Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  He spent the summer in St. Louis working for the News and staying with his sister Pamela. She was by now married to William A. Moffett, whom Twain described later as “a merchant, Virginian—a fine man in every way.” Sam made only eight or nine dollars a week, somewhat below what the average compositor could command, but he evidently saved his money, having promised his mother never to drink or throw a card. On August 19 he began an arduous six-day journey by steamboat, rail, and stagecoach to New York, where one of the attractions was the first World’s Fair, being held at the Crystal Palace, a huge dome of glass and iron on Fifth Avenue behind the Croton Reservoir, today the site of the New York Public Library. Back in Hannibal, he had very possibly read about the grand exhibit. On May 26 in Orion’s newspaper, a report stated that between fifteen and twenty thousand people came to it every day.1

  Although the city was overrun with printers, it could still absorb a sober applicant who hadn’t found anything upriver in St. Louis. He landed a position at John A. Gray’s book and job printing house (coincidentally, the printers of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County in 1867) at 95–97 Cliff Street near the East River, next to Harper and Brothers publishing house. “I work in the fifth story,” he told his mother, “and from one window I have a pretty good view of the city, while another commands a view of the shipping beyond the Battery; and the ‘forest of masts,’ with all sorts of flags flying.” There were at the time, unfortunately, two competing printers’ unions in the city, which drove down the pay to as low as twenty-three cents per one thousand ems, the rate seventeen-year-old Sam received. But, as he told his mother on August 31, he was lucky to get the job, which was permanent as long as he wanted it. He boarded ten blocks away near Broadway on Duane Street, where he missed southern home cooking.2

  Walt Whitman claimed to have known young Clemens during Sam’s first time in New York. Now a former newspaper editor, Whitman was working away on the first edition of Leaves of Grass while running a bookstore in Brooklyn. He would still have made frequent visits to printers’ row where Sam worked. “I have met Clemens,” the poet later told his Boswell, Horace Traubel, “met him many years ago, before he was rich and famous. Like all humorists he was very sober: inclined to talk of the latest things in politics, men, books, a man after old-fashioned models, slow to move, liking to stop and chat—the sort of fellow one is quietly drawn to.”3

  Parts of Sam’s letter to his mother and other letters were published by Orion, first in Hannibal and then in Muscatine, Iowa, where he had briefly relocated with another newspaper. Although Twain began his career as a travel writer, he was actually traveling for the first time. Hardly three months earlier he had never been far from Hannibal. Now, here he was in one of the biggest and most populous cities in America. “I was going to leave New York, every day for the last two weeks,” he wrote his sister in St. Louis. “I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave, I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause.” By the third week of October, he had relocated to Philadelphia. He went by steamboat to South Amboy, New Jersey, and then by train to Camden and over the Delaware River by ferry to what he described as a city “rich in Revolutionary associations.”

  Travel by rail was still dangerous in this era and throughout the nineteenth century because most trains, dependent on telegraph dispatchers sometimes either asleep or drunk on the job, ran on a single track going in opposite directions. Sam told Orion that he had traveled on the same line on which a deadly collision had occurred the previous August. He never thought of the danger, he said, until the train stopped “ ‘all of a sudden,’ and then began to go backwards like blazes. Then ran back half a mile, and switched off on another track, and stopped; and the next moment a large passenger train came round a bend in the road, and whistled past us like lightning!”4 Perhaps he later saw the experience as an omen for his brother Henry’s death on a steamboat, yet another very dangerous mode of transportation in the rapidly expanding nation.

