The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  THE LIFE OF MARK TWAIN

  THE EARLY YEARS 1835–1871

  Gary Scharnhorst

  UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS

  Columbia

  Copyright © 2018 by The Curators of the University of Missouri

  University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65211

  Printed and bound in the United States of America

  All rights reserved. First printing, 2018.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Scharnhorst, Gary, author.

  Title: The life of Mark Twain : the early years, 1835-1871 / by Gary Scharnhorst.

  Description: Columbia : University of Missouri Press, [2018] | Series: Mark Twain and his circle | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2017044383 (print) | LCCN 2017050629 (ebook) | ISBN 9780826274007 (e-book) | ISBN 9780826221445 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: LCSH: Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. | Twain, Mark, 1835-1910--Homes and haunts. | Authors, American--19th century--Biography. | Humorists, American--19th century--Biography.

  Classification: LCC PS1331 (ebook) | LCC PS1331 .S24 2018 (print) | DDC 818/.409 [B] --dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017044383

  This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984.

  Typefaces: Clarendon and Jenson

  This book was published with the generous support of

  The Missouri Humanities Council

  and

  The State Historical Society of Missouri

  Mark Twain and His Circle

  Tom Quirk and John Bird, Series Editors

  In memory of my father

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter 1. Ancestry

  Chapter 2. The Villages

  Chapter 3. Hannibal

  Chapter 4. Journeyman Printer

  Chapter 5. The River

  Chapter 6. The War

  Chapter 7. The Mines

  Chapter 8. Virginia City

  Chapter 9. From Virginia City to San Francisco

  Chapter 10. San Francisco

  Chapter 11. The Sandwich Islands

  Chapter 12. San Francisco Redux

  Chapter 13. New York

  Chapter 14. The Voyage

  Chapter 15. Washington, D.C.

  Chapter 16. The West Revisited

  Chapter 17. Hartford, Elmira, and Buffalo

  Chapter 18. Buffalo Exitus

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  Figure 1. The Clemens homestead in Florida, Missouri, ca. 1890.

  Figure 2. Samuel Clemens at the door of his boyhood home during his final visit to Hannibal in 1902.

  Figure 3. A daguerreotype of Samuel Clemens at age fifteen, 1850.

  Figure 4. Classified advertisement in the Hannibal Journal, April 28, 1853.

  Figure 5. Carson City in 1863.

  Figure 6. Orion Clemens’s house in Carson City, 1935.

  Figure 7. A bird’s-eye view of Virginia City in 1864.

  Figure 8. San Francisco in 1865.

  Figure 9. Samuel Clemens during his first visit to San Francisco in spring 1863.

  Figure 10. The Virginia City Territorial Enterprise building, 1864.

  Figure 11. Adah Isaacs Menken in Mazeppa, 1866.

  Figure 12. Adah Isaacs Menken and the elder Alexandre Dumas in Paris, 1866.

  Figure 13. Edward Jump’s Earthquakey Times (1865).

  Figure 14. “Convicts”: William Gillespie, Charley Parker, Dan De Quille, Bob Lowery, and Alf Doten, December 1865.

  Figure 15. Maguire’s Opera House in San Francisco, 1865.

  Figure 16. The Quaker City, ca. 1900.

  Figure 17. Passengers aboard the Quaker City, anchored in Yalta, August 1867.

  Figure 18. Olivia Langdon, ca. 1870.

  Figure 19. Publicity photograph of Samuel Clemens in San Francisco, April 1868.

  Figure 20. Samuel Clemens and Charley Langdon in Cleveland, September 1868.

  Figure 21. Sample of Horace Greeley’s handwriting, from A. D. Richardson’s Beyond the Mississippi (1867).

  Figure 22. Purported sample of Horace Greeley’s handwriting, from Roughing It (1872).

  Figure 23. Petroleum V. Nasby, Samuel Clemens, and Josh Billings in Boston, November 1869.

  Figure 24. Samuel Clemens’s map of Paris, Galaxy, November 1870.

  Figure 25. George Alfred Townsend, Samuel Clemens, and David Gray in Mathew Brady’s studio in Washington, D.C., February 7, 1871.

  Preface

  OVER A CENTURY and a half ago, a columnist for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle predicted that Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, was “bound to have a biographer one of these days—may it be a hundred years hence!” Albert Bigelow Paine’s official biography of the author was published less than fifty years later. It is an indispensable source for the legend of Saint Mark. Paine portrayed his subject as “the zealous champion of justice and liberty” who was “never less than fearless and sincere. Invariably he was for the oppressed. He had a natural instinct for the right, but, right or wrong, he was for the underdog.” As recently as 2002, Robert E. Weir echoed the dubious claim: Sam Clemens “was an indefatigable foe of anything that stood in the way of human progress and individual potential,” as if to suggest that the world would be a better place if only everyone emulated him. Sam’s most honest comments about his life, or so he asserted, are in his autobiography, most of which appeared posthumously. “A book that is not to be published for a century gives the writer a freedom which he could secure in no other way,” he explained in an interview in 1899. “In these conditions you can draw a man without prejudice exactly as you knew him and yet have no fear of hurting his feelings or those of his sons or grandsons.” Similarly, in the autobiography he noted, “I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason: I can speak thence freely.” And in a March 1904 letter to his friend W. D. Howells, Sam described his autobiography as

  the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly in extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell . . . the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

