by Ron Powers
Back on board, Sam read Suetonius, Pepys, Malory, Carlyle, Cervantes, Plutarch, Darwin, Macaulay, and Shakespeare, in addition to the Bible and ceaseless inquiries into history, science, music, languages, biography, astronomy, geology.20 One scholar has maintained that “Sam Clemens became a reader and critic of the best in literature by the time he was twenty-five years old.”21 One writer in particular influenced Mark Twain’s intellectual development.
Thomas Paine, the British-born American patriot and, later, disputatious French citizen, had helped inspire the American Revolution with the 1776 publication of Common Sense. This anticolonial manifesto declared that “[t]he cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind,” and proceeded to dismantle the hollow godhead of the British monarchy. Fifty-odd years after his death in 1809, however, Paine’s critiques of established theology, rather than of government, sustained his claim on the American imagination. In The Age of Reason, Paine’s icy 1795 deconstruction of the “heathen mythology” that was the Christian faith, Sam was mesmerized by a rebuttal to the terrifying sermons of his Presbyterian boyhood. He “read it with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power.”22 The credulous soul who had once cowered under his covers at the sound of thunder, believing it God’s terrible judgment on him, could only have cried “Amen!” to Paine’s withering judgment that “[p]utting aside everything that might excite laughter by its absurdity, or detestation by its profaneness, and confining ourselves merely to an examination of the parts, it is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty, more inconsistent with his wisdom, more contradictory to his power, than [the Bible] story is.”23
The Age of Reason stopped short of rejecting the concept of a god—the Anglican Church was Paine’s quarry, not faith itself. His countertheology took root in Samuel Clemens, and gave Sam a foundation short of nihilism on which to wage his eventual wars against the Christian God. His mimetic ear absorbed the old radical’s sardonic imagery and cadences, and stored them for later use. Toward the end of his life, Mark Twain reread The Age of Reason and found it tame. By then, he was privately at work on material that would render tame any previous Christian skepticism.
IN THE 1850s, the nation edged toward a new war, this one a social fratricide. The Kansas-Nebraska Act replaced the Missouri Compromise, restoring popular sovereignty in the developing territories as the standard for settling the slavery question. Kansas became a battleground: militantly abolitionist settlers from New England poured into the state, to preempt potentially destructive backlash against the act’s enforcement. Many of them came armed with Sharps rifles, supplied by the Boston minister Henry Ward Beecher. Proslavery Southerners, most of them crossing over from slave-friendly Missouri, mobilized to challenge the interlopers. In the fall, several Southern states threatened to secede if an antislavery Republican were elected president. James Buchanan, a clueless Democrat, won the race. Two days after his inauguration, the Supreme Court announced its long-awaited Dred Scott ruling that legalized slavery in all of the territories, made a martyr of Scott, and further intensified sectional tensions. If Sam had strong opinions about the growing divide, they are lost. In his 1906 autobiographical dictations, Mark Twain recalled his Mississippi River period as halcyon. He reconjured moonlight schottische dances on the decks of a steamer run by lovable country people, “simple-hearted folk and overflowing with good-fellowship and the milk of human kindness.” He recalled a romance with a young girl “in the unfaded bloom of her youth, with her plaited tails dangling from her young head and her white summer frock puffing about in the wind of that ancient Mississippi time…”24 The river seemed, in life and in memory, to be a sanctuary for him, as it was for his great characters Huck and Jim, where the sorrows of the world seldom intruded.
Sam was and remained an autodidact, a loner among friends and fans. America is no longer known for its self-taught thinkers (alas), but there were many in the 19th century, and Sam Clemens was one. He would never excel at abstract reasoning. To the twenty-five-year-old Sam, the concepts of “slavery” and “abolition” remained closed fortresses of thought, approachable only by inherited opinions. To some extent, the older man closed these gaps, producing excellent if unorthodox literary criticism. His late-life polemics against United States imperialism showed an engaged, even prophetic consciousness. But even then, when Twain strayed from the flow of his intuitive gifts as a storyteller and struck out into the thickets of deterministic philosophy, he bogged down.
