by Ron Powers
The ship decks looked like a battlefield. Victims pleaded for water, and for mercy, their bones and bowels exposed. A Catholic priest from Milwaukee was boiled alive. A Tennessee Supreme Court judge and a baritone with the New Orleans French Opera Company were among the fatally scalded. Captain Kleinfelter, freshly shaved, had just left his barber chair when the blast erupted. The force obliterated the chair and left the burned barber stirring his lather in shock for several seconds before he could move. George Ealer, Brown’s co-pilot and Sam’s good friend, was nearly brained by the heavy, descending pilot wheel. He rummaged for his beloved flute and the scattered pieces of his chess set, and then set about directing the rescue efforts. A French admiral’s eighteen-year-old son was hideously scalded and bore it with military stoicism. A plantation owner and his wife found themselves trapped by heavy timbers and, as flames approached them, they offered their acreage, their fortune, and their slaves, to anyone who could save them. Nobody could. Mark Twain later adapted these two vignettes for the steamboat catastrophe scene in The Gilded Age.
Among those injured in the opening moments of the first blast was Henry Clemens, who was sleeping above the boilers. The blast drove the youth through the ceiling and into the air on a jet of steam. Instead of landing in the river, he seems to have dropped back onto the heated boilers, where he was bombarded by falling debris. He managed to drag himself off the boat and into the water, probably clutching something that floated. From there, he was pulled into a crowded rescue boat. He and the other occupants waited eight hours for help, many of them with scalded skin peeling, in hundred-degree heat. A southbound rescue boat finally took the injured to the town of Austin, Mississippi, where it waited two hours for an upriver boat to transport them to Memphis. There was another transfer, this time to the Kate Frisbee. Henry Clemens and the others, who had suffered their wounds at dawn on Sunday, arrived at a makeshift hospital, the Memphis Exchange, at 3 a.m. the following day, June 14.
Sam made it to the Exchange a day later. His reaction on seeing his brother was captured by a local newspaper reporter:
We witnessed one of the most affecting scenes at the Exchange yesterday that has ever been seen. The brother of Mr. Henry Clemens, second clerk of the Pennsylvania…arrived in the city yesterday afternoon, on the steamer A. T. Lacy. He hurried to the Exchange to see his brother, and on approaching the bedside of the wounded man, his feelings so much overcame him, at the scalded and emaciated form before him, that he sunk to the floor overpowered. There was scarcely a dry eye in the house; the poor sufferers shed tears at the sight. This brother had been pilot on the Pennsylvania, but fortunately for him, had remained in New Orleans when the boat started up.43
Three days later, Sam was able to compose a letter to Mollie Clemens, who had stayed in Keokuk during Orion’s Kentucky sojourn.
Long before this reaches you, my poor Henry,—my darling, my pride, my glory, my all, will have finished his blameless career, and the light of my life will have gone out in utter darkness. O, God! this is hard to bear. Hardened, hopeless,—aye, lost—lost—lost and ruined sinner as I am—I, even I, have humbled myself to the ground and prayed as never man prayed before, that the great God might let this cup pass from me [and] spare my brother—that he would pour out the fulness of his just wrath upon my wicked head, but have mercy, mercy, mercy upon that unoffending boy…. poor wretched me, that was once so proud, was humbled to the very dust—lower than the dust—for the vilest beggar in the streets of Saint Louis could never conceive of a humiliation like mine. Men take me by the hand and congratulate me, and call me “lucky” because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! My God forgive them, for they know not what they say!44
Henry lingered on for three more days. The scene in the ward was spectral: doctors had covered the surviving patients’ skin with a kind of white medical paint (white lead), on which they had pressed raw cotton, so that the victims looked like ghosts of themselves. Henry’s body was swathed in this goo, but not his smooth face, which had escaped disfigurement. The doctors and nurses were struck by the dying boy’s beauty and by his gracious manner. He became a favorite among them.
