Mark Twain, A Literary Life

By Everett Emerson

Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title

"Mark Twain endures. Readers sense his humanity, enjoy his humor, and appreciate his insights into human nature, even into such painful experiences as embarrassment and humiliation. No matter how remarkable the life of Samuel Clemens was, what matters most is the relationship of Mark Twain the writer and his writings. That is the subject of this book."—from the Preface

In Mark Twain, A Literary Life, Everett Emerson revisits one of America's greatest and most popular writers to explore the relationship between the life of the writer and his writings. The assumption throughout is that to see Mark Twain's writings in focus, one must give proper attention to their biographical context.

Mark Twain's literary career is fascinating in its strangeness. How could this genius have had so little sense of what he should next do? As a young man, Samuel Clemens's first vocation, that of journeyman printer, took him far from home to the sights of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, while his next vocation would give him the identity by which we most frequently know him. His choice of "Mark Twain" as a pen name cemented his bond with the river, as did such books as Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn. Then following an unsuccessful try at silver mining, Clemens worked as a newspaperman, humorist, lecturer, but also cultivated an interest in playwriting, politics, and philosophizing.

In reporting the author's life, Emerson has endeavored to permit Mark Twain to tell his own story as much as possible, through the use of letters and autobiographical writings, some unpublished. These fascinating glimpses into the life of the writer will be of interest to all who have an abiding affection for Samuel Clemens and his extraordinary legacy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Feb 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781512821550

Everett Emerson

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

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Preface

Mark Twain endures. Readers sense his humanity, enjoy his humor, and appreciate his insights into human nature, even into such painful experiences as embarrassment and humiliation. No matter how remarkable the life of Samuel Clemens was, what matters most is the relationship of Mark Twain the writer and his writings. That is the subject of this book. While I have made use of the materials in my earlier book, The Authentic Mark Twain, which appeared in 1984, the differences between the two books are nevertheless substantial. My increased understanding and knowledge of Mark Twain’s life have led me to realize that in order to see his writings in focus one must give proper attention to aspects of his life that I had either insufficiently recognized or quite neglected in the earlier volume.

The assumption behind this book is that one can understand virtually all of Mark Twain’s works better if one can read them in their biographical context. It is therefore distinctly different from other biographies, including Andrew Hoffman’s Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel L. Clemens (1997), in which much that Mark Twain wrote is ignored.

Samuel Clemens himself, I like to think, would approve of my undertaking. In the next to last year of his life he wrote an essay entitled The Turning Point of My Life. In it he asserted, To me, the most important feature of my life is its literary feature. My purpose here has been to comprehend that literary feature, which requires a recognition of the constantly changing circumstances of his literary career.

Mark Twain is one of America’s greatest writers. Unlike some of his peers—Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, and William Faulkner, for example—he is widely read. Moreover, he and his writings are still frequently in the news: the discovery of the first half of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript in California, new information about Mark Twain’s support of a black student at Yale Law School and a black artist who wanted to study in Paris, the likely extinction of the kind of Calaveras County frog Mark Twain wrote about, the question of whether high school students should be assigned Huckleberry Finn.

Mark Twain’s literary career is truly fascinating in its strangeness. How could this genius have had so little sense of what he should do with himself? A contemporary observer of the writer’s life could not have imagined where his career would subsequently take him and what he would write next, if anything, though the unoriginal idea of writing sequels was always a strong temptation.

The connections between the writings of Mark Twain and the life of Samuel L. Clemens begin early. Clemens was blessed by a childhood that as Mark Twain he could often use in his most memorable novels, in his autobiography, and even at times in his travel books. In Tom Sawyer he asserted that most of the adventures in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Thereafter, in young Sam’s first vocation, that of journeyman printer, he was able to travel far from home to the sights of New York, Philadelphia, and Washington. He made extensive literary use of this printing experience in the posthumous book-length fragment No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, in which the narrator is a printer’s apprentice. Sam’s work in printshops also had much to do with his much later investing many thousands of dollars in a machine that would have replaced the typesetter had it worked properly. Its failure had major consequences for the writer.

His next vocation gave him an identity. He became a Mississippi steamboat pilot, where he heard the leadsman’s call MARK TWAIN, announcing that the water was just deep enough for the boat to proceed. Choosing Mark Twain as his pen name identified him permanently with the great river, as did such books as Life on the Mississippi and Huckleberry Finn.

All along in his early years he was sporadically writing for publication, but only when he went west to Nevada and, after an unsuccessful try at silver mining, had to find a new means of survival did he become a newspaperman—specifically, a humorist. For a time he followed a second career as well, that of lecturer; his success in this endeavor would provide him with a reliable source of funds when he was financially pressed. After he went bankrupt, he devoted most of a year to making a lecture tour around the world and then writing a book about his experience.

Mark Twain’s first success was an account of his 1867 trip to Europe and the Holy Land, and thereafter his writing career often took him back to Europe. To a large extent he defined himself and his America vis-à-vis Europe, especially in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but also in Huckleberry Finn, which in its way amounts to an international novel. In time he resided in London, Berlin, Florence, and most notably Vienna, where he and his family lived for nearly two years. His Austrian experiences enriched and conditioned his thinking at the end of the century and brought new life to his writing.

