All writers of fiction furnish their works with experience from their own lives. In a sense, no author can create a character not at least in part himself. Even so, each author has one book more intimately concerned than his others with the details of what he himself has known and done: his 'autobiographical' work. How an author titles this work, and how he christens his characters, is a subject of both literary and psychological interest. Freud, for instance, in The Interpretation of Dreams, ventures the theory that Zola, in his novel L'Oeuvre, offered 'a description of his own person and his own domestic happiness, and appears under the name of Sandoz'. This name, Freud guesses, was created in part by the reversal of Zola, the oz indicating the identity of the author and his fictional hero. And Foster, in his Life of Dickens, points out that David Copperfield, the hero of Dickens's most clearly autobiographical novel, bears a name the initials of which reversed become C. D. It is reported that Charles Dickens was not pleased when this was called to his attention.

The late Hanns Sachs once remarked that the German-Swiss poet and novelist Gottfried Keller wrote of himself as Heinrich Lee, and wondered whether the 'ell' of Keller might be, reversed in two ways, the source of Lee. Sachs also pointed out that Goethe called the heroine of his autobiographical novel, Die Leiden des Jungen Werther, by the name of his own beloved Lotte. The hero, Werther, representing himself, was named by prefacing a rhyming of Goethe with the first letter of his middle name, Wolfgang, thus: W-erther.

In these illustrations we see reversal, condensation, and rhyme, devices typical of the dream work. In some instances such devices are used consciously; in others this naming process is unconscious. Diverting as these guessing games may be, they are of limited significance. The naming of an autobiographical hero for reasons basic to the psychic conflicts of the author would be of more interest. Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer has, I believe, been named in this way.

As a name, Tom Sawyer sounds good. I have been told that it sounds better as a title than, for instance, Bill Rogers, who, in Twain's earlier writings, played the role later assigned to Tom. It is true that Tom Sawyer does sound better than Bill Rogers, although our preference may be subject to the persuasions of familiarity. In any case, we must look beyond euphony. Using the devices of condensation and reversal mentioned above, we might conjecture that Tom stands for Twain, and Sawyer for the first name of Samuel Clemens. Thus we arrive at Samuel (Clemens Mark) Twain, or the initials S. T., which, reversed, become those of Tom Sawyer. But let us look into meanings, and begin with Sawyer.

Mark Twain uses the word 'sawyer' in a letter to his sister written from New York in October, 1853, when he was not quite eighteen years old. He had gone east a few months earlier determined to make his own way in the world, and while following his trade of typesetter was tasting and relishing life in the big city, although not without a sense of guilt. But he was also somewhat homesick and afraid. He had taken lodgings in a cheap boarding house and was living under conditions that gave him but slight opportunity to betray his promise to his mother. 'I do solemnly swear', he had said, 'that I will not throw a card, or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone'. In this letter he states that 'a brother', if not able to take care of himself, is not worth one's thoughts', and continues, 'I shall ask favors from no one, and endeavor to be (and shall be) as "independent as a wood-sawyer's clerk"'.

The wood-sawyer as a symbol of independence was popular at that time, as shown by the promise of John M. Clayton, when made Secretary of State in President Taylor's cabinet in 1849, that he would be 'as independent of Congress as a wood-sawyer'.

Mark Twain's passion for independence was an unconscious denial of, a reaction-formation against, a deep unconscious passivity. This need for independence may have played an important part in determining his choice of the name Sawyer for the character modeled upon his image of his childhood self. In his letters, autobiography, and writings, he again and again declares his independence; but these declarations stand in strange contrast to his abiding alliance with the underdog and his deep feeling of identity with what he called 'the damned human race', a race he felt to be enslaved, even doomed, by its own puniness. Human beings are but playthings of Fate. Mark can conceive of a world directed by a devil ( The Mysterious Stranger), but he cannot bring himself to believe in God. He is simultaneously free and enslaved, strong and weak, struggling bravely against hopeless odds and experiencing repetitiously injustice and disillusionment. This is the world view of the masochistic personality.

