Mark Twain, A Biography Complete

A >> Albert Bigelow Paine >> Mark Twain, A Biography Complete


Mrs. Clemens and her son Samuel now had a sober talk, and, realizing that
the printing trade offered opportunity for acquiring further education as
well as a livelihood, they agreed that he should be apprenticed to Joseph
P. Ament, who had lately moved from Palmyra to Hannibal and bought a
weekly Democrat paper, the Missouri Courier. The apprentice terms were
not over-liberal. They were the usual thing for that time: board and
clothes--"more board than clothes, and not much of either," Mark Twain
used to say.

"I was supposed to get two suits of clothes a year, like a nigger, but I
didn't get them. I got one suit and took the rest out in Ament's old
garments, which didn't fit me in any noticeable way. I was only about
half as big as he was, and when I had on one of his shirts I felt as if I
had on a circus tent. I had to turn the trousers up to my ears to make
them short enough."

There was another apprentice, a young fellow of about eighteen, named
Wales McCormick, a devilish fellow and a giant. Ament's clothes were too
small for Wales, but he had to wear them, and Sam Clemens and Wales
McCormick together, fitted out with Ament's clothes, must have been a
picturesque pair. There was also, for a time, a boy named Ralph; but he
appears to have presented no features of a striking sort, and the memory
of him has become dim.

The apprentices ate in the kitchen at first, served by the old slave-cook
and her handsome mulatto daughter; but those printer's "devils" made it
so lively there that in due time they were promoted to the family table,
where they sat with Mr. and Mrs. Ament and the one journeyman, Pet
McMurry--a name that in itself was an inspiration. What those young
scamps did not already know Pet McMurry could teach them. Sam Clemens
had promised to be a good boy, and he was, by the standards of boyhood.
He was industrious, regular at his work, quick to learn, kind, and
truthful. Angels could hardly be more than that in a printing-office;
but when food was scarce even an angel--a young printer angel--could
hardly resist slipping down the cellar stairs at night for raw potatoes,
onions, and apples which they carried into the office, where the boys
slept on a pallet on the floor, and this forage they cooked on the office
stove. Wales especially had a way of cooking a potato that his associate
never forgot.

It is unfortunate that no photographic portrait has been preserved of Sam
Clemens at this period. But we may imagine him from a letter which, long
years after, Pet McMurry wrote to Mark Twain. He said:

If your memory extends so far back, you will recall a little sandy-
haired boy--[The color of Mark Twain's hair in early life has been
variously referred to as red, black, and brown. It was, in fact, as
stated by McMurry, "sandy" in boyhood, deepening later to that rich,
mahogany tone known as auburn.]--of nearly a quarter of a century
ago, in the printing-office at Hannibal, over the Brittingham
drugstore, mounted upon a little box at the case, pulling away at a
huge cigar or a diminutive pipe, who used to love to sing so well
the expression of the poor drunken man who was supposed to have
fallen by the wayside: "If ever I get up again, I'll stay up--if I
kin." . . . Do you recollect any of the serious conflicts that
mirth-loving brain of yours used to get you into with that
diminutive creature Wales McCormick--how you used to call upon me to
hold your cigar or pipe, whilst you went entirely through him?

This is good testimony, without doubt. When he had been with Ament
little more than a year Sam had become office favorite and chief standby.
Whatever required intelligence and care and imagination was given to Sam
Clemens. He could set type as accurately and almost as rapidly as Pet
McMurry; he could wash up the forms a good deal better than Pet; and he
could run the job-press to the tune of "Annie Laurie" or "Along the Beach
at Rockaway," without missing a stroke or losing a finger. Sometimes, at
odd moments, he would "set up" one of the popular songs or some favorite
poem like "The Blackberry Girl," and of these he sent copies printed on
cotton, even on scraps of silk, to favorite girl friends; also to Puss
Quarles, on his uncle's farm, where he seldom went now, because he was
really grown up, associating with men and doing a man's work. He had
charge of the circulation--which is to say, he carried the papers. During
the last year of the Mexican War, when a telegraph-wire found its way
across the Mississippi to Hannibal--a long sagging span, that for some
reason did not break of its own weight--he was given charge of the extras
with news from the front; and the burning importance of his mission, the
bringing of news hot from the field of battle, spurred him to endeavors
that won plaudits and success.

