Clearly, Twain Wanted To Be More Of A Writer Than He Was Allowed To Be

Can't let this go, just yet. 

Looking at the history of the book which was called "The Mysterious Stranger" it is a product from after Twain died, he having written several quite different versions of it, finishing none of them, over a number of years.  One is clearly him wanting to recycle his most successful characters,  Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn and Becky Thatcher all appear in one of the fragments unused by the characters who pasted together what was sold to the world as Twain's book during the period I read it.  I can't imagine that that version "Schoolhouse Hill" would have been much better, it's clear that none of them interested or pleased Twain enough for him to finish them. 

There was, apparently some controversy over the version that the world knew as the novel, especially when Bernard Devoto released all of Twain's unpublished manuscripts which the guy behind that cut and paste job, Albert Bigelow Paine had concealed.  Paine had kept the manuscripts private till his death.   It is clear that he pasted the ending of one story onto the version he published, changing the names of the characters to fit.  If Twain would have approved of that is doubtful, as can be seen in the history of his own revisions that led to The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he'd certainly have done the grafting job himself if he'd wanted to.  

The main selling-point of the book is its very conventional anti-religious content, which you'd think would get tiresome but that assumes what isn't in evidence, that the fans of that do much in the way of thinking.   I might, might go back to look at Twain, the anti-religious, anti-Christian, anti-Catholic might have said by way of clues that account for his holding the finished, published, well prepared and carefully written book about Joan of Arc as the one of his that he was proudest of and held in the highest esteem. 

It's clear that he longed to be more than the writer of cynical or sentimental humor but that he didn't know how to do it.  I don't blame him, if I was reduced to writing the same stuff over and over again to sell to magazines over that length of time, I'd long for more, too.  I think that accounts for him reporting that he did twelve years of preparation for writing it and two years writing the book.  He was trying to do something he hadn't done before because he was essentially repeating stuff - as can be seen in how many times he tried to re-write the Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn bunch into new books.   I'm surprised he didn't send them over Reichenbach Falls or have that hot air balloon he had them in crash into the ocean.

The hostility of the critics to the book is more telling about why they might value a piece of tripe like Pudd'nhead or Mysterious Stranger entirely more than the content those books as published merit.  I think it's exactly the anti-religious and generally cynical content of those books that both account for the reputation of those books and for the hostility towards Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc.  Every fault I've read them cite in that book - "sentimentality" "mawkishness" etc.  are present in practically every single other thing he wrote, including sections of Huckleberry Finn.  He seldom presented women and their thinking in other terms that I recall.  I would have to go back and re-read the book but I think they are most absent in the one book of his I like the best, Life on the Mississippi.  But that wasn't supposed to be fiction, though it's clear there are tall tales included.  I don't recall much in the way of anti-religious content in it, though I don't think I've picked it up in a decade except to move it on the book shelf.

Update:  Comment withheld here posted at commented on here.