The Life of Mark Twain

by Gary Scharnhorst

  No doubt Orion was absentminded and easily distracted. His mother remembered that he “always was the most forgetful boy. . . . If I sent him for a pail of water he was just as likely to come back and tell me he couldn’t find any as he was to bring me a pail of chips instead of water.” Some of the stories told about him by Sam’s biographers—none of them verifiable now—make him out to be an utter buffoon: accidentally stumbling into bed with two maiden ladies, calling on a sweetheart in the middle of the night, leaving the church without his new wife after their wedding, drinking a glass of ink he mistook for fruit juice. But Orion’s absentmindedness may have a simple explanation: he may have been born with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a medical condition often associated with high intelligence, somnambulism, and night terrors or, as his brother might have said, the “fan-tods.”

  Sam exhibited the same classic symptoms as his brother. “I scatter from one interest to another, lingering nowhere,” he once allowed. “I am not a bee, I am a lightning bug.” Or, as he admitted in his autobiography, “I was born excited,” and “if I saw a vision I emptied the dictionary onto it and lost the remnant of my mind into the bargain.” As is common for children with ADHD, many of Sam’s early friends were younger than he was: Will Bowen by a half year, John Briggs by a year and a half, and John Robards by four years.10 His Virginia City friend and roommate Dan De Quille remembered that Sam

  was nervously overstrung and always in danger of a neurotic upset or explosion. . . . [E]vidently there was some neural derangement from the time of his birth. Things that wouldn’t disquiet the average man would grate on him and set him wild, while just an ordinary annoyance hit with the force of an overpowering shock. . . . Even under the most favorable conditions he could never sleep well of nights. He would lie and read, or walk the room, or prowl all over the house during most of the hours he should have been sleeping; and you had to lock your door if you didn’t wish to keep vigil with him.

  Louis J. Budd has concluded, fairly enough, that Sam was “often hyperactive in private.”11

  Sam’s boredom with rote learning was another telltale sign of the condition. He had graduated from Elizabeth Horr’s dame school to Mary Ann Newcomb’s Select School in the basement of the Presbyterian church, where his teachers were a Miss Torrey and later Miss Newcomb, who boarded with the Clemens family. Newcomb wore her hair in “ringlets” or “spit curls” and sported “a long sharp nose, and thin, colorless lips, and you could not tell her breast from her back if she had her head up a stovepipe hole looking for something in the attic,” Sam recalled. She was also “a most disagreeable woman.” He described her more succinctly in “Villagers of 1840–3” as an “old maid and thin.” He reimagined her years later in the characters of Miss Watson in Huck Finn, the “tolerable slim old maid” who is the Widow Douglas’s sister, as well as Miss Pomeroy in “Schoolhouse Hill”; the “long and lean and flat-chested” Frau Stein in “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger” (1902–8); and Mrs. Bangs in the unfinished “Autobiography of a Damned Fool.” The first time that Huck mentions Miss Watson, in fact, she is school-marmish: she “took a set at me now with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour.” She also admonishes Huck “to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so.” Similarly, Sam learned to doubt the efficacy of prayer, or so he insisted in his autobiography, after Miss Newcomb told him that “whosoever prayed for a thing in earnestness and strong desire need not doubt that his prayer would be answered.” He “did as much praying, during the next two or three days, as anyone in that town . . . but nothing came of it.”12

  At the age of nine or so Sam enrolled in the academy on Holliday’s Hill kept by Samuel Cross, one of the cofounders, with Marshall Clemens, of the Hannibal Library Institute in 1843 and an elder at the Presbyterian church. Among his two dozen classmates were George Robards and Laura Hawkins. A “slender, pale, studious” boy, Robards was the only Latin pupil and, as a result, depending on Sam’s mood when he was reminiscing, he was either “the envy and admiration of all the school” or an insufferable prig. Laura Hawkins Frazer recalled three quarters of a century later that she “must have liked Sam Clemens the very first time I saw him” because he “was different from the other boys. I didn’t know then, of course, what it was that made him different, but afterward, when my knowledge of the world and its people grew, I realized that it was his natural refinement.” She remembered the “fuzzy light curls all over his head that really ought to have belonged to a girl,” much as Sam attributed to Tom Sawyer “short curls” that he considered “effeminate” and as he recalled in his autobiography his own “dense ruck of short curls.”13

