Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Loveless Marriage
Given the fine gusto with which Mark Twain flayed hereditary privilege, it seems fitting that he delighted in tracing his paternal ancestry to one Gregory Clement, who had served in the Parliament of England under Oliver Cromwell and joined in signing the death warrant of King Charles I. Twain confessed to being "wholly ignorant" of his forebears but applauded Gregory's action. "He did what he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day." When the monarchy was restored, Gregory was declared guilty of regicide, his severed head posted as a warning atop Westminster Hall. Characteristically, Twain found pungent humor in his fate, declaring that Gregory was "much thought of by the family because he was the first of us that was hanged." Unfortunately, Twain's descent from Gregory Clement was entirely fictitious, but it was hard to deprive him of a good story with such rich potential for laughter.
The earliest known English ancestor of Mark Twain was Richard Clements of Leicestershire, who lived in the early sixteenth century. In 1642 his great-grandson Robert boarded a ship for the American colonies and aided in founding the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Over the years the family drifted south to Pennsylvania and Virginia, where in 1770 it spawned Samuel B. Clemens, grandfather of our author. On October 29, 1797, he married Pamela Goggin in Bedford County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In 1742 her grandfather Stephen Goggin Sr. had emigrated to Virginia from Queen's County, Ireland.
Samuel and Pamela Clemens, a prosperous young couple, were fully enmeshed in slavery, their ten workers toiling on four hundred acres in Bedford County. The couple brought forth a brood of five children, the eldest being John Marshall Clemens. Born on August 11, 1798, and named after the future chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, he was destined to be the author's father. When he was seven, his father died in a freak accident-crushed by a falling log during a house-raising-and at some point before adulthood he labored in an iron foundry. Thus robbed of a carefree childhood, he developed a grim, driven personality, with little levity in his nature. He clung to pretensions of supposed descent from the "First Families of Virginia"; what his son labeled "a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginia stock." Having inherited three enslaved people, he settled in Columbia, Kentucky-his widowed mother had moved to Adair County, near the Tennessee border, and remarried-where he earned a license to practice law.
It was there that he met Jane Lampton, who had grown up in the town. On May 6, 1823, at twenty-four, he married Jane, who was pretty and gregarious, just shy of twenty, and brought a dowry of three more enslaved people. Her father, Benjamin Lampton, was a prominent local citizen, having served as a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812. As a skilled brick mason, he had constructed many fine buildings in town. Jane's maternal grandfather, William Casey-Indian fighter extraordinaire and Kentucky legislator-was so illustrious that the state named an adjoining county after him. A lively young woman, Jane enjoyed the social opportunities available to the daughter of two prominent families. "During her girlhood Jane Lampton was noted for her vivacity and her beauty," her eldest son said. "She was a great horsewoman when she was young and riding parties were a feature of Kentucky life . . . she was known as the best dancer in Kentucky," a descendant added. Her famous son would inherit her wealth of red hair as well as her spunk, gift for language, and sprightly spirit.
Jane Lampton proudly claimed ancestry from the British Lambtons of Durham, giving her a dubious connection to a string of earls. As her famous son noted, "I knew that privately she was proud that the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham, had occupied the family lands for nine hundred years; that they were feudal lords of Lambton Castle and holding the high position of ancestors of hers" at the Norman Conquest. Twain later poked fun at this family vanity, especially when one of Jane's relatives cooked up a preposterous claim to being the genuine Earl of Durham. Such genealogical pretensions would set up Mark Twain as a perfect satirist for big talkers, delusional dreamers, social climbers, and inflated windbags of every description.
The marriage of John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton was fated to be a loveless affair, and not solely because of strikingly dissimilar personalities. Jane had been jilted by a young doctor whom she loved and in retribution married John Marshall on the rebound. In a thinly veiled portrait of his father, Twain sketched the tragic consequences: "Stern, unsmiling, never demonstrated affection for wife or child. Had found out he had been married to spite another man." Though his parents behaved in dignified fashion, making a point of mutual courtesy, Twain recalled no signs of outward affection, just a frosty arrangement that substituted handshakes for hugs at bedtime. This arid match would foster in Mark Twain a huge craving for affection in his own marriage.
After a year or two, the newlyweds moved across the border to Gainesboro in northeastern Tennessee. Plagued by headaches and a weak chest, John Marshall Clemens hoped the salubrious mountain air might strengthen his health. Their first son, Orion-pronounced Or-ee-on-was born in 1825, his astral name a reflection of Jane's taste for the occult. Although John Marshall was an ambitious man, it soon grew apparent that the backwoods hamlet lacked any hint of a future. When Orion visited the cheerless spot more than forty years later, he encountered the "melancholy spectacle of doors closed with signs over them indicating past business; windows broken; houses faded or guiltless of paint."
The young family pushed forty miles further east to Jamestown, in Fentress County, a scenic hinterland of low, rolling mountains called the Knobs, where the career of John Marshall Clemens seemed briefly to flourish. Unlike Gainesboro, this new town breathed an air of possibility, having recently been named the county seat, and John emerged as a model citizen, serving as the county commissioner and clerk of the circuit court and even taking a hand in building the county courthouse and jail. He erected an impressive house that set envious tongues wagging. With their future more secure, the Clemenses expanded their progeny to include two daughters-Pamela (pronounced Pa-mee-la) born in 1827 and Margaret in 1830-and another son, Benjamin, in 1832; a first son, named Pleasant, died in infancy.
As he strode about town in a blue coat with brass buttons, John Marshall seemed to have satisfied his hunger for respectability. He even branched out into land speculation, amassing virgin forest at a time when real estate could be acquired for less than a penny an acre. Of his total investment, his author son Sam would later bandy about a figure of seventy-five thousand acres, while Orion could only establish title to thirty thousand acres. With an overheated imagination, John Marshall daydreamed that his forest of yellow pine would someday yield a cornucopia of iron ore, coal, copper, and timber. This inheritance of the "Tennessee land" would assume mythic proportions in his children's minds, alternately teasing and tormenting them with hopes of future grandeur. The beckoning mirage of phantom wealth would make ordinary riches seem paltry in comparison. For Sam Clemens, it would breed lifelong fantasies of king-size wealth and countless schemes to attain it. He later pronounced this grim epitaph on the Tennessee land: "It kept us hoping and hoping, during forty years . . . It put our energies to sleep and made visionaries of us-dreamers, and indolent. We were always going to be rich next year-no occasion to work."
The time in Tennessee set a tragic pattern for John Marshall Clemens, who would attempt to scratch out a living as a lawyer and public servant only to be forced, for survival's sake, into the humdrum routine of keeping a store. When his business faltered, he was required to abandon the fine house in town-he was now land-rich but cash-poor-and move nine miles north to a secluded spot in the woods, Three Forks, where his family occupied a cramped log cabin, an abrupt comedown from their previous high status in town. This solitary place at the junction of three rivers preyed on his sociable young wife, who had grown accustomed to material comfort and a buoyant party life in Kentucky. "I had always been in society," Jane Clemens later complained, and was "very fond of company." In this bleak backwater, John Marshall kept a store and served as the local postmaster at the nearby hamlet of Pall Mall.
In 1834 financial austerity brought on by Andrew Jackson's clash with the Second Bank of the United States snuffed out John Marshall Clemens's tenuous standing in Tennessee. Although Sam had not yet been born, the mood of that sudden wreckage must have formed the mental weather of his childhood; the specter of downward mobility shadowed his father, spawning constant status insecurity. As Twain recalled, "From being honored and envied as the most opulent citizen of Fentress county . . . he suddenly woke up and found himself reduced to less than one-fourth of that amount. He was a proud man, a silent, austere man, and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur." Stymied by ill luck, battered by hardship, John Clemens became a dour, defeated character, his ambitions thwarted in the wilderness. As Mark Twain wrote, in a character patterned after his father in The Gilded Age, Squire Hawkins was "not more than thirty-five" but with "a worn look that made him seem older." Between the two of them, John and Jane Clemens had inherited six enslaved people, but by the time they left Tennessee, austerity had thinned that number down to one-a young woman named Jennie.
Twice disappointed in Tennessee, John Clemens uprooted his family again in 1835, piled them into a two-horse carriage, and headed north to Louisville, Kentucky, where they boarded a steamer and rode down the Ohio River to St. Louis. "They had intended to settle in St. Louis, but when they got there they were horrified to hear that a Negro boy had recently been lynched," one Clemens descendant reported. "Moreover, there was cholera in the city. So they moved on to Florida [Missouri]." A more likely story was that the Clemenses had planned to settle in Florida all along since Jane's brother-in-law, John A. Quarles, had warmly encouraged them to join him there. The new town of Florida, born four years earlier in the state's northeast corner, stood on the ragged edge of western settlement. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had thrown the state wide open to slavery, spurring migration from Kentucky and Tennessee and lending the territory a southern character in the run-up to the Civil War.
Orion recalled their dismal first Florida residence as "a little white frame [house], one-story, with two small rooms, or a room and a shed under the same roof." Since Jane Clemens was pregnant with Sam during the westward journey, Orion would tease his brother that this early "travel had something to do with your roving disposition." With as sharp a tongue as her famous son, Jane Clemens later derided the frail house as "too small for a baby to be born in," yet she gave birth, two months prematurely, to Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835. The baby was named after his paternal grandfather, while John Marshall Clemens supplied the middle name in homage to a boon companion from his Virginia youth. With a flair for showmanship, mother and son converted Sam's birth into a cosmic event, marked by the appearance of Halley's Comet, which revisits the Earth at seventy-five-year intervals. Later endowed with a quip for every occasion, Twain remarked of his birth: "The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent . . . There is no record of a person doing as much-not even Shakespeare."
At a time of rampant infant mortality, the baby proved a runt with a sickly nature, and his parents grew concerned. "When I first saw him [I] could see no promise in him," Jane admitted in afteryears. "But I felt it my duty to do the best I could . . . But he was a poor-looking object to raise." When she was in her eighties, her son asked about his troubled infancy. "I suppose that during all that time you were uneasy about me." "Yes, the whole time," she agreed. Twain persisted: "Afraid I wouldn't live?" With a perfect deadpan worthy of her son, Jane retorted, "No, afraid you would."
Mark Twain would lampoon "the almost invisible village of Florida," evoking a settlement of two unpaved streets and scattered lanes. "Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material-tough black mud, in wet times, deep dust in dry." With flimsy houses made of logs, even the church was propped up on timber, allowing local hogs to root around underneath and squeal noisily during services. John Marshall entered into a partnership with John Quarles in a dry goods shop that sold a bit of everything: calico and coffee, shovels and brooms, hats and bonnets, even offering a swig of corn whiskey to every customer. Because John Marshall was a rigid man, he didn't cotton to the easygoing ways of John Quarles. Soon the partnership was dissolved and Clemens set up a rival store across the street.
As in Tennessee, John Marshall Clemens strove to lift a nascent town from obscurity and set it on the high road to progress. A political Whig, with an abiding faith in internal improvements, he was appointed president in 1837 of the Salt River Navigation Company, assembled to dredge the nearby river and open it to steamboat commerce from the Mississippi River. He was likewise made a commissioner of the Florida & Paris Railroad, both projects wiped out by the Panic of 1837 and a dearth of political support. John Marshall did land one coveted accolade: he was named a judge of the Monroe County Court, forever after bearing the proud title of Judge Clemens. He traded up to a larger house-three rooms and a kitchen-where Sam Clemens's beloved younger brother, Henry, was born in 1838.
The following year, Twain's sister Margaret died at age nine of a bilious fever. One day she returned from school in a delirious state and lay dead within a week. Jane Clemens always maintained that the girl "was in disposition & manner like Sam full of life" and enjoyed taunting her sister, Pamela. As she lay dying, Sam glided fast asleep into her room one night and stroked her bedclothes, exhibiting the somnambulism that would mark his childhood. Perhaps, if informed of the episode, it was his first intimation that he harbored an inner self free from his conscious control-a spiritual twin-which would form a recurrent theme in his later writings.
