Mark Twain

In the autumn of 1909, at his house in Connecticut, the most famous writer in America was working on a book he said would never be published. "This book will never be published," he told his biographer, "in fact it couldn't be, because it would be felony."¹ He was seventy-three. He had written a good deal of this kind of thing in his last fifteen years, about the Bible, about Providence, about the God of the Old Testament, and he had put almost all of it away. Some of it he had printed anonymously, in two hundred and fifty numbered copies, so that critics reviewed it without guessing the author. Some of it he labelled for publication after his death, "without damage to his friends or family."² The book he was writing that autumn, Letters from the Earth, was not published until 1962.³

Samuel Clemens, who wrote as Mark Twain, did not keep his unbelief hidden because he was ashamed of it. He kept it back for the people he loved, and for the public that loved him. This chapter is about where it came from, how it grew, and why so much of it waited.

A trained Presbyterian conscience

He was born on 30 November 1835 in a one-story frame house in the village of Florida, Missouri, in a year when Halley's comet was in the sky.⁴ In 1839 the family moved to Hannibal, a river town on the Mississippi.⁵ His mother, Jane, joined the Presbyterian church there, and her religion, his biographer wrote, regarded hell and Satan "as necessary institutions."⁶ School opened each day with a prayer and a chapter of the Bible, and the boy's home teaching convinced him that "flames were being kept brisk for little boys who were heedless of sacred matters."⁷

Hannibal was a violent place for a child to watch. He saw an old man shot in the street and laid out with the family Bible open on his chest; he saw a slave killed with a lump of slag, and other killings besides.⁸ Writing seventy years later, he described the conscience these sights produced in him: "mine was a trained Presbyterian conscience and knew but the one duty, to hunt and harry its slave upon all pretexts and on all occasions, particularly when there was no sense nor reason in it."⁹ He took the killings as signs meant for him. "They were inventions of Providence to beguile me to a better life." But the belief was not steady. "I believed it in the daytime; but not in the night. With the going down of the sun my faith failed and the clammy fears gathered about my heart."¹⁰¹¹ After a night of thunder he would lie awake repenting, sure that Satan would come for him, and lose his repentance again with the daylight.¹²

There is a story, which comes from his biographer rather than from Clemens himself, of the first crack. As a small boy he prayed for a schoolmate's gingerbread, got it once, and then prayed four more times without result. He told his mother, "No, but I don't believe in saying prayers any more, and I'm never going to do it again."¹³ His biographer remarked that it was "a serious thing in that day openly to repudiate faith."¹⁴ It was a child's experiment, and it did not make him an unbeliever; for years afterwards he still woke in terror of hell. His father died in March 1847, and the eleven-year-old, "fairly broken down" with remorse, promised his mother to be a better boy.¹⁵ He thought for a while of becoming a preacher, "because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It looked like a safe job."¹⁶ And he was made, he said much later, to read the whole Bible through, unexpurgated, before he was fifteen.¹⁷

The river

He left Hannibal as a printer, and in 1857 he went down the Mississippi to learn to be a steamboat pilot.¹⁸ His biographer tells of a winter spent in a Cincinnati boarding-house beside a self-taught Scotsman named Macfarlane, who argued that man was a failed experiment of nature, and says these talks "left their impress upon him for life." Clemens's own account of Macfarlane has not been found, and the biographer is the only source.¹⁹

In June 1858 the steamboat Pennsylvania blew up her boilers near Memphis. His younger brother Henry, whom he had found a place on the boat, was terribly scalded and died. Clemens blamed himself for the rest of his life.²⁰ The letter he wrote to his sister-in-law while Henry was dying contains a prayer: "Hardened, hopeless, aye, lost, lost, lost and ruined sinner as I am, I, even I, have humbled myself to the ground and prayed as never man prayed before, that the great God might let this cup pass from me, that he would strike me to the earth, but spare my brother."²¹ His biographer left that sentence out when he quoted the letter in 1912, and restored it when he printed the letters in 1917.²² It shows that at twenty-two, in the worst week of his life, he still prayed.

Two years later, writing to his brother Orion, he sounded different. "What a man wants with religion in these breadless times, surpasses my comprehension."²³ In 1864, in Nevada, he told an audience, half joking, that he was "not a very dusty Christian myself."²⁴

Innocents abroad

In June 1867, by now a well-known newspaper humorist, he sailed from New York on the Quaker City for a pleasure excursion to Europe and the Holy Land. The voyage had been advertised with the preacher Henry Ward Beecher among the passengers; Beecher did not go, but plenty of devout pilgrims did.²⁵ A motherly fellow passenger made sure that Clemens and the younger men were "at church regularly on Sundays; at the 8-bells prayer meeting every night."²⁶ A deacon from the same party thought him "sinful, irreverent, profane," and summed him up: "He was the worst man I ever knew." Then he added, "And the best."²⁷²⁸

