Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Sam Clemens was the greater beneficiary. He was not only reviewed in the Atlantic; by 1874 he was contributing to it, to great acclaim. Life on the Mississippi, his strange, fabulistic “travel” masterpiece of 1883, began as a series of essay-reminiscences in the magazine, encouraged and edited by this newfound friend. Howells’s embrace helped propel the former steamboat pilot to status as the representative figure of his nation and his century, and bequeathed America a torrential literary voice more truly, more enduringly its own than any then existing or being conceived by the reigning gods of New England probity and taste.

  Howells benefited as well. Mark Twain’s rise to critical and popular stardom in his magazine ratified the editor’s instincts for finding new, unorthodox writers in America and, later, Europe. Other native-born writers who emerged to prominence under his championing included Emily Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane. He later helped introduce such international figures as Ibsen, Zola, Pérez Galdós, Verga, and Tolstoy. As he moved from editing other people’s works to writing his own—he completed more than a hundred books of fiction, poetry, travel essays, biography, reminiscence, criticism, and even dramatic plays—Howells seemed to take inspiration from his fellow Midwesterner. (The novelized memoir of his youth, A Boy’s Town Described, published in 1890, contained strong echoes of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.) At his best, Howells was considered a novelist on a par with his other great friend, Henry James. Though that level of esteem did not survive the 19th century, Howells finished his long life enjoying the sobriquet, “the Dean of American Letters.”

  Breaching the ranks of New England literary culture was Clemens’s most important achievement (short of his actual works), and a signal liberating event in the country’s imaginative history. His audacity, and Howells’s accommodation of it, may seem unremarkable to an America long since accustomed to the leveling of hierarchies, the demythifying of great artists and the complexities of their works, the triumph of careerism over apprenticeship to a tradition. In the slipstream of the Clemens-Howells creative bond, American literature ceased its labored imitation of European and Classical high discourse, and became a lean, blunt, vivid chronicle of American self-invention, from the yeasty perspective of the common man. Without Howells’s friendship, Mark Twain might have flared for a while, a regional curiosity among many, and then faded, forgotten. On its legitimizing strength, he gained the foundation for international status as America’s Shakespeare and struck a template for the nation’s voice into the 20th century and beyond.

  MARK TWAIN’S great achievement as the man who found a voice for his country has made him a challenge for his biographers. His words are quoted, yet he somehow lies hidden in plain sight—a giant on the historic landscape. He has been so thoroughly rearranged and reconstructed by a long succession of scholarly critics that the contours of an actual, textured human character have been obscured. And his voice, not to mention his humor, has gone missing from many of these analyses.

  Twainian critical literature from 1920 onward has been dominated by theory, rather than interpretive portraiture. His biographers have tended to evoke him through the prism of Freudian psychoanalysis. In that way he is seen as an interesting, if not terribly self-aware outpatient—a walking case-book of neuroses, unconscious tendencies, masks, and alternate identities. Important questions are inevitably excluded in this approach. What was it that bound Mark Twain and his half of the American 19th century so closely together? In what ways, and by what processes, did this man become, as those who knew him repeatedly claimed, the representative figure of his times? What liberating personal magnetism did he possess that moved his contemporaries to forgive him for traits and tendencies that biographers of a later time have found deplorable? What was it about his voice that satisfied American readers in ways that the New England founders of American literature could not? What is it about his writing—nearly all of it problematic, much of it mediocre, a healthy part of it unfinished, some of it simply awful—that continues to exercise the very scholars who expend so much energy trying to reduce him to their pet formulas and crusades?

  The answers to these questions lie within Mark Twain as he lived, breathed, and wrote; within the preserved viewpoints of the people who knew him best, and in person; and within the annals of the American 19th century that he helped shape, and that he loved when he could find it in himself to love little else. The answers will remind us of who he was. And of who we are.

  * Mark Twain also used this joke in an 1872 letter commenting on Howells’s review of Roughing It. But Howells delicately suggests in My Mark Twain that its first use was in this 1869 interview in Boston.

