Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The other great presence was Uncle Dan’l, “a middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter,” Mark Twain wrote in 1897, “whose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.”6 To the children, black and white, who milled around the premises he was “a faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser.”7 Mark Twain recalled the “privileged nights” as a child when he and an assortment of cousins and slave children clustered at Dan’l’s feet in his cabin to hear him tell his thunderous stories.

  Uncle Dan, called “Dann” by John Quarles, who emancipated him in 1855, was 6 feet tall, of a black complexion, and still in his early forties when Sammy knew him.8 He is presumed to be the father of most, or all, of the black children in the quarters, including Mary, one of Sammy’s closest playmates and a child of “weird distorted superstitions,” as Sammy’s cousin Tabitha Quarles recalled in her old age.9 Only his voice survives him—but what an artifact that is. Uncle Dan’l’s voice, amplifying itself in geometric progressions as the American centuries marched on, is the first trumpet note of the first great jazz composition in American literature: the voice of Huckleberry Finn’s Jim. As Mark Twain said, late in life:

  He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as “Jim,” and carted him all around…It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.10

  He was not the only inspiration for Mark Twain’s achievements with black dialect. Many others would lend their distinctive phrasings and points of view: There was the family’s slave Jennie. There was a household slave boy named Sandy, whose constant singing got on Sammy’s nerves until Jane pointed out to him that singing was probably the child’s way of not thinking about the mother taken from him by an owner.11 There was the young, black servant Mark Twain encountered in 1872 at the Paris House hotel in Paris, Illinois, and whose great burst of rhythmic dialect he recorded and later published as “Sociable Jimmy.” There was Mary Ann Cord, a cook for Samuel Clemens’s sister-in-law at Elmira, New York, in the 1870s, whose own story of separation burned itself word by word into his brain.12 There was George Griffin, an ex-slave and beloved family butler during the Clemenses’ Hartford years. Finally, the writer had recourse to a storehouse of popular literature that distilled and parodied African-American dialect. (A few of Jim’s early speeches in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn betray the set-piece archness of blackface minstrel sidemen.)

  But something about Uncle Dan’l struck Twain as sole, incomparable. Perhaps it was the way he stirred up Sammy’s famous bad nerves with the ghost stories he told in his cabin—stories that Mark Twain would repeat in public and private all his life:

  I can hear Uncle Dan’l telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to…charm the world with, by and by; and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story of the “Golden Arm” was reached—and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening, and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed.13

  “The Golden Arm” was an old European ghost story that lent itself well to African-American patois. It concerned the “monsus mean” man who robs his wife’s grave to steal her prosthetic arm of solid gold. This does not sit well with the dead wife. Her ghost stalks the husband through the snowy night with the harrowing incantation, “Whoooo got my golllllden arrrrm?” Uncle Dan’l always climaxed the tale with a freighted pause, while the children on the floor writhed in juicy anticipation. Then he would thrust his finger at a small victim, evoking a spasm as he roared: “You’ve got it!”

  Sammy was addicted to “The Golden Arm.” The theme of supernaturally imposed guilt no doubt spoke to him, but his fascination lay mainly in Dan’l’s mesmeric style of telling. The timing. The rhythm. The dialect. That pause. No other single phrase, gesture, or image better illustrates the impact of his farm companions on his young psyche. As Mark Twain, he built his wildly popular oratorical style largely on the foundation of that pause. As for the story itself, he couldn’t stop telling it. He performed it for lecture audiences, houseguests, anyone, every chance he had, for the rest of his life.

  While the boy was inspired by the voices in his backyard, his father continued to work at the general store, and dreamed of amassing land. Land was cheap in these years; $1.25 an acre if bought at a certain bulk, as the U.S. government sold off the Louisiana Purchase for settlement and speculation—some 38 million acres between 1835 and 1837. Nearly every dollar that Marshall earned from the store went toward real estate. He secured a 120-acre tract, then 80 acres, then another 40.

