. Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Extract from Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." 3 holograph pages. Title followed by "related to" in a handwriting different from Twain's, presumably that of A. B. Paine. Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "From Captain Stormfield's Account Reminiscences." 19 holograph pages, Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Capt. Stormfields's Journey. Visit to Heaven." 66 photostated holograph pages. Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Capt. Stormfield Resumes." 11 holograph pages, Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Clemens, Samuel L. "Extract from Capt. Stormfield's Visit to Heaven." 78 typescript pages, Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley. 148

Clemens, Samuel L. "Capt. Wakeman's Travels in Heaven." 1 photostated holograph title page. Box 17, The Mark Twain Papers, The University of California at Berkeley.

Susy Biography ofSLC, unpublished papers. Examined at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Typescript DV #203. Examined at The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Typescript Notebook 14, February 26, 1879--September 8, 1879. The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Typescript Notebook 32a, January 31 and February 19, 1897. The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.

Unpublished manuscript, DV #254, "Mental Telegraphy?". The Mark Twain Papers, University of California at Berkeley.