Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  The three figures that Sam idly caricatured were just then wrestling with the destiny of the Union. Cass was soon to be secretary of state under President Buchanan. Douglas would make history as Abraham Lincoln’s rival for the presidency and in the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Seward would also run for president against Lincoln, then become his wartime secretary of state and, afterward, negotiate the purchase of Alaska. On this snowy day, they were leading the debate on whether to repeal the Missouri Compromise and thus eliminate a powerful bulwark against the extension of slavery westward in the territories. The measure at issue was the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Douglas’s vehicle for supplanting the Compromise. This act would allow territorial settlers, and not the federal government, to decide whether to allow slavery on their lands. Douglas steered his brainchild to victory three months after Sam’s visit. Its passage created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and drastically inflamed tensions over the slavery issue. The act prompted opponents of slavery to create the Republican Party and hand Lincoln a coherent political base. It set the stage for bloody border massacres and raids, and accelerated the onset of the Civil War. Sam lacked a sense of context to grasp what the amusing figures down on the floor were gassing on about. He went off to the Smithsonian Institution and to the Patent Office Building, which housed the National Museum, and then to the National Theatre to see Edwin Forrest play Othello.

  He would return to Washington a few years later—older, more seasoned, and vastly more plugged in to political nuance, and its uses in fact and fiction.

  Only the broad contours of Sam Clemens’s next twelve months are known. None of his letters from this period have surfaced. A trail of unclaimed letters to him (listed routinely in newspapers) suggests that he returned to Philadelphia after a few days in Washington, stayed a couple of weeks, and then went back to New York, where he probably struggled through a lean wage-earning period: two publishing houses were gutted by fire, leaving dozens of printers out of work. When he decided to return home to the Mississippi valley, as he probably did in April 1854, financial stress was one of his reasons, or so he said in 1899.26 He brought with him, no doubt, an awareness of the typesetter’s numbing life, its fatiguing demands, and its dim prospects for security.

  He rejoined his family, but within a few months, he returned to St. Louis and got himself rehired as a typesetter on the Evening News. He arrived in time to get mixed up in a makeshift dress rehearsal for the Civil War. Riots flared around the country like heat lightning in those tense times, many of them stirred up by angry Jacksonians who saw their way of life being swept away by industrialism, abolitionists, and the European Catholic immigrants, who seemed to mock the good Protestant verities, including the “verity” of slavery as divinely ordained. St. Louis was a stronghold of the most virulent dissidents, the Know-Nothings,* who could not abide the flow of German, Italian, and Irish Catholics into the city. A few years later the Know-Nothings would boast a new recruit: the struggling thirty-two-year-old ex-officer Ulysses S. Grant, who joined after a foreign-born opponent beat him out for appointment as county engineer. Grant attended one lodge meeting.

  The rioting in St. Louis erupted on August 7, 1854, as Know-Nothings attacked immigrant neighborhoods. Sam, who was living in a boardinghouse, went with a friend to an armory where a militia was being formed to quell the hell-raisers. “We drilled until about 10 o’clock that night,” Mark Twain recalled thirty years later; “then news came that the mob were in great force in the lower end of town, and were sweeping everything before them.” His column moved out, gripping muskets. As the bloody implications of this adventure clarified themselves in his mind, Sam developed a powerful thirst. “I was behind my friend,” Mark Twain remembered; “so, finally, I asked him to hold my musket while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home.”27 The riot was put down after two days; the Know-Nothings split over the slavery issue in 1856 and eventually faded away. Ulysses S. Grant went on to better things, and so did Samuel L. Clemens.

