WHO WANTS TO GO TO HELL? AN UNSIGNED
SKETCH BY MARK TWAIN?

On Friday, 22 August 1884, William MacKay Laffan, the business manager of the New York Sun, opened a letter to "My Dear Clemens" with: "I put her into type and I think her highly amusing and seasonable. She is on the Boss’s proofs and, I take it, is going in on Sunday."¹ Natural curiosity leads to scanning the Sun for 24 August. Fortunately, the trend toward the mammoth fruitcake of the Sunday edition had only begun. From a limited field, picking the most likely candidate for the item Laffan praised proves to be surprisingly easy. Assuming to start with that "her" was a sketch by Mary* Twain, nothing else in the Sun comes close to the unsigned "Hunting for H- - - - -" on p. 2, the editorial page. A strong set of conjectures can support this choice until hard evidence turns up. To be sure, the verdict may then come down on the negative side. Twain’s worshippers tend to forget that he merely outclassed hundreds of newspaper comedians and that patient searching will dredge up sketches or at least passages that can masquerade as Twain working at a medium pitch.

The most selective clue in Laffan’s letter is his "highly amusing." Although Charles A. Dana’s editing had earned the Sun a reputation for irreverent wit, no other column in the issue of 24 August has an extraordinary touch, by later standards anyway, or was that likely to impress Laffan, himself a rare mixture of bon vivant, fixer, and sophisticate. Furthermore, the underlying robustness of "Hunting for H- - - - -" suited his relationship with Twain, who in 1903 inscribed a self-caricaturing portrait for him: "To the pleasant barrels we’ve drunk together." Soon after meeting in 1880, the two struck up a camaraderie, and Laffan jovially visited Hartford, Connecticut in 1882 as Twain’s houseguest. The letter of 22 August 1884 went on to chaff about billiards, a passion of Twain’s that he at least pretended to share. Once a drama critic and now a connoisseur of art who was becoming J. P. Morgan’s personal expert on acquisitions, Laffan was also cosmopolitan enough to enjoy the open if good-natured impiety of "Hunting for H- - - - -" Though born in Ireland he presumably could likewise savor rather than resent a friendly kidding about Irish stereotypes.

The second large clue from Laffan is his "seasonable." Actually, arctic exploration—often in search of a Northwest Passage—made

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news throughout the nineteenth century, particularly after the second voyage of Sir John Franklin in 1825–27 and the continuing mystery of what had happened to him. The indexes for the New York Times and New York Tribune show an enduring pattern of interest, as fresh as the stories in the Times of 31 August and 21 September 1884. Still more gripping and current for Americans were the stories of the expeditions to relieve the party led by U.S. Army Lieutenant Adolphus W. Greely; it had left in 1881 to establish a chain of thirteen stations under a plan approved by the International Polar Geographical Conference. His party eventually suffered a tragic winter after supply ships failed several times to get through, partly because one was crushed by the ice. Although still another try succeeded in the summer of 1884, the public joy was undercut by later headlines like "Greely’s Dead Comrades" and "The Last of the Arctic Dead" (New York Times, 9 August 1884, p. 8; 10 August, p. 3). Perhaps even more "seasonable" in relation to the irony of the unsigned sketch was the latest word on the Jeannette expedition to reach the North Pole. Headed by U.S. Navy Lieutenant George W. DeLong, it had been financed and therefore trumpeted by James Gordon Bennett, stagey owner of the New York Herald. Since 1879 it had often made news, magnified by dramatic headlines when the main party was found frozen to death in 1882, though the bodies were not brought home until 1884. Somewhat less gruesomely, the press (New York Times, 16 and 21 August 1884) ran stories on newly recovered "relics"—articles of clothing and other gear—whose authenticity was at once challenged. In other words those touching memorabilia of the Jeannette martyrs might be expensive junk. Because "Hunting for H- - - - -" burlesques the squandering of money, we should also note that the expenses of the final Greely Relief Expedition had gone well over the budget and reached $700,000 (Times, 29 July 1884, p. 2). For that matter the Sun of 24 August editorialized about "Our Dangerous Navy," which was wasting much money through collisions at sea. If the sketch is ever definitively ascribed to Twain, scholars familiar with his brand of newspaper humor will probe still deeper for topical elements.

Broadly "seasonable" or at least topical was the sketch’s use of ballooning. For instance, the Sun of 24 August carried a summary of a "report just made" to the French Academy of Science about an "ascension." As for Laffan’s use of "her," I can spot no clue, just comradely semi-slang or the echo of a yarn-spinning session. Although Twain was sticking close to his summer study in Elmira, he had plenty of business reasons for dropping into New York City.

