Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

Jane saw to it that Sammy remained in school, and sent him each summer to his uncle’s farm at Florida. Of his playmates there, he recalled, “All the negroes were friends of ours, and with those of our own age we were in effect comrades. I say, in effect, using the phrase as a modification. We were comrades, and yet not comrades; color and condition interposed a subtle line which both parties were conscious of, and which rendered complete fusion impossible.”26

  DUAL IDENTITY—the divided self, the self transposed, two selves inhabiting the same body—formed a central theme in Mark Twain’s literature. To look into his father’s life is to confront the fountainhead of this vision. The extraordinary twins conjoined in Marshall Clemens’s frame were contradictory almost beyond caricature. One was the Judge: an educated, eloquent, ambitious man, claimant to British peerage; a natural civic leader, apostle of the Southern honor code, a visionary of the America to come. He held the power of life and death over other men: as justice of the peace, he prepared depositions in the trial of William Owsley, the murderer of Sam Smarr. (Owsley was acquitted.) In his Hannibal courtroom, a small space on Bird Street, he once subdued a plaintiff with a mallet blow to the head after the man had fired off a pepper-pot revolver. This version of Marshall Clemens reigned as a titan in Sammy’s consciousness.

  The Judge’s aims were constantly thwarted by Marshall, the proud idealist and frustrated intellectual whose honor code was exploited by lesser, stupider men; who wrecked his health at an early age, married a woman vengefully on the rebound, proved too visionary by a century in his greatest land investment, stood behind bad loans, paid his debts, forgave his creditors, and thus remained poor for most of his life.

  The Judge had his moments of intersection with history, however. In 1841 he sat on a jury in a trial that amplified the virulence of Missouri’s proslavery passions before the eyes of the nation. Only the United States Supreme Court’s Dred Scott ruling in 1857 (which nullified the Missouri Compromise’s restrictions on slavery and held that slaves could never become U.S. citizens) surpassed it in the annals of Missouri slave litigation. The trial, held at Palmyra, decided the fates of three Christian abolitionists who had crossed the Mississippi from Illinois in search of slaves to spirit back across the river to freedom. The men, James Burr, George Thompson, and Alanson Work, were captured by vigilantes alerted by the slaves themselves, who thought the strangers might be tricksters trying to get them into trouble. The trial ended with prison sentences of twelve years for each man. The stacked nature of the trial and the harshness of the penalty attracted attention as far away as William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery abolitionist paper the Liberator in Boston, and the Observer in Hartford.

  The move into the house at 206 Hill Street in 1843, bankrolled by James Clemens Jr., relieved the family of its anxiety over shelter, for a while. Marshall opened his law office near Hill and Main. He bought a piano for Pamela who by now was giving lessons in piano and guitar. “The Judge” helped organize the Hannibal Library Institute, and provided most of its books. He promoted a Masonic college for Hannibal. Nobody was interested.

  Jane’s and Sammy’s affection for each other deepened in these years, as did her influence on his character. She gamely suffered the red-haired boy’s habitual mischief—dosing a cat with a painkiller, fidgeting with pinch bugs in church, tricking her into standing up for Satan as a victim of bad luck. She reinforced Sammy’s enchantment with language. Mark Twain marveled at the “unstudied and unconscious pathos” of her native speech. When stirred to indignation “she was the most eloquent person I have heard speak.”27 He added:

  It was seldom eloquence of a fiery or violent sort, but gentle, pitying, persuasive, appealing; and so genuine and so nobly and simply worded and so touchingly uttered, that many times I have seen it win the reluctant and splendid applause of tears….28

  These were the days of the circuses and the mesmerizers; the heyday of Sammy’s larking gang. These were the days when Sammy encountered Anna Laura Hawkins, late of Kentucky—or, as she became in her incarnation as “Becky Thatcher,” the “lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited into two long tails, white summer frock and embroidered pantalettes.”29 The model for the heroine of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of ten children of a prosperous farmer who kept a trim white frame house in town opposite 206 Hill Street. Laura remembered Sammy as a caper-cutting barefoot boy with “fuzzy light curls all over his head that really ought to have belonged to a girl.”30 She also recalled that “Sam and I used to play together like two girls.”