The word 'sawyer' is closely connected, also, with the freest and happiest period of Mark Twain's life, the time he spent as pilot on a Mississippi river boat. In this period he was truly independent; he was making good money and he found it easy to think well of himself. The river pilot was a respected and privileged figure, and to become one required an exacting apprenticeship and a native gift of extraordinary memory. The channels of the river were constantly changing and in addition the pilot had to know the positions of dangerous snags. These were of two types: planters, those so firmly fixed as to remain motionless; and sawyers, those less firmly anchored and free to rise and fall with the waves or changing levels of the waters. Mark felt himself to be closely identified with the Mississippi—it gave him, among other things, the name under which he wrote—and his selection of the name Sawyer for the boy he had in mind, and who, like himself, was raised on the great river, may have been re-enforced by its association with the more freely moving snags.

Associations between the act of sawing and personal freedom are illustrated particularly clearly in two scenes of Huckleberry Finn. When Huck prepares to escape from his father he saws his way out of the cabin, although the story gives him several opportunities simply to sneak off without working so hard for his freedom. The same device of sawing one's way to freedom recurs when Nigger Jim is about to be freed in the last chapters of the book. Huck knows beforehand that Tom will insist upon sawing Jim out; and that is just what he does, regretting that the situation is not drastic enough to warrant sawing off Jim's leg! ere, too, the act of sawing is quite unnecessary as the chain could be freed by simply lifting the bed. Of course the entire episode is burlesque, since Tom knew before he began that Jim had been freed at his owner's death, but while Mark is having fun with, and amusing, his readers he is also giving us a measure of the emotional importance to him of winning one's way to freedom—by being a sawyer.

The more common associations between sawing and cutting must also have played a part in the selection of the name. Twain's works are rich in sadistic fantasies of death and mutilation. In Following the Equator, for instance, he is fascinated by reports of the incredible pain stoically endured by the Australian natives in their practice of primitive surgery without anesthesia; he describes the process of slowly burning off an injured hand or foot that appeared to be beyond cure. In the same country, he jokes about the sheepshearers who 'sometimes clipped a sample of the sheep'. Speaking of an explosion in Johannesburg, he writes of 'limbs picked up' by the survivors 'for miles around'. Many of the tales in Sketches Old and New are of mutilation and death. In 'My Bloody Massacre,' the failure of a satire is described as being due to the fact that people neglect the telling detail and hasten instead 'to revel in the bloodcurdling details and be happy'. One need but turn the pages of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, or The Prince and the Pauper, to learn to what degree Mark Twain's mind was occupied by sadistic themes.

So much for Sawyer. What about Tom? This is a more intricate problem, and the evidence of unconscious determination is but slightly less convincing. Tom, after all, is a very common boy's name—a pleasant name, short, simple and wholesome—but I am convinced it was more than that for Mark Twain. His choice of Tom was determined in two ways: by general association with social usage and folklore, and by personal association.

Tom as a name and in its combined forms is second only to Jack and its derivatives in popular usage in the English language. It is used to distinguish the male of certain animals, as tomcat and tom turkey, and in the sexually-reversed form, tomboy. It is also used to designate the common run of mankind, as Tom, Dick and Harry, or Tom Tyler and, in a limited sense, Tom Brown, the typical British schoolboy; also Tommy Atkins, the British soldier. A third group of usages includes tomfool, often Tom Fool, with the derivatives tomfoolery and tomfoolishness; Loony Tom; Tom Noddy; Tom Tram, a jester or professional fool; and Tom o'Bedlam, one truly mad. A special form is Tom Thumb, still a popular figure though first noted in a ballad of 1630, which places him in King Arthur's court. Mark wrote of that court, and must have heard much of Tom Thumb in the mid-nineteenth century when a midget so-named was one of P. T. Barnum's chief attractions. Another special case is Tom Pepper, a nautical term for a remarkable liar. He is mentioned by Twain in A Burlesque Biography as an ancestor, along with Nebuchadnezzar, and Baalam's Ass—they all belong to our family'.

