Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, a New York weekly that had been publishing tales of the Old Southwest since the 1830s, saw the South and the West as mines of material rich in strange dialects and stranger behavior. The stories of these regions were written by circuit judges and swamp doctors, educators and journalists—educated professionals who were out to interpret their part of the backcountry and were always careful to frame their dialect stories with the standard English of a stranger to the action, often the initial auditor. It was a form of realism that attempted to paint life as it was, “without the artificial embellishments of romance.”3

  These writers who preceded the rise of Mark Twain included William Tappan Thompson, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Joseph G. Baldwin, Johnson J. Hooper, Madison Tensas, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, George W. Harris, and later on, Twain’s early sponsor Artemus Ward. Most of these writers of the “Left Hand” used pseudonyms to further insulate themselves from the crudity of their fictional characters based on real life. Such “humorous” writings go all the way back to the beginning of American literature, certainly to the beginning of American drama with The Contrast by Royall Tyler in 1787. This is an upstairs-downstairs social comedy in which the crudity of the basically honest American is contrasted with the elegance of the corrupted Englishman. Its incongruities are initially funny but ultimately become the basis for defining the American as the epitome of candor and courage. With the scene shift to the South and the West, the British fop or, later, congressman is replaced by the American Yankee—or, more generally, the Stranger. “Although at first the West had applauded the eastern Yankee as a symbol of American ascendancy,” writes Edgar Marquess Branch, “it soon developed its own ideal types.”4

  Sam’s first apprenticeship as a printer was not with his brother’s paper but with Joseph P. Ament’s Missouri Courier, a position he took up about a year after his father’s death in 1847. Dixon Wecter theorizes that a reliable marker for Sam’s change to his brother’s paper, the weekly Hannibal Western Union, eventually converted into the Hannibal Journal, is the publication of Twain’s first story on January 16, 1851.5 The story essentially makes fun of the slow-witted Jim Wolfe, a printer’s devil in Orion’s print shop. Sam’s range of comical targets could be wide. The parameters of humor have shrunken in our time, so that no one except the objects of ridicule themselves can with impunity make fun of women, blacks, Jews, gays, or just about any other minority except representatives of Congress, rednecks, or possibly Catholics these days. In Huckleberry Finn, the “hare lip” drives Huck “up a stump” with her prying questions about his fictional background as a domestic in England. Yet in another real way, humor hasn’t changed at all, for its object is often a stranger to the culture, the outsider. Once that stranger becomes an accepted part of our community, we can no longer make fun of him or her.

  On January 9 a fire broke out in the establishment next door to Orion’s newspaper. It was discovered by Wolfe, whose actions young Sam described in one of the earliest examples of the wit that would glitter through the best work of Mark Twain:

  Our gallant devil, seeing us somewhat excited, concluded he would perform a noble deed, and immediately gathered the broom, an old mallet, the wash-pan and a dirty towel, and in a fit of patriotic excitement, rushed out of the office and deposited his precious burden some ten squares off, out of danger. Being of a snailish disposition, even in his quickest moments, the fire had been extinguished during his absence. He returned in the course of an hour, nearly out of breath, and thinking he had immortalized himself, threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age!” 6

  This is the Jim Wolfe on whom Sam and Henry played practical jokes. He was eighteen when the fire occurred, three years older than Sam. His shyness around girls became the subject of Twain’s “Jim Wolfe and the Cats” in 1867. Once, they loaded his bedclothes with wasps, for which Sam was pummeled by Jim. Later, Twain expressed regret over his conduct with Wolfe, saying his tricks had been “all cruel and all barren of wit.”7 But the practical joke was part of small-town life. Huck and Tom place garter snakes in Aunt Sally’s sewing basket, and young Sam probably did the same to his mother.

  If Sam learned anything from being a small-town practical joker, it was an appreciation for the basic incongruity of any humorous situation. The printer’s devil is anything but “gallant.” The least valuable items in the newspaper office are the broom, a wash bowl, and a dirty towel. There is no reason to remove these worthless items ten blocks away from the fire. This “snailish” individual is out of breath after taking an hour to return. The anecdote is topped off with malapropism in a play on the word “conflagration.” This is basic humor, but it is also the foundation for the much more subtle humor of Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. Sam Clemens was barely sixteen when he wrote this sketch, his first known publication. Yet he already sensed the raucous absurdity of the human race’s demand for self-approval in the face of outright failure. Orion’s sense of self-importance as a reformer had most likely been his first lesson.

  Very possibly Sam published other such short pieces in Orion’s newspaper and perhaps elsewhere, but nothing of his has been identified until “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” which appeared in the Boston Carpet-Bag—like The Spirit of the Times, another repository for American humor. As with “A Gallant Fireman,” Twain wrote in standard English, not yet introducing much vernacular. Later he would regret that he hadn’t written Tom Sawyer in the first person. “The Dandy” was published on May 1, 1852. Typical of the newspaper humor of that day in which the country type outwits the city slicker, it featured “a spruce young dandy” and a “brawny woodsman.” A steamboat has just landed in Hannibal, and the dandy attempts to frighten a town rough in order to impress the ladies on board. He pretends to have found this fellow after a long search and, confronting him with a bowie knife in his belt and a “large horse pistol in each hand,” is dispatched by the “squatter” with a deft blow that sends its victim into the muddy Mississippi.