  IN 1846, the Clemens family hit rock bottom. Marshall had sued William Beebe—who now owned a store near the levee—in 1843 over the outstanding notes regarding Jennie. He was awarded damages from them, but (being Marshall) was only able to realize some tin plates, sacks of salt, a screw press, some barrels, and a nine-year-old Negro girl. Marshall got John Quarles to try to collect on a $300 note, which pushed Beebe’s nose out of joint. The slave trader got possession of a $290.55 debt claim on Marshall from a local storekeeper and, in August 1846, he gleefully sued Marshall back. Marshall’s luck held true, as the judge awarded Beebe not only the amount of the debt, but also $126.50 in damages. A week before Christmas, the trader pressured the court to order the sheriff to sell off the “goods and chattels and real estate” of John Marshall Clemens toward payment of the award.31

  The sheriff could find nothing to sell. Marshall had foreseen the move and evacuated his family from the little house at 206 Hill Street, surrendering its title back to his cousin James in St. Louis. James rented the house to Dr. Hugh Meredith and his two elderly unmarried sisters. The Clemenses’ humiliation was complete. They accepted lodgings offered by the druggist Orville Grant across the street, just downhill from the prosperous Hawkins family. This was the same building—it still stands in Hannibal—where Sam Smarr had died from his gunshot wound. Jane cooked the Grants’ meals and washed their clothes. Pamela salvaged the family’s weather-beaten piano and continued giving lessons to help keep her family afloat.

  Mark Twain found punitive use for William Beebe in his late, unfinished fiction, casting him as slave trader Bat Bradish in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy and alluding to “the nigger-trader” in “Schoolhouse Hill.”

  In March 1847, Marshall Clemens saddled a horse and made the thirteen-mile trip to Palmyra on court business. On his way home he was overtaken by a sleet storm and contracted pneumonia. He lay abed in Dr. Grant’s drugstore for about two weeks. Orion came home from St. Louis. As delirium set in, Marshall’s mind returned to the Tennessee land and the hope it had represented. “I am leaving you in cruel poverty,” Mark Twain has Judge Hawkins gasp as he dies in The Gilded Age. “But courage! A better day is—is coming. Never lose sight of the Tennessee Land!…There is wealth for you there—wealth that is boundless!”32

  In his final moments, on March 24, 1847, Marshall Clemens reached out to Pamela and kissed her (“for the first time, no doubt,” Mark Twain notes in “Villagers”) and then sank back to die. He was forty-nine. Missouri had not worked out after all.

  John Marshall Clemens’s personal catastrophes never dimmed his civic visions. In November 1846, in the throes of his collapse at the hands of Beebe, Marshall had chaired a committee of businessmen pushing for a railroad from Hannibal westward to St. Joseph. The Hannibal & St. Joseph Railroad was chartered in 1847 and completed in 1859. It ushered in a boomtown epoch that lasted three-quarters of a century. Fortunes were created as pine logs, harvested in the Northern forests and floated down the Mississippi, were sawed into lumber in one of Hannibal’s several mills, stacked onto freight trains and transported west for house building in the newly populous territories.

  The railroad that arose posthumously from Marshall Clemens’s vision created more wealth in Hannibal than would ever be converted from his son’s literary reputation.

  A FOUNDATION stone of the Mark Twain myth involves a scene in which Jane leads the eleven-year-old Sammy to the side of his dead father’s bed. Paine gives it
a hagiographic glow.

  “Here by the side of him now,”33 Jane told Sammy; she needed a promise.

  He turned, his eyes streaming with tears, and flung himself into her arms.

  “I will promise anything,” he sobbed, “if you won’t make me go to school. Anything!”

  His mother held him for a moment, thinking, then she said:

  “No, Sammy; you need not go to school any more. Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.”