  Over fifty years later, after receiving an honorary degree from the University of Missouri, Sam credited Cross in part with preparing him for the distinction. Newcomb’s granddaughters claimed in 1935 that when Sam visited Hannibal in 1902 he had acknowledged his debt to their ancestor because “she compelled [him] to learn to read.” That Sam paid Newcomb this compliment is highly unlikely, however. When he passed through the village in 1902 he had insisted instead that he had received “all the learning” required to fit him for the LLD from “Mrs. Horr, Miss Torrey, Mr. Dawson and Mr. Cross,” pointedly omitting Newcomb. Elsewhere, however, he disparaged Cross’s form of instruction, which emphasized memorization and recitation, and he defined school in The Gilded Age (1873) as “a place where tender young humanity devoted itself for eight or ten hours a day to learning incomprehensible rubbish by heart out of books and reciting it by rote, like parrots.” At Cross’s school, he noted, “we had exhibitions once or twice a year,” and he often ridiculed the popularity on these occasions of such banal declamation pieces as Felicia Hemans’s poem “Casabianca” (aka “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck”), a ballad about a heroic lad who remains at the helm of a fiery ship in a vain attempt to save his father’s life. These programs failed to feature “a single line of original thought or expression.” Instead, if a student “showed any original thought the people suspected that something was the matter with him.”14 Sam dramatized the tedium of the exhibitions in chapter 21 of Tom Sawyer, in which students declaim such ripe old chestnuts as Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech, Mary Ann Harris Gay’s “A Missouri Maiden’s Farewell to Alabama,” and “The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck.”

  In short, Sam loathed the monotony of the classroom. As the protagonist declares in the unfinished “Boy’s Manuscript” (ca. 1868), “I hate school. . . . It is so dull,” and Tom Sawyer barely tolerates school, with its “captivity and fetters.” Laura Hawkins remembered that Sam often “played hooky from school” and “cared nothing at all” for his assignments, and he recalled an occasion when Cross “thrashed” him for his misbehavior. John A. Fry, another of his classmates, recollected that Sam was “shiftless, lazy, and dadblasted tired—born tired. No study in him.” In 1885, in the only interview Jane Clemens is known to have granted, she reminisced with a reporter for the Chicago Inter-Ocean about her famous son’s resistance to the rigors of formal education. “Sam was always a good-hearted boy,” she acknowledged, “but he was a very wild and mischievous one, and do what we would we could never make him go to school. This used to trouble his father and me dreadfully, and we were convinced that he would never amount to as much in the world as his brothers, because he was not nearly so steady and sober-minded as they were.” Sometimes Sam’s father would start him in the direction of Cross’s school, she remembered,

  and in a little while would follow him to ascertain his whereabouts. There was a large stump on the way to the schoolhouse, and Sam would take his position behind that and as his father went past would gradually circle around it in such a way as to keep out of sight. Finally his father and the teacher both said it was of no use to try to teach Sam anything, because he was determined not to learn. But I never gave up. He was always a great boy for history and could never get tired of that kind of reading, but
he hadn’t any use for schoolhouses and textbooks.

  When Marshall Clemens died, according to his widow, she thought then, if ever,

  was the proper time to make a lasting impression on the boy and work a change in him, so I took him by the hand and went with him into the room where the coffin was and in which the father lay, and with it between Sam and me I said to him that here in this presence I had some serious requests to make of him, and that I knew his word once given was never broken. . . . He turned his streaming eyes upon me and cried out, “Oh, mother, I will do anything, anything you ask of me except to go to school; I can’t do that!”

