Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I enjoyed both of these pieces so much that I asked Chris if he had any stray thoughts left for us. It turns out he did. Chris writes:
The Golden Arm
Samuel Clemens seems to have inherited his gift for storytelling from his mother. And he also inherited from her the distinctive halting drawl that the world would come to recognize as uniquely Mark Twain’s. As his official biographer Albert Bigelow Paine writes, “He always had a slow measured tempo of talking, from childhood, and his drawl and manner somehow arrested the attention of his playmates even then. His mother always called it ‘Sammy’s long talk.’ Hers was even longer, but she was not conscious of that.” Laura Hawkins Frazer—immortalized as Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer—recalled young Sam Clemens from her girlhood days in Hannibal:
He had a habit of telling stories in a slow, drawling voice that somehow made you listen. They weren’t very good stories. If anyone else had told them, they wouldn’t have amounted to anything; but when Samuel told them, they usually sounded quite funny. He had no gift of writing, as far as any of us knew.
Another source of the substance and style of Mark Twain’s storytelling came from his summer visits to his uncle’s farm thirty miles or so down the road from Hannibal, near Florida, Missouri. His memories of his experiences on that farm inspire some of the most beautiful descriptive passages in his Autobiography.
I spent some part of every year at the farm until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm. . . . I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rain-washed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the far-off hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of wood pheasants in the remoteness of the forest. . . . I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their end feathers. . . . I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted, and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts, and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickory nuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down. . . . I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made, also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will. I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkin vines and “simblins.”
And, on the storytelling theme,
I know the look of Uncle Dan’l’s kitchen as it was on privileged nights, when I was a child, and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Dan’l telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to gather into his book and charm the world with, by and by; and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story of the “Golden Arm” was reached–and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed.
Uncle Dan’l was the Negro slave on whom Twain would build the immortal character of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Samuel Clemens absorbed every detail of the story of the “Golden Arm,” about a greedy man who digs his wife’s body out of her grave to retrieve her golden arm. The story unfolded in slow southern rhythms, with no hurry, and always ended the same way, with the ghost of the woman searching about among the assembled children who were listening, and asking over and over in a haunting otherworldly plea, “Who got my golden arm?” “Who got my golden arm?”
Eventually a long soul-rivetting silent pause would come. The building drama was almost unbearable, until Uncle Dan’l suddenly leapt up pointing a terrifying finger at one of the children and shouted, “YOU’ve got it!” They would all jump and shriek; then Sam would have to go to bed.
Clemens memorized that story with all of Uncle Dan’l’s intonations, gestures, and drama and told and retold it in private and public, and practiced it and polished it from childhood on. All his writing is like that story in one way or another. Twain told his stories and his jokes and the stories and jokes of others over and over throughout his life.
Every telling was a self-conscious performance, whether Twain was performing for his children at bedtime, or for dinner guests, or an audience of 1,000 on the “platform.” Twain never stopped practicing different ways of performing the joke or story, and the great instrument to be played on in every performance was “the pause.” In all his performances, he said, “I used to play with the pause as other children play with a toy.”
When his eldest daughter Susy was a student at Bryn Mawr College in 1890, Twain was invited to speak at the college. By then, he was already the world famous author of The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873; co-authored), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Susy begged her father not to tell the “Golden Arm” story, which had made her jump countless times growing up, both at bedtime and after dinner with guests. She wanted her sophisticated fellow students and the faculty to see her father as a great man of literature, not a clown. Twain promised not to tell it, and then, at the end of his readings before a packed auditorium, he couldn’t help himself. He told it, just as Uncle Dan’l had done in the old days. Susy ran from the auditorium. She heard the thunderous ovation Twain received when it was over, but she was in a classroom across the hall in tears.
Having Mark Twain as a father was unpredictable.
Artemus Ward
Mark Twain was already a phenomenon, if a relatively new and mainly local or regional one, when America’s most popular humorist, Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne), came to Virginia City in Nevada Territory in December 1863. Ward came to deliver a lecture, or rather to perform his parody of a lecture called “Babes in the Woods,” in the local Opera House. A year older than Twain, Ward was famous for his misspelled, ungrammatical, written stories in Vanity Fair, told with a hilarious deadpan and full of malapropisms.
