Note: This first appeared in this blog in a slightly
different form on November 30, 2010 and again last year. Just
can’t get enough of Mark Twain…
Samuel
Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in
the insignificant village of Florida, Missouri shortly after the
memorable appearance of Haley’s Comet. His family soon
moved to the very significant and bustling river port of Hannibal where
he grew to be a lad of a more than standard issue impulse to mischief and a
disdain for authority. He vastly preferred idling along the river front
to school work, but was quick and clever with words. After his father
died, his family sent him to apprentice at the age of 15 to the Hannibal
Journal, a newspaper owned by his older brother Orion. He graduated from printer’s devil to typesetter and
occasionally contributed unaccredited comic sketches to the paper.
By the time he
was 18 he itched to get out from under his family’s thumb and headed east where
he easily found work as a type setter in New York City, Philadelphia,
Cincinnati, and St. Louis. In his spare time he haunted
libraries and educated himself. Returning home in 1857 he fell in with
legendary Mississippi River Pilot Horace Bixby on a trip to New
Orleans and studied with him for two years until he earned his pilot’s
license. For almost two years he plied the river earning a princely salary of
more than $250 a month and the prestige of the most important job on the
river.
When the Civil
War closed the river, the young man briefly joined his Hannibal friends in
a company of Confederate Volunteers. Without hearing a shot fired
Clemens quickly determined that the boring drudgery of a soldier’s life was not
for him. When his brother Orion secured appointment as secretary to the Republican
governor of Nevada territory, the two set out on an adventurous trip
by stage coach to the west.
Clemens tried
his hand as a gold miner in Virginia City, but soon decided it was too
much work. He went back to newspaper work for the Territorial
Enterprise. His tendency toward scathing satire often got him in
trouble and he often wrote under various pseudonyms, including one incorporating
a term from depth sounding on the Mississippi, Mark Twain. That one stuck. But he soon had too many
enemies with horsewhips and—worse—pistols and decamped for San Francisco
in 1864.
In the City by the Bay, Clemens returned to
reporting. He also fell in with a lively literary crowd that included local
color writers like Bret Harte and Artemus Ward as well a young poet, Ina Coolbrith. Under their influence he
submitted some of his sketches to Eastern publications. When The
Saturday Press in New York
published his mining camp story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County in 1865 he found himself a national celebrity and much in
demand.
In 1866 he took
an assignment from the Sacramento Bee to visit the Sandwich
Islands (Hawaii). His accounts of that trip and his first
ventures on the lecture stage recounting them, made him in demand as a travel
writer. In 1867 the San
Francisco Alta California sponsored Twain, as he was now
professionally known, on the Quaker City steamship tour of Europe,
the Mediterranean and the Holy Land.
That was a hell of a lot of living
for a young man still in his early 30’s. And Mark Twain used it all,
every bit of it, beginning with Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrim's
Progress, his account of his European adventures, published in
1869. It sold an astonishing 70,000 copies in the first year alone.
He followed it up in 1872 with Roughing It, yarns from his
journey west, gold mining adventures, and Nevada newspaper days.
Between those two books Clemens met
and fell in love with Olivia Langdon, the beautiful sister of a
friend. The Langdons of Elmira, New York were wealthy and socially
well connected to a world of the Eastern liberal elite. Despite their
mutual adoration, Olivia spent much of her time trying to tame Clemens’s
blaspheming tongue, cure him of his fondness for cigars, and make a decent Christian
out of the admitted heretic.
The couple spent a couple of years
in Buffalo, New York where he edited and had an ownership stake in the Buffalo Express. After their
first child and only son Langdon died of diphtheria at 19 months,
Clemens sold his interest in the paper and with the earnings of his first two
books built a handsome mansion for Olivia in Hartford, Connecticut.
The seventeen years spent in the
Hartford house were the happiest and most productive of Clemens’s life.
His three daughters, Suzie, Clara, and Jean were all born
there and doted on by their father. His circle of friends widened and
deepened from next door neighbor Julia Ward Howe to the editor and
Christian socialist William Dean Howells. He entertained
and admired Fredrick Douglas and casually welcomed the increasing parade
of fans, famous and ordinary, who made the pilgrimage to meet him.
