by Ron Powers
On May 25, 1853, a notice appeared in the Hannibal Journal: “Wanted! An Apprentice of the Printing Business. Apply soon.”25 A few days earlier, Sam had told Jane he was leaving. His destination was St. Louis, where he would put up at the home of Pamela and her husband, possibly get a printing job, and plan his next move. Already Sam had set his sights on destinations far beyond St. Louis, but he was not inclined to add to Jane’s anxieties by telling her that.
Mark Twain sculpted the moment of leave-taking from his mother, making it rival the scene at John Marshall’s deathbed. Jane holds up a copy of the Testament and demands that Sam take hold of the other end, and extracting a promise from him: “I do solemnly swear that I will not throw a card or drink a drop of liquor while I am gone.” Sam repeats the oath and receives his mother’s kiss.26 As with the deathbed scene, this moment seems suspiciously melodramatic. But in a letter to Pamela the following fall, Sam asks her to “tell Ma my promises are faithfully kept.”27
Sam’s departure nearly felled Orion. Shocked, distraught, and immediately self-lacerating, he sank into a depression so paralyzing that he was unable to get an edition of the Journal out for an entire month.
One night in the first two weeks of June, Sam boarded a packet and slipped off down the Mississippi. The exact date is lost in the mists; as an old man he simply recalled that “I disappeared one night and fled to St. Louis.”28 There are no accounts of his farewells to anyone besides Jane. His itinerary would take him south, then east, then west, then halfway around the world. Eventually he would circle the globe. He would travel, or reside in some form of exile for most of the rest of his life. He would never again be as integrated with a holy place as he had been with Hannibal. He would return to the town just six more times in his life, and he would never live there again, except in his literature and in his dreams.
* Some scholars, including Edgar Marquess Branch, an editor of The Works of Mark Twain: Early Tales & Sketches, believe that Sam composed this piece as he stood before the “case,” setting it by hand into type.
* A third poem, titled “Separation” and also signed “Rambler,” appeared in the rival Missouri Courier on May 12. As the editors of Early Tales & Sketches point out, its authorship cannot be conclusively attributed to Clemens; it may have been the work of an imitator.
7
“So Far from Home…”
(1853–56)
It was as though he had launched himself by a slingshot. In the year to come, he would cover more than two thousand miles of American terrain, adapt to life in three Eastern cities, support himself by finding jobs with no benefit of references, and write letters to his family of astonishing perception and eloquence regarding what he saw and heard and did. He would negotiate passage by steamship, stagecoach, train, and omnibus, crossing prairie, inland rivers, lakes, and metropolitan precincts. He would renew and extend his prowess as a newspaper correspondent, commenting suavely on debate in the Senate chamber in Washington, D.C. He would develop a taste for fancy clothing and sit for a portrait outfitted in a high-collared shirt, dark jacket, checked vest, and generously knotted bow tie, slightly scowling just to the right of the camera eye under a magnificent wash of thick groomed hair, his full lips expressionless. If his letters to Jane were at all reliable, he would uphold his promise to behave himself, heading for the library when his work shift ended. Somewhere in the midst of all this, he would turn eighteen.
He stayed in St. Louis for only two months while he bankrolled himself setting type for the Evening News and other weekly papers. He almost certainly boarded with Pamela and William Moffett, who had a year-old daughter, Annie, and were themselves living with an aunt while they rented out their Pine Street house. Pamela’s husband William, a thickset and jowly fellow, was a rising figure in St. Louis civic life: he had already done a turn on the Committee of Arbitration for the city’s chamber of commerce.
