Mark Twain: "Cradle Skeptic" 

Revised version (Sept. 1997)

Wesley Britton

Summary of Mark Twain: "Cradle Skeptic":

Preface

Chapter I: Introduction

Introduces the scope and content of the book, emphasizing

current critical thought regarding Mark Twain's religious

sense and its development. Points to the need for this

study as previous work has either only mentioned Twain's

religious formation in passing, without detailed analysis of

the biography and early works of Samuel Clemens in light

of his antipathy for Judeo-Christian beliefs.

Chapter II: The Critical Background: Mark Twain and Religion

An extensive survey of critical studies on Mark Twain's

religious thought and philosophy, explicating and analyzing

the most important works to date.

Chapter III: Biography: Family and Town Life

Discusses the influences on young Sam Clemens by his

father, mother, siblings, and town life in Hannibal,

Missouri.

Chapter IV: Philosophical and Literary Influences

Details the influence of "McFarlane," Thomas Paine, and

the "literary comedians" on Twain's religious skepticism.

Chapter V: The Early Writings

Discusses in detail how religious skepticism is present in

Twain's early writings, especially his letters, frontier

journalism, and early fiction.

Chapter VI: Skepticism, Affirmation, and Revised Visions

Shows how Twain's early thinking was reflected in his

last writings, emphasizing that late-life bitterness was

not the central reason for Twain's attacks on orthodoxy in

publications such as Letters from the Earth and "What is

Man?" Compares and contrasts early passages with late-life

echoes of these beliefs.

Works Cited

Mark Twain: "Cradle Skeptic"

Preface

My study of Sam Clemens's early religious life began as a thesis and then dissertation at the University of North Texas. There, under the mentorship, friendship, and daunting professionalism of David Kestersen, Martha Nichols, and most particularly, my committee chair, James T.F. Tanner, my work reached a point reasonable enough to be accepted as part of my doctoral requirements in 1990.

In the years since, my interest in the subject has continued, and I began to feel, contrary to my earlier lack of confidence, that an updated, expanded treatment of this material needed to be added to the canon of ongoing Twain scholarship. While interest in Twain's religious life continues to play an important role in studies of his literature, I'm not aware of any other project taking up the task of looking at Twain's early religious development, discussing how his later attitudes were shaped by his environment, reading, and independent temperament. So I now offer this study as a tool for further research into this intriguing aspect of Twain's philosophy and ethical base.

While much of this material will be familiar to Twain scholars, the general reader may not be aware of key influences on Twain's thinking, and I hope this audience will find this study illuminating, although most non-specialists may find it helpful to skip over the first two chapters that review previous scholarship on this subject. For specialists, I hope this work will serve as a reference source providing, in one place, most of the relevant primary sources along with a summary and synthesis of published scholarship on this subject up to 1996. I happily acknowledge no book can be a final word on any subject involving Mark Twain, and I look forward to future investigations of this important and dominant part of Mark Twain's thinking.

Some of this material was previously published as critical articles, and I must thank the following journals for their support of my work in progress. South Dakota Review published "Mark Twain `Cradle Skeptic': High Spirits, Ghosts, and the Holy Spirit" which contained passages not in my original dissertation (Vol. 30:4, Winter 1992, pps. 87-97). Tom Tenney, editor of The Mark Twain Journal, was very supportive of "MacFarlane, `Boarding House,' and `Bugs': Mark Twain's Cincinnati Apprenticeship" (Mark Twain Journal 27, Spring 1989, 14-17). I would like to thank the many Twain scholars who responded warmly to this article, especially Howard Baetzhold who passed along some fresh insights. "Mark Twain and Tom Paine: `Common Sense' as Source for `The War Prayer'" appeared in CCTE Studies (54, 1989, 132-49) as my first scholarly publication, and so this portion of the book, now augmented by the studies of Howard Baetzhold in The Bible According to Mark Twain, has a special place in my heart.

I need also acknowledge the work of Vic Doyno, whose anthology, Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic, inspired this project in the first place when I read it over a decade ago. I felt a happy irony when, while putting the final touches on this book, I had to add a new insight drawn from Vic's work on the 1996 Random House edition of Huckleberry Finn. In a sense, Vic's work brought this project full circle, and I am grateful for his presence in the Twain community.

Special thanks need also be given to Taylor Roberts at MIT, creator of the Mark Twain Forum online who allowed me to post the manuscript of this book at the Forum's websight to elicit suggestions and comments from that group of very knowledgeable Twain readers. We felt this was a new use of the internet, and both hope future scholars will use such opportunities to benefit from the shared knowledge of our peers. Among the Forum members who added to my knowledge of Twain materials were John Bird, Kevin Bochynski, Larry Marshburn, John W. Young, Barbara Schmidt, and the indispensable Bob Hirst, director of the Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley, California. I was very interested in the comments of Edgar K. De Jean, a Twain enthusiast who, while not a "scholar" in the academic sense, had many valuable, thoughtful insights now part of the Conclusion to this study.

I would also like to thank Karen Vanarsdel who participated in the production of all three versions of this project whose help cannot be overstated.

Wesley Britton

Grayson County College

September 1997

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter I

Introduction

Chapter II

The Critical Background: Mark Twain and Religion

Chapter III

Biography: Family and Town Life

Chapter IV

Philosophical and Literary Influences

Chapter V

The Early Writings

Chapter VI

Skepticism, Affirmation, and Revised Visions

Works Cited

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

If any reader were here present--let him be of

either sexes or any age, between ten and ninety--

I would make him answer this question himself--

and he could answer in only one way. He would be

obliged to say that by his knowledge and

experience of days of his early youth he knows

positively that the Bible defiles all Protestant

children, without exception. Mark Twain,

"Reflections on Religion." (The Outrageous Mark

Twain 41)

No God or religion can survive ridicule. No

church, no nobility . . . can face ridicule in

a fair field and live. Mark Twain. (Notebooks

198)

There is a scholarly consensus that Mark Twain's late-life concerns with reform, "the damned human race," religious skepticism, and deterministic thinking were not the products of latter day pessimism due to personal tragedies and setbacks, but rather that these concerns can be seen in his earliest years, in his earliest writings, and in his family heritage. This consensus is based on a miscellany of evidence from a wide variety of sources that, combined, make for a convincing case. What has so far been missing in Twain scholarship, however, is a full length study summarizing and consolidating this evidence. Previous studies have either looked to only a few examples of the available materials, or they have limited their discussions to biographical overviews without examining the early texts them-selves. This study combines a review of pertinent criticism, a focused study on Clemens's early life and influences, and a fuller examination of the early texts than has yet been made available. By examining Twain's earliest letters, sketches, and tales, I will demonstrate in detail that Mark Twain was, if you will, a "cradle skeptic," a man who continually faced varying religious doctrines and found them all wanting. He was, in short, without any faith or belief in any deity or religion, orthodox or "wildcat," even though, at times, he would have preferred otherwise.

Mark Twain's religious sensibilities and overall world views had deep roots in the experiences and influences of his early years from his family heritage as well as from the literary tradition in which he worked. From a very early age, Sam Clemens began to escape his "Presbyterian conscience." Escape was perhaps easier for the brash young Sam Clemens than for the elder family man Mark Twain, but his escapes were largely, if occasionally painful, successful as he established his early points of view regarding society and the state of man.

In this study, I review the history of Twain's early religious experiences to show how his frontier irreverence came naturally to him by both nature and nurture. This philosophical stance was fostered by his environment, career, and readings. I demonstrate how that early foundation can be detected in his first writings as well as in his less reliable memories of his youth.

Yet, it might seem to some readers of Mark Twain that the focus of this study is a restatement of the obvious, that Twain's skeptical attitudes are clearly seen in all his major writings and that this subject has already been fully explored. As early as 1873, an unknown Brooklyn Daily Herald columnist said of Twain, "Nature seems to have designed him for a Methodist circuit preacher, but forgot to endow him with a particle of reverence, which has happened in the cases of other preachers, Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Sydney Smith, and one of our Brooklyn preachers." (Henry Nash Smith in his "How True Are Dreams? The theme of Fantasy in Mark Twain's Later Fiction" identifies the "Brooklyn preacher" as Henry Ward Beecher. Smith 9). On May 7, 1910, True Seeker, a free-thought periodical published "What was Mark Twain's Religion?" Written anonymously, the article suggested various links between Twain and the movement that advocated reason over faith, a school of thought that, like Twain, was influenced by Darwin, Thomas Paine, and Robert G. Ingersoll (Encyclopedia 305). Twain's friend William Dean Howells wrote in Harper's Monthly "[Twain] never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death" (Encyclopedia 306). In spite of such brief, perceptive observations, there are several reasons why this study needed to be done. First, some recent critics still find Twain a religious man, though one with numerous doubts who carried religion as a onerous burden. William C. S. Pellow, for example, wrote in his Mark Twain: Pilgrim from Hannibal that "Twain was a religious man, right up to the last, for no irreligious person could have written The Mysterious Stranger" (185). E. Hudson Long claimed in the first Mark Twain Handbook that Twain never denied the resurrection or the power of prayer, although, as Randy Cross points out, there is such a denial in Huckleberry Finn (Cross 6). Long, according to Cross, does not find Twain a skeptic but a Deist because of one comment Twain made to Albert Bigelow Paine: "There is, of course, a great master mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness" (6).

This mechanistic deism is certainly evident in Twain's own words; "When we pray, when we beg, when we implore does He listen? Does He answer? There is not a single authentic instance of it in human history" (Neider Outrageous 43). Twain's 1906 "Reflections on Religion" (Charles Neider's title for posthumously published autobiographical dictations) is, in fact, a detailed and lengthy essay decrying any belief in prayer and Christian doctrines, as in:

If there is anything more amusing than the

Immaculate Conception doctrine it is the

quaint reasonings whereby ostensibly

intelligent human beings persuade them-

selves that the impossible fact is proven.

. . . to a person who does not believe

in it, it seems a most puerile invention.

(Neider Outrageous 35-36)

Other critics still follow in Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard DeVoto's footsteps by seeing Twain's skepticism in light of late-life disappointments. Wendy Bie's 1972 essay "Mark Twain's Bitter Duality," in the Mark Twain Journal asserts that Twain's duality, his views on good and evil, man and beast, and man's separation from God were best recorded in Letters from the Earth, the closest thing we have, says Bie, to a philosophical treatise from Twain (14). According to Bie, in that work Twain "left the guise of crotchety novelist and gave his increasing spleen full vent" and Twain's notions of the good-evil duality can be seen only "as early as 1882 in The Prince and the Pauper" (14), ignoring, of course, the earlier duality of the "Good Little Boy" and "Bad Little Boy" stories. I will show that such notions can be seen in Twain's work much earlier, even earlier than the Mark Twain Encyclopedia's claim that Twain's first attacks on religion appeared in his California years (629).

Depending on the critic's definitions of such terms, Twain is seen as being an agnostic (See Anderson 13-15), a deist (see Wilson 169), or simply "a skeptic," a man with doubts. But, as Stanley Brodwin noted, finding a philosophical unity in Mark Twain's thinking requires finding a consistency in the midst of inconsistencies, and much critical debate continues seeking this elusive unity, the core of Mark Twain's philosophical vision ("Theology" 220). For Brodwin, in the midst of Twain's varying poses and mental and artistic divisions, a constant interest in the religious ethos of his time, the theological problems he saw in Christian scriptures, and what Twain "ultimately regarded as the false principles of Christian civilization" he labeled barbaric were as close to Twain's center as any issue, the focus of his explorations of illusion vs. reality. For Brodwin, this focus included the world of the falsely damned Adam and his descendants trapped in a realm of dreams, artificial ideals, and subjective doctrines ("Theology" 223-7).

This description of conflict comes close to the core of contemporary critical consensus on Twain's religious questioning as does the succinct survey of Twain's own words on the subject in the well-written "God" article in the Mark Twain Encyclopedia. In that essay, Jude V. Nixon chronicles Twain's often contradictory ideas about religion. Nixon found Twain a Deist who does not accept the Christian notions of God, Heaven, or Hell, Twain associating the Bible with "a drugstore" supervised by quacks who keep their patients "religion sick" for eighteen centuries, never allowing them a well day in all that time (323). Perhaps the lengthiest example of the prevailing critical consensus is Sherwood Cummings's important 1988 Mark Twain and Science which states that "[Twain] had established indissoluble loyalties, first to the theistic world view and later to a deistic one" (xi). Critics quote Twain's theistic credos such as his "I think the goodness, the justice, and the mercy of God are manifested in His works" (1880) and "The book of Nature distinctly tells us God cares not a rap for us nor for any living creature" (Cummings 16).

