¹ Samuel L. Clemens, “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories, Author's National Ed. (New York, 1910), p. 308.

² Although disagreeing about other matters, most students of Twain seem united in the belief that he was neurotic. Albert Bigelow Paine has called him “high-strung and neurotic” (Mark Twain: A Biography, New York, 1912, i, 238); Van Wyck Brooks has made The Ordeal of Mark Twain (New York, 1920) an Adlerian study in wish-conflict; and Bernard DeVoto has implied that Twain's despair carried him to “the edge of insanity” (Mark Twain at Work, Cambridge, Mass., 1942, p. 130).

³ Anyone proposing to trespass on the domain of the psychiatrist would do well to echo the words of DeVoto: “Both psychology and literary criticism are highly speculative fields. This inquiry is more speculative still, in that it is carried on in the no man's land between them” (Mark Twain at Work, p. 106). While threading my way through this “no man's land,” I have found the following works especially helpful: J. F. Brown, with the collaboration of Karl A. Menninger, The Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior (New York, 1940); Lawrence E. Cole, Human Behavior (New York, 1953); Sigmund Freud, The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, trans, and ed. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938); Emil A. Gutheil, The Language of the Dream (New York, 1939); Joseph Jastrow, The House That Freud Built (New York, 1933); Samuel Henry Kraines, The Therapy of Neuroses and Psychoses (Philadelphia, 1943); William S. Sadler, The Theory and Practice of Psychiatry (St. Louis, 1936); Edward Weiss and O. Spurgeon English, Psychosomatic Medicine (Philadelphia, 1943); Werner Wolff, The Dream—Mirror of Conscience (New York, 1952). Moreover, I am deeply grateful to Dr. William G. Barrett, president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, for his willingness to examine this study and offer expert opinion concerning its conclusions.

⁴ Mark Twain as a Literary Artist (Norman, Okla., 1950), p. 58.

⁵ According to psychiatric theory, the superego is that “part of the mental apparatus which criticizes the ego and causes pain to it whenever it tends to accept impulses emanating from the id” (Richard H. Hutchings, A Psychiatric Word Book, Utica, N. Y., 1943, p. 224). It is especially important on the unconscious level of thought. In practice, says Brown, the superego “becomes almost synonymous with the idea of conscience, in that it originates feelings of remorse and feelings of guilt” (The Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior, p. 164). Cole sees the superego as being powerfully conditioned by one's environment: “If mother has ‘yammered’ the super-ego now ‘yammers.’ If the training has been weak or inconsistent the voice of conscience is uncertain. If the trainers have been gentle, accepting but insistent, conscience, too, is gentle but firm” (Human Behavior, p. 732). Cole further states (p. 758) that when “the super-ego's powers are reinforced—as they are in some cultures—by the belief that ‘sinful' acts call down punishment, and where the training techniques involve a labelling of natural impulses and appetites as sinful, intra-psychic tensions will be strong, the super-ego harsh.” It is interesting to note how closely these descriptions of the superego tally with'Twain's portrayal of conscience: “My conscience is a part of me. It is a mere machine, like my heart—but moral, not physical. … It is merely a thing; the creature of training; it is whatever one's mother and Bible and comrades and laws and system of government and habitat and heredities have made it.… Inborn nature is Character, by itself in the brutes—the tiger, the dove, the fox, etc. Inborn nature and the modifying Conscience, working together make Character in man” (Mark Twain's Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, New York, 1935, pp. 348–349).

⁶ Mark Twain's Autobiography (New York, 1925), ii, 27–28.

⁷ As quoted by DeVoto, M ark Twain at Work, p. 16.

⁸ Dixon Wecter has commented on the distortion in Twain's recollection of Hannibal: “And on the personal plane, this Hannibal was linked in his psyche with the age of innocence, before the unrest of puberty or the burdens and perplexities of adulthood settled upon his shoulders. Hannibal forever remained his symbol of security in days when disasters and frustrations were closing in upon him” (Sam Clemens of Hannibal, Boston, 1952, pp. 64 Eden …, and 173 “recoil … ”).

⁹ Perhaps it should be pointed out here that, according to Freudian doctrine, the Oedipus complex forms the crux of the superego problem (see n. 19).

¹⁰ See Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, pp. 51, 55–56, 81–82, 118.