On June 21, Sam sent a telegram to William Moffett in St. Louis:
HENRY DIED THIS MORNING LEAVE TOMORROW WITH THE CORPSE
Sam boarded a steamboat for St. Louis along with Henry’s body. From St. Louis, family members transported Henry’s casket to Hannibal aboard a steamer named the Hannibal City. Henry was buried beside his father, John Marshall, in the town’s northern Baptist cemetery, the one that appears in the grave-robbing scene in Tom Sawyer. In 1876, Mark Twain arranged for the two bodies to be transferred to the new Mount Olivet Cemetery, on a high bluff above the river, south of Hannibal. In time, Marshall and Henry were joined by the remains of Jane, then Orion, then Mollie. The five graves remain there still.
MARK TWAIN relived and rewrote Henry’s death for the rest of his life. Henry’s survival prospects improve a little with each retelling, until his death comes almost anticlimactically. In his 1858 letter to Mollie, Sam reports that Henry fell back on the hot boilers after the explosion, suffered internal injuries from falling debris, then swam to shore and was pulled into a flatboat with other survivors. In a tribute that Sam published several weeks later, Henry escapes on a “mattrass to a raft or open wood boat,” but has suffered brain damage from “the concussion.” Life on the Mississippi has Henry swimming back to the steamboat after the explosion on a mission to help others, fulfilling the brothers’ levee agreement of a few nights earlier. And by the time of Mark Twain’s autobiographical dictation (January 13, 1906), Henry is actually pulled back from the brink of death and is on the way to recovery, thanks to a “fine and large-hearted old physician of great reputation,”45 and probably would have survived, but for a melodramatic irony: an accidental overdosing of morphine administered by inexperienced doctors (“hardly out of medical school”) on the night watch. He spoke of the dream repeatedly during his lifetime, and seems to have been unconscious of its permutations. It is as though the dream came at him from differing corners of his mind, and perhaps in his constant retelling, he sought to make peace with it.
HENRY’S DEATH closed a door in Samuel Clemens’s heart. Before it happened, he had talked of joining the ministry, a fantasy he had in common with Orion. Now his skepticism regarding the Christian faith hardened into non-belief, and he embarked on a lifetime of guilt over his role in guiding his brother toward his doom, a guilt compounded by the excruciating luck of his own survival. “Lucky?” He beseeched God to strike his “wicked head” and have mercy “upon that unoffending boy.”
Death always lurked not far beneath the surface of his writing, even the satire, especially the satire; Mark Twain insisted that the secret source of humor was not joy, but sorrow. G. K. Chesterton was among those who noticed this sometimes subtle dialectic. Mark Twain was “always serious to the point of madness,” he observed—“an unfathomably solemn man.”46 At least once, Sam tried to contact his dead brother through a psychic.
And finally, there is the matter that Mark Twain recalled as the prophetic dream. It seems to have been consummated in real life. When Sam Clemens awoke from his stupefied slumber in the Memphis household on June 21 (he claimed in his autobiography), he returned to the “dead-room” at the Exchange. There lay Henry in a metallic burial case, dressed in Sam’s clothing. The surrounding coffins were of unpainted pine, but Henry had become a favorite among the Memphis women volunteers, and some of them had made up a purse of sixty dollars and given him this fancier one.
I recognized instantly that my dream of several weeks before was here exactly reproduced, so far as these details went—and I think I missed one detail, but that one was immediately supplied, for just then an elderly lady entered the place with a large bouquet consisting mainly of white roses, and in the center of it was a red rose, and she laid it on his breast.47
The losses of these two adored figures—his brother to death, his instantly
elected sweetheart, Laura Wright, to the vagaries of fate—were so crushing to Sam Clemens that he could not bear to accept them as losses. He gave Henry a kind of afterlife in three of his books: as “Sid” in Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and as himself in Life on the Mississippi and in his autobiography. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Hank Morgan is ordered burned at the stake on June 21, the date of Henry’s death; but he is saved from death by the distraction of an eclipse of the sun.
Some scholars have detected traces of Laura Wright moving like an apparition through Mark Twain’s literature: one female character, and then another, trailing her long plaited tresses and summer frock, a beautiful eidolon of regret and yearning.48 And he installed her permanently in the alternate reality of his dream world.
