Fame & Folly (25 page)

If I read “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” in an indifferent or insipid edition, I read it as a celebrated story by Mark Twain, with all that signifies intrinsically. But if I read that same story in an ambitious and even beautiful facsimile format, the extrinsic urges itself on the text with the inexorability of a compensating force. The facsimile volume advertises a false authenticity—but it can lay no claim to being a historical object, any more than the museum-shop lamp can. Without the testimony of the
archaeologists to give it context, the duplicate clay is merely last Tuesday’s factory item; and without the surround of 1900, what is the
raison d’être
of an imitation 1900 edition? The facsimile cries out for an adumbration of the world into which the original was introduced; that is its unique and pressing power, and the secret of its admittedly physical shock on our senses. Reproduction exacts history.

“T
HE
M
AN
That Corrupted Hadleyburg” was written in 1898, in Europe: specifically, Vienna. Mark Twain was still under the shadow of an indelible bereavement; only two years earlier, in 1896, Susy, the oldest and probably the most literarily gifted of the three Clemens daughters, had suddenly been carried off by cerebral meningitis. Restlessness and grief drove Mark Twain and his family—his wife Livy and their two remaining daughters, Clara and Jean—from England to Switzerland to Vienna, where they settled for nearly two years. Clara had come to study piano and voice with distinguished Viennese teachers; Jean was being treated, intermittently and inconclusively, for epilepsy. But Mark Twain was there, willy-nilly, as Mark Twain abroad—which could only mean Mark Twain celebrated and lionized. Vienna was a brilliant magnet for composers and concert artists, for playwrights and satirists, for vivid promoters of liberal and avant-garde ideas. Mark Twain was courted by Hapsburg aristocrats—countesses and duchesses—and by diplomats and journalists and dramatists. He spoke at pacifist rallies and collaborated in the writing of a pair of plays urging women’s suffrage (they never reached the stage and the manuscripts have not survived). He obliged this or that charity by giving public readings; one of them, in February 1898, was attended by Dr. Sigmund Freud. Set within resplendent architecture and statuary, the intellectual life of the city dazzled.

But there was another side to fin-de-siècle Vienna: its underside. Vienna was (then and later) notoriously, stingingly, passionately antisemitic. The familiar impulses that jubilantly welcomed Hitler’s
Anschluss
in 1938, and defiantly elected Kurt Waldheim, a former Nazi, as president of Austria in 1986, were acted upon with equal vigor (and venom) in 1898, when the demagogue Karl
Lueger held office as Vienna’s popular mayor; and Lueger was a preparatory template for the Nazi politics that burgeoned in Vienna only two and a half decades on. In Mark Twain’s Vienna, the cultural elite included prominent Jewish musicians and writers, among whom he flourished companionably; his daughter Clara married Ossip Gabrilowitsch, a Russian Jewish composer-pianist and fellow music student. These warm Viennese associations did not escape the noisome antisemitic press, which vulgarly denounced Mark Twain either as Jew-lover or as himself a secret Jew.

In 1898, the European press in general—whether in Paris or Brussels or Berlin or Vienna or even Moscow—was inflamed by an international controversy: the fever of the Dreyfus Affair was erupting well beyond France itself, where Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish army officer, had been falsely incriminated on a charge of treason. Polity after polity was split between Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards; and in Vienna, Mark Twain boldly stood for Dreyfus’s innocence. In 1898, Zola published his great
J’Accuse
, and escaped arrest by fleeing to England. It was the year of a vast European poisoning, by insidious sloganeering and hideous posters and caricatures; no single country went unsullied.

And it was in this atmosphere that Mark Twain sat down to write “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”—a story about a town in which moral poisoning widens and widens, until no single person remains unsullied. No one can claim that the Dreyfus Affair, a conspiracy to entrap the innocent, impinged explicitly on Mark Twain’s tale of a citizenry brought down by revenge and spreading greed. But the notion of a society—even one in microcosm, like Hadleyburg—sliding deeper and deeper (and individual by individual) into ethical perversion and contamination was not far from a portrait of a Europe undergoing the contagion of its great communal lie. The commanding theme of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”
is
contagion; and also the smugness that arises out of self-righteousness, however rooted in lie it may be.