No record survives of Sam’s first reaction to the urban swirl, and his later recollections were jumbled. St. Louis was a “happy, cheerful, contented old town” in an 1867 correspondence,1 but a year later he insisted on his “deep hatred” of the city; visiting it, he said, was a “ghastly infliction.”2 As for his feelings about launching out from his lifelong nest, though, Sam was swagger personified. “[N]othing could have convinced me that I would starve as soon as I got a little way from home,” he boasted in a letter to Orion.3 Later in life he joked, “The first time I ever saw St. Louis, I could have bought it for six million dollars, and it was the mistake of my life that I did not do it.”4
The transition must have been at least a little overwhelming. St. Louis was just then exploding beyond its old borders as a French fur-trading center and headquarters of the Louisiana Territory. River trade and railroad construction had lured a large immigrant workforce—Germans and Irish, principally. The city was swelling from a population of just over 16,000 in 1840 to 160,000 at the eve of the Civil War.
Sam soon received his first taste of big-city condescension. His typesetting skills, so impressive to Orion, didn’t cut much ice with his new, tough, older peers. “He always had so many errors marked in his proofs,” sneered one of them half a century later, “that it took most of his time correcting them. He could not have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life.”5 This same crusty pressman recalled another contemptible trait: in contrast to the printers’ “proud prerogative…to be able to drink more red whisky than men of any other trade,”6 the red-headed kid wouldn’t take a drop.
JANE AND the others learned that Sam had ventured beyond St. Louis only when a letter arrived postmarked August 24, 1853, with the return address of New York, N.Y. It is Sam’s earliest surviving letter—the earliest of between 50,000 and 100,000 written over his lifetime, by some estimates. Typical of the psychology he always used on Jane, he worked to defuse her likely anger with a joke—in this case, by inverting the reputations of himself and his solemn brothers.
My Dear Mother: you will doubtless be a little surprised, and somewhat angry when you receive this, and find me so far from home; but you must bear a little with me, for you know I was always the best boy you had, and perhaps you remember the people used to say to their children—“Now don’t do like Orion and Henry Clemens but take Sam for your guide!”
Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it, and so I thought I might as well go to New York. I packed up my “duds” and left for this village, where I arrived, all right, this morning.7
The journey might have taxed a veteran traveler. Sam had boarded a steamboat to nearby Alton, Illinois. From there he took a train east to Springfield, the closest he would ever come to Abraham Lincoln. There he boarded a stagecoach headed upstate to Bloomington. To Chicago the next day by rail. A twenty-six-hour layover, and then by rail to Toledo, Ohio, then Monroe, Michigan. A night there, and on Monday morning, across the three hundred-mile length of Lake Erie by the steamer Southern Michigan to Buffalo, New York. Onward to Albany on the “Lightning Express,” passing close to Saratoga Springs, where a few days earlier a resort chef named George Crum had invented the potato chip. From Albany he boarded the Hudson River steamer Isaac Newton into New York City, arriving at about 5 a.m. on August 24. He vowed that he would look out for a “sit,” or a printing “situation,” after resting up a day or so, tacking on a little bouquet of reassurance to Jane: “for they say there is plenty of work to be had for sober compositors.”8
The letter contained some evidence that while Sam may have breached the New York metropolis, he was still a long way from shedding his received backcountry biases. He tossed off a dismissive reference to “the infernal abolitionists” who had tried to rescue a fugitive slave (from around Hannibal, as it happened) and who had been arrested in Syracuse. He sneered callowly that “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”9
&
nbsp; The missive’s longest passage dwelt on a “curiosity” Sam had come upon as he strolled the streets of New York: a pair of dwarfish humanoid brothers, apparently caged, advertised as having been captured years earlier on the island of Borneo. He described them in half-horrified, half-lascivious detail: as small, simian-faced, “with small lips and full breast, with a constant uneasy, fidgety motion, bright, intelligent eyes, that seems as if they would look through you.”10 The creatures may have been the same that P. T. Barnum featured in his circus years later under the billing, “the Wild Men of Borneo.” They touched some deep chord in young Sam—the same chord, perhaps, that responded powerfully to themes and images of twinning, and of grotesque beings lifted from their natural habitat to grapple with identity in a hostile, dangerous world.