He became a sort of subeditor. When the forms of the paper were ready to
close and Ament was needed to supply more matter, it was Sam who was
delegated to find that rather uncertain and elusive person and labor with
him until the required copy was produced. Thus it was he saw literature
in the making.

It is not believed that Sam had any writing ambitions of his own. His
chief desire was to be an all-round journeyman printer like Pet McMurry;
to drift up and down the world in Pet's untrammeled fashion; to see all
that Pet had seen and a number of things which Pet appeared to have
overlooked. He varied on occasion from this ambition. When the first
negro minstrel show visited Hannibal and had gone, he yearned for a brief
period to be a magnificent "middle man" or even the "end-man" of that
combination; when the circus came and went, he dreamed of the day when, a
capering frescoed clown, he would set crowded tiers of spectators
guffawing at his humor; when the traveling hypnotist arrived, he
volunteered as a subject, and amazed the audience by the marvel of his
performance.

In later life he claimed that he had not been hypnotized in any degree,
but had been pretending throughout--a statement always denied by his
mother and his brother Orion. This dispute was never settled, and never
could be. Sam Clemens's tendency to somnambulism would seem to suggest
that he really might have taken on a hypnotic condition, while his
consummate skill as an actor, then and always, and his early fondness of
exhibition and a joke, would make it not unlikely that he was merely
"showing off" and having his fun. He could follow the dictates of a
vivid imagination and could be as outrageous as he chose without
incurring responsibility of any sort. But there was a penalty: he must
allow pins and needles to be thrust into his flesh and suffer these
tortures without showing discomfort to the spectators. It is difficult
to believe that any boy, however great his exhibitory passion, could
permit, in the full possession of his sensibilities, a needle to be
thrust deeply into his flesh without manifestations of a most unmesmeric
sort. The conclusion seems warranted that he began by pretending, but
that at times he was at least under semi-mesmeric control. At all
events, he enjoyed a week of dazzling triumph, though in the end he
concluded to stick to printing as a trade.

We have said that he was a rapid learner and a neat workman. At Ament's
he generally had a daily task, either of composition or press-work, after
which he was free. When he had got the hang of his work he was usually
done by three in the afternoon; then away to the river or the cave, as in
the old days, sometimes with his boy friends, sometimes with Laura
Hawkins gathering wild columbine on that high cliff overlooking the
river, Lover's Leap.

He was becoming quite a beau, attending parties on occasion, where
old-fashioned games--Forfeits, Ring-around-a-Rosy, Dusty Miller, and the
like--were regarded as rare amusements. He was a favorite with girls of
his own age. He was always good-natured, though he played jokes on them,
too, and was often a severe trial. He was with Laura Hawkins more than
the others, usually her escort. On Saturday afternoons in winter he
carried her skates to Bear Creek and helped her to put them on. After
which they skated "partners," holding hands tightly, and were a likely
pair of children, no doubt. In The Gilded Age Laura Hawkins at twelve is
pictured "with her dainty hands propped into the ribbon-bordered pockets
of her apron . . . a vision to warm the coldest heart and bless and
cheer the saddest." The author had the real Laura of his childhood in
his mind when he wrote that, though the story itself bears no resemblance
to her life.

They were never really sweethearts, those two. They were good friends
and comrades. Sometimes he brought her magazines--exchanges from the
printing--office--Godey's and others. These were a treat, for such
things were scarce enough. He cared little for reading, himself, beyond
a few exciting tales, though the putting into type of a good deal of
miscellaneous matter had beyond doubt developed in him a taste for
general knowledge. It needed only to be awakened.




XVI

THE TURNING-POINT

There came into his life just at this period one of those seemingly
trifling incidents which, viewed in retrospect, assume pivotal
proportions. He was on his way from the office to his home one afternoon
when he saw flying along the pavement a square of paper, a leaf from a
book. At an earlier time he would not have bothered with it at all, but
any printed page had acquired a professional interest for him now. He
caught the flying scrap and examined it. It was a leaf from some history
of Joan of Arc. The "maid" was described in the cage at Rouen, in the
fortress, and the two ruffian English soldiers had stolen her clothes.
There was a brief description and a good deal of dialogue--her reproaches
and their ribald replies.

He had never heard of the subject before. He had never read any history.
When he wanted to know any fact he asked Henry, who read everything
obtainable. Now, however, there arose within him a deep compassion for
the gentle Maid of Orleans, a burning resentment toward her captors, a
powerful and indestructible interest in her sad history. It was an
interest that would grow steadily for more than half a lifetime and
culminate at last in that crowning work, the Recollections, the loveliest
story ever told of the martyred girl.