However, a man of continual searching, probing, and questioning of both human and cosmic causes, as Twain certainly was, would inevitably have both optimistic and pessimistic moods about the nature of the Judeo-Christian notions of a creator, but the distanced, often tyrannical and illogical character of this "God" worked primarily as a symbol or metaphor recognizable by his culture in Twain's attempt to reconcile and accept a unified world view, a search never ultimately satisfying. In between the two extremes of hope and despair, atheism was, in fact, the only constant thread that dominated Twain's religious tendencies.

Many critics are still skittish about admitting that Twain went beyond doubt and deism into full-blown denial of any god. Surprisingly, I have found no study in which Twain is called an atheist despite the fact that he himself, on more than one occasion, said he did not have any religious belief, and this inclination to disbelief can be seen in his earliest writings. This point warrants further discussion here before we move on to the other purposes of this study.

Some recent Twainians have seen at least part of the obvious and have pointed to Twain's early religious skepticism in published books and articles dealing with Twain's life after 1876. These critics and biographers usually give only fleeting mention of evidence of Twain's early skepticism, although John Hays's 1989 Mark Twain and Religion: A Mirror of American Eclecticism is a near exception to this point. A typical example of this trend is Minoru Okabayashi's "Mark Twain and his Pessimism" (1983) in which the critic sees suggestions of Twain's negative concept of the "Moral Sense" as early as Roughing It, the stories of "The Good Little Boy" and "The Bad Little Boy," and the 1870 sketch "My Watch" (85-86). But Okabayashi only mentions this idea in passing without exploring or developing this point, without any evidence or explication of the texts mentioned. Howard Baetzhold and Joseph McCullough's The Bible According to Mark Twain (1995) brought together Twain's most important religious writings, the most important anthology to date of Twain's religious musings including texts not previously published. The volume, as the editors note, demonstrates how Twain's conflict between religion and science was as a typical thinker in the nineteenth century, influenced by Paine and Darwin (xv-xvii.) The editors note Twain knew the Bible well, repeating his claim to have read it all before age fifteen, and that the fallacies young Sam Clemens observed in Biblical texts troubled him his entire life.

In this collection, Twain's first use of Noah's flood, beginning in 1866, and his various drafts of "Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven," which Twain began in 1869, clearly show how Twain's mind worked on continuing themes in manuscripts often unfinished and later picked up again (xvii-xxvii). "Stormfield" is of particular interest as Twain began working on the project after Innocents Abroad. "Stormfield" was a text the writer borrowed liberally from in other religious writings, and was unpublished until after his death, an important example of how Twain's central interests continued throughout his writing career, linking his later "dark writings" with earlier attempts to express his dissatisfaction with Biblical myths and texts (129-131).

Yet, most of the volume, appropriately, draws from the texts of Twain's last forty years due, in large part, to the fact that so much material is still extant from this period and is, as explored below, more developed and reflective than his frontier journalism allowed. Because Baetzhold's and McCullough's purpose was to collect Twain's use of the Bible specifically, they neither comment at length on Twain's religious sense, allowing Twain to speak for himself, nor do they delve into the early years where Twain's Biblical references are typically brief, oblique, and usually part of more general philosophic musings. It is for this study to add to their work, again, discussing the years before Twain's mature works.

Other studies do have important insights into the formative years of Sam Clemens. James D. Wilson's excellent essay "The Religious and Esthetics Vision of Mark Twain's Early Career" notes one reason why the study of Twain's religious sense has been so elusive. As Wilson notes, Twain kept up "a modicum of religious" behavior after his marriage, attending church regularly, and having Bible readings in his home to appeal to the wishes of his wife (169). Wilson believes that Twain's attempt to appear, to pose, as a Moral Man, to live a moral life, and to live in a socially respectable manner encouraged Albert Bigelow Paine and William Dean Howells to think that Twain leaned towards a disinterested Deism until he manifested his frustration with all religion in his later works (169). But, despite lip service and outward appearances and Twain's occasional sincere wish to have faith in a deity, the "cradle skepticism" of his youth always prevented any permanent religious conversion.

Another misconception is voiced by the otherwise astute John Frederick that "the notebooks and family letters from the five years Twain spent in Nevada and California throw little light on his religious attitudes" (131-32). Chapters III through IV of this study are a cornucopia of this very evidence; indeed, this study is primarily built on these primary sources, especially Sam's letters and frontier squibs. In short, much has been said, but no definitive work has yet fully explored what Sam Clemens/ Mark Twain thought and what he wrote in those early years in the light of his religious and social musings that are typically more atheistic than deist, more often attacking the notion of the Judeo-Christian God and the believers in it than showing any "belief" in that entity.

One important reason this study is now possible is the appearance of the Mark Twain Paper's publications of Early Tales and Sketches (Volume 1, 1979, Volume 2, 1981), the first volume of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1975), and the first volume of Sam Clemens's Letters (1988). These editions now make many primary sources readily accessible to scholars. Edgar Branch, principal editor of both the Sketches and Letters, said of the letters

[they] evidence the ready humor, the sure

command of colloquial speech, the keen eye

for detail that characterize Mark Twain's best

writing. In his mature work . . . Clemens

returned to the material first recorded in these

letters. (Letters xxii-xxiii)

Mark Twain dipped into the well of his early writings and thinking in many ways throughout his professional career, and his religious background was an important, central core of this well.

It is also only relatively recently that we have a body of studies on Twain's early writings, brief though they be, that deal with his early religious skepticism. Only two dissertations examine Twain's religious beliefs in writings as early as The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Tom Sawyer 1876. There have been a few books, including Victor Doyno's Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic (1983) and Allison Ensor's Mark Twain and the Bible (1960), that deal briefly with Twain's earliest journals and short fiction in the light of his religious feelings.

Much has been written about Twain's early days but in the wealth of biographies available on Twain, only four reliable full-length books deal exclusively with the years before Clemens turned thirty-five. There are, of course, many focused biographies on Twain's western years, but these books are primarily strict biographies and shed little light on Twain's thinking. The first biography to deal exclusively with the early years, Dixon Wecter's Sam Clemens of Hannibal (1952), is also relatively barren of information pertinent to this study, but it is indispensable to the Twain scholar looking closely at the young Sam Clemens. John Lauber's The Making of Mark Twain (1985) does more with influences on Twain than Wecter, especially those of school, church, and Tom Paine. Like Margaret Sanborn's Mark Twain: The Bachelor Years (1990) which has only one sentence addressing Twain's religious development, Lauber's book is addressed to the general reader and less revealing than more focused studies.

One thesis biography, Everett Emerson's excellent The Authentic Mark Twain (1984), has scattered but brief references to Twain's early skepticism, and Emerson's work will prove useful throughout this study. In addition, Emerson's later article, "Mark Twain's Quarrel with God" will also be discussed as Emerson claims in the 1860's and 1870's, Clemens's religious ire was not with God but with Christian hypocrisy and behavior ("Quarrel" 38").

Other studies clearly show a new interest in Twain's early pieces as being more than apprentice work revealing little about the philosophy and processes of Twain's writing. Don Florence's 1995 Persona and Humor in Mark Twain's Early Writings discusses Twain's early Western tales and sketches, The Innocents Abroad, and Roughing It in the light of Florence's theory that Mark Twain created a fluid, changeable "personality much more complex than dualities can suggest" (1-2). Florence demonstrates that Twain's changeable dynamic offers more than mere interplay between dualities in the early work which Florence calls "narrative histories" alternately "fictive truths" or "true fictions" (3).

Focusing on the mind of Mark Twain, Florence's young Twain is a free-standing "mind" who "humorously observes--and shapes-- his world"(10). "Twain achieved fluidity as a literary self by 1872 and maintained it throughout his career" (12). For Florence,

the writings through Roughing It form a distinct,

self-contained movement that takes Twain as far as he

is to go in a certain direction; namely, that of a

variable, inclusive personality who uses the plasticity

of humor to unsettle our notions of a fixed world.

(16).

While not showing this thinking reflects Twain's skeptical bent, in Florence's examination of the early frontier sketches, Florence discusses Twain's oft-noted "fascination with hoaxes, illusions, and exaggerations" which Florence sees as techniques Twain used to gain control over the bewildering West, liberating Twain, "not diminished or endangered, by his transformations of the world" (37). Florence covers more early material than any previous study including "Petrified Man," "A Bloody Massacre Near Carson," "Aurelia's Unfortunate Young Man," "The Lick House Ball," and "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" among others. Florence deepens our appreciation of these pieces that show that, by the appearance of Innocents Abroad, Twain "emerges as much more than a mere `humorist': he emerges as a variegated and thoughtful mind, cognizant of existential dilemmas but also cognizant that humor can shape new perspectives on these dilemmas . . . with a relatively free identity" (83). With this "transcendent mind," Roughing It "illustrates the play of the mind--the restless, pioneering tendency of the mind not to stay settled with a given idea but to push at that idea, transforming and expanding it into new frontiers" (123). Again, Florence's subject is not Twain's religious issues but does support what this study emphasizes--that the mindscape often explored in Twain's later works can be illuminated by careful explorations of the Western canon.

It is natural enough that the bulk of studies on Twain should deal with the years after the publication of The Innocents Abroad as all his important work begins with this first travel book. It is also natural that Twain's distaste for religion should first be explored in the light of his later writings, the posthumous "dark works," and the seminal biographies of Brooks and DeVoto. It seems as though scholars traced this facet of Clemens thought from the last book first, and, going backwards, finally explored Twain's religious doubt in Tom Sawyer and The Innocents Abroad, and the best exploration of the latter work was published only as recently as 1986. With the publication of Hays's work in 1989 and the further work of the present study, the cycle is complete, bringing the earliest of Sam Clemens's writings into the ongoing debate.

This study also shows how much of what was contained in the "dark" writings was actually based on experiences, thoughts, and feelings of the boy called "young Sam" by his family. We shall see that religion, being only one of the many peeves of the satirist Mark Twain, was a subject that, for primarily commercial reasons, a popular author of the American nineteenth century could not attack overtly in his commercial work. His main reason in writing was to sell his work, not deconvert or offend Christian book buyers. "[A] man is not independent," Twain wrote, "and cannot afford views which might interfere with his bread and butter" (Doyno 426). He had a public, a family, and friends to whom he was responsible.

Albert Bigelow Paine once observed that Twain said exactly what he wanted to without censorship (Paine Notebooks i), but with the 1996 Random House edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it was made manifestly clear that Twain was indeed capable of deleting potentially offensive passages from his work, particularly those overtly critical of Christian sensibilities. In other cases, as shall be noted later in this study, some critics believe Twain did "speak the whole truth" but that readers have not always seen the truth the author intended. Twain said, "Only dead men can tell the truth" and had his harshest writings published posthumously when his responsibilities would be at an end. What I shall demonstrate is that these "Letters from the Earth" were based on ideas and concepts conceived long before he had the desire to write them down, and before he was in a position to "tell the truth."

Religion, while a major topic of our discussion, was not the only concern of Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Hartford, Elmira, and points west. Many matters of deep concern to Twain, expressed most potently in his last writings, can also be traced to his early years before 1876, and many critics have noted numerous examples of these. For example, John Stark noted in his "Mark Twain and the Chinese" (1986) that Twain's 1881-1885 involvement with the Chinese Education Mission reflected his earlier interest in the plight of the Chinese. "Twain's respect and concern date

back to his early days in the West. He spoke up in Roughing It, devoting chapter 54 to the Chinese in Virginia City and complaining about the persecution that they suffered and extolling their virtues" (Stark 36). Stark's note is among the evidence useful for our purposes because a secondary purpose of this study is to show the importance of the events and influences on Mark Twain, including influences not directly bearing on religion.

Twain's social sense and attitude towards man was part and parcel of his world view, and it is not always useful to extricate religion from his thoughts without examining other developing ideas. When appropriate, we will examine important early events for two purposes: to reinforce the thesis that the works of the later years can be traced to the early experiences, and to show how Clemens's philosophic leanings--however labelled--were always more humanitarian than religious.

