Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The Reader had a further effect on Sammy: it established the primacy of the Bible as a cornerstone of his intellectual edifice—indeed, of his very consciousness. Biblical verses and parables formed the essential texts of the McGuffey’s earliest editions. As he learned language, Sammy internalized the idioms and metaphors of the Scriptures as well. No reading of Mark Twain’s literature can miss the inexhaustible evidence of the Bible as a source.

  By the time of the Civil War, the Readers had effected a social transformation. Largely through their use, the first mass-educated and mass-literate generation in the modern world had come of age. Their surviving letters and diaries reveal an intimacy with English rhetoric and its leading avatars, and an assured, unself-conscious grace in deploying it. The prose of ordinary people generated a folk archive of the period unmatched by personal writing in subsequent generations.

  For Sammy Clemens, reading became metanoiac, life changing. Words became objects of almost physical beauty to him, tooled and precise and as distinct from one another as snowflakes, each with its unique function and value in the universe.

  After a couple of years of tutoring, Sammy moved on to a school for older children organized by an Irish immigrant named Sam Cross. In 1847, at age thirteen, he transferred briefly to John D. Dawson’s school, where he spent parts of a couple of years until the family’s poverty—Marshall was dead by then—forced him to work full-time. His formal education was finished, but his more formative education was just beginning.

  Mark Twain never became a scholar of literature; but he became a passionate amateur scholar of language—his native language and a few others, which he taught himself. An Italian word, he observed while living in Italy, has to be used while it is fresh, “for I find that Italian words do not keep in this climate. They fade towards night, and next morning they are gone.”3 As for German, he advocated eliminating the dative case, requiring it to reorganize the sexes (“in German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has”), and, in general, retaining “Zug” and “Schlag” with their pendants “and discard the rest of the vocabulary. This would simplify the language.”4 Hawaiian he had no use for—“there isn’t anything in it to swear with.”5

  Mark Twain became a stickler for grammar. Perfect grammar was “the fourth dimension,” he said, constantly sought but never found. (“I know grammar by ear only, not by note,” he confessed.)6 He was appalled by the subjunctive: “It brings all our writers to shame.”7 He valued brevity, and indeed his work was seminal in purging American literary English of its heavy Victorian ornamentation. “An average English word is four letters and a half,” he observed, adding that he had shaved down his own vocabulary till the average was three and a half. He adored aphorisms and built them throughout his life. Any language, to him, was a form of music. Even the slightest misuse of his native tongue grated on his ears like a false note in a tune—unless it was in dialect, which had its own laws.

  Mark Twain would show his appreciation for the Readers in the same way that he paid homage to all the literature that moved him as a child—by lampooning them. He upended McGuffey’s pietistic messages in sketches such as “Story of the Bad Little Boy,” whose main character breaks every rule of good conduct with impunity, grows up to attain great wealth by cheating, murders his family with an axe, “and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature”;8 and, “The Story of the Good Little Boy,” whose insufferably straight-arrow protagonist gets (literally) whacked for his smarmy good-deed doings.9

  Perhaps the most powerful evidence of his almost biophysical affinity for language, both read and spoken, was his capacity to remember great swaths of it. Even as a small child he could disgorge entire sections of adventure novels to move along the “plot” of some fantasy enactment with his friends. His rote memorization skills at school became legendary. Some of his best sketches—“Sociable Jimmy,” “A True Story Just as I Heard It”—are, if not virtual transcriptions of recollected dialogue, masterful approximations of it.

  Sammy’s other principal source for reading and memorization skills was the Bible. As a boy, he absorbed the Scriptures’ verses uncritically; he groped torturously through their implications, with increasing fury and despair, for all of his adult life.

