The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  Meanwhile, Sam found work in the shop of the St. Louis Evening News and in the composing room of Thomas Ustick, Orion’s former employer. With a population of about ninety thousand, including about two thousand slaves and about fifteen hundred free men and women of color, soon to become the eighth-largest metropolis in the nation, the Mound City at the time boasted twenty-one daily and weekly newspapers; twelve magazines; a half-dozen lithographic, printing, and engraving establishments; “four steel and copper plate engraving and three wood engraving” businesses; and “six book binderies and eight book and job offices.” In all, these businesses employed over 850 printers—that is, about 1 percent of the population of the city worked in the printing industry. Ustick was responsible for producing the Western Watchman; the St. Louis Presbyterian; Anzeiger des Westens, an antislavery German-language daily; and other local publications. Sam no doubt learned some rudimentary German in Ustick’s shop and, as soon as he was settled, began to save his money. He was a competent though not a skilled compositor, fully able to set around ten thousand ems during an eight-hour shift, but when he increased his speed to boost his income he multiplied his mistakes. “While the rest of us were drawing our $12 a week, it was all Sam Clemens could do to make $8 or $9,” a coworker at the Evening News remembered. “He always had so many errors marked in his proofs that it took most of his time correcting them.” Nor could he “have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life.” Sam likely lived with his sister Pamela and her husband Will on Pine Street to save the cost of renting a room. In a vain effort to make a little extra money, or so he recalled, he wrote several pieces he thought worthy of publication and carried them to the door of the editor of the St. Louis Missouri Republican, though he fled in trepidation before he submitted them for examination. While employed by the Evening News, he joined the St. Louis Typographical Union—his first but not last expression of solidarity with the cause of organized labor and craft guilds.2

  As usual, he enjoyed an active social life. He dated a “shy pretty girl from up country,” taking her to see Toodles at Ben de Bar’s theater. In fact, he frequented the city theaters, befriending the Bateman sisters, Kate and Ellen, whose acting in such stage spectacles as Aladdin or the Wonderful Lamp at the St. Louis Theater attracted crowds of “charmed and worshiping admirers.” At ages thirteen and eleven, Sam remembered, the sisters “were beautiful little creatures, and a delight to look upon.” Fourteen years later, he alluded to the play and to his reading of the Arabian Nights to explain why he had not yet married: he was a poor scribbler and “I can’t turn an inkstand into Aladdin’s Lamp.” By mid-August he had quit his jobs. Out of work, he “didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place as St. Louis,” he informed his mother. Nonetheless, he assured her that he was keeping his promise to her to refrain from demon rum. “The most remarkable thing I remember about Clemens,” his coworker recalled, “is the fact that he was not ‘one of the boys.’ Then, more than now, it was the proud prerogative of printers to be able to drink more red whiskey than men of any other trade. But Clemens, so far as I can remember, never took a drink.”3