She is perhaps the most indelibly evoked in a little-known Mark Twain essay that describes a hauntingly recurring dream in which a Laura Wright proxy reigned. Like many of Sam Clemens’s dreams, this one was so powerful and pervasive as to approach the status of an alternate reality, a theme that gripped him in his late-life writings. He developed the habit of recording his nighttime visions in his notebooks for decades before Sigmund Freud made it a quasi–civic duty. In 1898, living in Vienna, where Freud was then at work on The Interpretation of Dreams, Mark Twain chronicled his Laura dreams in “My Platonic Sweetheart.”49 Several magazine editors rejected the piece during his lifetime, bewildered by its hallucinatory strangeness or possibly taken aback by its intimations of sexual desire (“Helen had a summer hat on. She took it off presently and said, ‘It was in the way; now you can kiss me better’ ”).50 In 1912, it was finally published, minus several censored passages that meditated on the nature of dreams and dream-selves, in Harper’s Monthly Magazine.
The essay knits together a series of dreams, over a period of several years, in which Sam reencounters a lovely girl, whose name and features vary but whose essence remains intact. Strangers, yet tacitly acquainted, they roam hand in hand, caressing, petting, and kissing across enchanted landscapes. They never consummate their attraction, yet their love is “more clinging, more endearing, more reverent” than romantic or even filial devotion.51 They speak to each other in an esoteric, but mutually understandable language of dreams: “quite atreous,” and “Rax oha tal,” and “sufa.”52 In 1866, while sojourning in the Sandwich Islands, Mark Twain dreams that the girl is killed in his arms by an arrow, and the loss persists in the dreamer’s heart; and yet she reappears, an always dying yet indestructible muse, “once in two years on the average,”53 over a span of nearly half a century.
Dreams, reality, fact, fiction—it was all part of a seamless universe to Mark Twain, increasingly so as he aged. “In our dreams—I know it!—we do make the journeys we seem to make; we do see the things we seem to see,” he wrote in the 1898 essay. “The people…are living spirits, not shadows; and they are immortal and indestructible…When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves…”54
As the summer of 1858 faded, only one thing was immediately certain: Sam’s boyhood days were at an end. The great wandering epoch of his young manhood was beginning.
* The reliability of evidence varies, as Edgar Marquess Branch of the Mark Twain Project has pointed out.
* No direct evidence of this exists, but Sam had learned the guitar in Hannibal from his sister Pamela and played the instrument frequently in later years.
9
Ranger
(1858–61)
Less than a month after the Pennsylvania catastrophe, Sam was back on the river, where time seemed eternal. This was an illusion. During the three years leading up to the Civil War, Sam Clemens floated on a current that carried him away from the familiar “America” that was his patrimony, and toward the war-tempered nation whose soul he never quite grasped, even as he helped create it. Aboard the Alfred T. Lacey, the steamboat that had carried him to his death watch over Henry, Sam served as steersman under two good friends for a brief time: Bart Bowen, Will’s older brother, and George Ealer, a hero of the Pennsylvania explosion.
In August, twenty-two-year-old Sam said good-bye to these companions and took a two-month steersman assignment aboard the John H. Dickey, which plied the St. Louis–Memphis route. Three “correspondence letters” in as many river-town newspapers are attributed to him during this period. The most interesting shows Sam experimenting with a new writerly voice, that of the Insider—the wised-up businessman, hotel connoisseur, and political observer. “The present line of packets between the two cities is nearer what is wanted by shippers than any heretofore established,” “C.” pronounces in the Missouri Republican, “and here let me say to shippers in St. Louis, stick to the line. They are all good boats, reliable and prompt…”1 As to politics, “C.” recommends the reelection of Stephen Douglas over challenger Abraham Lincoln in the crucial Illinois Senate race. “There assuredly never was a State election to which so many eyes were directed, as the one so soon to come off in Illinois. Will her voters do their duty, and sustain Mr. DOUGLAS? We trust they will.”2 Sam may have been writing under the thrall of attending a Douglas oration in Cairo a month earlier.