An especially powerful force in Samuel Clemens’s career was his marriage and the associations to which it led. His choice of a wife from genteel Eastern society and his consequent adoption of Hartford, Connecticut, as his home often created contradictions with his earlier life. Was he the irreverent, satirical humorist of the West, or was he the husband of Olivia Langdon Clemens and conventional father of three daughters? Susy, his oldest daughter, was quite aware of her father’s divided identity. She, like her mother, favored the author of The Prince and the Pauper, not the one who wrote Huckleberry Finn. Moreover, the hectic social life that Clemens adopted in Hartford limited his writing time to the summer, when he would hide out on a hillside farm nestled above Elmira, New York, his wife’s hometown.

These tendencies are examined here, in addition to many others: Mark Twain’s continuing interest in the theater and playwriting; his substantial business interests and other distractions from writing; his preference for publishing by subscription rather than by the usual retail method; his preoccupation with religion and his changing views of the Deity; his many unfinished manuscripts, most of which have been published in recent years; the place of illustrations in his books; his on-again, off-again interest in writing his autobiography, and his involvement, again on and off, with politics.

Because during his lifetime Mark Twain was, in his own words, the most conspicuous person on the planet,¹ how he presented himself is crucial—and interesting. Therefore I have provided many images of the man, photographs taken over the years, some of them little known. In reporting the author’s life I have endeavored to permit Mark Twain to tell his own story through his letters and autobiographical writings. The reading and research undertaken for this book have been a great satisfaction to me, since I have an abiding affection for both Samuel Clemens and his extraordinary legacy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My work was made possible by the extensive resources of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. In its riches critics and scholars have access to sources such as are available for no other American author: thousands of Mark Twain’s letters and thousands of letters he received, his notebooks (including still unpublished ones), the manuscripts of many of his writings, published and unpublished, copies of the collections of other repositories, and dedicated scholars who staff the collection and prepare the marvelous editions that the University of California publishes, such as the first five magisterial volumes of Mark Twain’s letters that have now appeared. For a Mark Twain specialist, being there is to be in heaven, surrounded by angels. To say that I am grateful to Harriet E. Smith, Victor Fischer, Michael Frank, Lin Salamo, Kenneth Sanderson, Louis Suarez-Potts, Anh Bui, and particularly Dr. Robert Hirst, David Briggs, and Brenda Coker would be an understatement, and their support has been personally very gratifying. I am deeply grateful for permission to publish Mark Twain’s previously unpublished words, which I located in the Mark Twain Papers, to reproduce photographs found there, and to make use of the papers of Isabel Lyon, housed there. Quite as important, truly indispensable, has been the support my wife Katherine has given me through dark days.

I am grateful for the assistance of colleagues, associates, and friends, especially Alan Gribben, who read the entire manuscript in its penultimate stage and made hundreds of suggestions; R. Kent Rasmussen, author of the invaluable Mark Twain A to Z, who identified a shocking number of mistakes; Louis J. Budd, Great Authority on Mark Twain, my friend and neighbor, and always helpful; Carl Dolmetsch, whose work on Mark Twain’s years in Vienna is arguably the most important contribution to Mark Twain biography in the last twenty years; another friend and neighbor, Mary Boewe; Michael Kiskis, an authority on Mark Twain’s autobiography; Herbert S. Bailey; Howard Baetzhold; Salli Benedict; Alberta A. Booth; Kevin J. Bochynski; Isabelle Budd; Gregg Camfield; Sherwood Cummings; Hamlin Hill; Horst Kruse; Joe McCullough; Bruce Michelson; Paula Miller; Elaine Durham Otto, a superb copyeditor; Tracy Sayles; Barbara Schmidt; Gretchen Sharlow; Kenneth Silverman; Laura Skandera-Trombley; David E. E. Sloane; Thomas A. Tenney; and Jim Zwick. I am also grateful to the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City for permission to quote from Mark Twain’s autobiographical sketch, MA 1405, which it owns. I thank the heirs of Isabel Lyon for permission to quote from her diary, and both the Mark Twain House, Hartford, and the Vassar College Library for permission to reproduce photographs owned by those institutions. I have made use, with gratitude, of the scholarship and insights that other commentators have made during the past two decades. The resources of the libraries of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has been a constant boon.

CHAPTER ONE

Mark Twain Assembled

Between the birth of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his trimphant success as a writer, the path was long and crooked. A seven-months child, Sam was born in the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri—population one hundred—on November 30, 1835. His family had arrived there from Tennessee only six months before. Two years later the Clemenses moved thirty-five miles northeast to Hannibal, the Mississippi River town now celebrated for its famous son. The connections between the town and the writer are especially close because the author was to draw on his childhood experiences again and again in his most enduring works, in both fiction, especially Tom Sawyer, and in some of the best passages of his mostly factual autobiography. He especially celebrated summers at his Uncle Quarles’s farm.