  Jane Clemens believed Sam had merely moved to St. Louis to find work, but he wanted to see the world and by the world he meant New York. On August 19, 1853, he boarded the Cornelia for Alton, Illinois; took a train from Alton to Springfield; and then a stagecoach from Springfield to Bloomington. The next day he railed to Chicago; then passed through Toledo to Monroe, Michigan. On August 22 he sailed to Buffalo aboard a Lake Erie steamer and the next day he entrained from Buffalo, headed to Albany. As he passed through Rochester, he was reminded of the “rappings” of the Fox sisters in 1848, an early suggestion of his interest in spiritualism. In Syracuse he saw the courthouse where the fugitive slave Jerry McReynolds had been jailed “to prevent [his] rescue . . . by the infernal abolitionists.” He finally arrived in New York aboard a Hudson River steamer early in the morning on August 24 with two or three dollars in his pocket and a ten-dollar bill sewn into the lining of his coat—or so he claimed later. He soon found work that paid about two dollars a day or ten dollars a week in the shop of John A. Gray & Green on Cliff Street, where two hundred men set in type such magazines as Littell’s Living Age, the Jewish Chronicle, the New York Recorder, the Choral Advocate, and the Knickerbocker. “The price I get is 23 cents” per thousand ems, he wrote his mother, “but I did very well to get a place at all, for there are thirty or forty—yes, fifty good printers in the city with no work at all.” He rented a room in a “sufficiently villainous mechanics’ boarding house” on Duane Street on the Lower West Side, ten blocks from his workplace, that cost $3.50 a week. As in St. Louis, in his spare time he attended the theater, including productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin at Barnum’s American Museum on Anne Street and Robert Montgomery Bird’s The Gladiator, starring Edwin Forrest, at the Broadway Theater. Uncle Tom’s Cabin “had already run one hundred and fifty nights” and its audiences attended “in elegant toilettes and cried over Tom’s griefs,” he groused. The role of Spartacus in Bird’s play was, according to Forrest’s official biographer, “the most ‘physical’ and ‘melodramatic’” of all the parts in the actor’s repertoire. Sam again joined the local typographical union, which entitled him to frequent a pair of libraries free to members and where he could “spend my evenings most pleasantly.”4 They were no doubt the Printers’ Free Library and Reading Room on Chambers Street and the library of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen at 32 Crosby Street, the second-oldest library in the city.5 He was especially attracted by the Crystal Palace of the first World’s Fair, near the Latting Observatory and the Croton Reservoir on Sixth Avenue between Fortieth and Forty-Second Streets, the site today of Bryant Park and the main building of the New York Public Library. He was impressed that a daily average of some six thousand visitors—twice the population of Hannibal—paid fifty cents apiece to enter the Palace. Moreover, from the top of the observatory, he wrote his sister Pamela, “you can obtain a grand view of the city and the country round.” On the more exotic side, he attended to a “model artist show” or “leg show” at a theater on Chatham Street in lower Manhattan, probably Mademoiselle Couret’s ensemble. It was a precursor of striptease, in which women in various stages of dishabille assumed poses of Greek statues. It was “horrid” and “immoral,” and “everybody growled about it,” and “people wouldn’t go to see it,” Sam remembered sixteen years later.6 (Or, as Yogi Berra might have said, “Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.”) Eventually the police had to close it.

  Sam was neither prepared nor willing to reconcile with Orion. To judge from extant letters, Sam only wrote his mother and sister for several months after his departure from Hannibal. He did not mention Orion in any of these letters until early September 1853, and he did not write his older brother until late October, four months after he left home. Nor did he adjust easily to the metropolis. He was disturbed by what he observed in New York, especially the race mixing and the “trundle-bed trash” he saw every morning as he walked to work through the Five Points. As he wrote Jane Clemens a week after his arrival in the city, “Niggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese, and some the Lord no doubt originally intended to be white, but the dirt on whose faces leaves one uncertain as to that fact, block up the little, narrow street; and to wade through this mass of human vermin would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”7 In his response to the spectacle he betrayed his ingrained racism: “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.” From his perspective, the black folks he met in the East were insufficiently deferential. As he wrote, “I would like amazingly to see a good, old-fashioned negro.” But by early October he admitted to Pamela that he had “taken a liking” to New York “and every time I get ready to leave, I put it off a day or so.”8

  His letters from New York also contain the earliest evidence of his morbid fascination with misshapen bodies and human deform
ity. He wrote his mother that he had seen the so-called Wild Men of Borneo, a pair of sideshow freaks exhibited by P. T. Barnum at his dime museum: “Two beings, about like common people, with the exception of their faces, which are more like the ‘phiz’ of an orang-outang, than human. . . . [They] are supposed to be a cross between man and orang-outang; one is the best natured being in the world, while the other would tear a stranger to pieces, if he did but touch him. . . . Their faces and eyes are those of the beast.” For the rest of his life, Sam was intrigued by such “human curiosities.” Returning to Barnum’s Dime Museum in New York in March 1867 he observed “two dwarfs, unknown to fame, and a speckled Negro.” After touring the U.S. Capitol in late 1867 he remarked in his journal on Thaddeus Stevens’s clubfoot. He based his comic sketches “Two-Headed Girls” (1869) and “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins” (1869), his introduction of his friends Bill Nye and James Whitcomb Riley at Tremont Temple in Boston in 1889, and his novella Those Extraordinary Twins (1894) on the experience of conjoined twins. (One of them was a Catholic and the other a Baptist, one a drunk and the other a teetotaler, one fought for the Confederacy and the other for the Union, they were two years apart in age, one swallowed food the other digested, one slept while the other snored, etc.) In Jim Blaine’s story of his grandfather’s old ram in Roughing It (1872), “old Miss Wagner” borrows both a glass eye and a wooden leg from “old Miss Jefferson.” Traces of Sam’s macabre fascination with physical grotesqueries also appear in “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” (1876), in which the narrator’s conscience haunts him in the guise of “a shriveled, shabby” anthropomorphized dwarf, a “vile bit of human rubbish,” who is “covered all over with a fuzzy, greenish mold, such as one sometimes sees upon mildewed bread”; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), in which Joanna Wilks has a “hare-lip,” or cleft palate; and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), in which the eponymous heroine pardons a seven-foot giant ironically nicknamed the Dwarf. Sam reminisced as late as February 1906 about “a lonely and melancholy little hunchback” who had run a Hannibal cigar store.9

