Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The penny-press vogue had reached Hannibal in 1837, with a paper called the Commercial Advertiser, later the Pacific Monitor, then the Hannibal Journal and Native American, and finally the Journal. Now, with the quiet Gazette transformed, the Journal had some real competition. Ament was an ambitious, tight-fisted and shrewd young man who saw ad dollars to be harvested from Hannibal’s prospering parasol sellers, cigar and snuff dealers, cookstove merchants, slave traders, and saddle makers. Hannibal was booming. Even a fellow with writing ambitions could get a leg up. The Writing Academy of Messrs. Jennings and Guernsey offered

  [c]lasses, day or evening as preferred. A class for ladies only in the afternoons. A chance for Hannibal people who have never had an opportunity to write, to do so now.6

  The packing plants at Bear Creek now slaughtered thirteen thousand swine a year and the streets were glutted with squealing porkers and their waste. Sam and his friends made balloons out of discarded pig bladders—or at least Tom Sawyer and his friends did. Steam-driven ferries across the Mississippi replaced the ones powered by horses on treadmills. The jostling new steamboats formed a nautical skyline along the levee, replacing the once-a-day packets of Sam’s earlier boyhood. The boats took away 110,000 bushels of wheat and other produce; the total value approached $1.25 million.7 (In the summer of 1845 one of them unknowingly took away the nine-year-old Sammy, who had crept aboard and hidden under a lifeboat. He made it as far as Louisiana, Missouri, thirty-two miles downstream, before a crewman noticed his legs sticking out and he was set ashore.) Almost everyone was making out, it seemed, except the Clemenses.

  TYPESETTING WAS arduous, repetitive, exacting work. The steam-driven press had not yet appeared in Hannibal, and many newspapers employed updated versions of the wooden spindle-screw press used by Benjamin Franklin in 1725 London—a device similar to the one invented by Gutenberg almost three hundred years earlier. In 1795, a Scotsman living in Philadelphia named Adam Ramage tossed out the time-consuming spindle screw in favor of a triple-threaded device that allowed for 250 separate impressions an hour. Ramage’s lighter model was transportable by steamboats and even horse-drawn carts, and fit into a household-sized room. Even before the advent of steam, the Ramage press brought the age of newspapering across the Mississippi and into the West.

  Ament almost certainly owned a Ramage, and this machine became Sam’s primer. He and his co-workers learned to put together news pages by picking individual letters (cast backward, of course) from a case of metal typefaces sorted alphabetically. Placing them into the handheld metal tray called a “stick,” they formed the letters into words, and the words into lines, which they then placed onto the cast-iron type bed. When the type bed was full, the printers slathered it with viscous ink and covered the inky type with a sheet of paper, usually made of sturdy rag stock. Then they pressed the platen, hinged to the type bed at a right angle, down on the bed via the powerful triple-threaded screw. It was extremely dirty work, if only because of the ink.

  Typesetting was not the only source of fascination for Sam in Ament’s little newspaper shop. He also delighted in his fellow inmates. Newspapering held a natural attraction for eccentric misfits, whether in a rural outpost or a great city. The Courier boasted at least two, not counting the owner: a journeyman printer named T. P. “Pet” McMurry, and Sam’s fellow boarder and apprentice, the bear-sized Wales McCormick. Sam rejoiced in McMurry’s dandified ways—his plug hat tipped forward almost to the bridge of his nose, his greasy red hair rolled under at the bottom, his red goatee. The part of Pet’s hair under the plug hat was so deep and precise that “you could look into it as you would into a tunnel.”8 Sam loved his “mincing, self-conceited gait,” which he recalled as “a gait possible nowhere on earth but in our South & in that old day…”9 McMurry, in turn, later remembered Sam as a tiny, curly-haired boy “mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge Cigar,” wailing the ballad of a drunken man as he worked.10 McMurry probably mentored the boy in the art of typesetting.