Exposure to new ideas broadened him—and drove him further to the left
politically with each passing year as he also became ever more disenchanted
with smug Christianity. He embraced full social equality for Blacks
and other minorities, heartily endorsed women’s suffrage—and made one of the
most widely circulated addresses by a man on the subject—and endorsed labor
unions, gladly accepting an invitation to speak to the Knights of Labor.
The Gilded
Age: A Tale of Today published was in 1872 shortly after settling into the new
house. It was Twain’s first foray into the novel and was written in
collaboration with his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner. A satire on speculation
and political corruption, the book was moderately successful and spawned
a long running theatrical version featuring the blowhard promoter Colonel
Beriah Sellers. The book gave Twain the courage to try his hand at
more novels.
He turned to his own Hannibal
childhood for the inspiration of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in
1876, followed by his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn eight years later. By that time Twain had matured as an
artist and in addition to good fun and a rousing adventure yarn, Huck Finn, partly
inspired by The Odyssey, included sharp barbs at slavery, social
snobbery, mob mentality, and literary romanticism.
Among the books completed in
Hartford were the novels which explored class, caste, and power—The
Prince and the Pauper (1881) and A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur’s Court (1889.) The later was one of the first works of fiction
to employ the notion of time travel and deserves to be considered a forerunner
of modern speculative fiction. There was also more non-fiction—A Tramp
Abroad based on a second trip to Europe in made in 1878 and published
in 1880 and Life on the Mississippi, his 1883 look back at his
time as a Mississippi River boat pilot. There were also numerous
newspaper articles and sketches as well as speeches and lectures.
Clemens was also trying his hand at
business. He started a publishing house with his nephew by marriage, Charles
L. Webster & Company. The publishing company got off to a good
start when it issued the memoirs of Clemens’s friend, former President
Ulysses S Grant. Grant was dying of cancer of the jaw and out
of kindness, Clemens paid him a huge advance to secure his family’s financial
future. Luckily it turned out that Grant was an exceptionally fine writer
for a general and he book was a huge success. Later projects, however,
fared less well. A biography of Pope Leo XIII sold fewer than two
hundred copies ruining the company.
Clemens was also an enthusiast for
new inventions and his investments in them led to disaster. The worst was
the Paige Typesetter, a promising new invention to speed up the tedious
and expensive work of setting type by hand, as Clemens himself had so often
done as a young man. The invention worked tantalizingly well but was
complicated and too prone to mechanical failure to be practical. Clemens
sank nearly $300,000 (equal to more than $7.5 million today) of his own money
and Olivia’s inheritance on it between 1880 and 1894. Then, just as it
was about to be perfected the Linotype rendered it obsolete.
As his debts piled up, Twain wrote
furiously. He undertook any newspaper or magazine work offered and dashed
of hasty, not fully conceived novels like Tom Sawyer, Detective and
Puddin’ Head Wilson to try to bring in revenue. He turned
more and more to the lecture platform where he was in great demand. His
performances, mixtures of readings from his works and seemingly off-the-cuff observations
were masterful monologues and would be the envy of any stand-up comic today.
None of it was enough.
Clemens’s close friend, a Standard Oil executive named Henry
Huttleston Rogers stepped in and took over his finances. He
transferred all of his copyrights to Olivia to protect income from them from
creditors then declared bankruptcy. Roger personally managed the
household finances with a thrifty eye on the bottom line while Clemens
undertook a world girdling speaking tour to repay all of his creditors, even
though the bankruptcy absolved him of his obligations to them. The tour
stretched from 1894 to 1900, but Clemens returned home with enough money to pay
every one off and start again clean.
A series of personal tragedies
stalked Clemens in the last years of the 19th and early years of the 20th
Centuries. The death of his beloved daughter Suzie of meningitis
in 1896 was a huge blow from which he never fully recovered. He
battled increasing depression when Olivia passed in 1904. In 1909 both
his close friend Henry Rogers and daughter Jean died within months. Only
Clara remained.
