Chapter 1Florida and Hannibal

Foreword

Every writer I have ever taken as a subject arrived to me already split in two. There was the private person, and there was the public name — a name that had gotten loose at some point and started doing business on its own, in rooms the person was not in, saying things the person had not said. My whole working life has been the study of that split: what it costs an American writer to become a thing that can be bought, quoted, photographed, and mistaken for the self that made it. I thought I understood the machinery. I had traced its workings through two women who spent their careers being read as their public names before they were read as their sentences.

Then I went looking for who built the machine, and the trail did not stop at the twentieth century. It ran back to a Missouri printer's apprentice who took his pen-name off a river.

Mark twain. It was a measurement before it was a man — a leadsman's call sounded from the bow of a Mississippi steamboat, two fathoms, twelve feet, safe water under the keel. Samuel Langhorne Clemens named himself after an instrument of depth and then made the name into the most recognisable trademark in American letters. That is the fact that pulled me off my own ground. I write about women, and about the East, and about the century that had already inherited celebrity as a given condition. Twain is a man, and the West and the river, and the century in which an American author became, for the first time, a manufactured public self. He did not inherit the machine. He was the machine's founding engineer.

I came to him expecting the white linen suit — the genial humorist, the drawl, the after-dinner sage. I found the suit soon enough. But under it was a man who grasped, earlier and more completely than anyone of his time, that an author could be a product: a lecture ticket, a subscription volume sold door to door, a brand durable enough that when its inventor went bankrupt at fifty-eight, he could tour the whole circumference of the Earth and pay the debt back in full with nothing but his own fame. The reckoning with celebrity I had spent years documenting in the women who came after him had been prototyped here, deliberately, by a man who understood he was doing it.

The record he left is enormous and self-conscious in a way that suits a subject like this. I worked from the public record and only the public record: the published books and travel letters, the notebooks, the flood of correspondence, the autobiographical dictations he ordered sealed for a hundred years so that he might tell the truth from safely inside the grave, the press of his own loud century, the court and business papers of the bankruptcy. I have interviewed no one; the people in this book are all dead, and I have taken them at what they wrote down. The persona left more evidence of itself than most lives do. That is itself a finding.

What the evidence would not let me keep was the comedy as the whole story. The man who invented the American joke buried three of his four children and, at the last, his wife. The comet frame he is famous for — born under Halley in 1835, and out with it again, on schedule, in 1910 — was a public spectacle he narrated himself, one more performance of a life lived as a life watched. But beneath the schedule was a private accounting no persona could file: a running tally of the dead he had been made, as a boy of six, to kiss in their coffins.

He is worth a book because he is the source. If you want to know what fame does to an American writer — what it grants and what it hollows — you do not begin with the ones who suffered it. You begin with the one who built it and then could not get free of it. This is a life lived from end to end in public view, by a man who arranged the viewing himself, and who spent seventy-four years sounding for a bottom he could not always find. Twelve feet. Safe water. He called it out over deep channels his whole life, and hoped the call was true.

— Eleanor Whitlock, New York

Chapter 1 · Florida and Hannibal

The boy was born premature in a two-room frame house on Mill Street, Florida, Missouri, on the evening of Monday 30 November 1835. Halley's Comet had been visible over the Mississippi Valley since mid-October. The comet that month was at its closest naked-eye luminosity in seventy-six years; it would not return for another seventy-five. Jane Lampton Clemens, thirty-two, in labour by three in the afternoon, delivered the child into the hands of a country midwife at about seven in the evening. The baby weighed perhaps four and a half pounds. He was very small. He was not expected to live the night.

He lived. Jane named him Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Samuel was for her grandfather Samuel Lampton; Langhorne was for the Tennessee Langhorne family, the Lamptons' Virginia kin. The boy was the sixth of her seven children. One was already dead: Pleasant Hannibal, who had died in 1829 at three months. Margaret would die in August 1839 and Benjamin in 1842, both in childhood — the family's pattern already set. Of the seven Clemens children, only three would live to see fifty.

John Marshall Clemens, the father, was at Hannibal that week on a court errand. Florida was the village; Hannibal was the county seat thirty miles north-east; John as justice of the peace was at the Marion County circuit. He returned to Florida by horseback on the morning of 1 December. He held the boy. He told Jane the boy looked unwell. He said: Maybe he will get through, Jane. Maybe. He said it without conviction.

The boy got through.

