The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  The circumstantial evidence is substantial and almost incontrovertible that he was a latent pedophile obsessed with prepubescent lasses. Or, as Guy Cardwell puts it, Sam’s “unusual attention” to young women began early, and “he and his protective circle transformed his pedophilia into a culture-approved, circumspect affection for children.” At the age of twenty-five, soon after his arrival in Nevada, he ended a letter to his sister-in-law Mollie on a creepy note, asking her to kiss his six-year-old niece Jennie for him and to “tell her when she is fifteen years old I will kiss her myself . . . if she is good-looking.” He conceded to the readers of the Californian in March 1865 that he enjoyed “gazing at handsome young girls,” and as he commented in his journal in the summer of 1866, “Young girls innocent natural—I love ’em same as others love infants.” He was particularly susceptible to their charms and freer from scrutiny by family and friends when he was on the road. During his tour of the Sandwich Islands in 1866 he noted, again in his journal, that he had seen a “dozen naked little girls bathing in brook in middle of town at noonday.” The following year he wrote from New York that to “see a lovely girl of seventeen, with her saddle on her head, and her muzzle on behind, and her veil just covering the end of her nose, come tripping along in her hoopless, red-bottomed dress, like a churn on fire, is enough to set a man wild. I must drop this subject—I can’t stand it.” Six months later, during the Quaker City excursion, he admired the beautiful “scenery” in Egypt: “Naked girls in the streets—finely built.” Two years later, he infantilized Olivia Langdon, his fiancée, by referring to her as “little Miss Livy,” “little sweetheart,” and “my child.” In his autobiography he paid her a most unusual compliment: she “was slender and beautiful and girlish; she was both girl and woman. She remained both girl and woman to the last day of her life.” Sam recounted an act of voyeurism in his travel narrative A Tramp Abroad (1880): during a fanciful raft trip on the Neckar River in Germany, he spies “a slender girl of twelve years or upward” as she bathes. “She had not time to run, but she did what answered just as well; she promptly drew a lithe young willow bough athwart her white body with one hand, and then contemplated us with a simple and untroubled interest. Thus she stood while we glided by. She was a pretty creature, and she and her willow bough made a very pretty picture.” In 1902 an interviewer reported that Sam liked “pretty girls almost as well as cigars.” In his late essay “Why Not Abolish It?” (1903) Sam argued for repealing the age of consent on the grounds that the seduction of women at any time in their lives was an abomination, but the argument could just as easily be construed to justify the removal of legal barriers to consorting with children. Five years later, he admitted to a most peculiar hobby: “I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naïve and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears. My collection consists of gems of the first water.” He referred to these girls as his “angelfish” and the club as his “aquarium.” As Hamlin Hill observes, when Sam began to vacation regularly in Bermuda in 1908 his fascination with young girls “rapidly increased. . . . He would seek out for companions pre-pubescent girls, preferably those just on the verge of physical maturity, and his relentless pursuit would often drive them from him within a few days.” Or as Isabel Lyon, his secretary, noted in her diary at the time, “his first interest when he goes to a new place is to find little girls. . . . [O]ff he goes with a flash when he sees a new pair of slim little legs.” In June 1909, only a few months before his death, he told a pair of interviewers in Baltimore, where he delivered a graduation address at an exclusive girls’ school attended by one of his angelfish, that “Pretty girls . . . are always an inspiration to me” and “I always like the young ladies, and would go a long way to be in their company.”16 Then again, no solid evidence of any actual improper behavior toward young girls has ever surfaced.

  Sam was “not four inches from [Laura Wright’s] elbow during our waking hours for the next three days” in May 1858, or so he recalled. Though a freighter, not a passenger boat, the Roe often carried guests, and Laura was the niece of William Youngblood, one of the pilots and, as Sam put it, “as fine a man as I have known.” The boat also featured a piano in the cabin and, according to Sam, “a spacious boiler deck—just the place for moonlight dancing and daylight frolics.”17 He and Laura separated when the Pennsylvania left for St. Louis on May 20,18 and Sam asserted in his autobiography that he “never saw her afterward” and “no word has ever passed between us since.” Not true. They corresponded for the next two or three years, at least until Laura’s mother began to confiscate Sam’s letters (so he believed). He visited her in Warsaw at least once, in 1860. But her mother broke off the relationship soon after this visit. “The young lady has been beaten by the old one,” Sam wrote to Orion, “through the romantic agency of intercepted letters, and the girl still thinks I was in fault—and always will, I reckon, for I don’t see how she’ll ever find out the contrary.”19