He was just sixteen when he first described Hannibal in the Philadelphia American Courier. "This town is situated on the Mississippi river, about one hundred and thirty miles above St. Louis, and contains a population of about three thousand…. Among the curiosities of this place we may mention the Cave, which is about three miles below the city. It is of unknown length; it has innumerable passages, which are not unlike the streets of a large city."¹ This cave, Hannibal’s steep hill, the steamboats (over a thousand arrived each year), the islands in the river, his uncle’s farm not far from Florida—Mark Twain would utilize all of these in memorable scenes within the American literary landscape.

Of his boyhood summers he was to recall in Early Days (1897–98):

I spent some part of every year at the farm until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass—I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed.²

For several pages he conjured up the sights, tastes, touches, sounds, and smells of his past. Sentence after sentence begins hypnotically I know how and I know and I can remember.

Sam’s father, John M. Clemens, justice of the peace, carried the title of Judge Clemens. He was described in the St. Louis Republican as

a stern, unbending man of splendid common sense … the autocrat of the little dingy room on Bird Street where he held his court. … Its furniture consisted of a dry-good box which served the double purpose of a desk for the Judge and table for the lawyers, three or four rude stools and a puncheon for the jury. And here on court days when the Judge climbed upon his three-legged stool, rapped on the box with his knuckles and demanded, Silence in the court it was fully expected that silence would reign supreme.³

Like Judge Driscoll in Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson, he was very proud of his Virginian ancestry, and in his hospitalities and his rather formal and stately manners he kept up its traditions; he was a free-thinker (chap. 1). Judge Clemens was a man of dignity with a good standing in the community, but at his death in 1847 he left his family very little. He had supposed that riches might be found in the thousands of acres in Tennessee he had purchased in the 1820s and 1830s, and for years members of his family imagined that this land speculation was to make them rich. They were, however, mistaken.⁴

Sam’s mother was no doubt a stronger influence on the writer-to-be. (Much later he assumed considerable responsibility for his mother’s financial well-being until her death in 1890.) Jane Lampton Clemens saw to it that young Sam went to Sunday school, first at the Methodist church and later at the Presbyterian church that she had joined. Subsequently, the writer was to recall his Sunday school experiences when he wrote Tom Sawyer.

The author’s affectionate description of his mother is much lengthier and more emotional than that of his father. Among the characteristics he described, two may be mentioned.

She had a slender small body, but a large heart; a heart so large that everybody’s griefs and everybody’s joys found welcome in its hospitable accommodation. The greatest difference which I find between her and the rest of the people I have known, is this, and it is a remarkable one: those others felt a strong interest in a few things, whereas to the very day of her death [at age eighty-seven] she felt a strong interest in the whole world and everything and everybody in it…. When her pity or her indignation was stirred by hurt or shame inflicted upon some defenceless person or creature, she was the most eloquent person I have heard speak. 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.⁵

Clearly, Sam’s lifelong humanitarianism owed a debt to his mother.

Sam was a troublesome child, plagued by illnesses. In 1882 he wrote, During the first seven years of my life I had no health—I may almost say that I lived on allopathic medicines.⁶ His behavior was often eccentric, and he had a tendency to wander away from home. His formal education (soon to be interrupted) was such as a small town could offer. He himself referred to it dismissively in the early 1870s: Attended the ordinary western common school in Hannibal, Mo., from the age of 5 till near the age of 13. That’s all the schooling—if playing hookey & getting licked for it may be called by that name.⁷ Of necessity his later education was picked up elsewhere than in schools. As a boy he read adventure stories of pirates and knights in the heroic fiction and poetry of such authors as Sir Walter Scott, Lord Byron, and James Fenimore Cooper. Had he not chosen initially to think of these writers as exemplary, he would not have become the highly original writer that in time he became. He was always a reader, though he usually chose to present himself as far from being bookish.

Sam was only eleven years old when his father died in 1847. Already poor, the Clemens family now became almost destitute. Before 1849, when his schooling came to a close, Sam undertook part-time work that would lead to a career. After serving as delivery and office boy, he became a printer’s apprentice for the hometown newspaper, the Hannibal Courier. He was following in the footsteps of his brother Orion, nearly six years his elder, who had become an apprentice in 1839. Twenty years later Sam Clemens wrote, Education continued in the offices of the Hannibal ‘Courier’ & the ‘Journal,’ as an apprenticed printer.⁸ Sam served in all capacities, including staff work. The Courier’s makeshift library introduced him to humorous publications such as The Spirit of the Times, regularly drawn on for fillers. In early 1851, having completed his apprenticeship, Sam went to work for Orion as a journeyman printer on the Hannibal Western Union.