  In the meantime he worried about the changes at home. Having read somewhere that Orion had given up the Journal, he supposed that the family had joined Pamela in St. Louis, where his brother had previously made a living wage as a printer. He liked Philadelphia better than New York. It was, of course, the city of Franklin, Orion’s one-time model. “The grave of Franklin,” he told his brother in that era of grave robbers, “is in Christ Church-yard, cor. of Fifth and Arch streets. They keep the gates locked, and one can only see the flat slab that lies over his remains and that of his wife.” He visited Fairmont Park and the famous cable suspension bridge over the Schuylkill River that ran down the western side of the city. He saw steamboats with signs indicating they were headed for Germantown and Wissahickon Creek and vowed to visit the area as soon as possible. He had read about it in George Lippard’s Legends of the American Revolution (1847). Remembered by his fellow printers as a dedicated reader, young Sam may have even read this book in the Printers’ Free Library in New York.5

  Clemens remained in Philadelphia until the winter of 1854. He worked, as he later recalled, on the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Public Ledger, but only as a substitute printer. He didn’t worry, however, as he was still in the glow of happiness at having gotten away from Hannibal and seeing the wide world. (Despite its charm today as the home of Mark Twain, a visitor to that small river town will quickly realize why Sam Clemens yearned to spread his wings.) He told Orion of a printers’ annual ball that raised a thousand dollars toward the erection of a statue of Franklin. But the patriotic Clemens was annoyed by the many Irish (“foreigners”) in the city and among the ranks of the printers, “who hate everything American.” Two days before his eighteenth birthday, he still maintained his bias toward the Irish, northern blacks who didn’t know how to behave themselves around whites, and abolitionists. “I reckon I had better black my face,” he had told his mother while still in New York, “for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people.”6

  All the same, he was now living in the city of the Quakers, who had led the movement to draw freed and fugitive slaves north. Along with Boston, Philadelphia was a haven for such activity and sympathy. New York, on the other hand, was known to be hostile to passengers on the Underground Railroad. By now Orion, his mother, and Henry had moved to the Free Soil state of Iowa, and Sam asked his brother how he liked the change from Missouri. “I would like amazingly to see a good, old-fashioned negro,” he closed, meaning a black person beyond the politics of the anti-slavery movement that was heating up in the North. Ever since the Wilmot Proviso (introduced by a Pennsylvania congressman, no less) had been defeated in 1847, the differences between the North and the South had been sharpened. It had called for outlawing slavery in the new territories, and states like Iowa and Missouri whose western borders faced the territories were on the cusp of the controversy.

  This was Mark Twain’s first visit to the distant North, the land of the abolitionists that Hannibal residents increasingly feared, as he would later suggest in Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy. He also hailed from a southern town that was remote in terms of the fever pitch that the national debate over slavery had reached since the strengthened fugitive slave law of 1850. The closest metropolis that embraced the politics of abolition was forty miles away, across the river in Quincy, Illinois. The nearest big city was St. Louis, more than a hundred miles downriver, and it was still pro-southern on the question of slavery. The institution was also thoroughly supported in the pulpits in Hannibal, and Clemens had probably had little or no access to northern newspapers that called it into question. It would take some time in the West for this southerner to ever feel at home in the North.

  In fact, vestiges of his divided feelings toward blacks can be found as late as the turn of the century, long after his celebration of racial sympathy in Huckleberry Finn. Even when he was excitedly planning a book on lynching in 1901, to be based on an article he planned to submit to the North American Review entitled �
�The United States of Lyncherdom,” he recalled in the précis for his intended publisher the case of a black man who had deserved punishment (lawful retribution, not lynching). He had raped a girl and clubbed “her & her younger brother to death.” The crime had taken place near Hannibal in 1849. “I remember all about it,” he told Frank Bliss. “It came out that his owner smuggled him out of Virginia because he had raped 3 white women there & his commercial value was deteriorating.”7

  Faithful to the promise he had made to his mother, he told Orion while still in Philadelphia, “I believe I am the only person in the Inquirer office that does not drink.” That would have pleased Orion, who had tried to set the same example as a printer in St. Louis. But printers were rather notorious drunkards whose lifestyles in general were not typically healthy. “One young fellow makes $18 for a few weeks,” he wrote Orion, “and gets on a grand ‘bender’ and spends every cent of it.” He told his sister Pamela that he had hoped to return to St. Louis before the Mississippi froze over that winter and closed the river to steamboat traffic. Instead he stayed on and contributed two more letters to the Muscatine Journal. Once again, as he had in the Hannibal Journal before leaving town, he called upon his talent for mocking sentimental poetry.