Florida, Missouri, in 1835 was a settlement of perhaps a hundred people on the Salt River, sixty miles inland from the Mississippi. The village had a single general store (run by Sam's uncle John Quarles), a small grist mill, two churches, and a dozen frame houses scattered along Mill Street and the river bottoms. The settlement had been founded in 1831 by John Quarles and his Lampton in-laws as a cooperative town-building venture. The plan had been to lay the village out on the gentle bend of the Salt and to take advantage of the river commerce that the early settlers had assumed would develop on a navigable Missouri tributary. The Salt did not turn out to be navigable above the bend; the river commerce never came. Florida by 1835 was failing. The Quarles store was the principal economic engine. John Marshall Clemens, who had moved his family to Florida from Tennessee in 1835 specifically to join the Quarles business, was already by autumn 1835 considering a move to Hannibal where the Mississippi River traffic and the county-seat courthouse offered a better economic future. The boy was born into a family that was about to leave the village he was born in.

John Marshall Clemens, thirty-seven in 1835, was a Virginia-Tennessee-Kentucky lawyer of slowly diminishing prospects. His own father, Samuel Clemens of Mason County, Virginia, had died in 1805 when John was seven, leaving the family in the care of John's stepfather, who had moved them to Adair County, Kentucky. John had grown up in genteel-poor circumstances, had read law in Lexington, Kentucky, in his early twenties, had been admitted to the Tennessee bar in 1822, and had married Jane Lampton in May 1823 in Adair County. The couple's first eight years had been in Tennessee (Jamestown, then Three Forks of Wolf River), where John had purchased the legendary 70,000 acres of mountain land that would haunt the Clemens family for the rest of their lives. The Tennessee land was John's great speculative bet. It would never produce the fortune he had imagined. It would not even produce the survival income the family needed; the land would be sold piece by piece over the next sixty years for sums that did not approach what John had paid; the Clemens children would refer to it ironically across their adult lives as the Tennessee land, the inheritance that was not.

By 1835 the family had moved from Tennessee to the Salt River bottoms of Missouri at the invitation of John Quarles. John Quarles was Jane's brother-in-law (married to Jane's sister Patsy Lampton). The Quarles family in Florida ran the general store and a small farm four miles outside the village. John Marshall Clemens had been promised a partnership in the store and a small parallel law practice in the village. The partnership had not, by autumn 1835, produced the income John had been counting on.

The boy was born into this configuration: a failing village, a struggling father, a wise mother, a family already practising the bereavement that would be its constant undertone, a Mississippi River thirty miles east waiting in the geography to become the central fact of the boy's writing life sixty years on.

Jane Lampton Clemens, thirty-two, was the household's emotional centre and would remain so for the next fifty-five years until her death in 1890. She had been born in Adair County, Kentucky, in June 1803, the daughter of Benjamin Lampton, a Kentucky farmer, and Margaret Casey Lampton. She had red hair (the Lampton red that turned up in Sam and his sister Pamela), a quick wit, and a habit of speaking her mind with a Kentucky directness that could disarm strangers. She had married John Marshall Clemens at twenty in May 1823 — partly out of love, partly out of family pressure, partly because John was the most respectable young lawyer her Adair County circle had produced. The marriage by 1835 was twelve years old and was the kind of marriage Jane had not entirely chosen. She managed the household. She bore the children. She buried the children when they died. She comforted John when his investments failed. She did not complain, except in the small ways the family later remembered her by: a sharper observation than was strictly required, a slightly satirical inflection at the supper table, a momentary turn of the head that could have been laughter or could have been weeping.

The Quarles farm, four miles outside Florida, would be the central fact of Sam's childhood. Each summer from age four to age twelve Sam would spend at the farm with Jane and the other children. The farm had a Big House (the main two-storey wooden frame structure where the Quarles family lived), a smokehouse, a corn-crib, a barn, a small orchard, a tobacco shed, and the slave-quarters behind the orchard. The slave population at the farm in the 1840s was approximately fifteen to twenty. The principal figures Sam knew were Uncle Dan'l (the Quarles slave who would later be the model for Jim in Huckleberry Finn), Aunt Hannah (the household cook), and a small set of younger enslaved children including a boy named Sandy whom Sam later wrote about in his autobiography. Uncle Dan'l, in the slave-quarters in the long Missouri summer evenings, told ghost stories — the Golden Arm, the bull alligator, a long catalogue of plantation tales rendered in the Black vernacular Sam was hearing for the first time and would carry into his ear for the next sixty years. Sam would spend long Missouri summer evenings at the slave-quarters fire. He would not be sent away. The Quarles household, by the standards of the Missouri 1840s, was relatively kind to its enslaved labour; the cruelty of slavery was visible to Sam at the Quarles farm only in muted forms (the family-separation rhetoric was muted; the corporal punishment was rare). What Sam would later understand about slavery, the moral horror that Huckleberry Finn would centre, was learned later, in pieces, across the next forty years. The Quarles farm gave him the warmth of the slave-quarters voice and not yet the recognition of what the system around the voice was doing.