  But his attitude toward the Bible, as he navigated the treacherous seas of his adulthood, transmuted itself into a kind of rage. He used it as a literary image, to emphasize the grotesque horror of a shooting, describing how “some thoughtful idiot” had spread it across the chest of a man dying from a gunshot wound.10 He turned the figure of Satan into an ambiguous hero, and Adam and Eve into characters in a proto–situation comedy. At the height of his fury, he castigated the Good Book as nothing more than a vessel of “blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.”11 He unleashed similar invective on the works of Fenimore Cooper and Walter Scott, who were other important sources of his enchantment as a boy. This suggested, perhaps, that the sense of romantic estrangement which so deeply haunted him was not so much from the religion and literature he’d cherished as a child, but from childhood itself.

  THAT CHILDHOOD was laced with terror and loss. In May 1842 another Clemens child, this time nine-year-old Benjamin, fell suddenly ill and died, seemingly from the same “bilious fever” that had claimed his sister years earlier. Three of Marshall and Jane’s seven children were now in their graves. Marshall contained his grief under his well-worn armor of stoicism. Jane, who lived on passion, gave way to helpless keening, as she had after Margaret died. In her throes, she led her surviving children one by one into the bedroom where Benjamin’s corpse lay. There, she made each of them kneel beside the body and place a hand on its cheek. No explanation for this gesture survives. It may have been an artifact of mourning ritual learned in her Kentucky girlhood. It may have been a desperate gesture of farewell.

  For the high-strung Sammy, already saddled with Jane’s belief that he possessed “second sight,” the forced touching seems to have carried darkly mystical implications. He never forgot it. Moreover, he linked this ghoulish memory with the conviction that Benjamin’s death was somehow his fault. Half a century later, he jotted an entry in his notebook that read: “Dead brother Ben. My treachery to him.” In “Villagers of 1840–3,” which he composed in 1897, he wrote, speaking unmistakably of himself and his family, but with the veneer of fictional characters,* “The mother made the children feel the cheek of the dead boy, and tried to make them understand the calamity that had befallen. The case of memorable treachery” (emphasis added).12

  “IF CHRIST were here now,” reads an entry in Mark Twain’s notebook, “There is one thing he would not be—a Christian.” The seeds of this contempt for scriptural faith were planted a year into the family’s mourning of Benjamin, when Jane Clemens found that she could no longer do without the solace of church attendance. She joined a congregation, leaving Marshall stubbornly ensconced at home with his deist musings. Jane marched to church every Sunday, the four children in tow. Now the “imprinting” of the Bible’s influence on Sammy was intensified by the trauma and the torpor of Sunday mornings in the pews.

  It was not his first exposure to the faith, strictly speaking. Jane had enrolled him in a Methodist Sunday school almost as soon as the family arrived in town, and soon the boy was blandly memorizing and reciting biblical verses along with the rest of the small inmates in the church basement. But Jane’s call to worship gave him his first taste of the ecclesiastical big leagues. In the Presbyterian church his mother chose, a more soul-sobering production of weekly apocalyptic theater probably did not exist.

  Presbyterianism was the un-Transcendentalism of the early 19th century. No sunny optimism in its tenets, no cheery vision of liberating faith built on the divinity within the personal soul. Presbyterians derived from an older and chillier strain of worship in the New World, and from a blood-soaked era of Christian rebellion in Europe before that—the Reformation. They refused to believe t
hat sinfulness could be absolved through ceremony and incantation. Far from the Emersonian notion of man’s personal divinity, Presbyterians believed in the cold, absolute sovereignty of God’s will. Sinners were doomed to Hell. In sum, the Presbyterianism of the dank Scottish moors belonged to nearly every iron-plated spiritual concept that the poet-mystics of Concord and Boston were trying to abolish.†

  Sammy absorbed the bad news every Sunday. He later entertainingly disgorged his visual and aural memories of it all—the high pulpit with the red plush pillow for the Bible, the stiff wooden pews, the “melodeon,” or primitive organ; the caterwauling choir, the dozing oldsters, and his scattered fellow captives, the other boys, their spitballs at the ready, grateful for the diversion of a dog sitting down on the stinging warhead of a pinch bug—and getting up again.

