Some of the "darkness" in Twain's writings began before he published
his first book. He was describing civilization as a disease in his lectures
about Hawaii as early as 1867. Someone who heard his lecture in
Jamestown, N.Y., in 1869, wrote a letter to the editor of the local
newspaper saying that "His intimation that _civilization_ was responsible
for the decrease of population there is another insult to America." See:

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/sandrev4.html

A December 8, 1869, review in the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
provides a surprisingly (to me, anyway) early comment on Twain as a
social critic and reformer:

"Like all men of his temperament he has a hearty hatred of sham,
hypocrisy and cant, whether in religion, social life or politics. Some of
his
sturdiest blows have been aimed at the follies of the times; and we
believe that he may, if he chooses, exercise a very considerable
influence as a reformer."

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/onstage/sandrev2.html

Personal explanations of his later writings lose some of their force when
you look at how others responded to the creation of an American empire
at the turn of the 19th to 20th centuries. The timing led many to view it in
cataclysmic terms. Many of Twain's writings, including the Eden and the
Flood writings collected in _The Bible According to Mark Twain_ and
other historical fantasies collected in _Mark Twain's Fables of Man_ deal
with imperialism within the context of the change of centuries -- for
example, "History 1,000 Years from Now" (1901) and others where
dates are pushed up a century to look back at what was happening at
the time.

In _Doubters and Dissenters: Cataclysmic Thought in America, 1885-
1918_ (London: Free Press of Glencoe, 1964), Frederic Cople Jaher
argued that Twain was not a cataclysmic writer:

"Those obsessed with the idea of holocaust identified with displaced
groups and associated catastrophe with the elimination of their
compatriots.  Twain's estrangement, on the other hand, was personal.
He had never joined abortive crusades or belonged to defeated
movements -- his tragedy was death, illness in the family, and financial
failure. Consequently, his image of the social struggle was that of a
lonely, feeble individual bowing to his fate rather than that of a defiant
force involving society in its own destruction."

In 1964, Jaher apparently did not know about Twain's involvement with
the American Friends of Russian Freedom (1891-1910), the Anti-
Imperialist League (1901-1910), and the American Congo Reform
Association (1904-1908). Those were the kinds of "abortive crusades"
Jaher looked at in discussing cataclysmic writers like Henry Adams,
Jack London, and many of Twain's associates within the Anti-Imperialist
League. Many of them wrote about the changes taking place using
language and ideas that we also find in Twain's "dark" writings. Here's
something Charles Eliot Norton wrote in a June 24, 1898, letter to Leslie
Stephen:

"The days are grave and disheartening, and the prospect is dark. We
have been living in a Fool's Paradise, hoping that in the long run the
better elements in our national life would get the upper hand, and that
we should stumble along, with many a slip indeed, but on the whole in
the right direction. But the war has suddenly roused us from this dream.
America has rejected her old ideals, turned her back on her past, and
chosen the path of barbarism. All the evil spirits of the Old World which
we trusted were exorcised in the New, have taken possession of her,
and under their influence she has gone mad."

That's in Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe, eds.  Letters of Charles
Eliot Norto with Biographical Comment, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Co., 1913).

Twain also wrote about family tragedies in that way -- waking up to find
that familial happiness was only a dream, for example. When looked at
in isolation, you might think those writings are products of his personal
experiences but they become more difficult to interpret when you realize
that others were using the same ideas to discuss other changes that
were taking place at the turn of the century. Twain was also very much
concerned with those changes and writing about them in the same way
so the influences involved are not so easily separated into "personal
loss" and "societal change" categories.

Jim Zwick
[log in to unmask]