by Ron Powers
‘LOCAL,’ disconsolate from receiving no further notice from ‘A DOG-BE-DEVILED CITIZEN,’ contemplates Suicide. His ‘pocket-pistol’ (i.e. the bottle,) failing in the patriotic work of ridding the country of a nuisance, he resolves to ‘extinguish his chunk’ by feeding his carcass to the fishes of Bear Creek, while friend and foe are wrapt in sleep. Fearing, however, that he may get out of his depth, he sounds the stream with his walking-stick.8
Sam and his helpers inked the type, churned the edition out and distributed it, then sat back to wait for the inevitable howl of outrage from down the street. It came with gratifying shrillness and speed later that day. “This newly arisen ‘Ned Buntline’ [a lurid “dime-novelist” of the period] shall be paid in his own coin,” the Messenger threatened. But two days after that, Hinton withdrew his threat to retaliate in kind and attempted dignified condescension: “Such controversies are adapted only to those whose ideas are of so obscene and despicable an order as to forever bar them against a gentlemanly or even decent discussion,…”9
This flotilla of heavily armored prose, so conventional in its midcentury context, was no match for the sleek torpedoes that came foaming back. In the September 23 edition of the Journal two more woodcuts appeared. (Sam would be a sketcher and napkin-doodler all his life, and a few of his line drawings, awkward but comically intelligible, would accompany his published work.) The first showed the dog-headed “Local” mincing in excitement over “something interesting in the Journal.” The second, metaphorically shrewd, showed the same “Local” being blown away by his own cannon, which he had “chartered” to wage war on the Journal. “Lead being scarce,” the caption continued, rubbing it in, “he loads his cannon with Tri-Weekly Messengers.”
After a little more verbal nose-thumbing, Sam adroitly declared the feud over:
Mr. Editor:
I have now dropped this farce, and all attempts to again call me forth will be useless.
A Dog-be-Deviled Citizen.10
Arriving back in Hannibal just as this was going to press, Orion was horrified by Sam’s swashbuckling breach of decorum. He rushed an editorial into that very issue, trying to jolly up the Messenger: “The jokes of our correspondent have been rather rough; but, originating and perpetrated in a spirit of fun, and without a serious thought, no attention was expected to be paid to them, beyond a smile at the local editor’s expense.”11 Later that day this brought forth one final, tremendous harrumph! from the Messenger, and there the vendetta ended. But Sam Clemens had tapped the lode of invective that would irradiate his satiric voice forever afterward.
THE FILLETING of J. T. Hinton was not Sam’s first identifiable appearance in print. That had occurred eighteen months earlier, on January 16, 1851, within days after Sam had joined Orion’s paper, still named the Western Union. The target, unnamed in the item, was a long-suffering apprentice at the paper named Jim Wolf. The previous week, an early morning fire had broken out in the grocery store next door to the Western Union shop. The two boys, laboring late, had spotted it. Wolf came a little unhinged. Snatching the first items that caught his eye—a broom, a mallet, a wash-pan and a dirty towel—he bolted and ran for about half a mile. By the time he made it back, the fire was out. Sam got it all into a one-paragraph item headlined, “A Gallant Fireman,”* which he finished off with a sampling of Wolf’s homespun dialect:
He returned in the course of an hour, nearly out of breath, and thinking he had immortalized himself, threw his giant frame in a tragic attitude, and exclaimed, with an eloquent expression: “If that thar fire hadn’t bin put out, thar’d a’ bin the greatest confirmation of the age!12
So far as is known, Sam didn’t write again for Orion’s newspaper until just before he ridiculed J. T. Hinton in September 1852. He’d turned his energies toward getting published in the widely circulated papers of the East. His urban debut was a facetious sketch called “The Dandy Frightening the Squatter,” published in the May 1 edition of the Boston Carpet-Bag, a comic weekly, over the initials “S. L. C.”—his first byline.
A crude fragment of frontier slapstick, “The Dandy” nonetheless shows Sam paying attention to the literary conventions of his time. It has some aspects of the frame story, with young Sam himself in the role of the gentlemanly observer, recounting an incident that happened “About thirteen years ago, when the now flourishing young city of Hannibal…was but a ‘wood-yard,’ ” that is, a fueling station for steamboats. A brawny woodsman is leaning against a tree, gazing toward an approaching steamboat. Among the boat’s passengers is a “spruce young dandy, with a killing mustache,” who is keen on impressing the ladies on board. Spotting “our squatter friend” on the bank, he alerts the ladies that a good laugh is at hand. He sticks a bowie knife into his belt, takes a horse pistol in each hand, and strides up to the woodsman.