Even before this time, Sam had published A Gallant Fireman in the Western Union for January 16. Soon he was showing incipient signs of genuine literary ambition. On May 1, 1852, a Boston comic weekly, The Carpet-Bag, published his short sketch entitled The Dandy Frightening the Squatter. Although the piece is not in itself striking (it resembles a sketch that its author may well have read in the Hannibal Courier of 1850, Doin’ a Dandy), it is notable that this short sketch appeared in remote Boston. It was signed S.L.C. Sixty years later, the writer would say of this sketch and of his description of Hannibal published the same year, Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that line I have ever experienced since.⁹

His Boston publisher was B. P. Shillaber, creator of Mrs. Partington, a character who was later to influence the creation of Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly. Shillaber’s publication was only one of many comic periodicals flourishing in America at this time, and these had a strong influence on young Clemens. The first comic weekly was created as early as 1831 by William T. Porter, a Vermonter: The Spirit of the Times described itself as a Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature, and the Stage. Addressing a masculine audience, it is remembered chiefly for its publication of tales based on the oral humor of the frontier, especially the Southern frontier. Many other magazines soon followed its example. Although not far removed from the real life of the people they portrayed, the stories they published were frequently tall tales. To increase his credibility and enhance the sense of contrast, the narrator was likely to maintain a poker face while he provided a report. The theme of many of these tales is the distinction between the false and the real and between the pretentious and the unsophisticated. Sometimes the teller is himself the unconscious victim in his story; often it is an Easterner who is outsmarted, even humiliated, for he is likely to be innocent, ignorant, naive. (Sometimes it is the reader who is taken in as well.)

Clemens found this concern with victimization and humiliation particularly congenial to his talents and attitudes. Huckleberry Finn and The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg deal with these themes, to mention two examples. For a short time, Clemens adopted from the southern frontier stories the use of slang and elaborate misspellings. Also, like many of the writers of this school, he adopted a pen name. Among the writers familiar to Clemens in one way or another were George Horatio Derby, who became John Phoenix and told of his adventures in the California of the 1850s; H. W. Shaw, who, as Josh Billings, wrote about farming, exploration, and riverboating; and David Ross Locke, who adopted the name Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, late pastor uv the Church uv the New Dispensation, Chaplain to his excellency the President, and p. m. at Confederate roads, Kentucky. Most successful of all was Charles Farrar Browne, later to become Artemus Ward, a comic lecturer and crusader against insincerity and sentimentality. Clemens met Ward in 1863 and later made his humor the subject of a much-repeated lecture.

Young Clemens’s Dandy anecdote only faintly reflects the coarse and violent humor of these writers. Set in Hannibal when the now flourishing young city … was but a ‘woodyard,’ it tells of a would-be gentleman, obviously from the East, who seeks to demonstrate his manliness to some young women by frightening a woodsman. But the Easterner, who ends up in the river, is astonished and humiliated. Clemens gives no characterization to his narrator, and the story is not told in dialect.

A sometimes overlooked fact about Clemens’s youth is that he smoked immoderately, one hundred cigars a month, according to his own account, when he was eight years old!¹⁰ Many years later, at the party given to celebrate his seventieth birthday, he noted, I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven: ever since then I have smoked publicly…. Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit.¹¹ The limit? Not specified, but apparently Clemens meant as often as he possibly could.

After demonstrating that his work could be published in the East, Clemens turned his attention to local publication. While Orion was absent from home in September 1852, Sam was able to publish several items, some as a consequence of his getting into an argument with the editor of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, whom he tried to embarrass. Nearly forty pieces in all have been located in Hannibal newspapers: verses, burlesques, local items. They show much energy but little control. Several are signed W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins, later simply Blab or the initials, W.E.A.B. Other brief pieces used famous pen names of the period such as the Rambler and the Grumbler. Somewhat more personal is Oh, She Has a Red Head! by a redhead who signs himself A Son of Adam and who argues that red is the natural color of beauty. In this piece the future public personality acknowledges his love of open display, which was to be lifelong. A satire of the Democratic governor and legislature, Blabbing Government Secrets, anticipates another of his future interests, public affairs.

In May 1853, Orion Clemens awarded young Sam Our Assistant’s Column. Not only did the column criticize newspapers that borrowed without credit: it attacked one Mr. Jacques, whose drunken mistreatment of his children he believed should be punished with tarring and feathering and being ridden out of town on a rail. (Huck considered this form of punishment cruel when applied to the Duke and the King.) While Orion was away, Sam published a headline in the paper:

TERRIBLE ACCIDENT!

500 MEN KILLED AND MISSING!!!

We had set the above head up, expecting (of course) to use it, but as the accident hasn’t yet happened, we’ll say

(To be Continued)¹²

Hannibal was a small world, remote from East Coast literature, but as a journeyman printer Sam Clemens could find work elsewhere. In June 1853, at the age of seventeen, he went to St. Louis, where he seems to have stayed with his sister Pamela (by then married to William Moffett), and for two months he worked as a typesetter on St. Louis newspapers. In mid-August, having been unable to find work there, he made his way to New York without telling his mother in advance. He was able to work there as a typesetter and remained for about two months. Two letters he wrote appeared in Orion’s newspaper. Sam explains how he traveled to New York in five days, by steamboat and train, with a little sightseeing in Chicago, Rochester, and Syracuse. In New York he saw two wild men from Borneo, a magnificent fruit salon, and the ships of New York harbor. He expressed pride in his type-setting ability. Young Clemens had already developed a literary technique he was to make good use of throughout his career, for instance, as when Huck Finn would relate his story, emphasizing the narrator’s response to what he sees. Of the wild men Clemens wrote, Their faces and eyes are those of the beast, and when they fix their glittering orbs on you with a steady, unflinching gaze, you instinctively draw back a step, and a very unpleasant sensation steals through your veins. In these early letters home, Sam identified himself not as a fledgling writer but as a printer, proud of his ability to set clean proof. He found satisfaction in his discovery that the New York printers had two libraries where he could spend my evenings most pleasantly. He soon became a lover of books and a lifelong advocate of libraries.

