The Diary of Adam and Eve E-Book

Mark Twain

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 126

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Wheresoever she was, there was Eden Written in diary form, The Diary of Adam and Eve is an ingenious, witty, and ultimately delightful retelling of the dawn of human creation with many a grain of truth for today's gender disputes. Master storyteller Mark Twain hilariously recreates the very first days, portraying Adam as something of a recluse, and a man who is ill prepared for the arrival of Eve, a talkative, emotional, and highly charged female. Yet in time, and after many moments of conflict, they begin to learn to live together and come to realise that men and women can, in fact, exist in harmony.

Leseprobe

The Diary of Adam and Eve

And other Adamic Stories

Mark Twain

Foreword byJohn Updike

Hesperus Classics

Published by Hesperides Press Limited

167-169 5th Floor Great Portland Street W1W 5PF www.hesperus.press

This collection first published by Hesperus Press Limited, 2002

This edition printed 2025

‘Extract from Eve’s Autobiography’ , ‘Passage from Eve’s Autobiography’ from Letters from the Earth by Mark Twain, edited by Bernard DeVoto

Copyright 1938, 1944, 1946, 1959, 1962 by The Mark Twain Company.

Copyright 1942 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.

Reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers Inc.

Foreword © John Updike, 2002

ISBN (1st edition): 978-1-84391-005-3

ISBN (ebook): 978-1-84391-340-5

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

Contents

Foreword

John Updike

The Diary of Adam and Eve

Extracts from Adam’s Diary

As translated from the original M.S.

Eve’s Diary

Translated from the original

Extract from Eve’s Autobiography

Passage from Eve’s Autobiography

(Year of the World 920)

Eve Speaks

That Day in Eden

(Passage from Satan’s Diary)

Adam’s Soliloquy

A Momument to Adam

A Humane Word from Satan

Note on the text

Biographical Note

Foreword

John Updike

Most nineteenth-century Americans, even if not conventionally churchgoing, grew up with the sayings and stories of the Bible. The Missourian Samuel Clemens, who became the writer Mark Twain, was no exception; but where a literalist interpretation of the Bible spelled comfort, if vaguely, to most listeners, to Mark Twain it increasingly offered a purchase on the absurdity of the Christian religion and the cruelty of the Creator. Like the atheist evangel Robert Ingersoll, he sharply turned the Bible against itself. To burlesque its myths took merely a plain retelling in a down-to-earth American voice. With Adam, the first human victim of God’s whimsical tyranny, Clemens enjoyed a natural identification: he saw his own life in terms of lost paradises⁠* – the lost paradise of the Hannibal, Missouri, of his childhood, and later, of his family life in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1875 to 1891, where he wrote, among much else, his two masterpieces, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi. After 1891 he fell, as it were, into a wilderness of business failure, bankruptcy, family illness, celebrity, travel, loneliness, and increasingly dark views of God and humankind.

His inspirations were ever wayward; no great writer more haphazardly courted greatness. ‘Extracts from Adam’s Diary’ existed in some form before 1893, when Clemens received a request for a humorous piece on Niagara Falls to be part of a souvenir book for the 1893 World Fair in Buffalo, New York. At first he declined, but then saw that ‘Adam’s Diary’ might be relocated to an Eden that contained Niagara Falls. This insouciant transposition served its purpose; The Niagara Book published his contribution, though the author only received five hundred dollars of the promised thousand. In 1905, a request came from Harper’s Magazine for a contribution to their Christmas issue, and Clemens complied with a diary for Eve that led him to consider Adam’s anew. Hoping for Harper’s to publish the two diaries together, he cut seven hundred words from Adam’s, and wrote some new pages in Adam’s voice which he inserted, italicised, into ‘Eve’s Diary’. To the editor of Harper’s he pronounced the result ‘dam[n] good – sixty times as good as it was’. The magazine published only ‘Eve’s Diary’, however, and the two were not published together, as they appear here, until 1931.

