For more than a century—back at least as far as Van Wyck Brooks and Edgar Lee Masters—descriptions of Mark Twain's engagements with religious doctrine and thought have suffered from bouts of reductive argument. Supported by episodes from his life and by cherry-picked passages from the published and private writings, a case is made repeatedly, with variations, that Clemens spent fifty-plus years in theological, historical, and even pathological quarrel with the kind of fundamentalist Calvinism he was subjected to in his Missouri youth, and that catastrophes of his later life propelled him deeper into unbelief. To fit such a framework, his decades of church affiliation in Hartford and Elmira are skirted as essentially familial and social obligation, and his long friendship with Joe Twichell, pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church (where for twenty years the Clemens family were annual pewholders), is regarded more as client-and-shrink, or as a couple of professionally off-duty Men of the World, than as spiritual counselor and bona fide parishioner.In light of all that, Dwayne Eutsey's project, which he calls simply “a closer look at Mark Twain's lifelong engagement with the religious movements of his time,” does more than complicate our thinking about this intense, exuberantly curious, and volatile personality. With admirable thoroughness, Eutsey's book expands and enriches historical contexts of the career by interrogating the frequency and extent of Sam's interactions with influential preachers, with sages of local and national clout, and with others associated with varieties of liberal Christianity, not only in his urbane Eastern haunts but also in “the prevailing progressive ethos” of San Francisco and locales in the Wild West. Even the supposedly-orthodox bastion of boyhood Hannibal gets a fresh look, noting—again, without overstatement—an 1841 dust-up that spawned the the town's Second Presbyterian Church (refusing the gentler theology promulgated by Reverend Joshua Tucker, minister of the First, to whom the Clemens family remained loyal), and summers of breezy Universalism out at the Quarles family farm in nearby Florida, Missouri, where Sam enjoyed happy days with a freethinking uncle. The possible influence of other members of Clemens’ family are countenanced as well: the father's Quaker roots and reported outbreaks of theological skepticism; the mother's sporadic interest in non-Scriptural and exotic belief; brother Orion's published praise for Unitarian tenets; and sister Pamela's bouts of enthusiasm for what she knew of theologies from South Asia. These accumulations of family history and lore are mercifully not cobbled into a case for anything, other than the fact that Sam grew up in an environment where liturgical winds did not blow over him hard and steady from one single direction. In a similar spirit, Eutsey probes Sam's involvements with Freemasonry through much of the 1860’s, including his rise to the rank of Master Mason at a lodge in St. Louis, his participation in Masonic activities in the Washoe environs and later in Angels Camp and Sonoma, and his San Francisco friendship with Thomas Starr King, who at that time was not only “grand orator” of the Grand Lodge of California, but also an eminent Unitarian minister. There are also insightful pages here on Sam's connections with Horatio Stebbins (who took over as minister of San Francisco's First Unitarian Church after the untimely death of King), and with Charles Wadsworth, a liberal Presbyterian Bay Area cleric whom Clemens came to know well and whose Sunday services he attended. Again, extrapolations offered here are plausible: that these Western adventures and friendships out beyond Trinitarian doctrine introduced Sam to a broader range of varieties of faith as well as to gleanings from Hinduism and Buddhism that may resonate in writings from his final years. From Sam's Washoe days as reporter and sketch-writer for the Enterprise, Eutsey investigates the possible influence of two local parsons, one as a target for Mark Twain's wit, and the other as a focus for his playful admiration. In Sam's letters to William Clagett, the Presbyterian pastor A. F. White of Carson City is ridiculed as a “whining, nasal, Whangdoodle preacher,” while Virginia City's Episcopal minister Franklin Rising, a member of the American Church Missionary Society, won Sam's respect for good intentions, though Rising may be an inspiration for the greenhorn parson whose verbosity befuddles Scotty Briggs in Roughing It.As the chapters roll through Mark Twain's Holy Land sojourn and into his decades as a prolific author, entrepreneur, and A-lister on the Eastern Seaboard, familiar landmarks in his religious experience take dominion. In Hartford and Elmira there were Beechers aplenty, including Harriet, the famous next-door neighbor in the Nook Farm community, and Thomas, pastor of Elmira's breakaway-liberal Park Street Church, bankrolled by the Langdon family. And Joe Twichell close by, of course; and Moncure Conway, whom Sam encountered as a popular lecturer-circuit mashup of Unitarianism, demonology, and Hinduism, and also as a writer whose books Sam admired and collected. And ultimately there's a reckoning with the manuscripts that evolved into No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, and the troublesome ending that Mark Twain probably, though not certainly, intended for the last version he worked on—and mercifully, there's no attempt here to nail down a theological reading of this text or any other. Written with clarity, energy, and admirable scholarship, Eutsey's book enriches our understanding not only of Sam Clemens, but also of the intellectual, cultural, and spiritual worlds in which he was immersed.
Bruce Michelson (Thu,) studied this question.