By the time of his letter to Bowen, Twain had become famous with the Jumping Frog story and, more recently, The Innocents Abroad, whose lifetime sales would rival Uncle Tom’s Cabin, America’s first best seller. He was known as a humorist, first in the newspapers and then through subscription publishing, a kind of lowbrow book business that particularly went after readers in hinterlands like Hannibal, where there were no bookstores. He was now part owner of the Buffalo Express, a career that would take him nowhere. He thought of himself mainly as a comical travel writer, but also as an investigator and apologist for a rawer American consciousness, a view that stripped away the veneer of European manners. His next book, Roughing It, would exploit his experiences in the far west of Nevada, but the basis for his higher art had already developed on the edge of that great territorial expanse—in Missouri and in Hannibal. He may have conversed with murderers and imbibed with prostitutes in the Far West, but he had grown up in a boyland on the banks of the Mississippi that was destined to become not merely a better “Story of a Bad Boy” than Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s but also, in Huckleberry Finn and other writings, part of the great literature of the United States. For at his apex, Mark Twain did not stand apart from the human melee he reported. Unlike Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who—in the words of Larzer Ziff—“remained personally apart from what their writings criticized as socially disgraceful,” Twain, “who entered enthusiastically into the values of a culture marked by aggressive commercial practice and hungering social aspiration, wrote, correspondingly, in the vernacular of those immersed in the hurly-burly; that is, in the speech of Americans” to achieve the same subtle genius as his New England predecessors.10
3 Orion
Hannibal was anything but the sleepy town Mark Twain described in the first installment of “Old Times on the Mississippi,” published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875 and later incorporated into Life on the Mississippi. It was a busy place even without steamboats, and its activity should have assisted John Marshall Clemens in making a decent living for himself and his family. By the end of the second year in Hannibal, however, the family was forced to sell its last slave and sign over the deeds to most of the property they had purchased from Stout. Jennie was sold first to a “nigger trader” named Beebe, who in turn sold her to a Methodist minister. For all we know, she could ultimately have been sold down the river like Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson. Later, Mark Twain recalled the visages of other slaves sold in Hannibal; “they had,” he wrote, “the saddest faces I have ever seen.”1 To add to the general misery of the Clemens family, it was during this time that they lost two more children, nine-year-old Margaret and ten-year-old Benjamin. These losses were by this point somewhat offset by the birth of Henry in Florida in 1838. With what money he got out of the distress sale of their property, Marshall Clemens was able eventually to build another house for his family on Hill Street, which later became known as “Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home.”
This purchase was to be the last happy point in his fortunes. John Marshall Clemens died of pneumonia on March 24, 1847, not long after returning from a long journey on horseback to Palmyra, twelve miles to the west, to participate in a legal proceeding against the slave trader Beebe, whose profession was (hypocritically) despised in Hannibal. Ill and dying, Marshall Clemens went to his grave with the mistaken idea that his near-destitute family would be saved by the Tennessee Land. Otherwise emotionless to the last, he embraced only Pamela, his eldest daughter, whom he kissed before sinking back down and asking to die. The last words of the man who never spoke of religion were to express faith in Christ to an attending Presbyterian preacher. “He did not,” Mark Twain later recalled stoically, “say good-bye to his wife, or to any but his daughter.”2 Ironically, when John Marshall’s father, Sam, had died in the house-raising incident, he neglected that day to kiss his son good-bye. As a second-generation unloved son, Mark Twain would double his efforts to become a loving father.
For more than a year the Clemens family lived in Hannibal without a patriarch. Jane Clemens took in boarders to keep the family afloat. In 1849 Twain’s brother Orion, who had been helping the family financially from St. Louis, returned home and established a new paternal authority for the two boys, under which young Sam, at least, would labor with no little resentment.3 Henry, on the other hand, was already fast becoming the well-behaved lad who would furnish the basis for Sid Sawyer. It wasn’t that Sam did not respect Orion, who was his senior by a decade. Like his father, his brother was sincere, truthful, and painfully honest. He was also somewhat reserved and moody like their father. Yet it is not insignificant that Tom Sawyer has no father, or that Huck’s father is unable to perform his duties as a parent. The problem with Orion, who may also have shared with his father a form of manic depression, was that his probity and dedication to goodness took him in several, often conflicting, directions at once. As a model, Orion’s father had failed him, and for the rest of his life Orion usually found himself starting over in life. His return to Hannibal in 1849 in effect extended the Clemens patriarchal tradition of failure begun by his grandfather and father. In Samuel B. Clemens’s case, failure had been brought about by an early death. In Marshall Clemens’s case, it had been simply financial failure. In Orion’s, the central problem may have been a preoccupation with too many conflicting ideas.