  It was, of course, “the very request I was going to make. Well, we afterward had a sober talk,” and they compromised.15 If Sam would continue to attend school, he could also work part-time for the Hannibal Gazette, the first Democratic paper in the village, founded in November 1846 and owned and edited by Henry La Cossitt. Sam was an apprentice and journeyman printer for the next nine years. He also worked at a variety of odd jobs: delivery boy, drugstore and grocery clerk, law student, apprentice in a blacksmith shop, and bookstore assistant. Had there “been a few more occupations to experiment on,” he later mused, “I might have made a dazzling success at last.” From the day his father died “until the end of 1856 or the first days of 1857,” he added, “I worked—not diligently, not willingly, but fretfully, lazily, repiningly, complainingly, disgustedly, and always shirking the work when I was not watched.”16

  In lieu of (or in addition to) his formal schooling—“if playing hookey & getting licked for it may be called by that name,” he joked—Sam was an autodidact and chimney-corner child, a book lover since childhood. “He got the hang of books in his cradle,” Henry Watterson remembered. As an adolescent he was fond of Lord Byron’s verse, George William Curtis’s Potiphar Papers, Thomas Chandler Haliburton’s comic Clockmaker stories featuring the Yankee wiseacre Sam Slick, and Frederick Marryat’s sea novels. He was familiar with the works of the literary comedians George Horatio Derby (aka John Phoenix); Donald Grant Mitchell (aka Ik Marvel); B. P. Shillaber (aka Mrs. Partington); William Tappan Thompson, author of Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel (1847); and Frances Miriam Whitcher (aka the Widow Bedott). The dime novelist Edward Z. C. Hudson (aka Ned Buntline) gave a lecture in Hannibal in November 1851, “Cuba and Her Martyrs,” and a quarter of a century later Sam modeled some of Tom Sawyer’s adventures on Buntline’s sensational pirate tale The Black Avenger of the Spanish Main (1847).17

  But Sam eventually outgrew his love for a couple of other canonical authors favored by juvenile readers. Like other adolescents, especially in the South, he enjoyed the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, though forty years later in Life on the Mississippi (1883) he referred derisively to the “Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization” and the “Sir Walter disease” that infected the chivalric ethos of the South, semiseriously blaming Scott for causing the Civil War: “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making” antebellum Southern character, he averred, “that he is in great measure responsible for the war.” Sam expressed his disdain for the Waverley novels again in chapter 12 of Huck Finn, where three thieves trapped aboard a sinking steamboat named the Walter Scott represent the debased condition of the Old South prior to the war. In 1895 he tactfully told an interviewer that “Scott used a great many words where in our day we would get along with one or two,” and as late as 1902 he claimed that he “could not read” Scott’s novels “even as a child. . . . Their long descriptions, their false Wardour Street of antiquity, repelled me.” Similarly, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales were so popular among the boys in Hannibal that, Sam said, any of them “would have been proud of a ‘strain’ of Indian blood.”18 He eventually changed his mind about Cooper, too.

  In mid-April 1847, three weeks after Marshall Clemens’s death, John D. Dawson, a native Scot and devout Campbellite, opened still another private school in Hannibal. Sam enrolled, probably in the fall of 1847, and remained at least a year; the 1850 census indicated he had attended school within the previous twelve months. It was the last school he attended, and it was the one that most resembles Dobbins’s school in Tom Sawyer. “If I wanted to describe [Dawson’s school] I could save myself the trouble by conveying the description of it to these pages from Tom Sawyer,” Sam remarked in his autobiography. Among his classmates were Sally Robards; Nannie Owsley, the seven-year-old daughter of Sam Smarr’s killer; and the schoolmaster’s son Theodore, the original for the Model Boy, Willie Mufferson, the darling of all the mothers in Tom Sawyer. Theodore Dawson was “inordinately good, extravagantly good, offensively good, detestably good—and he had pop-eyes,” Sam remembered, “and I would have drowned him if I had had a chance.” As he described him elsewhere, the “Model Boy of my time—we never had but the one—was perfect: perfect in manners, perfect in dress, perfect in conduct, perfect in filial piety, perfect in exterior godliness; but at bottom he was a prig; and as for the contents of his skull, they could have changed place with the contents of a pie and nobody would have been the worse off for it but the pie.” In one crucial way, however, art did not imitate life: Tom Sawyer finished the school year at Dobbins’s school and began his summer vacation; Sam finished his year at Dawson’s school and became a full-time apprentice in a print shop. A quarter century later, in Roughing It (1872), he claimed that he “had gone out into the world to shift for myself at the age of thirteen.”19 Not exactly. He may have gone to work at thirteen, but his mother lived nearby and her pantry door was always open.

