The Mysterious Stranger

Considering how difficult it is to get a doctorate these days, one might well believe that all students in search of dissertation topics have thoroughly dusted the attics of all the Victorian houses throughout the United States for traces of any unpublished work by Mark Twain. Perhaps. But outside academe, like a carelessly flung Coke bottle or an errant cargo plane, a lost strand of Twain has fallen from the skies. And, mirabile dictu, it is good.

“A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” was meant to be Twain’s contribution to a literary contest he proposed to his friend William Dean Howells, at that time the editor of Atlantic magazine. The aim of the contest was to challenge the foremost writers in America--James Russell Lowell, Bret Harte and the young Henry James--to create stories based on a premise proposed by Twain. In the event, the project withered into dust, and the story was never published for reasons we can only imagine. Like many authors, Twain may have been merely twiddling his literary thumbs while “between novels”--even if those novels turned out to be “Tom Sawyer,” about to be published, and “Huckleberry Finn,” which he would begin within a few weeks. The conversation with Howells may have been nothing more than one of the many trial balloons that still sail five lunchtimes a week from the Union Square Cafe in Manhattan to Geoffrey’s in Malibu. The young Henry James may have already ripened into the mature Henry James whom one could only imagine fleeing from the very sight of any skeleton belonging to Twain. And then, the mystery of the story’s disappearance may have an answer no more thrilling than the author’s own ennui.

And yet, there are two reasons to rejoice over the story’s appearance. The first is the story itself, the kind of cotton candy Twain used to spin out of blue cigar smoke at the end of a particularly hearty meal. “Upon the border of a remote and out-of-the-way village in south-western Missouri” a stranger falls--literally out of nowhere--into the prairie in front of the farmhouse of one John Gray. Speaking a dozen languages, the young stranger insinuates himself into the hearts and minds of the citizens of Deer Lick, people who knew, “in a dim way, that out in the great world there were things called railways, steamboats, telegraphs and newspapers, but [who] had no personal acquaintance with them, and took no more interest in them than they did in the concerns of the moon. Their hearts were in hogs and corn.”

When the stranger reveals that he is, in fact, the French Count Fountingblow, the hearts and minds of the Gray family (possessing as it does the extraordinarily marriageable daughter Sally, heiress to the fortune of her irascible Uncle Dan) move quickly from hogs. Greed, fraud and a certain frontier bloodiness familiar to any who have lost a night’s sleep over the image of the dead body of Huck’s father floating down the Mississippi combine to draw the story to a climax. And then comes the “snapper,” as Twain calls it in “How to Tell a Story”--the twist. And like the best Twain, it winks one eye at the “mature” reader and the other at young fans like my 13-year-old son.

The second cause for celebration is the decision of the publishers at W.W. Norton to commission both a foreword and an afterword from a latter-day confrere of Twain’s, humorist Roy Blount Jr. With great good humor, Blount sets the story within both a political and a literary context. Twain was living not only at the time of the nation’s centennial but also through an electoral crisis reminiscent of our own recent kerfuffle. In 1876, Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote by a 185-184 margin to the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When the election was thrown to the House, Hayes beat a Democratic filibuster only by agreeing to withdraw federal troops from the South.

“The party of Lincoln,” Blount writes in the foreword, “thus relinquished its commitment to following up the abolition of slavery by advancing the rights and opportunities of African Americans, who had been emancipated but were still far from being included in common American advantages.” Little wonder that Twain (or the Atlantic) turned from this tale to the drama of a runaway slave on the Mississippi.

Meanwhile, in the literary world, one Frenchman was making his name on plots--especially ones involving balloons--that Twain had imagined for his own stories. One might well suppose, as Blount does, that by making Jules Verne the butt of his snapper in “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage,” Twain not only assuaged a modicum of his own bitterness but added a “postmodern” twist (Blount’s judgment, and not a bad one, even if the original postmodern twister was Laurence Sterne) to the tale. One could see “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage” working as one of Michael Palin’s “Ripping Yarns,” with Palin himself as Fountingblow, John Cleese as Farmer Gray and either Carol Cleveland or Graham Chapman as young Sally.

Which is all by way of saying that, long before Monty Python hit public television or Jackie Chan became the hottest comedian in America, Mark Twain was reaching across the ocean for humor. Yet, notwithstanding the delights of “A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage,” the world is all the better for his turning his sights to a boy and a slave floating on a raft down the Mississippi.