“Found you at last, have I? You are the very man I’ve been looking for these three weeks! Say your prayers!” he continued, presenting his pistols, “you’ll make a capital barn door, and I shall drill the key-hole myself!”
The squatter calmly surveyed him a moment, and then, drawing back a step, he planted his huge fist directly between the eyes of his astonished antagonist, who, in a moment, was floundering in the turbid waters of the Mississippi.13
He then offers his sputtering accoster a bit of rustic advice: “I say, yeou, next time yeou come around drillin’ key-holes, don’t forget yer old acquaintances!” The ladies are amused and vote “the knife and pistols to the victor.” End of story.
With that surrogate punch in the Dandy’s snoot, the sixteen-year-old Missouri truant had shown some bare knuckles to the fancy folks in Boston.
A week after this debut, the boy writer earned another big-city byline. The paper was the Philadelphia American Courier, and this time Sam’s Huck Finnish outlaw pose had given way to an experiment in Tom Sawyer–like boosterism. His new sketch, also signed “S. L. C.,” was a gilt-edged homage to his native town. This was the first published product in a lifetime of Hannibal-conjurings. Encrusted with flourishes that fit him as badly as Joseph Ament’s clothes—“Then the wild war-whoop of the Indian resounded where now rise our stately buildings”—the brief piece is flat and unremarkable, except for another hint of Sam’s Southwestern edginess regarding the snob culture of the seaboard: “Your Eastern people seem to think this country is a barren, uncultivated region, with a population consisting of heathens.”14
HIS AMBITION to reach a larger readership was fired by the periodicals that drifted into Orion’s humble print shop from around the country. If frontier-era newspapers were a “poor boy’s college,” they had their texts: other frontier-era newspapers. The Postal Act of 1792 allowed every publisher to send one free copy of his paper to every other publisher in the country, without charge, postal or otherwise, provided only that that publisher did likewise in return. This was the system of the “exchange.” No wire services yet existed and the telegraph was limited in its reach; thus small-town papers depended on this exchange, along with “letters” from sojourning friends or relatives, for all their material beyond the strictly local. As Sam sifted through the daily influx in Hannibal, he grew familiar with the names and locales of dozens of dailies, weeklies, and biweeklies around the country, including those in the metropolises east of the Mississippi: Boston, Philadelphia, New York.
He also grew familiar with the kinds of writing that made it into these papers. Besides news stories, they carried topical essays, poetry, and sketches, including the Southwestern frame story.
Yet another branch of dialect humor, rampant through the Southwest, was regularly available in Orion’s own paper:
“Julius, is you better dis morning?”
“No. I was better yesterday, but got over it.”
“Am der no hopes den ob your discovery?”
“Discovery ob what?”
“Your discovery from de convalescence dat fetch you on yer back?”
“Dat depends, Mr. Snow, altogether on de prognostifica
tions which amplify de disease. Should dey terminate fatally, de doctor tinks Julius am a gone nigger; should dey not terminate fatally, he hopes de colored individual won’t die till anoder time. As I said before, it all depends on the prognostics, and till these come to a head, it is hard telling whedder de nigger will discontinue hisself or not.”15
This darky humor was commonplace in the American press, and blacks rendered by Mark Twain sometimes sounded, on the surface, like these minstrel show end men. Yet the typical darky humor lacked the psychological depth, expressed in cadence, irony, imagery, and declamatory elegance, that issued from Mark Twain’s greatest characters. No print models existed for their deeply consummated language. It flowed from Mark Twain’s extraordinary auditory memory, and was shaped on the page by his loving respect for its outlaw integrity and its wild improvisational genius.
Orion looked for poetry and essays of the “refined” and the “polite” sort to fill his Journal. He sent letters to the New England eminences Emerson and Holmes, offering each the chance to write for the Journal at five dollars an essay. Unaccountably, he never heard back. He did manage to print some excerpts from Dickens’s new novel Bleak House, which he could do in the absence of international copyright laws, and he pressed a copy of the book on Sam as a literary model.