Other letters to his sister Pamela, written in September and October, describe New York sights, including the theater. They were not published until after his death. Soon Sam moved on to Philadelphia, and from there he wrote a series of letters that were published in the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal, partly owned by Orion, who had moved 120 miles up the river in September. After printing a portion of a letter dated October 26, 1853, apparently without permission, Orion had invited his brother to write letters for publication, and Sam accepted. The first four letters are somewhat impersonal accounts of Philadelphia and a February 1854 visit to Washington, D.C. With deep respect, the young Clemens described the monuments of American history, the grave of Benjamin Franklin, the Liberty Bell, and objects associated with George Washington. He saw Philadelphia as continuing the European cultural tradition. Some of his reverence was borrowed, for the two Philadelphia letters apparently were written with R. A. Smith’s Philadelphia as It Is in 1852 open in front of him. He had already stumbled upon the borrowing device of innumerable travel writers before him. In writing from Washington, his tone is similar to Smith’s as he describes the Capitol, the senators, and the members of the House of Representatives. He saw a printing press used by Benjamin Franklin and was intrigued by the patent office. One letter from Philadelphia reveals Sam’s amusement with obituary poetry, a lachrymose subject he would return to in his contributions to the Galaxy magazine and in Huckleberry Finn.

In the spring of 1854, Clemens was obliged to leave the East because of what he later called financial stress.¹³ He then took his printing skills back to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car for two or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I went to bed on board a steamer that was bound for Muscatine. I fell asleep at once, and didn’t wake for thirty-six hours.¹⁴ In Muscatine he worked for his brother, who could pay him no wages, and then to St. Louis, where his mother and sister now lived. Almost a year later, in February and March 1855, four more of Sam’s letters appeared in the Muscatine Journal. Signed S.L.C., these letters reflect his maturing tastes less apologetically and are perhaps the first strong indication of the writer that was to be. Young Sam reports, for instance, on The Merchant of Venice: "I had always thought that this was a comedy, until they made a farce of it. The prompters found it hard matter to get the actors on the stage, and when they did get them on, it was harder still to get them off again. ‘Jessica’ was always ‘thar’ when she wasn’t wanted, and never would turn up when her services were required. There is a freshness of diction even in his comments about the weather: Yesterday and to-day were as bright and pleasant as anyone could wish, and fires were abolished, I hope for the season."

During the following year and a half, when neither Sam nor Orion was connected with a newspaper, he wrote little for publication. By then the brothers both lived in Keokuk, Iowa—between Hannibal and Muscatine. Sam spoke at a printers’ banquet celebrating the 150th anniversary of Benjamin Franklin’s birth—Franklin the patron saint of American printers—and according to a piece Orion wrote for the Keokuk Gate City for January 19, 1856, his speech was replete with wit and humor and interrupted by much applause.¹⁵

Samuel Clemens’s interest in humor and in writing arose directly from his pleasure in books. In printers’ libraries and later in his own substantial collection, Clemens was an insatiable reader. His early work was influenced by his familiarity with the writings of both English and American literary comedians like Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hood, and George W. Curtis, whose Potiphar Papers (1853) satirizes religious hypocrisy and snobbery. In a March 1860 letter to Orion, Clemens identified Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World and Cervantes’s Don Quixote as his beau ideals of fine writing.¹⁶ Cervantes provided him with a model for expressing both realistic and romantic viewpoints within the same work. Later a different kind of influence upon Clemens, as a young cub pilot, was his reading of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power.¹⁷ Paine and Voltaire reinforced his penchant for skepticism.

In the late summer or early fall of 1856, following some eight years of association with printing, Clemens left Keokuk. Once again one can follow his travels from the letters he wrote for publication in the Keokuk Post, where he was initially paid $5.00, later increased to $7.50 a letter. He now adopted a pen name and a pen personality. As Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, he was an innocent ready to be amazed and victimized by his city adventures. The three letters in this series show the strong influence of another of the frontier comic writers, William Tappan Thompson, author of Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel (1847). Thompson cultivated bad grammar and an outrageous Southern dialect. Clemens’s first letter, dated October 18 from St. Louis, is a report from Snodgrass of his visit to a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. This bumpkin’s visit is largely predictable, although Snodgrass’s quotation from Dickens’s Little Dorrit comes as rather a surprise.¹⁸ A month later Snodgrass reports again. Just as he had been ejected from the theater in St. Louis because of his ignorance of proper behavior, here his innocence leads to misadventures. He had traveled eastward through Chicago, of which he reports: When you feel like tellin a feller to go to the devil, tell him to go to Chicago—it’ll anser every purpose, and is perhaps, a leetle more expensive.¹⁹

