The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  All Clemens biographers who mention this episode—among them DeLancey Ferguson, Andrew Hoffman, Justin Kaplan, Ron Powers, and Dixon Wecter—accept this account at face value. Instead, it should be discounted at least as much as a Civil War greenback; it is another example of Sam’s creative remembering. There are several reasons to doubt its veracity, especially the many discrepancies between the notebook and autobiographical versions of events. For example, in his notebook Clemens recalled that Campbell “gently reproved” the apprentice, whereas in his autobiography he remembered that Campbell delivered a “very stern” reprimand. More to the point, Sam did not work alongside Wales McCormick in Joseph P. Ament’s print shop on the two occasions Campbell visited Hannibal. In November 1845, when he was only nine years old, he had not yet been apprenticed to Ament, and by November 1852 he had left Ament’s employ to set type for his brother. Nor is there a bibliographical record of any sermon by Campbell ever published in Hannibal. Clemens likely (mis)remembered, instead, the circumstances surrounding the publication of a sermon by a local member of the Missouri Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, William G. Caples, in 1849—the only pamphlet known to have been set in type in Hannibal during the period Sam was apprenticed to Ament. Titled Justification, or the Pardon of Sin: Its Nature and the Means of Obtaining It, its author argues an arcane theological point: that sprinkling is just as efficacious as (or no more or less efficacious than) immersion, or “water baptism.”51 Nor does Caples’s printed sermon contain any reference to “Jesus H. Christ.”

  Marshall Clemens’s personal (mis)fortunes reached their nadir in 1845–46. In the spring of 1845 he moved the office he occupied as justice of the peace to a local commission house, where he moonlighted as a clerk. “I did not succeed in making such arrangements as would enable me to go into business advantageously on my own acc[oun]t,” he wrote his daughter Pamela on May 5, “and thought it best therefore not to attempt it at present.” The family moved across Hill Street from the house where they had lived for over a decade to the second story of Grant’s Drug Store, the same building where Sam Smarr had died a few weeks earlier. They paid no rent, but Jane Clemens cooked for Orville Grant’s family. In late 1846, in revenge for the suit Marshall Clemens had filed against him a few years earlier, William Beebe obtained a $290 note Clemens owed and sued him in retaliation. The judge awarded Beebe both the amount of the note and $126.50 in damages, and on December 17 he was granted a writ of attachment ordering the sheriff to sell “the goods and chattels and real estate of the said John M. Clemens” to satisfy the judgment. The sheriff could find nothing of value to sell.52

  By the spring of 1847, however, Marshall Clemens was finally poised to revive his legal career. He worked during the winter of 1846–47 to found a Masonic college in Hannibal. He became active in town meetings and chaired a committee that recommended the construction of what eventually became the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad. He served on a committee that tried to redraw the line between Marion and Ralls Counties, and he lobbied to extend the National Road (which ran from Cumberland, Maryland, to Springfield, Illinois) another hundred miles to Hannibal.53 By early 1847 he was nominated by the Whigs for the office of clerk of the local circuit court and selected as a delegate to the Whig state party convention.54

  Then calamity came. Returning on horseback from a campaign swing through Palmyra in a “storm of sleet and rain” in early March 1847, according to Sam, Marshall arrived in Hannibal “in a half-frozen condition,” contracted pleurisy and pneumonia, and died on March 24 at the age of forty-eight. He may have suffered mercury poisoning as the result of self-medication that compromised his immune system and hastened his death. According to Sam, he experienced a deathbed conversion ten minutes before he took his last breath. Sam recorded two different versions of his last words in his Autobiography, neither of them very uplifting. In his dictation on January 13, 1906, he recalled that in the throes of his distress his father “put his arm around my sister’s neck and drew her down and kissed her, saying ‘Let me die’” without so much as bidding his wife or sons farewell. Elsewhere in his autobiography, however, Sam remembered that Marshall Clemens charged his entire family to “Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away from you.” Yet a third version of his father’s final words is offered in the novel The Gilded Age, where Silas Hawkins tells the family, “I am leaving you in cruel poverty. I have been—so foolish—so short-sighted. But courage! A better day is—is coming. Never lose sight of the Tennessee Land! Be wary. There is wealth stored up for you there—wealth that is boundless!” In any case, Marshall’s death certainly left the family in cruel poverty. “We were about to be comfortable once more, after several years of grinding poverty and privation,” Sam observed in his dictation, but “our splendid new fortune was snatched from us and we were in the depths of poverty again.” Marshall Clemens was buried a few days later in the Old Baptist Cemetery atop Holliday’s Hill—the same cemetery where Huck and Tom witness Dr. Robinson’s murder by the moral monster Injun Joe in chapter 9 of Tom Sawyer. So traumatic was his father’s death that Sam wrote his daughter Clara on its anniversary in 1910: “My father died this day 63 years ago. I remember all about it quite clearly.”55

