Book Description

Fin-de-siecle Vienna was a special place at a special time, a city in which the decadent abandon of the era commingled with dark forebodings of the coming century. The artistic and intellectual ferment of the Austrian capital was extraordinary: Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Schnitzler, Theodor Herzl, Gustave Klimt, and Ludwig Wittgenstein were but a few of the figures who lived and worked there. And, in September 1897, into the very midst of this heady milieu, came America's most famous citizen, Mark Twain. Although most of Twain's biographers have mentioned his Viennese sojourn (occasioned by his daughter Clara's musical studies), it has remained an unexplored hiatus in his career. Partly because of impressions created by Twain himself, the twenty months he spent in Vienna are often dismissed as uneventful and unproductive. In "Our Famous Guest" Carl Dolmetsch shows the truth to be otherwise. Upon his arrival Twain found all the doors of the celebrity-mad city, from its literary cafe's to its aristocratic salons, flung wide open to him. The aging writer imbibed freely of Vienna's atmosphere, and the result was a final, astonishing surge of creativity. Among the thirty works that came, either whole or in part, from Twain's Austrian visit were the Socratic dialogue What Is Man?, the "Early Days" section of his Autobiography, Book I of Christian Science, the classic short story "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg," the polemical essay "Concerning the Jews," and, most important, a major portion of the manuscript cluster known as The Mysterious Stranger. As Dolmetsch notes, conventional wisdom about Twain attributes the "bitter pessimism" of these late writings to such factors as his personal bereavements and financial reversals. Rejecting this view as grossly oversimplified, Dolmetsch argues that the transformation in Twain's outlook and writing style owe much to the cultural currents he encountered abroad, above all in Vienna. He suggests that Twain was especially responsive to a peculiarly Viennese blend of nihilism and hedonism and to the "impressionistic" style favored by its writers. In locating these influences, Dolmetsch portrays a Mark Twain far more cosmopolitan and urbane than previous biographical studies have allowed. Through meticulous research in Viennese newspaper reports as well as in Twain's own journals and writings, Dolmetsch reconstructs the writer's visit in breathtaking detail. The narrative sparkles with accounts of Twain's shrewd manipulation of the Viennese press, his involvements in the city's musical and theatrical life, the attacks he endured from anti-Semitic journalists, and even his futile attempts to obtain marketing rights to two inventions by a Polish engineer. In one particularly intriguing chapter Dolmetsch ponders the riddle of Twain's association with Freud (who was then virtually unknown outside of Vienna) and their congruent fascination with the relationship between dreams and "reality." An invaluable addition to Twain scholarship, "Our Famous Guest" is equally compelling for the glimpse it offers of a vanished world.