Stark's note is also a good example of other observations in Twain scholarship. Useful points are scattered or buried in articles and books from Delancy Ferguson's 1943 Mark Twain: Man and Myth to Everett Emerson's brief statement at the end of Chapter 1 in his The Authentic Mark Twain:

[his style] was derived from a rejection of

artificiality, superficiality, the hypocritical

cult of polite conformity. More specifically,

Mark Twain was a skeptic in religion, and

irreverent too. When there was an establish-

ment . . . he was anti-establishment. (20)

Emerson's point is well stated, yet the evidence is not explored. That is a primary purpose of this study.

Chapter II of this work reviews recent scholarship relating to my purposes, pointing to the strengths and weaknesses in the current streams of critical thought. Chapter III explores biographical materials emphasizing the importance (and critical misconceptions) regarding young Sam's family and home town on his religious and social views. Chapter IV then examines philoso-phical influences on Twain's religious thinking, particularly John J. MacFarland ("Mcfarlane"), Thomas Paine, and the literary comedians. Then, Chapter V, the heart of this book, closely examines the primary texts, the letters, tales and sketches themselves to demonstrate that, despite claims to the contrary, skepticism and atheism can clearly be detected in the texts.

CHAPTER II

THE CRITICAL BACKGROUND: MARK TWAIN AND RELIGION

Mark Twain has perhaps received more causal

analysis than any other American writer. Regional

and economic factors, guilts and frustrations

imposed by his family life, several kinds of

sexual motives--all these have served to explain

the man and his works. (Baender 187)

Critic Paul Baender's comment is an appropriate reminder that contemporary critics are always responsible to the critics of the past who cumulatively have assembled evidence that has shaped our interpretations of Mark Twain's work. Major studies on Twain's religious sense have covered different aspects of this topic, proposing varying influences on this dimension of Twain's thought. Shorter studies have proposed specific readings, mentors, or events as significant in this area.

This chapter is an overview of much of this criticism, followed by discussions in Chapters III and IV of major religious influences generally agreed upon in twain scholar-ship. Below, we will examine the critical mainstream of the last twenty years as well as notable dissents in the critical dialogue.

Before I can make a convincing case establishing Samuel Clemens's antipathy for religion before 1876, I must emphasize that the critical mainstream agrees that these feelings are clearly manifested in Twain's first major work, The Innocents Abroad (1876) and before, especially discussing those who allude to the matters developed in this study. These critics provide a setting for later discussions, focusing on more general overviews of Twain's early thinking, writing, and influences. This chapter cannot be exhaustive or all inclusive. Many important writers will be noted in later chapters when particular influences, family members, or writings are discussed.

The major critical works requiring closest scrutiny here include two dissertations--Jeffrey R. Holland's Mark Twain's Religious Sense: The Viable Years 1835-1883 (1973) and Randy Cross's Religious Skepticism in Selected Novels of Mark twain (1979). Allison Ensor's excellent Mark Twain and the Bible (1969), Victor Doyno's useful Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic (1983), Edgar Branch's The Literary Apprentice-ship of Mark Twain (1950) and John Q. Hays's Mark Twain and Religion: A Mirror of American Eclecticism (1988) are also important to any study of the early years. Other shorter critical studies will be mentioned, but these six in-depth studies, being more extensive, provide the best of recent scholarship on the thinking of the young Samuel Clemens.

Victor Doyno's collection, Mark Twain: Selected Writings of an American Skeptic, is primarily an anthology of excerpts from the Twain canon that show, as Doyno writes in his introduction, that "Twain was, though not a systematic philosopher, a skeptic for most of his lifetime" (1). Doyno's selections begin with Twain's juvenilia and early journalism (discussed in detail in Chapter V of this study), and include passages from such unlikely works as A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, and Life on the Mississippi. Passages from other Twain writings, such as Huckleberry Finn and Letters from the Earth, would surprise no one by their inclusion in this anthology. These later works contain adverse criticism of Judeo-Christian thought and practices and have been often explored.

But the early passages are enlightening. They demonstrate, as Leslie Fiedler says in his foreword to the book, that Doyno has shown the "subversive" side of Twain, the Mark Twain who cleverly disguised his antagonism toward Christianity throughout his literary career (Doyno xi).

Doyno sketches a brief biography of Clemens's early years, which is incorporated into my chapter on biography. A quick summation is that, due to the influences of his parents' varied religious experiences, young Sam "was encouraged to become a cultural amphibian, able to become immersed and successful in a culture while also remaining objective and critical of it" (5). Doyno indicates that perhaps one of the reasons few critics have noted skepticism in Mark Twain's early writings is that it takes someone with similar views to spot it. Doyno cites Kurt Vonnegut Jr. as seeing Twain's skepticism as a mirror of his own (6). Then Doyno, after a short history of Sam Clemens's apprentice-printer career, says that, due to this "poor boy's university

. . . the printed word held, for Sam, little mystical authority" Doyno (7).

What Sam read in the printing house, Doyno writes, influenced not only his writing style but also his attitudes toward society. "Irony and social criticism permeate this form [frontier journalism], which can vary from the objective reporting of information to imaginative invention" (Doyno 7). His working environment, Doyno correctly deduces, not only fostered Clemens's religious skepticism but also his jaundiced eye at any number of other socially and culturally accepted notions. Experience, Doyno implies, creates religious skeptics and individuals. Like Sam Clemens, such well-traveled individuals tend to be less credulous.

The last point Doyno makes pertinent to our purposes is that the areas Twain would next explore--in both his written and oral practices--were influenced by creators of the tall tale. He says that, especially in the oral tradition of the tall tale, the speaker works on the credulity of his audience. This working on the emotions of readers and listeners can be linked with the sermons of nineteenth-century ministers.

Sam Clemens had traveled throughout America, had heard many preachers and storytellers, and had practiced the oral arts himself. He was certainly aware that the gullible were prey to preachers and used this point for comic effect in, among other works, Huckleberry Finn. Ultimately, as Stanley Brodwin noted, Twain saw all religion and theology as an opiate of the people, religion being a comic subject as it deluded the gullible as it provided only false morality and superficial foundations easily manipulated by preachers ("Theology" 223-4). And, as Victor Doyno notes, the storyteller Mark Twain learned just how man's credulity could be worked on and exploited from his earliest years. This is a key point and will be addressed throughout this study.

Victor Doyno, like Randy Cross and Jeffrey Holland, is important because he is among the first to explore and develop the idea that much of Twain's training in social criticism and skepticism was learned at home, at school, in the print shop, and on the road rather than based in late life bitterness and personal disappointments.

Jeffrey R. Holland, author of Mark Twain's Religious Sense: The Viable Years 1835-1883 (1973), is one critic whose focus completely overlaps my own, so I shall treat his views extensively here. In his introduction, Holland states that one of his basic premises is "that there was a dim religious light about virtually everything Mark Twain wrote," that religion was Twain's burden, and that Twain created "one of the most explicitly religious modes in all of American literature" (Holland 1-2).

Holland lists many examples of Twain's biblical metaphors in his personal life--naming his cats Famine, Pestilence, Satan, and Sin--and in his business talk (a new business opportunity was referred to as "a new mission field"). "Frequently it seems that he had no other metaphors at his disposal" (2). It is worth noting, as shall be shown shortly, that while religious, these allusions typically have negative connotations, not those of a practicing devotee of Christianity. In fact, these allusions are more often satirical than not. Further, it should be emphasized that Twain had to use the language of his reading audience, a language rich in religious vocabulary. As Susan Gillman notes in her 1989 Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America, Twain had to create a language of his own identity "using the cultural vocabularies available to him" (3).

Gillman's comments on the relationship between language and culture bear special note here. While trying to reconstruct Twain's personal obsessions in light of their cultural contexts, Gillman links topical issues of journalism, science, and law to the themes and vocabulary in Twain's fiction. She notes that Twain's influences were varied due;

especially [to] the proliferation of conceptual

systems . . . that applied self-consciously and

self-critically the scientific, classificatory

analysis in which so much modern faith was put.

(5)

Gillman claims that the preoccupations of Twain's culture provided "vocabularies he alternately appropriated and quibbled with, exploited and subverted, inhabited and ionized, but which were always enabling" (8). In short, Twain used identifiable vocabulary for his own purposes, and reverence was rarely his goal. So when Clemens refers to the Deity in quotes critics use to identify him with theism, they are missing the point that Twain is merely using the cultural symbols available to him.

Underlining this focus on language, Holland writes in his discussion on religion as burden that Twain frequently called his religious adversary "Presbyterianism" (3), but Holland believes that this term was generic and was meant to encompass all Christian faith (3). Holland maintains that Twain, like the mongrel pup in "A Dog's Tale," did not really care about clear theological distinctions (4). Twain saw theological distinctions more as opportunities for hypocrisy and strife than useful definitions of belief.

Yet, Holland claims, some concepts carried serious clout for Mark Twain. "Sin, punishment, conscience, duty, the fear of God, death--these were the staples in his moral pantry," Holland writes (5), and then discusses his view that guilt and the fear of the Puritan God were obsessions to Twain. Holland's view of the guilt-ridden Twain is supported by his look at Clemens's guilt over the deaths of a brother, son, and daughter, and he was perhaps the first to note the theme of the early stories "The Good Little Boy" and "The Bad Little Boy" as a forerunner to Twain's late life "reflections on religion" (6).

Holland believes that Clemens seriously considered becoming a minister despite his well known "My Dear Bro" letter to his older brother Orion. In that letter of September 1865, Sam said his career choices were limited and that he could not be a minister "because I lack the necessary stock in trade, i.e., religion" (Holland 7). Recalling this moment, as recorded in Paine's Biography, Twain remembered that he once toyed with the idea of being a minister, not out of piety, but because he needed a secure job. "It never occurred to me that a minister could be damned" (Paine Biography 1:84). Twain's intent in both quotes is open to speculation, but the verb "toyed" implies his thoughts were less serious than Holland concludes.

To quickly demonstrate this point, Hamlin Hill noted in 1988 that the "My Dear Bro" letter was written the day after Twain completed the "Jumping Frog" story, one day after the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle reprinted an article from the New York Round Table saying that Mark Twain would become one "of our brightest wits" if he "doesn't kill" his "mental golden goose" with overwork. Later in the "Dear Bro" letter, Twain stated simply, "[Humor] is my strongest suit" (Hill 24). A serious "Call" to the ministry was clearly not on Twain's mind--referring to literature as a Calling was hyperbole in the same spirit as referring to business opportunities as "mission fields." As Hamlin Hill has said, "Clemens felt compelled, perhaps, to camouflage a highly secular decision with the whitewash of theology and to strike a melodramatic pose of bowing to the verdict of a Higher Court" (Hill 25).

Holland never concludes that Twain was a skeptic, a doubter, a deist, but simply that religion was a constant burden to the man and that Clemens's natural piety was not enough to stand up to the late-life personal setbacks and tragedies. Holland's ideas are supported by John Q. Hays whose Mark Twain and Religion: A Mirror of American Eclecticism (1988) based in part on his earlier 1973 article, "Mark Twain's Rebellion Against God: Origins." As the title implies, Hays agrees with Holland's notion that Twain's religious concerns reflected those of his culture, and that Sam Clemens "unconsciously absorbed deep-rooted spiritual contradictions which illuminate the man's life-long rebellion against God" (Rebellion 27).

Hays writes in his longer study an appropriate appreciation of Bernard DeVoto's Mark Twain's American (1932) which refuted Van Wyck Brook's psychological assessment of Mark Twain's Later years, especially Brooks's claim that the frontier years were sterile soil "for the seed of genius to fall in" (Religion 2). Hays notes how DeVoto too found Twain's pessimism and despair to be a result of experience and disappointment, in particular that of the Western call of Manifest Destiny by which "young Sam Clemens and his generation were imbued with the hope of a New Jerusalem" (3). It was a generation that moved from simple, rural life through a scientific, technological world too complex for Sam Clemens to understand (3). And Christianity became "a sham by acting as a full-time partner [in materialism]" (3). Hays then claims:

Perhaps it is now possible to understand where

the welter of critical opinion and evidence has

left us and to see that early and late Clemens

was a man of immensely eclectic religious views.

(Religion 4)

His related article discusses how this came about, noting two major influences on the early Clemens and how they contributed to this varied view:

(1) his community's stern orthodox Calvinism--the

only "true Christianity" characterized by its

Big-Brother-like Master of a depraved human

race, that would be scared into him by the

terrifying superstitions of the slave and

(2) his own family's equally extreme heterodoxy,

in the guise of his deist-minded father and

uncle who planted into the sensitive lad's

imagination the seed of doubt and will to

disbelieve. (Rebellion 27)

Further, Hays believes Twain's flight from orthodoxy was lifelong:

Thus began his unresolved conflict on the nature

of God and man that led the mature Twain to keep

rebelling against his boyhood Presbyterianism

long after he was `emancipated' from it . . .

fashioning his own grim substitute faith.