  Still worse, he viewed the autopsy. In a notebook entry dated October 10, 1903, Sam noted that in 1847 he had observed the “post mortem of my uncle through keyhole.” Of course, it is a disguised reference to Marshall Clemens. Sam had no uncle who died in 1847. That is, he apparently watched the operation performed on his father’s body by the family physician, Dr. Hugh Meredith. Such a medical procedure was unusual in 1847 except in cases in which the cause of death was unknown. What did the autopsy reveal? A clue appears in a letter Howells sent Clemens in 1880 after reading a draft of Orion’s autobiography: “Don’t let any one else see those passages about the autopsy. The light on your father’s character is most pathetic.” The inference is inescapable: the autopsy revealed that Marshall Clemens had contracted a venereal disease. As Orion also noted, during the last years of his father’s hard-knock life “he bought Cooke’s pills by the box and took one or more daily.”56 Cooke’s pills and blue mass pills, both of which were laced with an active ingredient of mercury chloride, or calomel, were readily available for as little as a dollar a pound over the counter at any drugstore in Hannibal and were standard allopathic treatments for conditions such as tuberculosis, toothache, constipation, and syphilis. Marshall Clemens may have suffered from a venereal disease for years. If so, his wife had not contracted it, suggesting that they had long since stopped having marital relations.

  CHAPTER 3

  Hannibal

  I can picture that old time to myself now . . . : the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning.

  —“Old Times on the Mississippi”

  “ORION CAME TO the rescue,” Samuel Clemens conceded in 1906. After Marshall Clemens’s death, his eldest son at the tender age of twenty-one became the breadwinner and titular head of the family. After the funeral Orion returned to St. Louis, where he was setting type for the St. Louis Reveille, and from his weekly wage of ten dollars he mailed three dollars home to Hannibal. Pamela, who played piano and guitar, moved forty miles to Paris, Missouri, to teach music. “I have never found any difficulty as yet in getting scholars,” she gloated. The rest of the family continued to live on the second floor of Grant’s Drug Store. “Thus we got along,” according to Sam, “but it was pretty hard sledding.”1

  Orion had never aspired to a career as printer or newspaper editor. “I embarked in the business with no more partiality for it than for any other occupation,” he remembered. Instead, he craved a career in politics. “If I could have been so employed that daily practice in the art of speaking would have been part of my duty, my life would have been full of bliss during all my working hours,” but “that had been forbidden by my father.” He added, with no little resentment,

  His pleasure in knowing that I was so engaged must have
been slight, compared with the happiness I might have enjoyed if I had been permitted to pursue a course warmed by the fervor and illumined by the light of my childish dreams. . . . There being no pleasure in the mechanical part of the business, and no hope of attaining a position where I could work at editing, free from the embarrassments of business, I began to yearn for a chance to get away from the office, and rest and breathe fresh air.

  Orion returned to Hannibal on weekends: he taught a Sunday school class there and delivered an Independence Day speech in the village on Sunday, July 4. The family also received an unexpected windfall soon after Marshall Clemens’s death: $150 for the sale of eight hundred acres of the Tennessee land.2 Orion earned a little extra cash as the Hannibal correspondent for the Reveille, owned and edited by Joe Field, a humorist and the father of Kate Field, a lecturer and journalist with whom Sam Clemens would often cross paths in the future. Orion was probably paid a dollar or two for each of his columns, all signed Lorio, nearly an anagram of Orion.