  In an effort to improve his situation, he finally resigned his position with Gray & Green and traveled to Philadelphia, the second-largest city in the country, via the Camden and Amboy Railroad around October 20, 1853. He shared a room in a boardinghouse with an Englishman named Sumner and within a week he was working the graveyard shift as a substitute printer for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the largest morning local. “I go to work at 7 o’clock in the evening, and work till 3 o’clock the next morning,” he wrote Orion. “I can go to the theatre and stay till 12 o’clock and then go to the office, and get work from that till 3 the next morning; when I go to bed, and sleep till 11 o’clock, then get up and loaf the rest of the day.” He initially bragged that he was easily able to earn $2.50 per shift, setting ten to eleven thousand ems in type. Still, he “was laughed at by all the hands” in the shop, “the poorest of whom sets 11,000 on Sunday.” Of the twenty-two compositors with whom he worked, at least twelve “set 15,000 on Sunday.” A month later, he conceded that for some reason he could not “set type nearly so fast as when I was at home. Sunday is a long day, and while others set 12 and 15,000, yesterday, I only set 10,000.”10

  Meanwhile, he played the tourist and sent Orion a pair of letters for publication in the Muscatine Journal. In them Sam described his visits to the graves of Benjamin and Deborah Franklin in Germantown; Carpenter’s Hall, where the first U.S. Congress assembled; the campus of Girard College; and the original Fairmont Park. On the “sacred ground” of Independence Hall, where the declaration was signed, he experienced “an unaccountable feeling of awe and reverence.” He reclined on a pine bench where Franklin and George Washington had once sat and, in a letter to his mother and sister, admitted that he had repressed the temptation to whittle off a chip. He crisscrossed the city by horsecar, citing without credit R. A. Smith’s Philadelphia as It Is in 1852 in his correspondence with the Journal. Sam’s tendency to paraphrase or plagiarize from guidebooks eventually became almost routine, especially in his travel writings. He may have acquired the habit—and thought nothing of it—while copying from newspaper exchanges at the typecase.

  In the first flush of his pleasure in Philadelphia, Sam admitted to his sister that it had been “as hard on my conscience to leave New York, as it was easy to leave Hannibal.” But he soon adjusted to the rhythms of the Quaker City. “Unlike New York, I like this Phila[delphia] amazingly,” he wrote on October 26. But succumbing to the xenophobia common at the time, he was put off by the number of “abominable foreigners” he encountered. He complained when he visited the shop of the Philadelphia North American that “there was at least one foreighner [sic] for every American at work there.” He was particularly offended by the Irish immigrants who worked beside him at the Inquirer and “hate everything American.” He had never seen before “so many whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens as I find in this part of the country. I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink.” He was still honoring his oath to his mother. He soon adapted to the local custom, however, including what the printers called “a ‘free-and-easy’ at the saloons” on Saturday nights, when “a chairman is appointed, who calls on any of the assembled company for a song or recitation.” As he wrote home, “It is hard to get tired of Philadelphia, for amusements are not scarce.”12