At least three posthumously published pieces – ‘That Day in Eden’, ‘Eve Speaks’, and ‘Eve’s Autobiography’ – extend Mark Twain’s animation of Adam and Eve; ‘Eve Speaks’, for instance, dated at around 1900, begins with her bewildered questioning of God and His angelic agents (‘They drove us from the Garden with their swords of flame, the fierce cherubim. And what had we done? We meant no harm. We were ignorant, and did as any other children might do...’), proceeds to describe her pathetic misapprehension that her slain son Abel is merely sleeping, and ends with this brief entry from Satan’s Diary:

‘Death has entered the world, the creatures are perishing; one of The Family is fallen; the product of the Moral Sense is complete. The Family think ill of death – they will change their minds.’

As Mark Twain became, with the death of his favourite daughter, Suzie, increasingly isolated and lonely, he identified more and more with the first, singular man. He came to see himself as ‘the American’ and even ‘the man’. His quarrel with God became more savage in the wake of his financial miseries and family tragedy, which eventually carried off another daughter, Jean. These Adamic diaries are one of the many modes with which, in the last decade of his life, Twain sought to confront ultimate questions and the great Christian fraud, in writings whose blasphemous and nihilistic nature by and large prevented publication: ‘The Mysterious Stranger’ and ‘Letters from the Earth’ are the most extensive, most vehement examples.

‘The Diary of Adam and Eve’ itself is a more agreeable work, toying with Genesis in a mood less of indignation than affection, taking the myth as a paradigm of the relations between the sexes. Adam is a typical male, into whose solitude a talkative, inquisitive, organising, long-haired creature has abruptly intruded. He is slow to recognise her as closer to him than to the other animals, and the revelation of her gender brings no accompaniment of desire: ‘What she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.’ She spoils his fun, whose main ingredient is going over Niagara Falls, in a barrel or without. When Eve produces children, he has no idea where they came from, and is very slow to see that they resemble, in miniature, him. Boyishly, he stands outside all social processes; he attempts to recover his pristine solitude outside of Eden, where she follows him and feeds him the forbidden apples. Eating them is against his principles, but he finds – in the voice of Mark Twain the immoralist – ‘that principles have no real force except when one is well fed.’

Eve, on the other hand, is, in the feminist term of fashion, ‘relational’ to a fault. Like Adam, she takes her mate for a mere animal at first. She resents its interest in resting (‘It would tire me to rest so much’), but when it speaks, she begins to fall in love: ‘For I love to talk; I talk, all day, and in my sleep, too, and I am very interesting, but if I had another to talk to I could be twice as interesting, and would never stop, if desired.’ Eve is embodied activity; she talks all day, gives things their names, discovers fire, befriends animals, and perpetrates a wifely love beyond all limit and reason. Her attempt to plumb her love for Adam reaches into female masochism, in this age when Freud and Havelock Ellis were anatomising Eros:

‘Then why is it that I love him? Merely because he is masculine, I think.

At bottom he is good, and I love him for that, but I could love him without it. If he should beat me and abuse me, I should go on loving him. I know it, it is a matter of sex, I think.’

‘Eve’s Diary’ makes a bold foray into female sexuality, a territory that Bernard DeVoto thought presented a conspicuous gap in Mark Twain’s world: ‘None of Mark Twain’s nubile girls, young women, or young matrons are believable.’ Yet Clemens, a product of the trafficked Mississippi and the Wild West, who did not marry until he was thirty-five, was no prude; in ‘Letters from the Earth’, he dared complain about the lack of copulation in heaven: ‘From youth to middle age all men and women prize copulation above all other pleasures combined,’ brief as its ‘overwhelming climax’ is, compared to the ‘supremest ecstasies unbroken and without withdrawal for centuries’ that angels purportedly enjoy. Eve’s indiscriminate subjection to the masculine principle has something in it of Victorian hysteria and something of biological truth, the hot truth. Twain is at his hottest, his least guarded, in these sweeping avowals of Eve’s. Her diary concludes with Adam’s saying at her grave that ‘wheresoever she was, there was Eden’: a lightly disguised tribute to Clemens’ recently deceased wife, Olivia. Adam and Eve, half-mocked, yet gave him a path into intimate feelings unapproached by the beguiling, brusquely fantastic, altogether masculine yarns that dominate his oeuvre.

*This insight, and much of the bibliographic information here, come from A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Mark Twain, by James D. Wilson (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1987).