NEW YORK was hardly a “village” in 1853. Its population, 515,000 and swelling rapidly toward a million at the Civil War’s eve, dwarfed that of St. Louis and nearly matched the total of Missouri. The vertical skyline had not risen yet, but the populace was flowing in, and Sam arrived on the tide: Irish fleeing the potato famine, Chinese fortune seekers soured on the Gold Rush and looking for urban labor; Germans; Jews; free blacks; swarms of merchants, financiers, and their employees jostling for a slice of the lucrative import-export trade that funneled Southern cotton and farm products from the interior to European markets, and received British-made machinery and manufactured goods. New York was an expanding poker game played with industry-sized stakes. The mostly Protestant winners built retail palaces of Italian marble, and residential mansions on Fifth Avenue and in Union, Madison, and Washington squares. The mostly Catholic losers fought disease, despair, and one another in some of the worst slums on earth, such as the Five Points that repelled even the slum refugee Dickens.
Sam homed in on Broadway, where he’d spotted the Borneo creatures. He took lodgings in a boardinghouse on Duane Street in lower Manhattan, not far from the future site of the Brooklyn Bridge, a neighborhood that Melville would haunt in his postwar decades as a customs inspector. Sam walked four miles a day, inspecting ornamented fruit salons, libraries, and the Crystal Palace (the venue of New York’s first world fair, the Exhibition of the Industry of All Nations). Before long, he was a Broadway swell, commenting suavely on the stagecraft of the actor Edwin Forrest. He attended a performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by his future neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe, and recalled years later how “[e]verybody went there in elegant toilettes and cried over Tom’s griefs.”11 Young Sam may also have poked his head into some of Broadway’s more lurid attractions, such as the wicked girlie show, The Model Artists. He apparently stayed long enough to confirm his worst suspicions.12
As would Thomas Wolfe a century later, he loved the manswarm on the streets: “I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs,” but disdained “Niggers, mulattoes, quadroons, Chinese” and other inconvenient life forms, including “trundle-bed trash”—children.13
WITHIN A week of his arrival, and despite a glut of qualified printers, Sam landed a job. He joined two hundred other employees in the noisy fifth-floor hive of John A. Gray’s large job-printing house at 95–97 Cliff Street, preparing type for books and dozens of periodicals. He started at the lowest rate, 23 cents per 1,000 ems, but he satisfied Gray’s exacting standards. “[O]ut of all the proofs I saw, without boasting, I can say mine was by far the cleanest,” he wrote home. “…I believe I do set a clean proof.”14 Typesetting, sightseeing, letter writing, haunting the “free printer’s library”: in the two months that Sam remained in New York, and through all the Eastern urban sojourning that followed until his correspondence abruptly ceased in February 1854, these pursuits defined his life. He strengthened his skills in travel and self-expression. His compunction for noticing, powerful since infancy, fueled letters home that brimmed with detail, easy wit, and acquired information.
Things back home were in flux. Sam complained to Pamela in October that he didn’t know where the Hannibal folks were. No one had bothered to inform him that the family had moved from Hannibal to Muscatine, Iowa, where Orion was gearing up to publish the Muscatine Journal. By that time Sam was not in New York anymore, either. He was in Philadelphia, as of mid-October, a substitute typesetter at the Inquirer.
His petulance didn’t last. Sam was in the mood to strut; he had flabbergasted even himself with his blitzkrieg of the East. On October 26 he told his brother: “…I like this Phila amazingly, and the people in it.” Some of his friends had encouraged him not to get downhearted. “ ‘Downhearted,’ the devil! I have not had a particle of such a feeling since I left Hannibal, more than four months ago.”15 The letter blossomed into a robust travelogue of the city; he’d visited Benjamin Franklin’s gravesite at Christ Church and strained to see the inscription on the marker.
