SOURCE: “The Gentle Blasphemer: Mark Twain, Holy Scripture, and the Book of Mormon,” in Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2, Winter, 1971, pp. 119-40.

[In the following excerpt, Cracroft describes Mark Twain's literary treatment of the Book of Mormon as humorous and witty, resulting from Twain's ability to mix the lofty and solemn ideas of the sacred text with his own irreverent and flippant outspokenness.]

Chapter Sixteen of Mark Twain's Roughing It begins, “All men have heard of the Mormon Bible, but few except the ‘elect’ have seen it, or, at least, taken the trouble to read it.”¹ Conversely, all Mormons have heard of Twain's caustic burlesque on the Book of Mormon, but none seems to have taken the trouble to demonstrate to Gentiles that Twain was obviously one of the multitude who had not read the book. Indeed, the four chapters in Roughing It (1872) devoted to the Mormons and their “golden Bible” continue to evoke hilarity from Latter-day Saints, not only because of the burlesque on sacred Mormon institutions, of which Twain was understandably but appallingly ignorant, but also because of the amusingly evident fact that if Twain read the Book of Mormon at all, it was in the same manner that Tom Sawyer won the Sunday School Bible contest—by cheating.

But it doesn’t really matter—either the fact that Twain misunderstood Mormon life or the “Mormon Bible”—for Twain was, above all, a humorist and therefore dependent upon the immediate response of his generally American audience, an audience which had preformed and thus very exploitable judgments about the Mormons and their “peculiar institutions.” He knew that irreverence, or at least a humor which, says Pascal Covici, presents “a solemn association in a context that is ridiculous and insignificant,”² is a dependable device for setting up that necessary and fruitful tension which Henry Nash Smith has called “two ways of viewing the world,” the tension between the “genteel and the vernacular.”³

This tension, a ridiculous and ridiculing mixture of the sublime and the profane, is the key to Mark Twain's treatment not only of the Book of Mormon, but other sacred writings as well. Twain reveled in treating the solemn, immutable splendor of the sacred books of the Western and Eastern worlds with a flippant and, for some, shocking earthiness. In dealing democratically with the Holy Bible, the Apochryphal New Testament, the Koran, the Institutes of Menu, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and the Book of Mormon, Twain demonstrated that he was an iconoclast with a twinkle in his eye. …

MARK TWAIN'S TREATMENT OF THE BOOK OF MORMON IN CONTEXT

Set in the context of his other assassinations of Holy Writ and religious customs, East and West, Mark Twain's humorous treatment of the Book of Mormon and the “peculiarities” of Latter-day Saint institutions becomes more meaningful.

Certainly the Mormons were not strangers to Twain. Hailing from Hannibal, Missouri, Samuel L. Clemens was but three years old when Governor Lilburn W. Boggs issued his infamous “extermination Order” of October 27, 1838; and, though he was then too young to understand the issues, young Sam must have heard a great deal about the Mormons throughout his youth, for the harassed saints settled in Nauvoo, Illinois, only fifty miles upstream from the Clemens' Hannibal home. The Mormon migration westward, along with mysterious tales of Danites, massacres, and polygamy, seem to have fired Twain's imagination just as they fired the imaginations of most nineteenth-century Americans.

Thus, when he had occasion, while enroute to Carson City in 1862, to visit the Saints in their Mecca on the Great Salt Lake, Twain rejoiced at the opportunity to see the nefarious Saints at firsthand, and proposed, tongue-in-cheek, that he might even institute a “much-needed reform” among the poor, benighted souls. The brief visit, loosely recorded in chapters 12 through 17 in Roughing It, is a generally fictional account which purports to describe conditions among the Mormons at that time and to “analyze” the Book of Mormon, the sacred book of the Latter-day Saints. Having aroused the curiosity of the reader, Twain appends to his book a long excerpt from Mrs. C. V. Waite's “entertaining book,” The Mormon Prophet and His Harem, a typical anti-Mormon “history” of the period in which Mrs. Waite charges Brigham Young with ordering, among other atrocities, the infamous Mountain Meadow Massacre of 1857.

Mark Twain's treatment of the Mormons and their institutions is delightful, and the anecdotes which he compiles concerning Brigham Young and polygamy continue to delight readers—Mormon and non-Mormon alike. As a closer look will demonstrate, however, his mock analysis of the Book of Mormon is much more heavy-handed and uneven, and Twain encounters many of the same difficulties which he would confront thirty years later in writing of Science and Health.

