by Ron Powers
The genre originated in newspapers throughout the South. It spread to books. It took the form of grotesquely comic sketches and tales. The main characters enacted the Southern gentry’s worst nightmare, pollution of the aristocracy by the backwoods rabble. They were a gothic assortment: violent, coarse, drunken; they were confidence men, brutish adolescents, addled Bible-thumpers. Their names gave fair warning: Sut Lovingood, Simon Suggs, Ransey Sniffle, Flan Sucker. They brawled, boozed, leered, tricked, lusted, and eye-gouged their way through story after story. Their exploits fanned the economic and class anxieties that were widening the rift between North and South in the quarter-century leading up to the Civil War. The authors of the so-called “Southwestern humor” tales were not usually writers by calling, though many of them proved gifted within the bare-knuckle conceits of their genre. They were politically engaged newspaper publishers, doctors, lawyers—men who supported the aristocracy and the reactionary politicians who kept things nicely stratified.
A pair of stylistic devices—two contrasting “voices”—saved these tales from being merely disgusting, and allowed readers to be entertained. The first voice was that of the ruffians themselves. Coarse, ungrammatical, thickly vernacular, rendered in clunky phonetic spelling, it was the seductively comic voice of the id. “I jist lent him a slatharin calamity,” recalls Sut Lovingood about a fight he’d once picked for no particular reason,
rite whar his nose commenced a sproutin frum atween his eyes, wif a ruff rock about the size ove a goose aig. Hit fotch ’im!…I jumped hed fust through, atween his belly an’ the pole; my heft broke his holt, an’ we cum to the ground a-fitin…the fust thing I did, was tu shut my jaws ontu a mouthful ove his steak, ni ontu the place wher yer foot itches to go when yu ar in kickin distance ove a fop…I thot ove a box ove matches what I hed in my pocket, so I foch the whole boxful a rake ontu the gravil, an’ stuffed em all a-blazin inter one ove the pockets in his coat-tail…I no’d he’d soon show strong signs ove wantin tu go. So the fust big rare he fotch arter the fire reached his hide, I jist let my mouth fly open—so—an’ he went! his hole tail in a blaze!6
The second voice in these stories was the antithesis of the first. This was the smooth, grammatical, cool, and subtly disdainful voice of the “teller” within the story: the suave gentleman, no doubt a Southern Whig exactly like the reader, who begins the sketch by engaging in conversation with Suggs or Sniffle or Lovingood, and elicits the rough tale that forms the great middle of the piece. This supercilious voice provides the story’s indispensable “frame,” the point-of-view space that narrator and reader share, in an unspoken but obviously disapproving alliance against the lowlife telling the story. As it gained popularity throughout the Southwest, attracting imitators and recycling itself through the pages of a hundred local weeklies, the “frame story” accomplished its political work of hardening gentrified public opinion against the white-trash underclass. But it accomplished a contradictory and unintended effect as well.
The Suggs/Sniffle/Lovingood “voice” transcended its narrow political agenda. It made people laugh, not just in derision at the grotesques who slouched through the stories, but in recognition of parts of the human condition. It offered a compendium of folk customs—horse races, revivals, shooting matches, courtship rituals, quilting bees. It noted the clothes people wore and the food they ate. And with blithe equal-opportunity malice, it lampooned a whole universe of American types: the preacher, the Yankee peddler, the old wife, the pompous merchant, the rough but morally sensate youth.
What Southwestern frame humor lacked was legitimacy. No one had transplanted its rich vernacular energy or its gleeful grassroots realism into stories of deeper moral complexity. The New England arbiters of enlightenment would not allow these muddy boots inside the foyer. It remained a regional entertainment, its universal power awaiting the maturity of a small boy on the Missouri prairie.
That boy’s father, still reeling from the Panic of 1837, saw a notice in the February 27, 1839, edition of a small paper called Peake’s Commercial Advertiser. Property was available in a larger and growing village, called Hannibal, some forty miles to the northeast, on the banks of a great river. A great river! A town on the rise! Here at last was a can’t-miss opportunity! Marshall contacted the seller, one Big Ira Stout, and began trying to scrape together the purchase price. But before the Clemenses left Florida, Jane and Marshall’s nine-year-old daughter, Margaret, died on August 17, 1839, after suffering from an attack of “bilious fever.”