  Then there was seventeen-year-old Wales McCormick, who awed Sam with his genial amorality. His bulk bursting through Ament’s other cast-off suit, Wales capered through the premises as “a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company.”11 Among the antics that regaled Sam, who was not yet detached from the racist mores of his time and place, was Wales’s pastime of coming on to the daughter of the Aments’ elderly slave-woman cook. Mark Twain recounted the casual hazing decades later, still with only a hint of reproach. A “very handsome and bright and well-behaved young mulatto,” as Twain remembered her, this hapless figure endured Wales’s boisterous bouts of “making love” to her night after night: “It was killingly funny to Ralph [the other apprentice] and me.”12 Mark Twain did not specify what he meant by “making love.” In that era the term was often a synonym for “romancing” or “paying court to.” But he left it clear that whatever the extent of McCormick’s attentions, or intentions, the mother and daughter were helpless: “And, to speak truly,” he continued in the passage, “the old mother’s distress about it was merely a pretense. She quite well understood that by the customs of slave-holding communities it was Wales’s right to make love to that girl if he wanted to.” (The fact that the girl was “mulatto” more or less ratified this.) He concluded the anecdote with a moderate acknowledgment of the sordidness of it all: “But the girl’s distress was very real. She had a refined nature, and she took all Wales’s extravagant lovemaking in resentful earnest.”

  McCormick turned his rakehell needling on more formidable targets as well. Not long after Sam joined the Courier, an eminence from the booming religious-revival circuit swept into town. In Mark Twain’s frequent (and varied) recounting of the story, the figure was Alexander Campbell,* son of Thomas Campbell, the founder of the Campbellites and a co-founder of the Disciples of Christ. The illustrious divine preached a sermon on the town square, and Sam marveled at the turnout. “[T]hat was the first time in my life that I had realized what a mighty population this planet contains when you get them all together.”13 His followers craved a printed version of the homily, and Ament printed five hundred copies for sixteen dollars, a sum exceeding any Sam had ever seen, given that Hannibalians usually settled their debts with sugar, coffee, turnips, and onions.

  This visit produced what might be called the Gospel according to Wales. In one version of the story, Twain insisted that when Campbell stopped by Ament’s shop with the sermon, he overheard McCormick exclaim, “Great God!” The preacher took the boy aside and admonished him that “Great God!” was blasphemy, and that “Great Scott!” would be one example of an acceptable substitute. McCormick apparently took this to heart: while correcting the proof sheet of the sermon, he dutifully changed Campbell’s own pious use of “Great God” to “Great Scott.” Taken with the spirit, he amended “Father, Son & Holy Ghost” to “Father, Son & Caesar’s Ghost,” and then improved even that bit of euphemism—to “Father, Son & Co.”14

  Wales’s moment of divine reckoning approached when he removed the full name “Jesus Christ” from a line in the sermon to create more space, and substituted “J. C.” For some reason, this infuriated Campbell as he read the proof sheet; he strode back to the print shop and commanded McCormick: “So long as you live, don’t you ever diminish the Savior’s name again. Put it all in.”15 McCormick took this advice to heart: the revised line came out, “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Typesetting made language more palpable to Sam and he quickly excelled at it. The process of putting his fingers on molded metal letters, feeling their weight, and sliding them along precise rows into words and sentences as he smoked his outsize “Cigar” seems to have annealed him to language as a tactile presence in his hands. The paradigm of typesetting governed his prose writing and his handwriting, resonating with his speaking style. Even as torrentially fast as he worked, twenty manuscript pages a day in the throes of inspiration or need, his sentences were always constructed, never dashed o
ff: “…[T]he difference between the almost-right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning.”16 He loved the last words of the ex-printer, Benjamin Franklin, and the process of their careful composition: “He pondered over his last words for as much as two weeks, and then when the time came he said ‘None but the brave deserve the fair,’ and died happy. He could not have said a sweeter thing if he had lived till he was an idiot.”17 His handwriting remained exceptionally clear, almost geometrically shaped on the page, throughout his life, and he frequently filled his margins with typesetter’s instructions to the printer. His speaking style, famous for its “long talk” and its effective pauses, was virtually an aural analog of typography’s orderly flow.

  IN 1849, Sam and his cohorts had plenty of news to set in type.