Readers of Twain's burlesque “analysis” of the Book of Mormon must constantly keep in mind, as must readers of Christian Science, Innocents Abroad, Following the Equator, or virtually any of Twain's works, that his intention is always to make people laugh. To achieve this end, he wrenches from context, exaggerates, misunderstands (intentionally or unintentionally), and distorts. All of this, in treating any scripture, but especially in treating the Book of Mormon, is to exploit for the sake of humor—and “The Mormon Question” was a popular topic replete with highly humorous potential. Twain's typically funny, irreverent, and pseudo-authoritative dismissal of the Book of Mormon as a non-vicious kind of hoax should therefore be appreciated for what it is, and not dismissed, as it is by some, as a maliciously misguided attempt to write off the Mormons and their book.

However, Twain's unfamiliarity with the Book of Mormon, his audience's unfamiliarity with the book, and his obvious strain in groping for humor in the book's content combined to thwart his usual humorous soaring by pinning him to a book which forced him, first, to educate his audience as to the nature of the book; then, second, to make fun of the material he had just introduced. This necessity of setting up his own target before he could fire at it caused Twain to be unsteady in his firing and uncertain in his aim; and more misses than hits occur. Twain would face a similar problem in writing Christian Science, but the main difference is that in treating the Mormons there is no veiled bitterness; there is only a sense of real or mock condescension.

Still, in treating the Book of Mormon, Twain applies many of his standard devices—the same mock-serious analysis, the same irreverent, naughty-boy, or belch-in-the-parlor kind of roughshod humor so popular in nineteenth century America. And, as was typical in his treatment of other sacred writings, in order to forestall coming to grips with the text of the book itself Twain spends four of the ten pages devoted to the Book of Mormon in discussing extraneous material—specifically, the non-scriptural introduction to the book. Strangely—or perhaps not-so-strangely—Twain fills the other six pages with two pages of quotation from one chapter in the Book of Ether, one page of commentary on the same chapter, one page of quotation and commentary on two chapters from 1 Nephi; and half a page on several well-discussed verses on polygamy from the Book of Jacob (2:23-26; 3:5). His haphazard use of four relatively unimportant passages from only five chapters of the Book, together with a complete lack of any controlling awareness of the Book's total content, as well as the glaring omission of many possible humorous passages combine with numerous errors to convince the man who has read the Book of Mormon that Twain has not—he is again perpetrating one of his choice literary hoaxes, this time at the expense of the Mormons.

As has been demonstrated, one of his favorite comic devices is sweeping a sentence from context and distorting it through picking at the wording. Twain got no further than the title page itself, which contains the statement, “… wherefore [Book of Mormon] is an abridgement of the people of Nephi … hid up unto the Lord. …” “‘Hid up,’” says Twain derisively, “is good. And so is ‘wherefore’—though why ‘wherefore’? Any other word would have answered as well—though in truth it would not have sounded so Scriptural.” (RI, 111.) Such humorous quibbling prepares the innocent reader for further attacks—and falsely strengthens his confidence in Twain's seemingly close reading of the text. Twain then moves three or four pages further into the book—still in the introduction—and reproduces the complete “Testimony of the Three Witnesses,” delightfully and irreverently mocking their claim that an angel appeared, showed them the plates, “and probably took [their] receipt for it.” (RI, 111.) He follows this with the complete testimony of eight additional witnesses. He ridicules the wording of their declaration and lights perceptively on the fact that the document is signed by eight witnesses—comprised of four Whitmers, three Smiths and one lone outsider. Chuckles Twain, “I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.” (RI, 112-113.) This is good humor, regardless of the tenderness of one's toes.

Now established in the reader's mind as an authority on the book, Twain sets about undermining the book as “merely a prosy detail of imaginary history” (RI, 110) by “exposing” its faults. What follows is doubly funny to the Latter-day Saint, and at least funny to the non-Mormon reader, for Twain, in every instance, has purposely misread the book. The Mormon reader, like the Christian Science reader, is comforted by Twain's clear lack of expertise, so he is able to laugh, not only at Twain's humor, but at Twain's often bumbling distortions; the non-Mormon can enjoy the humor on the level at which Twain introduces it—as sheer burlesque.

A closer look at a few of the errors in Twain's gentle mocking of the book again reveals Twain's method in handling scripture. For example, he turns to the passage in 1 Nephi in which Nephi notes that the family of Lehi used an instrument called the “Liahona” in finding their directions while enroute from the Old World to the New. Twain seizes on this instrument as an anachronistic “compass,” noting smugly that the travelers appear to “have had the advantage of Noah,” all the while ignoring the text's explanation that the so-called compass was a miraculously powered ball—not a magnetic compass—which operated commensurate to the faith of the travelers—indeed, a kind of New World pillar of fire.