Jane, who had already lost one baby and was struggling to keep another child alive, went hysterical. Her wailing and invocations of the paranormal world were observed by her children. Orion, then fourteen, swore later that he witnessed an eerie gesture from little Sammy in the early phase of Margaret’s illness: as Orion sat beside his sister’s bed one evening, Sammy came floating into the room, fast asleep. He placed his hands on Margaret’s blanket and fidgeted with it for a few moments, then drifted off again.
Sammy’s actions, real or imagined, conformed to a ritual enshrined in Kentucky superstition: a gesture of second sight known as “plucking the coverlet” of someone who was soon to die. After Margaret succumbed several days later, Jane became convinced that Sammy possessed psychic power. For all his later worldliness and rejections of belief in a Christian god, Mark Twain retained similar suspicions. In later years he would experiment in communicating with his dead brother Henry through psychics.
Had the Clemenses understood the actual origins of Margaret’s affliction, they would have perceived an omen rooted in human, not paranormal affairs. “Bilious fever”—yellow fever—was a terrifyingly common frontier disease whose sources were murky. A viral infection that attacks the liver, it remains untreatable to this day, although there are now preventive vaccines. A Philadelphia doctor in 1798, groping for explanations for a recent epidemic of the fever in that city, noticed that it had broken out shortly after a ship, transporting slaves to America from the West Indies, docked and released the “foul air” stored up in its hold.
Years later, a fuller understanding emerged. It wasn’t the “foul air” itself that transmitted the disease, but what lived in that air: a mosquito, native to the rain forests of central and coastal Africa, the regions in which the slave traders did most of their harvesting. The mosquito was a hardy traveler. Margaret Clemens was likely killed by the same Peculiar Institution that had helped attract her father to Florida.
IN NOVEMBER of that year, a couple of weeks before Sammy’s fourth birthday, Marshall Clemens completed his plans. He negotiated a land deal with Ira Stout in Hannibal: he would sell Stout, for $3,000, more than 160 acres of his land holdings around Florida. In return, Stout would sell Clemens a 9,000-square-foot city block, for $7,000. Marshall recovered $2,000 of his capital a few days later, when he sold Stout an additional 326 Florida acres.
Hannibal, chartered as a town by the state just that spring, had 1,000 citizens. Marshall and Jane gathered their possessions (including Jenny, the last of their slaves), and their children: Orion, 14; Pamela, 12; Benjamin, 7; Sam; and Henry, aged 16 months.
The family’s first lodging in Hannibal was the Virginia House, a rickety wood-frame structure on Marshall’s new block of property a few dozen yards from the Mississippi riverbank. The Virginia House was a hotel, technically speaking, and Marshall hoped to draw revenue from its guests. His family occupied the second floor while, on the first, he established yet another grocery and dry-goods store. The problem was that at the time of the Clemenses’ arrival, Hannibal was neither a tourist mecca nor a national crossroads. It certainly didn’t need another general store. The action lay in sawmilling and hog slaughtering. Three mills processed local timber into boards for building permanent houses to replace log cabins. Hogs jostled dogs for primacy on the dirt streets. The hogs were driven by farmers to the pair of new pork-packing plants in town. Their hides ended up at the nearby tanyard, where they were cured for processing into shoes, boots, and saddles.
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While Jane set up housekeeping, Marshall invested $2,000, on credit, toward purchase of foodstuffs and dry goods from a string of wholesalers in St. Louis, 120 miles down the river. He installed Orion behind the counter. If Marshall had overlooked any possible danger of success, his hiring of Orion made things airtight. As he grew more desperate, Marshall borrowed money from his wife’s relatives. Still, nothing worked. The new town was shaping up as just another stop on a winding trail of failure.
MEANWHILE, SAMMY took stock of his new surroundings. He saw a different realm entirely. He saw a heavenly place—as he later wrote—for a boy. There was so much, after the torpor of Florida, to excite his mind: the bustle of a town under construction; gable-roofed cottages, shops, and stables taking shape under the whine of sawmill blades and the percussion of hammer on nail. The clanging from the blacksmiths’ forges, the pig squeals, and the loud voices of the men in the riverfront bars. All of it was contained in a tidy little square of municipal plotting, with five streets parallel to the river, ending with Main Street nearest to the water’s edge. The Virginia House stood at Hill and Main, just yards from the shoreline.
