I am persuaded," wrote Bernard Shaw about Mark Twain, "that the future historian of America will find your works indispensable to him as a French historian finds the political tracts of tare." By his own participation, no artist in our literature save Lincoln is so broad a segment of typical American experience in the last century, Langhorne Clemens, known by the most famous pen name that an American ever bore, is a matchless annalist of his times. His life makes those Carry men in Boston and Concord and New York resemble the flowering of talents that blossomed in too retired a k. He knew the greatest river of the continent as Melville knew the high. He witnessed the epic of America, the westward tide at its full, with option keener than the shallow appraisals of Bret Harte and Joaquin. When in his Autobiography Mark Twain recalls after forty years the faddy of an emigrant lad stabbed to death by a drunken comrade, and adds, the red life gush from his breast," we are reminded of Whitman's nation, "I was there"—with the difference that Walt's immediacy was genitive, Mark's actual. In the activities of the external man as well as in actor and temperament, Mark Twain was a representative American— idyllic ante-bellum boyhood in a river town, to maturity enmeshed in Toss-purposes of the Gilded Age which he christened, and thence to the years of mingled hope and disillusion in the Progressive Era. Despite »we avowal, "There is not a single human characteristic which can be f labeled as 'American,' " Mark Twain is stamped unforgettably with the brand. If he failed finally to reconcile reality and ideality, he abs and gave expression to both. That failure was not his; it belonged to penetration.
age his incurably Calvinist mind saw all the events of his life, from son November 30, 1835, in the village of Florida, Missouri, as a chain of titian forged by some power outside his will. Like his Connecticut Yankee as led to reflect upon heredity, "a procession of ancestors that stretches a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom ace has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed."
His father, an austere restless Virginian, bequeathed the family a vain hone of fortune from "the Tennessee lands," like Squire Hawkins in The Gilded Age; he also gave his son an object lesson in failure like the example set the father of a genius whom Mark the Baronial once rose to challenge Shakespeare of Stratford. The wife and mother, Jane Lampton Clernens of Kentucky pioneer stock, sought by her strong Presbyterianism to balance her husband's village-lawyer agnosticism; their famous son inherited the self-tormenting conscience with the latter's will to disbelieve. As for derivations more remote Twain the romantic relished his maternal tie with the Earls of Durham through "the American claimant," while Twain the democrat reserved his sole ancestral pride for a Regicide judge, who "did what he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day."
In 1839 the Clemens’s moved to Hannibal, on the west bank of the Mississippi, and set the conditions of boyhood and youth from which flowed the wellspring of Mark Twain's clearest inspiration. Thanks to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, its aspect in the forties has become the property of millions: the wharf giving upon the turbid waters where rafts and broad-horns, fast packets and gay showboats passed endlessly, the plank sidewalks where Tom and Becky trudged to school, the tanyard where Huck's drunken father slept among the hogs, the steep slope of Cardiff (really Holliday's) Hill, the surrounding woods of oak and hickory and sumach, and a few miles downstream the cave where Injun Joe met death. Hannibal lay in its halcyon summer between frontier days and the convulsions of the Civil War, the latter forecast in the mobbing of an occasional abolitionist and the tracking down of runaway slaves. On the whole, happiness outweighed grief; prized in retrospect was the large freedom of a boy's life, with the swimming hole and woods full of game, jolly playmates banded against a world of adult supremacy, and dinner tables groaning with prodigal hospitality. "It was a heavenly place for a boy," Hannibal's first citizen remembered.
Sam Clemens' schooling ended early, when he was about twelve. After his father's death the lad was apprenticed to a printer's shop—"the poor boys college," Lincoln called it. Lack of formal education doubtless gave the later Mark Twain an eagerness to have his genius certified by convention, and also led him occasionally to discover shopworn ideas with a thrill impossible to sophisticates; but it also delivered him from those cultural stereotypes into which the genius of New England, for example, for generations had been poured. Fatalist that he was, Twain liked to date his career from certain accidents. The first of them came one day on the streets of Hannibal, when the young printer picked up a stray leaf from a book about Joan of Arc, an for the first time saw magic in the printed word. Henceforth the itch scribbling was strong upon him. His earliest known appearance in print, crudely humorous sketch called "The Dandy Frightening the Squatter," appeared in the Boston Carpet Bag of May i, 1852. He left Hannibal the next year, wandering on to New York and Philadelphia, and began to send hometown papers the first of those facetious travel pieces which he wrote sporadically for the next half-century. In 1857, after tarrying awhile in Cincinnati, Jie set out for New Orleans with a notion of shipping for the Amazon. But, lacking funds, he became a steamboat pilot under the tutelage of Horace Bixby. That veteran gradually taught him the ever changing aspects of the Mississippi, by sun and starlight, at low water and in flood.
For two years after that Clemens turned his wheel atop the taxes deck, drawing a licensed pilot's high wages, while he gained postgraduate schooling inhuman nature. Oft quoted is his later assertion: "When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river." A born worrier, he felt the responsibility that lay within a pilot's hands as he steered past narrows and snags and sand bars, or for the sake of prestige raced his rivals until the boiler nearly burst under its head of steam. His old master, many years later, stated that Clemens "knew the river like a book, but he lacked confidence." One may speculate whether a very human incertitude, deep in his being, did not chime with a classic type of humor in his constant self-portrayal as the man who gets slapped: the bumptious yet timid cub of Life on the Mississippi; the fear-bedeviled soldier of "The Campaign That Failed"; the tenderfoot of Roughing It, setting forest fires and just missing wealth through sheer stupidity; or the harassed traveler losing his tickets, browbeaten by porters and shopkeepers, falling foul of the authorities, who appears in a long sequence from the juvenile Snodgrass letters to A Tramp Abroad.
Clemens' career on the river ended in the spring of 1861 with the outbreak of hostilities. With brief enthusiasm he joined a Confederate militia band, savoring the boyish conspiracy of war in its early stages. In the lack of discipline the band soon broke up; and Sam, with qualms about fighting for slavery, yielded to persuasion from his Unionist brother Orion, lately appointed Secretary of the Territory of Nevada. In July, 1861, the two set out for the West. The outlines of the story told in Roughing If are true enough: the nineteen-day trip across the plains and Rockies to Carson City; an attack r mining fever that left Sam none the richer; his acceptance of a job on the Vll"ginia City Enterprise; a journalist's view of San Francisco in flush times; and a newspaper-sponsored voyage to the Sandwich Islands. His dream of becoming a millionaire by a stroke of fortune never forsook him; lingering ift
his blood, the bonanza fever made him a lifelong victim of gold bricks, quick profit schemes, and dazzling inventions. But his return to journalistic humor the vein he had worked in his late teens and early twenties, imitative of such professional humorists as Seba Smith, J. J. Hooper, and B. P. Shillaber ' whose productions every newspaper office abounded—proved to be his real] lucky strike. In 1863 the Missourian of twenty-eight met Artemus Ward o the latter's Western lecture tour, and watched a master storyteller in action-the adroit timing, change of pace, and deadpan obliviousness to the point of one's own wit. Twain's "How to Tell a Story" (1895) acknowledges these profitable lessons.
It was Ward who encouraged him to seek a wider audience than the redshirted miners of Washoe and nabobs of the Golden Gate. The first fruit of this encouragement to appear in the East—a piece of jocular sadism against the small fry who made day and night hideous at resort hotels, "Those Blasted Children"—was printed early in 1864 by the New York Mercury Meanwhile in 1863 Clemens had begun to imitate current funny men like Ward, Orpheus C. Kerr, and Josh Billings, by selecting a pen name, the river-boat man's cry for two fathoms, "Mark Twain." Clemens stoutly maintained he appropriated it soon after an eccentric pilot-journalist of New Orleans Captain Isaiah Sellers, relinquished it by death. No contribution in the New Orleans press, however, has ever been found under that name; also, Sellers' death occurred a year after Clemens adopted this pseudonym. Whether original or borrowed, the name served an important purpose. It created an alter ego, a public character, which Clemens could foster through the years while doffing it in private as he pleased. It set definable limits to his role of being what the age called a "phunny phellow." A speculative critic might guess that his abiding interest in transposed identities, twins, and Siamese prodigies mirrored a dualism which self-observation would have shown running like a paradox through his nature: gullible and skeptical by turns; realistic and sentimental, a satirist who gave hostages to the established order, a frontiersman who bowed his neck obediently to Victorian mores, and an idealist who loved the trappings of pomp and wealth. Incessantly he contradicted himself on a variety of subjects. His was not a single-track mind, but a whole switcn-yard. The creation of two more or less separate identities—Clemens the sensitive and perceptive friend, Mark Twain the robust and astringent humorist springing from the same trunk of personality, helped to make him like those ligatured twins in Pudd'nhead Wilson, Luigi and Angelo, "a human philopena."