The Clemenses’ home life was looking up as the 1850s began. With Orion having finally sold a tiny sliver of the Tennessee land and launching his little newspaper, the Clemenses could feel that some of life’s everyday pleasures seemed possible again. Jane had recovered from Marshall’s death. Careworn, gentle-eyed Pamela married in October 1851, at the advanced age of twenty-four. The groom was a former neighbor named William Anderson Moffett, eleven years her senior and a partner in the commission-merchant firm of Moffett, Stillwell and Company.
Sam and his younger brother Henry, the Good Boy, worked side by side in Orion’s shop during these years. From the sketchy evidence, they behaved toward each other like typical siblings, a little fractiously, each trying to get an edge. They would not fashion a real friendship until the end of their adolescences.
HANNIBAL GREW plump, and brassy, and busy in these last years before the Civil War. It had become Missouri’s second-largest city. Orion Clemens did his best to match the new excitement with thundering editorials in his Journal: “We notice every day that the side walks, all over the city are obstructed with goods, boxes, &c., &c. This should not be. The streets are so muddy that it is impossible to walk outside the pavement, and the side walks generally are so covered with lumber that there is scarcely room for two to walk abreast of them.”16
By his own later admission, Sam slipped in a playful paragraph here and there from the very beginning of his stint with Orion.17 There is no doubting the true identity of “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins,” who made his first appearance on September 9, 1852, a week before Sam’s strike at J. T. Hinton. This is the first of many pen names that Sam experimented with before he settled on his immortal alias. “A Family Muss” is a rather puerile experiment in Irish-baiting humor, the faux-account of a rampage by the head of a Gaelic family on Holliday’s Hill, who, “very much in want of exercise,” finds himself a “good stout cudgel” and commences “thumping the heads of his astounded neighbors promiscuously.” The short piece ends with an exhibition of boilerplate Irish dialect—“Och! he’s the dreadfulest man I iver see. Oh, me, I’se scairt to death, I is, an’ I’ll niver git over it in the worl’.”18
W. Epaminondas Adrastus reappears—his last name now changed to “Blab”—in the notorious September 16 edition that ridicules Hinton’s abortive suicide. Written with labored grown-up facetiousness and cast as a frame story, “Historical Exhibition—A No. 1 Ruse,” begins, “A young friend gives me the following yarn as fact.” The sketch deals with a supposed exhibition at a dry-goods store in Hannibal, called “Bonaparte crossing the Rhine”; townsfolk can hear a lecture explaining the “piece” for a dime, children half price. A boy, named Jim C—, plunks down his nickel and demands to see the show. What he sees is the proprietor passing a three-inch piece of hog leg (the “bony part”) across a dollar-sized strip of hog skin (the “rind”). “Young man, you have now learned an important historical lesson,” the proprietor tells the stricken boy.
AS 1852 drew to a close, Sam was dealing with a secret but increasingly powerful impulse to indulge a fantasy he’d harbored from early childhood: to hit the river. Now the idea was reinforced by adult considerations. Three weeks after his seventeenth birthday, he could look back on five and a half years of drudgery in various cramped printing offices, and forward to years more of the same. He had become a “swift and clean” journeyman typesetter, in Orion’s estimation—not that Orion rewarded this accomplishment with an actual salary. His universe was constricted to the little river town that had held him since the age of four. He could go to the Mississippi levee and watch emissaries from the larger world disembark from the floating palaces up from St. Louis and New Orleans, but then the boats would depart, and the larger world receded from the boy’s reach.
He could only ogle the high architecture of the riverboat—“long and sharp and trim and pretty” with its tall, fancy-topped chimneys. He envied the deckhands his own age who strutted on the decks, coils of rope in hand, flaunting their connection to the river life. He gazed upward at the captain lounging by the big bell, calm, “the envy of all.” He admired the black smoke rolling out of the chimneys, even though he was shrewd enough to grasp it was “a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving.” He took in the absurdities of his fellow townspeople as a steamer approached: the excitable saddler John W. Stabler (“John Stavely” in Life on the Mississippi) tearing down the street and struggling with his fluttering coat at the blast of a whistle—“he liked to seem to himself to be expecting a hundred thousand tons of saddles by this boat, and so he went on all his life, enjoying being faithfully on hand to receive and receipt for those saddles, in case by any miracle they should come.”19
Other Hannibal men and boys were rushing in the opposite direction, westward, for gold—the California mines would yield $65 million in the ensuing year—but Sam was doomed to climb the same stairs every day to Orion’s shop. Outside of Sam’s own items, the Journal was a desolate, uninviting little sheet, with a readership of about a hundred people, which made almost no money.