Sam’s personal experience gestated over time, not into argumentation but into narrative language, one that produced moral visions of lasting force. His narratives were built on his own joys and sorrows, and the sorrows of the world did not fail to intrude upon the river. Sam soon would be dealt a dream-redolent catastrophe that produced gray hairs on his head, obliterating the last remnants of his boyhood Christian faith, and of his boyhood.
THE YOUNG girl with plaited tails and white frock was named Laura Wright. She floated into Sam’s enchanted vision, as he recalled it, on a spring night in 1858 on the New Orleans waterfront, and transported him to a forty-eight-hour tour of heaven that he re-created in his mind, compulsively, for the rest of his life. He paid for this interlude with a session in Hell less than a month afterward, which he also revisited, faithfully. The two episodes resonate eerily with one another. Each involved the same steamboat; a permanent parting; deep love interrupted at the point of its discovery. Each shaped his literature, and his views of mankind, fate, and God. Fourteen-year-old Laura Wright was the daughter of a Warsaw, Missouri, judge who had allowed her to go down to New Orleans on her first trip away from home, accompanied by her uncle, William C. Youngblood, one of the pilots of the sprawling freight steamer John J. Roe. Sam knew the Roe and all her officers very well, and was delighted to find it in the adjoining slip when, on the evening of May 16, the Pennsylvania, the fast packet on which he was then working, put into port at New Orleans. Sam jumped onto the Roe’s deck from a rail of this boat, and began shaking hands with old friends. Then, the young girl appeared, almost chimerically. Sam moved toward her and wangled an introduction. She became his “instantly elected sweetheart out of the remotenesses of interior Missouri” for a brief idyll that enlarged itself in his imagination at least until four years before his death.25
The notion of a twenty-two-year-old man romancing a girl scarcely out of childhood would trigger suspicion in a later America, but Laura Wright’s chastity was safe with Sam. Scandalized by the leg shows in New York and repulsed by the Daughters of Desire who sashayed along every levee of the lower river, he saw Laura as metaphor as much as maiden. She was an emissary from a fast-receding Eden, his boyhood Missouri prairie in its loneliness and peace—“a frank and simple and winsome child who had never been away from home in her life before, and had brought with her to these distant regions the freshness and the fragrance of her own prairies.”26
He gives few details about what passed between them, but he recalls being not four inches from her elbow (“during waking hours,” he stipulates) for the three days that they were together. He invests their farewell with the abruptness of an interrupted dream. On May 20, Zeb Leavenworth, the Roe’s captain “came flying aft shouting, ‘The Pennsylvania is backing out.’ I fled at my best speed…and just did manage to make the connection, and nothing to spare. My…finger-ends hooked themselves upon the guard-rail, and a quartermaster made a snatch for me and hauled me aboard.”27
He tried to keep the romance alive. He paid a courting visit to her at Warsaw in 1860: a man who claimed to have been introduced to him on that occasion wrote Mark Twain a letter in 1880 reminiscing about their encounter. Sam blamed Laura’s mother for “playing the devil” with him on that visit, and putting the kibosh on the romance.28 He wrote to Laura, and she answered for a while, but Sam grew frustrated as her interest waned, and stopped. Nothing could extinguish Sam’s lingering ache. In that same 1861 letter, he recounted how a New Orleans fort
une-teller saw the young girl clearly inside his head. This “Madame Caprell” described Laura perfectly, Sam insisted.
THE SECOND fateful event of that summer involved his younger brother, Henry.29 In February of that year, Sam had found the boy a menial job as “mud-clerk” aboard the Pennsylvania, in the hopes of rescuing Henry from the torpor of an aimless life in St. Louis. Those good intentions launched a catastrophic chain of events. Henry Clemens was then nineteen. Whatever dreams he might have had for his own life will never be known. He was living in St. Louis, probably with Jane and Pamela. He read books, sat for a couple of daguerreotypes. In one of them, he appears in the process of vanishing into the background. His face is handsome in the Clemens way, the hair thick and the mouth full, the eyes wide-set and alert.
To Sam, Henry was “the flower of the family.”30 Sam’s niece Annie Moffett always thought that his love for his younger brother was one of his outstanding qualities. Orion noted that the thoughtful and quiet Henry was always leaning on Sam for protection. Sam had planned to consolidate their blossoming friendship by expanding Henry’s sedate world, drawing him into the dash and glamour of his own new lifestyle.