Hadleyburg’s lie is its belief in its own honesty; it has, in fact, sheltered itself against the possibility of corruption, teaching “the principles of honest dealing to its babies in the cradle,” and insulating its young people from temptation, “so that their honesty
could have every chance to harden and solidify, and become a part of their very bone.” Yet the absence of temptation is commonly no more than the absence of a testing occasion, and when temptation finally does come to Hadleyburg, no citizen, despite stringent prior training, can withstand it. Dishonest money-lust creeps over the town, first infiltrating a respectable old couple, then moving from household to household of nineteen of the town’s most esteemed worthies. An archetypal narrative, it goes without saying: the devil tempting the seemingly pure, who turn out to be as flawed as the ordinary human article usually is. The Faustian bargain trades innocence for gold.

A first reading of “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg”—i.e., a first reading
now
, nearly a century after its composition—is apt to disappoint through overfamiliarity. It is not that familiarity lessens art; not in the least; more often it intensifies art. The experience of one
Hamlet
augments a second and a third, and this is as true of
Iolanthe
as it is of Shakespeare; but surely we don’t go to
Hamlet
or
Iolanthe
for the
plot
. In the last several decades Hadleyburg, as the avatar of a corrupted town, has reappeared in short stories by Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery”) and I. B. Singer (“The Gentleman from Cracow”), and in
The Visit
, a chilling drama by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. And not only through such literary means: in the hundred years since Mark Twain invented Hadleyburg, a proliferation of story-appliances (radio, film, television, and video-recorders), spilling out scores of Hadleyburgs, has acquainted us with (and doubtless hardened us against) the stealthy despoliation of an idyllic town by a cunning stranger. Hadleyburg, for us, is largely a cinematic cliché worn down, by now, to a parody of itself; nor do we have any defense against our belatedness (to use a critical term made famous by Harold Bloom).

But all that applies only to a first reading, when what will stand out is, mainly, the lineaments of the narrative itself. Behind the recognizable Faustian frame are two unlikely categories of ingenuity. The first touches on the identity of the tempter. Hadleyburg, we are told, “had the ill luck to offend a passing stranger … a bitter man and vengeful.”

We know no more than this about the injured stranger and never will know more. (Here the illustrator has supplied a gloating figure in overcoat, top hat, and cravat, rubbing his hands together and hooking his feet around the legs of a chair. Ears, nose, and chin are each pointedly pointed, and you almost expect to catch the point of a tail lashing behind.) There is no shred of a hint concerning the nature of the offense, or exactly who committed it. This forcefully suggests the Demiurge, who hates the human race simply for its independent existence, especially when that existence is embroidered by moral striving; the devil requires no motive. And as the powerful sovereign of a great and greatly populated kingdom, he has no need of revenge. The Demiurge’s first and last urge is gluttony—the lust to fatten his kingdom with more and more souls. Vengeance is clearly a human trait, not the devil’s; so we may conclude that the “passing stranger” is, in truth, no different in kind from any indigenous citizen of Hadleyburg, and that the vengeful outlander and the honest native are, in potential and surely in outcome, identical.

And, indeed, at the end of the day, when Hadleyburg has been fully corrupted, there is nothing to choose between the “evil joy” of the schemer and the greedy dreams of the townsfolk who scheme to enrich themselves through lies. The contest is not between the devil and man, but between man and man.
^*
And it is not so much a contest as a confluence. In other words, we may be induced to imagine that
all
the citizens of Hadleyburg are “passing strangers”: strangers to themselves. They have believed that they
are one thing—pure hearts burnished and enameled by honesty—and they learn that they are another thing: corruptible, degraded, profoundly exposed.