The river meant everything to the town. It carried away tobacco, hemp, pork, and whiskey, and brought back cash. It offered a continuing vaudeville of floating humanity: the solitary canoeists—trappers, Indians—gliding past the town on the tide; the raftsmen and flatboatmen and the keelboatmen. Mark Twain could never stop describing the Mississippi as seen through Sammy’s eyes. “The hungry Mississippi…astonished the children beyond measure,” he wrote in his first long work of fiction. “Its mile-breadth of water seemed an ocean to them…and the vague riband of trees on the further shore, the verge of a continent which surely none but they had ever seen before.”7
Nothing compared to the featured attraction. First the deep coughing of the engines from perhaps a mile distant. Then a series of whistle blasts that echoed off the hillsides. Then the emergence from behind the bluff of the towering white emissary from Somewhere most unmistakably Else: first the prow of the three-tiered superstructure, the thirty-foot smokestacks pumping plumes of soot into the air; the high pilothouse and a figure at the knobbed wheel, staring ahead through the unglassed window; and then the rest of the boat’s curving three-hundred-foot length, festooned with fluttering banners, pennants, the American flag; the boat’s name written in bright decorative script across the paddle-wheel casing to break the whiteness.
If the steamboat docked at the levee, an expanse of inlaid stones, a landlocked local could glimpse a civilization unimaginable to one bred on the prairie at the nation’s far rim: a civilization of chandeliers, brass fittings, draperied windows, and gold-framed mirrors; of red velvet carpets and gilded saloons and skylights of colored glass; a civilization of oil paintings and calliopes and great stacked bales of cotton to be exchanged somewhere for great stacks of money. A civilization inhabited by astounding diverse creatures. Strolling the decks or stepping onto the levee to stretch their legs were Southern planters in striped frock coats and wide-brimmed hats, their wives nearly invisible under deep bonnets, their floor-length silk dresses expanded by petticoat and restrained by corset; immigrants newly arrived from Europe at New Orleans; perfumed French merchants and high-hatted British speculators; expressionless gamblers in their ruffled blouses and jackets with velvet piping; mustachioed military men; assorted divines, actors, whores, circus troupes, politicians, trappers with their sidearms handy.
Sammy Clemens, who lived a block from the river, regularly took in the show. Yet he showed remarkable restraint—he did not try to hitch a ride on a riverboat until he was nine.
LIFE INSIDE the Clemens household was a lot less enchanting. Marshall’s hopeless business instincts had sandbagged him again: Stout had inveigled him into some sort of indebtedness that effectively ended any dreams of prosperity. Mark Twain in his autobiographical dictations implied that Stout had bankrupted his father by refusing to repay a loan. This is unprovable in surviving records, but something had happened that deepened Marshall’s debt, and the humiliation of penury loomed.
Marshall grew bony, spectral; Sammy later recalled the Judge’s “eagle’s beak and an eagle’s eye.” He enforced discipline among his children, mostly by the power of his barely suppressed rage. A deist, he disdained churchgoing, and for a while, the family remained unaffiliated. His idea of a great evening consisted in reading poetry aloud to the family in an inflectionless voice. (Sammy developed a shrewd ear for bad poetry, and parodied it mercilessly later on.)
Outside the household, Marshall spearheaded new committees, tried to practice law, got himself elected justice of the peace in 1844, watched his store slowly strangle, and hoped that his Tennessee land would finally become desirable and make his fortune. Whatever anxieties rattled through the family may have worked their way into Sammy’s own consciousness. He was a remote, erratic little boy, with a wicked eye for the ways in which a desperate household betrayed itself—with its shabby décor, for instance; oilcloth window curtains with “pictures on them of castles such as had never been seen anywhere in the world but on window-curtains.”8
He suffered nightmares. His sleepwalking continued. He was prone to convulsions. Not until he was seven did he enjoy the health of a normal child. Jane and Sammy seemed to feed on each other’s hair-trigger nerves. Sammy would slip bats and snakes into her sewing basket; she told him tales of brutal and sadistic Indian attacks on her mother’s people. A loathing of Indians, or at least of Fenimore Cooper’s fictitious noble savages, was the one racial prejudice that Mark Twain could never shake off.