In Jerusalem he bought a Bible for his mother, and he read the King James version through the weeks in Palestine; his biographer thought its language shaped the style of the book he made from the trip.²⁹ That book, The Innocents Abroad, laughed at the relics shown to tourists, "two of St. Paul's fingers ... a bone of Judas Iscariot, (it was black,)" and found that "Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes."³⁰ The orthodox directors of his publishing company feared it was heresy, and thought the subtitle, The New Pilgrims' Progress, a sacrilege in itself.³¹

Livy

In the Bay of Smyrna that September a young passenger named Charles Langdon showed him a miniature of his sister Olivia.³² Clemens met her in New York two days before Christmas 1867, and courted her through the next year.³³ She was devout, and on his first visit to her family in Elmira she suspected that he "might have unorthodox views on matters of religion."³⁴ That autumn in Hartford he met the Reverend Joseph Twichell, pastor of the Asylum Hill church, who became his closest friend for forty years. "Ministers always loved Mark Twain," his biographer wrote. "They did not always approve of him, but they adored him."³⁵ Clemens married Olivia Langdon at Elmira on 2 February 1870, with Twichell assisting at the service.³⁶

In their first home Livy established family prayers, grace before meals and a Bible chapter every morning, and an old friend, Joe Goodman, was astonished to see Mark Twain ask a blessing. It did not last. One morning, his biographer says, he put a stop to it. "Livy, you may keep this up if you want to, but I must ask you to excuse me from it. It is making me a hypocrite. I don't believe in this Bible. It contradicts my reason. I can't sit here and listen to it, letting you believe that I regard it, as you do, in the light of gospel, the word of God."³⁷ No one remembered afterwards when it happened, only that it was early in the marriage.³⁸

Why the doubt belongs here

This scene, rather than the gingerbread prayer, is where his adult doubt belongs on the timeline. The boy in Hannibal had questioned prayer and been frightened back into belief every night. The man in the 1870s read the Bible as a grown reader, every morning, beside a wife who believed it, and found that he could not pretend. His friend William Dean Howells remembered walks around Hartford in those years, "when he was in the first fine flush of his agnosticism," and Clemens telling him that Christianity had done nothing to improve morals.³⁹ He stopped going to hear Twichell preach. He read Lecky's history of European morals at the family's summer farm, and wrote "Sound and true" in the margin beside the argument that every human action springs from the wish for happiness.⁴⁰ In 1883 he read a paper on that idea, "What Is Happiness?," to a Hartford club of clergymen and professional men, who "scoffed and jeered at it; denounced it as a manifest falsity."⁴¹⁴² Proofreading his novel The Prince and the Pauper, set in the England of the Reformation, "cost me the last rags of my religion," he told Howells in 1884.⁴³

Howells also remembered what this cost Livy. She grieved at his denial of immortality. And she said to him, as he later told Howells, "Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you."⁴⁴ Howells's verdict was that Clemens "never went back to anything like faith in the Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a conscious divinity."⁴⁵

The private credo

Clemens wrote down what he believed in those years, on a few sheets that his biographer found after his death and dated, by the paper and the handwriting, to the early 1880s. It was never published in his lifetime. "I believe in God the Almighty," it begins. "I do not believe He has ever sent a message to man by anybody, or delivered one to him by word of mouth, or made Himself visible to mortal eyes at any time in any place. I believe that the Old and New Testaments were imagined and written by man, and that no line in them was authorized by God, much less inspired by Him."⁴⁶ On hell: "I cannot see how eternal punishment hereafter could accomplish any good end, therefore I am not able to believe in it."⁴⁷ On a fly-leaf of a book he wrote a shorter version of the same thought: "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."⁴⁸

This is not atheism, and he never called it that. In no surviving sentence does he call himself either an atheist or an agnostic; "agnosticism" is Howells's word for him.⁴⁹ What he denied was revelation: that God had ever spoken, that any book came from God, that anyone would be punished forever. What he kept, for a time, was a God too large to be described.

Huck

He put the argument into fiction, where it could be said by someone else. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885, a boy raised on the same Sunday-school religion that had frightened Clemens decides to help a runaway slave escape, believing that God and his conscience both require him to turn Jim in. He writes the letter that would return Jim to his owner, looks at it, and tears it up. "All right, then, I'll go to hell."⁵⁰ It is the most famous moral decision in American literature, and its meaning is that a boy's heart was better than the religion he had been taught.