The word 'tommyrot', while defined simply as 'nonsense', probably stems from both the idea of stupidity of the masses and of decay (putrefaction and corruption). It is interesting that our present day teen-agers use Tom currently to mean 'lousy', 'fouled up', or 'moldy', as opposed to George, meaning 'super', 'terrific', or 'just right'.

There are other Tom derivatives, but those of greater currency describe: 1, maleness; 2, the common man, in a derogatory sense; 3, foolishness (amateur and professional!), nonsense, stupidity and madness; 4, smallness; 5, untruthfulness; 6, the quality of being typical. Mark Twain holds selfishness to be the controlling element in man's nature, but in his complaining, bitter condemnation of the damned human race' he speaks frequently of man's stupidity, puny insignificance, falseness and hypocrisy—and he writes almost exclusively about the male sex and is a male identifying himself with the average representative. Tom would seem to be just the right name for a male member of Mark's 'damned human race'.

One of the most familiar usages is the term Peeping Tom. There is no English word for the activity this term designates nor do we know how the name Tom became here, as in so many other forms, associated with the socially unacceptable: the shady activity of guilty sexual spying.

Scoptophilic and exhibitionistic impulses are, of course, present in everybody and are included among the 'partial instincts'. There is an economic balance between these opposing impulses: whenever we find clinical evidence of the presence of the one we eventually come upon the other in approximately corresponding quantity; also, whenever one of the pair is represented consciously we discover it to be, in some degree, a defense against the opposing impulse in the unconscious. Mark Twain was notoriously exhibitionistic both in his appearance and his activities. In his later years, for instance, he gave up conventional dark clothing entirely and always appeared in immaculate white suits, with a black necktie to mark the boundary between his body and his head with its shock of curly white hair. His biographer, Paine, tells how he would demur to the suggestion that they make an inconspicuous entrance in Peacock Alley of the old Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, and insisted upon walking down the great staircase before the admiring eyes of the crowd. He took great pride in his appearance, particularly in his thick, curly hair which, as it changed color from red to white, was allowed to become longer and thus increasingly impressive. He also took pride in his stage presence while lecturing, in his facial control, and particularly in the 'dead pan' delivery of his humor. He found great gratification in the admiration of his audiences and was always more or less on display.

One does not find evidence of Peeping Tom impulses in significant quantity in Mark Twain's writings, but his manifest exhibitionism forces one to conclude that there must have been a corresponding quantity of unconscious Peeping Tom impulses. The psychodynamics of the writer have been studied in some detail by Hanns Sachs [in his The Creative Unconscious, 1942] and by Edmund Bergler [in his The Writer and Psychoanalysis; 1950]. The latter quoting Rank says:'… the writer has always been suspected, analytically, of a "shameless urge to reveal himself "', and goes on to say that the exhibitionism 'is but an inner defense against an even deeper repressed voyeurism'. Sachs expressed a similar conviction in his earlier publication, although it was less clearly formulated. I agree with this hypothesis and it seems to me possible that unconscious peeping impulses may have been a factor in Twain's selection of the name Tom for his personal representative. This suggestion is based upon the general psychological tendency toward unwitting revelation of subliminal knowledge of repressed impulses, the result of minimal outbreaks of the repressed into conscious fantasy.

The first personal Tom in Mark's life was Tom Blankenship, the ne'er-do-well son of an impoverished and disreputable family of the town of Hannibal, Missouri, in which Mark was raised. This Tom has been spoken of as the model for Huck Finn and was described by Mark, in his later years, as a 'kindly young heathen'. In an unpublished manuscript he lets us know that Tom's sisters were charged with prostitution—not proven'. On the same page he speaks of a 'Tom Nash [who] went deaf and dumb from breaking through ice', and, 'his two young sisters [who] went deaf and dumb from scarlet fever'. So the name Tom was early associated with disaster not only to one's self, but also to those close to one. Mark Twain had a feeling of responsibility for the welfare of his family and a strong inclination toward self-accusation. At the time of his younger brother's death his assumption of guilt became grotesque. Henry died as a result of being severely burned and perhaps internally injured in a steamboat explosion, but the older brother went to great lengths to find reasons for reproaching himself for what had happened. He blamed himself for Henry's presence aboard the boat, for not being himself aboard to help and protect him (this required the presumption that he, himself, would not have been injured) and, finally, for what he feared might have been an overdose of morphine which he urged a young doctor to give for the relief of pain shortly before Henry's death. There were no valid reasons for Mark to consider himself guilty in this instance, nor in connection with the death of his son, or of his daughter, many years later; nevertheless, he spoke of having killed his son because a carriage robe had blown off him for a few minutes one day about the time he contracted diphtheria, and he held the mismanagement of his 'entire life' the cause of Susy's death from meningitis.