He escaped the oppressive household at every opportunity. Out in the world, he took extravagant physical risks, a lifelong predilection. He ventured onto the frozen Mississippi in winter and cavorted on its heaving ice floes. Dangerous water drew him; he dived into the depths of Bear Creek, which emptied into the Mississippi. The fact that he could not swim did not seem to matter; he recalls having been rescued from drowning seven or nine times. One of these episodes prompted Jane’s famous wisecrack that “[p]eople born to be hanged are safe in water.”
Sammy discovered another means of escape shortly after his family arrived in Hannibal. He learned to read.
3
Of Words and the Word
(1840–42)
His learning process began well before his fifth birthday, in the spring of 1840, when Jane installed him in a “dame school” in Hannibal. Dame schools, classes taught by women in their homes, were a new phenomenon in the country. Previously, most teachers had been men who, on their way into careers as ministers or lawyers, would spend a year or two as schoolmasters as a way of paying their dues in the community.
Sammy’s first dame school convened in a little log structure on the southern flank of town, near Bear Creek. After a year or so Jane moved him on to a “Select School” conducted in a church basement. The teacher, who had known the Clemenses in Florida, boarded for a time in the family’s household, where she watched Sammy compulsively steal sugar, and get his knuckles rapped for it, at the dining table. This was Miss Mary Ann Newcomb, who taught Sam Clemens to read. Her granddaughters reported that she always recalled the Clemens household with gentle respect. Jane “was an intellectual woman,” whose wit and humor Sammy inherited. Marshall was “a courteous, well-educated gentleman,” admittedly not practical, but “a good conversationalist.”1 Overall, she never heard any grumbling in the household despite its straitened circumstances.
Mark Twain graciously returned this esteem years later, by making Miss Newcomb the model for the character Mrs. Bangs in his unfinished manuscript, “Autobiography of a Damned Fool.” Here she is “a very thin, tall Yankee person, who came west when she was thirty, taught school nine years in our town, and then married…She had ringlets, and a long sharp nose, and thin, colorless lips, and you could not tell her breast from her back if she had her head up a stovepipe hole…”2 He also made her the model for the fussy Miss Watson in Adventures of Huck
leberry Finn.
Learning to read was by no means an inevitable skill for Sammy. He was a restless child, hated school, spent a lot of his class time daydreaming, and finished his “formal” education by age twelve. Had he been exposed to the standard, Puritan-inspired manner of instruction—rote memorization, as modeled by the New England Primer that appeared in 1686—his edgy attention may well have wandered to the leafy hills outside the schoolhouse window, as it did during other subjects. But a new text for teaching literacy was just being hawked by subscription salesmen across America. Its popularity doomed the Primer to the dustbin in nearly every city and town where it showed up. McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers would take their place in the pantheon of American brands, along with Coca-Cola and Ford.
The Reader perfectly fit Mark Twain’s trope on American style: it did something that hadn’t been done before. This was the first schoolbook that conformed to the child’s cognitive strengths, rather than the adult’s didactic habits.* McGuffey’s Reader made literacy available by mass production after two centuries as a special privilege of the elite.
Before the McGuffey’s Reader, sons and daughters of the wealthy and the devout were drilled by tutors in a long, slogging metronomic march from letters of the alphabet, to syllables, to words, and finally to phrases. The classic medium for this method was the “horn book”—a sheet of paper with printed alphabet letters, a few short words, and a biblical verse. The paper was fixed to a paddle-shaped wooden board and protected by a sheet of transparent antler horn. The child literally wore the book—attached to his belt by a cord tied to the paddle’s handle—to memorize any time the urge hit him. The McGuffey’s Reader changed all that. Its methods were practical enough that just about anyone could teach them to a child. McGuffey’s drew the child into an active process, as opposed to passive memorization. In its advanced editions, McGuffey’s opened up a larger universe of contemporary writing. The Fourth Reader offered Daniel Defoe and Louisa May Alcott, for example; the Fifth, Charles Dickens, James Russell Lowell, James Fenimore Cooper.