  Orion shut down his Journal around the end of March 1855 and, with his brother Henry and his mother, left Muscatine for Keokuk. He had enlivened the paper with occasional dispatches from Sam, still the proud reactionary, in St. Louis—“A new Catholic paper (bad luck to it) is also soon to be established, for the purpose of keeping the Know Nothing organ straight,”28 he’d groused in one item. But Orion’s new wife, Mollie, finally persuaded her husband to move to the city where her family lived. On June 11, Orion set himself up as a job printer, his youngest brother serving as his assistant. Orion soon wrote to Sam and asked him to return to small-town Iowa life, offering him five dollars a week. By mid-June, surprisingly, Sam accepted the offer.29 He probably accepted on an impulse: the job would get him out of a dangerous city and back on the Mississippi for a while. He had rekindled his boyhood fantasy of being a Mississippi steamboat pilot, and threw himself into making it happen. Once he had established himself in Keokuk, he took a downriver packet to St. Louis, then back to Hannibal, and Paris, Missouri, sometime in July 1855. In St. Louis he pleaded unsuccessfully with his wealthy relative James Clemens Jr. to pull some strings for him. Sam headed for the levee to try the direct approach, but had no luck.

  Probably on that downriver trip, he began a practice that would prove incalculably useful to his literary career: he started keeping a notebook, the first of fifty that survive; others, probably dozens, have been lost. Into these, over four decades, he poured “found data”: wisps of experience and anecdotes; bursts of indignation, opinion, regret; newly minted aphorisms; maps real and imagined; German vocabulary; timetables and laundry lists; notes on the works of Shakespeare and Matthew Arnold; the listing of facts of all kinds; and, as always, the stunning harvest of his intense noticing (“Sailors walk with hands somewhat spread & palms turned backward”) that made his writing burn truer and more mimetic of life-as-lived than anyone else’s in America or Europe.

  He took a side trip to the Quarles farm in Florida, Missouri, which his uncle John had by now sold—his last glimpse of the prairie in its loneliness and peace—and then traveled to Paris to wrap up some family business. Then he headed back upriver to Keokuk, and the last brief period of a rooted life that he would know for fifteen years.

  AS THE nation began to crack, Sam found himself, atypically, far from the center of things. Keokuk, Iowa, was a hotbed of rest. A more insular cocoon could hardly be found than this red-bricked little burg atop the bluffs in southwestern Iowa, where the Des Moines River joins the Mississippi. Keokuk had its rough edges and tough customers, like all steamboat ports of call; but it was being “sivilized.” Boosters had attracted a cadre of respectable transplants from New England who were turning the town into a prototype for the new, westward-moving middle class.

  Sam floated through this haze of leafy gentility, so far from Bleeding Kansas and the growing polarization in the country. He joined his brothers at Orion’s Ben Franklin Book and Job Office: Cards, Circulars, Bill Heads, Bills Lading, Posters, and Colored Work, Printed. It was a mellow time. “I have nothing to write,” he informed his mother and sister in St. Louis. (Jane had headed back downriver a few weeks earlier to live with Pamela and William Moffett.) “Everything is going on well…I don’t like to work on too many things at once.”30 He and Henry shared a bed on the premises, so his board was covered. He read long into the night after Henry had gone to sleep, frowning over Dickens or Poe, and puffing on his Oriental water pipe. One night another boarder, Ed Brownell, asked what he was reading. Sam said that it was a “so-called funny-book,” and then muttered that one day he would write a funnier one. Brownell said he doubted this.

  To his ever-present notebooks, he added laundry lists, girls’ addresses, musical notation, reminders to himself (“Go to Christian Church,” “Write to John Shoot”), annotations of chess matches.31 He sketched out phrenology diagrams that illustrated the regions of the mind (“Moral Sentiments,” “Selfish Propensities,” “Semi-Intellectual Sentiments”).32 He copi
ed textbook descriptions of the supposed Four Temperaments into which human beings are sorted. He composed detailed appraisals of young women:

  Tall, slender, rather regular features medium sized hand, small foot, oblong face, dark hair, pug or turned-up nose, small ears, light, pencilled eyebrows…She will go any length to add an admirer to her list, and likes to be complimented on the number of her conquests…There is an ocean of passion behind her black eyes which will stop at nothing when lashed to fury.33

  MOLLIE CLEMENS gave birth to a daughter, Jennie, on September 14, 1855. Orion struggled to match his profits to his household needs and Sam’s small salary, but he fell behind. Near the end of the year, Sam blew up over his phantom wages and quit. He took a typesetting job on the far side of the Mississippi, in Warsaw, Illinois.34 He came back a few weeks later, but his eruption typified his lifelong waspishness toward his older brother. Orion Clemens was an unoffending soul if ever there was one, but something about him drove Sam crazy. Sam remained impatient, condescending, and contemptuous toward Orion, in writing and in life, and his barbs frequently bordered on the cruel. On the other hand, he made sure that Orion and his family were never destitute, and he often exhorted his brother to be better, bolder, more ambitious.