(Rebellion 27).

Hays believes Twain "preached a `gospel of despair'" and practiced "a religion of humanity by writing moral satires" (27-8). Twain remained "unresolved to the end on life's basic issues, much as he had been on leaving Hannibal in 1853" (28). Hays presents an interesting theory that the "voodoo" of John Quarrels's slaves put terror into Sam when they told him stories "overlaying Biblical mythology" with African lore (31). While it is true that Jim is an "encyclopedia" of voodoo in Huckleberry Finn, it seems likelier that fear and terror were implanted in Sam in other arenas, most notably in church and school.

It is worth noting that Hays's short article focuses on the influences of Hannibal, voodoo, John Clemens, and John Quarles, a formula that again shows critics agree that Clemens's religious sense grew from a variety of influences. Many differences are on matters of degree and determining priority. No one formula, of course, is definitive or conclusive but all are illuminating and point to the complexity and depth of Twain's religious experiences.

Hays also discusses community experiences Sam certainly shared, including the Campbellite crusades in Hannibal in the fall of 1845 and October-November 1852. Sam was certainly aware of the Millerite doctrine that the world would end on October 22, 1844 (Religion 4). "No church was big enough to take all comers so the evangelists preached outdoors" (4). In the same vein, Hays reviews Twain's memories of the "wildcat" religion of spiritualism in "Villagers of 1840-1841" where "a particularly violent case of insanity was yoked to `religion'" because a young man cut off his hand which had committed "a mortal sin" (6-7). The variety of such religious stimulants, says Hays, "caused confusion in an intellectually active youngster like Sam Clemens" (7). This confusion made Clemens "a divided Mark Twain-Mr. Clemens." Further:

One side of him knew; the other side hoped.

Sometimes one voice was louder than the other,

but both voices were always present. Though

this division is evident from Clemens's earliest

experiences to his later writing, it does not

. . . add up to a final negation of life, of the

damned human race, of the universe, or of God.

(Religion 11-12)

Unlike many other critics, for Hays, Clemens sought alternatives for orthodoxy but failed, especially scientific determinism which Hays believes Twain could not finally accept (Religion 12). "He floundered through the options, confused, angry, pained at and in a secular world" (12). This "spiritual confusion," says Hays, is appropriate for "someone spiritually alive" persistently "asking the big questions of the universe" (12).

Hays claims the reason for this confusion was Clemens's "chronological" mirroring of America's own spiritual confusion of the age. As discussed below, Clemens's personal spiritual biography can be construed to fit many patterns or pigeonholed to follow a critic's thesis, but the simple truth is that Sam Clemens's quest was his own, more often in conflict with his culture rather than mirroring it, and our focus is on the writer himself and not as a cultural representative. For, as Susan Gillman implies, Twain used culture and its language for his own purposes as much as it molded him.

Still, obviously, as Hays and others know, when young Sam left home, "he took with him Hannibal and its moral imperatives, its prejudices, its religious teachings and their consequences--heavy gear for life's journey . . . but it didn't take him long to unload the excess baggage for the rest of the trip" (Religion 17). In short, Twain's religious odyssey was personal and individual, no mere mirror of American culture. While a Puritan past dominated America's religious thought, Mark Twain was, perhaps reluctantly, perhaps angrily, able to move away from many of his culture's restraints although these moves were, especially during his years as father and husband, more profoundly difficult than for the younger iconoclasm.

It is true, as Hays notes, that as a late teenager, Clemens wrote derogatory remarks about Catholics and blacks, reflecting the popular mood of Hannibal in the late 1850's, but as Clemens himself noted later, "Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque reception, dense and pitiful chuckleheadness--and almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 or 20" (Letters 1:289). In short, simple immaturity can account for much of Twain's early use of cultural slurs as well as his early ease in rebelling against institutional and out-worldly authorities.

Hays, among others, finds the earliest attack on orthodoxy in 1855 in the sketch on the widow with five children in need of Christian charity (analyzed in Chapter IV of this study). Hays briefly reviews the correspondence with Orion on religion, including the 1860 letter, "I can not see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious--except he purposely shut the eyes of his mind and keep them shut by force" (Religion 23, Fonor 132). Hays's broad interpretation of this quotation finds "a clear reliance upon reason to come to grips with reality and truth, a consequence of the reading of The Age of Reason" (Religion 24). This notion supports the idea of Twain's anti-Romantic feelings, of his antipathy towards overly emotional religious out flowings typical of camp meetings and "wildcat" services. In Twain's words, "A consensus examines a new thing with feelings rather oftener than with its mind" (Encyclopedia 305). This use of reason, says Hays, might leave us with the possibility of Twain's being a Deist except that Twain's own claim excludes all religion (Religion 24). Sam Clemens very early in life was moving away from Deistic determinism, not toward it, in spite of his brief flirtation with Freemasonry in 1860-1861.

Hays's notes on the frontier years contain useful insights, including the idea that Thomas Paine's line "My religion is to do good" was reflected in Clemens's interest in moral reform (26). Hays discusses two sketches, "The Dutch Nick Massacre" on a stock-rigging scheme in October 1863 and one on Bill Stewart who, in Clemens's opinion, "construed" the Nevada constitution for his own selfish ends, as examples of Clemens's early moralistic writings (26).

These pieces provide evidence of Clemens's growing

awareness of the evil in the world, and implied

inadequacy of the church to do anything but evil,

the indifference of the church to evil, and the

cloaking of evil in the garb of religion. (26)

There was more than frontier high jinks in the early journalism of the Enterprise era. As Hays notes, "such a stance earned Clemens the description of `moral phenomenon'" (26).

Hays also spends some time discussing Clemens's attacks on institutions in his short stay in San Francisco where he attacked inefficiency in the police department. More importantly, says Hays:

. . . for the first time he is overtly

critical of the clergy and posed as having

offered three prominent Easter ministers a

chance for a "call" in San Francisco with

each turning him down because he was making

more money in his home pastorate investing

in cotton, petroleum, or grain markets. (27)

Twain reversed this scenario in the imaginary "Important Correspondence" in San Francisco, offering vacant high-paying positions to Eastern clergy such as the Reverend Phillips Brooks who were clearly motivated by financial gain (Encyclopedia 629). As we shall see later, these attacks were based on earlier sketches that dealt with hypocrisy and anti-clerical attitudes. More usefully, Hays writes one of the few interesting analyses of "The Story of The Good Little Boy," believing the tale resulted from Twain's offended feelings regarding overly simplistic solutions to problems as well as his reaction to "Emerson's two laws, one for man and one for things" (28). The church must "decide which side it is on . . . [and] teach virtue, but it must not . . . advise that virtue is easy, a point made explicit in the later story `The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg' and the companion story, the `Bad Little Boy'" (28).

Before we leave Hays's discussion of "wildcat" spiritualism and frontier Presbyterianism, his comments on the sketches "Sabbath Reflections" and "Reflections on the Sabbath" can point us to key conclusions Hays offers about Twain's religion in the early years. His notion that lofty ideals, here Twain's reflections on the nature of the sabbath, lose out to distractions like Brown's barking dog.

Twain's ridicule and criticism of most

institutions and people seem to constantly go

back to the failure of the institution for the

individual to face reality or truth and the

insistence on hiding truth or reality behind

some religious sham or political verbiage

passing for uprightness. (33)

Further, the pieces on the Sabbath, says Hays, "are prophetic in that Twain would continue to employ reason to explain `man's origin, nature, and destiny' throughout his career" (33). Hays concludes that, as Twain set sail for the Sandwich Islands:

He had been exposed to a variety of religious

beliefs and seems, at that time, to be on the

side of a secular religion of reason. he had

left behind the trappings of Calvinist dogma

and other unreasoning religious sects. He had

not abandoned belief in a Creator and seems

to have equated that Creator with natural laws

that include barking dogs and fighting cats.

Whatever he believed, it was not what he had been

taught in the Sunday Schools. (33-4).

Supporting Hays, Randy Cross claims, in his dissertation Religious Skepticism in Selected Novels of Mark Twain (1982), that most scholars tend to agree that Mark Twain did not believe in the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible or in the divinity of Jesus Christ (1). This is due, Cross says, to the studies of Twain's posthumous publications, including most notably The Mysterious Stranger (1917), Letters From the Earth (1962), and Mark Twain's Notebook (1935). Cross's thesis is that this disbelief can be seen as early as The Innocents Abroad (1869) and when Twain "denounced the authenticity of the Bible and the belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ" (1). This skepticism, Cross shows, can be seen in Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and The Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.

Cross then says that one of the reasons Twain hated religion was that it was, to him only superstition (5). During the period Clemens courted Olivia Langdon, Cross notes, Twain claimed to be a Christian in order to be acceptable to the Langdon household, but after the marriage, "Twain refused to participate in Bible readings and devotions on the grounds that he considered it would be hypocritical for him to do so" (10). Cross claims that the religious skepticism found in Twain's last writings can be seen in his "most popular novels" (31).

Allison Ensor, author of Mark Twain and the Bible (1969), also examines Twain's early disparaging of the Bible. Like Cross, Ensor's study begins with The Innocents Abroad because, as he states in his first chapter, Twain, while being somewhat flippant with Bible passages in his early journalism, still spoke of Christ reverently and had respect for the Bible and its ideals until 1867 when he took the "Quaker City" excursion (Ensor 3-5). Ensor notes that young Sam's early influences included his independent father and the near opposite views of Sam's mother and his sister, Pamela Moffett (14). He is less successful in attempting to claim John Quarles (Sam's Uncle) and Freemasonry as principal influences on Sam's early religious thought. But he correctly cites the writings of Thomas Paine as a strong influence on Clemens's young mind, a subject explored in Chapter IV below.

Ensor's study is important because his book, along with the work of Hays, Cross, Doyno, and Holland, clearly established the religious skepticism in Twain's first major book, The Innocents Abroad, leaving me free to delve into the years before Sam Clemens became Mark Twain. First, the insights of Edgar Branch, the most important living scholar on Twain's early years, must be mentioned as he discusses religion in his The Literary Apprenticeship of Mark Twain (1950). Branch agrees that Twain had outgrown fundamentalism by 1866, and says the following regarding Twain's influences and Calvinism in particular:

John Clemens, John Quarles, Tom Paine and

MacFarlane had done their work well. But all

his life long, as Paul Carter has said, `the

blacker tenets of Calvinism hovered like shadowy

specters in the background of his mind.' Those

tenets fed his insistent iconoclasm; he always

ridiculed literal interpretations of the Bible

and other orthodox conceptions of God. Also they

affected his seasoned estimate of man as a free

agent and as a responsible member of society.

(147)

Branch believes that Twain's religious explorations were based first on his need to explain personal tragedies and the "blunders and injustices of man" (147). "He inevitably had to extend that explanation to cover man's origin, nature, and destiny, for nothing less would suffice. His rationalization was best constructed from key symbols in the Christian cosmology he had absorbed as a child in Florida and Hannibal" (147).

These are key insights because they rely primarily on examining the mind of Sam Clemens more than placing him in a broad, cultural context. Branch also underlines the notion that, to Mark Twain, the use of religious words and concepts was more symbolic than heartfelt. These symbols included "God and Satan, heaven and hell, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden and cursed ground" (147). These symbols, according to Branch, took on "empirical significance"--representing the good and evil Clemens observed without as well as his concerns with evil within (147). Branch believes that The Mysterious Stranger was Twain's ultimate "theoretical resolution." Moreover,

That the book is worlds away from the feeble jest

at the expense of fundamentalism made in San

Francisco. The doubts and the fluid symbols,

even in the sixties, were finding expression.

(148)

Branch observes that Twain's frontier writings were critical of individual conduct, dealing with the good-evil duality of man. "He condemned the imperfections of man's heart and mind and was drawn irresistibly to man's goodness" (148). Although Twain admired the innate goodness of friends like Jim Gillis and Captain Ed Montgomery, he found himself examining man's ethical flaws, "man's selfish motivation, his addiction to lying, his cowardice, his easy susceptibility to temptation and self-deception, and his socially harmful reliance upon petty moral prohibitions and conventions" (148). These were concerns expressed in 1865-1866, and "They were ideas he retained all his life" (148).

