THE MYSTERY OF THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER

 In December of 1916, more than six years after the death of Mark Twain, his final novel was published. Whether it was published in full remains a matter of mystery but what is known is that it had appeared throughout his later years in fragments and different versions. In its final (if not “finished”) form, The Mysterious Stranger is among Twain’s most exasperating works, painfully reminiscent of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno. It is, however, a revealing look into the mind of a grieving genius who had endured the loss of his wife and daughter and its release makes a valuable addition to Twain’s cannon.  

Like the works it by Kipling and Carroll it is an episodic telling of encounters with a supernatural being visiting our world, in this case Satan, though not Satan himself…but Satan’s nephew who shares his name and arrives in 16th century Austria and tantalizes a group of young boys with shocking and often nihilistic teachings on the meaning of life. 

Not surprisingly, it’s an angry, unrelentingly cynical, work. Evidence of Twain’s state of mind during composition could be seen in such short works as What Is Man?, here unleashed in a larger uninhibited platform. 

Curiously, however, The Mysterious Stranger started out in far more colorful, teasingly naughty spirits. In its first incarnation, appearing in the fall of 1897, the work was known merely by its working title “The St. Petersburg Fragment” which evolved over the next few years into Chronicle of Young Satan, the story at this point set in the 18th century. The most promising state of the work came in the fall of 1898 under the title Schoolhouse Hill and featured an encounter with Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. 

After that, the work disappeared beneath the small and sporadic works released during Twain’s last decade and the status of the novel was not known until after his death. 

After more than five years sorting through Twain’s manuscripts his biographer and estate executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, reintroduced the work in what he called its finished form, now titled The Mysterious Stranger, though elements earlier versions were evident throughout. It was published with much fanfare as Twain’s last novel. 

Indeed, The Mysterious Stranger was accepted as such for almost fifty years. Then, in 1963, Twain scholar John S. Tuckey examined Twain’s manuscripts and found that what was published as The Mysterious Stranger was really a hybrid of Twain’s notes with a lot of cosmetic and outright padding by Paine and associate Frederick Duneka. To be sure this has happened since. Jane Austen's unfinished Sanditon, for instance, has been published with a conclusion tagged on to the work Austen left behind and also in an edition dismantling what Austen had laid down and building up from scratch. In both cases, however, the editors came about the published work honestly. 

Nonetheless, the work as it was released was an insight into Twain’s bleak view of humanity and religion, though his Christian Science, one of his last works is a far better read. But perhaps Twain is not to blame for the punishing darkness of The Mysterious Stranger. As is evident from the fluidity of its earlier versions it suffers both from expansion into novel length and its presentation in a narrative structure. Ideally, The Mysterious Stranger would have come to us as an essay but could have also stayed afloat as a short story. Paine and Duneka gave us a valuable glimpse into Twain’s increasing animosity in his twilight years, but robbed it of its power through inflation.