The Diary of Adam and Eve

[Note. —I translated a portion of this diary some years ago, and a friend of mine printed a few copies in an incomplete form, but the public never got them. Since then I have deciphered some more of Adam's hieroglyphics, and think he has now become sufficiently important as a public character to justify this publication. -M. T.]

Extracts from Adam’s Diary

As translated from the original M.S.

monday

This new creature with the long hair is a good deal in the way. It is always hanging around and following me about. I don’t like this; I am not used to company. I wish it would stay with the other animals… Cloudy today, wind in the east; think we shall have rain. …We? Where did I get that word? I remember now – the new creature used it.

tuesday

Been examining the great waterfall. It is the finest thing on the estate, I think. The new creature calls it Niagara Falls – why, I am sure I do not know. Says it looks like Niagara Falls. That is not a reason; it is mere waywardness and imbecility. I get no chance to name anything myself. The new creature names everything that comes along, before I can get in a protest. And always that same pretext is offered – it looks like the thing. There is the dodo, for instance. Says the moment one looks at it one sees at a glance that it ‘looks like a dodo’. It will have to keep that name, no doubt. It wearies me to fret about it, and it does no good, anyway. Dodo! It looks no more like a dodo than I do.

wednesday

Built me a shelter against the rain, but could not have it to myself in peace. The new creature intruded. When I tried to put it out it shed water out of the holes it looks with, and wiped it away with the back of its paws, and made a noise such as some of the other animals make when they are in distress. I wish it would not talk; it is always talking. That sounds like a cheap fling at the poor creature, a slur; but I do not mean it so. I have never heard the human voice before, and any new and strange sound intruding itself here upon the solemn hush of these dreaming solitudes offends my ear and seems a false note. And this new sound is so close to me; it is right at my shoulder, right at my ear, first on one side and then on the other, and I am used only to sounds that are more or less distant from me.

friday

The naming goes recklessly on, in spite of anything I can do. I had a very good name for the estate, and it was musical and pretty – Garden of Eden. Privately, I continue to call it that, but not any longer publicly. The new creature says it is all woods and rocks and scenery, and therefore has no resemblance to a garden. Says it looks like a park, and does not look like anything but a park. Consequently, without consulting me, it has been new-named Niagara Falls Park. This is sufficiently high-handed, it seems to me. And already there is a sign up:

keep off the grass

My life is not as happy as it was.

saturday

The new creature eats too much fruit. We are going to run short, most likely. ‘We’ again – that is its word; mine, too, now, from hearing it so much. Good deal of fog this morning. I do not go out in the fog myself. The new creature does. It goes out in all weathers, and stumps right in with its muddy feet. And talks. It used to be so pleasant and quiet here.

sunday

Pulled through. This day is getting to be more and more trying. It was selected and set apart last November as a day of rest. I had already six of them per week before. This morning found the new creature trying to clod apples out of that forbidden tree.

monday

The new creature says its name is Eve. That is all right, I have no objections. I said it was superfluous then. The word evidently raised me in its respect; and indeed it is a large, good word and will bear repetition. It says it is not an it, it is a she. This is probably doubtful; yet it is all one to me. What she is were nothing to me if she would but go by herself and not talk.

tuesday

She has littered the whole estate with execrable names and offensive signs:

This way to the Whirlpool

This way to goat Island

Cave of the Winds this way

She says this park would make a tidy summer resort if there were any custom for it. Summer resort – another invention of hers – just words, without any meaning. What is a summer resort? But it is best not to ask her; she has such a rage for explaining.

friday

She has taken to beseeching me to stop going over the Falls. What harm does it do? Says it makes her shudder. I wonder why; I have always done it – always liked the plunge and coolness. I supposed it was what the Falls were for. They have no other use that I can see, and they must have been made for something. She says they were only made for scenery – like the rhinoceros and the mastodon.

I went over the Falls in a barrel – not satisfactory to her. Went over in a tub – still not satisfactory. Swam the Whirlpool and the Rapids in a fig-leaf suit. It got much damaged. Hence, tedious complaints about my extravagance. I am too much hampered here. What I need is change of scene.

saturday