  Sam returned to Keokuk just in time to get his first feel of the limelight’s hot glow. It happened unexpectedly on the evening of January 17, 1856, at a hotel dinner organized by some printers to celebrate the 150th birthday of the Founding Typesetter, Benjamin Franklin. Orion, who venerated Franklin and fancied himself something of an orator, presided. Nineteenth-century public dinners generally segued into elocution marathons, and this one was no exception: as the plates were cleared, speaker after speaker arose to deliver “remarks.” The succession lasted several hours. As the last scheduled orator plumped back down into his chair, some diehard called out for Sam to speak. The twenty-year-old was nonplussed; he hadn’t prepared anything. He made his way to the dais and delivered an off-the-cuff performance that alternately convulsed his bleary listeners and moistened their eyes. No one took notes, but the applause rolled on for several minutes. This would happen again.

  SAM DEVELOPED a new, adult friendship with Henry, whom he had hazed through childhood. Now Sam was as solicitous toward his younger brother as he was contrary toward his older one. During his courtship several years later, Sam would remark that only five people had ever known him well, and that of those, he had felt sympathy with only two: his fiancée Livy, and Henry. Sam also brushed up on his piano skills under the tutelage of Oliver C. Isbell, who ran the music studio downstairs from Orion’s office; and he dropped in of an evening to sing along and strum his banjo during the singing classes for young ladies. The proper town daughters in their parted ringlets covered their mouths at the way Sam would screw up his face while singing about grasshoppers sittin’ on a sweet potato vine, or suddenly leap to his feet to do a shuffle; and they would tease him good-naturedly for being a fool.

  He liked the ringlet girls in their long bell-shaped gingham dresses. He flirted with them in a diffident, summer-straw-hat kind of way, and dashed off poems in some of their autograph albums, gentle mock-romantic stanzas in the style of Wordsworth.

  Sam met one girl who drove him past doggerel and into heights of giddy wordplay. She was Ann Elizabeth Taylor, daughter of a literary-minded Keokuk alderman, and herself a witty, independent-minded student at Iowa Wesleyan College in Mount Pleasant, just forty-five miles due north. While Henry made shy overtures toward her younger sister Mary Jane, scribbling variations of the French word for “love” on scraps of paper, Sam courted Ann down the locust-lined streets of Keokuk during her trips home from school. His propensity to be inflamed by girls was counterbalanced by a kind of deifying reverence for their chastity. When Ann confessed to him her unfulfilled aspirations toward literature, he responded with self-humbling empathy: “Ah, Annie, I have a slight horror of writing essays myself; and if I were inclined to write one I should be afraid to do it, knowing you could do it so much better if you would only get industrious once and try.”35 When she was away at “Mount Un pleasant,” he fired off torrents of letters to her, bursts of lovesick silliness:

  …Bugs! Yes, B-U-G-S! What of the bugs? Why, perdition take the bugs! That is all. Night before last I stood at the little press until nearly 2 o’clock, and the flaring gas light over my head attracted all the varieties of bugs which are to be found in natural history…They at first came in little social crowds of a dozen or so, but soon…a religious mass meeting of several millions was assembled on the board before me, presided over by a venerable beetle [!], who occupied the most prominent lock of my hair as his chair of state…

  The big “president” beetle (who, when he frowned, closely resembled Isbell when the pupils are out of time) rose and ducked his head and, crossing his arms over his shoulders, stroked them down to the tip of his nose several times, and after thus disposing of the perspiration, stuck his hands under his wings, propped his back against a lock of hair, and then, bobbing his head at the congregation, remarked, “B-u-z-z!” To which the congregation devoutly responded, “B-u-z-z!” Satisfied with this promptness on the part of his flock, he took a more imposing perpendicular against another lock of hair…36

  Annie saved his letters for sixty years.