A similarly advantageous misreading occurs in his treatment of the Book of Ether (15:2). Twain introduces Coriantumr, an ancient general who experiences the Götterdämmerung of his people. Ether writes of Coriantumr at the end of the final battle, “‘there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and children,’—say 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 in all [adds Twain]—‘and he began to sorrow in his heart.’” “Unquestionably it was time,” Twain smirks. (RI, 117.) Here the author typically fails to note the facts that Coriantumr had been cursed by God through the prophet Ether to outlive his people unless he repented prior to the battle. Not until the long war has destroyed his people does Coriantumr belatedly recall the words of Ether and humble himself before God. The actual scripture reads:

He saw that there had been slain by the sword already nearly two millions of his people, and he began to sorrow in his heart; yea, there had been slain two millions of mighty men, and also their wives and their children [which I interpret to be included among the two million slain]. He began to repent of the evil which he had done; he began to remember the words which had been spoken by the mouth of all the prophets, and he saw then that they were filled thus far, every wit; and his soul mourned and refused to be comforted.

(Ether 15:2-3.)

Unquestionably it was time—for Coriantumr to repent of his sins! But it is funnier the way Twain reads it—especially when he adds the devastating comment that he understands it was the “most remarkable [battle] set forth in history—except, perhaps, that of the Kilkenny cats, which it resembles in some respects.” (RI, 117.)

In an often clumsy attempt to fill pages—typical of Twain at his worst—he then devotes nearly two pages to a transcription of the grand battle described in the Book of Ether, which ends with Ether's words: “And he went forth, and beheld that the words of the Lord had all been fulfilled; and he finished his record; and the hundredth part I have not written.” Drawls Twain, whose taste was for more exciting stuff, “It seems a pity he did not finish, for after all his dreary former chapters of common place, he stopped just as he was in danger of becoming interesting.” (RI, 119.) Twain's humor again triumphs over the facts, for in the few pages of this so-called “common-place” book, (1) God reveals himself physically to an ancient prophet, (2) Jesus Christ appears (several hundred years before his birth), (3) the Jaredites (a pre-Nephite emigrant group) cross the ocean in submarine-like vessels, (4) two major wars are fought, (5) an important king loses and regains his throne, and (6) curious animals—the cureloms and cumoms—are introduced (surely Twain could have had fun with those!). These “commonplace” events culminate in the massive slaughter at the Hill Cumorah, described by Twain. Yet Twain calls the Book of Ether, which contains thirty-one of the most exciting pages in the Book of Mormon “dreary” and “common place”! He could have done better than that!

Another error for humor's sake arises in his treatment of 1 Nephi, the first book in the Book of Mormon. Twain mistakenly claims Nephi finished his “Noah's ark”—actually a very conventional ship—in a single day. The book contains no specific mention of the time lapse, but the textual implication is clearly that it took some time—at least enough for several incidents of insubordination and for the young and, sometimes at least, self-righteous Nephi to go frequently “into the mount” to receive architectural instructions from the Lord Himself (1 Nephi 17, 18), another event which Twain might have taken advantage of.

One of the grossest distortions, however, lies in Twain's obviously insecure and ambiguous treatment of 3 Nephi (simply called the Book of Nephi by Twain). The book of 3 Nephi, wherein Jesus Christ appears to the Nephites following his resurrection, is perhaps the most important single book in the Book of Mormon. During his brief stay among the Nephites, Jesus repeats the same gospel preached earlier to his followers in Jerusalem. He organizes a church and bestows his priesthood upon twelve disciples. So unfamiliar is Twain with the Book that he seems uncertain as to whether or not the episodes are embellished recountings of Christ's life in Jerusalem or new events among the Nephites—a serious misunderstanding unenhanced by any attempt at humor. To recapture his wavering confidence and evoke a bit of humor, he comments on the conclusion of the ministering angels' passage, which reads, “and they were in number about two thousand and five hundred souls; and they did consist of men, women, and children.” “And what else would they be likely to consist of?” he chuckles. Of course even here he depends heavily upon the reader's unfamiliarity with the text and upon his own superficial reading, for the original passage is clearly stressing that no one was excluded from Christ's blessing—a re-emphasis of the “suffer the little children” gesture of Jesus while in Jerusalem.