  So he promised her to be a faithful and industrious man, and upright, like her father. His mother was satisfied with that. The sense of honor and justice was already strong within him. To him a promise was a serious matter at any time; made under conditions like these it would be held sacred.34

  This account, with its Victorian flourishes, has become suspect in certain critical circles. But in an 1885 interview with the Chicago Inter-Ocean, Jane Clemens described a scene that, while different in some respects, confirms the essence of Paine’s account. She said in part:

  …[A]nd when Sam’s father died…I thought then, if ever, was the proper time to make a lasting impression on the boy and work a change in him, so I took him by the hand and went with him into the room where the coffin was…and with it between Sam and me I said to him that here in this presence I had some serious requests to make of him, and I knew his word once given was never broken. For Sam never told a falsehood. He turned his streaming eyes upon me and cried out, “Oh mother, I will do anything, anything you ask of me except go to school; I can’t do that!” That was the very request I was going to make. Well, we afterward had a sober talk, and I concluded to let him go into a printing office to learn the trade, as I couldn’t have him running wild. He did so, and has gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who were more studious in early life.35

  To say the least.

  Whether or not Sammy’s promise changed him, guilt hung like a fog around Mark Twain’s memories of his boyhood. He blamed himself for nearly every calamity that happened to others. But what had he ever done?

  A couple of provocative explanations for Mark Twain’s guilt arise from the records. The first is the enigmatic matter of “the autopsy.” Twain alluded to “the autopsy” twice, each time with an obvious self-distancing. In “Villagers,” he appends the two words to the bottom of his long entry regarding “Judge Carpenter.” In his notebook entry of October 10, 1903, Twain wrote: “1847. Witnessed post mortem of my uncle through keyhole.”

  This may be an oblique way of recording that Sammy saw his father’s body cut open with a knife employed by the family physician, Dr. Hugh Meredith.

  What was Dr. Meredith looking for? One Twain scholar has surmised that Dr. Meredith was driven by a professional curiosity similar to that of the cadaver-storing Dr. McDowell.36 Meredith may have wanted to assess the effects on Marshall’s body of his “lifelong mysterious maladies,” the nervous exhaustion and shortness of breath that chronically afflicted the Judge.

  More recent scholarship has taken a darker view. One scholar has speculated that Marshall, sexually starved in his passionless marriage, contracted a venereal disease on that winter trip downriver. Or at least that Jane suspected as much and ordered the autopsy, a rare procedure after a death of a nonviolent nature.37

  There was at least one corroborating witness to Marshall’s autopsy: Orion, who wrote of it in an unpublished autobiography, a manuscript he gave to his brother in the hope of getting it into print. William Dean Howells read this manuscript, and when he came across the account, he was utterly shocked.* He pleaded with Mark to suppress it:

  But the writer’s soul is laid too bare; it is shocking…if you print it anywhere, I hope you won’t let your love of the naked truth prevent you from striking out some of the most intimate pages. Don’t let any one else even see those passages about the autopsy. The light on your father’s character is most pathetic.38

  Judge Clemens was buried in the cemetery that served as the model for the one in Tom Sawyer, the hilltop Baptist cemetery north of town, on the same ridgeline that formed Holliday’s Hill. Mark Twain never had to look far for his fictional ideas.

  * Will also inspired “Joe Harper” in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy. He also provides elements of the highly composite “Tom Sawyer,” who by tradition is Sammy’s alter ego.

  * This version of the story, which Twain recounted in The Innocents Abroad, varies significantly from the more cautious version the author told to his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine some thirty-five years later, around 1906. The older Twain now insisted that the boulder had begun moving on its own, and that the incident had occurred on a Sunday, when the cooper’s shop was empty.

  * Paine read the manuscript as well. In fact, he lost it, either by accident or on purpose, which is why it remains unpublished.

  5

  Apprentice

  (1848–51)

  Twenty-one-year-old Orion now headed the family, a responsibility essentially beyond him. But there were no other options. Jane Clemens, not yet forty-four, drew inward, wept frequently, became absorbed in omens and dreams. Her flame-colored hair was graying. She took up pipe smoking, played cards, accumulated cats, and grew deeply absorbed in the color red. Pamela was now a pale woman of twenty, kindly disposed, solemn, interested in Eastern spirituality. She gave up her rounds as a traveling music teacher and stayed at home, receiving a few pupils and taking care of Jane. Henry and Sam—he no longer wanted to be called “Sammy”—went to school.