  Howells replied skeptically: “Even you won’t tell the black heart’s-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day.”1

  Howells was correct. In the end, Sam failed to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth about his life in his memoirs. From the beginning he was reticent to discuss sex, for example. “There were the Rousseau confessions,” he acknowledged, “but I am going to leave that kind alone.” He eventually conceded to Howells that “as to veracity” the entire autobiography “was a failure; [Sam] had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told the truth about himself it was because no man ever could.” Sam elsewhere declared that “no man dares tell the truth until after he is dead.” His autobiography is so rife with inaccuracies, embellishments, exaggerations, and utter untruths that a cottage industry of naysayers has developed to debunk it. Many parts contain not so much a remembrance of things past but a remembrance of things that did not happen. As Louis J. Budd remarks, scholars who try “to separate truth from yarn-spinning in his autobiographical dictation” have discovered it is “a mountain of funny putty.” Sam Clemens�
�s biographers must consult the autobiography with caution in reconstructing the events of his life. He never allowed the facts to interfere with a good story, such as the discovery of a blind lead in Roughing It (1872) or his complicity in the death of a stranger in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed” (1885). Even the apologetic Paine admitted that Sam’s autobiographical dictations bear “only an atmospheric relation to history.” Bernard DeVoto agreed that though Sam was one “of the most autobiographical of writers,” he was “least autobiographical” when he tried to chronicle his life. Howard Baetzhold describes Sam’s memory as “faulty” and “convenient,” Hamlin Hill calls it “immensely selective,” and James M. Cox refers tactfully to “the magnifying lens of his imagination.”2

  The first task of Sam Clemens’s biographers, in short, should be to sort facts from factoids or truth from truthiness, a process akin to stripping lacquer from a painting to reveal the original pigments or removing carpet to expose the grain in a hardwood floor. As Sam famously joked, when he was young “I could remember anything, whether it happened or not,” but as he grew older his memories began to fade “and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the latter.”3 To arrive at some reliable account of various events, such as Sam’s first lecture engagement in San Francisco in early October 1866 or his putative visit to the czar’s dacha in Yalta in 1867, I have had to cross-check many sources. He seems to have been a yarn spinner from an early age. As his mother once allowed, “He is the wellspring of truth, but you can’t bring up the whole well with one bucket. . . . I discount him 30 per cent for embroidery, and what is left is perfect and priceless truth.”4

  In a Virginia City, Nevada, Territorial Enterprise column in January 1863, the month before adopting the Mark Twain pseudonym, Sam conceded that, on his part, he had “a sort of talent for posturing.” As Ron Powers remarks, “he was forever revising his life to make it even more interesting and melodramatic than it had been.” Many Clemens scholars note the extent to which he crafted his own reputation or, as Jeffrey Steinbrink has observed, “anybody who attempts a biography” of Sam collaborates with him, since he “was in the process of constructing himself . . . throughout his career.” Hill similarly observes that “if art is a mode of dissembling, the Samuel Clemens hidden beneath his own disguise was an artist of a magnitude as yet not completely defined and barely explored.” Not even Sam’s travel books—The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Following the Equator (1897)—are entirely reliable sources about his life, despite his insistence that if “the incidents were dated, they could be strung together in their due order, & the result would be an autobiography.” On the contrary: Hill refers, for example, to Twain’s “enormous violation of the facts of his biography” in the construction of his narrative persona in Roughing It. Put another way, virtually all of his major works, including his autobiography, are semiautobiographical. If, on the one hand, I’ve depended as little as possible on these narratives and have explicitly acknowledged my debt when it has been necessary to cite them, on the other hand the statement underscores the pressing need for a complete and reliable biography of the author for what it tells us about the alchemy of his imagination. “I never deliberately sat down and ‘created’ a character in my life,” Sam told an interviewer in 1907. “I begin to write incidents out of real life.”5