The two were together for six trips aboard the Pennsylvania. Henry labored at the bottom of the boat’s labor chain. A mud-clerk got his shoes dirty by hopping off the boat at unscheduled points where the riverbank was unimproved by brick or stone, but where passengers or a few bales of cotton waited to be taken aboard. His pay consisted of meals and a place to sleep.
As an apprentice, or “cub,” on loan from Bixby (who had gone to work temporarily on a Missouri packet), Sam was at the center of things, in the pilothouse. Normally this was Sam’s idea of heaven, but not on this boat. The Pennsylvania’s pilot, William Brown, was a seething and abusive man. His malevolence was enhanced by a powerful memory and an inability to distinguish the significant from the trivial. Brown, unlike Bixby, was not charmed by Clemens. He apparently believed—in wonderful irony—that the cub was the rich son of a slaveholding aristocrat.
“Here!—You going to set there all day?”
…I said, apologetically:—“I have had no orders, sir.”
“You’ve had no orders! My, what a fine bird we are! We must have orders! Our father was a gentleman—owned slaves—and we’ve been to school…ORDERS, is it? ORDERS is what you want! Dod dern my skin, I’ll learn you to swell yourself up and blow around here…”31
At the end of May 1858, shortly before departing with Henry on their sixth trip aboard the Pennsylvania, Sam had an eerily prophetic dream while at the Moffett house, where he stayed between trips. Annie Moffett, who was in the house at the time, maintained years later that Sam told everyone about the dream before leaving, “but the family were not impressed; indeed they were amused that he took it so seriously.”32
Of this dream, Mark Twain wrote that he
had seen Henry a corpse. He lay in a metallic burial case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing, and on his breast lay a great bouquet of flowers, mainly white roses, with a red rose in the center. The casket stood upon a couple of chairs.33
Sam awoke grief-stricken, believing that Henry’s casket lay in the next room. He dressed and approached the door, “but I changed my mind. I thought I could not yet bear to meet my mother. I thought I would wait awhile and make some preparation for that ordeal.” He recalled that he actually left the house and walked a block “before it suddenly flashed upon me that there was nothing real about this—it was only a dream.” He ran back, charged up the staircase to the second-floor sitting room, “and was made glad again, for there was no casket there.”34
THE PENNSYLVANIA cast off for New Orleans later that day, May 30. The bizarre skein of events on board are recorded by Mark Twain in Chapter 29 of Life on the Mississippi and in some letters written at the time. They form the first act of a drama almost operatic in its inexorable progression toward tragedy. Brown continued to make life miserable for Sam. Mid-morning on June 3, a couple of hours above Vicksburg, Brown was at the wheel, and Sam was standing by. Henry appeared outside the pilothouse to relay an order from the boat’s captain, John S. Kleinfelter: the Pennsylvania was to make an unscheduled stop at a plantation downstream. He shouted it to Brown through a stiff wind; the pilot, a little deaf, did not hear him. The steamboat floated past the stop, and Kleinfelter rushed to the pilothouse yelling for Brown to come about: “Didn’t Henry tell you to land here?” Brown denied it. Kleinfelter turned to Sam: “Didn’t you hear him?”35
“Yes, sir,” Sam replied, realizing that his answer was fraught with danger: he had contradicted his boss to the ship’s captain. Sam braced himself for a vicious retribution.
An hour later, this time with Sam at the wheel, Henry entered the pilot-house, unaware of what was brewing. Brown pounced.
“Here! Why didn’t you tell me we’d got to land at that plantation?”
“I did tell you, Mr. Brown.”
“It’s a lie!”
I said:—“You lie, yourself. He did tell you.”36
Brown glowered at Sam, then ordered Henry out of the pilothouse. Before Henry could obey, Brown attacked him. Sam intervened, swinging a heavy stool, knocking Brown to the floor. Sam fell on top of Brown and pummeled him with his fists for several minutes, while the 486-ton steamboat drifted downriver at fifteen miles an hour with no one to control its rudder and paddle wheels. The commotion attracted a crowd on the hurricane deck. Brown eventually struggled free, grabbed the wheel, and got the boat under control. He roared at Sam to leave, but Sam, in Mark Twain’s telling, wasn’t through.