Beginning in late October, Sam’s letter- and notebook-writing ceases again for a four-month stretch. A few glimpses into his mood and habits in those days survive, thanks to the charming perceptions of his niece Annie Moffett. Annie, six years old in 1858, studied her “Uncle Sam” closely when he boarded with her family between runs on the river. She contributed her memories to a 1946 book published by her son Samuel Charles Webster.3 Annie recalled that Uncle Sam wore sideburns, and that his “chestnut” hair was curly. He must have enjoyed teasing her: she remembered how she tried to explain the biblical story of Moses to him during one of his visits, but finally fled to her father in frustration: “Papa, Uncle Orion has good sense and Mama has good sense, but I don’t think Uncle Sam has good sense. I told him the story of Moses and the bullrushes and he said he knew Moses very well, that he kept a secondhand store on Market Street. I tried very hard to explain that it wasn’t the Moses I meant, but he just couldn’t understand.”4 His rough-and-ready lingo shocked the polite little girl during a family chat in the parlor one evening, and she rushed from the room to formulate a response. Stalking back a few minutes later, she delivered a brief women’s-rights manifesto: “Uncle Sam says to dry up. My Mama doesn’t want me to dry up. My Papa doesn’t want me to dry up. My doll doesn’t want me to dry up. Uncle Sam says to dry up. I won’t dry up!”5
In gentler moods, Uncle Sam went into “trances” when Annie practiced her mesmeric powers on him—“he did just what I told him to, and made the most astonishing remarks.”6 He sat at the piano and sang to Annie “by the hour,” she recalled, and it was generally the same song, a song many others heard him sing over the years, a silly tune about an old horse whose name was Jerusalem. Or maybe Methusalem (accounts differ). He sang it in the drawling voice that captivated, and sometimes disquieted, nearly everyone who heard it. A friend tried to describe Samuel Clemens’s voice years later:
It was not a laughing voice, or a light-hearted voice, but deep and earnest like that of one of the graver musical instruments, rich and solemn, and in emotion vibrant and swelling with its own passionate feeling…His way of uttering [words] and his application of them often gave the simplest words which he habitually used a pictorial vividness, a richness of suggestion, a fullness of meaning with which genius alone could endow them.7
Uncle Sam flattered Annie by nicknaming her “Old Horse.” (He called his various nieces “Trundle-bed trash,” until they refused to run errands for him anymore until he stopped.) He sang another song to Annie, whose words she never forgot:
Samuel Clemens! the gray dawn is breaking,
The howl of the housemaid is heard in the hall;
The cow from the back gate her exit is making,—
What, Samuel Clemens? Slumbering still?8
IN THE spring of 1859 h
e was again writing lush, descriptive letters to the homefolk. He described Mardi Gras to Pamela in a way that made him seem to have become one with the crowds in their costumes; the monks and priests and clowns; the “ ‘free-and-easy’ women” whose “costumes and actions were very trying to modest eyes.”9 He saw torches shaped like the spots on a deck of cards; figures whose bodies were vast drums, pitchers, punch bowls; shapes half beast and half human. The dream world, flowing across its boundaries into his waking consciousness.
On April 9, 1859, Sam Clemens fulfilled the most ardent of his boyhood dreams: he received his pilot’s license. He was now a fully invested member of the river world’s elite lodge, with its $250 monthly salary. He took his ease at the Pilot’s Association “Rooms” in New Orleans, and bragged to Orion that when he paid his dues, he enjoyed giving his peers “a glimpse of a hundred dollar bill peeping out from amongst notes of smaller dimensions, whose faces I do not exhibit!”10 He laced his letters with French phrases, and swaggered through the fancy restaurants of New Orleans with Bixby and other pilots, a full equal now, polishing off ten-dollar dinners of sheepshead fish, mushrooms, shrimp and oysters, and coffee with burnt brandy. He bought a pair of twelve-dollar alligator boots for Orion.
Among the great characters on the river was a veteran pilot named Isaiah Sellers, an occasional river correspondent for New Orleans papers. No one knew the river better than Sellers, and no one had stored up more knowledge of its history, and no one was better at delivering long, tedious recitations of his lore. To get a chuckle out of the other pilots, Sam parodied Sellers in a ludicrously detailed “account” of a 1763 river trip on a boat with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew. In May 1859, Bart Bowen submitted the piece, which Sam had signed “Sergeant Fathom,” to the New Orleans Crescent.
