1
âSomething at Once Awful and Sublimeâ
(1835â39)
The prairie in its loneliness and peace: that was what came back to him toward the end of his life, after he had pulled the rug out from under all the literary nabobs, and fired off all his nubs and snappers, and sashayed through all the nations, and collected all his ceremonial gowns and degrees, and tweaked all the grinning presidents, and schmoozed all the newspaper reporters, and stuck it to all his enemies, and shocked all the librarians, and cried out all his midnight blasphemies, and buried most of his family. The prairie was what came back to him as he wrote in 1897âspeaking, in his conceit, from the grave, and thus freely. He remembered what had mattered the most, the earliest. He thought not of the Mississippi River, which he encountered most fully later in his life, but of âa level great prairie which was covered with wild strawberry plants, vividly starred with prairie pinks, and walled in on all sides by forestsââa swatch of the great western carpet yet a decade from disfigurement by the grooves of the California gold rushers.1 There his prodigious noticing had begun. His way of seeing and hearing things that changed Americaâs way of seeing and hearing things.
It was there, as a boy, where his great font of visual imagesââthe multitudinous photographs oneâs mind takes,â he later called themâbegan to form. He found enchantment in the way moonlight fell through the rafters of the slanting roof of his uncleâs farmhouse into little squares on the floor of the stairway landing. He was struck by the darkness of his bedroom, packed with ghostly stillness. When he woke up by accident in that darkness, his forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of his memory.
But more powerful than the early images in his memory were the sounds: the crack of a watermelon split open, the rising and falling wail of a spinning wheel, the dismal hoo-hoo of the owl and the howl of the wolf, the crash of summer thunder. It was to the sounds that he had always assigned his deepest fantasies and fears. The spinning wheel âwas the mournfulest of all sounds to me . . . and filled my atmosphere with the wandering spirits of the dead.â2 Animal wails were omens of death; the thunderclap was Godâs wrath over his sinfulness.
Of all the sounds, none had quite the lasting mimetic (or moral) effect on Sam Clemens as the sound of the human voice. And no human voices, save his own motherâs, caught his imagination quite like those of the Negro slaves. Those voices spoke in a way different from the people in his family: quick, delicious, throbbing with urgencies half-named, half-encoded. They conjured mind-pictures: lightning bolts, apparitions from the spirit world, chariots swooping down from heaven, skies of blood, animals crying out. Adorned with tonal shifts and repetitions and the counterpointed rhythms of stridency and hush, the slave voices treated language as a cherished creature, to be passed around, partaken of, as well as simply heard. Clear as flowing water, and yet invested with deep currents of meaning that only the fellow speakers could fully understand.
He heard his first slave voices on the prairie before he turned four, and sought them out through the rest of his childhood and beyond. In Mark Twainâs manuscript pages half a century later, these voices challenged the genteel paradigm that had sonorously governed the first epoch of indigenous American literature. They ushered in a replacement: gutbucket truth rooted in the solo riffs of the dispossessedâthe advent of an American voice derived not from European aesthetics, but entirely from local improvisational sources, black and white. Mark Twainâs baton began to mute the Anglican symphony, and strike up the rhythms of American jazz.
His capacity to transform commonplace spoken language into literature, like any artistâs gift, remains beyond understanding. A contemporaryâs remark that â[h]e is the ordinary manâplus genius,â probably comes as close as any theory. But his acute attentiveness to language, and some of his other distinguishing traits, can be traced in part to his precarious entry into the world.
Born two months premature, on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Sam Clemens narrowly survived childbirth. His labyrinthine personality, subjected to endless analysis by 20th-century Freudians, has never been considered in the context of this difficult birth and his convalescence from it. As a toddler Sammy was sickly and underweight (his adult height reached only 5 feet 81/2 inches). He was largely bedridden until his fourth year, and frail for the next three. âWhen I first saw him I could see no promise in him,â his mother Jane admitted. Her frontier fatalism was more than matched by a visitor to the little house. Eyeing the shriveled form, the woman turned to Jane and blandly asked, âYou donât expect to raise that babe, do you?â Jane said she would try.3
Premature babies are generally unable to sleep deeply and sometimes exist in a kind of dream world that is typical neither of the womb nor of a fullterm infantâs consciousnessâa world of unstable borders between reality and the inner oceans of the mind. The subsuming of reality by dreams was among Mark Twainâs signal literary preoccupations, and his writingâwhether journalism, travel, memoir, or novelâmoved between truth and fantasy with sometimes maddening unconcern.
Sammy grew into a sleepwalker, and his mother felt that he had the gift (or curse) of âsecond sight.â He lived his life on the edges of self-control; he was quick to anger, hounded by guilt and anxiety, and subject to seismic shifts of mood.