Then is the corrupter of Hadleyburg
not
the devil? And if he is not, is there, after all,
no
Faustian frame? Is what we have, instead, the textual equivalent of the sort of optical illusion that permits you to perceive, with unqualified clarity, two different pictures, but never at the same instant? Nearly everyone has experienced the elusive vase that suddenly shows itself as a pair of silhouettes, and the maddening human profiles that unaccountably flash out of sight to reveal a vase: is
this
the conceptual design of Mark Twain’s narrative? That the outline of the corrupter is inseparable from the outline of the corrupted—that they are one and the same, ineluctably and horribly fused—but that our gaze is barred from absorbing this metaphorical simultaneity? A far more subtle invention than the Faustian scaffold on which this tale has always been said to depend.

On the other hand, Hadleyburg’s tempter (whether or not he is intended to be a Mephistophelean emblem)
does
have a palpable identity of another kind—one we can easily grasp; and this is Mark Twain’s second category of ingenuity. The stranger is a man who relishes the manipulation of words: certain phrases must be reproduced, and they must be precisely the
right
phrases, every syllable perfected. When a sack is deposited at the house of Mr. and Mrs. Richards, an explanatory note is attached. The note is far from brief; it has a plot, a trajectory, a climactic purpose; it promises as much as the opening of a fairy tale. The sack, it claims, “contains gold coin weighing a hundred and sixty pounds four ounces,” and should be given as a reward of gratitude to the unknown Hadleyburg citizen who long ago unwittingly earned it. The sack’s donor was once a gambler who was spurred to reform because a man of the town gave him twenty dollars and spoke a sentence that “saved the remnant of my morals.” That man, the schemer’s note continues—and we have understood from the beginning that all this is a spurious concoction—that man “can be identified by the remark he made to me; I feel persuaded that he will remember it.”

This is a story, then, that hangs on a set of words—fictitious, invented words—and as the narrative flies on with increasing complexity, devising painful joke after painful joke, it soon becomes clear that “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” is less about gold than it is about language. A sentence that is
almost
“correct” but contains a vagrant “very,” is deemed fraudulent; eventually all versions of the elusive remark fall under a cloud of fraudulence, and threaten the town, and expose its infamous heart. And ultimately even hard gold coin is converted into language, in the form of written checks. It is language itself, even language subjected to comedy, that is revealed as the danger, as a conduit to greed, as an entangler in shame and sin and derision.

Which probably
does
return us to the devil. And why not? Mark Twain, early and late, is always preoccupied with the devil and his precincts: the devil is certainly the hero of
The Mysterious Stranger
(a work that is also a product of Vienna), where he is a grand imaginer who appears under the name of Dream, though his dreams are human nightmares, and his poetry destroys. In this view (and who will separate it from Mark Twain’s metaphysical laughter?), the devil is a writer, and the corrupter of Hadleyburg a soulless figure who comprehends that words can carry more horror, and spread more evil joy, than any number of coveted treasures in a sack: even in the saving light of ridicule.

A
ND IF WE
are returned to the devil and his precincts, we are also returned to Vienna. Under the purposefully ambiguous title “Stirring Times in Vienna,” Mark Twain published in
Harper’s
, in the latter part of 1897, four pieces of journalism reporting on sessions of the parliament of the Hapsburg empire, then known as Austria-Hungary—a political amalgam of nineteen national enclaves that endured for fifty-one years until its dissolution after the First World War. The Austrian parliament, situated in Vienna, and conducted in German (the empire’s official language), is, in Mark Twain’s rendering, a non-homogeneous Hadleyburg corrupted well past mere greed into the contagion of chaos and contumely. The Hadleyburg townsfolk are uniformly named Richards and Burgess and Goodson and Wilson and Billson; and yet their interests
conflict as if they held nothing in common. In the Austrian parliament it is certain that nothing is held in common: the native languages of the members are Polish, Czech, Romanian, Hungarian, Italian, German, etc., and the motley names correspond to their speakers’ origins. What is at issue, in December of 1897, is a language dispute. The Bohemians are demanding that Czech replace German as Bohemia’s official language; the government (i.e., the majority party) has acceded. But the German-speaking Austrians, who comprise only one-fourth of the empire’s entire population, are enraged, and are determined to prevent the government from pursuing all other business—including the ratification of the indispensable
Ausgleich
, the renewable treaty of confederation linking Austria and Hungary—unless and until German is restored in Bohemia.