In his platform performances, he meandered from one joke to another as if unconscious that any humor was occurring. (Abraham Lincoln had memorably read one of Ward’s sketches out loud to open the historic cabinet meeting on September 22, 1862, when he presented the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.) Ward brought letters of introduction, and on his arrival Twain joined him for breakfast, including the “whiskey cocktails” that were the local custom. Ward’s manager, Edward Hingston, took notes of his impressions on meeting this specimen of the Wild West:
The very man I had expected to see – a flower of the wilderness… a Californian celebrity, rich in eccentricities of thought, lively in fancy, quaint in remark, whose residence upon the fringe of civilization had allowed his humor to develop without restraint, and his speech to be racily idiomatic.
Twain attended Ward’s opening night performance of “Babes in the Woods” and sat near the stage; he later remembered that it was the “funniest thing I ever listened to.” But, as was usual with him, Twain had a professional interest in the performance, as well. He studied Ward’s art and noted something with which he was already long familiar: “his inimitable way of pausing and hesitating, of gliding in a moment from seriousness to humor without appearing to be conscious of so doing…. There was more in his pauses than his words.” Twain’s friend and fellow journalist Jeremy B. Graham recalled that Ward’s performance stirred Mark Twain’s ambition; it gave Twain “a jolt. . . . he was dreaming until Artemus Ward awakened him to his capabilities.”
Twain had not yet taken to “the platform,” but when he did a few years later, he would remember and make use of Ward’s meandering and seemingly extempore stage presence and deadpan delivery. It wasn’t lost on him either that Ward was earning $30,000-$40,000 a season with his lectures, while he was earning $25.00 a week as a reporter at the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Soon after making Ward’s acquaintance, Twain’s familiar muttonchops disappeared, and his signature mustache, much like Ward’s, was on display.
Ward had planned only a short visit, but he found the company of Twain and the Enterprise staff so congenial he ended up staying for 11 days and made the Enterprise office his headquarters. He hosted a Christmas Eve banquet for his friends at the fanciest restaurant in town, and it lasted till dawn Christmas morning. Enterprise editor Joe Goodman recalled of this all-night frolic that Twain proved himself even funnier than Ward; he was the “King of Comedy” that night. He “fully demonstrated his right to rank above the world’s acknowledged foremost humorist.”
More than one eyewitness told different versions of what followed (eyewitnessing was a form of literature with Enterprise reporters). At sunrise, Ward announced, “I feel like walking on the skies, but as I can’t I’ll walk on the roofs.” Ward and Twain then scrambled up a building and strode across rooftops until Joe Goodman noticed a policeman raising his revolver in their direction. He called out to him: “What are you going to do?” and the policeman answered reasonably, “I’m going to shoot those burglars.” Goodman: “Don’t for your life! That’s Mark Twain and Artemus Ward.”
The roof-walkers came down, and the revelers proceeded to a saloon for morning refreshment. The festivities continued for a week. Ward wrote Twain from Austin, Nevada on New Year’s Day that he would always remember Virginia City “as a bright spot in my existence.” He added philosophically: “Some of the finest intellects in the world have been blunted by liquor.”
Ward was impressed with Twain’s talents and urged him to give up “sage-brush obscurity” and come back to New York. With Ward’s encouragement, Twain soon thereafter sent a couple of manuscripts to the New York Sunday Mercury which were published in February 1864. These were his first two original publications in the east under the nom de guerre Mark Twain.
Ward and Twain never met again, though Ward would soon give Twain another boost toward fame. It was indirectly due to him that Twain’s name appeared in the New York Saturday Press on November 18, 1865, as author of the story, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Newspapers across the country picked the story up, and “Mark Twain” became a nationally famous humorist before Sam Clemens became aware of it. A month later, Bret Harte published the story in the Californian under the now more famous title, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” The story became the centerpiece of Twain’s first book, which came out in May 1867, just weeks after Artemus Ward, 32 years old, died of tuberculosis in England.