¹¹ Jane Lampton Clemens had married in a fit of pique after having been jilted by her sweetheart. She and her husband apparently felt respect and even friendship for one one another, but hardly love: “The Clemenses were a reserved and formal family, their tone set by John Clemens, and while they always shook hands at night before going to bed, warmer gestures of affection played no part in their daily life” (Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, pp. 16–19, 77).

¹¹ For a discussion of the relationship between Jane Clemens and her sons, see Coleman O. Parsons, “The Devil and Samuel Clemens,” Virginia Quart. Rev., xxiii (Autumn 1947), 582–608.

¹⁵ In later years Twain was to reflect upon the chilly atmosphere of his boyhood home: “All through my boyhood I had noticed that the attitude of my father and mother toward each other was that of courteous, considerate and always respectful, and even deferential friends; that they were always kind toward each other, but that there was nothing warmer; there was no outward and visible demonstration of affection. This did not surprise me, for my father was exceedingly dignified in his carriage and speech, and in a manner he was austere. He was pleasant with his friends, but never familiar; and so, as I say, the absence of exterior demonstration of affection for my mother had no surprise for me. By nature she was warmhearted, but it seemed to me quite natural that her warmheartedness should be held in reserve in an atmosphere like my father's” (as quoted by Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, pp. 19–20).

¹⁴ As quoted ibid., p. 67. Wecter discusses (pp. 66–68) at some length the strained relations between father and son. Also, he feels it significant that for many years Twain thought of his father as having “deserted” him when he was accidentally left in an empty house. Wecter comments: “The effect of this ‘desertion’ upon Sam's relations with his father and later feelings about his father's inadequacy through the years that the son nurtured its memory, can be surmised” (pp. 91–92).

¹⁵ “We can now see why the death of a father, the break-up of a home by divorce, the early separation of children from their parents will each alter the course of development of the super-ego function. It is the whal-happens-later-to-balance-and rectify this infantile super-ego that fails to occur in these cases. That the father is not a giant in the earth, an infallible and ever-righteous one, a perfectly self-disciplined person, becomes amply demonstrated to the child who grows up in the household with that father. The growth of the ego-function sets up an institution that both elaborates and mitigates the one formed earlier. Without the close contact with the father, within the family circle, the boy has a greater difficulty in filling in the details of that masculine ego-ideal that he needs for his own development” (Cole, Human Behavior, p. 749).

¹⁶ See Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 117. Whatever emotions Twain experienced while watching the post-mortem, he apparently communicated them to Orion; and years later, when Orion wrote of the “autopsy” in his projected autobiography, these emotions were still strong enough to produce the following warning to Twain from William Dean Howells: “Don't let any one else even see those pages about the autopsy.” Then Howells added: “The light on your father's character is most pathetic” (Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, ed. Mildred Howells, New York, 1928, i, 288).

¹⁷ Paine, Twain: A Biography, i, 75. A Freudian interpretation would stress the fact that Twain's somnambulism often took him in the direction of his mother's bed.

¹⁸ Some contemporary psychiatrists might be unwilling to assert, as did Freud, that neuroses are specifically the expression of an unsatisfactory sex life and that neurosis is impossible where the sex life is normal. Nevertheless, there seems to be widespread agreement that adult neuroses often center about sex and can be traced to a childhood shock or to a conflict between aggressive instincts and reality requirements.

¹⁹ To a Freudian analyst, the superego is the “heir of the Oedipus complex.” The shock of phallic frustration, through the resolution of the Oedipus and castration situations, gives new equilibrium and also leads to the development of the normal superego. Indeed, some analysts look upon all personality development as a “restructurization” brought about by the conflict arising in a “blocked-goal situation.” When, therefore, an Oedipus complex is not resolved normally, that person tends to retain certain immature traits, which suggest that to some extent he has been fixated at this early stage of psychosexual development. Such a person, says Cole, is “like the commander with too large a portion of his troops invested in the rear, forced repeatedly to retreat at every confrontation of enemy troops” (Human Behavior, p. 573). It would seem that Twain's usual line of retreat was toward the mythical Hannibal of his memory (see n. 8).

²⁰ Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, pp. 147, 174–175, 214–215.

²¹ Page 174. Tom Blankenship was the prototype of Huck Finn. His sisters had a “not proven” reputation as prostitutes.

²² Mark Twain at Work, p. 96.

²³ DeVoto, Mark Twain's America (Boston, 1932), pp. 64–65.