  These columns fill in some blanks in the history of Hannibal. In his autobiography, Sam reminisces about the “first negro-minstrel show I ever saw. It must have been in the early ’40s. In our village of Hannibal we had not heard of it . . . before, and it burst upon us as a glad and stunning surprise. The show remained a week, and gave a performance every night.” The format of this entertainment was carefully structured, if not entirely scripted, with standard makeup and costumes and assigned roles for the end men or comic stooges and the caricatured middleman or interlocutor. To be sure, the humorous songs and broad dialect exploited the stereotype of the “comic darkie” almost always played by white men in blackface (which was created by the application of burned cork), though the most popular shows also expressed topical social satire. As Eric Lott has explained, “acting black” encompassed “a whole social world of irony, negotiation, violence, and learning.” According to Albert Bigelow Paine, after the first minstrel show to visit Hannibal pulled up stakes and left, Sam “yearned for a brief period to be a magnificent ‘middle man’ or even the ‘end-man’ of that combination.” Sam wrote in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) that the “first of all the Negro minstrel shows” to come to St. Petersburg, the fictionalized Hannibal, “made a sensation,” and in “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875) he added that “the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life.” That show was almost certainly the one mentioned by Lorio in his Hannibal dispatch to the Reveille dated April 27, 1847, where he reported that the “small boys of our city were thrown into a high state of excitement this morning by the sudden appearance among us of the ‘Sable Brothers,’ and the subsequent pasting up, on all the corners, of big handbills, with big type in them, announcing that they (the ‘Brothers’) would do certain wonderful things at a certain place mentioned, and beginning at a certain hour.”3 The Sable Brothers, featuring the minstrel pioneer William S. Cleveland, also performed in New York City in 1847. They are the only minstrel troupe Sam is known to have seen in boyhood.

  Another Lorio letter establishes the date that the first “mesmerizer” or hypnotist visited the village. In his autobiography Sam reminisced about this “exciting” appearance. He thought the year was 1850. “As to that I am not sure,” he allowed, “but I know the month—it was May.” The mesmerizer’s visit in fact occurred in May 1847. As Lorio reported to the Reveille on May 20, “two gentlemen” arrived in Hannibal “a few days ago,” one to lecture on mesmerism and the other to practice it on townspeople selected from the audience. The Hannibal Gazette printed a few additional details about the performers, a duo named Sparhawk and Layton: their “remarks and experiments” were “highly interesting,” and their “subject (who resides in the city) seemed fully under the magnetic influence” and “anyone who doubted was desired to examine him.” They performed every night for two weeks in Hawkins’ Saloon and charged only ten cents’ admission.4 Sam was only eleven at the time.

  His age is significant because of the role he played in the mesmerist’s performances. As he explained in his autobiography, “The village had heard of mesmerism in a general way, but had not encountered it yet.” Sam believed that he had been at the time “fourteen or fifteen years old—the age at which a boy is willing to endure all things, suffer all things, short of death by fire.” By the fourth evening of the performances, he “had a burning desire to be a subject myself” and to replace his rival, a journeyman printer, onstage. Selected from the audience, as he tells the story, he gazed at a spinning disk until he “began to nod” and pretended to be in a trance. At the command of the hypnotist, he “fled from snakes, passed buckets at a fire,” and “made love to imaginary girls and kissed them. . . . I was cautious at first, and watchful, being afraid the professor would discover that I was an impostor,” but soon he simply acted out of impulse, and the mesmerist went along with the ruse, claiming he was ordering the child around telepathically. “After that fourth night, that proud night, that triumphant night, I was the only subject,” he recalled, and “I performed alone, every night, the rest of the fortnight. . . . When the magician’s engagement closed there was but one person in the village who did not believe in mesmerism, and I was the one.” He was to remain thereafter “an implacable and unpersuadable disbeliever in mesmerism and hypnotism for close upon fifty years.” In both Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), mesmerists are nothing more than frauds. In Tom Sawyer, a “phrenologist and a mesmerizer” comes to St. Petersburg to dupe the townspeople for a week or two, and in Huck Finn the Duke brags that he sometimes takes “a turn to mesmerism and phrenology when there’s a chance.” According to his working notes for the novel, in fact, Sam considered adding a scene featuring “the mesmeric foolishness, with Huck & the king for performers.” Ironically, when Sam confessed to his mother during a visit to Hannibal thirty-five years later that he had been a willing stooge, merely pretending to be in a trance, she refused to believe “that I had invented my visions myself; she said it was folly: that I was only a child at the time and could not have done it.”5 Even Orion thought Sam was lying.