  The story has the exaggeration of the tall tale. The dandy warns the woodsman to say his prayers. Pointing his pistols at his intended victim, he says, “You’ll make a capital barn door, and I shall drill the key-hole myself!” Following the easterner’s quick defeat, the woodsman refers to the keyhole metaphor in a comic dismissal of the poseur. Tales of raftsmen in this literary tradition featured braggarts who would, in their efforts to frighten their opponents without actually fighting, compare themselves and their efforts to events of cosmic proportion. In the raft scene that Twain borrowed from the yet unfinished Huckleberry Finn manuscript and placed in chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi to pad his book, the little guy, a third party to an impending quarrel between two raftsmen, handily defeats the loudmouthed pretenders.

  A week after “The Dandy” appeared, Sam Clemens placed a sketch about Hannibal in the Philadelphia American Courier. It was remarkably polished for the sixteen-year-old school dropout, indeed for any person of that tender age. Entitled simply “Hannibal, Missouri” in the May 8 issue, it contains the seeds of the most famous Hannibal stories such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, including a description of the town’s cave he would make famous. “Your Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated region, with a population consisting of heathens,” the future chronicler of the Mississippi wrote in defense of his region. (Young Sam may indeed have also been defending slavery in the South, which had come under increased scrutiny following the newly strengthened fugitive slave law of 1850.) He speaks of the first houses being built in Hannibal around the time of his birth, as if Hannibal is itself indistinguishable from the writer who is already introducing himself to the world at large, or to the East, where in 1877 he would satirize the works of three of its literary saints in the notorious Whittier birthday speech. He speaks of the “children of the forest” now go
ne from their canoes, replaced by the steamboat. Later, in Roughing It, he would become clearer about his disdain for the eastern myth of the Indian. Finally, there is an allusion to the Arabian Nights, from which he would draw inspiration for his own approximation of the thousand and one stories that originated in the river town of his childhood.8

  “Hannibal, Missouri” was sent as a letter to the editor and signed “S.L.C.” Among other firsts in the career of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, it began his efforts as a travel writer who was describing the events to the folks back home. In this case, of course, he was describing home to the folks far away, but the genre was begun with “A Family Muss,” appearing in his brother’s newspaper for September 9, 1852. Here he adopted his first nom de plume, “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins.” Otherwise, the piece is largely unremarkable as a literary effort. The object of his satirical scorn is a collection of immigrant Catholic families of German, Irish, and Scottish origin in Hannibal—“a small house, occupied by an indefinite number of very large families” on the other side of Holliday’s Hill. Raised as a Presbyterian fundamentalist, Clemens often expressed anti-Catholic sentiments in his early thinking and writing. Here alcoholism and domestic violence are the subjects of humor, the anecdote spiced at the end with comic Irish dialect.

  Shortly after “A Family Muss,” Orion made his trip east to the Tennessee Land, and Sam got the newspaper into a feud, an episode not unlike Franklin’s mischief on his brother’s newspaper. It was another case of the printer wanting to become the writer. The local papers had commented about barking dogs. In the nineteenth century, such untended or roaming animals were routinely shot without protest. The details of this story are conflicting, but young Sam decided to ridicule a rival editor, a “newcomer” from Illinois named J. T. Hinton, who ran the Hannibal Triweekly Messenger and whose politics were Whig. On August 24, 1852, he had defended the dogs and sarcastically criticized Orion for complaining about their barking in the night.

  Sam retaliated on September 16 by publishing a sketch he had carved himself on a printer’s block—something he would do later for the Galaxy in his parody of military maps of the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War. He had heard the town rumor that Hinton as a disappointed suitor had attempted suicide in Hannibal’s Bear Creek but changed his mind and quickly waded ashore. The sketch was entitled “ ‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide.” Its caption indicated that Hinton had attempted suicide because he had not heard from Orion in response to his attack in which he had labeled Orion “A Dog-Be-Deviled Citizen.” It portrayed Hinton with a dog’s head and a bottle of liquor as his suicide “pistol” as he descends into a local creek. “Fearing, however, that he may get out of his depth,” the legend continued, “he sounds the stream with his walking-stick.” “Mark Twain,” as he would later call himself, made his first sounding in water that was somewhere between “safe” and “dangerous” for steamboats and humorists. He would do it again many times and did it first as a journalist. He closed with a pun, “Peace to his re-manes,” and signed it “A DOG-BE-DEVILED CITIZEN.”9 Clemens followed this up the next week with a second piece, also illustrated, called “’Pictur’ Department.” These naturally caused ill will toward Orion, whom Hinton assumed to be its author, but upon his return Orion was able to bring the exchange to a close by publicly dismissing it as a farce.