  In 1836 Marshall bought a fairly substantial house on the south side of Main Street, from Jane’s father, Benjamin Lampton. A year later, he bought a larger house on the tract he’d bought earlier, actually two one-room cabins under a common roof. For the second time in his career he became a judge in fact as well as in title: of the Monroe County Court, in November 1837. As his land holdings increased, he became festooned with chairmanships: the Salt River Navigation Company, the Florida & Paris Railroad commission, the board of trustees of the proposed Florida Academy. On paper, at least, Marshall Clemens was the Jefferson of northeastern Missouri.

  Marshall joined other self-invented captains of industry who were arising from one-horse villages throughout the interior. They formed consortiums, printed prospectuses, and overloaded their burgs with grandiloquent names: Herculaneum. Palmyra. Kingdom City. An all-but-nonexistent hamlet on the Mississippi shore, Marion City, was ballyhooed as “the future metropolis of Missouri.” Charles Dickens used it as a setting in Martin Chuzzlewit. Eventually it sank under floodwaters.

  Sammy looked at his father with the same focused intensity that he trained on every object of his fascination. The attention was one-sided. Marshall held himself aloof from his children, except for his oldest son, Orion, whom he recruited at age ten to help out in the general store. He also refused to show any affection for Jane in front of the children, or anyone else. Sammy drew little notice from anyone save Jane. (She may have preferred her children to her husband; she had married him as a spiteful act against another suitor who had infuriated her by a tactless gesture. Jane remained in love with her suitor’s memory for the rest of her long life.)

  Withdrawn, irascible, given to pranks that could border on the mean-spirited, the thin red-haired Sammy lingered at the borders of activity, escaping notice, but noticing.

  Sammy’s scrutiny would confer on “the Judge” the renown, in fiction, that eluded him in fact. Mark Twain found many surrogates for John Marshall Clemens in his books. Nearly all were brooding, somewhat gothic misfits haunted by their lost status as Virginia gentlemen. They ranged from roman à clef (the land-burdened Squire Hawkins who dies in Missouri exile in The Gilded Age), through indulgent satire (the comically imposing Judge Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) through the chilling (the icily honorable duelist, Judge York Driscoll, in Pudd’nhead Wilson).

  In one of his unfinished fiction manuscripts, “Simon Wheeler, Detective,” the writer transports the father of his memory onto the page in iron-plated strokes. “Judge Griswold” is a displaced old-fashioned Virginian. He evokes a whiff of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: tall, spare, with a long, thin, smooth “intellectual” face, “long, black hair that…was kept to the rear by his ears as one keeps curtains back by brackets.” He has “an eagle’s beak and an eagle’s eye.” He is emotionless, a churchgoing nonbeliever. Unfortunately for Marshall, none of these characteristics were offset by good fortune.

  THE CRACKS in Marshall’s grand schemes began to reappear early in 1838. Within two months of his new judgeship he endured the public humiliation of being abandoned by his brother-in-law and business partner, John Quarles. Quarles not only severed
his ties in the store ownership with John, he underlined his displeasure by marching across the street and opening up a competing shop.

  Later that year, Henry, the last of the Clemens’s seven children, was born. Sammy was sixth in line, after Orion, Pamela, Pleasant Hannibal (who died in infancy), Margaret, and Benjamin. After Henry’s birth, Marshall watched in despair as hope receded for Florida’s date with destiny. His navigation company dissolved under the indifference of the state legislature. The railroad and academy initiatives dangled in limbo. A crushing truth grew ever clearer: Marshall had picked the wrong hamlet, missing the right one by ten miles: a village equipped with the regulation-grandiose name of Paris. Paris was the county seat, and it boasted a racetrack. As Paris’s fortunes grew, Florida looked more and more like a backwater. Marshall gradually came to the sickening realization that he would have to sell his house and land, uprooting his family, and start over. Yet again.