  Still, he dreamed of her every year or two for the rest of his life and covertly alluded to her in his writings. He recorded a coded reference to a dream of her in his notebook for February 1, 1865, for example: “Saw L[aura] Mark Write [Wright] in a dream—ce matin-ci—in carriage—said good bye & shook hands.” She was probably one of the inspirations for Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and the Hartford telephone operator that Hank Morgan remembers in his dreams in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Laura married in 1862; Sam remarked laconically in 1867 that one of the “old sweethearts I have been dreaming of so long has got five children now.” She eventually moved to Dallas, where she enjoyed a long teaching career in the public schools and as principal of the Temple Emanu-El school. In 1880 one of her students wrote Sam, who replied that he remembered Laura as “a very little girl, with a very large spirit, a long memory, a wise head, a great appetite for books, a good mental digestion, with grave ways, & inclined to introspection—an unusual girl.” In August 1898 he wrote a story, originally titled “The Lost Sweetheart” and published posthumously under the title “My Platonic Sweetheart,” about his dream lover, a type of muse. “The affection which I felt for her and which she manifestly felt for me was a quite simple fact,” he declared, adding that he occasionally dreamed of her. In these dreams, both Sam and Laura were always young. In 1906 Laura Dake, née Wright, by then a “world-worn and trouble-worn widow of sixty-two” teaching school in San Diego, wrote Sam to solicit his help. She asked him to persuade his wealthy friend Andrew Carnegie to send her a thousand dollars to help her care for her disabled son. “Here’s a romance for you!” he wrote Sue Crane on July 30, 1906. Nearly a half century earlier he had “parted from a sweetheart who was 14 years old, and since then I have never seen her nor exchanged a word with her—and to-day I got a letter from her!”20 Rather than contact Carnegie on her behalf, Sam sent her the money.

  While Sam later romanticized his piloting career, he never concealed his disdain for William Brown. In “Old Times on the Mississippi” he portrayed Brown as a pompous fool. Eight years later, in Life on the Mississippi, he depicted him as “a middle-aged, long, slim, bony, smooth-shaven, horse-faced, ignorant, stingy, malicious, snarling, fault hunting, mote-magnifying tyrant.” Sam recalled, “I early got the habit of coming on watch with dread in my heart.” As soon as he entered the pilothouse, “I could feel [Brown’s] yellow eyes upon me, and I knew their owner was watching for a pretext to spit out some venom on me.” In his dreams he “killed Brown every night for months; not in old, stale, commonplace ways, but in new and picturesque ones.” Their fraught relationship reached a crisis on June 3, 1858, when about eighteen miles from Vicksburg en route to New Orleans, Brown struck Henry Clemens in the face in retaliation for a perceived slight. “I was wild from that moment,” Sam wrote Mollie Clemens, and he “left the boat to steer herself, and avenged the insult.
” In recounting the incident in Life on the Mississippi, he added that Brown also tried to attack Henry with a ten-pound chunk of coal—a detail that, if true, may have reminded Sam of a slave’s murder by his master with a hunk of iron ore, something he had ostensibly witnessed as a ten-year-old. In any case, “I hit Brown a good honest blow” with a heavy stool, “which stretched him out,” and then “pounded him with my fists a considerable time” while the Pennsylvania steamed “down the river at the rate of fifteen miles an hour” with “nobody at the helm.” In a passage deleted from the manuscript of Life on the Mississippi, Sam crowed that he “was not afraid of him, now; he was a whipped man, & he looked it. I said I should go out when I got ready, but not earlier.” After knocking Brown flat, “it was safe to ‘sass’ him, now!” The commotion on the hurricane deck attracted the attention of passengers and crew, who applauded the fight. Rather than discipline the cub pilot, as Sam told the story, Captain Kleinfelter commended him. For the rest of the voyage, Sam recalled, “I knew how an emancipated slave feels; for I was an emancipated slave.” There is no reason to doubt the veracity of his account of the whipping he gave Brown in his letter to Mollie and in Life on the Mississippi, though they are the only records of the altercation that exist. Moreover, his suggestion that the apprentice is a type of slave is not accidental. Sam refers to Bixby as “my owner” in his autobiography and as his “pilot-master” in “Is Shakespeare Dead?” (1909).21

  Brown insisted that Sam be fired as soon as the ship docked in New Orleans, of course. According to Sam, Kleinfelter preferred to replace Brown rather than dismiss the cub, but the WBBA prevented him from taking this action—that is, the union apparently supported Brown in the dispute. Thus the irony: one of the leading antiunion captains (Kleinfelter) defended a cub sympathetic to the union but not yet a member (Sam) against a pilot who was a prominent union member (Brown), but was unable to discharge him. So long as the suit for damages filed against the Vicksburg for colliding with the Pennsylvania was pending, moreover, Kleinfelter could hardly terminate Brown lest he seem to concede that the pilot was incompetent. In any event, Kleinfelter failed to hire a replacement for Brown in New Orleans, so he retained him and arranged for Sam to return to St. Louis on another boat, the Alfred T. Lacey. Sam assured Mollie that Kleinfelter had promised to rehire him once they all reached St. Louis. What would have happened to Brown in St. Louis—whether the captain would have sacked him or rehired Sam—is anyone’s guess.22

