Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn’s idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer’s endless summer of freedom and adventure. Indeed, this nation’s best-loved author was every bit as adventurous, patriotic, romantic and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well- one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with the frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night.
Tramp printer, river pilot, Confederate guerrilla, prospector starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: The man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms of water- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world.
The geographic core, in Twain’s early years, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nation’s heart. Keelboats, flatboats, and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses, cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In the 1850’s, before the climax of westward expansion, the vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled United States.
Young Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat.
The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied-a cosmos. He participated abundantly in this life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds, piracies, lynchings, medicine shows, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that seemed phonographic.
Steamboat decks teemed not only with the main current of pioneering humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the difference between what people claim steamboat trade marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twain acknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type of human nature. Those acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing, but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the people along the great stream.
When railroad began driving up the demand for steamboat pilots and the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He tried soldiering for two weeks with a motley band enemy. Twain quit after deciding, “… I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.”
He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver fever in Nevada’s Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and was rebuffed. Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, to literature’s enduring gratitude.
From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.
Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His description of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. “It was a splendid population- for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained sloths stayed at home…It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day-and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says “Well, that is California all over.”
In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notations about the weather and the tedious mining-camp meals lies an entry nothing a story he had heard that day-an entry that would determine his course forever: “Coleman with his jumping forg- bet stranger $50-stranger had no frog, and C. got him one – in the meantime stranger filled C.’s frog full of shot and he couldn’t jump. The stranger’s frog won.”
Retold with his descriptive genius, the story was printed in newspapers across the United States and became known as “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” Mark Twain’s national reputation was now well established as “the wild humorist of the Pacific slop.”
Two years later the opportunity came for him to take a distinctly American look at the Old World. In New York City the steamship Quaker City prepared to sail on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Hold Land. For the first time, a sizable group of United States citizens planned to jurney as tourists –milestone, of sorts, in a country’s development. Twain was assigned to accompany them, as correspondent for a California newspaper. If readers expected the usual glowing travelogue, they were sorely surprised.
Unimpressed by the Sultan of Turkey, for example, he reported, “… one could set a trap anywhere and catch a ozen abler men in a night.” Casually he debunked revered artists and art treasures, and took unholy verbal shots at the Holy Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing his articles. America laughed with him. Upon his return to the States the book version of his travels, The Innocent Abroad, became an instant best-seller.
At the age of 36 Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His best books were published while he lived there.
As early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story about the boyhood adventures of a lad he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he changed the name
to Tom, and began shaping his advertures into a stage play. Not until 1874 did the story begin developing in earnest. After publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly became a classic tale of American boyhood. Tom’s mischievous daring, ingenuity, and the sweet innocence of his affection for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be studied in American schools today as is the Declaration of Independence.
Mark Twain’s own declaration of independence came form another character. Six chapters into Tom Sawyer, he drags in “the drunkard.” Fleeing a respectable life with the puritanical Widow Dounglas, Huck protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer: “I’ve tried it, and it don’t work; it don’t work, Tom. It ain’t for me … The wider eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell-everything’s so awful re’lar a body can’t stand it.”
Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life of his own,\\ in a book often considered the best ever written about Americans . His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave presents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.
On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life’s regularities and the energy-sapping clamor for success.
Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: “What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our
edges.
Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis, Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter, Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub.
Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had beed well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretened to praise the U.S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic crater. In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusion and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make a better world.
The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiggraphy late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men’s final release from earthly struggles:”….they vanish from a world where they were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sigh that they had existed –a world which will lament them a day and forget them forever.”
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