  * It has been starchily pointed out that Mark Twain’s famous boast that he came in with Halley’s Comet and would go out with it must not be taken too literally. The comet’s visibility would have peaked in New England for example, on October 16, about six weeks before his birth. The celestial shuttle had not yet peaked by the date of Mark Twain’s death (April 21, 1910). Of course Mark Twain never claimed that his birth and death coincided with maximum visibility of the comet, only that he and it came and left together, which they indubitably did. Some folks just don’t know how to spot a celestial messenger when they see one.

  * In 1897 Clemens wrote that the farm had “fifteen or twenty negroes.” In an interview with a reporter from the New York World in 1891, he had enlarged the farm to a “plantation,” and recalled “forty or fifty Negroes.” But research by the Hannibal historian Terrell Dempsey has confirmed the smaller number—suggesting that there were, at most, eleven slaves, assuming the records are accurate and complete.

  2

  “The White Town, Drowsing…”

  (1839)

  What is an Englishman?” Mark Twain asked himself in an 1883 notebook entry. “A person who does things because they have been done before.” Then he asked, “What is an American (or difference between ’em)” and replied, “A person who does things because they haven’t been done before.”1 By the close of the 1830s, the new republic was fitfully suspended somewhere between those two definitions. Politically independent from Great Britain for nearly sixty years, economically vigorous despite blunders in the banking system, America still lacked an ethos: an inventory of distinctive national ideas in art, music, literature, religion, or learning comparable to the accumulated pedagogy of Europe.

  Some elements of America’s rise to “refinement” were simply acknowledgments of Old World good sense. Full-body bathing, never de rigueur during the Colonial period, finally became commonplace in the cities, and gained acceptance in the rest of the country. Fashionable families adopted the European custom of eating food with a fork, instead of balancing it on the tips of their knives. New England men shaved their faces clean and cropped their hair close about their skulls, in the virtuous Roman style. On the frontier, they let their hair grow long and flowing, but still took a razor to their cheeks. Cultivated Americans went wild over phrenology, and sipped on sarsaparilla, and dined on chicken fricassee. They used ketchup as a medicinal cure.

  A jackleg homegrown folk culture had started to emerge, to be sure. The Fourth of July became the nation’s premier holiday. Wild West shows and wild animal shows toured the land, with Indians hopping around “authentically” and impresarios in gladiator suits shoving their arms into lions’ mouths, and beating them with crowbars if they bit. (Accused of cruelty, the showmen invoked the Bible, a document equally in vogue for keeping slaves in line.) White pop entertainment launched its long, slumming flirtation with Negro style and idiom. In the 1830s, the actor Thomas “Daddy” Rice smeared burnt cork on his face and pranced around in various cities, as the addled, ditty-dancing slave/buffoon “Jim Crow.” In Rice’s crude strut lay the origins of minstrelsy.

  The Christian faith as defined by Europe and Scotland came in for a little nativist tweaking. In the ’30s, the Second Great Awakening swept the country, melting icy Calvinism with the hot breath of American jump-to-Jesus rapture. Passionate, prophetic, evangelical, and focused on the Second Coming, it ushered the faithful out of their somber Puritan pews and into the head-shaking, talking-in-tongues ecstasies of the camp meeting—or, as it was known in west-central New York, near the fashionable town of Elmira, the “tent revival.”

  But it was in the development of a native literature that America found itself most whipsawed by the competing pulls of tradition and radical innovation. By 1839, the first great generation of American men of letters had established its authority in New England. Powerful intellectuals whose prowess extended into science, medicine, the law, and social theory, they honored Harvard College’s two-hundred-year tradition of moral value achieved through the discipline of scholarship and rhetoric, even as they rebelled against its orthodoxies. Their radical Christian theology was influenced by Eastern philosophy: the Hindu Vishnu Sarma, the Persian Desatir, the writings of Confucius, and the sayings of Buddha. It rejected chilly Calvinism, calling instead for a sunnier, liberating faith extracted from the divinity within the personal soul. The New England Transcendentalists felt obliged to bestow the soul-enhancing benefits of eloquence, transcendence, and politeness on the new nation, ready or not. They proposed building a perfect society on the scaffolding of golden sentences.