On a reading tour that winter his partner was the novelist George Washington Cable, a strict Presbyterian who read the Bible aloud every evening until Clemens asked him to stop. "In him and his person I have learned to hate all religions," he told Howells, joking and not joking. "He has taught me to abhor and detest the Sabbath-day."⁵¹ The two men stayed fast friends. In 1887 he wrote to Howells more soberly: "People pretend that the Bible means the same to them at 50 that it did at all former milestones in their journey. I wonder how they can lie so."⁵² After the Johnstown flood of 1889 he wrote, "I swear I was afraid to pray, for fear I should laugh."⁵³

In public, the sharpest he allowed himself was a joke at the head of a chapter. Following the Equator, in 1897, carried maxims attributed to his character Pudd'nhead Wilson: "Faith is believing what you know ain't so," and "True irreverence is disrespect for another man's god."⁵⁴⁵⁵ The first of those is genuine; many of the other religious one-liners attributed to Mark Twain are not, and do not appear in anything he published.

The losses

In August 1896 his daughter Susy died of cerebral fever in Hartford while her parents were abroad, three days after her mother had sailed to join her.⁵⁶ Twichell stayed with her to the end. Clemens's letters afterwards are the hardest things he ever wrote about Providence. "How am I to comprehend this? How am I to have it? Why am I robbed, and who is benefited?"⁵⁷ A year later he wrote to Howells of "Susy and Winnie given us, in miserable sport, and then taken away."⁵⁸ He remembered that Susy herself, at about eight, had stopped praying for a while after learning that the Indians had believed in their own gods. "By and by it can turn out that we are wrong," she told her mother. "So now I only pray that there may be a God and a heaven, or something better."⁵⁹

In Vienna he wrote what he called "the Gospel," a dialogue in which an Old Man argues that a human being is a machine: "Whatsoever a man is, is due to his make, and to the influences brought to bear upon it by his heredities, his habitat, his associations."⁶⁰ He printed it in 1906, as What Is Man?, anonymously and privately, in two hundred and fifty copies; reviewers thought it a clever exposé of philosophies "no longer startlingly new," and did not guess who had written it.⁶¹

The Person Sitting in Darkness

He did publish one great attack under his own name, and it was aimed not at God but at missionaries. In February 1901 the North American Review printed "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," his attack on an American missionary in China who had collected heavy indemnities from Chinese villages after the Boxer rising. The Reverend Judson Smith of the American Board of Foreign Missions defended the missionary, and conceded that Clemens's "brilliant article ... would produce an effect quite beyond the reach of plain argument."⁶²⁶³

In June 1904 Livy died at a villa near Florence. "At a quarter past 9 this evening she that was the life of my life passed to the relief & the peace of death after 22 months of unjust & unearned suffering," he wrote in his notebook.⁶⁴ Twichell conducted her funeral at Elmira, and spoke of death as something they did not believe in: "Robert Browning, when he was nearing the end of his earthly days, said that death was the thing that we did not believe in. Nor do we believe in it."⁶⁵⁶⁶

The Master Mind

His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, lived in his house during his last four years and wrote down what he said. "No one who thinks can imagine the universe made by chance. It is too nicely assembled and regulated. There is, of course, a great Master Mind, but it cares nothing for our happiness or our unhappiness."⁶⁷ Of a charge of blasphemy he said, "If God is as vast as that, He is above blasphemy; if He is as little as that, He is beneath it."⁶⁸ In a private letter of 1908 he wrote that through the centuries "the fear of Satan and Hell made 99 Christians where love of God and Heaven landed one."⁶⁹ He let Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, a comic story about a sea captain who reaches heaven and finds the harps and halos useless, be printed at last; it had lain in a drawer for forty years.⁷⁰ And he wrote Letters from the Earth.

On 24 December 1909 his youngest daughter, Jean, died at Stormfield.⁷¹ Two days later he told Paine, "For one who does not believe in spirits I have had a most peculiar experience," and wrote that he had "never greatly envied any one but the dead."⁷²⁷¹ He died there himself on 21 April 1910, in the year the comet came back. His last word to his daughter Clara was "Good-by," and a doctor thought he heard him add, "If we meet."⁷³ He was buried at Elmira after a service at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York, at which Twichell prayed; "pulpits forgot his heresies and paid him honor."⁷⁴

Did his unbelief change shape?

His two closest witnesses disagreed about what he believed at the end, and both deserve to be heard. Paine wrote that "his belief in God, the Creator, was absolute," and that his disbelief and his pessimism "were of his mind; never of his heart."⁷⁵ Howells wrote that he never went back to a conscious divinity, nor to any hope of life after death. The sources support something between them. The man who began as a boy afraid of hell came to deny every part of Christian teaching, most of all eternal punishment; he kept, for a long time, a God who had made the universe and did not speak; and in his last years, after the deaths of two daughters and his wife, he described that God as indifferent and wrote his angriest pages for a drawer.

The shape of his unbelief was the shape of his life: an ear for what people really meant, a heart that could not bear needless suffering, and a deep reluctance to hurt the people he loved. He kept most of it back, not because he doubted it, but because, as he said of Letters from the Earth, the world was not ready, and the people he loved would have been hurt.

Robert Ingersoll, the orator whose speech in Chicago in 1879 he said would "sing through my memory always," has his own chapter in this book.⁷⁶