The incident meant even more than that: it meant the awakening of his
interest in all history--the world's story in its many phases--a passion
which became the largest feature of his intellectual life and remained
with him until his very last day on earth. From the moment when that
fluttering leaf was blown into his hands his career as one of the world's
mentally elect was assured. It gave him his cue--the first word of a
part in the human drama. It crystallized suddenly within him sympathy
with the oppressed, rebellion against tyranny and treachery, scorn for
the divine rights of kings. A few months before he died he wrote a paper
on "The Turning-point of My Life." For some reason he did not mention
this incident. Yet if there was a turning-point in his life, he reached
it that bleak afternoon on the streets of Hannibal when a stray leaf from
another life was blown into his hands.

He read hungrily now everything he could find relating to the French
wars, and to Joan in particular. He acquired an appetite for history in
general, the record of any nation or period; he seemed likely to become a
student. Presently he began to feel the need of languages, French and
German. There was no opportunity to acquire French, that he could
discover, but there was a German shoemaker in Hannibal who agreed to
teach his native tongue. Sam Clemens got a friend--very likely it was
John Briggs--to form a class with him, and together they arranged for
lessons. The shoemaker had little or no English. They had no German. It
would seem, however, that their teacher had some sort of a "word-book,"
and when they assembled in his little cubby-hole of a retreat he began
reading aloud from it this puzzling sentence:

"De hain eet flee whoop in de hayer."

"Dere!" he said, triumphantly; "you know dose vord?"

The students looked at each other helplessly.

The teacher repeated the sentence, and again they were helpless when he
asked if they recognized it.

Then in despair he showed them the book. It was an English primer, and
the sentence was:

"The hen, it flies up in the air."

They explained to him gently that it was German they wished to learn, not
English--not under the circumstances. Later, Sam made an attempt at
Latin, and got a book for that purpose, but gave it up, saying:

"No, that language is not for me. I'll do well enough to learn English."
A boy who took it up with him became a Latin scholar.

His prejudice against oppression he put into practice. Boys who were
being imposed upon found in him a ready protector. Sometimes, watching a
game of marbles or tops, he would remark in his slow, impressive way:

"You mustn't cheat that boy." And the cheating stopped. When it didn't,
there was a combat, with consequences.




XVII

THE HANNIBAL "JOURNAL"

Orion returned from St. Louis. He felt that he was needed in Hannibal
and, while wages there were lower, his expenses at home were slight;
there was more real return for the family fund. His sister Pamela was
teaching a class in Hannibal at this time. Orion was surprised when his
mother and sister greeted him with kisses and tears. Any outward display
of affection was new to him.

The family had moved back across the street by this time. With Sam
supporting himself, the earnings of Orion and Pamela provided at least a
semblance of comfort. But Orion was not satisfied. Then, as always, he
had a variety of vague ambitions. Oratory appealed to him, and he
delivered a temperance lecture with an accompaniment of music, supplied
chiefly by Pamela. He aspired to the study of law, a recurring
inclination throughout his career. He also thought of the ministry, an
ambition which Sam shared with him for a time. Every mischievous boy has
it, sooner or later, though not all for the same reasons.

"It was the most earnest ambition I ever had," Mark Twain once remarked,
thoughtfully. "Not that I ever really wanted to be a preacher, but
because it never occurred to me that a preacher could be damned. It
looked like a safe job."

A periodical ambition of Orion's was to own and conduct a paper in
Hannibal. He felt that in such a position he might become a power in
Western journalism. Once his father had considered buying the Hannibal
Journal to give Orion a chance, and possibly to further his own political
ambitions. Now Orion considered it for himself. The paper was for sale
under a mortgage, and he was enabled to borrow the $500 which would
secure ownership. Sam's two years at Ament's were now complete, and
Orion induced him to take employment on the Journal. Henry at eleven was
taken out of school to learn typesetting.

Orion was a gentle, accommodating soul, but he lacked force and
independence.

"I followed all the advice I received," he says in his record. "If two
or more persons conflicted with each other, I adopted the views of the
last."