  In April, a new stream of transients joined the hogs and dogs jostling for space on Hannibal’s streets: fortune hunters from the East, disembarking by ferry and steamboat to commence the two-thousand-mile overland trek to California following the discovery of gold on the American River in the California Territory. Here was the hotel clientele that the late Marshall Clemens had dreamed about. The Gold Rushers galvanized the town and swept eighty of its citizens along with them that year. Three hundred Hannibalians would eventually join the worldwide frenzy—including Dr. Meredith and his son and, in a roundabout way, the small cigar smoker in Ament’s printing shop.

  Two months later, a darker stream infested the town: cholera. An epidemic broke out in New Orleans at the year’s turn, traveled by steamboat up the Mississippi River, left 3,200 dead in St. Louis, and struck Hannibal in June before moving on to Chicago and into Wisconsin. It was the second such attack in three years. The Courier toted up the dead—thirty, before the summer was over—and recommended “soap and courage,” while the Journal advised a flannel or woolen belt around the belly. The Bloomington, Illinois, Western Whig theorized that it was a “malignant agent in the atmosphere” that originated somehow in “the decay of vegetable matter about the mouth of the Ganges in Asia.”18

  Cholera was the most dreaded of all the inexplicable diseases to sweep through European and American populations in the 19th century. Like bilious fever, it crossed oceans on westbound ships and then fanned out along inland waterways, borne by a bacterium that lurked in food and drinking water (although science did not figure this out until 1883). It attacked the intestines, causing diarrhea and vomiting, and death resulted within three days. Cholera hitched a ride west with the Gold Rushers. The prospect of it would haunt every ocean voyage that Mark Twain made in his long life, and sometimes it struck the ships on which he sailed.

  Later that year, Sam found himself setting type on a gruesome story that spread terror in Hannibal, led to the country’s first legal execution, and reinforced the racial tensions that were mounting inexorably toward civil war. This was the rape and murder of a twelve-year-old girl by a young slave known as “Glasscock’s Ben.” The girl had just brained her ten-year-old brother with a hunk of quarry rock, and Ben responded by cutting the girl’s throat. Ament personally covered the slave’s trial and death sentence in Palmyra and wrote a long account of it in the December 6 edition of the Courier. Ben was reported to have boasted that he would never be hanged because he was worth a thousand dollars. (He was wrong about the first part.) Sam stored the traumatic story in his mind, as he had so many others, and discharged it in the plot of Pudd’nhead Wilson: the technically Negroid Tom Driscoll escapes a life sentence for the murder of his uncle because he is revealed to be “the property” of his father’s estate.

  Mark Twain’s prodigious memory often found congenial company with a contrary impulse: the tale teller’s impulse to improve memory with fiction. Mark Twain took a democrat’s view of fact and fiction; he privileged neither above the other and let them mingle in his work without prejudice, joking famously in later life about being able to remember anything whether it happened or not, and about too much truth as an impediment to good literature. This habit of mind produced good literature indeed, and left biographers over two centuries stumbling into one another as they tried to sort out what actually happened from what actually didn’t.

  Joseph Ament never drove his rival Journal out of business, luckily for the Clemenses. In January 1850, the Journal’s publishers and owners, Robert and Joseph Buchanan, hit the trail for California, leaving the paper in the hands of Joe Buchanan’s son, Robert, and Samuel R. Raymond. Jane Clemens urged Orion to return to Hannibal with an eye to taking over the paper. In September, he released the first issue of the Hannibal Western Union. Not long afterward, he acquired the Journal, consolidated the two papers, and hired the as-yet undiscovered Lincoln of American literature.

  * Mark Twain may have misidentified the churchman. Marc Parsons has pointed out that Campbell’s own writings in his Millennial Harbinger cite two visits to Hannibal, in 1845 and 1852. The incident in question could have happened only between 1848 and the end of 1850, the span of Sam Clemens’s time in Joseph Ament’s shop. It remains possible that Campbell, who traveled almost constantly, neglected to record this particular visit.