Branch notes other aspects of Twain's early years that

persisted in his later thinking. Branch says Clemens saw

man as a hopeless and pathetic thing in later years, but "In San Francisco he was not so hopeless about man's state, but essentially the same conception of the irrational in man made him a satirist of individual manners and morals" (149). It is interesting that Branch emphasizes Twain's thinking in terms of men, not deities. It is individual men that Twain accuses of wrongdoing, even while agreeing that institutions mold the ideas of individuals (149-49). Branch notes that individual courage against lynch mobs or individual evil, as in Twain's attacks on King Leopold and the Czar of Russia, is the real core of Twain's beliefs. Again, Twain is seen as a humanist, not a believer in god or divinity but is still, to use another's phrase, "asking the big questions." Other big questions dealt with science and religion, an area of interest to critic Sherwood Cummings.

As Cummings's Mark Twain and Science (1988) points out, Mark Twain's relationship with scientific thought went far beyond mere interest in technology. "Persistently philosophical, he was after bigger game. He looked to science for such meanings as it could give in answering social, moral, and cosmological questions" (xi). Because of this, no explanation of Twain's religious sense can ignore Twain's early musings about science as they certainly contributed to his world view.

As with his interest in Paine, Twain's reading of scientific works was a lifelong interest. Albert Bigelow Paine said Twain's interest in science "amounted to passion" (Biography 1: 512). Twain owned over one hundred titles in his personal library covering topics from astronomy, geology, anthropology, and evolution, a range appropriate for "someone seeking a world view" (Cummings xi). Cummings believes this search led to two loyalties, "first to a theistic world view and later to a deistic one . . . the result [was] the conflict between the cosmology of Genesis and science's disclosures about the antiquity of the universe and the evolution of life" (xi).

The major early influence, according to Cummings, was Hippolyte Taine, "the French philosopher who applied science to the arts and humanities . . . who gave American realism its theoretical foundations" (xi). Cummings says that from Taine Twain learned the realist's methods--as did Howells--"and the clinical approach to personality and society" (xi).

It should be noted that we can document only Twain's reading of Taine and Darwin in the 1870's, though Clemens surely knew of Darwin's theories much earlier. Alan Gribben shows that both Twain and Livy read Taine in the 1870's. In a letter to Mollie Fairbanks, "Clemens referred to The Ancient Regime, along with works by Carlyle and Dumas, as histories which cleared up his confusion about French events" (683). As Twain noted in 1882, "Mr. Darwin's Descent of Man had been in print five or six years and the storm of indignation raised by it was still raging in pulpits and periodicals" ("Monument to Adam" Notebook 20, Gribben 174). New scientific ideas were, if you will, in the air.

Twain's iconoclastic eye, of course, never found science sacrosanct. His "Prehistoric Man" sketch, an early example of Twain's skepticism, was also a precursor to later burlesques on scientific writing. The satire of the sketch was mirrored in September and October 1871's "A Brace of Brief Lectures on Science," published in Orion's American Publisher. The "Lectures" were a response to "Our Earliest Ancestor," a work which aroused Twain's doubts about paleontologists' abilities to understand prehistory. As Cummings noted, in the "Lectures," Twain took on the guise of a scientist "but one who used the common sense lacking in his `brother paleontologist'" (Cummings 12; Hamlin Hill, "Mark Twain's `Brace of Brief Lectures on Science'" 236-39). Many later writings followed this theme including "Some Learned Fables, for Good Old Boys and Girls" (1874) which also continued Twain's early use of animal imagery with Professor Snail, Professor Woodhouse, Engineer Herr Spider, and Professor Field-Mouse.

Cummings also notes that Thomas Paine's scientific views affected Twain's religious sense. Paine contrast "the foolish Biblical notion of a geocentric universe with a modern `belief of a plurality of worlds'" (22). Paine "declares that our earth is `infinitely less in proportion than the smallest grain of sand is to the size of the world'" (22). Clemens, as Cummings notes, concurred saying "the modern universe consists of countless worlds . . . that in comparison ours is grotesquely insignificant" (22). In many instances, Twain's philosophical views were mirror images of Pain's (22-3).

In Mark Twain: Rebel Pilgrim (1973), J. Harold Smith points to the early influences on Samuel Clemens and lists them as follows:

(1) a budding evolutionary determinism initiated

by MacFarlane

(2) a sense of guilt-despair induced by the death

of brother Henry

(3) a daring independence generated by success in

piloting

(4) a habit of brooding speculations fostered by

the pilot's way of life

(5) a variant concept of Deity drawn from the

Deism of Paine

(6) a spirit of reckless bravado--never

unprincipled, always controlled--grown out

of the speculative adventures of the mining

frontier. (25)

Smith's comments that precede this list are not enough to establish fully the basis for these conclusions, yet the conclusion makes for an interesting formula, many facets of which are major tenets in this volume. Smith's stressing of the guilt over Henry's death is not supported in his argument, but other critics have indeed shown that guilt was obviously a major aspect of Clemens's feelings and was a decidedly influential part of his conscience.

The other points Smith lists, excepting the much-noted Thomas Paine and MacFarlane, clearly are interpretations of Twain's character based on his life on the river and his westward travels that Smith uses to establish Twain's mental stage before the pilgrimage of the "Quaker City." Smith is one of the few writers who indicate that the years on the river had anything to do with Clemens's religious sense beyond the fact that it was as a cub pilot that Twain first read Thomas Paine.

It must be admitted that Smith, or any other writer dealing with the river years, must be interpretive because these years are so poorly documented; the only extant documents we have of the piloting period are the notebooks that Horace Bixby commanded the young cub to keep of the Mississippi River's many landmarks and changes, the letters Sam Clemens wrote home, and the three brief sketches attributed to him. Some of those letters and sketches are central to this study and will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. Smith concludes his discussion by finding Twain "tortured by religious skepticism which culminated in a Deistic determinism" (157).

James D. Wilson's 1986 "Religious and Esthetics Vision in Mark Twain's Early Career" is an in-depth article looking at religious matters in Twain's thinking before the publication of Innocents Abroad. Wilson believes that the period of the Clemens/Langdon courtship was the period when "his religious and artistic concerns fused to form at the outset of his professional career an esthetics credo that Mark Twain neither fully satisfied nor completely abandoned" (156). Twain was:

a man already alienated from the comfortable

religious homilies of his childhood. His early

training in the Hannibal Presbyterian church

and the support and example of his parents

had left him a conscience keen to humanitarian

concerns and personal moral responsibility,

and a knowledge of, if not a belief in, the

basic tenets of Protestant faith., He had by

this time become disenchanted with religious

orthodoxy, distrustful of the emotionalism

and sentimentality characteristic of superficial

or false piety, and impatient with any hint of

religious chicanery . . . [but] he nevertheless

exhibited little disposition to blasphemy. (156)

For Wilson, during the courtship period, Twain was capable of sensitive expression of pious sentiments" (156). Yet this piety was expressed only in love letters at a specific time in his life, and these expressions were, as Wilson admits, made in frustration. Clemens may have cried "I will be a Christian" in his 1868 correspondence to Livy, but a consummation of this short-lived ideal never occurred. Wilson's examples of this desire are found only in the letters to Livy and Mary Fairbanks during an admittedly passionate phase of his life. Wilson shows how Twain's interest in conversion was undoubtedly profound: as Twain himself wrote in 1868:

Piety is the right performance of a common duty

as well as the experience of a special moral

emotion. I now perform all my duties as well as

I can but see what i lack!--I lack the chief

ingredient of piety for I lack (almost always)

the "special moral emotion"--that inner sense that

tells me what I do I am doing for love of the

Savior. (Wilson 168; 27 December 1868)

This letter not only invites comparison to Clemens "My Dear Bro" statement that "I lack the necessary prerequisite, i. e. religion," but it also seems an echo of the tale young Sam told his mother about rejecting God on the grounds that he could not do good except for selfish reasons. In several letters quoted by Wilson, Clemens could not accept Christianity for any reason beyond gaining the love of Livy and the hope of easing the pain of his mother's last years (169). In short, when Samuel Clemens most yearned to become a Christian, he was honest enough to realize that, intellectually if not spiritually, he could not be converted.

Unquestionably, this was an intense and powerful battle, but the outcome was that Mark Twain remained the "cradle skeptic" of his youth. It is often recounted that by 1876, Twain had destroyed Livy's Presbyterian faith. This claim is based on a quotation from Paine's Biography where, upon an occasion of heavy bereavement, Clemens asked his wife if she could not find any comfort in Christian faith. She responded, "I can't, Youth. I haven't any" (Paine 650). Twain told Paine that he felt a great sense of guilt at having been the instrument of creating Livy's skepticism, and would have changed that if he had had the chance (Paine Biography 653). It is worth noting, however, that Livy's religious doubts were manifested much earlier. Two years after their wedding in February 1870, Livy told minister Joseph Twitchell that she had fallen away from Christian faith too many times to go back again (Emerson "Quarrel" 38). (Note: Many members of Thomas K. Beecher's Park Church in Elmira were, as in the case of the Langdon family, Calvinist and fundamentalists in their beliefs but were not necessarily "Presbyterians" in their theology. Livy's faith may have been "Presbyterian" in Twain's generalized definition, but it is probably not a precise description of her personal theology (see Leah A. Strong's Joseph Hopkins Twichell: Mark Twain's Friend and Pastor [U of Georgia Press, 1966]). In short, Sam Clemens's pull against orthodoxy was stronger than Livy's pull toward it.

Wilson also sees what many other critics have observed, that Clemens was indeed quite interested in the ministry and in liberal ministers who expressed humanitarian concerns (156-57), an idea Stanley Brodwin augments by believing Twain saw his better self in ministers who took up the profession he couldn't and Orion wouldn't take up ("Theology" 224-6). Further, Wilson stresses the impact of ministers on Twain's esthetics sense, that there was "a call" of a higher order that Twain looked for in his own work, particularly to the beauty in the expression of ministers like Beecher, Twitchell, Burton, Bushnell and Parker (156-57).

Justin Kaplan also notes that Twain "could get along well enough with the professional clergy . . . He had in common with them an interest in oratory" (41). Maxwell Geismar also noted this point, saying Twain attended Henry Ward Beecher's Plymouth Church in New York "less for religious reasons than to observe the platform style of the famous minister" (9).

Kaplan notes the long friendship with Reverend Joseph Twitchell in Hartford as indicative of Twain's compatibility

with professional speakers; much of Twain's anger, says Kaplan, was directed at the mob-arousing amateurs such as the antics of the Duke at the camp meeting in Huckleberry Finn. Twain got along well with liberal preachers like Twichell and the Beecher brothers (Henry Ward and Thomas K., discussed below), but dogmatic believers became subjects for his ridicule.

This was one instance where Twain, influenced by the popular humor of the day, separated the sheep from the goats using the skeptical microscope of frontier humor. As Mark Sexton has shown, "folk" preachers, particularly those of the "funda-mentalist" stripe, were stock comic figures in American fiction.

Character stereotyping, exaggeration, use of

a trickster figure who is often the preacher

himself, and a predominantly [sic] ironic

narrative perspective [were part of the Old

Southwest humorists' tools to remove] social

and religious respectability. (1)

Sexton claims that Twain's attack on religious characters in Huckleberry Finn was in the Old Southwest tradition of Johnson Jones Hooper and George Washington Harris (i), a subject of considerable interest later in this study.

"Darkness at Morning: the Bitterness in Mark Twain's Early Novel Tom Sawyer," published by Joseph S. Feeney in 1978, must be discussed in tandem with Forrest G. Robinson's 1986 In Bad Faith: the Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain's America. Feeney's study attempts to show that the bitterness and cynicism readers found in The Mysterious Stranger (1917), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889), The Tragedy of Puddn'head Wilson (1894), and "The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1900) can be seen in earlier books. He claims that readers see cynicism in the later books, "yet Twain's early, funny books--Innocents Abroad (1869) or The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)--seemed unaffected by this shadow of cynicism" (Feeney 4). Robinson's discussion develops this point, focuses on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn showing "bad faith," a faith which includes self-deception which "functions as a bridge between codes and actual day-to-day behavior" (2). "Bad faith . . . may act to conceal problems of grave consequences," and we can see how this deception works, says Robinson, in Twain's most famous boy-books (2).