  1

  “Something at Once Awful and Sublime”

  (1835–39)

  The prairie in its loneliness and peace: that was what came back to him toward the end of his life, after he had pulled the rug out from under all the literary nabobs, and fired off all his nubs and snappers, and sashayed through all the nations, and collected all his ceremonial gowns and degrees, and tweaked all the grinning presidents, and schmoozed all the newspaper reporters, and stuck it to all his enemies, and shocked all the librarians, and cried out all his midnight blasphemies, and buried most of his family. The prairie was what came back to him as he wrote in 1897—speaking, in his conceit, from the grave, and thus freely. He remembered what had mattered the most, the earliest. He thought not of the Mississippi River, which he encountered most fully later in his life, but of “a level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forests”—a swatch of the great western carpet yet a decade from disfigurement by the grooves of the California gold rushers.1 There his prodigious noticing had begun. His way of seeing and hearing things that changed America’s way of seeing and hearing things.

  It was there, as a boy, where his great font of visual images—“the multitudinous photographs one’s mind takes,” he later called them—began to form. He found enchantment in the way moonlight fell through the rafters of the slanting roof of his uncle’s farmhouse into little squares on the floor of the stairway landing. He was struck by the darkness of his bedroom, packed with ghostly stillness. When he woke up by accident in that darkness, his forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of his memory.

  But more powerful than the early images in his memory were the sounds: the crack of a watermelon split open, the rising and falling wail of a spinning wheel, the dismal hoo-hoo of the owl and the howl of the wolf, the crash of summer thunder. It was to the sounds that he had always assigned his deepest fantasies and fears. The spinning wheel “was the mournfulest of all sounds to me…and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead.”2 Animal wails were omens of death; the thunderclap was God’s wrath over his sinfulness.

  Of all the sounds, none had quite the lasting mimetic (or moral) effect on Sam Clemens as the sound of the human voice. And no human voices, save his own mother’s, caught his imagination quite like those of the Negro slaves. Those voices spoke in a way different from the people in his family: quick, delicious, throbbing with urgencies half-named, half-encoded. They conjured mind-pictures: lightning bolts, apparitions from the spirit world, chariots swooping down from heaven, skies of blood, animals crying out. Adorned with tonal shifts and repetitions and the counterpointed rhythms of stridency and hush, the slave voices treated language as a cherished creature, to be passed around, partaken of, as well as simply heard. Clear as flowing water, and yet invested with deep currents of meaning that only the fellow speakers could fully understand.

  He heard his first slave voices on the prairie before he turned four, and sought them out through the rest of his childhood and beyond. In Mark Twain’s manuscript pages half a century later, these voices challenged the genteel paradigm that had sonorously governed the first epoch of indigenous American literature. They ushered in a replacement: gutbucket truth rooted in the solo riffs of the dispos
sessed—the advent of an American voice derived not from European aesthetics, but entirely from local improvisational sources, black and white. Mark Twain’s baton began to mute the Anglican symphony, and strike up the rhythms of American jazz.

  His capacity to transform commonplace spoken language into literature, like any artist’s gift, remains beyond understanding. A contemporary’s remark that “[h]e is the ordinary man—plus genius,” probably comes as close as any theory. But his acute attentiveness to language, and some of his other distinguishing traits, can be traced in part to his precarious entry into the world.

  Born two months premature, on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Sam Clemens narrowly survived childbirth. His labyrinthine personality, subjected to endless analysis by 20th-century Freudians, has never been considered in the context of this difficult birth and his convalescence from it. As a toddler Sammy was sickly and underweight (his adult height reached only 5 feet 8½inches). He was largely bedridden until his fourth year, and frail for the next three. “When I first saw him I could see no promise in him,” his mother Jane admitted. Her frontier fatalism was more than matched by a visitor to the little house. Eyeing the shriveled form, the woman turned to Jane and blandly asked, “You don’t expect to raise that babe, do you?” Jane said she would try.3

  Premature babies are generally unable to sleep deeply and sometimes exist in a kind of dream world that is typical neither of the womb nor of a full-term infant’s consciousness—a world of unstable borders between reality and the inner oceans of the mind. The subsuming of reality by dreams was among Mark Twain’s signal literary preoccupations, and his writing—whether journalism, travel, memoir, or novel—moved between truth and fantasy with sometimes maddening unconcern.