Anyhow, since arctic exploration had kept popping up in the news all year, Laffan and Twain could have joked about its blunders months before.

On the other hand, by definition almost everything in the newspaper ought to be seasonable, and amusement varies in the eye of the beholder more widely than beauty. A respectable case has to produce evidence almost unique to Twain, not the only humorist-amateur or professional—to take interest in just about anything that passed for news. His taste in books indicates that he would have shared the public’s zest for arctic drama. Among his thematically relevant reading, Alan Gribben, in Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction (1980), establishes that by 1858 he knew Elisha Kent Kane’s Arctic Explorations: The Second Grinnell Expedition in Search of Sir John Franklin; much later he owned Fridtjof Nasen’s Farthest North (1897). In fact, his late fantasies about starkly forlorn voyages may borrow from such reading.² However, it was too common to serve as a tracer here. Likewise, though the constituency narrows, Robert G. Ingersoll had thousands of devotees besides Twain for his jeering at biblical literalism as "The Great Agnostic." At most, we can insist that Twain liked to joke about a physically accessible Heaven and, more gingerly, about such a Hell. He never forgot writing a boyhood poem entitled ‘‘To Miss Katie of H- - - - - l" (or Hannibal).³ Incidentally, the title of the unsigned sketch just might have inspired Laffan to pun about the seasonable scorching weather in the metropolis.

An interview during his return to the Mississippi Valley in 1882 offers evidence much more personalized. According to the reporter, Twain summarized an aborted speech about "arctic expeditions":

I wished to say that, in my humble judgment, we have spent too much money on these trips. Too many valuable lives have been immolated in this search. Even if it is finally successful, what is the good result of it. We could not borrow any money in the North Pole, and I don’t think it would become fashionable as a summer resort. Now, I am full of an expedition of another kind. I want the next set of explorers sent in another direction. We have got some doubts to the exact location of hell, and I was very desirous to suggest to the assembled warriors [the Army of the Tennessee] last night, and through them to the Government and the American people, that the next expedition go in search of the place I have mentioned. If we ever locate that region, we can make some practical use of it. I had sketched a plan which is shadowy yet, but I thought it might grow real and practical under the potent influence of champagne.⁴

Then the reporter asked, "Would it be strictly in accordance with the fitness of things if the expedition, like those to the Arctic regions, should get stranded and lost, and those who sailed in it should never reach their destination?" At that point Twain "smiled broadly and declared . . . that he really would not answer leading questions." His jocularity may have jarred some readers of the recent news that a rescue party had found only the bodies of the Jeannette explorers. It surely jarred the fundamentalists who realized he was again teasing their highly exact vision of the afterlife. Typically, Life on the Mississippi (1883) would comment that inland America still favored goatees and an "iron-clad belief in Adam and the biblical history of creation, which has not suffered from the assaults of the scientists" (chap. 22). Any admirer or enemy who remembered the interview would have jumped to the conclusion that "Hunting for H - - - - -" deserved Twain’s signature.

While not distinctive the ballooning motif does fit the case for Twain’s authorship. The most intriguing item along the trail of proof is that in 1884–85 Susy’s biography of her father recorded his bedtime story, suggestive of Jules Verne, about a ballooning voyage.⁵ Also familiar to Twainians is the sketch’s contempt for a massive stupidity that is matched only by a pompous intransigence about owning up to it; the narrator can blend into a parade of Twain’s self-convicted fools. The ridicule of prodigality with taxpayers’ money and of bureaucratic fecklessness was just as congenial to Twain. Increasingly, he felt able to improve on the running of large-scale operations. By 1884 he had decided to become a publisher and had started to believe that nature intended him for a captain of private enterprise.

There is similarly good reason to think he could have continued to jeer at the exploring of the Arctic. Within the Renaissance passion for roving adventure and the later drive to lay out routes of trade, two doubts nagged at paying high for the Northwest Passage from Europe to the Orient. It promised little if any profit for Americans, though they did want to feel surer about where to spot the North Pole. Second, while the existence of a Northwest Passage had been certain since 1857, the trip was proving so cumbersome and dangerous that commercial uses looked more unlikely right along. (It was not actually made until 1903, and then just barely.) The expensive American disasters outpaced the promise of useful results. Of course Twain was adventurous in body and spirit, and he never stopped kowtowing to Henry Morton Stanley. But the differences between Africa and the Arctic in prospects for raw materials, climate

aside, were obvious. More generally, while revering the ideal of scientific progress—the intellectual rationale for struggling to reach the North Pole—he was always quick to burlesque the fossil-hunters who trekked far and grubbed long for scraps to erect hypotheses with no practical function. Indeed, the arctic disasters squandered strong, trained men. Except for his fascination with cosmic distances Twain, like most of his contemporaries, admired not pure science but technology that was raising the standard of living.