  THE KEOKUK City Directory rolled off the presses in July 1856, and Orion presented it to the citizenry with a flourish of preemptive defense. “Errors in this Directory,” he hedged in his Preface, “apologise for themselves, because the attempt is the first in Keokuk, and it would be a novelty among directories, if there were no mistakes…we shall have an opportunity to improve in our next.”37 Perhaps it was the prospect of this sort of tediousness, spun out over a lifetime, that finally got Sam reconnected with his rambling urges. Henry had followed Jane to St. Louis by that time, and though Sam remained enchanted with Annie Taylor, the genteel torpor of Keokuk was too much to bear any longer.

  He had been dreaming an exotic destination: Brazil. He’d been reading a book about the Amazon valley, which told of a certain “vegetable product with miraculous powers.”38 He had mentioned this amazing vegetable product to some of the upstanding citizens of Keokuk, including Joseph S. Martin, lecturer on chemistry and toxicology at the local medical college, and a businessman named Ward. The two were sufficiently impressed with the flora’s commercial possibilities—“so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native…would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch…and require no other sustenance”39—that they initially proposed to accompany him. Sam was “fired with a longing to ascend the Amazon. Also with a longing to open up a trade in [the substance] with all the world. During months I…tried to contrive ways to get to Para [Pará, seaport city in Brazil] and spring that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet.”40

  The idea of Samuel Clemens turning Keokuk, Iowa, into the mid-19th-century cocaine capital of America has its irresistible nutty appeal, but it was not to be. Dr. Martin and Mr. Ward quickly lost their appetites for fortune hunting. Sam, who had no idea exactly where Brazil was or what the Amazon country looked like, decided to forge ahead alone. Yet his boyishness still shone through the grown-up’s armor, as did his tug toward Annie. “Between you and I,” he wrote to Henry, “I believe that the secret of Ma’s willingness to allow me to go to South America lies in the fact that she is afraid I am going to get married! Success to the hallucination.”41 Hallucination, indeed.

  “To destiny I bend,” Sam had written in a sonorous three-verse poem to Miss Ann Virginia Ruffner in May 1856. Five months later, he departed Keokuk. Mark Twain enshrined the leave-taking with one of the suspiciously “literary” episodes that flavor his life memories. He recalled slogging along Main Street in the midafternoon cold when a piece of paper, plastered against a house by the wind, caught his eye. “It was a fifty-dollar bill…the largest assemblage of money I had ever seen in one spot.” Sam dutifully advertised the wayward note in the paper, but no one claimed it over four
days. “I felt sure that another four could not go by in this safe and secure way. I felt that I must take that money out of danger. So I bought a ticket to Cincinnati and went to that city.”42

  He went first to St. Louis to look in on his family. While in town he took in a production of Julius Caesar. He sent a sketch about it up to the Keokuk Daily Post under a newly minted persona: Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. He was riffing again off popular themes in the culture. Snodgrass was a stock-dialect rube off the Simon Suggs/Sut Lovingood template, with maybe a little cornball hick-from-the-sticks shtick that the Grand Ole Opry of seventy years later would recognize.

  Snodgrass swaggers into the theater and recognizes that he is a bumpkin in fancy-pants land. He fishes out a pocket comb and plays it in competition with the house orchestra, meaning to take “them one-hoss fiddlers down a peg and bring down the house, too.” The audience laughs, which only gets Snodgrass’s dander up. He cusses out a man near him and triggers a near riot. When he gets around to summarizing the play’s plotline for the Keokuk audience, he reports:

  At last it come time to remove Mr. Cesar from office…so all the conspirators got around the throne, and directly Cesar come stepping in, putting on as many airs as if he was mayor of Alexandria. Arter he had sot on the house awhile they all jumped on him at once like a batch of Irish on a sick nigger.43

  Snodgrass shows up in two further dispatches to the Daily Post. A trivial creation in himself, he is significant as the first phase of the writer’s slow but inexorable reinvention of dialect as a serious literary device.

  After about a week in St. Louis, he lurched fitfully around the countryside, eventually making his way to Cincinnati, where he stayed put long enough to earn some money as a printer. Finally, in February 1857, Sam Clemens commenced, more or less by accident, his life on the Mississippi.