²⁴ Twain's Autobiography, ii, 277.

²⁵ Twain showed considerable preoccupation with miscegenation on all levels of thought. Upon meeting Howells for the first time, he confessed that the other's favorable review of The Innocents A broad made him feel like the woman who said she was so glad her baby had “come white” (Paine, Biography, i, 390 n.). Of all his published fiction, only Pudd'nhead Wilson deals openly with sex, and here it takes the form of miscegenation. Finally, as will be shown later, even Twain's own sense of guilt sometimes expressed itself in these same terms.

²⁶ Introd., The Love Letters of Mark Twain (New York, 1949), pp. 3–4.

²⁷ “Those Blasted Children,” The Washoe Giant in San Francisco, ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco, 1938), p. 18.

²⁸ Only one bit of positive evidence seems to favor the virginity theory. During his courtship Twain admitted to George Wiley that he was “too rough” for Livy, then added: “Well, I will go see her again tomorrow, and I'll harass that girl and harass her till she'll have to say yesl For George, you know I never had wish or time to bother with women, and I can give that girl the purest, best love any man can ever give her” (as quoted by Samuel C. Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man, Boston, 1946, p. 102). Although such a statement might seem to confirm Wecter's theory, it is also true that Twain was anything but candid during his pursuit of Livy—castigating himself as a sinner one moment, minimizing the peccadillos of his bachelor days and adopting the role of apprentice Christian the next. For this reason, his statement to Wiley has probably no more validity than his announcement to Will Bowen, made soon after his marriage, that before the “majesty” of Livy's purity all the “old vices & shameful habits” that had possessed him “these many many years” were “falling away, one by one” (Mark Twain's Letters to Will Bowen, ed. Theodore Hornberger, Austin, Tex., 1941, p. 20). Such statements, couched in exalted rhetoric and full of hyperbole, belong to the dialectic of courtship and cannot be taken at face value. For the most part, Twain's attitude was a mixture of remorse, unctuous piety, rationalization, and wishful thinking: he had been a sinner, but not a really wicked sinner—and, besides, his past was unimportant since he was now going to lead a Christian life. Concerning the Langdons' misgivings, for example, on 1 Dec. 1868, he wrote as follows to his sister Pamela: “They are not very concerned about my past, but they simply demand that I shall prove my future before I take the sunshine out of their house” (as quoted by Wecter, Love Letters of Twain, p. 29). Yet a strikingly different outlook is revealed in a letter from Livy's mother to Mrs. Fairbanks, also written on 1 Dec. 1868. Admitting that “Mr. Clemens … seemed to have entered upon a new manner of life, with higher and better purposes actuating his conduct,” she continued: “The question, the answer to which would settle a most wearing anxiety, is,—from what standard of conduct, from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation, commence? Does this change, so desirably commenced, make of an immoral man a moral one, as the world looks at men? or—does this change make of one, who has been entirely a man of the world, different in this regard, that he resolutely aims to enter upon a new, because a Christian life” (as quoted by Wecter, Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 53)?

²⁹ Wecter states (Love Letters, pp. 2–3) that Twain's “long bachelorhood was no testament to misogyny” and then discusses his various sweethearts. See also Paine, Biography, i, 132, 156, 164, 268–269.

³⁰ Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown, ed. Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane (New York, 1940), pp. 41 and 84 (also p. 86); Letters from the Sandwich Islands: Written for the Sacramento Union by Mark Twain (Stanford Univ., Calif., 1938), p. 178.

³¹ It is interesting to note that Twain's boyhood friend, Sam Bowen, who likewise became a river pilot, shared his sweetheart's bed for some time before marrying her (see Twain's Autobiography, ii, 185–186).

³² Twain used this phrase in a letter to his mother (Mark Twain's Letters, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine, New York, 1917, i, 126). He applied it humorously to Dan Slote, his roommate on the Quaker City. Although Twain was obviously teasing his mother, the phrase is nevertheless an apt one since it describes perfectly the sort of person he found most congenial during his bachelorhood. Moreover, while there is no proof that the “immorality” of his companions included promiscuity, it is also true that no one has ever successfully demonstrated a negative correlation between the qualities Twain enumerated and tolerance in sexual matters.

³³ Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, ed. Dixon Wecter (San Marino, Calif., 1949), p. 8.

³⁴ Love Letters, pp. 76, 357.