It is reasonable, however, to doubt that Twain would squander his own energy on "Hunting for H - - - - -" when major decisions tugged at him during August 1884. Besides overseeing the campaign to sell Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, he was organizing, as the entrepreneur, a lecture tour with George Washington Cable. But he always managed to indulge himself or plunge into sidelines (like, at the moment, a history "game") at making money. For his marvelous fluency the sketch was hardly more than a walk around the block. At almost as busy a time a year ago he had tossed off a slightly longer yarn for an old Nevada friend.⁶ The operative question is rather: Why should Twain send the Sun anything unsigned and presumably free? The full answer would have to dig out his clashing attitudes toward his status as a literary figure. On the conscious level, caution may have whispered that "Hunting for H - - - - -" would offend prospective customers for the new book or the tour.

We keep underestimating the intricacy of Twain’s activities as well as those of some persons they touched. Around this time he would grudgingly decide to accept the overtures of Dana, who wanted fresh allies or just friends. Though Twain had disliked him for years, Huckleberry Finn would soon be needing favorable publicity. Moreover, Twain was already planning how to win over the newspaper market in New York City for his mechanical typesetter. In both 1885 and 1890 he favored the Sun with a signed letter-to-the-editor, and he would consider planting other items there between those years. Nevertheless, his satire of archaeologists ("Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls") who erect dense theories on a false lead restrains me from laying out the complexities of his bartering with Dana or Laffan.

Besides, emphasizing his web of schemes will cloud the huge streak of impulse in his career. Intimidated by exhibits like "The Canvasser’s Tale"—which ‘elaborates a trivial wheeze," said Bernard

DeVoto—many of his admirers are too quick to concede he increasingly strained to be funny on cue. But neither could he repress his instinct for humor. Playful letters to strangers keep turning up, and Twainians are not surprised by a comic menu he composed in 1868 or a far more elaborate one a decade later.⁷ His editors may never dare to claim they have found all his impulsive leaps into print. Max Eastman overstated the basic point cleanly: "Mark Twain, as he himself said, hardly ever set out to be funny. He just couldn’t help being funny. His humor was himself. Of all the great comic writers from Aristophanes down, he was, in my opinion, the most spontaneously humorous." Close to the time as well as the specific origins of "Hunting for H - - - - -" a Hartford associate observed that "daily conversation among friends amply demonstrate[s] the spontaneity and naturalness of his irrepressible humor."⁸ It is easy to imagine Twain drolling over a glass of whiskey or the billiard table until Laffan saw a chance to inveigle a free column. Maybe he felt he had helped; Twain once argued that "it takes two to produce mental effervescences . . . the spark stays in the flint until the steel strikes it out."⁹ Or maybe Twain welcomed the outlet for his always percolating spirit. Some theorists argue that humor demands a social transaction, that its creator cannot be satisfied until it is appreciated by others. Whoever spun the following burlesque must have hoped for peals of laughter.¹⁰

Hunting for H - - - - -

This is O’Flannigan’s account of it as he told it to me. I have made no alterations, being unwilling to take any responsibilities upon myself in a matter of such importance. Said he:

"There are more fools in the world than you would think for. When our Geographical Society met last we found that we had got hold of one. This was the new member. So I just set it down as a maxim, then, that if fools can work their way into even a Geographical Society, there isn’t any place that’s safe against them. However, that’s neither here nor there; I simply mention it in passing; it hasn’t anything do with what I started out to tell you about.

"Well, as I was saying before, I was loaded up solid with my sublime project. I was a festering volcano of excitement. It was as much as I could do to hold in till my turn should come. And when it did come, at last, I was in such a state that I could only pant it out in broken phrases, with gaspings for breath between. It made an immense stir. It was received with prodigious favor. The end of every sentence was drowned in applause. I closed by saying:

"‘So, gentlemen, my project, in a word, is to send out a discovery expedition to search for a new and directer road to Hail.’ I pronounced it hail, out of deference to the society, all the members being religious; but you can pronounce it your own way.

"I sat down amid a storm of applause which lasted several minutes, during which my hand was wrung by throng after throng of geographers, who said my idea was the grandest one of the age, and would make my name immortal.