Most importantly in terms of his art were the ways in which his senses were affected. The hyperacuity of his ear and his unusual retention of sounds (he never stopped performing the earliest songs and spirituals he heard, and as a mature writer he could reproduce entire blocks of spoken conversation) may have been a vestige of his fitful early months. Hearing develops more quickly in newborns than the sense of sight, especially with premature babies, who are more interested in voices than in other sounds. At any rate, no one expected Sammy to survive the winter. Frontier children routinely died from measles, mumps, smallpox, âbilious fever,â malaria, spider bites, cholera, scarlet fever, polio, diphtheria, or teething complications; and, if not from those, then often from the âcuresâ applied to them. Still, Jane did her best for Sammy. Always alert for omens, Jane may have looked for hopeful signs that he would survive, such as the widely discussed comet named for its British discoverer, Edmund Halley, which neared the earth in its seventy-five-year cycle in the late autumn of his arrival.I The child hung on.
He was in Missouri because his father Marshallâs luck had run out more than once. The austere self-educated lawyer, named after John Marshall, had left the Virginia Piedmont first for Kentucky, as a boy, after his father died; then to Tennessee, as a married man, when his farm failed. He began buying up land, amassing deeds to more than seventy thousand acres of virgin yellow-pine acreage, for a total outlay of only a little more than $400. The land was thought to be rich in copper, and Marshall envisioned a day when railroads would haul timber from his forests, building him and his heirs an immense fortune.
But the Tennessee land investment only triggered the Clemens familyâs decline into poverty. It remained unsold for decades, a financial failure that haunted Marshall Clemens and his children, and fueled Sam Clemensâs lifelong anxiety over money.
While waiting for the land-buyers to show up, Marshall opened a general store at Jamestown, which also served as his familyâs living quarters. Daughter Pamela (sometimes spelled âPameliaâ and always pronounced that way) was born there in 1827. Another arrival, Pleasant Hannibal, followed either one or two years later; he survived only three weeks, although there are no precise records of his life or death even in the family Bible. Margaret came along in 1830. Marshall became overwhelmed by the pressures to provide for his growing family, as the income from his tiny store proved insufficient. His chronic headaches grew more severe, and he began to dull them, or try to, with Cookâs pills and other ânotions,â some of which were 50 percent alcohol. (He seems never to have drunk to excess.) In 1831 he uprooted his family once again, this time to a clearing in the Tennessee woods at the confluence of three mountain streams. He built another cabin, and tried to make a go of it as a farmer/store clerk/postmaster until the financial crash of 1834 wiped out his credit.
Finally, in 1835, he relocated one more time, to Missouri, when his wifeâs brother-in-law sent a rapturous letter from there. It was a letter whose promised-land spirit Mark Twain would fold in to his great comic character âColonelâ Eschol (later âBeriahâ and âMulberryâ) Sellers in The Gilded Age:
Come right along to Missouri! Donât wait and worry about a good price but sell out for whatever you can get, and come along, or you might be too late . . . Itâs the grandest countryâthe loveliest landâthe purest atmosphereâI canât describe it; no pen could do it justice . . . Iâve got the biggest scheme on earth . . . Mumâs the wordâdonât whisperâkeep yourself to yourself. Youâll see! Come!ârush!âhurry!âdonât wait for anything!4
The model for this letter was written by John Quarles, who had followed his father-in-law, Samâs maternal grandfather, to the flyspeck hamlet of Florida in 1835. (For some reason, the founders of new towns in Missouri indulged a naming whimsy not quite so prominent in other states. As the century went on, Missouri filled up with towns bearing such names as Neck, Torch, Climax Springs, Conception Junction [in Nodaway County], Joy and Romance, Useful, Peculiar, Impo and Ink, Lupus, Zebra, Chloride and Cooter, Advance, Half Way, Fair Play, Pumpkin Center, Nonesuch, Monkey Run, Gerald, and Low Wassie.)
Once arrived, while Sammy hovered between life and death, his father accepted John Quarlesâs offer to become a co-proprietor of his general store, which allowed him to begin investing for a future powered by the Industrial Revolution. More opportunity for his luck to run out.
Slater mills had long since replaced the household spinning wheel. Coupled with the cotton gin, the mills revived the cotton economy of the South, and reversed a trend toward abolition of slavery in the planter states. Annual cotton production leapt from 3,000 bales in 1790 to 178,000 bales by 1810.
The slave trade reached a higher volume than in any period in its four-hundred-year history, fueled by the avarice of Northern merchants.
Steam suddenly drove just about everything with moving parts. The nationâs quiet inland waterways, accustomed to flatboats and scows, were disturbed by paddle wheels: in 1807, a young portrait artist and submarine fantasist named Robert Fulton got his paddle-wheel-driven steamboat the Clermont chugging up the Hudson River.