Though it doesn’t really matter, other insignificant errors abound. For example, Twain enumerates the names of the fifteen books comprising the Book of Mormon and mistakenly includes among them the record of Zeniff, an account contained in the Book of Mosiah, while failing to include the Fourth Book of Nephi. Even his spoof on the Book's redundant and ubiquitous phrase, “And it came to pass,” is a typically inaccurate though delightful exaggeration. Twain claims that if Smith “had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.” (RI, 110-111.) This is a bit of humor which survives the literalist's observation that foreign language editions of the book, printed without the repetitive phrase, still run to more than five hundred pages—pages filled, incidentally, with much more matter than Twain manages in his chapter on the Book of Mormon—but far less amusing.

So Twain's desire to spring aboard a popular bandwagon of anti-Mormon sentiment impels him to attack vigorously and humorously a book which he has apparently not read. But had his animosity towards the Latter-day Saints been really serious, he might have attempted a bonafide study of the book, as he did with Mrs. Eddy's book. In that case his chapter in Roughing It might have evolved into a more delightful and perhaps more authoritative work. But probably not, for his shallow and often clumsy gropings, while humorous, are too crude, too irrelevant. He misses too many opportunities for far more devastating jabs at the Book, opportunities which a competent humorist such as Twain must certainly have exploited had he enjoyed any degree of familiarity with the Book. For example, Twain accuses Joseph Smith of “smouching” (a word he attributes, in a footnote, to “Milton”) the entire book from the New Testament “and no credit given” (RI, 119), and that 1 Nephi is somehow “a plagiarism of the Old Testament” (RI, 115); but he fails to present any specific evidence. His unfamiliarity with the Book causes him to overlook several chapters in 1 Nephi which have been literally “smouched” from Isaiah (although credit is given), as well as the meaty and exciting book of Alma, wherein Alma and his companion have adventures which are strikingly parallel to those of Paul and Timothy; and his confused treatment of 3 Nephi ignores the fact that many of Christ's words to the Nephites are verbatim quotations from the New Testament (with no credit given). In addition, although he does include the standard note about the passages in Jacob in which the Lord forbids polygamy, Twain ignores too many of the major books and too many of the supposed flaws which critics who have read the Book of Mormon have regularly delighted in pointing out since its first publication in 1830.

Still, some of Twain's dogmatic assertions about the Book are widely appreciated by modern Mormon and Gentile readers alike. His pronouncement that the Book “is such a pretentious affair, and yet so ‘slow,’ so sleepy; such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print” (RI, 110), is universally quoted—and, some would claim, not totally wrong, and applicable, in fact, to any scripture.⁴ And Twain's final assessment of the book, often quoted with obsequious condescension by well-meaning ministers (who themselves may not wish to read the book), is phrased so as not to offend anti-Mormon sentiments yet provide at the same time a kind of innocuous sop to the fair-minded reader or the Mormon deafened by Twain's loud, rattling wagon of delight: Says Twain, clothed in his spurious gown of authority, “The Mormon Bible is rather stupid and tiresome to read, but there is nothing vicious in its teachings. Its code of morals is unobjectionable.” (RI, 119).

ON MORMONS AND THEIR “PECULIAR” INSTITUTIONS

Despite the author's distortions in treating the Book of Mormon, the reader cannot fail to appreciate Twain's genius for capitalizing upon the humor found in juxtaposing the profane and the sublime. And the reader must also appreciate, on close reading, that if Twain generally failed in his heavy-handed humorous treatment of the Book of Mormon he succeeded admirably in his hilarious reporting on the Mormon people and their “peculiar” institutions.

In treating these institutions, Mark Twain is clearly more comfortable. He tells, for example, of taking supper with a “Destroying Angel,” one of that band of saints “who are set apart by the Church to conduct permanent disappearances of obnoxious citizens.” (RI, 91.) Although, as he tells us, he has his shudder ready, he was instead appalled at what he found:

But alas for all our romances, he [the “Destroying Angel”] was nothing but a loud, profane, offensive old blackguard! He was murderous enough, possibly, to fill the bill of a Destroyer, but would you have any kind of an Angel devoid of dignity? Could you abide an Angel in an unclean shirt and no suspenders? Could you respect an Angel with a horse-laugh and a swagger like a buccaneer?

(RI, 91-2.)

Here Twain is more at home; he is up to his old tricks again—this time making light of an apparently mythical institution which had nonetheless evoked chills in the backbones of readers of nineteenth century anti-Mormon fiction.

A similar kind of exaggeration is used by Twain to point up the clean and healthy aspects of Mormondom, a fact which some would-be reformers sometimes chose to ignore. He insists that his acquaintances in Salt Lake City “declared that there was only one physician in the place and he was arrested every week regularly and held to answer under the vagrant act for having ‘no visible means of support.’” (RI, 96.) But this, and most of the stories which Twain treats in Roughing It, must be considered as fiction. Twain was, as ever, out to tell a funny story, not relate history, for by the time he wrote the narrative his stagecoach ride across the plains was a dim memory.