He started full of enthusiasm. He worked like a slave to save help:
wrote his own editorials, and made his literary selections at night. The
others worked too. Orion gave them hard tasks and long hours. He had
the feeling that the paper meant fortune or failure to them all; that all
must labor without stint. In his usual self-accusing way he wrote
afterward:

I was tyrannical and unjust to Sam. He was as swift and as clean as a
good journeyman. I gave him tasks, and if he got through well I
begrudged him the time and made him work more. He set a clean proof, and
Henry a very dirty one. The correcting was left to be done in the form
the day before publication. Once we were kept late, and Sam complained
with tears of bitterness that he was held till midnight on Henry's dirty
proofs.

Orion did not realize any injustice at the time. The game was too
desperate to be played tenderly. His first editorials were so brilliant
that it was not believed he could have written them. The paper
throughout was excellent, and seemed on the high road to success. But
the pace was too hard to maintain. Overwork brought weariness, and
Orion's enthusiasm, never a very stable quantity, grew feeble. He became
still more exacting.

It is not to be supposed that Sam Clemens had given up all amusements to
become merely a toiling drudge or had conquered in any large degree his
natural taste for amusement. He had become more studious; but after the
long, hard days in the office it was not to be expected that a boy of
fifteen would employ the evening--at least not every evening--in reading
beneficial books. The river was always near at hand--for swimming in the
summer and skating in the winter--and once even at this late period it
came near claiming a heavy tribute. That was one winter's night when
with another boy he had skated until nearly midnight. They were about in
the middle of the river when they heard a terrific and grinding noise
near the shore. They knew what it was. The ice was breaking up, and
they set out for home forthwith. It was moonlight, and they could tell
the ice from the water, which was a good thing, for there were wide
cracks toward the shore, and they had to wait for these to close. They
were an hour making the trip, and just before they reached the bank they
came to a broad space of water. The ice was lifting and falling and
crunching all around them. They waited as long as they dared and decided
to leap from cake to cake. Sam made the crossing without accident, but
his companion slipped in when a few feet from shore. He was a good
swimmer and landed safely, but the bath probably cost him his hearing. He
was taken very ill. One disease followed another, ending with scarlet
fever and deafness.

There was also entertainment in the office itself. A country boy named
Jim Wolfe had come to learn the trade--a green, good-natured, bashful
boy. In every trade tricks are played on the new apprentice, and Sam
felt that it was his turn to play them. With John Briggs to help him,
tortures for Jim Wolfe were invented and applied.

They taught him to paddle a canoe, and upset him. They took him sniping
at night and left him "holding the bag" in the old traditional fashion
while they slipped off home and went to bed.

But Jim Wolfe's masterpiece of entertainment was one which he undertook
on his own account. Pamela was having a candy-pull down-stairs one
night--a grown-up candy-pull to which the boys were not expected. Jim
would not have gone, anyway, for he was bashful beyond belief, and always
dumb, and even pale with fear, in the presence of pretty Pamela Clemens.
Up in their room the boys could hear the merriment from below and could
look out in the moonlight on the snowy sloping roof that began just
beneath their window. Down at the eaves was the small arbor, green in
summer, but covered now with dead vines and snow. They could hear the
candymakers come out, now and then, doubtless setting out pans of candy
to cool. By and by the whole party seemed to come out into the little
arbor, to try the candy, perhaps the joking and laughter came plainly to
the boys up-stairs. About this time there appeared on the roof from
somewhere two disreputable cats, who set up a most disturbing duel of
charge and recrimination. Jim detested the noise, and perhaps was
gallant enough to think it would disturb the party. He had nothing to
throw at them, but he said:

"For two cents I'd get out there and knock their heads off."

"You wouldn't dare to do it," Sam said, purringly.

This was wormwood to Jim. He was really a brave spirit.

"I would too," he said, "and I will if you say that again."

"Why, Jim, of course you wouldn't dare to go out there. You might catch
cold."

"You wait and see," said Jim Wolfe.

He grabbed a pair of yarn stockings for his feet, raised the window, and
crept out on the snowy roof. There was a crust of ice on the snow, but
Jim jabbed his heels through it and stood up in the moonlight, his legs
bare, his single garment flapping gently in the light winter breeze. Then
he started slowly toward the cats, sinking his heels in the snow each
time for a footing, a piece of lath in his hand. The cats were on the
corner of the roof above the arbor, and Jim cautiously worked his way in
that direction. The roof was not very steep. He was doing well enough
until he came to a place where the snow had melted until it was nearly
solid ice. He was so intent on the cats that he did not notice this, and
when he struck his heel down to break the crust nothing yielded. A
second later Jim's feet had shot out from under him, and he vaulted like
an avalanche down the icy roof out on the little vine-clad arbor, and
went crashing through among those candypullers, gathered there with their
pans of cooling taffy. There were wild shrieks and a general flight.
Neither Jim nor Sam ever knew how he got back to their room, but Jim was
overcome with the enormity of his offense, while Sam was in an agony of
laughter.

"You did it splendidly, Jim," he drawled, when he could speak. "Nobody
could have done it better; and did you see how those cats got out of
there? I never had any idea when you started that you meant to do it
that way. And it was such a surprise to the folks down-stairs. How did
you ever think of it?"

It was a fearful ordeal for a boy like Jim Wolfe, but he stuck to his
place in spite of what he must have suffered. The boys made him one of
them soon after that. His initiation was thought to be complete.

An account of Jim Wolfe and the cats was the first original story Mark
Twain ever told. He told it next day, which was Sunday, to Jimmy
McDaniel, the baker's son, as they sat looking out over the river, eating
gingerbread. His hearer laughed immoderately, and the story-teller was
proud and happy in his success.




XVIII

THE BEGINNING OF A LITERARY LIFE

Orion's paper continued to go downhill. Following some random counsel,
he changed the name of it and advanced the price--two blunders. Then he
was compelled to reduce the subscription, also the advertising rates. He
was obliged to adopt a descending scale of charges and expenditures to
keep pace with his declining circulation--a fatal sign. A publisher must
lead his subscription list, not follow it.

"I was walking backward," he said, "not seeing where I stepped."

In desperation he broke away and made a trip to Tennessee to see if
something could not be realized on the land, leaving his brother Sam in
charge of the office. It was a journey without financial results; yet it
bore fruit, for it marked the beginning of Mark Twain's literary career.

Sam, in his brother's absence, concluded to edit the paper in a way that
would liven up the circulation. He had never done any writing--not for
print--but he had the courage of his inclinations. His local items were
of a kind known as "spicy"; his personals brought prompt demand for
satisfaction. The editor of a rival paper had been in love, and was said
to have gone to the river one night to drown himself. Sam gave a
picturesque account of this, with all the names connected with the
affair. Then he took a couple of big wooden block letters, turned them
upside down, and engraved illustrations for it, showing the victim wading
out into the river with a stick to test the depth of the water. When
this issue of the paper came out the demand for it was very large. The
press had to be kept running steadily to supply copies. The satirized
editor at first swore that he would thrash the whole journal office, then
he left town and did not come back any more. The embryo Mark Twain also
wrote a poem. It was addressed "To Mary in Hannibal," but the title was
too long to be set in one column, so he left out all the letters in
Hannibal, except the first and the last, and supplied their place with a
dash, with a startling result. Such were the early flickerings of a
smoldering genius. Orion returned, remonstrated, and apologized. He
reduced Sam to the ranks. In later years he saw his mistake.

"I could have distanced all competitors even then," he said, "if I had
recognized Sam's ability and let him go ahead, merely keeping him from
offending worthy persons."

Sam was subdued, but not done for. He never would be, now. He had got
his first taste of print, and he liked it. He promptly wrote two
anecdotes which he thought humorous and sent them to the Philadelphia
Saturday Evening Post. They were accepted--without payment, of course,
in those days; and when the papers containing them appeared he felt
suddenly lifted to a lofty plane of literature. This was in 1851.

"Seeing them in print was a joy which rather exceeded anything in that
line I have ever experienced since," he said, nearly sixty years later.

Yet he did not feel inspired to write anything further for the Post.
Twice during the next two years he contributed to the Journal; once
something about Jim Wolfe, though it was not the story of the cats, and
another burlesque on a rival editor whom he pictured as hunting snipe
with a cannon, the explosion of which was said to have blown the snipe
out of the country. No contributions of this time have been preserved.
High prices have been offered for copies of the Hannibal journal
containing them, but without success. The Post sketches were unsigned
and have not been identified. It is likely they were trivial enough. His
earliest work showed no special individuality or merit, being mainly
crude and imitative, as the work of a boy--even a precocious boy--is
likely to be. He was not especially precocious--not in literature. His
literary career would halt and hesitate and trifle along for many years
yet, gathering impetus and equipment for the fuller, statelier swing
which would bring a greater joy to the world at large, even if not to
himself, than that first, far-off triumph.--[In Mark Twain's sketch "My
First Literary Venture" he has set down with characteristic embroideries
some account of this early authorship.]