  6

  Rambler

  (1852–53)

  On September 16, 1852, a refined young gentleman named Josiah T. Hinton, the “local” editor for the brand new Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, picked up a copy of the rival Hannibal Journal and was thunderstruck to find himself wickedly caricatured in a woodcut printed along with a story about him: his head was portrayed as the head of a dog; the Hinton figure was leaning on a cane, carrying a lantern, and advancing toward the moonlit waters of Bear Creek with a liquor bottle suspended in space in front of him. The headline above the drawing announced: “ ‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide.” Below the headline, a brief paragraph summed it all up:

  The artist has, you will perceive, Mr. Editor, caught the gentleman’s countenance as correctly as the thing could have been done with the real dog-gerytype apparatus. Ain’t he pretty? and don’t he step along through the mud with an air? “Peace to his re-manes.”1

  The paragraph was signed, “A DOG-BE-DEVILED CITIZEN.”2

  About three weeks earlier, J. T. Hinton had made the grave, if unsuspecting, mistake of ridiculing Orion Clemens in print. Orion had written a mild complaint about barking dogs at night, in his newly established Journal. Hinton, a newcomer, had responded in the Messenger with a ponderous bloc of elephantine scorn: “A fierce hater of the canine race pours out his vials of wrath, as if to add a fresh stimulus to our worthy dog-exterminator, whose active exertions have already silenced the plaintive wail and mournful howl of many a pugnacious cur and ferocious mastiff.”3 The response to the response was not from phlegmatic Orion, but from his younger brother. Hinton became the first public victim of the compressed satiric vengeance of the future Mark Twain.

  Sam had recently turned fifteen when he joined Henry in Orion’s shop in January 1851. Orion needed all the help he could get. Within a few months of his debut as a publisher, he had lost his enthusiasm and had grown depressed. Already, he was turning into his late father: serious, studious, oppressively honest; a young man who, like Marshall, had never really been a boy. Like his father, he was born to failure. Orion lurched and drifted through life from one dreamy impulse to another, never quite surrendering himself to any one thing. Sam once confessed to Howells that he imagined Orion on the stage, a melancholy harlequin, forever shifting his political and religious passions, “& trying to reform the world, always inventing something, & losing a limb by a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts.”4

  Orion served as frequent fodder for Sam’s satire. He is the undisguised Secretary in Roughing It, and traces of him show up in Washington Hawkins in The Gilded Age; he is Oscar Carpenter in the mostly factual “Villagers 1840–3” and in “Hellfire Hotchkiss.” He influenced Angelo Capello in Pudd’nhead Wilson. He was also the star of a malignant, unfinished story, to which the biograph
er Paine assigned the title, “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” and which did not see publication until 1967.5

  Sam’s cruelty toward Orion coexisted with a habit of literally giving his older brother the clothes off his back. He pitied, bankrolled, and safeguarded his sibling. In this context, young Sam’s counterattack on J. T. Hinton was more than mere adolescent spleen. It was payback for an attack on his flesh and blood. Sam’s pen (and knife) treated Hinton to a roasting the likes of which had not been seen in the brief annals of Hannibal journalism. Here were the early glowings of the pen warmed up in Hell.

  Sam saw his opportunity when Orion left on a late summer business trip to St. Louis and put him in charge of the paper—or the henhouse, in a manner of looking at it. He “asked me if I thought I could edit one issue of the paper judiciously. Ah, didn’t I want to try!”6

  “Judiciously” was scarcely the point. Sam’s fingers must have been snaking toward the typecase before Orion was out the door.

  The sixteen-year-old built his payback on an incident that had caused Hinton some embarrassment around town. “ ‘Local’ Resolves to Commit Suicide” referred to Hinton’s halfhearted attempt to drown himself in Bear Creek one night after being jilted. Hinton had slogged waist-deep into the water, thought better of the impulse, and sloshed back to shore. In the meantime a friend of his had found his suicide note and made for the creek in time to see Hinton struggling back to safety. “The village was full of it for several days, but Hinton did not suspect it.”7

  Beneath the woodcut—which he had slashed out on the backs of large wooden types, with his jackknife—Sam archly suggested that Hinton’s aborted suicide (and his imputed drinking) had to do with a lack of public response to his attack on Orion: