Some time ago I picked up a used copy of Letters From The Earth: Uncensored Writings By Mark Twain. Actually, I have another copy of this in the house which I saw while looking for something else on a bookshelf.

The book was pulled together posthumously by editors from writings Twain never published, things they found after he died. Like many authors, Twain started things, working toward some grand plan, then never finished them. Perhaps he realized the project didn’t make sense. Perhaps other things caught his interest. The editors found value in these writings and published it in 1938, more than twenty years after Twain’s death.

Thus, the book is a hodgepodge of materials, most of them dealing with religion and man, particularly relations between men and women. The Table of Contents is as follows.

• Letters From The Earth
• Papers of the Adam Family
• Letter To The Earth
• A Cat-Tale
• Cooper’s Prose Style
• Official Report to the I.I.A.S
• The Gorky Incident
• Simplified Spelling
• Something About Repentance
• From An English Notebook
• From The Manuscript of “A Tramp Abroad”; the French and the Comanches
• From an Unfinished Burlesque of Books on Etiquette
• The Damned Human Race
• The Great Dark

These vary in length from a few pages to fifty pages. Some I found interesting, if not illuminating. Some of his thoughts on women’s sexuality came from a different perspective and included things I’d never thought of. Some about sin and man’s relationship to God presented a skeptic’s or atheist’s viewpoint on Christianity. I don’t know if Twain was an atheist, but would conclude so just based on reading this book.

I found the article on James Fenimore Cooper’s writings overly critical. Cooper wrote a several decades before Twain began. Writing styles were different and had changed a lot in those years. This is the second piece I’ve read of Twain’s that pans Cooper. Not sure why Twain had it out for him.

I’m glad I read this as it tells me much more about Twain. I read almost all of it, skipping some of “The Great Dark” and most of the editor’s notes. I won’t be keeping it. Next time I leave The Dungeon for the Upper Realm, I’ll bring it with me and take it strait to the sale/donation pile. As a matter of fact, when I find that other copy of this somewhere on one of my many book shelves, it will go out as well. I’m not having a permanent Twain collection.

I began reading Mark Twain’s complete short stories over eight years ago, as I’ve reported before on the blog. I started on them, found them too intense to read continuously until done, so put it aside. Picked it up again after a few years, put it down. I then established a pattern of getting it out whenever I finished another book and reading a few stories in it before I started a new book.

The brought me to 2017, with only one story left to read. The problem was, it was 80 pages long. “The Mysterious Stranger” looked too daunting to tackle. That’s not a short story, I thought: that’s a novella.

But I knew I needed to read it, or have another unfinished book hanging around. I finally started it on May 23 and finished it on May 28. So, the whole volume is read.

For my review though, I just want to concentrate on that last story. It’s fresh on my mind, and it’s…odd. The mysterious stranger is named Satan, and he claims to be an angel, the nephew of the more famous fallen angel of that name. He materializes in the forest, in Germany to three teen boys, and enchants them. They feel happy in his presence and sad when he leaves.

Satan tells them man isn’t the highest animal, but the lowest. The problem is man’s “moral sense,” which causes him to apply right and wrong to his actions. Most of the time, though knowing the right, man chooses the wrong.

Other animals don’t have that problem. They don’t do wrong because they have no concept of right and wrong. They just do, and have whatever natural consequences there may be.

Satan shows no concern for man. He seems willing to kill them, which gives him pleasure because it saves them from years of dealing with right and wrong. He tells how everyone’s life is fated to be something, based on a whole series of minor choices, one choice leading to another. He will cause a person to change a minor action, which might lengthen or shorted his or her life by decades.

Twain tends to paint Satan in a good way. His words always seem to be not only soothing but also logical. It makes me wonder if Satan is giving us Twain’s views of Christianity, which can only be characterized as disdain. Methinks that is the case.

So, was I enriched by reading “The Mysterious Stranger”? Or reading Twain’s stories as a whole. For sure I was. I wanted to read them, not only to help me in my short story writing by reading the one of the masters, as well as for my efforts to go back in time and read things I’d skipped for years. I’m glad I did it.

Although, I’m not sure they qualify as stories that were so good I need to read them again. In fact, I’m not going to keep the book I read. It’s a mass-market paperback. The covers came off, and the pages are beginning to crumble, all since it was printed in 1983. I have books from the 19^th century that are in better shape than this. No, I won’t keep it. The stories are all in public domain now, and I can easily access them if I ever want to read them again.

I found this book, Mark Twain’s Letters From Hawaii, (Edited by A. Grove Day, c. 1966, The University Press of Hawaii, Honolulu, ISBN 0-8248-0288-8, Pacific Classics Edition 3rd printing 1979), in a place where they sell used books, either a thrift store or a garage sale. I put it midway through the first half of the reading pile I put together last August, and came to it in mid-March. I read a little of it in February, on that business trip to Phoenix, but read it mostly over the last two weeks (when I wasn’t distracting myself with the letters of Tolkein and Lewis).

Mr. Day begins his Introduction with a question some of my readers may be asking: “Why should anyone today want to read the travel letters written by Mark Twain from the Hawaiian Islands more than a hundred years ago?” I chose the book because I want to read more of Mark Twain’s works. Why not this one? And of course it was cheap, an oldish paperback at a used book sale. It’s been decades since I read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, the only two things by Twain I’ve read. I downloaded a book from the Gutenberg Project, Letters of Mark Twain, Volume 1, but I haven’t done anything with it to date.

Why indeed would anyone want to read this? It’s history. It captures Hawaii in a snapshot in time, 1866. Twain was 31, before he achieved literary fame, and was working as a journalist in Nevada and California when he wrangled himself an assignment from the “Sacramento Union” to travel to Hawaii for several months and write a series of travelogue type letters for publication in the newspaper.

The letters he wrote are full of information and humor. He described the scenery, the people, the government, the missionaries, the agriculture, the inter-island travel, the volcanoes, the commerce. He created an imaginary travel companion, Brown, who became a foil for Twain’s epee thrusts.

While Twain was in the Sandwich Islands (as they were still mostly called at that time), two newsworthy events happened. The crown princess, who was to become sovereign queen upon the death of the king, herself died at age 27. Twain’s description of the month-long mourning and funeral rites tells much about the people. And, while he was there, survivors of the clipper ship “Hornet” arrived at the island after 43 days in lifeboats following the burning and sinking of the “Hornet”. Twain’s account is gripping (to use an over-used word, but it works in this case) as he tells how the men survived and made it across the miles to Hawaii. That one letter did much to begin Twain’s rise to fame in the States.

I could give many examples of how Twain’s humor comes through. I’ll just give this one, about his inter-island trip on a small, coastal ship. “The first night, as I lay in my coffin [how he described his berth], idly watching the dim lamp swinging to the rolling of the ship, and snuffing the nauseous odors of bilge water, I felt something gallop over me. Lazarus did not come out of his sepulcher with a more cheerful alacrity than I did out of mine. However, I turned in again when I found it was only a rat. Presently something galloped over me once more. I knew it was not a rat this time, and I thought it might be a centipede, because the captain had killed one on deck in the afternoon. I turned out. The first glance at the pillow showed me a repulsive sentinel perched upon each end of it–cockroaches as large as peach leaves-fellows with long, quivering antennae and fiery, malignant eyes. they were grating their teeth like tobacco worms, and appeared to be dissatisfied about something.”

With such colorful language and use of metaphor, Twain paints his pictures of the beautiful Sandwich Islands. The book is well worth the time to read, if you ever come across it. I don’t know about going out of your way to try and purchase it, however. Would it be worth full price at a bookstore, if you could even find it? Probably.