  But the abrasions of what he heard there never healed. Here was a religion seemingly designed in heaven that reinforced all of a nervous child’s worst fears. Unless you were one of the “elect,” ran the preacher’s constant message, there was no hope—you were categorically contaminated by sin. But you should still try to be good and cultivate the Moral Sense, on the off chance that God had elected you. A boy who already felt himself guilty for the death of his brother could conceivably take that kind of message to heart.

  SAMMY’S CHURCH attendance also exposed him to the “Bible defense of slavery”—a burgeoning industry in the two decades running up to the Civil War.

  The First Presbyterian had not always been a clearinghouse for proslavery propaganda. The church was organized in 1832 by a doctor and minister named David Nelson, a Tennessean who struggled with the moral implications of slaveholding. His temperate views did not, at first, antagonize the local slaveholders, who tolerated the (segregated) presence of slaves in the congregation starting in 1833. All of that changed in 1835, the year of Sammy’s birth, when Nelson suddenly declared himself an abolitionist. This was not a shrewd career move in Missouri. Soon his pamphleteering followers were being run out of the state by mobs. In 1836, Nelson himself triggered a riot while preaching abolition in the village of Palmyra, thirteen miles northwest of Hannibal. He narrowly escaped capture and imprisonment—or worse—and fled across the Mississippi River to Illinois. There, he founded an antislavery academy called the Mission School near Quincy.

  By the time the Clemenses joined the church, it was solidly proslavery. The new minister, the Rev. Joshua Tucker, was perfectly happy to circulate the growing number of tracts, written and published in the slaveholding South, that explained how the institution of slavery was God’s will.

  “MAN IS without any doubt the most intriguing fool there is,” Mark Twain wrote in 1909. “Also the most eccentric. He hasn’t a single written law, in his Bible or out of it, which has any but just one purpose and intention—to limit or defeat a law of God.”

  “[Man] concedes that God gives to each man his temperament, his disposition, at birth; he concedes that man cannot by any process change this temperament, but must remain always under its dominion. Yet if it be full of dreadful passions, in one man’s case, and barren of them in another man’s, it is right and rational to punish the one for his crimes, and reward the other for abstaining from the crime.”13

  In Mark Twain’s autobiography, God comes across like an avenging hit man. “I was educated, I was trained, I was a Presbyterian and I knew how these things are done,” Mark Twain seethes. “I knew that in Biblical times if a man committed a sin the extermination of the whole surrounding nation—cattle and all—was likely to happen. I knew that Providence was not particular about the rest, so that He got somebody connected with the one He was after.”14 Near the close of his life he still could not put it to rest. To his biographer, he quoted an old minister who declared that “Presbyterianism without infant damnation would be like the dog on the train that couldn’t be identified because it had lost its tag.”15

  Yet strong evidence suggests that Mark Twain never could quite outrun the Christian faith. He remained a dutiful Presbyterian believer, at least until 1858 when a cataclysmic holocaust on the Mississippi River took the life of a beloved sibling. In the darkness of his private grieving after that, and even into his hard-drinking and hell-raising days as a wild journalist in the West, he toyed with the notion of becoming a preacher. In the long and grief-laced nights of his later years, even as he fulminated against a pitiless, depraved Christian God; brought Satan forward as a central figure in his tales; and secretly compiled the texts that would fully declare his apostasy after his death, Mark Twain seemed often to behave toward that God less like a coldhearted nonbeliever than like a jilted lover. His torment was Job’s torment, the transitory agony of one driven from the comforts of orthodox faith, who seeks a new faith system to fill the void.