  Sammy grew into a sleepwalker, and his mother felt that he had the gift (or curse) of “second sight.” He lived his life on the edges of self-control; he was quick to anger, hounded by guilt and anxiety, and subject to seismic shifts of mood.

  Most importantly in terms of his art were the ways in which his senses were affected. The hyperacuity of his ear and his unusual retention of sounds (he never stopped performing the earliest songs and spirituals he heard, and as a mature writer he could reproduce entire blocks of spoken conversation) may have been a vestige of his fitful early months. Hearing develops more quickly in newborns than the sense of sight, especially with premature babies, who are more interested in voices than in other sounds. At any rate, no one expected Sammy to survive the winter. Frontier children routinely died from measles, mumps, smallpox, “bilious fever,” malaria, spider bites, cholera, scarlet fever, polio, diphtheria, or teething complications; and, if not from those, then often from the “cures” applied to them. Still, Jane did her best for Sammy. Always alert for omens, Jane may have looked for hopeful signs that he would survive, such as the widely discussed comet named for its British discoverer, Edmund Halley, which neared the earth in its seventy-five-year cycle in the late autumn of his arrival.* The child hung on.

  He was in Missouri because his father Marshall’s luck had run out more than once. The austere self-educated lawyer, named after John Marshall, had left the Virginia Piedmont first for Kentucky, as a boy, after his father died; then to Tennessee, as a married man, when his farm failed. He began buying up land, amassing deeds to more than seventy thousand acres of virgin yellow-pine acreage, for a total outlay of only a little more than $400. The land was thought to be rich in copper, and Marshall envisioned a day when railroads would haul timber from his forests, building him and his heirs an immense fortune.

  But the Tennessee land investment only triggered the Clemens family’s decline into poverty. It remained unsold for decades, a financial failure that haunted Marshall Clemens and his children, and fueled Sam Clemens’s lifelong anxiety over money.

  While waiting for the land-buyers to show up, Marshall opened a general store at Jamestown, which also served as his family’s living quarters. Daughter Pamela (sometimes spelled “Pamelia” and always pronounced that way) was born there in 1827. Another arrival, Pleasant Hannibal, followed either one or two years later; he survived only three weeks, although there are no precise records of his life or death even in the family Bible. Margaret came along in 1830. Marshall became overwhelmed by the pressures to provide for his growing family, as the income from his tiny store proved insufficient. His chronic headaches grew more severe, and he began to dull them, or try to, with Cook’s pills and other “notions,” some of which were 50 percent alcohol. (He seems never to have drunk to excess.) In 1831 he uprooted his family once again, this time to a clearing in the Tennessee woods at the confluence of three mountain streams. He built another cabin, and tried to make a go of it as a farmer/store clerk/postmaster until the financial crash of 1834 wiped out his credit.

  Finally, in 1835, he relocated one more time, to Missouri, when his wife’s brother-in-law sent a rapturous letter from there. It was a letter whose promised-land spirit Mark Twain would fold in to his great comic character “Colonel” Eschol (later “Beriah” and “Mulberry”) Sellers in The Gilded Age:

  Come right along to Missouri! Don’t wait and worry about a good price but sell out for whatever you can get, and come along, or you might be too late…It’s the grandest country—the loveliest land—the purest atmosphere—I can’t describe it; no pen could do it justice…I’ve got the biggest scheme on earth…Mum’s the word—don’t whisper—keep yourself to yourself. You’ll see! Come!—rush!—hurry!—don’t wait for anything!4

  The model for this letter was written by John Quarles, who had followed his father-in-law, Sam’s maternal grandfather, to the flyspeck hamlet of Florida in 1835. (For some reason, the founders of new towns in Missouri indulged a naming whimsy not quite so prominent in other states. As the century went on, Missouri filled up with towns bearing such names as Neck, Torch, Climax Springs, Conception Junction [in Nodaway County], Joy and Romance, Useful, Peculiar, Impo and Ink, Lupus, Zebra, Chloride and Cooter, Advance, Half Way, Fair Play, Pumpkin Center, Nonesuch, Monkey Run, Gerald, and Low Wassie.)