Feeney claims that in Tom Sawyer, "under its bright surface runs a current of dark bitterness, a bitterness often present in its most humorous moments" (4). This bitterness, Feeney says, is seen in Twain's portraying people as stupid; "stupidity prevails" (4). This unkind opinion is supported by citing passages from the novel, and Feeney focuses his discussion on one type of stupidity, religion. Religion is seen as another of man's mistakes, for religion is found ineffective in the scenes where everyone goes to the mandatory Sunday services but "people don't change" (5).

Robinson supports Feeney's ideas. "St. Petersburg society is a complex fabric of lies: of half-truths, of simulation, dissimulation, broken promises, exaggerations, and outright falsehoods" (26). The women "are easy marks" for quackery and "exotic religions" (26). Villagers are blind to their own hypocrisy (27), and Tom knows "his neighbors are perpetually deceived" (29). And "the villagers will swallow almost anything" including allowing Tom, whom they all know did not learn his Bible verses, to be ceremoniously decorated for his non-achievement (29). Social codes are linked to "shows," showing mastery in spelling or memorizing verses or sermons (20). This strain is too much for a public enthusiast who "vaingloriously spread himself before the congregation by reciting from memory 3,000 verses without stopping . . . Unfortunately the strain upon his metal faculties was too great. He was little better than an idiot from that date forth" (20). The search for public acclaim is inevitable in the church, "where rituals of devotion and edification readily give way to an orgy of showing off" (20-1).

Feeney goes further:

religion . . . is found ineffective, destroys

happiness and boyish joy, brings fear and

repression, and is the butt of jokes and

situation comedy. (5)

While this point may seem beyond the scope of this study--Tom Sawyer not appearing until 1876--there are points here that reflect on the biography of Sam Clemens's early years. The St. Petersburg setting, as well as Tom's actions, are certainly reflections of Twain's own memories and impressions of Hannibal. Tom learns to deceive the public: Mark Twain repeatedly creates characters who are capable of deceits in many ways on many levels. Tom's pranks would, in a sense, become Mark Twain's profession; both learned the meaning of gullibility as young children. (Chapter V examines how this view of man was demonstrated in the early writings.)

If Tom Sawyer is patterned on Hannibal, the following passage may be telling as it points to both gullibility and the power of oratory:

Our assessment of his style notwithstanding,

the Reverend Mr. Sprague was regarded as a

wonderful reader. At church "sociables" he

was always called upon to read poetry; and

when he was through, the ladies would lift up

their hands and let them fall helplessly in

their laps, and "wall" their eyes, and shake

their heads, as much as to say, "words cannot

express it; it is too beautiful. Too

beautiful for this mortal earth.

(Tom Sawyer 67)

Feeney would conclude that people fall for such sermons because he believes Twain portrays people as stupid, particularly churchgoers. Feeney demonstrates this delusion in a brief paragraph from Tom Sawyer about the funeral of Injun Joe which he believes shows Twain's attitude that religion is only delusion and hypocrisy.

After reading Feeney's roll call of bitter aspects in Tom Sawyer, a reader wonders why Twain's religious skepticism in this "book for boys" was not recognized earlier. Again, I refer to Fiedler's claim that Twain was subversive in presenting his religious skepticism. Perhaps Victor Doyno is right; the reader must be of a similar mind to see it. At any rate, Feeney's work helps establish the chain of critics who find skepticism in the early novels before the dark years.

Worthy of mention, finally, are Kenneth Anderson's "Mark Twain, W. D. Howells, and Henry James: Three Agnostics in Search of Salvation," and Pascal Covici's "Mark Twain and the Puritan Legacy." Covici believes we can see Twain's humor with "special clarity" if we examine "Puritan determinism, rather than God's chosen community and personal guilt" and, in particular, if we look at three of Twain's predecessors, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Nathanial Wade to see this pattern (3). His main point is:

Mark Twain, in the 1916 "Mysterious Stranger,"

presents a naturalistic analog to Calvinism.

Satan explicates a deterministic theory of human

behavior . . . The Puritan's theological strait-

jacket has been replaced by a naturalistic one

very like it. (12)

Simply stated, by looking to the past, Covici decides that Twain's later determinism--a debated point--grew naturally from Puritan seeds. William Anderson sees another angle, and shows in his article parallels in the main characters of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and the Ambassadors to demonstrate that the three authors--Twain, Howells, and James--could, as agnostics, try to find salvation only on earth rather than in an unlikely heaven.

Anderson defines an agnostic simply as someone who believes that one cannot verify the existence of God by genetic or sensory means (Anderson 13). After he asserts that the three novelists were agnostics, he writes that attainment of heaven was "at best dubious" but they believed "that the attainment of an earthly salvation was, however, within grasp and was, as it were, `the real thing'" (Anderson 13).

In his discussion of Hank Morgan, Anderson says that the character is not allowed to grow as an individual because of his stubborn belief in nineteenth-century ways of progress (14). Morgan does not strive for heaven: defies the medieval church which supported heredity and tries to make a heaven on earth. Morgan dies, but he is not worthy of salvation. "For Mark Twain, Morgan could have only attained earthly salvation through, with, and for society" (14).

What Anderson is implying, but does not explicitly state, is that agnostics not convinced of an afterlife with the creator must strive for perfection as simple, carnal men. This benevolent attitude, being part and parcel of Anderson's concept of an agnostic, is interesting. Whether Twain was an agnostic or not, he certainly is generally considered a humanitarian: the inscription on the monument of Twain that overlooks the Mississippi River near Hannibal, Missouri, reads "His Religion was Humanity." While some critics find Twain an atheist, an agnostic, or a deist, we all share the common belief that the man was very interested in the human race and did what he could to benefit it even his barbed attacks on human frailties. He supported Helen Keller, black law students, the Congo Reform Movement, and other philanthropic enterprises throughout his life, all interest begun in his formative years. It is one thing to point to his bitter last years and another to demonstrate his lifelong religious skepticism, but we must remember that his religious sense was only one aspect of the total man. None of us would stand on safe ground showing that one shadow--in this case religion--was so long and so great as completely dominate the life works and ideas of a man as complex and varied as Mark Twain.

There were occasions when to accept orthodoxy might have been socially, emotionally, and perhaps spiritually helpful to Samuel Clemens, but the integrity of his spirit precluded any such easy resolutions to his problems. Instead, he could not and did not accept dogmatic blinders on his world view but rather allowed himself to experience and write about a wide concentric circle of the world, a range possible only when a religion free of strictures is present. For Sam Clemens, these strictures were both created and assaulted in his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri.

CHAPTER III

BIOGRAPHY: FAMILY AND TOWN LIFE

One late February morning in 1867, according to Justin Kaplan in Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens and his friend Edward House paid a call on Captain Charles C. Duncan. Duncan had conceived the idea of a private party to tour Europe with the congregational backing of Henry Ward Beecher, a journey later to be the "Quaker City" excursion recounted in Innocents Abroad. Sam Clemens wanted to go on this cruise, and he had a plan.

Being somewhat drunk that morning, House and Clemens were in a "gay mood" (Kaplan 28). House approached Captain Duncan and announced, "Let me introduce the Reverend Mark Twain, a clergyman of some note, lately arrived from San Francisco" (28). Clemens then told Duncan of his missionary work in the Sandwich Islands, and he told Duncan his church wanted to send him on the upcoming excursion for his health. He had a question for Duncan: since Mr. Beecher was to be on board, would he allow Reverend Twain, a Baptist, to conduct services once in a while? Duncan assured Reverend Twain that this was certainly possible.

This anecdote clearly points to Twain's jocular irreverence on the eve of the "Quaker City"s sailing on June 8, 1867, the expedition that became the subject of The Innocents Abroad, the first major work by Twain universally accepted as irreverent, sacrilegious, and manifesting all of the moral indignation typical of Mark Twain. This chapter explores the family and community influences that helped shape the "Reverend Mark Twain," emphasizing the values taught by Sam's parents, John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens, and the institutions of school and church in Hannibal, Missouri. Further insights are revealed in the letters between Sam and his older brother, Orion, as well as correspondence between Sam and the women of his family.

Perhaps the best look at the relationship between John Marshall Clemens and his son is Keith Coplin's "John and Sam Clemens: A Father's Influence" (1970) which emphasizes the father as a central role model in Sam's formative years, particularly as a model of personal independence and unorthodox religious views that John Clemens passed on to his sons, Orion and Sam, influencing their lifelong thinking on a variety of levels. One often-noted example was John Clemens's well-known lack of business acumen, an attribute clearly passed on to both Orion and Sam. John Clemens's hope for a rich life was left to the family in the legacy of the Tennessee land, a major disappointment Sam used as material for his first novel, The Gilded Age, and this speculative bent was repeated by Mark Twain in a series of get-rich-schemes equally disappointing.

Sam's feelings about his father were probably more mixed and ambivalent, but it is equally clear their relationship was never warm but more a matter of respect for John Clemens's intellectual independence, especially in religion, for in later life Sam Clemens was to maintain a personal religious doctrine quite similar to that held by his father. According to Coplin:

He respected his father's impeccable integrity and

his authority, but at the same time he hated his

father's unyielding austerity. (2)

As John Q. Hays notes, Sam Clemens identified his father as a Calvinist-deity figure, "the image of this parochial Jehovah, the upright judge, the austere law-giver, the father who dealt strongly with his son but softly with his daughters" (Wecter 66, Rebellion 44). Further, John Hays believes Sam "never quite forgave his father for committing the cardinal sin of the Gilded Age by failing in business" (Rebellion 31).

Equally profound, Coplin says that one of the greatest influences on Sam's life was his father's death, for it was on that occasion that Sam had to go to work. "His father's death ended Sam's childhood, and I believe he never forgave his father for dying" (3). John Clemens's death on March 24, 1847 was certainly significant for the entire Clemens family, as he left them with financial troubles until Mark Twain's success decades later (Rasmussen 79). In an 1861 letter to Orion recounting the hits and misses of a New Orleans fortune teller, Sam admitted "And Pa's death in 47-8, as the turning point in my life, was very good" (Letters 111). It is interesting to note that later, Mark Twain would call his becoming a cub pilot "The Turning Point of My Life," not his father's passing, and the uncertainty in his letter about the year of his father's death may indicate some-thing of his distanced feelings for his father.

On a literary level, according to Coplin, John Clemens was a partial model for all of the fathers in Twain's fiction, seen either as ineffective failures or tyrannical, overpowering figures (3-5). This point is echoed in Leslie Fiedler's What Was Literature? As Fiedler puts it, "Fathers do not fare well in Twain" (240). As in the case of the Grangerfords in Huckleberry Finn, the "stark macho code" is not "nurture but death . . . kill or be killed" (240). Coplin agrees and says that in his fiction Twain struck back at his unemotional, unloving father by casting him either as Tom Canty or Pap Finn (3-4). Kent Rasmussen has a different view; he believes Mark Twain had an exaggerated notion of his father's legal power and cast him as Judge Thatcher in Tom Sawyer, "Judge Carpenter" in Villagers of 1840-3 and "Hellfire Hotchkiss," and Judge Driscoll in Pudd'nhead Wilson "who, like [John] Clemens, is fiercely proud of his Virginia ancestry" (79). Beyond the literary roles possibly based on Judge Clemens, his stamp is clearly reflected in the religious attitudes of Twain's lifelong philosophy. As John Frederick puts it, "this unloved but deeply respected parent was a free-thinker, a representative of a restricted but important minority in the religious pattern of frontier towns" which clearly helped shape Mark Twain's religious sense (128). This free-thinking of John Clemens, according to John Hays, was based on a Kentuckian-pioneer spirit "under the shadow of the Enlightenment . . . of the Jefferson type" (Rebellion 32). While "free thinkers," properly speaking, were members of the "Free Thought Movement of the late 19th and early 20th century, the tradition of Jefferson and the Enlightenment included men with the independent ben of John Marshall Clemens. According to Sidney Warren, free thinkers were "usually characterized by the application of reason and scientific principles to natural law and human existence," rejecting the idea of divine intervention (32). Coplin's description of Judge Clemens includes precisely these notions, including his probable doubting of the divinity of Christ, "a frontier echo of Unitarianism" (128). Not that these principles diluted the senior Clemens's moral base: Hays adds that John Marshall Clemens's Puritan sense of morality led him to strip himself of all possessions to repay his creditors when bankruptcy struck--an act clearly foreshadowing his son's later response to his own loss of solvency (Rebellion 32). It is also possible, as Everett Emerson believes, that the father's "influence on his son was to suggest that religion is a woman's concern," a subject analyzed further in this chapter ("Quarrel" 32).