I tarried, and criticised his grammar; I reformed his ferocious speeches for him…calling his attention to the advantage of pure English over the bastard dialect of the Pennsylvanian collieries whence he was extracted.37
Sam’s 1883 account of this scene varies slightly from what he said in a letter written soon after it occurred,38 and the later version might be dismissed as self-mythifying. But what happened next suggests that a confrontation did take place. Captain Kleinfelter was waiting for Sam outside the pilot-house. He hustled the cub pilot to his parlor “in the forward end of the texas” and grilled him about what had led to the brawl. Sam assumed that he would be jailed on arrival at New Orleans. He was astounded when the captain promised not to press charges, and even urged Sam to “lay for” Brown once they were ashore. “Give him a good sound thrashing, do you hear? I’ll pay the expenses. Now go—”39
Brown bristled for the rest of the downriver trip, Kleinfelter having made it clear that the pilot no longer had his support. After arriving at New Orleans on June 5, the captain tried for three days to replace Brown for the upriver voyage, but the pilots’ union thwarted him. Shipboard coexistence between the two was unthinkable, so Kleinfelter secured upriver passage for Sam aboard another boat, the A. T. Lacey. The Pennsylvania was scheduled to depart on the evening of June 9; the Lacey, two days later. On June 8, Sam and Henry spent their last evening together on the lamplit New Orleans riverfront. They hunkered down on a freight pile near the Pennsylvania. Dwarfed by the three-tiered silhouettes of docked steamboats falling away in either direction, hulls gently bumping and smokestacks swaying with the current, the brothers talked into the night. As Mark Twain remembered it,
The subject of that chat, mainly, was one which I think we had not exploited before—steamboat disasters. One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it, was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked;—but it would arrive at the right time and the right place…[W]e decided that if a disaster ever fell within our experience we would at least stick to the boat, and give such minor service as chance might throw in the way. Henry remembered this, afterward, when the disaster came, and acted accordingly.40
The Pennsylvania, with Brown at the wheel and Henry on the main deck, churned out of port at 5 p.m. the next day, its cargo including barrels of turpentine stored in the hold. T
he Lacey pulled out on June 11, as scheduled. Two days later, Sam Clemens heard a chilling shout from the levee: “The ‘Pennsylvania’ is blown up at Ship Island, and a hundred fifty lives lost!”41 Mark Twain is silent on his reaction to this ghastly news. Whatever shock he felt was temporarily allayed at Napoleon, Arkansas: an “extra” edition of a Memphis newspaper, rushed downriver, listed the fates of some of the passengers. Henry’s name appeared among the uninjured.
Then the news turned irremediably bad. A later edition reported that Henry Clemens was “hurt beyond help.”
A hundred miles downriver from Memphis, the Lacey steamed into a watery cemetery: corpses floating in the current, along with fragments of the Pennsylvania’s superstructure. At Memphis, Sam Clemens hurried to the makeshift hospital where his brother lay on a mattress among the burned and scalded.
The Pennsylvania had been destroyed by a boiler explosion that had occurred at around 6 a.m. Sunday, June 13, about sixty miles below Memphis. A family named Harrison watched from their house as the graceful boat churned upriver. They were preparing for church when, with an ear-shattering blast, the front of Pennsylvania erupted in a nebula of fire, steam, and smoke, and human bodies went pinwheeling into the air. A third of the boat, including the pilothouse and the texas and smokestacks, was pulverized into a mass of twisted steel and blackened fragments of wood. It was one of the worst explosions in the history of steamboating. Passengers who moments earlier had been sleeping or gazing at the shoreline, were blown into the river, scalded, decapitated, impaled. Survivors screamed in agony from their burns. William Brown, who had gone off-duty a few hours earlier, was among the dozens whose body was never found. He was propelled into the air on a scalding torrent of steam, and then fell into the river, where a passenger named Reed Young, who had grabbed a life preserver, reached out to him with one hand. Brown “soon slipped away.” His last words, Young reported, were “My poor wife and children!”42