The third and most ambitious letter, dated Cincinnati, March 14, 1847, explains that the writer had pooty much quit scribblin until now when he has at last a little adventer to report. The innocent has been taken advantage of again, this time by a young woman who asks him to hold her basket while she goes around the corner. Snodgrass obliges and uses the waiting time to daydream of marrying the woman, whom he supposes is a rich heiress. An hour and a half later, he starts after her, whereupon he hears from the basket the howls of the ugliest, nastiest, orneriest he-baby I ever seed in all my life. Snodgrass does not know what to do. He keeps the baby for a day, then tries to poke the dang thing through a hole in the ice on the river. He is arrested and fined, then released. Such is his tawdry adventure. This sketch was directly inspired by William T. Thompson, who told a similar story in Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel.²⁰

The Snodgrass letters, the last of which was written when Clemens was twenty-one, do not yet show the author-to-be discovering his métier; they simply indicate that Clemens wished to be a humorous writer. He now left journalism for an extended period, and also not surprisingly—for one who had lived in the river towns of Hannibal, St. Louis, Keokuk, Muscatine, and Cincinnati—he was attracted to an occupation on the river. Some fifteen years later, he was to explain his decision in an unpublished autobiographical sketch:

About 1855 [actually April 15, 1857], aged 20, started to New Orleans, with about ten or twelve dollars, after paying steamboat passage, intending in good earnest to take shipping there for the port of Para [Brazil], & explore the river Amazon & open up a commerce in the marvelous herb called coca, which is the concentrated bread & meat of the tribes (when on long, tedious journeys) that inhabit the country lying about the headwaters of the Amazon. Broken-hearted to find that a vessel would not be likely to leave N[ew] O[rleans] for Para during the next generation. Got some little comfort out of the fact that I had at least not arrived too late, if I had arrived too soon, for no ship had ever yet left N. O. for Para in preceding generations.

Had made friends with the pilots & learned to steer, on the way down; so they had good-will enough to engage to make a St. Louis & N. O. pilot of me for $500, payable upon graduation. They kept their word, & for 18 months I went up & down, steering & studying the 1275 miles of river day & night, supporting myself meantime by helping the freight clerks on board & the freight watchmen on shore. Then I got my U. S. license to pilot, & a steady berth at $250 a month—which was a princely salary for a youth in those days of low wages for mechanics.²¹

Later he brilliantly described his experiences as apprentice pilot to Horace Bixby, though with some exaggeration, in Old Times on the Mississippi (1875).

This piloting phase of his career lasted four years, until Clemens was twenty-five. He learned the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, then served as a steamboat pilot. Very little that he wrote during that time has survived: seventeen letters, one sketch, several pieces of journalism, all slight, and two pieces of fiction that he did not publish. A few letters do give the impression, however, that the pilot was still interested in writing. A letter to Annie Taylor in 1857 describes the French Market of New Orleans and a cemetery of vaults and tombs in the city. Clemens was to have a continuing interest in cemeteries, morgues, and death, as The Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and many of his other writings show. To his sister Pamela he wrote a rather literary letter on March 11, 1859, providing a description of the Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans: The procession was led by a Mounted Knight Crusader in blazing gilt armor from head to foot, and I think one might never tire of looking at the splendid picture.

In Old Times, Mark Twain described the destruction of the steamer Pennsylvania on June 13, 1858. Clemens had made several trips on that boat as an apprentice pilot, including one when it was damaged as a result of a collision with the Vicksburg, with which it was racing.²² Although he was not on the Pennsylvania at the time of the catastrophe, his beloved brother Henry was. After much suffering, he died from inhaled steam. Since Sam had obtained a position for Henry as clerk, the tragedy caused him to feel terrible guilt for many years.²³ Throughout his lifetime Clemens repeatedly experienced guilt; perhaps as a result of this and ensuing disasters, in time he developed a deterministic philosophy that was a means of denying a painful sense of responsibility he felt then and for other events thereafter.

Sam continued to read and enhance his education. His ongoing interest in Charles Dickens is suggested by a quotation in a November 1860 letter to his brother Orion from Martin Chuzzlewit concerning Mrs. Gamp’s interest in alcohol. Indeed, Clemens regarded Dickens as one of his favorite writers for many years, though eventually he was to claim he found Dickens’s sentimentalism unattractive.

These years on the river seem to have been so deeply gratifying to Clemens that he was not tempted to try another career. He obtained his pilot’s license on April 9, 1859, and was extremely proud to be working on the City of Memphis, the largest boat in the trade and the hardest to pilot. He was proud, too, of his reputation as a pilot and his acceptance by fellow pilots. He told Orion, "I derive a living pleasure from these things. Throughout his life he referred to his experiences as a pilot, frequently with pleasure but occasionally with gratitude that he had escaped from its demands. In August 1862, he wrote to his sister, I never have once thought of returning home to go on the river again, and I never expect to do any more piloting at any price. But, in January 1866, he wrote to his mother, I wish I was back there piloting up & down the river again. Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting."