³⁵ Love Letters, p. 74. Apparently this oblique self-defense was far from successful, for a week later he was writing as follows: “No, Livy, I yield in the matter of sowing wild oats. I have thought it over—& I have also talked it over with Twichell, the other night, & I fear I have been in the wrong. Twichell says, ‘Don't sow wild oats, but burn them … ‘ I only thought of sowing them being the surest way to make the future man a steady, reliable, wise man, thoroughly fitted for this life … But there is a deeper question—whether it be advisable or justifiable to trample the laws of God under foot at any time in our lives?”

³⁶ Notebook, pp. 280, 286. For another discussion of “natural passion” see Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York, 1940), pp. 315–316. Dr. William G. Barrett feels that “only a man who had known women, and suffered the anxiety over venereal disease that was the burden of the Victorian era, could make such a plea for ‘clean women’ for the soldiers” (letter to author, 6 Feb. 1955).

³⁷ Notebook, p. 392.

³⁸ Wecter, Introd., Love Letters, p. 3. 39 Paine, Biography, i, 309.

⁴⁰ Concerning their relationship on the Quaker City, Twain wrote as follows: “She sewed my buttons on, kept my clothes in presentable trim, fed me on Egyptian jam, (when I behaved,) lectured me awfully on the quarter-deck on moonlit promenading evenings, & cured me of several bad habits. I am under lasting obligation to her … We all called her ‘mother’ & kept her in hot water all the time” (as quoted by Webster, Twain, Business Man, p. 97). Twain's treatment of Mrs. Fairbanks was, for him, typically filial. As he wrote to Livy, “I have got Mother Fairbanks in a stew again. … I like to tease her because I like her so” (as quoted by Wecter, Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 47).

⁴¹ Love Letters, pp. 19, 32.

⁴² For a time Twain apparently hoped to have his cake and eat it, too. Before their marriage, he wrote to Livy: “And she [Mrs. Fairbanks] says: ‘Of course you must live in Cleveland.‘ That is what I want to do. Don't you? Now say you do, Livy, there's a dear girl. Mrs. Fairbanks, & Mrs. Severance, & little Mrs. Foote, & sweet Mother Crocker, would so love you & minister to you that you would hardly know you were not at home” (as quoted by Wecter, Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. 61). Livy displayed an understandable lack of enthusiasm for this design for living, and Twain was soon asking anxiously, “Did I scare you, Livy?”

⁴³ Several students of Twain have pointed out that Eve in Eve's Diary is in many ways a tribute to Mrs. Clemens; Wecter has described Eve as the “epitome of all that Livy in thirty-six years had taught him about women” (Love Letters, p. 15). It is interesting, therefore, to hear Eve discuss her relationship with Adam. She says, “He loves me as well as he can; I love him with all the strength of my passionate nature …” Also: “At bottom he is good, and I love him for that, but I could love him without it. If he should beat me and abuse me, I should go on loving him. I know it. It is a matter of sex, I think … Yes, I think I love him merely because he is mine and is masculine”- (New York, 1906, pp. 95–103).

⁴⁴ Notebook, p. 397.

⁴⁵ Love Letters, p. 186. Twain himself scratched out the words enclosed in parentheses-Moreover, Wecter says that both exclamations of “Expedition's the word” have been “heavily inked out, at a later date and probably by another hand. Elsewhere Clemens uses the same phrase to express impatience …” In these letters to Livy, the phrase undoubtedly has sexual connotations—which would account for the subsequent censorship.

⁴⁶ Notebook, p. 235.

⁴⁷ My Mark Twain (New York, 1910), p. 13. Livy's chronic invalidism was unquestionably due in part to a true, but mild, hysterical neurosis. But neither Howells nor Twain realized this.

⁴⁸ Using layman's terms, Wecter has well described Twain's neurosis as composed of “pride, hypersensitiveness, self-distrust and masochism” (Love Letters, p. 84). Twain probably took masochistic pleasure in castigating himself as a sinner (see n. 54).

⁴⁹ Notebook, pp. 261–262, 347.

⁵⁰ Mark Twain in Eruption, p. 95.

⁵¹ Mark Twain as a Literary Artist, pp. 373, 174, 182.

⁵² Howells, as quoted by Paine, Biography, i, 524.

⁵³ Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography: Memories and Experiences (Boston, 1904), ii, 144.