Other connections with the name, Tom, turn up in Pudd'n-bead Wilson. The core of this story is the exchange made by a Negro mother of her own white-appearing child for the truly white infant of her mistress. This replacement is not discovered for many years, but the child of mixed blood, despite advantages of wealth and background, turns out to be cowardly, cruel, selfish, corrupt and weak. Mark gives him the name Tom Driscoll. This picture bears no relation to Mark's feeling about Negroes for whom he had respect and sympathy. Tom Driscoll, however, is a man who was only 'by a fiction of law and custom a Negro', for he was thirty-one thirty-seconds white. The black portion, however, was the determinant of his character in this parable for, as his mother said relative to this black one thirty-second: 'en dat po' little one part is yo' soul' It seems that Tom Driscoll, with his black soul, is not merely a character in his own right, but a paradigm of Mark's conception of all men—an example of what he repeatedly refers to as the 'damned human race'.

Mark Twain's conviction that he, himself, was evil from birth is made dramatically clear in his notes on the illness of his epileptic daughter, Jean. He tells that, in 1892, Jean's nature underwent a sudden and unaccountable change'. She had been 'affectionate, gentle and joyous', but became 'wilful, stubborn, rude, conceited, insolent, offensive'. During the early stages of her illness and before she suffered her first convulsion, Mark had 'concluded that the great change had been merely the development, in due course, of her real nature, and her former lovable nature an artificial production due to parental restraint and watchfulness'. With the diagnosis officially pronounced, he was happy to be able to 'perceive … that the real nature was the early one'. Mark's conviction regarding Jean's 'real [evil] nature' shows his masochistic identification with his daughter and we see that he feels his basic nature to be as 'black' as Tom Driscoll's. It is interesting that the story, 'Those Extraordinary Twins,' a story of a monster with two heads, four arms and two legs, upon which Mark had been working for some months, crystallized into Pudd'nhead Wilson in the late fall of 1892. When, in 1899, Mark wrote the story of Jean's illness he stated that the change in her nature first appeared in 1892 t Tolz, in Bavaria, while Mrs. Clemens was undergoing treatment, probably in the summer or fall. It is possible that Twain's interest in the Siamese twins was increased by the appearance of the mystifying changes in Jean's character but that this very closeness to his personal problem prevented completion of the story at that time. In Pudd'nhead Wilson the 'twins' are separated into two ordinary twins and have only a loose relationship to the main plot. In fact, the inclusion of Pudd'nhead was his final alteration of the story and, although his name titles the book, he appears on but a few pages and his only significant role is to identify the criminal, Tom Driscoll, by means of his thumbprint. A thumbprint is a man's individual, distinctive mark, and a part of his biological inheritance. Jean had become a 'monster', had begun to show evidence of her heritage: a black soul. It seems clear that Twain felt the criminal responsibility for this should be placed upon himself: Jean's evil nature is the imprint of his own nature; she is the 'fingerprint' that reveals his guilt. In the story, Mark writes, 'From the very beginning of his usurpation', Tom Driscoll became 'a bad baby'. Tom Driscoll changed when his mother rejected him, and the description of this change in his nature parallels Mark's description of the change in Jean's nature. Can it be that maternal rejection is the cause of the evil in the damned human race'?

In connection with Twain's interest in twins, it is interesting that the substitution of Tom Driscoll for the child of the master is made possible by the twinlike similarity in appearance of the two babies. It would be interesting to know whether Clemens was familiar with the derivation of the name 'Tom' from the Aramaic, meaning 'twin'.