ALMOST BEFORE it began, the steamboat era saw the advent of its vanquisher. The railroad, a horse-powered convenience of the English collieries, was a novelty import in America until Christmas Day of 1830, when a contraption named âThe Best Friend of Charlestonâ chugged six miles along a South Carolina roadbed to launch the era of the steam-powered locomotive. (It later blew up.) By 1850 there would be nine thousand miles of roadbed on the continent, with new construction surging ahead.
A new form of capitalism arose to bring out the economic yield of these new marvels. It ran on frenzied speculation fed by visionary organizers and owners, who structured new national and even international markets for the accelerating flow of goods. These new captains of industry enriched themselves as they increased the national wealth. Their excesses triggered a credit-fueled financial panic in 1837 that damaged the national economy for years.
Marshall Clemens noted and coveted these triumphs of machine-driven wealth as they tumbled westward, paying less heed to the plight of the enslaved subculture on which it all still depended. His son would absorb himself in both ends of this spectrum, and make a different kind of capital of what he saw there.
SAMMYâS HEALTH slowly improved. He grew aware of his appearance, and asked for pure white dresses as soon as he could speak. When he realized that he had no tail, unlike some of his fellow beings around the house, he complained about it: âThe dog has a tail bebind, the cat has a tail bebind, and I havenât any tail bebind at all at all.â5 His uncle John made a tail of paper and pinned it onto his dress.
When he gained the strength to leave the small family house on his own, he found himself in a lonely prairie hamlet. Florida comprised fifty-odd low-slung wooden houses and barns, embraced by two forks of a small river, the Salt. In the spring of 1839, John Quarles expanded Sammyâs world by opening a 230-acre farm on the prairie land adjoining Florida, and deploying a few slaves to make it run.II It was among these otherwise forgotten tutors who worked the fields and then gathered in their cabins at night that Sam Clemensâs self-education as a literary artist began.
The slave cabins were on the far side of an orchard, beyond a stand of hickory and walnut trees that screened the Quarlesâs double-log farmhouse. Sammy had no inkling of where the black people in the little cabins had come from, or how they had got there. But he knew that they were different, profoundly so. He knew it from their voices. He would remember two of them in particular. One was a bedridden old woman with a bald spot, who was known as Aunt Hannah. Sammy and his cousins had heard from the slave children that Aunt Hannah was a thousand years old. She had known Moses, and Pharaoh, the wicked slave master of Egypt. The horror of watching Pharaoh drown while chasing Moses across the Red Sea had given her a bald spot. Aunt Hannah prayed a lot, and when she wasnât praying she terrified the children with tales of witches.
The other great presence was Uncle Danâl, âa middle-aged slave whose head was the best one in the negro-quarter,â Mark Twain wrote in 1897, âwhose sympathies were wide and warm, and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile.â6 To the children, black and white, who milled around the premises he was âa faithful and affectionate good friend, ally and adviser.â7 Mark Twain recalled the âprivileged nightsâ as a child when he and an assortment of cousins and slave children clustered at Danâlâs feet in his cabin to hear him tell his thunderous stories.
Uncle Dan, called âDannâ by John Quarles, who emancipated him in 1855, was 6 feet tall, of a black complexion, and still in his early forties when Sammy knew him.8 He is presumed to be the father of most, or all, of the black children in the quarters, including Mary, one of Sammyâs closest playmates and a child of âweird distorted superstitions,â as Sammyâs cousin Tabitha Quarles recalled in her old age.9 Only his voice survives himâbut what an artifact that is. Uncle Danâlâs voice, amplifying itself in geometric progressions as the American centuries marched on, is the first trumpet note of the first great jazz composition in American literature: the voice of Huckleberry Finnâs Jim. As Mark Twain said, late in life:
He has served me well, these many, many years. I have not seen him for more than half a century, and yet spiritually I have had his welcome company a good part of that time, and have staged him in books under his own name and as âJim,â and carted him all around . . . It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities.10
He was not the only inspiration for Mark Twainâs achievements with black dialect. Many others would lend their distinctive phrasings and points of view: There was the familyâs slave Jennie. There was a household slave boy named Sandy, whose constant singing got on Sammyâs nerves until Jane pointed out to him that singing was probably the childâs way of not thinking about the mother taken from him by an owner.11 There was the young, black servant Mark Twain encountered in 1872 at the Paris House hotel in Paris, Illinois, and whose great burst of rhythmic dialect he recorded and later published as âSociable Jimmy.â There was Mary Ann Cord, a cook for Samuel Clemensâs sister-in-law at Elmira, New York, in the 1870s, whose own story of separation burned itself word by word into his brain.12 There was George Griffin, an ...