⁵⁴ Many psychiatrists conceive of masochism as a mechanism whereby a neurotic individual can actually enjoy physical or mental suffering as atonement for guilt, either real or imagined.

⁵⁵ See Twain's Autobiography, n, 156–158. Livy, of course, was not without her own aggressive impulses.

⁵⁶ Howells' early impression of Livy was that she was “the very flower and perfume of ladylikeness” (Life in Letters, i, 187).

⁵⁷ Van Wyck Brooks interprets Twain's desire to show himself off and his love of the limelight as an example of Adler's “masculine protest” (The Ordeal, p. 183).

⁵⁸ Biography, i, 524 (see also Howells, My Mark Twain, pp. 4–5).

⁵⁹ The Ordeal, p. 183.

⁶⁰ Brown, Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior, p. 159.

⁶¹ Notebook, p. 387. In keeping with his masochistic temperament, Twain was not only reproaching himself for mistreating Livy but was simultaneously feeling neglected: “And there … she lay white and cold and unresponsive to my reverent caresses—a new thing to me and a new thing to her; that had not happened before in five and thirty years” (Letters, ii, 761). Yet there is something very curious about her last years. While she was ill in Italy, almost everyone could visit her except her husband—who was limited to occasional visits of a few minutes' duration.

⁶² Introd., Love Letters, p. 14.

⁶³ Ibid., 45. Once again, Twain may be using the hyperbole of courtship, although Dr. William G. Barrett feels he is thinking of sexual guilt (letter to author, 6 Feb. 1955). In any event, since in later years Twain seriously looked upon himself as sinful—or at least as full of corrupt impulses (n. 49, 50, 51)—this statement cannot be discounted as mere rhetoric. For even if Twain did enter marriage as a virgin, which seems less than likely, an imaginary masochistic guilt could cause as much inner conflict as guilt based on actual deeds, possibly even more.

⁶⁴ As quoted ibid., p. 144.

⁶⁵ “Why Not Abolish It?” Harper's Weekly, xlvii (2 May 1903), 732. The “it” is the so-called “age of consent.” For another discussion of seduction, see The Innocents Abroad, Author's National Ed. (New York, 1911), i, 137–143, in which Heloise is characterized as a “misused, faithful girl” and Abelard as a “dastardly seducer.”

⁶⁶ During their courtship he had praised portions of Tristram Shandy but asserted that as a whole “the book is coarse, & I would not have you soil your pure mind with it” (Love Letters, p. 34). If there is any one adjective that Twain was obsessed with during his courtship, it was “pure.”

⁶⁷ Notebook, pp. 327, 392.

⁶⁸ According to Gutheil, in the United States the Negro “usually appears in dreams of white people as a symbol of repressed desires and impulses or as a symbol of tabooed persons” (The Tjmouaee of the Dream, p. 104).

⁶⁹ See “My Platonic Sweetheart,” The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories (New York, 1922), pp. 287–304. Incidentally, two clinical psychologists have assured me that this dream sweetheart of Twain's is far from “platonic” but that considerable idealization has taken place, disguising the latent sexual content of the dream. Specifically, they have emphasized the following “symbols”: a bluebird sitting on a fence, while a fox squirrel hurries toward it with tail elevated; a farmer wading knee-deep in grain beyond the fence; Twain's kissing the girl on the hand, and her then kissing the same spot; the girl's having Twain carry her across the stream to keep her feet dry, and having him hold her hat—which would somehow keep his feet dry; crossing the stream a second time because the action was very pleasant; the two sweethearts plucking flowers and then tying and retying each other's ribbons and cravats; the girl's being shot with an arrow and dying in Twain's arms as they recline under a tree; Twain's climbing a grassy hill toward a palatial mansion of red terra cotta with a spacious portico; his finding her inside, sitting on an ivory settee, crocheting. On the other hand, such Freudian interpretation should be accompanied by a warning that one cannot decipher dreams merely by “memorizing lists of symbols [by means of which] he can interpret his own or anyone else's dreams” (Brown, Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior, p. 228).

⁷⁰ Notebook, pp. 349–351.