Sam's own recollections regarding his father's religious sense are recorded in Following the Equator:

[My father] attended no church, and never spoke

of religious matters, and had no part or lot in

the pious joys of his Presbyterian family, nor

ever seemed to suffer from this deprivation.

(Equator 18)

Sam Clemens would differ from his father in three important ways. (1) He certainly did, at times, suffer from the loss of faith. (2) But Twain never ceased speaking about religion, however, unlike his grim father, which, in a sense, defused some of the cold Puritanical grip that silent Calvinism had put on John Clemens. Mark Twain, by constantly examining religion, was at least able to distance himself from the fire-and-brimstone by treating it with irreverence and jocular ire. And (3) it is clear that Twain and Livy's views if not practice of family life were much warmer than in Sam's Hannibal home. Mark Twain clearly participated in his family's "pious joys": John Clemens's influence was strong, but Sam freed himself of some of his father's weakness.

Yet, as Allison Ensor notes, John Clemens's irreligious feelings helped contribute to "the intensity of his son's religious doubts," (13), an intensity beyond indifference.

But Sam also learned that a man could be moral and upright without the dictates of formal religion (Coplin 6). Moreover, John Clemens showed that a man could be seen as moral while keeping his religious heresy to himself. John Clemens's "subversive" skepticism, as Fiedler would put it, demonstrated that overt anti-religious sentiment may result in a uncomfortable distancing from the family, a situation Twain would have dreaded. Quoting Twain, Vic Doyno notes, "Judge Driscoll could be a free-thinker and still hold his place in society," unlike Mark Twain dependent on his writing income (290).

Clara Clemens noted in her book My Father, Mark Twain, that her father and aunt, Susan Langdon Crane (or "Saint Sue," as Twain called her), loved to argue during morning walks when the Clemens family visited the Cranes in Elmira, New York. Clara wrote:

Father often joined my aunt in her morning

walk by the flowers, and I am certain now that

the subject of their talks was frequently the

undying topic of religion. My aunt lived by her

strong faith in God and all His acts. Father

loved to fight her on this subject, and she was

big enough to be greatly amused by his original

way of putting his questions and objections,

instead of resenting his attitude. (Elmira 47)

Mark Twain was fortunate to have such an understanding sister-in-law; Susan Crane built him his favorite octagonal study for writing in spite of his poking "attacks with more and more vehemence" (Elmira 47). Such a relationship mirrored that of young Sam Clemens with his mother and sister in the early years. Some critics have claimed that Twain was a "good bad boy"--Leslie Fiedler's term--meaning that Twain's nature led him to flee the repressive Calvinism of his youth. As Fiedler and Trygve Thoreson have noted, the theme of escape from female-dominated society is apparent in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the theme of expressing a strong desire to avoid being reformed (Fiedler Love and Death 270, Thoreson 17). One view on this issue is:

The image of woman as civilizer and man the

untamed rough remains undeniably a part of

our natural mythos . . . Mark Twain's Aunt

Polly has long been associated with this

civilizing role. (Thoreson 17)

But there is more to the "myth" than this cultural generalization.

While Aunt Polly has always been associated with her real-life model, Jane Lampton Clemens, Jane Clemens was not as "repressed or repressive" (Frederick 129) as sometimes portrayed or perceived by earlier critics who look too closely at Twain's fiction for biographical revelations. There are as many contrasts as comparisons between the real and fictional woman. As Thoreson says, women served as social enforcers in Twain's fiction. Aunt Polly is an archetype. "She is a representative of the community and all that it involves: communal hypocrisies, vanities, prejudices, customs, values, and dreams" (17). Her job is to tame "her bad boy" into an acceptable initiation into society. "Aunt Polly relies on her Christian teachings and her sense of duty for guidance' (Thoreson 18-19). This "sense of guidance" was to curtail Tom's youthful high jinks, and punishment was the tool to solve moral problems (18-19).

As Thompson implies, Tom's role sound suspiciously autobio-graphical, as in the aftermath to the funeral scene. "Tom can recall with pride the duping of Polly, Mary, and Sid as `a good joke' and `very ingenious'" (21-22). Tom has a regret about the pain he puts Aunt Polly through, "but his regret quickly passes" (22). This love of duping, no doubt, translated into Twain's own love of duping his readers, a desire based on his inclination to have "a good joke" at society's expense. Institutions are never sacrosanct, including the reforming role of women. Indeed it seems likely that, like Tom, his first pranks would have involved rebelling against his mother.

Even so, Jane Clemens was more a strict Calvinist in the mind of a young rebel than in fact. Twain's view, of course, is not one-sided. For example, the mother figure is split into two characters in Huckleberry Finn,

the kind and loving Widow Douglas and the

single-mindedly punitive Miss Watson [who

are] the two roles of maternal guidance

[with] communally and Biblically inspired

rod wielding. (Thompson 23)

And Jane Clemens is as much the Widow Douglas as either Aunt Polly or Miss Watson. For example, John Frederick corrects Van Wyck Brooks's idea that Jane Clemens was a cold, Calvinistic disciplinarian (Frederick 125-27). There was more depth to the real woman than granted by Brooks or Fiedler; still, their seminal ideas do merit our consideration because Twain did indeed have a dual vision of women, and there can be little doubt that Twain's mother had a strong influence on his religious, moral, and philosophical thinking. It is true that Jane Clemens later confided, "Religion is a jugful; I hold a dipper," and that she lost any convictions she had held about Presbyterianism in her later years. As a mother and authority figure, it is equally clear that she was a strong influence on her son's religious, social, and moral senses. (See Alexander E. Jones, "Heterodox Thought in Mark Twain' Hannibal," for a fuller discussion of Jane Clemens's later views.)

Jane Lampton Clemens, as has often been noted, was her husband's opposite in virtually every way. Where he was stern, she was vivacious; where he was aloof, she like to dance and be involved with people. Her granddaughter, who lived with Jane for twenty-five years in St. Louis, noted:

She loved every kind of excitement . . .

I have known her to dance when she was seventy-

five . . . Grandma's room was always a riot of

red; carpets, chairs, ornaments were always

red . . . she was modern in her ideas and

insisted on wearing her skirts shorter than

what was conventional. (Webster 40)

Jane Clemens changed her "religion" by switching from the Presbyterian to Methodist denominations after moving to Hannibal, and this was for purely social reasons. She simply chose the congregation she felt most at home in. However, both these churches were steeped in the Calvinist doctrines of the Elect and predestination, and her son would come to see all Christianity as Calvinist, a doctrine he would attack all his life (see "Calvinism" entry in the Mark Twain Encyclopedia).

All her children and most of the Hannibal community had a high regard for Mrs. Clemens, and it is clear that her children would confide in her rather than in her husband. One of these first confidences was on Sam's lack of faith. As Twain remembered the incident in his Autobiography, he was in his earliest school years. One of his school teachers had taught him about prayer, and the youngster put this process to work in an attempt to acquire some coveted gingerbread. He wrote in 1906:

. . . but this dream was like almost all the other

dreams we indulge in this life, there was nothing

in it [prayer]. I did as much praying in the next

two or three days as anyone in that town, I

suppose, and I was very sincere and earnest about

it too, but nothing came of it. (Autobiography

35).

This scene was a harbinger of things to come. The failure of prayer was echoed both in Sam's letter regarding his brother Henry's death and in his love letters to Livy. In this first instance, Sam concluded that "if a person remains faithful to his gingerbread and keeps his eye on it he need not trouble himself about your prayers" (35). He then told his mother that he had "ceased to be a Christian," and when she asked why, he told her he had been a Christian "for revenue only and I could not bear the thought of that, it was so ignoble" (35).

It would be easy to dismiss this remembrance of an atheistic epiphany if it were not for the fact that Twain himself noted elsewhere the seriousness of the occasion:

Why should one laugh at my praying for ginger-

bread when I was a Child? What would a child

naturally pray for?--and a child who had been

lied to by preachers and teachers and a lying

Bible-text? My prayer failed. It was 65

years ago. I remember the shock yet. I was

astonished as if I had caught my own mother

breaking a promise to me. Was the doubt planted

then, which in fifty years grew to a certainty"

that the X and all other religions are lies and

swindles. (Cummings 19)

Twain clearly felt that events of very young children have profound effects on the later mature persons. The gingerbread event must have been profound to be recorded twice in his later dictations and was clearly a precursor to Tom Sawyer's similar conclusions in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Thus we cannot take his confessions lightly, even if we cannot answer his question about when the doubt was planted.

Another incident involving Jane Clemens, remembered by her son in his Autobiography, may shed some light on Sam's preoccupation with a more humane view of Satan, and certainly helps illustrate Jane Clemens's humanitarian bent. Letters from the Earth (1962) was Twain's attempt to rehabilitate Satan, an idea he had long held in his imagination. (Joan of Arc too "defends the devil" at her Inquisition in Twain's novel. See Spengemann 116).

Perhaps this idea was born when friends and neighbors of the Clemenses, knowing Mrs. Clemens's sympathy for the underdog, set her up to see if she would defend the ultimate underdog, Satan. The conspirators gathered together, and one by one, damned Satan more and more ferociously. "Sure enough," Twain recalled, "the unsuspecting victim of the trick walked into the trap (Autobiography 28). Mrs. Clemens built a case that Satan was a sinner, yes, but had he been treated fairly? All men are sinners, she said, and all deserving of forgiveness. No one, she asserted in her son's words, is saved by his own efforts, and we all depend on each other's prayers. "Who prays for Satan?" she asked. "Who in eighteen centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner who needed it most?" (28).

This pitying and gentle "friend of Satan" was clearly a strong influence on her son and certainly on her daughter

Pamela and daughter-in-law Mollie, Orion's wife. It was to her and the younger Clemens women that most of Sam's lifelong correspondence was directed. Yet, as the years passed, Sam would not write to the women of his family about his religious feelings because he did not share their fundamental beliefs and did not want their approbation. Or he would do so only briefly and teasingly.

In a letter to Jane Clemens dated October 1861, Sam answered her questions about his behavior in Nevada. "`Do I go to church?' Answer: `Scasly' [sic]" (Letters 138). While it is true that Jane Clemens was not the fire-and brimstone ironclad character of Aunt Polly, it is also true that she did have clear notions about how far to go with religious heresy. As Minnie Brashear notes in her Mark Twain: Son of Missouri, Jane strongly objected to the views of her brother-in-law, John Quarles, who was a Universalist (54). A Universalist denied the Calvinistic doctrine of the Elect and believed that all men were automatically saved. Even the open-minded "friend of Satan" could not go that far, at least in the years her children were growing up. Brashear surmises that Jane warned her children about Quarles's views but that he, unlike the stern John Clemens, was much loved by his nieces and nephews (54).

Sam would certainly expect similar approbation regarding his own unorthodox beliefs and opinions. Four letters written home during Sam's riverboat and western years chronicle this relationship and shed light on his religious bent during this period.

The first letter, written to Mollie Clemens on June 18, 1858, must be dealt with carefully. It is one of the most painful letters Sam ever wrote, telling his family the tragic circumstances of Henry Clemens's death as a result of a boiler explosion on the steam packet, the Pennsylvania. Sam was present when his younger brother died of the burns received when the Pennsylvania burst into flames, and he long believed that the aid he gave Henry hastened the boy's death. One important line from the letter bears our perusal here. Sam wrote:

O God! this is hard to bear. Hardened, hopeless,--

aye, lost--lost--lost and ruined sinner as I am--

even I, have humbled myself to the ground and

prayed as never a man prayed before that the

great God might let this cup pass from me.

(Letters 80-81)

The question raised here is what did Clemens mean when he wrote "even I humbled myself" referring either to pride or to his lack of faith, or perhaps a combination of both. John Q. Hays believes the letter was:

quite literary and the emotion a little strained

. . . the emotion rings somewhat hollow because

Clemens's faith has been damaged by a reading of

Paine . . . Clemens is striving for a consolation

he needs from a source in which he does not

believe. (Religion 21-2)

As noted earlier, Clemens' feeling of guilt after this incident were more serious than Hays alludes. Clemens's family certainly knew of his attitudes towards religion and "I even I" indicates that fact. It is the only letter to his family that deals with prayer in a serious way, and no one need doubt his heartfelt reactions to this tragedy. This letter suggests that in 1858, Sam Clemens was a religious skeptic and that only under unusual circumstances was this matter brought before the women of his family. (One study also concludes that the event of Henry's death and its psychological aftermath led to Twain's use of dreams and death in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court See Allmendinger 13-24).