Indeed, years later, when he came to write of his overland trip, he wrote to his older brother, Orion, with whom he had traveled from Missouri to Nevada: “Do you remember any of the scenes, names, incidents or adventures of the coach trip?—for I remember next to nothing about the matter. Jot down a foolscap page of items for me.”⁵ We can probably assume, then, that his “study” of the Book of Mormon and his “examination” of Mormon institutions emerged not from some basic irritation or anger, as did his articles on Christian Science, but from the need to fill his funny book about a tenderfoot out West with the kind of rollicking humor which his readers had come to expect. The implications of such a motivation are important.

The visit of Twain to Brigham Young as well as the hilarious stories which he recounts about Brigham's marital difficulties have become even more hilarious with the passage of time. Ranging from the breastpin which Brigham purchased for his “darling No. 6—excuse my calling her thus, as her other name has escaped me for the moment” (RI, 105), to Brigham's mighty power over his subjects, to the problem of keeping such a household in teething-rings, “papa's watches,” and bedsteads, which Brigham finally solves by building a bedstead seven feet long and ninety-six feet wide, these anecdotes about Mormon folkways are enduring, classic examples of Twain's genius for exaggeration and the tall tale, and remain among the choicest gems of literature about the Mormons.

Yet perhaps none of these accounts reveals Twain so clearly as his comment on polygamy. Mocking this time the thousand would-be reformers of Mormon institutions, as well as the Saints, Twain regrets that his stay among the Saints was so short that “we had no time to make the customary inquisition into the works of polygamy and get up the usual statistics and deductions preparatory to calling the attention of the nation at large once more to the matter.” Twain insists, in jest, that he

had the will to do it. With the gushing self-sufficiency of youth I was feverish to plunge in headlong and achieve a great reform here—until I saw the Mormon women. Then I was touched. My heart was wiser than my head. It warmed toward these poor, ungainly, and pathetically “homely” creatures, and as I turned to hide the generous moisture in my eyes, I said, “No—the man that marries one of them has done an act of Christian charity which entitles him to the kindly applause of mankind, not their harsh censure—and the man that marries sixty of them has done a deed of open-handed generosity so sublime that the nations should stand uncovered in his presence and worship in silence.

(RI, 101.)

This kind of witty twist, in which Mark Twain not only tweaks the noses of the myriad critics of Mormondom but provides a complete turnabout of the standard recommendation by such “reformers” by suggesting, instead, an awful reverence for the polygamist, is typical, as we have seen, of his irreverent treatment of religious themes and holy scriptures in general.

Thus Twain crashes, scrapes, and blasts his way across the toes of many serious-minded Americans—and others—but few are offended, for the familiarly blatant tall-tale exaggerations, distortions, and shocking juxtapositions strike home, not to inflict lasting pain but enduring humor. On reading Mark Twain's gentle blasphemies, whether concerning the Almighty or His foible-prone creations, everybody, including the victim, has a good time.

CONCLUSION

In the sunset of his life—if such a tranquil image can be rightfully applied to Mark Twain—an admiring lady said to him: “Oh, Mr. Clemens, how God must love you.” After she had left the room Twain remarked to his friends, “She evidently hasn’t heard of our strained relations.”⁶ The strain was not wholly from Twain's side, however, for the Almighty, that Inspirer of Holy Writ, may well have looked askance upon this bristling earthling, who, during a long career, had audaciously taken it upon himself to criticize several of the Almighty's own writing endeavors—as well as those of the prophetic scribes who had served Him so well. So, though most readers, on reading Twain's treatment of the scripture and customs of God's people, early and late, learn to chuckle tolerantly at Twain's amazing sense of humor, most of the same readers come to hope, for Twain's sake (and their own), that the Almighty has a Sense of Humor proportionate to His greatness.

Notes

1. Roughing It (New York, 1959), p. 110. Hereafter: RI.

2. Pascal Covici, Jr., Mark Twain's Humor (Dallas, 1962), p. 118.

3. Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 2. …

4. Compare Twain's assessment of the Book of Mormon with Thomas Carlyle's dictum on the Koran: “It [the Koran] is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook, a wearisome, confused jumble, crude, incondite.”

5. Introduction to RI, p. xiii, by Henry Nash Smith.

6. Quoted in [William C. S. Pellowe, Mark Twain, Pilgrim from Hannibal (New York, 1945)], p. 151.