Huntsville-Madison County Public Library discussion

One of Mark Twain’s last and strangest tales

Actually, ‘No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger’ is not quite as far from what we think of as a typical Mark Twain story as we might at first assume. He wrote three different drafts of ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ over the course of 11 years between 1897 and 1908. The first has become known as ‘The Chronicle of Young Satan’ and tells of the nephew of Satan, an impartial observer of the plight of humanity, currently located in the Austrian village of Eseldorf in the early 1700’s. To put it simply, he is the Ultimate Explainer of Predestination. He knows the past, present, and future at the global as well as the individual scale. He proves that knowing one’s own fate or the fate of someone near and dear to you does not enable you to alter the course of events. Every deviation in the course of events becomes the preordained course.

The second version, known as ‘Schoolhouse Hill’ is set in the St. Petersburg, Missouri of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In fact, it is another Tom and Huck tale, in which they meet Satan. I suppose if he had finished it, it would have sat alongside ‘Tom Sawyer, Detective’ and ‘Tom Sawyer Abroad’ although somehow I don’t think ‘Tom and Huck’s Travels with Satan’ would be as favorably received.

The third version, ‘No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger’, is also set in Austria, but in the 1400’s at the time when printing presses first acquired mass use, and occurs in a printing house that has received a commission to turn out a massive number of Latin Bibles. The narrator is a sixteen-year-old apprentice named August Feldner, an Everyboy, similar to Tom or Huck but trying to make his way in 15th century Austria. The apprentices are a rowdy lot and Mark Twain uses his first hand experience as a “printer’s devil” in his early adolescence along with his familiar subject of teenage boys to make the atmosphere convincing.

Aside from those familiar tropes, though, there is a print shop manager named Herr Stein, his beautiful niece, Margret Regan, her mother and Stein’s sister, Frau Regen, and Stein’s current wife, Frau Stein, who has a close relationship with Balthasar Hoffman, alchemist and magician. One day, a bedraggled boy arrives wanting food and shelter. Frau Stein wants to get rid of him immediately, but Katrina, the head cook and housekeeper, immediately takes him under her wing and overrules the lady of the establishment. Stein asks the boy if he is willing to do a lot of heavy lifting and hard work. The boy assures him he will do whatever needs to be done.

When asked his name, the boy says, ‘No. 44, New Series 864,962.” He admits he doesn’t know where he got the name. He’s always had it. Some of the bullies assume that it’s a jail number and take to calling him “Jail Bird”.

It quickly becomes apparent that No. 44 can outwork anyone else in the facility. August feels a particular affinity for the boy and they quickly become friends although he doesn’t want that association to become public knowledge for fear that he will be bullied along with 44. The mysterious stranger can not only lift enormous weights despite his slight build, but he can read your thoughts as clearly as though you had expressed them aloud, and subsequently replies to them.

The bullies of the work force decide to go on strike because they are afraid that they will become expendable if No. 44 becomes the boss’s favorite. This leads to a jumbled plot which is a kind of mess, such as Mark Twain tends to get into in many of his works, even ‘Huckleberry Finn’. He’s still fascinating reading. He just wasn’t the most disciplined fiction writer.

No. 44 can become invisible and makes August invisible on occasion as well. He introduces an idea of the duality of self, divided into a Waking Self and a Dream Self. This gets even more complicated when each person’s duplicate self has a different name and personality. When you throw in the Soul you have a third identity to contend with. Mark Twain used the idea of the dual self as well as twins in many of his stories e.g. ‘The Prince and the Pauper’, ‘Pudd’nhead Wilson’, ‘Those Extraordinary Twins’, etc. so this is familiar territory. August is infatuated with the beautiful Margret but her ‘Duplicate’ is the one that is really in love with August, leading to some screwball mix-ups of identities that dispel any preconception I had about ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ being a serious, dour, and cynical tale.

No. 44 can travel back and forth through Time and brings back foods from the future for August to sample, such as food from a place called America, which will be discovered in a couple of hundred years, such as corn-pone from Arkansas, fried chicken from Alabama, buckwheat pancakes from Missouri, cream-smothered strawberries, two pellets of saccharin, coffee from Vienna, French eggs from the past century.

In this version, there is no identification of Satan. No. 44 appears to be a timeless angel (the nephew of Satan in the other versions), but he knows the ways of Eternity, and after giving August a tour through Time and Space, leaves him. August asks if they’ll meet again, maybe not in this life, but in some other. “There is no other,” the stranger replies.

The stranger tells him that the future they saw was a vision, a dream:
‘Nothing exists; all is a dream. God—man—the world, --the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars: a dream, all a dream, they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you!”
And “you” are just a thought. There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. Just a vagrant thought, soon to evaporate.

The ending is the same as in the earlier version of this story:
‘He vanished, and left me appalled; for I knew, and realized, that all he had said was true.’

So here we have Mark Twain the Nihilist, the Atheist, the bitter old man who appears to have outlived his humor. Quite a cheery character, eh?