The succession of deaths caused
Clemens to re-examine religion. He was already deeply skeptical, although
for Olivia’s sake he had often tried to open his mind to Christianity.
Twain’s serious 1896 novel Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the
Sieur Louis de Conte explored a topic that had fascinated him for more
than 40 years. He based the 17 year old Joan on his own Suzie and
examined her more as a revolutionary heroine than a mystical figure. He
considered it his best work, but the public disagreed.
After Suzie’s death he became
increasingly bitter at the notion of a God that would allow such pain and
suffering in the world. Twain last novella The Mysterious Stranger
told of the visits of Satan to earth over various periods in
history. He wrote three versions over several years, but declined to
publish any of them out of respect to Olivia and Clara. A version miss
mashed from all three manuscripts was published in 1924. Now considered a
classic, it was every bit as controversial as his family had feared.
Another, even more bitter, look at
Christianity, Letters to the Earth was considered so
shocking that it was withheld from publication for fifty years after Twain’s
death. Other manuscripts, including the complete versions of his Autobiography
were held up for 100 years. A version of the Autobiography,
which Twain dictated from his bed, was published in serialized form as Chapters
of My Autobiography in the North American Review in 1906
and ’07. It was published as a book in 1927. But the massive
transcriptions contained much more material, which Twain knew to be scandalous.
In 2010 the first of three volumes
of the complete Autobiography was published and became an instant best
seller, making Mark Twain the first writer to have original material published
and attain that status in three different centuries. As Twain predicted,
it contains “shocking” material with more promised in the remaining two volumes
to be released over the next two years. Here is a sample:
There is one notable thing about our Christianity: bad, bloody, merciless, money-grabbing, and predatory. The invention of hell measured by our Christianity of today, bad as it is, hypocritical as it is, empty and hollow as it is, neither the deity nor his son is a Christian, nor qualified for that moderately high place. Ours is a terrible religion. The fleets of the world could swim in spacious comfort in the innocent blood it has spilled.
If his views on religion had soured,
his political views had become extremely radical. The Spanish American
War and the brutal suppression of the Philippine Rebellion were the
last straws. Twain declared himself an anti-colonialist. He
co-founded the American Anti-Imperialist League in 1901 and spent the
last ten years of his life crusading for justice for the “colored races of the
world.” He penned pamphlets, lectured until his health gave out and was
equally as scathing to European as American imperialism. He grew to hate
war. In 1905 he submitted his caustic War Prayer to Harpers
Magazine, normally eager to publish anything by the great
writer, but they rejected it as unsuitable for their female readership.
Because of contractual obligations, Twain was barred from publishing it
elsewhere. It did not see the light of day until 1923. It has since
inspired anti-war protesters from the Vietnam War to the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
Clemens’s views were becoming
revolutionary. He commented on his evolving views when he told an
interviewer, “When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in
1871, I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it
differently–being influenced and changed, little by little, by life and
environment ... and now I lay the book down once more, and recognize that I am
a Sansculotte! – And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat!”
Despite his hatred of war and
violence, he endorsed the abortive 1905 Russian revolution. “I am
said to be a revolutionist in my sympathies, by birth, by breeding and by
principle. I am always on the side of the revolutionists, because there never
was a revolution unless there were some oppressive and intolerable conditions
against which to revolt.”
He passed many of these ideas on to
one of his last protégés, the deaf/blind student Helen Keller with whom
he spent many hours of conversation through her interpreter Anne Sullivan, after
first meeting her in 1896. He encouraged his friend Rodgers to pay her
tuition at Radcliffe. Keller owed her awakening to social justice
and socialism to Clemens and Anne Sullivan earned the title Miracle
Worker from him.
Sam Clemens and Mark Twain—the two
personalities now so intertwined that it was impossible to tell them
apart—died as he predicted the day after Haley’s Comet reached the nearest
point to Earth on its return in 1910. He suffered a heart attack on April
21 at Redding, Connecticut.
And Twain’s legacy? Just this:
the best damn American writer ever. Period. No argument allowed.
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