⁷¹ Twain's dreams are mirrors in which one can catch fascinating, though distorted, glimpses of his agonized conscience. They are crammed with examples of wish fulfillment, regression to the irresponsible days of childhood, release of inhibitions, and masochistic self-punishment. Of his dreams, Twain says, “I go into awful dangers; I am in battles and trying to hide from bullets; I fall over cliffs. … I get lost in caves and in the corridors of monstrous hotels; I appear before company in my shirt; I come on the platform with no subject to talk about, and not a note; I go to unnamable places, I do unprincipled things; and every vision is vivid, every sensation—physical as well as moral—is real” (Notebook, p. 351). One of his recurrent dreams was that of appearing nude, or partially dressed, in public (Paine, Biography, ii, 1368–69, and Notebook, p. 249). Some of his dreams, moreover, involve his wife. For example, a Freudian interpretation of the following dream would place great stress upon its sexual symbolism, which is specifically linked with guilt: “I dreamed I caught a beautiful slender white fish 14 inches [long] and thought what a fine meal it would make. I was very hungry. Then came the feeling of disappointment and sorrow; it was Sunday, and I could not take the fish home, for it would deeply grieve Livy to know that I had been fishing on the Sabbath. Then it occurred to me to catch a fish for her, and that would disarm her.” Twain then adds: “The dream is a perfect reflection of my character and hers, down to that last detail—there it suddenly breaks down. But in the dream it seemed quite natural that her religious loyalty should be bought for a fish” (Notebook, p. 325). The latent sexual content of the dream, although obviously linking sex and guilt, is open to several different specific interpretations. It may represent the Garden-of-Eden theme again, but with the roles reversed and Twain, like Milton's Eve, saying, “Adam shall share with me in bliss or woe.” On the other hand, the dream might conceivably mirror latent homosexual impulses. One psychiatrist consulted by the present author feels that catching the fish for Livy represents a circuitous defense against such guilt lying deep in the subconscious (n. 104). Or, according to another analyst, the dream may involve a denial of castration. In any case, the fish is probably a penis symbol—both of the above-mentioned experts agree upon this point, and Dr. Barrett concurs.

⁷² See, e.g., Bellamy, Twain as a Literary Artist, pp. 30–32.

⁷³ Mark Twain at Work, p. 15 (see also Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 172).

⁷⁴ Bellamy, Twain as a Literary Artist, p. 329.

⁷⁵ Notebook, p. 20.

⁷⁶ The Washoe Giant in San Francisco, p. 105.

⁷⁷ Guy A. Cardwell feels it possible that George Washington Cable's “frank recognition of sex as a human and literary motive and of miscegenation as a tragic theme may have emboldened Clemens to make what is, among his writings, a conspicuously serious approach to sex problems in Pudd'nhead Wilson” (Twins of Genius, East Lansing, Mich., 1953, p. 69).

⁷⁸ Author's National Ed. (New York, 1915), i, 182–183. Of the seduction Twain says, “It is a long story; unfortunately it is an old story, and it need not be dwelt on.”

⁷⁹ According to Webster, Twain spent a “good deal” of his wedding trip to Buffalo singing about this same woman. As Webster says, the song “does not seem particularly appropriate for a wedding trip” (Mark Twain, Business Man, p. 109).

⁸⁰ See Paine, Biography, i, 277. The Yale Univ. Library possesses certain verses by Twain which deal with lost virility.

⁸¹ See, e.g., Notebook, pp. 225–226, for a deliberately outrageous letter to Twichell. Incidentally, 1601 began as such a letter to Twichell.

⁸² DeVoto, Twain at Work, p. 15.

⁸³ Brooks, The Ordeal, p. 185.

⁸⁴ My Mark Twain, pp. 3–4.

⁸⁵ As quoted by Bellamy, Twain as a Literary Artist, p. 58.

⁸⁶ Notebook, p. 151.

⁸⁷ Psychoanalytic theory holds exhibitionism to be a denial of castration. Some psychiatrists also see it as a defense against voyeurism.

⁸⁸ Brown, Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behavior, pp. 204–206, 217–218.

⁸⁹ Wecter has characterized Twain's pornography as “sallies into the world of men only” (Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks, p. xxiv).

⁹⁰ Twain as a Literary Artist, p. 57.

⁹¹ Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown, p. 221.

⁹² Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 94.

⁹³ Notebook, p. 325 (see also pp. 81, 148, 269, 288; Following the Equator, Author's National Ed., New York, 1899, ii, 11–12; Paine, Biography, ii, 1513).

⁹⁴ Notebook, p. 337 (also Brooks, The Ordeal, p. 231).