  Orion did manage one important act: he prevailed on James Clemens Jr. to let him lease the house at 206 Hill Street, probably for a token sum, and the family moved back there a month after Marshall’s death.

  At his mother’s urging, Sam set out to take whatever work he could find around town. He clerked in a grocery store, but was fired, he later revealed with a wink, for getting into the sugar. He worked in a bookstore, but didn’t like it because “the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort.”1 A stint in an apothecary shop ended because “my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water.”2 He had a paper route for a while, delivering the Hannibal Gazette; he delighted in spreading word of the United States Army’s victory at Chapultepec Castle in September 1847, which turned the tide of the Mexican War. An officer in that battle—who ordered a howitzer lifted into a church belfry for more effective firing—was Ulysses S. Grant, whom Clemens would get to know rather well.

  He worked in a blacksmith’s shop. He worked part-time as a printer’s devil at the Hannibal Gazette, published by one Henry La Cossitt—the first stage of apprenticeship. He claimed that he even spent a week studying the law, but gave it up “because it was so prosy and tiresome.”3 (No offense, Pa!)

  This fitful job hopping went on for about a year and a half. Then, around June 1848, Jane apprenticed him to the new twenty-four-year-old publisher of the Hannibal Gazette, renamed the Courier. Joseph P. Ament took over La Cossitt’s shop on the second floor of the L. T. Brittingham drugstore at Hill and Main, Hannibal’s hub of commerce.

  Sam’s workplace was only half a block from the Clemens household, yet it stood directly in history’s path. The newspaper age was dawning in America, an age that would effloresce into mass communications and the formation of a transformative popular culture. Sam Clemens, who would come to define that culture, was there from the beginning: he fetched water, swept the floor, and stoked the fireplace in the winter. He was paid nothing, but the arrangement saved Jane a few pennies. Sam wore Ament’s hand-me-down clothes and took meals in the Ament household on the edge of the village, returning downtown to sleep on the print-shop floor. Sam loathed the Aments. He considered Joseph a stingy, short-tempered, and generally nasty man—“this diminutive chunk of human meat,”4 as he would brand him in the Hannibal Journal several years later. In his spare moments, however, Sam learned to set type, a valuable skill.

  Newspape
rs proliferated across the nation in the late 1840s. Borne on the rising tide of mass literacy, their page production expanded by steam, their information sources interlinked by the railroad and telegraph, newspapers collapsed time and space between individuals and the events that affected their lives. In the cities, two-cylinder iron printing presses powered by steam replaced the wooden hand-operated ones, some of which had required four days of loading just to print one page. In the hinterlands, smaller and more manageable hand-run presses made start-ups possible in every hamlet. Cities were hotbeds of the press. In Baltimore, a Quaker printer and journalist named Hezekiah Niles created the ancestor of the 20th-century newsmagazine: his Niles’ Register, which he founded in 1811, grew into a national journal of tremendous influence in the pre–Civil War era. Its densely set pages, unrelieved by illustration, were crammed with national and international news, most of which Niles drew (in classic newsweekly fashion) from other publications. Devoted readers included John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson.

  America, which claimed only 650 weekly papers and 65 dailies in 1830, boasted double that number in the early 1840s. By the end of the decade the figure would double again. Most of the papers sold for a penny, and took in profits by selling ad space. Newspapering had shifted its raison d’être a few years earlier, from functioning as political-party organs to journals of information aimed at an undifferentiated readership.

  The social impact of newspapers reached well beyond information sharing. Collectively, they formed a far-flung archipelago of working writers’ workshops: venues where talented young men, and occasionally women, could develop prose writing skills that they might later adapt to the creation of novels, essays, and poems. Most of the nation’s best-known writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries made this journey “from fact to fiction,” as Shelley Fisher Fishkin has called it.5 “The poor boy’s college,” Franklin called the printing shop, and indeed it was the wellspring of America’s distinctive literature of personal experience.