No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger

by Mark Twain

  11.2–22 In some . . . sadder still.] Mark Twain’s own “castle,” the great house in Hartford, had been standing empty and neglected since the death of his daughter Susy there in 1896. He and his wife could not bear to live in the house after that event, and he sold it in the spring of 1903.

  20.25 “Number 44, New Series 864,962.”] Mark Twain’s rationale for this arresting number-name is not certainly known, but there are several interesting speculations. Henry Nash Smith has suggested that the name may derive from Mark Twain’s early acquaintance with the two Levin boys in Hannibal. They were the first Jews he had ever seen, and they seemed to him “clothed invisibly in the damp and cobwebby mould of antiquity.” The youths of Hannibal jokingly nicknamed them “Twenty-two,” that is, “twice Levin” (“Mark Twain’s Images of Hannibal,” 20). William M. Gibson has noted a joke that appeared in “A Mystery,” a newspaper sketch about Mark Twain’s “Double” which appeared in the Cleveland Herald on 16 November 1868. Complaining that his “Double” was going about the countryside misbehaving and giving the author a bad reputation, Mark Twain said: “I am fading, still fading. Shortly, if my distress of mind continues, there may be only four of us left. [That is a joke, and it naturally takes the melancholy tint of my own feelings. I will explain it: I am Twain, which is Two; my Double is Double-Twain, which is four more; four and two are six, two from six leave four. It is very sad.]” Gibson observes that “in a punning non-mathematical sense, 44 might be Twain twice doubled” (Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts, 473).

  For many psychologists, four or a multiple of four symbolizes psychic wholeness. The number forty-four would intensify this significance. See, for example, C. G. Jung, Man and His Symbols (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969), 200. Mark Twain’s work of course antedates Jung’s; however, Jung did not claim to have invented the signification of fourness, but only to have elucidated it as an abiding symbol of the whole personality, the greater Self that includes both the conscious and the unconscious mind. The number forty-four would, in this respect, express a high degree of psychic wholeness. See the note to 187.27.

  37.21–30 Moses was setting type . . . double-leaded at that.] Mark Twain here displays his printshop expertise. The incompetent Moses Haas needs a guide to keep his place in the copy he is following, and he spaces his lines of type very unevenly. He sets only 600 ems of type an hour on a fat take (copy having much open space, as for example poetry) that is double-leaded (has lines widely spaced). See the Glossary of Printer’s Terms for fuller definitions of these and other terms used in the novel.

  45.31 B.-A] The letters signify “Bottle-Assed,” from the printer’s term meaning “type thickened at the feet through . . . continual impression and improper planing down” (Charles T. Jacobi, The Printer’s Vocabulary [London: Chiswick Press, 1888], 11). They apparently refer in this context to August’s “girl-boy” figure.

  55.20 “In the year 1453] Mark Twain here pinned to his manuscript clippings from a religious pamphlet issued in 1902. On a manuscript page inserted at the end of the preceding chapter he wrote: “Note: It is curious and interesting to find that the miracles recounted by Father Peter in the next chapter are still kept on tap, in Father Peter’s identical words, in the pious publications of the convent of the Perpetual Adoration at Clyde, Missouri, an institution devoted to good and charitable works and rest from intellectual activity.—Translator.” He later deleted the note. The clippings, in which Mark Twain made minor changes, provide the text for Father Peter’s sermon at 55.20–56.8, 56.14–25, 56.28–31, 57.6–13, and 57.24–58.6.

  122.6 “Elisabeth von Arnim!”] Elisabeth (Bettina) von Arnim was a young friend of Goethe’s, whose wife found her devotion excessive. After Goethe’s death Elisabeth wrote about their friendship and published some of his letters to her.