Tom Driscoll is one of three important Toms in Twain's writings; the others are Tom Sawyer, of the 'autobiography', and Tom Canty, of The Prince and the Pauper. Interestingly enough, with but one exception this name is not used for minor characters, other than for a few who are disposed of in a line or two. The exception concerns a Tommy, rather than a Tom, who is the hero of the second story of 'Two Little Tales.' His 'was the lowest of all employments, for he was second in command to his father, who emptied cesspools and drove a night-cart'. In spite of his humble station, he manages to get medical advice to the sick emperor and save the royal life. The prescription: to eat watermelon!

A lowborn Tom whose works are good and who has some relation to royalty is the theme of The Prince and the Pauper, where the third important Tom appears. Tom Canty lived 'up a foul little pocket called Offal Court, out of Pudding Lane', a London slum, but he is as fundamentally good as Tom Driscoll is bad. While the true prince experiences the unhappy lot of the ordinary citizen and discovers the baseness of human nature, Tom, in the role of prince, brings justice and fair play into the courts of the realm and in his own way exposes the venality, greed, and inhumanity of those in high places. This is an evangelical Tom, but he is none the less involved in the perfidy of the 'damned human race'—a kind of dichotomous literary twin of Tom Driscoll.

The three Toms other than the one directly representative of Mark Twain are made, it would seem, of rather poor stuff. Tom Canty was the product of Offal Court, Tommy was the child of a collector of excrement, and Tom Driscoll was 'black', the color symbolic of excrement. The name, Tom, is used for a depreciated person, but, more specifically, for a child of anal origin. These Toms have overtly or covertly suffered rejection. Tom Sawyer was an orphan.

The book, Tom Sawyer, tells about an active, inventive, death-fearing, typical boy of the mid-nineteenth century mid-frontier. Under cover of the liberty given boys of his age he lives out the wild, defiant and fearful imagery of his daydreams. These are covertly oedipal, but untinged by overt sexuality. Tom struggles more or less successfully against the 'damnation' of the human race, but engages in hypocrisy, fraud and cruelty which would not be acceptable in a grown-up hero. Despite his brave rebellion, his success depends upon the social acceptance of his activities as the larks of a preadolescent boy—although he destroys the villain and becomes a real hero in the end. This theme was most dear to Mark Twain. It produced, also, not only a sequel, Tom Sawyer Abroad, one of his best stories but, many years later, another book which seems to have served him as an unconscious release, at least in part, from a long period of guilt, depression and masochistic exhibitionism: The Mysterious Stranger. Through these literary expressions of deeply repressed fantasies he seemed, for a while, freed of his burden. But such freedom was always incomplete for Mark Twain. In spite of his conscious feelings of guilt, his confessions of weakness, his 'affectations' (as his friends called them) of self-depreciation and self-condemnation, he was actually not able to assume frank responsibility for what he considered his personal failures. In this respect he seems never to be mature enough. His failures he always thought, or secretly felt, were due to fate. They were his lot as a member of the damned human race'. In these moods he was the Tomchild, anal in origin, rejected by his mother, and the victim of a relentless conscience. As Huck Finn says, 'it don't make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person's conscience ain't got no sense, and just goes for him anyway. … It takes up more room than all the rest of a person's insides, and yet ain't no good, nohow. Tom Sawyer he says the same.' With the debt to his conscience paid by self-punishment, he could become the Sawyer-child, the ego ideal struggling toward freedom, independence and self-determination. Mark Twain, in his literary life, tried both to work out and to cover his basic unconscious conflict. In a simpler way his white dress served the same function in public life, for it not only covered his black soul' (Tom) but rendered him pure, lily-white (Sawyer), and deserving of general approbation.

Samuel Clemens's life and works show that he felt himself, more than do most of us, to be two people: he was, indeed, twain. With this in mind, we can better understand his pre-occupation with twins, and can believe that the selection of his pen name was not merely the accidental result of his exposure to nautical terminology. We can also sense the deeper meaning of his pun before the Authors' Club, of London: 'Since England and America have been joined in Kipling, may they not be severed in Twain'.