This literary assessment of the southern attitude toward blacks after the Civil War is complemented by the antebellum tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, in which Roxy, whose mixed race allows her to become Twain’s only sexually provocative female, is “as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black out-voted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro.”14 Such democracy for the damned in this miscegenated hell guarantees her destiny as a slave in Dawson’s Landing. Here Mark Twain looked back to his childhood and saw not the innocent charm of small-town life with Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher, but a much darker Hannibal in which even skin color is not always the key to freedom, and getting “engaged,” as the two youngsters do in Tom Sawyer, leads to more than innocent kissing.
Like the patriarchs in Pudd’nhead Wilson, John Quarles and John Marshall Clemens became, despite their conventionally religious wives, freethinkers and Universalists. And while young Sam was somewhat distant from his stolid father, he found his uncle, who was also fond of storytelling, more accessible. “I have not come across a better man than he was,” Mark Twain remembered. “I was his guest for two or three months every year, from the fourth year after we removed to Hannibal till I was eleven or twelve years old.”15 The seeds of Mark Twain’s fondness for the tall tale as well as his pessimism can probably be traced as far back as Florida, Missouri. Uncle John may have been the first one to tell Sam Clemens the story of the jumping frog. His late-life despair possibly came, then, not only from John Marshall Clemens but also from John Quarles, who also could not reconcile the mystery of human destiny with strict religious dogma. Yet unlike his brother-in-law, Quarles was more successful at submerging this point of view in the gregariousness of town and country life as a shopkeeper, farmer, and even local politico, once serving as a justice of the peace in Monroe County. In Tom Sawyer, Detective, however, Twain almost turns Uncle Silas into a murderer.16 By 1896, when this work was published, the fictional John Quarles has become a brooding, troubled patriarch instead of the sweet part-time preacher who says an extra-long blessing over the vittles. His wife—Sam’s Aunt Patsy—had died in 1850 after giving birth. Quarles himself had died in 1875. By the time Twain wrote the dark sequels to Huckleberry Finn, the world had changed for him dramatically. With the sudden death of his first daughter, Susy, in 1896, his past came back to him through a glass darkly. Even A. B. Frost’s illustrations in Tom Sawyer, Detective, unlike E. W. Kemble’s in Huckleberry Finn, which suggest the innocence of a time gone by, depict Tom and Huck as older than their adolescent conversations would suggest and locate them precariously on the verge of the twentieth century and the dawning of its deterministic philosophy.
2 Window to the West
Mark Twain’s fictional name for Hannibal was St. Petersburg. It was possibly a code word for heaven, the home of St. Pete and the site of Sam’s childhood happiness. Or, on a more somber note, he may have named his hometown for St. Petersburg—after the city built in the eighteenth century by Peter the Great of Russia. Also set on water, or on pilings driven into the marshes of the Neva River on the Gulf of Finland, in its architecture it looked to the West and to Europe. Until recently, it was called Leningrad, so named in the wake of the Russian Revolution that Twain encouraged; but since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, this seaport city through which the famous Neva flows has recovered its original name and perhaps some of that earlier spirit. Twain’s interest in the lack of democracy throughout the world fully surfaced in the 1890s, but by the mid-1870s he had become seriously interested in the politics of his own country and possibly was already thinking of czarist Russia and its oppressive royalty when he renamed his own river city.
In 1867 his party on the ship Quaker City had stopped in Yalta for an audience with the czar, whose influence over human events, Twain wrote in chapter 37 of The Innocents Abroad, was so immense that his sudden death “might shake the thrones of half the world!” (Alexander II was in fact assassinated in 1881.) St. Petersburg in its age of kings, long before the rapid disappearance of aristocracies in the twentieth century, may have suggested with its window to the west the democracy and freedom of youth, certainly the idyll recalled in Tom Sawyer if not altogether in Huckleberry Finn and the unsuccessful sequels. Later, its sunshine faded into the shadows as Hannibal became the models for Dawson’s Landing, Hadleyburg, and the medieval village of Eseldorf. In all cases and in spite of its different manifestations in the fiction, Hannibal was the wellspring of Mark Twain’s literary imagination.
The actual town was named for the defeated Carthaginian general. It would eventually signal defeat for John Marshall Clemens, who after four years of storekeeping and farming in Florida as well as petitioning federal authorities in vain for the Salt River improvement, sold his lands in Monroe County and moved to neighboring Marion County and the river town of Hannibal. His departure, however, was due as much to the failure of Florida as to the latest lack of good luck for John Marshall Clemens. Named for the territory of Florida, which had been flourishing ever since its transfer from Spain in 1819, the town of Florida, Missouri, which once foolishly thought itself to be almost as promising, had finally stumbled as a commercial center, not only because of the river commission’s inability to get the Salt River dredged all the way up to the town but also because of the Panic of 1837, which swept the country for the next three or more years. Even so, Marshall Clemens was one of the last of the leading citizens to give up and leave, and even then he realized five thousand dollars from the sale of his land in Monroe County.
But this latest new beginning would set his course downward for the rest of his days, even though Hannibal clearly had a more promising future and managed to flourish much more than Florida. Set upon the Mississippi at one of its widest points, the clapboard town was located in a small valley between the bluffs of Holliday’s Hill and Lover’s Leap. It climbed away from the river in a rather steep incline beginning at Front Street and running up to Fifth and Sixth streets. With a population of three thousand when Sam was a boy, its businesses included a pork-processing plant, a cigar factory, four general stores, three sawmills, three blacksmith shops, two hotels, two schools, two churches, a hemp factory, a tannery, a liquor distillery, and three saloons. In the summer this “white town drowsing,” as Twain first described it in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” was set against vibrantly green hills. During Twain’s boyhood it saw at least two steamboats a day stop at its wharves, one up from St. Louis and the other down from Keokuk, Iowa. Not only was it a regular stop on the Mississippi, but Hannibal was also a port on the way to the Missouri River and its gateway to the West. The village found itself on the circuit for all the river types Twain brought back to life in the pages of Huckleberry Finn and his other river writings: town drunks, bogus lecturers, itinerant actors, patent medicine hawkers, minstrels, traveling-circus performers, palm readers, phrenologists, spiritualists, and—that fascination of antebellum America—mesmerists. Once, young Sam went on stage and pretended to be hypnotized.
In Hannibal, Sam’s father purchased a series of buildings on the northeast corner of Hill and Main streets for seven thousand dollars. One of these was the Virginia House, a hotel in which he initially housed his family, which by now had grown to five living children, counting Sam and Henry. Margaret, aged nine, had recently died before the family left Florida. Having spent all his cash on real estate, Marshall Clemens borrowed large sums to set himself up in the grocery and dry goods business, but as Huck would say about his own father, “it warn’t good judgment.” The houses and hotel had been built or financed by Ira Stout, an investor who had somehow persuaded Clemens to cosign a hefty loan. John Marshall’s downfall came either because Stout subsequently declared bankruptcy and (as Twain recalled in a sketch entitled “Villagers of 1840–[5]3”) “made a pauper of him” or because his steady decline in business even in Hannibal made it impossible for him to pay his debts. In the words of biographer Dixon Wecter, “With these debts at his back, John M. Clemens opened anot
her in his endless series of general stores—[this one] fronting the muddy thoroughfare of Hannibal, with the great river rolling past the wharf one block below.” Eventually, he became Hannibal’s justice of the peace and, as his son remembered, “lived on its meager pickings.”1 No wonder this man, who had been virtually cuckolded into marriage, who had been the ward of a man who charged for his upbringing, was remembered by his son as stern and unsmiling. Yet the financial burdens of Marshall Clemens did not daunt young Sam’s spirit or stunt his psychological development. For as Twain recalled, he and his comrades never knew they were poor until the California Gold Rush in 1849 sucked out a fair percentage of the town’s population. By this time the impressionable youth of Mark Twain had ended. Indeed, Sam Clemens’s life—the one that formed the basis of his literary imagination—was over. At the turn of the twentieth century, when Mark Twain had been an international celebrity for thirty years, he told the widow of his best boyhood friend, Will Bowen, that “those were pleasant days; none since have been . . . so well worth living over again. . . . I should greatly like to re-live my youth, & then get drowned. I should like to call back Will Bowen & John Garth & the others, & live the life, & be as we were, & make holiday until 15, then all drown together.”2
Opportunities for this form of death abounded. There was the river with its islands, including Glasscock and Shucks, which before erosion may have formed the fictional Jackson’s Island that Mark Twain moved three miles downriver in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And there was also Bear Creek, which ran near Broadway south of town. Town legend had it that, from the bluff known as Lover’s Leap, about a mile south of town, an Indian and his lover had jumped because the woman’s father forbade their marriage and tried to have the brave killed. It jutted out over the low river land and provided a perfect view of the village. Three miles farther south was the cave in which Tom and Becky become trapped and in which the fictional Injun Joe dies of starvation. Just north of town at the end of Third Street stood Holliday’s Hill, renamed Cardiff Hill in the novels. Up in that vicinity lived the town gentry.
Yet “money had no place” in this wonderland, Twain emphasized in “Villagers.” “To get rich was no one’s ambition.” In “Old Times on the Mississippi” and Tom Sawyer, Twain first re-created the wonderment of his childhood in Hannibal. Tom Sawyer’s reading of romances reflects Twain’s early reading, in which the primary theme was travel and adventure; hence, the charm of the steamboat. Merchants who traveled to St. Louis were the envy of every boy and girl in town. “When a minor citizen realized the dream of his life,” he wrote, “and traveled to St. Louis, he was thrilled to the marrow when he recognized the rank of boats and the spire [of the Catholic Church] and the Planters [House]. . . . He talked St. Louis and nothing but [St. Louis] and its wonders for months and months afterward.”3 When Sam Clemens finally left Hannibal at the age of seventeen, he never came back to stay but literally traveled the world during much of his life. Yet however far and wide his life travels took him from this little town only hundreds of miles from the perilous Indian territories, he never left what Henry Nash Smith has called the Matter of Hannibal and the Matter of the River.4 Here life had been an idyllic adventure mostly, with its tragic elements kept politely out of sight.
But Hannibal could also be a scary place, especially for an impressionable and imaginative lad such as young Sam. Once, he witnessed a fatal assault on one of its slaves on the city streets. On another occasion, Sam, hiding after playing hooky all day, suddenly realized that he was sitting next to a corpse laid out by the coroner in his father’s justice of the peace office.5 The son of one of the town’s three physicians was so demented that he had to be chained to what resembled a doghouse in the family backyard. Believing that his left hand had committed a mortal sin, one day he got hold of a hatchet and chopped it off. Two sisters of one boyhood friend were suspected of prostitution. Invading Yankee abolitionists were sentenced to long prison terms or simply tarred and feathered. And river con men, as Twain ultimately acknowledged in Tom Sawyer, Detective, could even be murderers. One slave woman, no doubt the model for Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson, was sold down the river by a man who had purchased her from Marshall Clemens, who himself had once whipped the woman “for impudence to his wife.” Like Roxy, she was seen years later working as a maid on a steamboat. Whether these examples are based on absolute facts or acts of a fading or inventive memory (as parts of Twain’s autobiography are), they suggest at least the half-truth of something gone very wrong in the blissful past of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Indeed, the town’s murky past may be the source of Twain’s lifelong obsession with a guilty conscience, along with his late-life pessimism. Its Calvinism, which failed to include slavery in its condemnations of human behavior, left an indelible mark on this uncertain teller of children’s stories.
Most of the principal characters in these so-called boyhood novels are based on family members or Hannibal residents. Aunt Polly, the allopathic matron, is the author’s mother. Mary, Tom’s cousin, is Sam’s older sister, Pamela. Henry, the youngest sibling, and the one who was fated to die in a steamboat explosion, is Sid Sawyer. Tom Sawyer is the combination of three childhood comrades, including Will Bowen. Huck Finn is based on Tom Blankenship, the son of a town drunkard who lived in the alley behind the Clemens home and who fed his family on caught fish and fowl. In the summer of 1847 Tom Blankenship’s older brother (by only a year) Bence hid a runaway slave on an island on the Illinois side of the river and brought him food for several weeks. Huck is also a poor white who is sinful enough to help a fugitive slave. The prototype of Huckleberry Finn was “ignorant, unwashed, and insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as ever any boy had.” And he is the type of underclass boy Sam and his friends were told to avoid. As Twain wrote in Tom Sawyer, “Tom was like the rest of the respectable boys, in that he envied Huckleberry his gaudy outcast condition, and was under strict orders not to play with him.”6
Pap Finn is Jimmy Finn, the other town drunk, a position that Twain called “an exceedingly well-defined and unofficial office of those days.” Mark Twain’s father, as justice of the peace, once tried to reform Jimmy Finn. In Huckleberry Finn a new judge tries to do the same. In defense of Judge Clemens, Twain said that his father was only a “spasmodic” reformer. Pap Finn makes a speech and holds out his hand (once “the hand of a hog”) to the judge and his wife; then he proceeds to get drunk in their guest room and break his arm in two places. No doubt Judge Clemens felt the same way about Jimmy Finn as the fictional judge did about his ward—that reform for such a lowlife could come only from the end of a shotgun.
Then, as today, almost every small town had at least one drunk, and every one including Hannibal probably had a widow wanting to remarry. This is the Widow Douglas in the novel, in real life Mrs. Richard Holliday. Her brother built the finest mansion in Hannibal for her. Her second husband, Richard Holliday, went broke in 1844. He was one of those who went to California in 1849, where he died. The widow ultimately went insane. Twain remembered her as “old, but anxious to marry,” yet actually she was only around forty years of age, though no doubt “aged” to a boy of twelve or thirteen. In chapter 29 of Tom Sawyer, Injun Joe plans to mutilate the widow—“slit her nostrils”—in revenge for the fact that her late husband as justice of the peace had ordered him horsewhipped. The half-breed’s going “for her looks” could have been Twain’s shorthand for an intended rape, still another crime not out of the realm of possibility in the relatively remote river town of Hannibal.7 Or in Dawson’s Landing, where the white crime of miscegenation is openly treated in Pudd’nhead Wilson.
This fictional Hannibal is named after one of the real town’s teachers, John D. Dawson, who founded a school in 1847 that instructed Sam Clemens and twenty-four of his schoolmates. He appears as Mr. Dobbins in Tom Sawyer, the schoolmaster who “had reached middle age with an unsatisfied ambition.” His restlessness was probably exorcised two years later when Dobbins suddenly closed the school a
nd joined the California Gold Rush.
It was also in Hannibal that the model for Colonel Sherburn shot down the model for Boggs in chapter 21 of Huckleberry Finn, in which Hannibal is called Bricksville. The actors were William Owsley, a proud Kentuckian, and Samuel Smarr, a local cattleman who had insulted him. Justice of the Peace Clemens took twenty-nine depositions for a trial that acquitted Owsley a year later. The murder took place on January 22, 1845, and young Sam Clemens was a witness. Later as the author of Huckleberry Finn, he repeated the scene, in the words of Wecter, “almost without a hairsbreadth of variation.” As in the novel, the victim, claiming that Owsley had cheated him, drunkenly abused him from the streets. One day Owsley caught Smarr unarmed and shot him point-blank—twice. “The shooting down of poor old Smarr in the main street at noonday,” Twain later recalled, “supplied me with some more dreams; and in them I always saw again the grotesque closing picture—the great family Bible spread open on the profane old man’s breast by some thoughtful idiot, and rising and sinking to the labored breathings, and adding the torture of its leaden weight to the dying struggles.”8
In addition to Wecter’s biography, there have been several attempts to verify the childhood facts of Hannibal, but the most inspiring one, and generally reliable, can be found in both Twain’s autobiographical writings and his hymns to boyhood, especially Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and in the nostalgic parts of Life on the Mississippi. Four days after his marriage to Olivia Langdon in 1870, he reminisced from Buffalo, where the couple first lived, to Will Bowen, who, like his brothers, had become a Mississippi pilot before the war. “Your letter [of congratulations] has stirred me to the bottom,” he wrote. “The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory again.” He spoke fondly of the town drunks and of his first sweetheart, Laura Hawkins, who would make appearances as Becky Thatcher in Tom Sawyer and under her real name in The Gilded Age. He recalled their play at Holliday’s Hill, his jumping off the ferry in the middle of the river on a stormy day in pursuit of his hat (no doubt the seed of the rumor about Huck’s drowning in Huckleberry Finn), and sadly about a derelict who burned up in the local jail with matches the boys had given him. This was Dennis McDermid, who perished in the Hannibal “calaboose” in 1853.9
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 4