  As it happens, the question is moot. The Pennsylvania with Henry aboard embarked from New Orleans on its return voyage north on the afternoon of June 9. The Lacey, with Sam aboard and piloted by his friend Bart Bowen, followed two days later. At approximately 6:00 a.m. on June 13, Henry Clemens’s twentieth birthday, the Pennsylvania suddenly blew apart near Ship Island, seventy miles below Memphis and three hundred yards from shore. The ensuing fire was fueled by barrels of turpentine in the hold. The boat had been “creeping along . . . on a half-head of steam,” Sam was later told, with George Ealer at the helm, Kleinfelter in the barber’s chair, and William Brown and Henry Clemens asleep below deck. The front third of the vessel—everything in front of the chimneys—was shattered. The explosion may have been the result of steam pressure during a race the Pennsylvania ran against the Duke a week earlier that compromised the integrity of the boilers. Of the 300 or so passengers, dozens perished—the death toll ranged from 25 or 30 (the estimate of the shipowners) to upwards of 250 (the estimate of the newspapers). In the absence of a reliable passenger manifest, no one knew for certain how many people were killed. By chance, both Ealer and Kleinfelter escaped without serious harm. Brown may have died instantly; his body was never recovered. Henry was not so fortunate. From his berth just above the boilers, he was thrown into the river and suffered fatal injuries—at the very least a traumatic head injury and scalded lungs. From that moment on, he was essentially a dead man; no medical treatment available in 1858 could have saved his life. He was exposed to the elements for the next eight hours before he and some 40 other victims were evacuated. He finally arrived at a makeshift hospital at the Cotton Exchange in Memphis, two blocks from the river, at 3:00 a.m. on June 14 “in a senseless and almost lifeless condition,” Sam wrote. Over twenty hours after the explosion, his wounds were finally dressed. The doctors administered the standard treatment for burns: morphine for pain and soft-carded cotton saturated in linseed oil and white lead paint and/or lime water applied to the skin. He was “senseless and motionless” for the next twelve hours.23

  Sam learned about the disaster when the Lacey landed at Greenville, Mississippi, on June 13. That evening at Napoleon, Arkansas, he read in a Memphis paper that Henry had been slightly hurt. Only later did he discover that his brother had been mortally injured, and he did not learn the full details of the catastrophe until he reached Memphis on June 15. Bart Bowen gave the unsalaried apprentice twenty dollars to help cover his emergency expenses. When Sam arrived at the Cotton Exchange he saw “two long rows of prostrate forms—more than forty, in all—and every face and head a shapeless wad of loose raw cotton. It was a gruesome spectacle.” When he reached Henry’s “scalded and emaciated form” he was so overcome with grief “that he sank to the floor.” He was “almost crazed” by the sight of his brother’s “fair young face,” which among the other victims’ “was almost the only one unmarred by steam and flame.” The same day he arrived in Memphis he telegraphed his mother and the Moffetts in St. Louis that his brother’s “recovery is very doubtful.”24

  Sam remained in the makeshift hospital for “six days and six nights, and a very melancholy experience it was.” Henry “lingered in fearful agony” and “had full possession of his senses only at long intervals, and then but for a few moments at a time.” In fact, Sam soon realized that Henry’s “great intellect was a ruin” and even had he recovered physically he nevertheless “would have been but the wreck of his former self.” The community rallied in the crisis, and “the ladies of Memphis came every day, with flowers, fruits, and dainties and delicacies of all kinds, and there they remained and nursed the wounded. All the physicians stood watches there, and all the medical students; and the rest of the town furnished money, or whatever else was wanted.” Some twenty thousand dollars was raised for the succor of the victims. Henry received “ten, fifteen, twenty times the care and attention that anyone else has had,” he reported to his family; and Henry’s doctor, Thomas F. Peyton, whom Sam considered “the best physician in Memphis . . . sat by him for 36 hours” after he reached the hospital. Peyton “did all that educated judgment and trained skill could do” for his brother. A generation later, Sam wrote one of the Memphis nurses that the week he spent at his brother’s deathbed

  was so terrible that I have never liked to think about it. . . . You will easily believe that I did not want to forget you, or any other of the kind friends who helped me there, and made me forget that I was a stranger. . . . What I do remember, without the least trouble in the world, is, that when those sixty scalded and mutilated people were thrown upon her hands, Memphis came forward with a perfectly lavish outpouring of money and sympathy. . . . Do you remember how the physicians worked?—and the students—the ladies—and everybody? I do. If the rest of my wretched memory was taken away, I should still remember that.

  Sam recounted the scene in The Gilded Age: “a score of Good Samaritans moved among them doing what they could to relieve their sufferings; bathing their chinless faces and bodies with linseed oil and lime water and covering the places with bulging masses of raw cotton.” But the die had been cast: heavily sedated, Henry died early on the morning of June 21, eight days after the explosion.25

  Sam was understandably disconsolate. On June 18, as Henry’s condition deteriorated, he wrote Mollie Clemens that by the time she read his letter “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.” This letter was saturated with self-pity,
as if the author were the real sufferer in the explosion. “The horrors of three days have swept over me—they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time,” he complained. “Mollie, there are gray hairs in my head tonight. For forty-eight hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair.” He had prayed “that the great God might let this cup pass from me”—Christ’s words in Gethsemane before the Crucifixion—and he had been congratulated “because I was not on the Pennsylvania when she blew up! May God forgive them, for they know not what they say”26—virtually the same words Christ uttered on Calvary during the Crucifixion. Henry suffered physical injury and Sam suffered vicariously.