BY THE end of 1852 Sam’s boyhood had effectively ended. Six months later, in the eternal summer that was the climate for his fictional boyhood adventures, Hannibal would be behind him as well. In March 1853, Orion turned the paper into a daily. The timing was perfect, in an Orionean way of looking at things—people were already paying for their subscriptions in turnips and cordwood instead of cash, and a week earlier someone had spilled several columns of type, delaying publication of the weekly version. He was on a roll.
A new issue every day except Sunday meant more space to fill, which meant more dependence on Sam, and in early May he returned for a final profusion of poetry and madcap pranking in the Journal. (Orion was out of town again.) The poems are forgettable. The spree of self-mocking, identity-switching foolery they prompted him to unleash in the paper is less so. Already in a romantically humid (not to say randy) frame of mind, he had been moved by the hearts-and-flowers verse of Robert Burns and others, and on May 5, writing as “Rambler,” he disgorged a lovesick ode loaded with “thou’s,” “wilts,” “thines,” and “mines” titled “The Heart’s Lament,” and addressed “TO BETTIE W—E, OF TENNESSEE.” The poem was the first of two in that vein. The second, equally sentimental and called “Love Concealed,” was addressed “TO MISS KATIE OF H—L.”*
The following day, readers of the Journal were confronted with a short, waspish letter to the editor expressing outrage at the poem’s title: “Now, I’ve often seen pieces to ‘Mary in Heaven,’ or ‘Lucy in Heaven,’ or something of that sort, but ‘Katie in Hell,’ is carrying the matter too far.” Sam’s letter was signed GRUMBLER.20 Two da
ys after that, RAMBLER shot back at GRUMBLER: “are you so ignorant as not to be able to distinguish ‘of’ from ‘in’? Read again—see if it is not ‘of’ H—l (Hannibal), instead of ‘in’ Hell…” and recommended a straitjacket.21
GRUMBLER was not about to take this lying down. The next day, he attacked again: “Must apologise. I merely glanced at your doggerel, and naturally supposing that you had friends in ‘H—l,’ (or Hannibal, as you are pleased to interpret it,) I…considered it my duty, in a friendly way, to tell you that you were going too far.”22
Two days after that another voice joined the fray—this one the high, reedy know-it-all voice of “PETER PENCILCASE’S SON, JOHN SNOOKS.” Snooks offered RAMBLER some high-toned but incoherent advice on lovemaking: “It is really amusing to every intelligent and intellectual mind, to see how consequential some coxcombs are. The parlor is too remote a place, and not conspicuous enough to reveal the overflowing affections of the H-e-a-r-t…”23
RAMBLER was back in print the next day, getting the last, heavy-handed adolescent word: “…I find that I have attracted the notice of a——fool…‘Snooks’…He calls me a ‘Cox-Comb.’ I will not say that he belongs to that long eared race of animals that have more head and ears than brains…”24
This one-man repertory revue was Sam’s final boyhood display of his developing gift of “voice”—of tonal and syntactic mimicry.
Orion had returned to Hannibal in time to witness the winding-down stages of Sam’s latest romp through his Journal. (In addition to the RAMBLER-GRUMBLER put-on, Sam had laced nearly everything in the paper with his screwball wit—proposing in one news item that a newly enacted whiskey tax made it a patriotic duty to drink.) Orion was finally starting to get it: that his younger brother might be the paper’s main draw. He gave Sam a showcase for his wit. “Our Assistant’s Column,” a potpourri of topical items, gossip, feuds, and the general discharge of Sam’s rocketing mind, might have become one of the early sensations of Missouri journalism, had it run for more than three editions. Orion’s timing, as always, was misbegotten. Sam was bored, broke, and benumbed by the drudge work in his brother’s office, and his daily diet at Jane’s table of bacon, butter, bread, and coffee.