  In May 1848 Joseph P. Ament, the twenty-four-year-old owner of the Missouri Courier, moved the four-page weekly from Palmyra to Hannibal, bought the Hannibal Gazette, and merged the two papers. The next month, even as he completed his final year of formal education, Sam was apprenticed to Ament. As Jane Clemens explained, in a stunning understatement, “I concluded to let him go into a printing office to learn the trade, as I couldn’t have him running wild. He did so, and has gradually picked up enough education to enable him to do about as well as those who were more studious in early life.”20 Much as Marshall Clemens apprenticed Orion in 1841 to reduce household expenses when his store and hotel in Hannibal failed, Jane apprenticed Sam to reduce household expenses after his father died.

  The tasks performed by a printer’s devil were menial and tedious, to say the least, and Sam was little more than an indentured servant. He not only collected money from subscribers by walking door-to-door but learned to sort and set 154 different pieces of type. He built Ament’s fire on winter mornings, and

  I brought his water from the village pump; I swept out his office; I picked up his type from under his stand; and, if he was there to see, I put the good type in his case and the broken ones among the “hell matter”; and if he wasn’t there to see, I dumped it all with the “pi” on the imposing stone. . . . I wetted down the paper Saturdays, I turned it Sundays—for this was a country weekly; I rolled, I washed the rollers, I washed the forms, I folded the papers, I carried them around at dawn Thursday mornings. . . . I enveloped the papers that were for the mail—we had a hundred town subscribers and three hundred and fifty county ones; the town subscribers paid in groceries and the country ones in cabbages and cordwood—when they paid at all, which was merely sometimes, and then we always stated the fact in the paper and gave them a puff; and if we forgot it they stopped the paper. Every man on the town list helped edit the thing; that is, he gave orders as to how it was to be edited; dictated its opinions, marked out its course for it, and every time the boss failed to connect, he stopped his paper.

  Sam also claimed sixty years later that he “helped to edit the paper when no one was watching.”21

  He received no wages—merely room, board, and two suits of clothes a year, usually oversized hand-me-downs from Ament. Sam was only about half Ament’s size, however, and when he wore one of his boss’s old shirts “I felt as if I had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make them short enough.”
Ament’s apprentices, slaves, cook, and the cook’s daughter “got but little variety in the way of food” at the table in the kitchen, Sam recalled, “and there wasn’t enough of it anyway.” He was sometimes so hungry that he stole potatoes and onions from Ament’s root cellar and roasted them in the printing office. Two years after leaving Ament’s employ, Sam scorned his former boss as a “diminutive chunk of human meat,” a “father of NOTHING,” and a “soft-soaper of Democratic rascality.” Still, he made a couple of close friends in Ament’s shop. His fellow apprentice Wales McCormick was “a reckless, hilarious, admirable creature; he had no principles, and was delightful company.” McCormick was also the model for the irreverent “wandering comp” Doangivadam in “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger”: “He was a beauty, trim and graceful as Satan, and was a born masher and knew it.” Writing to Sam over twenty years later, the jour printer Pet McMurry, his other friend in Ament’s shop, remembered him as “a little sandy-headed, curly-headed boy . . . mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a huge Cigar, or a diminutive pipe.”22 In the earliest photograph of Sam, a daguerreotype probably taken at Ballard’s Dagnerrean Rooms on November 29, 1850, the day before his fifteenth birthday, he stands with his typecase in hand.