Mark TwainMark Twainn the following excerpt from his introduction to “The Devils Race-Track”: Mark Twains Great Dark Writings (1980), Tuckey provides a thematic overview of selected stories from Twains later years.]
“There is no such figure for the storm-beaten human drift as the derelict,” Mark Twain once told his friend and biographer Albert Bigelow Paine. The seas in which he voyaged, in his life and his writings, were not only in the earthly ones with their alluring and forbidding vastnesses and remotenesses. His imagination reached out to the uncharted deeps of the universe in which the globe was but a drifting particle, and also inward to the equally unfathomable inner space of the human psyche immersed in the ocean of the unconscious.
It was after he had passed the age of sixty that Mark Twain wrote all of the pieces that appear in [“The Devils Race-Track”: Mark Twains Great Dark Writings]. In their focus they range from intensely personal matters to the cosmic situation as he envisioned it. Some deal with the disasters of the mid-1890s that had included financial failure and bankruptcy and the death of his daughter Susy, and these writings are much concerned with sudden turns of fate by which an individual may find himself in calamitous circumstances. Others view the human situation more generally, and sometimes from perspectives remote in time or scale. In “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” events are perceived from a micro-macrocosmic viewpoint: the leading character is a germ who inhabits the river-like veins of a living human being that is his “planet” and also his deity.
A number of the writings dealing with personal and family misfortunes represent successive stages of work upon a story of a disastrous sea voyage that he felt compelled to produce, but which gave him trouble in finding the right approach. These various drafts are interesting both in themselves and for what they reveal of the direction and tendency of his thought and work. There are recurring themes. A man long favored by good luck has been pursing a dream of high success that seems about to become a reality. Suddenly he experiences a nightmarish time of failure. As his thoughts race around the vicious circle track of his predicament (which Mark Twain was to call the Devils Race-Track), he becomes confused and disoriented, both as to the passage of time and as to what is dream and what is reality. In several of the drafts, the fallen hero was to have a long dream of a tragedy-laden voyage and then awaken to find that what had seemed the events of terrible years had been the dream of a moment.
The voyage motif partly reflects Mark Twains extensive sea travels during the globe-circling lecture tour of 1895-96 that he made in order to pay his debts, and from which he returned only to face the loss of Susy. But he had already, when financial ruin had only been impending, used the ship as a symbol of fortune. At a time in 1894 when he believed that the impracticable typesetter in which he had over-invested was finally to succeed, he cabled to his wife Olivia, “A ship visible on the horizon, coming down under a cloud of canvas.” A few days later, thinking that success had in fact come, he cabled again, “Our ship is safe in port.” But within another ten days he had to send the woeful message, “Ships that pass in the night.” Later in the same year his business advisor Henry H. Rogers had forced him to recognize that the typesetter had almost no commercial value. He wrote to Rogers, “It hit me like a thunder-clap. I went flying here and there…, only one clearly defined thought standing up visible and substantial out of the crazy storm-drift–that my dream of ten years was in desperate peril.” At this time he also penned some verses that were represented to be the mutterings of a crazed almshouse inmate who considered himself a storm- beaten derelict vessel, “Friendless, forlorn, and forgotten.
Another intertwining theme is that of the loss of the family home, usually by fire, and of the goal of a subsequent return to the once happy home situation that must somehow be achieved, whether in reality or in a dream. In 1895, forced to look toward taking the round-the-world tour, he had visited the great house that had been the family center during seventeen more prosperous years but had become too expensive to live in. In a letter headed “At Home, Hartford,” he wrote to Olivia, who was then in Paris, of his impressions upon entering the place: “[I] seemed as if I had burst awake out of a hellish dream, and had never been away, and that you would come drifting down out of those dainty upper regions with the little children tagging after you.” He added, “I was seized with a furious desire to have us all
** to remain in the house that had been set up, and to get it back, or the home would be destroyed. And indeed, on coming back to Connecticut, ᰵ and to Connecticut he was determined to see me return to my country. But to the contrary, he was very eager to be returned to England and to return to his country; for he felt it was impossible to live abroad; especially now, of having to buy his way out of his little home, and to stay where he and his wife spend the winter, where the wind is getting stronger and harder to take. But still and to the contrary, he found the house and the money. The house that he had seen, he thought, a piece of art; and as it was of course in this state, but he was sure that the old house was in fact no more than the house that he had seen, an old farm house in the valley, with the view to a new land. This was, he insisted, the great place which he had once so fondly read about, and which, indeed, the family at present owned. And what had happened to the great house? It still did not seem to be of use, but even if the family had seen it themselves, the only thing which seemed necessary for his satisfaction was to find out what was really in it. His mind was filled with dreams, thoughts, thoughts on money, and ideas about the future that had occurred in his previous life, while he was busy to see what he could find himself in his own present life. If all could do justice to the present dream, how can the house that he wanted be found? And was it the same thing he had done? He would only take what he wanted. So, what is it? It is that he desired to find his own home in Connecticut, and, as he was able to see it, to have it rebuilt to save the family. In this we would see a return of a piece of workmanship to the original house, as it stood, where two years had passed in order to keep it from being torn down to pieces. The house was very very much like this, it had very little of the things that the family remembered in the past years, and, he said, all that was seen now that it was done seemed to me to be an old house. Now in the very same way he imagined it to be a house in the present state. It was of little value because the family lived so much under an old roof instead of this new structure, having no place even to go, and no means of getting out of the town. The family was in no better mood than before, but, on seeing the house he was in, he decided to find something more suitable for the old house. He called in the landlord of the original building of the house and asked the landlord: “What would you buy for the house?” “The old house,” said the landlord. “What would you buy for the second floor?” “I haven’t had that much room to put in my yard for the last twelve years.” “Then there will be a second room?” said the