HE’D HOPPED a stage for Fairmount Hill, where he inspected the cable bridge above the Schuylkill River, the first suspension bridge in the United States. At the Water Works, he ogled the “[f]at marble Cupids, in big marble vases” as they squirted water. Resuming the letter two days later, Sam described the “old cracked ‘Independence Bell’ ” and how he sat on the same small pine bench where Washington and Franklin had sat: “I would have whittled off a chip, if I had got half a chance.”16 He expressed his awe at standing in the Old State House, where the Declaration of Independence was passed. In a letter written on December 4, he told about a woman billed as “The Largest Lady in the World” who tipped the scales at 764 pounds. He’d been disappointed: “She is a pretty extensive piece of meat, but not much to brag about; however, I suppose she would bring a fair price in the Cannibal Islands.”17
His voracious cataloguing and disgorging of experience was more than the passing exhilaration of a boy away from home. It was the first rough draft of a writerly instinct in tune with a national literature in chrysalis. (Orion may not have quite grasped that potential, but he did shovel most of these missives from Sam directly into the Hannibal Journal and soon also the Muscatine Journal.) Here lay the early contours of The Innocents Abroad and the other products of Mark Twain’s lifelong compulsion to capture life with words. Like Whitman, just then escaping the confines of journalism for the free-verse nonesuch Leaves of Grass—but without the older poet’s aesthetic self-consciousness—Sam was performing the role of the Poet as redefined by Emerson: a representative man, intoxicated by some divine enhancement of thought, speaking out of his direct experience on behalf of his fellows. “He will tell us how it was with him, and all men will be the richer in his fortune.”18
“I look in vain for the poet whom I describe,” Emerson had lamented in 1844. “We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer.”19 Here he came.
Yet he was far from Emersonian on some topics. He wrote to Orion on November 28, of “the eastern people” who were “whisky-swilling, God-despising heathens,” adding, perhaps for Jane’s eye, “I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink.”20 Referring to the Clemenses’ new Iowa address, he concluded with, “How do you like ‘free-soil?[’] I would like amazingly to see a good, old-fashioned negro.”21
On Christmas Eve, he wrote the first letter addressed explicitly to the Muscatine Journal, indulging a bit of tabloid journalism (a fire fatality’s “feet were burned off, his face burnt to a crisp, and his head crushed in”).22 He mixed patriotic travelogue and grumpy preservationism. The Assembly Room in which Congress first met was now occupied by an auction mart. “Alas! that these old buildings, so intimately connected with the principal scenes in the history of our country, should thus be profaned. Why do not those who make such magnificent donations to our colleges and other institutions, give a mite toward their preservation of these monuments of the past?”23
His next letter to the Journal, written on Febr
uary 17 and 18, 1854, was from the nation’s capital. He arrived in Washington in a snowstorm and immediately set out to inspect the seat of American government. He was not entirely pleased: “The public buildings of Washington are all fine specimens of architecture, and would add greatly to the embellishment of such a city as New York—but here they are sadly out of place looking like so many palaces in a Hottentot village.”24 Sam thawed out inside the Capitol, finding his way to the small, Victorian arena on the second floor of the North Wing. From the visitors’ balcony he looked down—in more ways than one—on a huddle of lawmakers as they conducted the nation’s business:
I passed into the Senate Chamber to see the men who give the people the benefit of their wisdom and learning for a little glory and eight dollars a day. The Senate is now composed of a different material from what it once was. Its glory hath departed. Its halls no longer echo the words of a Clay, or Webster, or Calhoun…the void is felt. The Senators dress very plainly as they should, and…do not speak unless they have something to say—and that cannot be said of the Representatives. Mr. Cass [Sen. Lewis Cass, Democrat from Michigan] is a fine looking old man; Mr. Douglas, or “Young America” [Sen. Stephen Douglas, Democrat of Illinois] looks like a lawyer’s clerk, and Mr. Seward [Sen. William H. Seward, Whig from New York] is a slim, dark, bony individual, and looks like a respectable wind would blow him out of the country.25