  Still, he was scarcely able to earn more than a subsistence and he complained that the “incessant night-work” in the print shops was damaging his eyes and dulling his mind. He tarried in Philadelphia until mid-February 1854, when he took a brief furlough over a long weekend to Washington, D.C., on what he called “a flying trip . . . to see the sights.” He did not apparently look for work, though he wrote an account of the trip for the Muscatine Journal. The city as a whole he thought “a wide stretch of cheap little brick houses, with here and there a noble architectural pile lifting itself out of the midst—government buildings, these.” He attended a performance of Othello starring Edwin Forrest at the National Theater on the evening of February 17—in the first flush of his fame, Forrest had only recently added the role to his repertoire. The Treasury building, he thought, “would command respect in any capital” and the redbrick Smithsonian Institution seemed “half-church and half-castle.” The White House reminded him of “a fine large white barn, with wide unhandsome grounds about it. . . . It is ugly enough outside, but that is nothing to what it is inside. Dreariness, flimsiness, bad taste reduced to mathematical completeness is what the inside offers to the eye.” He was more impressed by Clark Mills’s statue of Andrew Jackson commemorating the Battle of New Orleans, recently unveiled in Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the Executive Mansion. Construction on the Washington Monument, begun in 1848, had stalled at only about 150 feet, a mere stub of what had been planned and less than a third of its final height of 555 feet, because its private funding had been exhausted. Still, Sam thought it towered “out of the mud—sacred soil is the customary term. It has the aspect of a factory chimney with the top broken off. The skeleton of a decaying scaffolding lingers about its summit, and tradition says that the spirit of Washington often comes down and sits on those rafters to enjoy this tribute of respect which the nation has reared as the symbol of its unappeasable gratitude.” The obelisk would finally be completed in 1888. Sam was particularly impressed by the Museum of the Patent Office, with its exhibit of ancient Peruvian mummies, Washington’s military uniform, the original Declaration of Independence, and a printing press that Franklin had owned in London. In chapter 28 of The Innocents Abroad (1869) he compared piety and pragmatism, what Henry Adams would call “the virgin and the dynamo” over a half century later. If the Vatican contained “all that is curious and beautiful in art,” he opined, then “in our Patent Office is hoarded all that is curious or useful in mechanics.” In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), moreover, Hank Morgan, aka “the Boss,” es
tablishes a patent office on the first day of his administration because “I knew that a country without a patent office and good patent laws was just a crab, and couldn’t travel any way but sideways or backwards.”

  But the U.S. Capitol was the public building that most impressed Sam. Standing on “the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position,” with its white marble facade and “great rotunda,” the “temple of liberty” was, he thought, “a very noble and a very beautiful building, both within and without.” During his visit to the public galleries there he watched as the Senate and the House of Representatives debated the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the repeal of the Missouri Compromise. On the Senate side he heard speeches by Lewis Cass of Michigan, Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois, and William Seward of New York. Seward struck him as “a slim, dark, bony individual” who looked “like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country.” On the House side he observed Thomas Hart Benton, the former senator from Missouri, sitting “silent and gloomy in the midst of the din, like a lion imprisoned in a cage of monkeys, who, feeling his superiority, disdains to notice their chattering.” As in New York, Sam complained about the racial diversity of the city, comparing Washington to “a Hottentot village.” According to the 1850 census, nearly one-third of the more than fifty thousand residents of the District of Columbia were black, over ten thousand of them free men and women of color. A decade before the abolition of slavery in the district in 1862—and well before the Great Migration from the South of the early twentieth century—it had become a destination for free blacks.13

  After four days Sam returned to Philadelphia, where during the spring and summer of 1854 he set type for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and Philadelphia North American. One of the conventions of the former paper, he explained in 1870, was to append to death notices “a verse or two of comforting poetry. . . . There is an element about some poetry which is able to make even physical suffering and death cheerful things to contemplate and consummation to be desired. This element is present in the mortuary poetry of Philadelphia.” The death of a child was just as “surely followed by a burial” as “by the accustomed solacing poesy in the ‘Public Ledger.’” Sam admitted to Albert Bigelow Paine over sixty years later that he had “offered his contributions to the Philadelphia Ledger—mainly poetry of the obituary kind,” though his submissions had been refused. He was reticent to discuss the matter even in his anecdotage. “All he ever said” of the episode, according to Paine, was that “my efforts were not received with approval.” But at least one of his obituary poems, titled “The Swiss Girl’s Home” and signed “S.L.C.,” reached print in the Portland Transcript, a Maine literary weekly and one of the Public Ledger’s exchanges, for May 24, 1854: