Mark Twain

Mark Twain --- Mirror of America

Noel Grove

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Most Americans remember Mark Twain as the father of Huck Finn's idyllic cruise through eternal boyhood and Tom Sawyer's endless summer of freedom and adventure. In-deed, this nation's best-loved author was every bit as ad-venturous, patriotic, romantic, and humorous as anyone has ever imagined. I found another Twain as well – one who grew cynical, bitter, saddened by the profound personal tragedies life dealt him, a man who became obsessed with the frailties of the human race, who saw clearly ahead a black wall of night.

Tramp printer, river pilot , Confederate guerrilla, prospector, starry-eyed optimist, acid-tongued cynic: The man who became Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he ranged across the nation for more than a third of his life, digesting the new American experience before sharing it with the world as writer and lecturer. He adopted his pen name from the cry heard in his steamboat days, signaling two fathoms (12 feet) of water -- a navigable depth. His popularity is attested by the fact that more than a score of his books remain in print, and translations are still read around the world.

The geographic core, in Twain's early years, was the great valley of the Mississippi River, main artery of transportation in the young nation's heart. Keelboats ， flatboats , and large rafts carried the first major commerce. Lumber, corn, tobacco, wheat, and furs moved downstream to the delta country; sugar, molasses , cotton, and whiskey traveled north. In the 1850's, before the climax of westward expansion, the vast basin drained three-quarters of the settled United States.

Young Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub pilot on a steamboat. The cast of characters set before him in his new profession was rich and varied a cosmos . He participated abundantly in this life, listening to pilothouse talk of feuds , piracies, lynchings ,medicine shows, and savage waterside slums. All would resurface in his books, together with the colorful language that he soaked up with a memory that seemed phonographic

Steamboat decks teemed not only with the main current of pioneering humanity, but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers, and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain gained a keen perception of the human race, of the difference between what people claim to be and what they really are. His four and a half year s in the steamboat trade marked the real beginning of his education, and the most lasting part of it. In later life Twain acknowledged that the river had acquainted him with every possible type of human nature. Those acquaintanceships strengthened all his writing, but he never wrote better than when he wrote of the people a-long the great stream. When railroads began drying up the demand for steam-boat pilots and the Civil War halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river country. He tried soldiering for two

weeks with a motleyband of Confederate guerrillas who diligently avoided contact with the enemy. Twain quit after deciding, \the man that invented retreating. \

He went west by stagecoach and succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver fever in Nevada's Washoe region. For eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth available to the lucky and the persistent, and was rebuffed . Broke and discouraged, he accepted a job as reporter with the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, to literature's enduring gratitude.

From the discouragement of his mining failures, Mark Twain began digging his way to regional fame as a newspaper reporter and humorist. The instant riches of a mining strike would not be his in the reporting trade, but for making money, his pen would prove mightier than his pickax. In the spring of 1864, less than two years after joining the Territorial Enterprise, he boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then and now a hotbed of hopeful young writers.

Mark Twain honed and experimented with his new writing muscles, but he had to leave the city for a while because of some scathing columns he wrote. Attacks on the city government, concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese, so angered officials that he fled to the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His descriptions of the rough-country settlers there ring familiarly in modern world accustomed to trend setting on the West Coast. \– for all the slow, sleepy, sluggish-brained slothsstayed at home... It was that population that gave to California a name for getting up astounding enterprises and rushing them through with a magnificent dash and daring and a recklessness of cost or consequences, which she bears unto this day – and when she projects a new surprise, the grave world smiles as usual, and says 'Well, that is California all over. '\

In the dreary winter of 1864-65 in Angels Camp, he kept a notebook. Scattered among notationsabout the weather and the tedious mining-camp meals lies an entry noting a story he had heard that day – an entry that would determine his course forever: \– bet stranger $50 – stranger had no frog, and C. got him one – in the meantime stranger filled C. 's frog full of shot and he couldn't jump. The stranger's frog won.\the story was printed in newspapers across the United States and became known as \reputation was now well established as \ Two year s later the opportunity came for him to take a distinctly American look at the Old World. In New York City the steamship Quaker City prepared to sail on a pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. For the first time, a sizablegroup of United States citizens planned to journey as tourists -- a milestone , of sorts, in a country's development. Twain was assigned to accompany them, as correspondent 工for a California newspaper. If readers expected the usual glowing travelogue , they were sorely surprised.