  124.26–27 Waking-Self, the Dream-Self, and the Soul] Mark Twain had explored these psychological concepts in his notebook, seven or eight years before writing this passage. In an extended entry dated 7 January 1897, he distinguished three selves: the waking self; “that other person [who] is in command during the somnambulic sleep”; and a “spiritualized self which can detach itself & go wandering off upon affairs of its own—for recreation, perhaps” (Notebook 40, TS p. 3, Mark Twain Papers of The Bancroft Library; in Mark Twain’s Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine [New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1935], 349).

  125.20–21 Box and Cox lodgers] Box was the name of the journeyman printer and Cox the journeyman hatter in a farce by John Maddison Morton, Box and Cox (1847).

  135.18–19 I had only ruined myself.] Mark Twain carried his novel this far at Florence in the spring of 1904. He resumed composition at the end of June 1905 and then wrote, at the bottom of the last manuscript page of chapter 25, “June 30/05[.] Burned the rest (30,000 words) of this book this morning. Too diffusive.” That he did in fact destroy a substantial amount of what he had already written is confirmed by his letter to his daughter Clara on the preceding day: “I have spent the day reading the book I wrote in Florence. I destroyed 125 pages of it, & expect to go over it again tomorrow & destroy 25 more. Then I think I will take hold of it & finish it” (29 June 1905 to Clara Clemens, James S. Copley Library, La Jolla, California). Mark Twain’s wife had died in Florence on 5 June 1904; it is likely that the “too diffusive” portion of the manuscript he destroyed had been written in the extremity of his grief. Chapter 26 begins the part he wrote in 1905.

  136.21–138.11 that figure capered in . . . noble pathos.] Forty-four cheers up August by putting on a one-man minstrel show, playing the parts of both end men. Mark Twain was a long-time fan of the authentic (as opposed to the black-face) minstrel show and African American music. In 1873, writing in praise of the Jubilee Singers from Nashville, he said: “I think these gentlemen & ladies make eloquent music — & what is as much to the point, they reproduce the true melody of the plantations. . . . I was reared in the South, & my father owned slaves, & I do not know when anything has so moved me as did the plaintive melodies of the Jubilee Singers. It was the first time for twenty-five or thirty years that I had heard such songs, or heard them sung in the genuine old way — & it is a way, I think, that white people cannot imitate — & never can, for that matter, for one must have been a slave himself in order to feel what that life was & so convey the pathos of it in the music” (10 March 1873 to Tom Hood and George Routledge and Sons, in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 5: 1872–1873, ed. Lin Salamo and Harriet Elinor Smith [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997], 315–16).

  137.25–26 “I reckon that gets in to where you live, oh I guess not!”] Mark Twain wrote in 1865: “When you want genuine music—music that will come right home to you like a bad quarter, suffuse your system like strychnine whisky, go right through you like Brandreth’s pills, ramify your whole constitution like the measles, and break out on your hide like the pin-feather pimples on a picked goose,—when you want all this, just smash your piano, and invoke the glory-beaming banjo!” (“Enthusiastic Eloquence,” San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, 23 June 1865, 2, reprinted in Early Tales Sketches, Volume 2, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, with the assistance of Harriet Elinor Smith [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981], 235).

  151.29 set my spirit free!] This plea from August’s Dream-Self foreshadows the concluding chapter, where 44 tells August, “But I your poor servant have revealed you to yourself and set you free” (186.27–28).

  160.27–30 groping Mortal Mind . . . dull Mortal Mind’s reach.] The “Mortal Mind” is a basic concept in the doctrines of Christian Science.

  165.19–27 “Hear, O Israel . . . June 27, 1905.”] A clipping from the Boston Herald, which Mark Twain pinned to his manuscript, is the source for this quotation.

  175.17–18 the very minute . . . two fleets were meeting] Here Mark Twain rearranged history for dramatic effect and for a joke on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science and a favorite satir
ical target. The battle of Tsushima, which resulted in the destruction of the Russian fleet and led to the end of the Russo-Japanese War, occurred on 27 May 1905—one month before the date assigned it in the novel.

  177.10 Flora McFlimsey—nothing to wear] A popular poem by William Allen Butler, first published in Harper’s Weekly on 7 February 1857, concerned a Miss Flora M’Flimsey who had “Nothing to Wear.”