The most consequential single fact of Sam's early life, Halley's Comet at the birth, was not yet known to him. He was an infant; the comet receded toward Jupiter's orbit by spring 1836 and was not visible to the naked eye after April. Jane registered the coincidence but did not yet make anything of it. Sam himself would learn of his Halley birth-coincidence in his teens, when his mother told him; he would carry it for the rest of his life as a small private armature; in 1909, age seventy-three, he would say publicly I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year. I expect to go out with it. He would be right.

In autumn 1839 the family moved from Florida, Missouri, to Hannibal, Missouri.

The move was John's decision. The Quarles store partnership had not paid. The Florida law practice had not sustained. Hannibal, thirty miles north-east on the Mississippi River, was a county-seat town of perhaps a thousand people, with a courthouse, four churches, six general stores, a steamboat landing, two newspapers, and a population that was growing as the Upper Mississippi commerce expanded through the late 1830s. John had visited Hannibal twice in 1839. He had identified a small frame building on Hill Street that could be converted into a general store and law office. He had identified a five-room frame house at 208 Hill Street, two blocks west, where the family could live. The total moving cost (the renting of the Hannibal house, the establishment of the store, the wagon transport of the family's possessions) would consume what little capital remained from the Tennessee land sales. John was betting the family's recovery on Hannibal.

The wagon trip from Florida to Hannibal in October 1839 took two days. Sam was three years and ten months. He travelled in the back of the wagon with Pamela (then twelve), Benjamin (seven, who would die at ten of unknown cause in 1842), and Henry (eighteen months, the youngest brother who would die in the Pennsylvania explosion in 1858). The wagon was the family's transport; the Lampton-side household goods (Jane's wedding china, the Bible, the children's clothes, John's law books) were stacked at the back. The Mississippi River bluff first appeared on the east horizon late on the afternoon of the second day. Jane Clemens at the front of the wagon turned and pointed it out to Pamela. Sam at three did not yet register the river as a thing he would write about. He registered it as a green-blue strip beyond the trees.

Hannibal in October 1839 was the town Sam Clemens would write into the central inheritance of American letters. It would also be the town that he would render slowly and ambiguously: a town remembered as innocent and recognised as compromised, a town of childhood and a town of slavery, a town of Mississippi sunlight and a town of family bereavement. The Hannibal that Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn would make canonical was an idealisation of the actual Hannibal of the 1840s. The actual Hannibal contained the death of Sam's father, the death of his brothers, the sale of the family slave Jennie, the rented enslaved labour, the drowning bodies in the river. The canonical Hannibal contained the white-painted picket fence Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into white-washing; it contained the Cardiff Hill the boys play pirate on; it contained the Mississippi-shore evenings of fishing and lying. Both Hannibals were true. Sam would write the canonical version because the canonical version was the version his readers wanted; but he would, in the more honest moments of Huckleberry Finn and in the late autobiographical dictations, write the actual Hannibal as well. The two Hannibals would coexist in the work for the next sixty-five years.

The Hill Street house was the family's address from October 1839 through 1843. The house had five rooms: a front parlour, a kitchen at the back, two small bedrooms, and a sleeping loft above. Sam shared the loft with Henry from age four onward. The boys slept on a corn-husk mattress on the wooden floor under the eaves. The rain on the shingle roof in spring was loud enough to wake them. Sam later said the sound of rain on the Hill Street loft roof was the first sound of his life he remembered.

The first three years at Hannibal (1839 through 1842) were quiet. John Marshall Clemens was working. The store on Hill Street was producing modest income. John had been elected justice of the peace for the Hannibal precinct in spring 1840 (a position he would hold intermittently through 1846); the office paid a small salary and gave him courthouse standing. Jane was raising the children. Pamela at twelve attended the Hannibal Female Academy. Sam at four was already known in the household as the wandering child, the boy who would slip out of the front parlour during the afternoons and turn up an hour later at the riverfront or at the Hannibal Hotel kitchen door asking the Black cook there for a piece of bread. Jane developed the habit of tying a piece of red yarn to Sam's collar so that the neighbours could identify him and walk him back to Hill Street.

The family had come to Hannibal already in mourning. In August 1839, before the move, his sister Margaret Clemens had fallen ill at Florida with bilious fever. She was nine. She died on 17 August 1839. Sam was three. One night shortly before her death he was found sleep-walking at her bedside — an episode the family, in the manner of the time, took for an omen. He would have no memory of her in his later life. The first sibling-death he would remember would be Benjamin's in 1842. But the family pattern — the bedside vigil, the wooden coffin, the burial in Florida, Missouri — was being established around him.

In summer 1840 Sam came down with a fever that the Hannibal doctor (Dr. Hugh Meredith) thought might be the same bilious fever Margaret had died of. The illness lasted five weeks. Jane, who had buried two children and would bury two more, did not leave Sam's bedside through the entire five weeks. The fever broke in late August. Sam recovered. Decades later, an aged Jane was asked by Sam whether she had been uneasy about him through those sickly years; she had been uneasy the whole time, she told him — not, in her dry Kentucky manner, that he would fail to live, but that he would. The fever-of-1840 was not the only one Sam survived in the Hannibal childhood; he had a recurrent winter cough that the family doctor attributed to the cold loft above the kitchen; he had a malarial-type fever in summer 1842 that put him to bed for ten days. The boy who would live to seventy-four had been, by every doctor's reckoning, a frail child whose survival to age ten was an open question.

He survived. By 1842 he was walking the Hill Street neighbourhood with his closest friend, John Briggs, and getting into the kind of small mischief (climbing onto the courthouse roof, throwing rocks at the Hannibal-Quincy stagecoach, trying to swim in the Mississippi off the steamboat landing) that the Tom Sawyer novel would render canonically.

In summer 1842 his older brother Benjamin Clemens fell ill. Benjamin was ten, Sam was six, Henry was four. The illness was variously diagnosed by the Hannibal doctors as malaria, typhoid, and finally as general decline. Benjamin died at the Hill Street house on the morning of 12 May 1842. Sam was at the bedside. The death was the first sibling-death Sam would remember.

Jane Clemens in the parlour after Benjamin's death held Sam by the shoulders and made him kiss Benjamin's forehead in the open coffin. Sam was six. The forehead was cold. He did not understand, in the moment, why his mother required the kiss. He would understand it decades later, and would write about it in his autobiography as his mother's instruction in mortality — her way, in the only form she knew, of teaching him not to shrink from the dead. She had buried two children before him and would bury two more after him; the kiss was her lesson that death was the central fact of family life, and that the dead were the family that had gone before.

He learned the lesson. He would, across his life, kiss the foreheads of the dead: his father in 1847, his brother Henry in 1858, his son Langdon in 1872, his daughter Susy in 1896, his wife Olivia in 1904, his daughter Jean in 1909. The kiss in the parlour at Hill Street in May 1842 was the founding gesture of Sam Clemens's adult relation to mortality. He would not shrink. He would write the deaths in his books and his letters and his late autobiographical dictations with the unshrinking fidelity that his mother had instructed him in at age six.

The summer of 1842 was the summer the family pattern crystallised. John Marshall Clemens was struggling at the Hill Street store. The Tennessee land was producing nothing. Jane was managing the household and the bereavement. Sam was the surviving second-youngest. Pamela was leaving for boarding school in St Louis in autumn 1842. The household at the Hill Street house in late summer 1842 was a five-person family — John, Jane, Pamela, Sam, and Henry. The household had now buried three children: Pleasant Hannibal in 1829, Margaret in 1839, and Benjamin in May 1842. Sam was seven. He was the family's youngest surviving son apart from Henry, four years younger.

The Mississippi River, three blocks east of the Hill Street house, was the daily sound of the boy's world. The steamboats came down from Galena and St Paul at all hours; the deep horns of the upstream packets at the Hannibal landing carried up the Hill Street slope and into the boys' bedroom loft. Sam at six and seven could identify the major Upper Mississippi packets by the timbre of their horns. The river, the green-blue strip he had first seen from the back of the wagon at age three, was, by age seven, the central acoustic fact of his life. He would, by twelve, know the Mississippi pilots' names and the boat schedules. He would, by twenty-one, sign on as a cub-pilot to Horace Bixby and learn the river by heart. He would, by sixty, write the river as the central character of Life on the Mississippi.

The river in autumn 1843 was already, in him, the centre of his geography. He did not yet know it was. He was seven. He was watching the steamboats from the front porch of the Hill Street house at sunset on a Saturday in October 1843, with John in the parlour reviewing court papers, and Jane in the kitchen preparing supper, and Henry asleep in the loft, and Pamela writing a letter at the kitchen table, and the family's two youngest children present and the three buried children absent. The boat at the river that evening was a small packet on the St Louis run. Its horn sounded twice as it pulled away from the Hannibal landing. Sam on the porch listened. The first chapter of his life was nearly over.