⁹⁵ Letters from the Sandioich Islands, p. 178; Innocents Abroad, i, 130–131.

⁹⁶ A Tramp Abroad, Author's National Ed. (New York, 1907), ii, 244–245. Twain describes this painting, the so-called “Venus of Urbino,” as “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses.” Art historians do not agree about this painting. David M. Robb feels there is “no touch of the carnal or the merely erotic” (The Harper History of Painting, New York, 1951, p. 416). On the other hand, Thomas Craven has described Titian's nudes as “aphrodisiacs for connoisseurs” and specifically agrees with Twain's condemnation of the painting: “Today we smile at Mark Twain's moral indignation, but his criticism has the uncommon merit of honesty: he saw what everyone sees in the Venus —the left hand—it is the center of attraction. He acknowledged it and recoiled in disgust. But no false sense of delicacy prevented him from publishing his reactions; and so far as I am aware, he is the only writer who has mentioned the inescapable fact.… Incidentally, Mark Twain raised the perfectly valid question of the aesthetic properties of exhibitionism in art” (Men of Art, New York, 1931, pp. 189–190). It is interesting that Twain should condemn exhibitionism in the pictorial arts but should resort to it himself in his writings—even though he apparently thought he did not do so (see Notebook, p. 153).

⁹⁷ Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown, pp. 84, 86.

⁹⁸ In “That Day in Eden” Eve is even younger and more innocent than in Eve's Diary; in fact, both she and Adam are “mere boy and girl, trim, rounded, slender, flexible snow images lightly flushed with the pink of the skies, innocently unconscious of their nakedness, lovely to look upon, beautiful beyond words” (Europe and Elsewhere, New York, 1923, p. 339).

⁹⁹ See Innocents Abroad, ii, 371; A Tramp Abroad, i, 110; and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Author's National Ed. (New York, 1917), p. 10. Twain feels such naked innocence can be found only in very young girls. Women, almost without exception, become self-conscious; and therefore there can be no truly modest adult female nudity (Letters, i, 397).

¹⁰⁰ Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 170.

¹⁰¹ Autobiography, i, 135–143 (see also Mark Twain's Speeches, New York, 1910, pp. 262–264; Mark Twain in Eruption, pp. 131–136; Following the Equator, i, 19—24; A Connecticut Yankee, pp. 32–33.

¹⁰² Letters front the Sandwich Islands, p. 178; A Tramp Abroad, i, 76–77; Autobiography i, 125–130.

¹⁰³ Paine, Biography, ii, 1513.

¹⁰⁴ While in India, Twain found himself unwilling to undress until his manservant's back was turned. Apparently the servant's hair, combed back, knotted, and held with a tortoise-shell comb made him seem like a woman (Notebook, p. 270). Twain's interest in nudity, especially male nudity, might possibly be taken as indicating latent homosexual leanings—as might some of his dreams and his interest in pornography. The question is a difficult one, especially since scholars are not in complete agreement as to the significance of such latent homosexuality. Some feel it is clearly an abnormality; others, including almost all psychiatrists, agree with Freud that there is a suppressed homosexual component in the libido of every person, normal or neurotic. While granting that Twain probably had latent homosexual impulses, I do not feel that such suppressed impulses were strong enough to affect his conscious attitudes. In spite of his maladjustments and regressive tendencies, he obviously found adult heterosexuality to his liking.

¹⁰⁵ Author's National Ed. (New York, 1912), p. 165.

¹⁰⁶ Leslie Fielder has interpreted those scenes where Huck and Jim drift naked down the river as indicating homosexuality (“Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!” Partisan Rev., xv [June 1948], 664–671). On the other hand, Guy A. Cardwell feels that Huck “enjoys sexless love poured forth by a black slave with the uncomplicated bounteousness that a romantic mind might attribute to benign Nature” (Twins of Gennis, p. 71).

¹⁰⁷ Freud might almost have been thinking of Twain in the following passage: “This age of childhood, in which the sense of shame is unknown, seems a paradise when we look back upon it later, and paradise itself is nothing but a mass-phantasy of the childhood of the individual. This is why in paradise men are naked and unashamed, until the moment arrives when shame and fear awaken; expulsion follows, and sexual life and cultural development begin” (The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, p. 294).

¹⁰⁸ Mark Twain at Work, p. 102.