  177.21–29 “Backward, turn backward . . . hasn’t been written yet.] Mark Twain quotes the first two lines of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s poem “Rock Me to Sleep,” first published in the Saturday Evening Post on 9 January 1860, and gives the title of another poem not yet written, “Beautiful Snow,” by John Whittaker Watson, first published in 1869.

  182.16 his other things.] The part of the manuscript written in 1905 ends here. The next chapter, comprising eight manuscript pages, was written in 1908.

  185.17–187.29 and you are going away . . . The End] Mark Twain wrote this chapter in Florence in 1904; he headed it “Conclusion of the Book.” That he intended it as the ending for No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, and not for any earlier version of the story, is established by the names “44” and “August,” which appear together only in this version. The manuscript shows that Albert Bigelow Paine altered these names when he edited the chapter for his 1916 edition of the novel.

  187.27 He vanished] This conclusion suggests the psychic wholeness implied by 44’s name. In psychological terms, if a full assimilation of the unconscious to the conscious were to be achieved, 44 and August would in effect merge. There would no longer be a projection on the part of August by which the unconscious component of the total psyche would be seen as a strange and mysterious otherness. The illusion of separateness would dissolve, even as at the last moment 44 vanishes in the act of completing August’s enlightenment.

  Glossary of Printer’s Terms

  The fifteenth-century printshop where August Feldner and Number 44 are apprenticed in No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger is to a great extent based on the nineteenth-century printshops that Samuel Clemens knew from his own experience since 1847 when he worked as a printer’s devil and jack-of-all-trades in the office of the Hannibal Gazette. After an apprenticeship with Joseph P. Ament, the editor and proprietor of the Hannibal Courier, he eventually became a journeyman printer and until 1857 worked in shops in St. Louis, New York City, Philadelphia, Keokuk, and Cincinnati, “& belonged to the Typographical Unions in those cities, by a courtesy which forebore to enforce the rule requiring 21 years of age for eligibility” (“Samuel Langhorne Clemens,” autobiographical manuscript of January 1873, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York). Clemens’s interest in the trade and his ear for the accurate depiction of it continued throughout his life. In 1909 he wrote that “a man can’t handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.... If a man should write a book and in it make one of his characters say, ‘Here, devil, empty the quoins into the standing galley and the imposing-stone into the hell-box; assemble the comps around the frisket and let them jeff for takes and be quick about it,’ I should recognize a mistake or two in the phrasing, and would know that the writer was only a printer theoretically” (Is Shakespeare Dead? [New York and London: Harper and Brothers, 1909], 15, 73; Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 1: 1853–1866, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch, Michael B. Frank, Kenneth M. Sanderson [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988] 1, 11 n. 2, 58–59, 69–70). This glossary is adapted from William M. Gibson, Mark Twain’s Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969), 475–80. The definitions mostly derive from Herbert Simon and Harry Carter, Printing Explained (Leicester, England: Dryad Press, 1931).

  bearers] Strips of the same height as the type put in the form to make the ink rollers run smoothly.

  bed] The surface in the press against which the feet of the type rest.

  box-partitions] The divisions forming compartments in the case.

  case] A shallow wooden tray divided into compartments of different sizes in which printers keep type.

  chase] A rectangular frame of iron in which pages of type are locked up before the whole is put on the bed of the press.

  composition] Selecting types from the case, placing them in the composing stick, and justifying each line of type.

  compositor] One who sets up type, often shortened to “comp.”

  countersunk rails] Rails on which the type bed may be moved and adjusted under the platen.

  devil] A printer’s devil is the youngest or newest apprentice printer who performs much of the dirty work of a printshop, such as washing type or inking forms, and who is often black with ink.

  distribution] Dispersing washed type back into the case after printing has been completed.

  double-leaded] See “leaded.”

  doubles] The compositor’s common mistake of setting a word or phrase twice over; also used by pressmen to mean a sheet which is pulled twice.