  In the same issue of the paper, under the name now of W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, Clemens printed three more features: “Editorial Agility,” “Blabbing Government Secrets!” and “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse,” which anticipates Twain’s future use of history as the basis of satire and humor. It also anticipates the crowd-baiting used by the Duke and the Dauphin in their “Royal Nonesuch” production in chapter 23 of Huckleberry Finn. In “Historical Exhibition,” a Jim C is duped into paying to see an exhibit titled “Napoleon Crossing the Rhine,” which turns out to be the “bony part” of a hog’s leg being passed over a piece of hog’s rind. The victim is subsequently encouraged to respond like the townsfolk of Bricksville, who hide their disappointment until all of their neighbors have been duped by the same scheme. According to the editors of the early sketches, the piece contains the phallic humor of the country with the play on the word “bony” for “boner,” but Twain was probably not relying on this aspect to draw laughter. He was known to the public throughout his career as a “clean” humorist, and aside from the off-color humor of the privately published 1601, a few other pieces not published during his lifetime, and possibly the mildly scatological “Royal Nonesuch” in Huckleberry Finn, he seldom depended on that effect.10

  The next week, with Orion probably still out of town, Adrastus Blab announced that he was leaving for a “furrin” tour of Glasscock’s Island, and this name—a variation on Sam’s first literary pseudonym—was permanently retired. For the rest of 1852 and until he left Hannibal the following June, there are in all thus far thirteen extant pieces that can probably be attributed to him. In “ ‘Connubial Bliss’ ” he may have returned to the impoverished inebriates at the foot of Holliday’s Hill. The piece is included in Twain’s collected works because of the last sentence, which forms a pun involving the change in the existence of the drunk’s wife from the earliest blissful days of her marriage before she realized she had wed an alcoholic, and what little spare change there is to be found in the pockets of printers. This was on November 4 in Orion’s newspaper, and it may have been a muted complaint about the absence of a salary for Sam, who was about to turn seventeen and getting restless.

  By the following spring we find a couple of poems and letters written by “Rambler.” It is doubtful that “The Heart’s Lament,” a straightforward imitation of one of Thomas Moore’s love ballads, published in Orion’s journal on May 5, is the work of the young Sam Clemens. Yet it may have given him the idea for the poem and letters that immediately followed in the Hannibal Daily Journal. Called “Love Concealed,” it was subtitled “To Miss Katie of H—l,” meaning “Hannibal” but leaving open the other possibility. The actual printing shows that the title was too long for the column, thus requiring the elided final word, though Twain in another of his Galaxy articles in 1871 claimed it was an intentional “thunderbolt of humor.”11 The poem draws the response of the “Grumbler,” who expresses his opinion that damning a former girlfriend to hell is “carrying the matter too far.” This is followed up by other exchanges whose humor has not survived the nineteenth century.

  One of Sam’s last clearly identifiable contributions to his brother’s sagging newspaper is “The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap, Editor of the Bloomington ‘Republican,’ ” published on May 23, 1853. It reminds us again of Ben Franklin, who published a premature obituary of one of his competitors in retaliation for continuing to use a journal title that Franklin had purchased from him. The humor of Sam’s “Burial” not only outlives its century but also anticipates Twain’s famous parody of poetry, or doggerel, in chapter 17 of Huckleberry Finn. The incident originated in a competition between Hannibal and Bloomington, Missouri, then the county seat of neighboring Macon County, over the route of what became the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. As editor of one of Bloomington’s newspapers and also an aspiring politico, Gilstrap had accused certain Hannibal businesses of bribery in winning the railroad route.12 The issue was discussed by a number of area newspapers in a time when editors regularly assailed each other in print. But this editor became the object of one of Mark Twain’s hilarious parodies of poetry, a literary genre he never truly appreciated but nevertheless used to good effect.

  His poetic talent here would culminate with Emmeline Grangerford’s “Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” in which the beloved Stephen does not die from whooping cough or measles “drear, with spots.” Rather, “His soul did from this cold world fly, / By falling down a well.” In the case of Abner Gilstrap:

  Not a sound was heard, nor a funeral note,

  As his carcass through town we hurried;

  Not e’en an obi
tuary we wrote,

  In respect for the rascal we buried.

  . . . . .

  No useless coffin confined his breast,

  Nor in sheet nor in shirt we bound him;

  But he lay like an Editor taking his rest

  With a Hannibal Journal around him.13

  Sam Clemens was eighteen years old and already possessed of the satirical glee that would first make him famous. But his real-life Hannibal days, the experience that would become the basis for his most memorable work, were now over.

  5 Tramp Printer

  “I disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis,” Twain recalled in his autobiography. This was probably sometime in the first two weeks of June 1853. “There I worked in the composing-room of the Evening News for a time and then started on my travels to see the world.” His first stop was New York City, but it is remotely possible that by the time he resided there, he had already decided to travel to South America and profit in coca (possibly the first of a lifetime series of get-rich schemes or inventions), and not simply after he returned to the Mississippi Valley almost a year later. New York would have been as convenient a port of departure as New Orleans.