Toward the end of his piloting years, in February 1861, Clemens made a visit to a fortune-teller that piqued his imagination. According to a detailed letter he sent to Orion, she told him, "You have written a great deal; you write well—but you are out of practice; no matter—you will be in practice some day. She observed that he enjoyed excellent health but told him, you use entirely too much tobacco; and you must stop it; mind, not moderate, but stop the use of it totally." This was only one of many antismoking warnings that Clemens chose to ignore, even though he noted that Madam Caprell’s ability to tell the truth about him was remarkable.

River Intelligence, one of the few known publications of these years, which ended with Clemens’s last piloting on the river in 1861, relates to the obscure and muddled history of his pen name. The simplest explanation of the name is the one included in an autobiographical sketch he wrote for his nephew Samuel Moffett in the early part of the twentieth century. It has been unduly neglected. Here he explains, using a third-person voice, that he became the legislative correspondent of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise.

He wrote a weekly letter to the paper; it appeared Sundays, & on Mondays the legislative process was obstructed by the complaints of members as a result. They rose to questions of privilege & answered the criticisms of the correspondent with bitterness, customarily describing him with elaborate & uncomplimentary phrases, for lack of a briefer way. To save their time he presently began to sign the letters, using the Mississippi leadsman’s call, Mark Twain (2 fathoms =12 feet) for this purpose.²⁴

A few years later, in his autobiography, he explained that while a pilot he composed a rude and crude satire of a steamboat man who wrote under the pen name of Mark Twain.²⁵ In 1874 he was more specific: "Mark Twain was the nom de plume of one Capt. Isaiah Sellers, who used to write river news over it for the New Orleans Picayune. He died in 1863, & as he would no longer need that signature I laid violent hands upon it without asking permission of the prophet’s remains.²⁶ But Sellers did not die until a year after Clemens began to call himself Mark Twain, and no evidence has yet been found that Sellers actually used that pen name. Why Clemens repeatedly asserted that borrowing" from Sellers is not known.

On the other hand, Clemens did indeed satirize Sellers, whom he called Sergeant Fathom in River Intelligence, a piece he published in the New Orleans Crescent in May 1859. He depicted Sellers as reminiscing ludicrously while offering predictions of phenomenally high water. "In the summer of 1763 [ninety-six years before the date of the report] I came down the river on the old first ‘Jubilee.’ She was new, then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew." According to the account in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (chap. 50), this satire deeply affected Sellers, to the regret of the young Clemens. Another satire that Clemens wrote was a brief Pilot’s Memorandum, which burlesqued the standard reports on river traffic appearing in newspapers. Its humor assumed a good deal of familiarity with the steam-boating of that day.

Four other pieces by Clemens the steamboatman were discovered and reprinted in 1982. Three are mere journalism, first published in 1858. More ambitious was Soleleather Cultivates His Taste for Music, which appeared in the New Orleans Crescent in 1859. In it the brash narrator told of his experiences at a St. Louis boardinghouse, where he soothed a sick fellow boarder with his attempts to play first a violin, then a trombone. Soleleather is another version of Snodgrass, but better educated.²⁷

Of the two attempts at fiction Clemens made during his years on the river, one is a gothic tale of murder and revenge set in Germany, but with a plot borrowed from Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837). The other tells of a pilot who returns from the dead to perform an unusually difficult task of piloting. Aside from attesting to Clemens’s continuing serious interest in writing, the stories are unmemorable.

With the coming of the Civil War, Clemens left the river, since the war effectively disrupted commercial traffic. In 1899 he described the situation, using the third person: He was in New Orleans when Louisiana went out of the Union, Jan. 26, 1861, & started North the next day. Every day on the trip a blockade was closed by the boat, & the batteries of Jefferson Barracks (below St Louis) fired two shots through her chimney the last night of her voyage. He returned home and soon joined a group of volunteers who were taking the Confederate side in the conflict, but within two weeks he left them. ‘Incapacitated by fatigue’ through persistent retreating is the way he described the volunteers in a statement from the source just quoted.²⁸ This service was too informal and irregular for it to be said with any truthfulness that he was a deserter, as is sometimes reported. Nearly twenty-five years after the event, he rendered a somewhat fictionalized account of his war experiences in The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.

Sam’s next adventure was more crucial than his gesture at combat. In July 1861, he accompanied his brother to the West, where Orion, who had identified himself strongly with the Union side as the great conflict shaped itself, was rewarded with the office of the secretaryship of the territory of Nevada. Sam was eventually hired to be a government clerk at eight dollars a day, but not as Orion’s official secretary, as Sam reported in the entertaining account in Roughing It (1872).²⁹

The trip westward to the territory was long and slow. Leaving on July 18, 1861, they went up the Missouri River to St. Joseph, then travelled by overland stagecoach by way of Salt Lake City. They reached Carson City on August 14. Having finally arrived, Sam found himself in a world that strangely combined ugliness and beauty. He soon undertook some exploring and examined Lake Tahoe, only twenty miles or so from his headquarters in Carson City. He greatly admired the lake, but his negligence there resulted in his starting a forest fire in its tinder-dry terrain. He wrote a vivid account of the lake and the fire to his mother and sister in the early fall. A letter sent a little later, in October 1861, is one of his best early pieces. Testifying to Sam’s succumbing to the get-rich-quick fever of the silver miners, it also provides a description of the landscape:

It never rains here, and the dew never falls. No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them. Only the crow and the raven tarry with us. Our city lies in the midst of a desert of the purest, most unadulterated and uncompromising sand—in which infernal soil nothing but that fag-end of vegetable creation, sage brush, is mean enough to grow. If you will take a liliputian cedar tree for a model, and build a dozen imitations of it with the stiffest article of telegraph wire—set them one foot apart and then try to walk through them—you will understand (provided the floor is covered twelve inches deep with sand) what it is to travel through a sagebrush desert. When crushed, sage-brush emits an odor which isn’t exactly magnolia and equally isn’t exactly polecat—but a sort of compromise between the two. It looks a good deal like greasewood, and is the ugliest plant that was ever conceived of.

A version of this letter was published in the Keokuk Gate City in November.

Two subsequent letters, written in January and March 1862 and also addressed to Clemens’s mother, seem to have been intended for publication; they also appeared in the Gate City. In them Clemens assigns Jane Clemens the role of a worshiping disciple of Fenimore Cooper and admirer of the romantic Noble Savage and portrays himself as a disenchanted old-timer. Later, when he used these same materials in Roughing It, he played both roles: he had arrived in the West, he explains, as an innocent tenderfoot, full of book learning, but now years later he was writing as a hardened veteran. While the 1872 book version is deservedly better known, these previous letters are a valuable indication of Clemens’s development as a writer: he was beginning to assign himself more interesting roles.

The second of these early Nevada letters describes a trip Clemens and three others made to Unionville, Humboldt County, where silver was being discovered and mined. In this letter Clemens mixes information and anecdote just as he was to do in his travel books. In a March letter, he responds to an imagined plea from his mother to tell me all about the lordly sons of the forest. Clemens’s response reveals a scornful attitude toward American Indians that would not mellow for decades, unlike his racist views of African Americans, which dissipated in later years. The description of a representative Indian, whose name is given as Hoop-dedoodle-do, is thoroughly repulsive. In 1897, Mark Twain wrote that in his youth, Any young person would have been proud of a ‘strain’ of Indian blood; Cooper’s great popularity was responsible.³⁰ But on the basis of his experience in Nevada, Clemens’s advice is, Now, if you are acquainted with any romantic young ladies or gentlemen who dote on these loves of Indians, send them out here before the disease strikes in.

These long descriptive letters home indicate how thoroughly Clemens was beginning to enjoy playing the skeptic. Chiefly, however, he wanted to get rich quick, and the means was obviously silver. In a letter written to Orion on May II and 12, 1862, he reported that he owned a one-eighth interest in a ledge, and "I know it to contain our fortune" in gold and silver. The same letter refers to Sam’s contributions to the local newspaper; he assumed that Orion was seeing his letters in the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. By June he was thinking seriously of his work as a writer, for he instructs Orion, Put all of my Josh’s letters in my scrap book. I may have use for them some day. (The Josh letters written for the Enterprise have not survived.) But in the same letter he reports, I have quit writing for the [Keokuk] ‘Gate’ [City]. I haven’t got time to write. Perhaps it was at this juncture that he was obliged to take on a job that was nothing but manual labor. Ten years later he wrote, I shoveled quartz in a silver mill at ten dollars a week, for one entire week, & then resigned, with the consent & even the gratitude of the entire mill company.³¹ A month later he told Orion to write to the Sacramento Union or to members of its staff to announce that I’ll write as many letters a week as they want, for $10 a week—my board must be paid. Tell them I have corresponded with the N. Orleans Crescent, and other papers—and the Enterprise. California is full of people who have interests here, and its d—d seldom they hear from this country. The explanation for his job hunting is that he was in debt: "The fact is, I must have something to do, and that shortly, too."

What happened next is not quite clear, though it turned out to have great consequences. According to his autobiography, Clemens now became so desperate that he stood on the verge of the ministry or the penitentiary. Fortunately, he recounted, he found occasion to submit to the Enterprise for publication a clever burlesque of a speech by the chief justice of Nevada just when his services became necessary: the city editor of the Enterprise, Dan De Quille (William E. Wright) was planning a trip home to Iowa. Sam’s piece was considered witty, and he was hired.³² A more probable scenario is that Sam was taken on because of the Josh series and because employing Sam might mean that the Enterprise printing house would get patronage from Sam’s brother, the territorial secretary. In any event, within a short time Clemens was a full-time writer for the Enterprise, and the Enterprise did obtain the printing contract.³³ Clemens soon adopted the pen name Mark Twain for his humorous writings, but probably used his real name for serious news stories. Seemingly he identified in important ways with the adopted name, for now he signed a letter to his mother and sister Mark. According to one letter he sent to them, I take great pains to let the public know that ‘Mark Twain’ hails from there [i.e., Missouri]. For his newspaper work, They pay me, he wrote home, six dollars a day, and I make 50 per cent profit by doing only three dollars’ worth of work.

The development of Samuel Clemens as a writer cannot be fully documented, since a large portion of what he wrote for publication