  em] The square of a body of type. A common method of measuring in America is by ems. The number of ems in a line is multiplied by the number of lines, and the result gives the quantity set.

  en] Half the width of an em.

  form] The collection of type pages and of wooden and metal furniture (or filler blocks) when they are locked up in the chase by means of quoins.

  frisket] A thin metal frame covered with paper and linen hinged to the tympan of the press which serves to protect margins from ink-smears during the impression, to keep the sheets from moving, and to pull the paper away from the type when the tympan is raised.

  galley] A metal tray with one open end on which type is placed as it is composed in lines in the stick.

  galley-proof] A proof taken from type in the galley before the type has been made up into pages.

  guide] A piece of reglet or lead which some compositors used to keep their place in the copy hanging in front of them on the upper case. Clemens plainly considered the use of a guide the mark of an inferior compositor.

  hell-box] A box into which battered or broken type metal is thrown.

  imposing-stone] A stone-topped table or a flat, firm surface to which type is transferred from the galley and upon which it is locked up in the chase.

  ink-ball] A covered ball on a handle used for inking galleys. The ink roller was reserved for inking the form prior to printing.

  jeff for takes] To play a game of chance with em quads to determine which compositor has first choice of takes.

  justify] To space elements within a line of type so that the length will come out exactly as it should be. Only a skilled compositor justifies well.

  leaded] Set with leads or strips of type metal less than type-high to create interlinear space between lines of type.

  lock up] To fit quoins in a form and tighten them so as to hold the type and the furniture firmly within the chase.

  lye-hopper] A device used in the process of producing a wood-ash lye solution used to clean type after printing.

  out] An omitted word or words in the galley of type, usually corrected by resetting a good many lines to accommodate the omission.

  over-run] “Over-running a page” means to carry words backwards or forwards in correcting.

  pi] A hodge-podge of mixed-up type, often the result of “piing the form”—dropping the form and spilling out the lines of type.

  platen-springs] Springs designed to lift the platen off the impression.

  proof-slip] A trial print made from a galley for the printer’s reader or the author to scrutinize and mark mistakes or alterations on.

  prove a galley] To make a proof-slip from a galley.

  quads] Quadrats, or blocks of type metal less than type-high and of varying thicknesses used as spacing material within the line of type.

  quoins] Wedges of wood or metal often used in pairs to tighten or lock up forms.

  reglets] Strips of wood less than type-high and of various thicknesses.
Springy and resilient, they keep type matter efficiently under pressure in the form.

  rule] Composing rule, a strip of metal placed over a line of type in the stick to make it easier to drop letters into the next line.

  sheep-foot] An iron claw hammer used to tighten quoins in the chase.

  signature] A sheet of paper making four or more pages when folded and often having an identifying letter or figure at the bottom of the first page.

  solid] Set without leads; that is, having no horizontal space between the lines of type.

  space] A hair space is less than one-half em.

  standing form] A form stored for reuse.

  standing galley] A galley upon which matter is emptied; here, a galley where units of type are kept for reuse, firmly tied up.

  stick] The composing stick is a narrow, flanged metal tray, closed at one end and with an adjustable stop at the other. The compositor holds the stick in his left hand and assembles several lines of type in it with his right.

  strap-oil] Concerns an initiation trick in the printshop: presumably dispatching a new apprentice to the saddler’s shop for “strap-oil” and then paddling him for failing to find it.

  strike galley-proof] See “prove a galley” above.

  take] A take is a section of copy given to one compositor when there are several compositors working at a single job. A “fat” take is an assignment which requires little exertion, such as poetry or leaded matter, as opposed to a “lean” take of closely written pages of prose. See “jeff for takes” above.

  tie up] To tie up dead matter is to wind printer’s cord several times around a page or unit of type matter that has already been printed. Dead matter may be stowed away to be washed and distributed at some future time, or it may be held for use again.

  token] Haif a ream, once 240 and now 250 sheets of paper.