  Sam Clemens enjoys a reputation unrivaled in American literary history, and he was in large part the architect of that reputation. From the start of his career, he tried to control his public image. As early as 1871 a columnist in the Phrenological Journal commended Sam’s marketing genius, noting that he “is shrewd, and not only understands how to write and name a book, but also how to advertise it.” Sam understood intuitively the advantages of favorable publicity, and he was adept at “dramatizing his celebrity,” Budd comments. In “both a literary and psychological sense, the shambling but perceptive humorist remembered as Mark Twain is a mask,” according to Louis Leary, a “posturing and flamboyant figure” created by Clemens, who over the years sculpted his public persona and fiercely protected it. Budd has explained that Sam “did not just welcome publicity: he eagerly sought it for almost fifty years.” He readily sat for interviews when they were to his advantage, as when they served to promote a book or lecture, but otherwise he was largely inaccessible. He praised his butler for learning to lie when turning away “the newspaper correspondent or the visitor at the front door.” He often admonished interviewers not to publish his exact words because he could sell them for up to thirty cents apiece rather than give them away. “Don’t print a word of what I have said,” he ordered a stringer for the New York World in November 1900. “It is my trade to gaggle, and if I talk to reporters for nothing where’s my bread and butter coming in?” In 1903 he claimed, “To ask a man who writes for his livelihood to talk for publication without recompense is an injustice.” He never employed a publicist because he didn’t need one—or, more correctly, he saw one in the mirror. He sometimes urged his correspondents to destroy his private letters rather than jeopardize his public image, as in a postscript he sent his brother Orion and Orion’s wife Mollie as early as October 1865, a month before his thirtieth birthday, even before his comic sketch “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” appeared in the New York Saturday Press: “You had best shove this in the stove” because “I don’t want any absurd ‘literary remains’ & ‘unpublished letters of Mark Twain’ published after I am planted.” Similarly, he admonished his mother and sister in January 1868, over two years later and some sixteen months before the publication of The Innocents Abroad, his first great literary and commercial success, to read his letter “only to the family, & then burn it—I do hate to have anybody know anything about my business.” Ironically, these letters not only survive, but the texts have been published—not that Sam would have been surprised. Shortly after the birth of his youngest daughter in 1880, he interrupted a note to his friend Joseph Twichell to admonish the future reader of his private correspondence, noting that

  somebody may be reading this letter 80 years hence. And so, my friend (you pitying snob, I mean, who are holding this yellow paper in your hand in 1960,) save yourself the trouble of looking further; I know how pathetically trivial our small concerns would seem to you, & I will not let your eye profane them. No, I keep my news; you keep your compassion. Suffice it you to know, scoffer & ribald, that the little child is old & blind, now, & once more toothless; & the rest of us are shadows, these many, many years.6

  This pattern of massaging the message and spin-doctoring holds throughout Sam’s life. Late in his career he hired a clipping service, and the files of the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California–Berkeley are filled with the articles he was sent. Most of his interviews in Australasia and South Africa in 1895–96 are known to scholarship only because newspaper clippings of them survive in his scrapbooks.

  In the course of his long career Sam Clemens lost as many friends as he made. He did not suffer fools or rivals gladly, especially if they wore crinoline. He targeted them indiscriminately—from religious leaders (e.g., John Alexander Dowie, Mary Baker Eddy, De Witt Talmage), politicians (William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, Tim Sullivan), and fellow writers and lecturers (Bret Harte, Kate Field) to literary pirates (John Camden Hotten) and military leaders (Frederick Funston). If Sam was often loved in public, he was sometimes loathed in private. He feuded for years with C. C. Duncan, the captain of the Quaker City, the ship that carried him and the other “innocents” to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867. Though he and James were both friends with Howells, neither of them could abide the other’s work. If Henry James was “the Master,” a careful craftsman who considered Sam’s writings vulgar, then Sam was the anti-James, an improvisational artist who, he said, “would rather be damned to John Bunyan’s heaven” than read The Bostonians.7

  Particularly early in his career, Sam systematically burlesqued all types of fiction
and journalism (e.g., temperance literature, French and epistolary novels, gothic and ghost stories, dime and detective novels, fairy tales, success stories, joke books, almanacs, theatrical reviews, sentimental romances, travel narratives, biography and autobiography, pornography, fashion articles, obituaries, interviews, medicinal and lovelorn advice columns, news reports, social columns, sportswriting, and celebrity features) as well as popular plays, operatic librettos, and Shakespearean comedies and tragedies. His hoaxes and parodies gradually evolved into social and political satire. But everything he wrote did not turn to gold, nor was every speech he delivered touched with genius. He readily violated the classical unities and ignored the standards of the well-made novel. Or, as Howells remarked,

  he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.8

  While Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) is generally hailed as a great American novel, Sam also suffered his share of reverses and disasters. He was hardly exempt from the slings and arrows of outraged critics. He published his share of flops and potboilers, such as Merry Tales (1892), The American Claimant (1892), and Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894), all written when he was in the throes of financial exigency and imminent bankruptcy. All of these books clearly fall below the mark of his best writing. A consummate performer in his own right, he nevertheless wrote with Bret Harte the play Ah Sin (1877), the most disastrous collaboration in the history of American letters. Ambitious to succeed, he was notoriously unwise in his investments, thinking the telephone a wildcat speculation while backing such inventions as a steam pulley, a carpet pattern machine, and a powdered food supplement made from the albumin of eggs called plasmon. In short, he exhibited his share of human foibles, despite his modern reputation.