August 4 Wednesday – Sam’s recorded in his notebook that he “Began Hellfire Hotchkiss” on this day [NB 42 TS 24]. Sam’s alternate title was “Sugar-Rag Hotchkiss” [MTS&B 175n5; see surviving chapters, p. 175-203].
F. Kaplan writes of this unfinished work:
“Hellfire Hotchkiss,” an extended story intended as a novella, contained his father, mother, and Orion, barely transformed. Hellfire herself is an extraordinarily talented, brave young woman so attracted to and successful at masculine activities that she raises issues of gender identity that fascinated Twain, a representation of his inner struggle about female roles. The cross-gender and cross-dressing elements seemed the other side of the coin of his conventional desires for his daughters and wife. He had taken at least one opportunity to dress as a woman for public fun and photographer, and he had made cross-dressing important to the plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson. “Hellfire Hotchkiss” remained unfinished, like “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” because Twain’s imagination took him into dangerous complexities that his Victorian prudence could not pursue to a conclusion [550].
On the reasons for Sam not finishing any of the books begun this summer at Weggis, Paine writes:
“Clemens appeared to be at this time out of tune with fiction. Perhaps his long book of travel had disqualified his invention. He realized that these various literary projects were leading nowhere, and one after another he dropped them” [MTB 1045].
F.R. Rogers, editor of MTS&B, traces Sam’s uses of Hotchkiss (Hitchcock) as a character in several other works, and offers that Sam concluded in 1898 that only “Which Was the Dream?” among the works started at Weggis was important enough to continue [172-3]. See Aug. 16, 1898 to Howells. Rogers offers: “The evidence of paper and ink indicates that, except for revisions and inserts, the entire surviving text was written at Weggis before the Clemenses moved to Vienna in September” [173].
Notes: See June-July 1864 entry (Vol I, MTDBD) for Lillie Hitchcock (Eliza Wychie Hitchcock 1843 -1929), the original inspiration for “Hellfire Hotchkiss.” 18- year-old Lillie was a cross-dressing, cigar smoking, poker-playing girl who, on a dare, rode a cowcatcher on the Napa railroad. Sam was fascinated by Lillie, and spent many hours with her. She was a brilliant talker…It always seemed funny to me that she & I could be friends, but we were—I suppose because under all her wild & repulsive foolery, that warm heart of her would show.
From this 1864 inspiration Sam crafted “Hellfire” after Lillie. He had also used the personal as the character of Shirley Tempest in the 1877 play of Ah Sin, in collaboration with Bret Harte [Sanborn 243-5].
Sandra Littleton-Uetz writes,
“Hellfire” resembled Twain’s favorite daughter Susy, but the description matches more closely incidents in the life of Lillie Hitchcock, a woman he knew in San Francisco…”Hellfire” rescues Oscar from danger that Twain had actually experienced: being trapped on the Mississippi’s ice flows. His companion that day was Tom Nash, and his description in the Autobiography (2: 213) of Tom’s sister Mary makes her another source for this composite picture, rarely drawn, of an admirable, resourceful, and heroic female protagonist [T Encyclopedia, “Hellfire Hotchkiss” 355]