  * The author of the Reader, William H. McGuffey, was well-suited to this sensibility. Born in 1800 in Pennsylvania, he taught himself to read, and succeeded well enough that he was teaching in rural Ohio schools by the age of thirteen. In 1826 he joined the faculty of Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, and began to think about public education. He turned his house into a model school for children in his neighborhood, and in observing them, formulated the basic principles of his Reader: that teachers should develop an intimate, “conversational,” but demanding relationship with their pupils, and that children’s reading skills should be built on a foundation of “wholesome” values: patriotism, charity, honesty, hard work, and a reverence for the Christian God.

  * The Clemenses are the only fictionally named family (the “Carpenters”) in “Villagers,” which Mark Twain obviously compiled as reference notes for possible future works. It lists and describes more than a hundred citizens of antebellum Hannibal from a perspective of forty-four years.

  † Theology aside, Presbyterianism left its mark in the New World in one towering, fundamental way: it formed the model for American representative democratic government. John Knox adapted John Calvin’s antipapist scheme of “voluntary associations,” organizing his churches as little communities whose elders—“presbyters”—were elected by the laity. These local councils fed into regional bodies, called synods, which in turn sent representatives to national groups, or General Assemblies. This grassroots system of churchly self-government, imported to the colonies in America by the Puritans, became the template for political self-government eventually enshrined in the Constitution of 1789.

  4

  The Hannibal Decade

  (1843–53)

  As the dogwood blossomed on the forested hills around Hannibal in 1843, Sammy Clemens began to live the ten most imaginatively fertile years of his life. The “Hannibal Decade,” as it has been called, influenced most of his literature.

  At age seven, he found a circle of boys his own age and became its animating force, appointing himself scriptwriter and director of all make-believe escapades. His lieutenant was a natural-born sidekick named Will Bowen, a year younger and one of seven children. Their father, a Tennessean named Samuel Bowen, was a fire insurance agent and warehouse owner. The Bowen family lived in a wing of that warehouse a block or so from the Virginia House. Drawing on the tales of Sir Walter Scott, Fenimore Cooper, and the legends of Robin Hood, which he had virtually memorized, Sammy assigned roles and dialogue to everyone. Will usually played the Terror of the Seas to Sammy’s Black Avenger of the Spanish Main. Sammy always reserved the star turn for himself. He demanded accuracy, just as Tom Sawyer demanded of “Joe Harper.”*

  Tom called:

  “Hold! Who comes here into Sherwood Forest without my pass?”

  “Guy of Guisborne wants no man’s pass. Who are thou that—that—”

  —“Dares to hold such language,” said Tom, prompting—for they talked “by the book,” from memory.

  “Who are thou that dares to hold such language?”

  “I, indeed! I am Robin Hood, as thy caitiff carcase soon shall know.”

  “Then art thou indeed that famous outlaw? Right gladly will I dispute wit
h thee the passes of the merry wood. Have at thee!”…

  So they “went it lively,” panting and perspiring with the work. By and by Tom shouted:

  “Fall! fall! Why don’t you fall?”

  “I shan’t! Why don’t you fall yourself? You’re getting the worst of it.”

  “Why that ain’t anything. I can’t fall; that ain’t the way it is in the book. The book says ‘Then with one back-handed stroke he slew poor Guy of Guisborne.’ You’re to turn around and let me hit you in the back.”

  There was no getting around the authorities, so Joe turned, received the whack and fell.1

  Samuel Clemens kept up his friendship with Will Bowen until Bowen’s death in 1893. Clemens greeted him in a famous 1870 letter as “My First, & Oldest & Dearest Friend,”2 a letter that went on to virtually announce the stirrings of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This loyalty, even when separated by decades, half a continent, and the oceanic difference in their life fortunes, was deeply characteristic: Clemens held friendship as a value of nearly sacred proportions. The most convincing—if paradoxical—proof of this lay in his well-known rages and vendettas against people who he felt had betrayed his trust. “You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men and he did not mind,” William Dean Howells recalled, “…but if he thought you had in any way played him false, you were anathema and maranatha forever.”3