  Once arrived, while Sammy hovered between life and death, his father accepted John Quarles’s offer to become a co-proprietor of his general store, which allowed him to begin investing for a future powered by the Industrial Revolution. More opportunity for his luck to run out.

  Slater mills had long since replaced the household spinning wheel. Coupled with the cotton gin, the mills revived the cotton economy of the South, and reversed a trend toward abolition of slavery in the planter states. Annual cotton production leapt from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 bales by 1810. The slave trade reached a higher volume than in any period in its four-hundred-year history, fueled by the avarice of Northern merchants.

  Steam suddenly drove just about everything with moving parts. The nation’s quiet inland waterways, accustomed to flatboats and scows, were disturbed by paddle wheels: in 1807, a young portrait artist and submarine fantasist named Robert Fulton got his paddle-wheel-driven steamboat the Clermont chugging up the Hudson River.

  ALMOST BEFORE it began, the steamboat era saw the advent of its vanquisher. The railroad, a horse-powered convenience of the English collieries, was a novelty import in America until Christmas Day of 1830, when a contraption named “The Best Friend of Charleston” chugged six miles along a South Carolina roadbed to launch the era of the steam-powered locomotive. (It later blew up.) By 1850 there would be nine thousand miles of roadbed on the continent, with new construction surging ahead.

  A new form of capitalism arose to bring out the economic yield of these new marvels. It ran on frenzied speculation fed by visionary organizers and owners, who structured new national and even international markets for the accelerating flow of goods. These new captains of industry enriched themselves as they increased the national wealth. Their excesses triggered a credit-fueled financial panic in 1837 that damaged the national economy for years.

  Marshall Clemens noted and coveted these triumphs of machine-driven we
alth as they tumbled westward, paying less heed to the plight of the enslaved subculture on which it all still depended. His son would absorb himself in both ends of this spectrum, and make a different kind of capital of what he saw there.

  SAMMY’S HEALTH slowly improved. He grew aware of his appearance, and asked for pure white dresses as soon as he could speak. When he realized that he had no tail, unlike some of his fellow beings around the house, he complained about it: “The dog has a tail bebind, the cat has a tail bebind, and I haven’t any tail bebind at all at all.”5 His uncle John made a tail of paper and pinned it onto his dress.

  When he gained the strength to leave the small family house on his own, he found himself in a lonely prairie hamlet. Florida comprised fifty-odd low-slung wooden houses and barns, embraced by two forks of a small river, the Salt. In the spring of 1839, John Quarles expanded Sammy’s world by opening a 230-acre farm on the prairie land adjoining Florida, and deploying a few slaves to make it run.* It was among these otherwise forgotten tutors who worked the fields and then gathered in their cabins at night that Sam Clemens’s self-education as a literary artist began.

  The slave cabins were on the far side of an orchard, beyond a stand of hickory and walnut trees that screened the Quarles’s double-log farmhouse. Sammy had no inkling of where the black people in the little cabins had come from, or how they had got there. But he knew that they were different, profoundly so. He knew it from their voices. He would remember two of them in particular. One was a bedridden old woman with a bald spot, who was known as Aunt Hannah. Sammy and his cousins had heard from the slave children that Aunt Hannah was a thousand years old. She had known Moses, and Pharaoh, the wicked slave master of Egypt. The horror of watching Pharaoh drown while chasing Moses across the Red Sea had given her a bald spot. Aunt Hannah prayed a lot, and when she wasn’t praying she terrified the children with tales of witches.