Orion’s first work experience was as a clerk in his father’s general store in Florida and later Hannibal, but at about age eighteen he left Hannibal for St. Louis and worked as an apprentice and later journeyman printer. In his search for a new model, he found the example of Benjamin Franklin, America’s First Printer. When Franklin had worked at the trade as a young man in London, he had been known as the “water American” because of his teetotalism among workers who drank pints of beer throughout the day instead of water, thinking it gave them strength. Franklin’s example of temperance may have been resented among his English fellow workers. Apparently Orion followed Franklin’s example in drink, as well, for his nickname in the St. Louis print shop was “Parson Snivel.”4
The national crusade against demon rum in the 1840s was very big, and as a reform-minded person, Orion was hardly alone in his point of view. Temperance was seen as vitally necessary to the development of America’s fledgling democracy. It went hand in hand with the American Dream that Franklin conveyed in his autobiography. This was the dream of success, destined for anyone (male, of course, in those days) who was both moral and industrious. This Jeffersonian ideal, now transported to the frontier, said that one could rise or fall in the social hierarchy based on virtue and talent, instead of being assigned a place based on property and birthright. This concept of a “natural aristocracy” was somewhat out of keeping not only with his father’s myth of a Virginia aristocracy but also with his own faith in the Tennessee Land. Yet for Orion as well as his father, dreams of success and honor often clouded his judgment of the immediate present.
Another problem Sam had with Orion was that his elder brother may have returned to Hannibal with anti-slavery sympathies. In the northern part of a border state like Missouri, having such views wouldn’t have been uncommon even though the town supported what it viewed as a benign form of black slavery. Orion could have picked up these ideas from his mentor in St. Louis, a lawyer named Edward Bates, destined to become Lincoln’s first attorney general. Although Mark Twain would make probably one of the strongest post–Civil War arguments against slavery in Huckleberry Finn, in the 1850s young Sam was a racist and a pro-slavery advocate. Like most southerners—indeed most Americans—of that day, he could not abide blacks who were not (as he would discover on his first trip north in 1853) automatically subservient to whites.5
Bates, a former slaveholder himself, represented the conservative wing of the coming Republican, or old Whig, Party, which would favor Free Soil over abolition in the 1850s. It was an important distinction, as Free Soil advocates opposed not slavery per se (in the southern states where it already existed) but the expansion of the instit
ution into the western territories. Bates, who was older than Orion’s father, had also come from Virginia, where he had been the son of a planter and merchant. As a young man he had studied law in St. Louis and subsequently had become involved in city and state politics. He occupied several local offices before being elected to Congress in 1826, but his opposition to Andrew Jackson in 1828 cost him his re-election.6 No doubt Orion came to see the elder Bates as a surrogate father figure resembling Franklin, though Orion must have seemed to Bates something of a lost soul. But he became the young man’s mentor, nevertheless. When Bates finally gave up his own presidential aspirations and got behind Lincoln in 1860, Orion may have helped his mentor by campaigning for the candidate in Hannibal and possibly other rural spots in the state.
While still in St. Louis, Orion showed the clearest signs of his lifelong lack of tenacity and frequent indecisiveness. He remained a printer in the city mainly because his father demanded it. As he reveals in what remains of his otherwise lost autobiography, Orion had hoped to become an orator, the fastest way to fame in the nineteenth century. “My life would have been full of bliss,” Orion wrote of that fleeting possibility.7 But then, under Bates’s influence, he thought he would like to be a lawyer like his father, a profession not altogether distinct from a career in oratory. Orion studied law in Bates’s law offices while continuing to work as a printer. Later he considered becoming a minister. Yet he never followed through on or finished anything. This scattershot vision would also—in a much happier application—be Mark Twain’s problem, curiously enough, as a writer who throughout his life usually had on hand a number of unfinished works in different genres waiting for completion, including Huckleberry Finn, which was written over a period of eight years.
“Parson Snivel” undoubtedly experienced ridicule in Hannibal as well as in St. Louis. He had his father’s bearing. He was quiet, even somewhat brooding, but he lacked the full weight of his father’s aristocratic pretensions as a member of the supposed Virginia gentry. And rather than hold back as a freethinker, Orion changed religions almost as frequently as others changed horses. Twain observed years later in a letter to Howells that Orion had “belonged to as many as five different religious denominations.”8 As a result of his uneven temperament and spasmodic efforts to move ahead in the world, Orion inadvertently became one of the major sources, though not the primary one, for Mark Twain’s great sense of humor. He became the boy’s straight man in some respects, the one whom the younger brother was always trying to outmaneuver. Sam’s genius for irreverence was probably honed on Orion’s indignant sense of reform and general lack of humor.
Indeed, it is not at all surprising that Sam Clemens grew up to become a writer of boy’s books, for he was formally constrained as a child for a longer period than most—first by his somber father, then by his rather awkward elder brother. Even though he began to work at a young age, it was under the supervision of this brother and surrogate father, who was essentially responsible for Sam’s adolescent attitude, which extended into adulthood. Orion as an authority figure presented something of a buffoon—at least to a smart-aleck younger brother like Sam, now entering his teens. Early on under Orion’s eye, Sam began to develop the mentality of a Tom Sawyer who cons his friends to whitewash the most famous fence in American fiction. The truth is that Mark Twain was virtually a “kid” all his life, not only to his own children but also to the America that came to cherish him. (His final years, following the death of his wife, find him in almost a second childhood, the idol of the press and a public always ready to chortle over whatever quip of his they read or heard about.) This delayed adolescence derived from his campaigns to undermine Orion’s authority and from a teenage upbringing in which he bridled at his brother’s authority as a stand-in for the father he had really never come to know well. Ironically, early in his career as a writer, he sought out such authority figures, as we shall see.
