by Twain, Mark
On old Long Island’s sea-girt shore
Many an hour I’ve whil’d away,
In list’ning to the breaker’s roar,
That wash the beach at Rockaway.
Transfix’d I’ve stood while nature’s lyre
In one harmonious concert broke,
And catching its promethean fire,
My inmost soul to rapture woke. Oh!
(J.C.H., 1:106)
98.6 Kate Field] Mary Katherine Keemle (Kate) Field (1838–96), a journalist, author, and lecturer who gained considerable popularity as a New York Tribune correspondent from Boston, London, and elsewhere. Clemens, who had met her in 1871, had a low opinion of her journalism and called her lecture technique “repellently artificial” (SLC 1898a, 9†).
98.23 The two young sailors—Irish] The sailors have not been identified, but an entry in one of Clemens’s notebooks for 1900 provides some information about them: “Huck tells of those heros the 2 Irish youths who painted ships on Goodwin’s walls & ran away. They told sea-adventures which made all the boys sick with envy & resolve to run away & go to sea—then later a man comes hunting for them for a small crime—laughs at their sailor-talk” (NB 43, CU-MARK†, TS p. 6). Goodwin’s was the name of a tavern in Palmyra, about twelve miles from Hannibal (Holcombe, 200).
99.6–7 The “long dog.”] The anecdote apparently alluded to, one of Clemens’s favorites, has not been recovered, although the punchline recurs in his notebooks, for example in 1879: “If all one dog, mighty long dog” (N&J2, 279; see also N&J3, 359, 644). The gist of the story is suggested by an illustrated postcard that author and editor George Iles sent Clemens in 1907, showing a barn containing several cows. Upon seeing the head of a cow in one window, the hind portion of a second cow in another window, and the torso of a third cow in the doorway between the two windows, a startled observer, mistaking the three cows for one, says “Wal, if that ain’t the darnedest longest cow I ever see.” “This recalls your St. Louis dog story,” Iles wrote on the postcard (20 July 1907, CU-MARK). In chapter 45 of Following the Equator (1897), Clemens had told of “a long, low dog” he had seen on a train—perhaps a version of the same anecdote, although the notebook punchline is not included. No association of the anecdote with REBECCA PAVEY can be documented, however, and it remains conceivable that Clemens was here thinking of a minstrel routine known as “the long dog scratch” (DeVoto 1932, 34; Wecter 1952, 190).
99.24 Byron, Scott, Cooper, Marryatt, Boz] George Gordon Byron (1788–1824); Walter Scott (1771–1832); James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851); Frederick Marryat (1792–1848); and Charles Dickens (1812–70), who used the pseudonym Boz. Mark Twain was favorably disposed toward Byron’s poetry and Marryat’s fiction and travel writings. His responses to the other writers were more complex—evolving, in varying degrees, from early enthusiasm to mature dislike. In chapter 46 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) he blamed Scott’s novels for the “jejune romanticism” prevalent in the antebellum South, later dismissing them as “so juvenile! so artificial, so shoddy” (SLC to Brander Matthews, 4 May 1903, NNC, in MTL, 2:738). He condemned Cooper for a prose style he called “a crime against the language” (SLC 1895a, 12) and for the romanticized depiction of the American Indian he attempted to counter in “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians.” And of Dickens he remarked: “I must fain confess that with the years I have lost much of my youthful admiration. . . . I cannot laugh and cry with him as I was wont. I seem to see all the machinery of the business too clearly, the effort is too patent. . . . How I used to laugh at Simon Tapper[t]it, and the Wellers, and a host more! But I can’t do it now somehow; and time, it seems to me, is the true test of humour” (“Visit of Mark Twain,” Sydney [Australia] Morning Herald, 17 Sept 95, 5). For an overview of Mark Twain’s opinion of all these authors, see Gribben, 1:120–22, 159–60, 186–92, 452, and 2:612–18.
99.26 Oft in the Stilly Night] A song dating from 1818, with lyrics by Thomas Moore set to a Scottish air arranged by Sir John Stevenson:
Oft in the stilly night,
Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,
Fond mem’ry brings the light
Of other days around me,
The smiles, the tears, of boyhoods years,
The words of Love then spoken,
The eyes that shone now dimm’d and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken!
(Ogilvie, 26)
In his 1896–97 notebook, among a series of entries about his recently deceased daughter Susy, Clemens jotted the final four of these lines from memory; in his 1902 notebook he reminded himself to use this song in a story he was planning about Huck and Tom (NB 39, TS p. 58, and NB 45, TS p. 15, CU-MARK; Gribben, 1:483).
99.26–27 Last Rose of Summer] Thomas Moore’s lyrics (1813) were sung to an old Irish melody:
’Tis the last rose of summer
Left blooming alone;
All her lovely companions
Are faded and gone;
No flow’r of her kindred,
No rosebud is nigh,
To reflect back her blushes,
Or give sigh for sigh!
(Ogilvie, 118)
This song, which Mark Twain called “exquisite” in 1865, was a lifelong favorite. In his 1902 notebook, among notes for a new Huck and Tom story, he reminded himself to “Get in Last Rose” (ET&S2, 180; NB 45, CU-MARK†, TS p. 15; Gribben, 1:483).
99.27 The Last Link] See the note at 96.15.
99.27 Bonny Doon] “The Banks o’ Doon” (1792), written by Robert Burns and sung to an old melody of disputed origin:
Ye banks and braes of bonny Doon,
How can ye bloom sae fresh and fair?
How can ye chaunt, ye little birds,
While I’m so wae, and full of care?
Ye’ll break my heart, ye little birds,
That wander thro’ that flow’ring thorn,
Ye mind me of departing joys,
Departed, never to return.
(Ogilvie, 156–57)
Another of Mark Twain’s longtime favorites, this song is given passing mention in “Schoolhouse Hill” (218.36–219.1; see also Gribben, 1:115).
99.27 Old Dog Tray] By Stephen Foster (1853):
Old dog Tray’s ever faithful,
Grief cannot drive him away,
He’s gentle, he is kind,
I shall never, never find
A better friend than old dog Tray.
(Heart Songs, 156–57)
In 1866 Mark Twain called this one of the “d—dest, oldest, vilest songs” (N&J1, 262; see also Gribben, 1:238).
99.27–28 for the lady I love will soon be a bride] This song has not been identified.
99.28 Gaily the Troubadour] A song by Thomas Haynes Bayly, written in the early nineteenth century:
Gaily the Troubadour
Touch’d his guitar,
When he was hastening
Home from the war.
Singing “From Palestine
Hither I come,
Lady Love! Lady Love!
Welcome me home.”
(Bayly, 1:192)
99.28–29 Bright Alfarata] “The Blue Juniata” (1844), by Marion Dix Sullivan, celebrates Alfarata, an Indian girl who lived with her “warrior good” on the banks of Pennsylvania’s Juniata River. In his autobiography Clemens mentioned this as one of the “sentimental songs” popular with minstrel troupes (AD, 30 Nov 1906, CU-MARK, in MTE, 114; J.C.H., 1:93; Gribben, 2:678).
99.30–32 Old Kentucky Home . . . Massa’s in de Cold Ground; Swanee River] All by Stephen Foster: “My Old Kentucky Home” (1853), the source of the lyric Clemens recalls; “Massa’s in de Cold, Cold Ground” (1852); and “Swanee River” (1851), more properly known as “The Old Folks at Home” (Gribben, 1:238).
99.33 The gushing Crusaders admired] Probably Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusaders, two novels (The Betrothed, The Talisman) first published in 1825.
100.18 the three “rich” men] Mark Twain may be referr
ing to Judge ZACHARIAH G. DRAPER, who in 1850 owned real estate valued at $45, 164; pork packer RUSSELL W. MOSS, who in the same year reported property holdings worth $23, 500; and Captain ARCHIBALD SAMPSON ROBARDS, whose real estate holdings, while not reported in the 1850 census, were valued at $89,000 in 1860 (Marion Census 1850, 312, 315, 317; Marion Census 1860, 761).
101.7 The Hanged Nigger] BEN.
101.11 The Stabbed Cal. Emigrant. Saw him] Clemens is referring to a stabbing that occurred in the mid-1840s, when travelers regularly passed through Hannibal en route to California. The body of the murdered man was taken to Justice of the Peace JOHN MARSHALL CLEMENS’s office, where young Sam, hiding to avoid punishment for truancy, saw it (“Annapolis Laughs,” Baltimore Sun, 11 May 1907, 10). Clemens recalled the incident repeatedly, in lectures as well as writings (see, for example, Lorch 1968, 275, 288). Perhaps the most vivid account appears in chapter 18 of The Innocents Abroad (1869), where he tells how “lagging moonlight” gradually revealed the body with its “ghastly stab.” A page of autobiographical notes he made about 1897 includes this terse summary: “All emigrant’s went through there. One stabbed to death—saw him. . . . Saw the corpse in my father’s office” (SLC 1897b†). Dixon Wecter supposed that Clemens was recalling Hannibal’s first homicide, the stabbing of James McFarland in September 1843, but the conjecture seems unlikely for two reasons: McFarland was a local farmer, not a transient, and Hannibal’s justice of the peace in 1843 was Campbell Meredith, not John Clemens (Wecter 1952, 103–4, 291 n. 7). In 1900, while working on his autobiography, Clemens again recalled “the young Californian emigrant who was stabbed with a bowie knife by a drunken comrade: I saw the red life gush from his breast” (SLC 1900, 7). Wecter, however, conjectured that this last reminiscence was of another incident entirely—an 1850 stabbing that occurred in a Hannibal saloon (Wecter 1952, 219).
101.27 Daily Packet Service] Daily steamer service between Keokuk, Iowa (60 miles north of Hannibal), and St. Louis, Missouri (135 miles south of Hannibal), was initiated in 1843 (Scharf, 2:1115).
101.29 Planters House] St. Louis’s most elegant hotel, which opened in 1841. It catered not only to travelers and other short-term guests, but to plantation families and their personal servants who came to spend the whole winter—the social “season”—in the city (Kirschten, 23).
101.31–32 the modest spire of the little Cath Cathedral] St. Louis’s Catholic Cathedral, completed in 1834, is described in the History of Saint Louis City and County (1883) as “a noble and imposing structure.” Its spire—resting on “a stone tower, forty feet in height above the pediment and twenty feet square”—is “an octagon in shape, surmounted by a gilt ball five feet in diameter, from which rises a cross of brass ten feet high” (Scharf, 2:1652).
102.8–9 Temperance Society, Cadets of Temperance] The Hannibal chapter of Sons of Temperance, a fraternal order that promoted abstinence from alcohol, was organized in the spring of 1847. A junior adjunct called the Cadets of Temperance, pledged to uproot the tobacco habit, was formed three years later (Wecter 1952, 152). In 1906, claiming to have been “a smoker from my ninth year,” Mark Twain remembered that he joined the Cadets for the privilege of wearing a red merino sash on holidays, but withdrew after only three months. He explained that the “organization was weak and impermanent because there were not enough holidays to support it. . . . you can’t keep a juvenile moral institution alive on two displays of its sash per year” (AD, 13 Feb 1906, CU-MARK, in MTA, 2:100).
102.9 the Co of St P Greys] That is, the St. Petersburg Greys, presumably a militia company. No information has been discovered about its probable Hannibal prototype.
102.9–10 the Fantastics] The Southern term for mummers, who dressed in fantastic costume and paraded on holidays (Lex, 78–79).
102.15 Mesmerizer] In an autobiographical dictation of 1 December 1906, Mark Twain recalled the mesmerizer’s show, which he believed came to Hannibal about 1850. After three nights of volunteering to be a subject and failing to fall into a trance, young Clemens simply pretended to be hypnotized: “Upon suggestion I fled from snakes, passed buckets at a fire, became excited over hot steamboat-races, made love to imaginary girls and kissed them, fished from the platform and landed mud-cats that outweighed me” (CU-MARK, in MTE, 120). As a result of his facility, he became the star of the show during the balance of its two-week stay in Hannibal.
102.16 Nigger Show] See the note at 15.12.
102.17 Bell-Ringers (Swiss)] The “Campanalogians, or Swiss Bell Ringers” gave one of their “chaste, select and novel Musical Entertainments” at Hannibal’s Second Presbyterian Church on the Fourth of July in 1850 (“Grand Musical Entertainment!” Hannibal Missouri Courier, 4 July 50).
102.18 Debating Society] Popular in pre—Civil War Missouri, these societies sought both to edify and to amuse. The Down East Debating Society of Hannibal, established in 1853, entertained by arguing such questions as “Where does fire go when it goes out?” and “When a house is on fire, does it burn up or burn down?” (Elbert R. Bowen 1959, 3).
102.30 The Mock Duel] Mark Twain may be alluding to the “Glover-Buckner Tragedy” of 1846 in Palmyra, near Hannibal, which in effect made a mockery of the code duello. John Taylor, challenged by Henry Broaddus, proposed a fight “with doublebarrel shot guns, the parties two feet from the muzzles. The guns are to be presented with a rest upon a stretched cord, cocked, and discharged at the word ‘fire.’ ” Broaddus’s second, George W. Buckner, regarded these terms as a bluff and accepted on behalf of his friend, but subsequently asked Taylor’s second, Joseph W. Glover, for new terms that would not “outrage all rules of propriety.” Before matters went further, however, all four men had to go into hiding from the sheriff. A few weeks later, after an exchange of insults between the opposing camps, Buckner waylaid and fatally wounded Glover and was himself killed in their ensuing struggle for his pistol. The entire affair received widespread attention throughout northeast Missouri and may have made a particular impression upon ten-year-old Clemen’s, since Glovers brother, SAMUEL TAYLOR GLOVER, was an acquaintance of the Clemens family (Holcombe, 276–82).
104.2 The stray calf] When JANE and JOHN MARSHALL CLEMENS arrived in Jamestown, Tennessee, early in 1827, their temporary home was a cabin in the woods. During one of John Clemens’s absences to replenish the stock for his store, a severe downpour threatened to flood the cabin. “I put a chair across the door to keep Orion in,” Jane Clemens later recalled, “& I waided. The water was k[n]ee deep & rising the cow was lowing round the fense the calf inside blating the water rising round it I waided to the gate & threw it open & the calf ran out the cow took it off in the woods or it would have been washed clear away. Two of the boys that kept me in wood & attended to the cow & horse came & said their mother said I must come up there one carried Orion I went not one dry thread on me” (Jane Lampton Clemens to Orion and Mary E. (Mollie) Clemens, 6? May 80, CU-MARK).
104.18–19 Had but one slave . . . sold her down the river] JENNY.
105.6 the Pres. preacher] LEMUEL GROSVENOR.
105.11 The autopsy] One of Samuel Clemens’s most disturbing memories was of surreptitiously observing, at the age of eleven, the autopsy performed on his father by physician HUGH MEREDITH. In a notebook entry of 1903 Clemens recalled the incident, but made the dead man a fictitious uncle: “1847. Witnessed post mortem of my uncle through the keyhole” (NB 46, CU-MARK, TS p. 25, in Wecter 1952, 116).
Hellfire Hotchkiss
(1897)
“Began Hellfire Hotchkiss” Mark Twain wrote in his notebook on 4 August 1897, in Weggis, Switzerland (NB 42, CU-MARK†, TS p. 24). On the envelope in which he kept the manuscript he affirmed his choice of title, while recording a potential alternative: “Hellfire Hotchkiss, or Sugar-Rag ditto.”
The setting here, Dawson’s Landing, is, like St. Petersburg, a re-creation of Hannibal. Mark Twain had previously used this name for the town in Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), but “Hellfire Hotchkiss” was not a sequel to that
novel, even though Wilson is mentioned in passing (121.3, 8–9). Rather it is a continuation of the narrative about Oscar Carpenter (Orion Clemens) which Mark Twain began to develop as he came to the end of “Villagers of 1840–3.”
Mark Twain had long seen literary possibilities in his erratic and capricious brother. In the burlesque “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” begun in 1877 but never completed, he had depicted Orion “at 18, printer’s apprentice, soft & sappy, full of fine intentions & shifting religions & not aware that he is a shining ass” (SLC to William Dean Howells, 23 Mar 77, MH-H, in MTHL, 1:173). In 1878 he and Howells began collaborating on a play about Orion, which they soon agreed to abandon. Repenting that decision, the following year Clemens urged Howells to
keep that MS & tackle it again. It will work out all right, you will see. I don’t believe that that character exists in literature in so well developed a condition as it exists in Orion’s person. Now won’t you put Orion in a story? Then he will go handsomely into a play afterwards. How deliciously you could paint him—it would make fascinating reading,—the sort that makes a reader laugh & cry at the same time, for Orion is as good & ridiculous a soul as ever was. (SLC to Howells, 21 Jan 79, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:246)
And again:
don’t you think you & I can get together & grind out a play . . . ? Orion is a field which grows richer & richer the more he manures it with each new top-dressing of religion or other guano. Drop me an immediate line about this, won’t you? I imagine I see Orion on the stage, always gentle, always melancholy, always changing his politics & religion, & trying to reform the world, always inventing something, & losing a limb by a new kind of explosion at the end of each of the four acts. Poor old chap, he is good material. (SLC to Howells, 15 Sept 79, NN-B, in MTHL, 1:269)
Nothing came of these proposals, however, and the depictions of Orion as Bolivar in “Autobiography of a Damned Fool,” as Albert in an 1892 fragment called “Affeland (Snivelization),” as Oscar Carpenter in “Hellfire Hotchkiss,” and as Oliver Hotchkiss in “Schoolhouse Hill,” are the only known direct portrayals of him in Mark Twain’s fiction (for the text of the “Autobiography” and a partial text of “Affeland,” see S&B, 136–61, 170–71).