  Minstrels and mesmerists were not the only entertainers to visit the village. Conveniently located on the Mississippi River and with a growing population, Hannibal became a popular stop on the circus circuit. According to Donald H. Welsh, “Circuses were common in Hannibal, three appearing in 1847 alone,” including Mabie’s Circus, Rockwell & Company’s Mammoth Circus, and Turner’s Menagerie & Circus. The popular circus clown Dan Rice performed in the village in 1848. On the Fourth of July in 1849, Raymond’s Menagerie appeared in Hannibal, and the next year Stokes’ Mammoth Circus played the village twice. It’s little wonder that in Tom Sawyer the boys play circus “in tents made of rag carpeting” and that Huck tells Tom that with his share of the buried treasure they expect to discover he will “go to every circus that comes along.” Sam remembered in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” too, that whenever a circus came to Hannibal “it left us all burning to become clowns.” In chapter 22 of Huck Finn, the eponymous hero actually attends a circus in Bricksville, another incarnation of Hannibal; and in the fragment “Hellfire Hotchkiss” (written in 1897) the title character is “on hand . . . with many others, at sunrise” to “see the elephant free of charge” when the circus promenades through town on its way south for the winter.6

  If Orion’s religious convictions were unsettled, his political principles were unwavering: pro-Union and antislavery. Like Abraham Lincoln he opposed slavery, but he was never a radical abolitionist. Instead, he was a meliorist who favored gradual emancipation. Like Lincoln, he became an ardent Republican when the Whig Party dissolved. He supported the Fugitive Slave Act that (temporarily) preserved the Union. In short, only a sliver of what Sam once said of him in the character of Oliver Hotchkiss in “Schoolhouse Hill” (1897–1908) is true: “He changed his principles with the moon, his politics with the weather, and his religion with his shirt.” He “missed his voca
tion—he should have been a weather-vane.” On the contrary, according to Minnie Brashear, Orion was “the greatest single influence” on Sam during his adolescence, becoming Sam’s surrogate father after the death of Marshall Clemens. “He was always truthful; he was always sincere; he was always honest and honorable,” Sam said of Orion in his autobiography.7

  Orion has been unfairly caricatured by Twain scholars over the years as a callow will-o’-the wisp, mostly as a result of his brother’s sibling rivalry. Sam referred derisively, for example, to “the pathetic realities of Orion’s life” in his “Autobiography of a Damned Fool” (written in 1877). He wrote W. D. Howells in 1879 that Orion was “a field which grows richer and richer the more he mulches it with each new topdressing of religion or other guano” and that his older brother “had mental perception but no mental proportion.” Following Sam’s lead, James O’Donnell Bennett called Orion “the Village Idiot,” and Seymour Gross described him as “one of the strangest fellows ever born.” Dixon Wecter seems to have missed the irony of his own statement that “Orion, Sam’s ne’er-do-well senior by ten years,” was appointed by President Lincoln in 1861 as the “Secretary of the Territory of Nevada.” Yet Fred W. Lorch fairly concludes that “it would be unsafe to rely upon Sam’s estimate of Orion.”8 It is true enough that Orion’s life pales in comparison to his younger brother’s, but he was hardly the bumbler of legend. In fact, he was more progressive on racial issues than was Sam, and he was uncommonly successful until the age of thirty-eight, when he suffered the devastating loss of his only child.

  If we can trust Sam’s autobiography or his faux autobiography of his brother, Orion read a life of Ben Franklin at the age of twelve and “at once set about making a Franklin of himself.” The claim seems reasonable enough. According to the historian Louis B. Wright, “by a credible though partial perception” of Franklin’s ideas, the Found(l)ing Father became the “high priest of the religion of commercial success.” In “Villagers of 1840–3” (1897), the character Oscar Carpenter, modeled on Orion, writes his mother that he is “studying the life of Franklin and closely imitating him” by dividing his day “on the Franklin plan—eight hours for labor, eight for sleep, eight for study, meditation and exercise.” Whatever the reason, Orion’s stock began to rise when he was in his early twenties. He was elected president of the St. Louis Apprentices’ Association and in that office met Edward Bates, a Whig politician and former slaveholder who in 1861 became Lincoln’s attorney general and the first cabinet member in U.S. history to hail from west of the Mississippi. Orion delivered a temperance speech in Hannibal in 1848, sent Bates a copy of it, and solicited career advice. Bates replied on March 8 “that no man could become a good editor of a newspaper or a statesman without being well acquainted with the civil and political history of his Country, including Constitutional law.” Orion closely followed Bates’s career, if not his advice, and editorially endorsed him for vice president on the Whig ticket in 1852. In a profile of Orion syndicated in newspapers across the country in 1892, he was said to rival his brother Sam “in conversational powers, and at almost every turn, upon almost any subject, there is a gleam of humor that fastens his thought to his hearer’s mind.” Even Sam sometimes admitted that Orion was a genius in his own idiosyncratic fashion: with “a grave mien and big earnest eyes,” he had “a precocious intellect, and a voracious appetite for books and study. He had no playmates, of course; he had nothing to offer them, they had nothing to offer him.”9