"Quiet was hardly restored when the new member spoke up and said:

‘"But who wants to go to Hail?’ He pronounced it the old way.

"It was a most strange question. Members glanced at each other in a surprised and somewhat affronted way, and said nothing. Then the new member spoke up again:

"‘Nobody wants to go to Hail; nobody wants to travel any road to Hail; so where in the nation is the use in hunting up a new one?’

"After an awkward pause, the President said, with a cold and cruel blandness of tone and manner:

"‘It is evident that our new acquisition is not familiar with the ways of geographical societies. If he will reflect a moment, it may occur to him that his question need be changed in words only, not in sense, to read, "Where is the use in searching for the Northwest passage?’"

"‘It was an awful shot. I pitied the poor ass with all my heart; and I could see that others did, too, though naturally we couldn’t help enjoying the annihilating completeness of the President’s retort. But what do you think? It never pheazed the new member at all. He didn’t know he was hit—he actually didn’t. No, he looked up as sweet and innocent as the child unborn, and says:

‘"In my day I have wanted to ask that very question as much as upward of a half a million times.’

"If he didn’t say it, I wish I may never stir. And he didn’t stop there, either, but goes right on as calm as anything, and says:

"‘What do you want of a Northwest passage, anyway, after you’ve got it? Do you calculate that anybody is going to use it?’

"‘Use it?’ says the President, who saw that sarcasm was wasted on this numbscull, and didn’t propose to throw away any more of it on him; ‘No, we don’t expect anybody to use it. There would be no occasion to use it anyway, because the old routes are far better and quicker and easier. And besides, nobody could use it, for the reason

that from the nature of the climate and the shortness of the season it is simply non-usuable.’

"‘Well, then,’ says the new member, as calm as that door knob there, ‘what do you want it for?’

"‘Want it for?’ says the President, rather hotly. ‘We don’t want it, we only want to find it.’

"‘Well that is odd,’ says the new member. ‘I don’t seem to get your idea, somehow. What do you want to find it for, if you don’t want it after you’ve found it? As I understand it, England and America and other countries have been hunting for it for fifty years, and they’ve spent about $35,000,000 and got no end of ships mashed up in the ice, and no end of men frozen to death, and scurvied to death, and starved to death, and so on, and buried around, here and there, on a lot of skinned rocks in the Arctic ocean—and that’s all that’s been accomplished; and it appears to me it’s a big price to pay and a long ways to go just to start an international graveyard. Yes, and as I said before, the thing that is too many for me is, what do you want to find that Northwest passage for, if you don’t want it after you’ve found it?’

"‘My friend,’ says the President, pretty fiercely, ‘if you knew anything about geographical societies, you wouldn’t ask so foolish and irrelevant a question. Geographical societies do not trouble themselvevs to hunt for things that are wanted—everybody does that; there is no occasion to gather together a learned and expensive organization for such a purpose. It is the distinct and peculiar province of a geographical society to hunt for things that are not wanted. We do not seek them out because they are needed, but simply to prove that they are there.’

"‘It’s a big thing,’ says the new member, sardonically, and moved off and pretended to interest himself in our new chart, wherein the search for the Holy Grail, the Crusades for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre, and the search for the Northwest Passage are ingeniously contrasted.

"The society now settled down to business, and asked me for the details of my project. I said that, to begin with, exhaustive study and investigation had convinced me that Hail was not located within the body of our globe; hence I inferred that it must be above us somewhere—doubtless in some part of the empty space between us and the stars. Continuing, I said:

"‘I propose to employ balloons inflated with pure oxygen. I would not send a fleet of balloons, but simply one at a time. I shall

desire the society to petition Congress for an appropriation of $250,000 for the equipment and expenses of each of ten balloons. I would start the first one up, say, about the beginning of the coming summer. I would start up the second to hunt for the first, say, about a year later. After an interval of a year more, I would start up the third to hunt for the other two, and bring home buttons and other such relics of the crews as might be found. Every year thereafter I would send up a fresh balloon to hunt for the previous balloons and carry relief to the survivors—that is, gravestones and monuments and so on, to be set up where the birds and the comets might see them from time to time, and be reminded of the brave deeds of the departed martyrs to science. This method, you see, is systematic; the very thing which all previous efforts of this kind have lacked, was system. We have always waited till we knew an expedition was lost before we sent out another to hunt for it; whereas, since we knew it would get lost, the right and only wise course would have been to send out a procession of expeditions, at brief and regular intervals, so that they could begin to hunt for each other without disastrous delays. Many spoons, and jackknives, and other valuable relics have been irretrievably lost to science because the search expeditions waited so long that these things got snowed up meantime, or were captured by the natives and bartered off for blubber. Now under my system nothing of the kind will happen. The balloons will follow each other at short and measured intervals, and the work of hunting for each other, and gravestoning each other, and gathering up each other’s remnants will begin right away, as you may say. And by keeping this sort of thing up right along and briskly there is not a question that sooner or later one or another of these balloons will find Hail—and collapse into it and stay there, too. And the whole honor of it will belong to this Geographical Society, this great nation, and Congress.’