  The patron of these new secular saints, Ralph Waldo Emerson, unveiled his groundbreaking Transcendentalist vision in two speeches at Harvard. In 1837, Emerson gave his “American Scholar” lecture to the Phi Beta Kappa Society, calling for the common man to free himself from the orthodoxies of dead books, of colleges and institutions, and discover true knowledge within his own instincts and experiences. “We will walk on our own feet,” he famously concluded; “we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds…A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men.”2

  A year later, at Harvard’s Divinity School, the former clergyman laid out similar contours for a new, deinstitutionalized mode of worship. Rejecting denominational Christianity, he suggested that divinity permeated the daily world, and that man’s challenge was to look into himself for the religious impulse that awaited expression. The professors of Harvard expressed their reaction to these sentiments by ostracizing Emerson for thirty years.

  NO 19TH-CENTURY figure better exemplified the worship of the Eastern Literary Man than a self-made intellectual from the West named William Dean Howells.

  Howells would trace his awakening to the night that a Literary Man from the East descended on his Ohio hometown in 1860, when he was twenty-two. The eminence was Bayard Taylor, a poet and adventurer whose books of travel made him one of the best-known authors of his day. Taylor had traveled to Europe in 1844 as a teenager, seeking the sacred ground of Goethe, Byron, Dante, and Milton. He wrote travel letters for the Saturday Evening Post and the United States Gazette to support himself. The book that resulted from these dispatches, Views A-Foot, cemented his reputation. Through the ’50s, Taylor turned out books about his sojourns in California, the Holy Land, Asia Minor, Central Africa, India, Sicily, and Spain. A widely circulated illustration depicted him looking fearless in an Arab burnoose and turban. Now here he was in Columbus, Ohio.

  Howells crashed Taylor’s post-lecture reception. “Heaven knows how I got through the evening,” he wrote in his old age. “I do not think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the West. I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by heart in those days…”3 A year later, Howells would make his own literary pilgrimage, to Boston. Anticipating Sam Clemens by nine ye
ars, Howells planned to drop in on James Russell Lowell at the Atlantic and thank him for printing some of his poems. The great man “had even written me a little note about them, which I wore next to my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out.”4

  Lowell received the young visitor graciously in spite of his congenital Puritan frostiness. Howells was mesmerized by Lowell’s beautiful eyes and by his general “Christ-look.” When the visit ended, Lowell even escorted him “across-lots” toward North Avenue until the pair came to a fence, which Lowell, caught up in the spirit of manly camaraderie, essayed to vault. He succeeded on the third try.

  The visit cracked open a brilliant future for Howells. Lowell invited him to dinner a few days later in an upstairs room at the Parker House, a haven for writers, “at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two.”5 Howells was delightedly shocked to discover that the other guests would be Oliver Wendell Holmes and James T. Fields. As coffee and cognac were served at the end of a four-hour feast, Dr. Holmes smiled at the young man, then remarked to Lowell, “Well, James, this is something like the Apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” The implication was unmistakable: William Dean Howells, the printer’s son late of Martins Ferry and Columbus, Ohio, had been selected as heir apparent to the editorship of America’s premier literary magazine. Howells would join the magazine as an assistant editor in 1866 and succeed Fields as editor in 1871. His influence over American literature for the remainder of the 19th century would be unrivaled.

  THE NEW England Brahmins may have reigned as the high-Anglo literary voice of America, but they did not have the field to themselves. A shadow voice emerged from down in the buckskin-and-cottonfield regions of the country—the “Southwest,” as it was known then, or the South, as it would call itself in a bloody time yet to come. No lofty bouquets to Soul and Nature here; this strain was rough, illicit—and funny: the dark twin of the Boston school. Its purpose was not aesthetic, but political: to defend, by ruthless satire, the interests of the region’s monied classes against a rising tide of populism.