Unimpressed by the Sultan of Turkey, for example, he reported, “... one could set a trap anywhere and catch a dozen abler men in a night.” Casually he debunked

revered artists and art treasures, and took unholy verbalshots at the Holy Land. Back home, more newspapers began printing his articles. America laughed with him. Upon his return to the States the book version of his travels, The Innocents Abroad, became an instant best-seller.

At the age of 36 Twain settled in Hartford, Connecticut. His best books were published while he lived there.

As early as 1870 Twain had experimented with a story about the boyhood adventures of a lad he named Billy Rogers. Two years later, he changed the name to Tom, and began shaping his adventures into a stage play. Not until 1874 did the story begin developing in ear nest. After publication in 1876, Tom Sawyer quickly became a classic tale of American boyhood. Tom's mischievousdaring, ingenuity , and the sweet innocence of his affection for Becky Thatcher are almost as sure to be studied in American schools to-day as is the Declaration of Independence. Mark Twain's own declaration of independence came from another character. Six chapters into Tom Sawyer, he drags in \Huckleberry Finn, son of the town drunkard.\puritanical Widow Douglas, Huck protests to his friend, Tom Sawyer: \and it don't work; it don't work, Tom. It ain't for me ... The widder eats by a bell; she goes to bed by a bell; she gits up by a bell – everything's so awful reg'lar a body can't stand it.\

Nine years after Tom Sawyer swept the nation, Huck was given a life of his own, in a book often consider ed the best ever written about Americans. His raft flight down the Mississippi with a runaway slave presents a moving panorama for exploration of American society.

On the river, and especially with Huck Finn, Twain found the ultimate expression of escape from the pace he lived by and often deplored, from life's regularities and the energy-sapping clamorfor success.

Mark Twain suggested that an ingredient was missing in the American ambition when he said: \would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges.\

Personal tragedy haunted his entire life, in the deaths of loved ones: his father, dying of pneumonia when Sam was 12; his brother Henry, killed by a steamboat explosion; the death of his son, Langdon, at 19 months. His eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis , Mrs. Clemens succumbed to a heart attack in Florence, and youngest daughter., Jean, an epileptic, drowned in an upstairs bathtub . Bitterness fed on the man who had made the world laugh. The moralizing of his earlier writing had been well padded with humor. Now the gloves came off with biting satire. He pretended to praise the U. S. military for the massacre of 600 Philippine Moros in the bowl of a volcanic, crater . In The Mysterious Stranger, he insisted that man drop his religious illusions and depend upon himself, not Providence, to make a better world.

The last of his own illusions seemed to have crumbled near the end. Dictating his autobiography late in life, he commented with a crushing sense of despair on men's final release from earthly struggles: \

were of no consequence; where they achieved nothing; where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness; where they have left no sign that they had existed – a world which will lament them a day and for-get them forever.”

(from National Geographic, Sept., 1975)

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NOTES 1) Mark Twain:This was the pseudonym of the American humorist and writer, Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910). The phrase, meaning \deep”, was employed in making soundings on the Mississippi river boats. Among his well-known works are Innocent. Abroad (1869), Tom Sawyer (1876), and Huckleberry Finn (1884-5.” )

2) tramp printer: a person who goes around doing odd jobs of printing 3) Confederate guerrilla: a guerrilla fighter who supported the southern Confederacy (See note below on \

4) cub pilot: a young inexperienced pilot; a person just learning to become a pilot 5) the Civil War: This refers to the American Civil War (1861-65), also called the War of Secession. This war was fought between the northern states (Federal States or the Union) and the southern states (the Confederacy or confederate States of America) which seceded from the U. S. in opposition to the proposed abolition of slavery. The southern states were defeated.

6) trend setting: taking the lead in starting new trends or new ways of doing things 7) Pacific slope: the west coast of the United States, which slopes down to the Pacific 8) I've tried it ... stand it: uneducated English of an American boy:'don't' for 'doesn't', 'ain't' for 'isn't', 'widder' for 'widow','gits' for 'gets' and 'body' for 'person' 9) Philippine Moros: Moslems of Malay origin living in S. Philippines

EXERCISES 9

I. Give brief answers to the following questions, using your own words as much as possible:

1) Why is Mark Twain one of America's best-loved authors? 2) Give a brief account of Mark Twain's experience before he became a writer.

3) Why did the author adopt 'Mark Twain' as his pen name? 4) When did Mark Twain become a pilot on a steamboat? How long did he stay there? What did he learn there? What effect did this experience have on his writing?

5) Why did Twain leave the river country? What did he do then? 6) What story did he write that made him known as \