It is also useful to suggest that the feelings expressed in this letter may have led to Sam's declaration in 1869 that his favorite hymn was "Even Me," a three-verse plea to the trinity asking for forgiveness for a sinner. As Allison Ensor notes, Twain claimed "Even Me" was his favorite hymn when he was courting Livy, and "If ever there was a period of piety in Clemens's life, this was it, as is manifested by any number of letters he wrote to her and others during this time" (21-22). It is interesting to see that the correlation between the words of the letter and those of the hymn were close to Sam's heart at times of his closest affinity with Christian comfort.

Sam rarely wrote of religion in letters home in such a conciliatory way. The Clemens women's tendency to "nettle" Sam if he wrote offensive material led to uncomfortable circum-stances. "Ma and Pamela seem to be down on my last to the Gate City," was one rueful comment Sam wrote in 1862 to Orion after one of his irreligious letters was printed in Keokuk (Letters 201). (This letter is discussed in detail in Chapter V). Two months later, Sam had still not written home after the outcry. "I half intended writing east to-night, but I hardly think I will. Tell Mollie I shall not offend again" (221). Sam finally wrote east in August, five months after the offence, but once again had to get a dig in.

We didn't luxuriate then . . . we said wise

and severe things about the vanity and

wickedness of high living. We preached our

doctrine and practiced it. Which of course

I respectfully recommend to the clergyman of

St. Louis. (237)

As time went by, relationships became easier as the Clemens's women too began to lose their unflinching conservatism. His sister Pamela--to whom Sam wrote in 1859 about Catholic gluttony in pre-feasting for Mardi Gras--would also have her religious problems in later years (87). Samuel Webster noted:

As I remember my grandmother . . . it seems to

me that she was always searching for absolute

truth . . . in religion Pamela never did seem

to reach a satisfactory goal. (226)

And this dissatisfaction was mirrored in the lives of her siblings, and if one brother, like her, would never reach a satisfactory goal, it would be Sam's older if not wiser brother, Orion Clemens.

Sam Clemens wrote several letters to his brother Orion regarding his antipathy towards religion, including the often quoted "My Dear Bro" letter in which he stated that he could not be a minister because he "lacked the necessary stock in trade: i.e. religion." In an earlier letter to Orion in March 1861, Sam wrote, "What a man wants with religion in these breadless times surpasses my comprehension" (Paine, Letters 1: 45); Branch, Letters 117). And, on March 23, 1878, Twain wrote the following advice to his brother:

And mind you, in my opinion you will find that

you can't write on hell so it will stand printing.

Neither Howells nor I believe in hell or divinity

of the Savior, but no matter, the Savior is none

the less a sacred Personage, and a man should have

no desire or disposition to refer to him lightly,

profanely or other wise than with the profoundest

reverence. (Selected Letters 103)

This passage is important because it states Mark Twain's lack of faith simply and then shows his awareness of what his reading audience expects. This "frank admission" seems contradictory to "religious convention" but "it was one thing to disbelieve, but another to attack the character of Jesus," and Twain had a clear purpose in making this point (Brodwin "Theology" 228). This letter was in response to one of Orion's abortive attempts at fiction, and the letter was intended to give Orion useful editorial advice. Twain is clearly advising his brother against mocking hell, not for religious reasons, but for commercial realities. Again, Twain was a man who knew his audience and would be subversive rather than overt in his published work. These three letters together are a plain statement of atheism, statements he could write to no one else in his family but Orion.

It was only to Orion that Sam could write about religion without expecting a female outcry because Orion himself had no strong religious feelings. He changed denominations frequently enough to amuse his brother, resulting in the 1877 "Autobiography of a Damned Fool" fragment and the other denomination-hopping satirical fragments Twain wrote based on Orion over several decades. (See Mark Twain's Satires and Burlesques where these fragments are collected.)

As companions in Nevada during Orion's career as state secretary, the Clemens brothers attended the same church, the newly established First Presbyterian Church of Carson City. Orion joined the church in 1862; Sam did not. Explaining this decision in a March, 1862 letter to William Claggert, Sam described a sermon by Rev. A. F. White--the preacher who inspired the comic controversy in Chapter 25 of Roughing It (Letters 174):

SUNDAY.--I intended to finish this letter to-day

but I went to church--busted! For a man who

can listen to an hour to Mr. White, the whining,

nasal, Whangdoodle preacher, and then sit down and

write, without shedding melancholy from his pen as

water slides from a duck's back, is more than

mortal. Or less. I fear I shall not feel

cheerful until the beans I had for dinner begin

to operate. (Letters 171)

But Orion, probably for political reasons--along with the fact that his wife and daughter Jennie were with him--continued regular church service of one kind or another for a decade. But he was Sam's accomplice in keeping some of the Enterprise sketches out of the disparaging eyes of the Clemens women. After the fracas over the Gate City letter, Sam wrote to Orion in May 1862 regarding his letters to the Enterprise, "I hope Barstow will leave the `S.L.C.' off the Gate City letters in case he publishes them. Put my Enterprise letters in the scrapbook-but send no extracts for them EAST" (Letters 214). As Edgar Branch notes, avoiding "nettling" from Jane and Pamela was the probable reason for this request (Letters 215).

But Orion too had trouble with denominational orthodoxy, and in 1876 he decided to go public with his views and gave speeches on "Man: the Architect of Our religion" that resulted in his excommunication from the Presbyterian church (Lorch 372-80). By going public, he upset Jane and Pamela and wrote to Pamela on August 10, 1876:

It grieves me to see you and Mollie so distressed

over a matter of opinion . . . But if I profess to

believe certain facts to have taken place when I

do not believe it--this is religious hypocrisy.

(Lorch 173)

This letter, written from Keokuk, shows that, unlike his younger brother, Orion took steps to make his religious skepticism public, even at the expense of a family outcry. Sam would not do this openly--hence the religious subversion we have already noted. Orion could, in a sense, be more open than his brother because Twain depended on a wide audience for his income. Orion, although the older of the two, did not have the political "savvy" or sense of diplomacy Twain used so well throughout his adult life, and was invariably scolded by Sam for his actions. Still, the two brothers were more alike than Sam would like to have admitted. Both clearly reflected their parents: while they shared their father's denials of Protestant Christianity, they also practiced his Calvinist morality. Orion followed his mother's path from simple Presbyterianism to ultimate disbelief; Sam, the more rebellious, followed this path much sooner.

The Clemens family, of course, were each affected by the others and, logically enough, the family unit was shaped by the institutions of the community. To put these matters in a larger perspective, it is appropriate at this point to see How Hannibal's institutions helped push Sam and Orion from more traditional heterodoxy into full-blown disbelief.

The Clemens family was fully integrated into the stream of Hannibal society, and young Sam was as influenced by his home town as he was by his family and its role in the river town. As Twain put it, "all that goes to make the me in me was in a Missouri village" (Equator 18). Bernard DeVoto wrote that "Hannibal is the most important single fact in the life of Samuel Clemens the man or Mark Twain the writer" (Portable 6). These claims are irrefutable; it is our purpose here to examine why this is so as it applies to Twain's religious sense.

According to John Lauber in The Making of Mark Twain (and many other critics and biographers), one of the most important influences on Sam Clemens was the institution of the Presbyterian church, the same Christian denomination that later excommunicated his brother (21-3). "In Hannibal, revivalism was strong, and there was a good deal of spiritualism as well" (Emerson Authentic 3). One notable example was the Campbellite revival about which Twain recalled "All converted but me . . . All sinners again in a week" ( qtd. in Emerson "Quarrel" 33). As Henry Nash Smith put it, Clemens "never entirely rid himself of his deference for fundamentalist Protestant culture of Hannibal, Missouri" ("How True the Dream?" 8).

Other critics see a less profound impact of the church on young Sam. John T. Frederick says in The Darkened Sky that the burlesques of sermons in Twain's autobiographical writings, most notably Tom Sawyer, were only of a light vein. "So far as the published writings show," says Frederick, "Twain's only clear recollections of church services in his boyhood were farcically humorous" (125). One example of such good-natured humor, as noted by Emerson, was when young Sam collected blue tickets every Sunday in order to own a religious book. To earn the tickets, Sam recited the same five Bible verses about "five foolish virgins" repeatedly over several months without the teacher's notice, a trick inspiring a similar incident in Tom Sawyer ("Quarrel" 32).

But Frederick's view ignores much evidence showing how deeply the "limitless fire and brimstone" sermons of Tom Sawyer and Hannibal influenced young Sam Clemens. John Hays, for example, recalled that "Howells once wrote that young Clemens, like Tom Sawyer, was `bred to fear God and dread the Sunday school'--language which Mark Twain admitted `exactly describes that old feeling I used to have but I couldn't have formulated it" (Hays 30, My Mark Twain 125).

The church, along with the school, was seen by the young boys of Hannibal, including the rebellious Sam Clemens, to be cultural institutions that fostered fear and guilt (Lauber 24). In April 1869, Twain praised the new and unorthodox Thomas K. Beecher "Park Church" in Elmira because "The idea is to make a child look upon the church as only another home, and a sunny one, rather than as a dismal exile or prison" (Elmira 125). Twain approved of Park Church because this "sunny" environment had not been his youthful experience in Hannibal, where Clemens learned to forever associate Christians as unyielding fundamentalists (Emerson "Quarrel" 33). What the Beechers offered was an emphasis on the "fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man" (Emerson 36). For young Sam Clemens, religious services were a literal punishment:

Besides the weekly ritual of family worship,

Sunday School, and sermon, with an evening

service occasionally added as punishment for

any extraordinary crime that Sam might have

committed, there was the frenzy of the camp

meetings . . . and of the periodic revivals

in town. (Lauber 23)

This was no "sunny home" for children. An 1853 letter from Clemens in Philadelphia to Orion records his "squint at" the "`House of Refuge' . . . which we used to read about in Sunday School" (Letters 22). The House of Refuge was a reform school for white juveniles, undoubtably used in "Sunday School literature" as a threat to wayward Hannibal youths (Branch, Letters 27). The Sunday School books were later mocked by Twain not only for their superficial morality, but because they were part of the Presbyterian conscience, a faith that ruled by fear and guilt, at least in Twain's opinion.

This point on religion as punishment bears special emphasis. As the late, eminent John Tuckey noted in his introduction to The Devil's Race Track: Mark Twain's Great Dark Writings (1966), the hellish Devil's Race Track was "an immense circular region" (xii). He also wrote:

Once caught in its maelstrom forces there is

no escape, only the possibility of further

entrapment into the `Everlasting Sunday,' an

area of eternal and deathly stillness that lies

at the center of the region in the storm belt.

It is a Sargosso of the Antarctic, a graveyard

for derelicts. (xii)

The errant sea captain in "The Passenger's Story," "The Enchanted Sea-Wilderness," and "Which was the Dream?" (composed in 1895-96) is punished for his treacherous burning of a dog, a dog that had saved human lives, by being becalmed in the "Everlasting Sunday" (xi-xii).

It is interesting to note this image because, as Tuckey points out, the sea captain was psychologically Twain's alter ego. Tuckey believes the fragments represent Twain punishing himself for leaving his daughter Suzy alone to die in the Hartford house. Tuckey cites the captain saying the dog was as cumbersome as children, eating as much as children; the dog is burned alive as Suzy was, in fevered deliriums of meningitis (xi-xii). If we combine the biographical awareness of Lauber's "literal punishment" idea with Tuckey's psychological "literary punishment" in these fragments, the "Everlasting Sunday" is another instance in which youthful fears became old age fiction in the life of Mark Twain. Sundays composed of Sunday school and church were hell for Sam Clemens on several levels.

Further, it is possible that this image was reinforced during Clemens's Philadelphia printshop months in 1853 where he worked long and late hours every Sunday, the shops biggest day. "Sunday is a long day . . . I only set 10,000 [ems] yesterday. However, I will shake this laziness off soon" (Letters 29). While this is only a passing conjecture, it may contain insights into the enigmatic late life fragments and further demonstrate that the core of Twain's literature, even in the hallucinogenic later fragments, can be traced to the early years.

School, in Hannibal, was as moralistic as church, and young Sam hated it as much as anything else. These two main cultural institutions, writes Lauber, were remembered by Mark Twain in his boys' books Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, as twin vessels of fear and guilt, teaching Sam Clemens the Calvinistic doctrine of the natural depravity of man, a