View a Sample Chapter

M01_LEVY3754_01_SE_C01.qxd 6/2/10 2:44 PM Page 13 THIRD REVISED PART I Preparation Literature is an art, not an inspiration. It is a trade, so to speak & must be learned—one cannot “pick it up.” Neither can one learn it in a year, nor in five years. And its capital is experience. the moment you venture outside your own experience, you are in peril—don’t ever do it. live within your literary means, & don’t borrow. Whatever you have lived, you can write—& by hard work & a gen- uine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it. Mark Twain to a young writer (1885) 13 M01_LEVY3754_01_SE_C01.qxd 6/2/10 2:44 PM Page 14 THIRD REVISED CHAPTER 1 Growing Up in Hannibal I Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in a tiny Missouri village named Florida. The “Samuel” came from his paternal grandfather; the “Langhorne” is something of a mys- tery but might have been taken from one of his father’s friends. As it happened, Halley’s comet, while no longer visible in the night sky, was paying one of its regular visits to the neighborhood of the planet Earth as the infant entered the world. When Clemens (by then universally known as Mark Twain) was an old man of seventy-four, he said “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” He insisted that “it will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s comet.” It was one disappointment he was destined to be spared. In 1835 Florida, Missouri, was “nearly invisible.” It had two short streets, a number of muddy lanes, a few houses, most of them made of logs, some sawmills, and a church. The town’s pop- ulation was around one hundred, and Twain later boasted that he had increased that total by a full percentage point. “It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town,” he said. “It may not be modest in me to refer to this but it is true.” Like many other towns in the American West, Florida was built on hard work and wildly exaggerated dreams of future prosperity. If only they would dredge the Salt River, the town could connect to the Mississippi and blossom into a thriving commercial center; 14 M01_LEVY3754_01_SE_C01.qxd 6/2/10 2:44 PM Page 15 THIRD REVISED G ROWING U PINH ANNIBAL * 15 if only the railroad would come and connect the town to St. Louis, eighty short miles to the southeast, then riches would surely fol- low. These were exactly the sort of inflated hopes that were likely to attract and seduce a man like Sam’s father. Except for a certain advantage in education and a religious skepticism that led him to abandon his Presbyterian upbringing, John Marshall Clemens was a typical pioneer. He was a wanderer, always in pursuit of some new opportunity, continu- ally chasing that elusive American dream of getting wealthy by virtue of hard work and a little luck. He had been born in Virginia in 1798, but moved as a child with his widowed mother to Kentucky. He studied law, married a lively local girl named Jane Lampton, and after the birth of their first child, Orion, moved to Tennessee where he tried to make a success practicing law in one Tennessee town after another. He tried his hand at farming, clerking, and running a store; he speculated in land and served as a postmaster; he had carpentry skills and built and sold wagons. And when things were going nowhere in Tennessee, he eagerly grasped at his brother-in-law’s glowing reports about the golden opportunities awaiting in Missouri. In June 1835, the family, now numbering five, made the arduous journey. Jane was carrying another child on that trip, and Sam was born, prematurely, six months after arriving at their new home. One thing that John Marshall Clemens did while still in Tennessee had important implications both for the future of the family and for the mental outlook of his unborn son. The father sunk every dollar he could scrape together into purchasing Tennessee land. Before leaving for Missouri, he had accumulated at least 70,000 acres—perhaps as many as 100,000—and he lived on the faith that this land would someday be worth unimagined millions. Things might be rough for the family right now, but once the Tennessee land was sold, the children would have everything they had ever dreamed of. Along with this mirage came the well-understood admonition that they would be fools to sell those acres too soon, that the land’s value would rise inevitably if they could only hold on a little longer. “He had always said that the land would not become valuable in his time,” Twain remembered, “but that it would be a commodious provision for his children some day. My father’s dying M01_LEVY3754_01_SE_C01.qxd 6/2/10 2:44 PM Page 16 THIRD REVISED 16 * M ARK T WAIN charge was, ‘Cling to the land and wait; let nothing beguile it away from you.’” Like everything else into which the father put his hopes, the Tennessee land came to nothing. But for Mark Twain, those acres were symbolic: “With the very kindest inten- tions in the world toward us he laid the heavy curse of prospec- tive wealth upon our shoulders. He went to his grave in the full belief that he had done us a kindness. It was a woeful mistake but fortunately he never knew it. It is good to begin life poor; it is good to begin life rich—these are wholesome; but to begin it poor and prospectively rich! The man who has not expe- rienced it cannot imagine the curse of it.” In his first novel, The Gilded Age, Twain created a character named Squire Hawkins, who was lured from Tennessee to a forlorn town in Missouri and who spent his days dreaming of the riches his family would someday know because of the large tract of land he had acquired back in Tennessee. By the time Sam turned four his father had given up on Florida—they were never going to build that railroad or dredge that river—and decided to move to a more promising Missouri village called Hannibal. Thirty miles east of Florida, Hannibal did not require a connection to the Mississippi; it was located between two bluffs and overlooked the magnificent river. In Hannibal, John Clemens achieved a modicum of respectability. He became a justice of the peace and was elected clerk of the Surrogate Court, but he was still dogged by failure. He bought a ramshackle hotel and opened a general store on its first floor, but both the hotel and the store failed and he gave up the place after a couple of years. After guaranteeing a loan to a defaulting acquaintance, he was virtually destitute. His wife took in laun- dry and cooked for another family; he sold some of the furniture and sent Orion to St. Louis to learn to be a printer; his eldest daughter gave piano lessons. Twain did not often speak or write about his father, and some critics have noted the absence of fathers in much of his fiction. He remembered him to be distant, unemotional, and stern: “Silent, austere, of perfect probity and high principle; ungentle of manner toward his children . [he] never punished them—a look was enough and more than enough.” John Clemens influ- enced his son in both positive and negative ways. The mature M01_LEVY3754_01_SE_C01.qxd 6/2/10 2:44 PM Page 17 THIRD REVISED G ROWING U PINH ANNIBAL * 17 Twain inherited his father’s puritanical morality, particularly as regards financial dealings (both father and son had to work their way out of bankruptcy, and both were determined to pay back every penny). Twain also saw, in his father’s example, that a rigorous moral code was possible without the benefit of formal religion—even theological skeptics could live upright and honest lives. On the other side, it seems clear that, although the son pursued opportunities with the same eagerness, he resolved to provide for his own family better than his father had provided for his; this compulsion, together with the example of his father’s consistent disappointments, inevitably led to his lifelong worrying about money. If the father had failed to achieve the American dream, the son was determined to do better. And when it came to his emotional relations with his own wife and children, Twain—tender, loving, playful, ebullient, generous— could not have rejected more decisively the atmosphere he had known as a boy. Sam was much closer to his mother, and she was easily the most important presence in his early life. Her own story was not an entirely happy one. She was an attractive and animated young woman with a slender figure and lush red hair (which her son inherited); one observer said she was thought to be “one of the most beautiful women in the state.” According to her own account, told many years later, she had been in love, back in Kentucky, with a young medical student: “I loved him with my whole heart, and I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words had been spoken.” Everyone “supposed we were engaged—took it for granted we were—but we were not.” After a bizarre misunderstanding, the young man left town, erro- neously believing that Jane Lampton did not return his feelings.

Load more