"The applause which greeted me when I sat down was something marvellous. I felt that the next most glorious thing to going to Hail under my system was to have originated the way. It was at this point that the new member meandered up to the front and made that little speech that I said I was going to tell you about, you know. Said he:

"‘Gentlemen, I wish to resign. If it was your idea to hunt up a cheaper and softer Northwest Passage to Paradise, you could count me in every time. But I don’t want any of this present project in mine. Now, mind, I tell you. 1 think that a Geographical Society that lays out to take all this trouble and spend all this money to find that other place is harnessing itself to a mighty unnecessary contract.

For just this reason: It won’t benefit the general public, for they don’t want to go there, and, moreover, they don’t even wish to know where it is; and as for the Geographical Societies, they don’t need to worry, for if they will sit still and keep cool they will land there all in good time and plenty soon enough.’

"Whereupon we fired him out."

Having met the text itself each critic will make a case on formalist grounds. There is no need to forestall a negative decision by suggesting that Twain was not trying to live up to the distinctiveness his pen name had earned by 1884. In fact the sketch could serve as a gallery of his typical devices: colloquial tone, emphatically direct address, an underlying violence of diction, dashes of slang, impudent exaggerations, deadpan metaphors, and even one of his tag-phrases ("you know"). Most noticeable of all, it follows one of his favorite strategies—an imperceptive narrator piling worse absurdity upon absurdity before a quick ending. Its broader patterns match Twain’s newspaper comedy, a mode he had mastered long ago. "Hunting for H - - - - -" is topical, and it is barbed, to the pain of owlish orthodoxy, yet deviously so. Bustling with energy, it creates perspectives that arrest the mind and even the scanning reader’s eye. For ten or fifteen minutes it must have entertained the newspaper audience that had nurtured Twain. But it may also have left its mark.

DUKE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹Letter in Mark Twain Papers, Bancroft Library (Univ. of California, Berkeley). The entry for Laffan in the Dictionary of American Biography is highly knowledgeable. I plan to enlarge elsewhere on his relationship with Twain. Meanwhile, for a few more details see my "Color Him Curious about Yellow Journalism: Mark Twain and the New York City Press," Journal of Popular Culture, 15 (1981), 29.
   ²Mark Kosinski, "Mark Twain’s Absurd Universe and the Great Dark," Studies in Short Fiction, 16 (1979), 335–40, suggests that the story, simply entitled "Statement" by Twain, should be called "The Great White Glare."
   ³Early Tales & Sketches. Volume 1(1851–1864), ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst. Vol. XV in The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1979), pp. 92–96.
   ⁴"An ‘Innocent Interviewed’ / Mark Twain Pays a Visit to St. Louis," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 May 1882, p. 2; reprinted in my "Listing of and Selection from Newspaper and Magazine Interviews with Samuel L. Clemens, 1874–1910," American Literary Realism, 1870–1910, 10
(Winter 1977). 33–39.
   ⁵For a roundup of balloon clues see John C. Gerber, "Introduction" for Tom Sawyer Abroad, pp. 241–43, in Vol. IV of The Works of Mark Twain (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1980).

    ⁶Everett Emerson, "A Send-Off for Joe Goodman: Mark Twain’s ‘The Carson-Fossil Footprints,’" Resources for American Literary Study, 10 (1980), 71–78.
   ⁷Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, Literary San Francisco (New York: Harper & Row, 1980), p. 32; the later item, still mostly unnoticed, is pasted in Joseph H. Twichell’s journal (Yale Collection of American Literature).
   ⁸Eastman, "Mark Twain: Representative American," New Leader. 43 (26 Sept. 1960), 19; Charles Hopkins Clark, "Mark Twain at ‘Nook Farm’ (Hartford) and Elmira," Critic, 6 (17 Jan. 1885), 25–26.
   ⁹Quoted in William M. Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976), p. 176
   ¹⁰It is reprinted verbatim including idiosyncrasies in the use of quotation marks; the text is based on a microfilm of the New York Sun lent by the library of the University of Minnesota.