He did not, of course, rebel from these people exactly, as he had from Orion, but he continued in the same role he had played under his brother, that of the unpredictable and occasionally gauche individual in civilized society—“God’s fool,” as he described himself after the scan dalous Whittier birthday dinner speech he made in 1877 in Boston, the most civilized society in nineteenth-century America. As the humorist’s first straight man, Orion gave Sam his sense of comic contrast. He would callously ridicule his brother’s behavior in letters to his mother and to William Dean Howells, his closest literary ally. In what is perhaps an exaggeration, he recalled in his autobiography an incident that made his brother sound like a bumbling idiot. While Orion was still living in St. Louis, he once returned to Hannibal unannounced and found himself in a most embarrassing situation. His family had moved locally without telling him, and so he entered the wrong house, quietly because he wanted to surprise his family the next morning. He retired into a bedroom then occupied by two “ripe old-maid sisters,” the daughters of a local physician. Undressing in the dark and slipping into bed with them, thinking it occupied by one of his brothers, he was jolted out of both the bed and the house, where he found himself barely dressed and threatened by a butcher knife wielded by the irate father.9
Like his father, Orion was always dreaming but never fully succeeding in any worthwhile endeavor. When he died in 1897, he was found sitting at a table in the early morning, having jotted down his next idea for either new employment or another invention, the latter a penchant Sam also shared. Only once in Orion’s life did he come close to success, and that was in the Nevada territory in the 1860s. With one recent exception, however, biographers have not given Orion adequate credit for the performance of his duties as territorial secretary of state, probably because of the sport his brother took with him in letters to Howells and others. Philip Ashley Fanning unfortunately tears down Twain in order to reconstruct Orion, but he also offers an important corrective to the “Damned Fool” view of Orion perpetuated in the Paine biography.
By 1853 Orion’s attempt at editing a commercially successful newspaper in Hannibal had gone persistently downhill. He had a faulty business sense, another trait his younger brother would share. The Hannibal Journal failed mainly because of flagging subscriptions and a general lack of advertising revenue. Orion’s politics, though never very consistent, may have been part of the problem. Even a whiff of abolitionism would have sent many Hannibal readers away. Slaves were still an important source of labor, as well as revenue for local and state governments because they were taxed like land.10 Talk of temperance, while politely endorsed by the town’s families, also wouldn’t have been welcomed by its politically powerful saloon and distillery owners. Although Orion worked long and hard, writing editorials late into the night and choosing literary selections and stories from exchange newspapers, which was the way the press reported the national and international news before the days of the wire services, he failed to generate enough revenue to survive, much less to pay Sam or their brother Henry, who was learning printing on the job. Not only was Sam unhappy at the lack of wages, but he had to work ever harder to make up for his brother Henry’s typesetting mistakes.
One day, desperate for money, Orion set out much like his father on a journey intended to reverse his ailing fortunes. He traveled to Tennessee in yet another attempt to sell that worthless land, which would eventually be seen as a curse their father had put on the family. But the family curse lay mainly with Orion, whose principle of the moment always prevented a sale of any kind. This particular failure probably involved scruples over temperance or the welfare of immigrants—or both. On at least two occasions, the stumbling block had been temperance. This time it may have involved a vintner who, Orion thought, intended to bring in European labor that might be mistreated, homesick, and consequently unhappy in “those far eastern Tennessee mountains.”11
Whatever the case, Orion returned to Hannibal empty-handed. In the words of Albert Bigelow Paine, it was “a journey without financial results; yet it bore fruit, for it marked the
beginning of Mark Twain’s literary career.”12 Already exposed to the printed word as a printer’s apprentice for five years, Sam now got a chance to serve Orion’s paper unofficially as “assistant editor,” though the post was unpaid. While Orion was away, he had been put in charge of a newspaper that badly needed material to compete with the other papers. Although Orion had taken Franklin as his model, Sam, whose wit and outlook on life much more sharply resembled the First American’s, took him as a model in another way—and got Orion in some hot water.
4 Southwest Humorist
At almost the same age as Twain, Benjamin Franklin had written as “Silence Dogood” in a parody of Puritan piety in his brother’s newspaper, the New England Courant. Sam Clemens wrote under several pseudonyms in his brother Orion’s newspaper and began a writing career that Walter Blair has called the culmination of the humor of the Old Southwest.1 Blair’s pioneering work on the subject has recently been deepened by James H. Justus in Fetching the Old Southwest (2004). In this penetrating history of southwestern humor before Mark Twain, Justus reminds us of how serious the humor could become in the hands of its culminator. While mysterious strangers easily mixed with a steamboat of strangers, in towns like Hannibal they were easily spotted as agents of mischief and deceit, or made the object of a prank or ostracized because of their dandyness. The image of the stranger in southwestern American humor, Justus writes, “figures prominently in the critical juncture between settler and migrant.”2 Often the local was the practical joker and the stranger was the con artist.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 5