  “The people here,” he wrote in the Muscatine Journal of February 3, 1854, “seem very fond of tacking a bit of poetry (?) to the notices of the death of friends, published in the Ledger.” He cited as an example of this “most villainous doggerel” the following:

  Ah! dry your tears, and shed no more.

  Because your child, husband, and brother has gone before;

  In love he lived, in peace he died,

  His life was asked, but was denied.

  “What do you think of that?” he asked his Iowa readers. “Will not Byron lose some of his popularity now?”8 Even though he did not know any Muscatine readers personally, he could address them with the same intimacy he might have written to Hannibal readers because they were not from the East and would have appreciated his mockery of supposedly highbrow culture.

  Not long after writing this letter, Sam made what he later remembered as a “flying trip” to Washington, D.C. In fact, it was on February 17 that he stood in the snow before the unfinished Capitol dome. As snow fell heavily on his shoulders, he sank “ankle deep” in the unpaved street of mud and snow. Possibly he felt more comfortable in Washington than he had in Philadelphia with regard to slavery, for the District of Columbia still allowed it. He stood proudly before a recently constructed equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson near the White House. He thought the public buildings “fine specimens of architecture,” which would more readily embellish New York City. “Here they are sadly out of place looking like so many palaces in a Hottentot village.” He was consciously writing now to the Muscatine readers. “The streets,” he told them, “indeed are fine—wide, straight, and level as a floor. But the buildings, almost invariably, are very poor—two and three story brick houses, and strewed about in clusters.”

  He ventured into the chambers of the Senate and the House of Representatives and lamented that the halls of the Capitol were no longer peopled with greats like Clay, Webster, or Calhoun. At the time he visited one session of Congress, debate was beginning on the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Act, which when passed the following year, would void the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and help to create John Brown’s firestorm in Kansas. This visit may have marked the beginning of what would become his lifelong practice of making fun of congressmen. But even more interesting than Congress to this future inventor of a self-pasting scrapbook and self-adjusting suspenders was the U.S. Patent Office. Also, as the largest future investor in the doomed Paige typesetting machine, he admired the printing press used by Franklin a hundred years earlier, remarking, “What vast progress has been made in the art of printing!”9

  One would think that Sam Clemens would have spent more than a weekend in Washington to take in the sights, including the Washington Monument, under construction since 1848, but it was probably no more than a weekend that he actually spent there, four or five days at the most, before he returned to work again as a printer in Philadelphia. In terms of surviving letters, the rest of 1854 and the first part of 1855 constitute a blank. His authorized biographer states that Clemens, after working a while in Philadelphia, returned for a brief visit to New York before heading west again in the spring or summer of 1854.

  He went to St. Louis, but he probably didn’t stay there very long, mainly because he wanted to see his mother, who with fourteen-yearold Henry was living with Orion in Muscatine. In chapter 57 of Life on the Mississippi, while discussing the upper river towns, he describes Muscatine’s beautiful sunsets. He called them “summer sunsets,” which suggests that he spent only the summer in the Iowa town, working perhaps in his brother’s newspaper office before returning to St. Louis to resume his printing job on the Evening News. He had made little money as a printer in St. Louis on his first try, and this situation may have persisted in the winter of 1855. In 1908 Anthony Kennedy, a printer who had worked alongside Clemens then, claimed that the young printer “could not have set up an advertisement in acceptable form to save his life.” The testimony is a little suspect since Orion had expressed an admiration for Sam’s abilities as a printer in Hannibal. By 1908 Clemens, of course, had become the world-famous Mark Twain, while Kennedy had remained a relative nobody. Yet Kennedy’s description does conform to those of others suggesting that the small-boned, red-headed Clemens, who stood around five feet eight and a half inches, was never “one of the boys.” “He was a silent chap, who attended to his own business and didn’t mingle with the wild fellows who worked with him.”10

  In December 1854 Orion married Mary Eleanor Stotts, or “Mollie,” as she was called. He met her in Keokuk, and her homesickness soon prodded them to move from Muscatine to Keokuk, less than a hundred miles downriver, the following June. Almost exactly nine months to the day after their marriage, Mollie gave birth to their only child, named Jennie. Sam made a visit from St. Louis in June and returned that fall to work for the Muscatine Journal, to which he had already contributed from St. Louis. During that summer he briefly visited Hannibal and—for the last time in his life—Florida, Missouri.

  In one of his letters to the Muscatine Journal, dated February 16, 1855, he alluded somewhat approvingly to the case of a free black woman from Ohio who had been arrested in St. Louis for entering Missouri without permission. State law at the time forbade a free black from entering the state “unless in the service of a white man, or for the purpose of passing through.” Yet at the same time, he took the point of view of a passive observer, noting that she had avoided the price of a license to save money and would “doubtless be more careful in the future.” He was heading, it seems, in several directions at once in life during this period, taking in events and scenes that would later crop up in his fiction, such as in Pap Finn’s tirade against the free black man from Ohio in chapter 6 of Huckleberry Finn. He was, as his earliest known journal shows, studying phrenology, that forerunner of self-help psychology. He also began the study of the French language in 1855, possibly because he hoped soon—or someday soon—to visit New Orleans. This too would come back to serve him well in his famous jokes about the French.11

  It probably wasn’t until some months after Orion had re-established himself in Keokuk that Sam left St. Louis to live there and work for him. Orion had taken possession of the Ben Franklin Book and Job Office, located on the third floor of 52 Main Street. Henry also worked in the office, where both he and Sam slept at night. Orion and Mollie, now with a new infant, moved in with her father, William Stotts, on Timea Street. Fred W. Lorch writes that this period in Keokuk was one of the happiest in Sam’s early career because he was now old enough to both work for Orion and be independent of him. Orion, too, was now preoccupied not only with a new business but with a new baby as well. Well known for his pranks in Hannibal, Sam lived up to the same reputation in Keokuk. He also began to develop the
public personality of a humorist, which would throughout his life overshadow the literary talent we celebrate today.

  In fact, he delivered his first public speech at a banquet in Keokuk given by the printers’ association on the 150th birthday of Ben Franklin. The event took place at the Ivins House on January 17, 1856. After the planned portion of the program had been completed, including a speech by Orion, there was a boisterous call for Sam Clemens to speak. He responded with an informal talk, enhanced by the slow drawl he had inherited from his mother and “replete with wit and humor, being interrupted by long and continued bursts of applause.” These are the words of Orion, who had been elected secretary for the occasion. He wrote an article in the Keokuk Gate City that described the banquet in detail. Later, J. C. Fry, who had sat next to Clemens at the Keokuk banquet, recalled his performance.

  “Blushing and slowly getting upon his feet, stammering in the start,” Fry wrote in the Gate City of January 17, 1885, “he finally rallied his powers, and when he sat down, his speech was pronounced by all present a remarkable production of pathos and wit, the latter however predominating, convulsing his hearers with round after round of applause.”12 This description appears to anticipate Twain’s mature lectures, when “the trouble” began with him playing the part of the reluctant lecturer. Then he would appear on stage without anyone to introduce him, seem not to know what he was about during a silence that could last up to five minutes, and then unfurl his wings of irony and wit.

  Clemens no doubt remained in Keokuk for most of the next year, but in October 1856 he moved to Cincinnati to work. He may have first visited his mother, who was now back with Pamela in St. Louis. It is not altogether clear just why he made this move so far away, almost as if he were heading back east again. The move was later romanticized in a late-life memoir entitled “The Turning Point of My Life,” which shares with his autobiography some of the tendency for simplification. Paine uses the story in his biography. Sam found a fifty-dollar bill on the street in Keokuk and took the discovery as a good omen for his plan to go to the Amazon, having read an account of its exploration.13