Mark – the pilot of American fiction

Nabila Habib

Sam, the sixth one! Samuel Langhorne Clemens came into the world on the freezing November evening of 1835 as the sixth baby of John Marshall and Jane Lampton Clemens. John and Jane were happy enough with their beautiful curly-headed baby, without the faintest idea what a world-renowned literary icon he was to become. Four years later, the Clemens family moved 35 miles east to Hannibal, a growing port city along the banks of the Mississippi. Little Sam was frequently ill in the damp city, and his mother managed to keep him indoors till the age of nine, when he was strong enough to go outdoors like other kids. And then he got himself introduced to Mississippi – the river that moulded his impressionable age, and became the centre of major developments in his fictional works on Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. He attended a private school in Hannibal. The young apprentice Three years into the outside world, and his father left him as an orphan, succumbing to pneumonia. By next year Sam had to leave school to be a printer’s apprentice. After two short years the bright teenager was ready to join his brother Orion`s newspaper as a printer and editorial assistant. It was here that young Samuel found he enjoyed writing. The river-boy In three years, Sam was ready to move on again, and he left Hannibal behind for a printer`s job in St. Louis. While in St Louis, Clemens became a river pilot`s apprentice. Sam enjoyed the river trade, and by the time he was twenty-three, he was a licensed river pilot. The job suited Samuel’s temperament perfectly, and had it not been for the Civil War, he might have waited some more years before he heeded to his true calling – of being a writer. In fact, his pseudonym Mark Twain has its origin in these waters. ‘Mark twain’ is a river term which means two fathoms or 12-feet when the depth of water for a boat is being sounded. In other words, the lookout on the boat would call out ‘mark twain’ to mean it is safe to navigate! Work, family, and getting on When the Civil War stalled the river trade, Clemens got work as a newspaper reporter for several newspapers all over the United States. In 1870, Clemens married Olivia Langdon, and settled down in Hartford, Connecticut to his most productive years as a writer. They had four children, one of whom died in infancy and two who died in their twenties. Their surviving child, Clara, lived to be 88, and had one daughter. Clara`s daughter died without having any children, so there are no direct descendants of the greatest fiction writer of America today. Writing the indelible works Twain rose to fame with his story ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County’ that was published in the ‘New York Saturday Press’ on November 18, 1865. Four years later, his first book ‘The Innocents Abroad’ was published. After a gap of seven years came his masterpiece ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’. Then nine more years and he was ready with ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’, that is now considered that one book from which spring all the contemporary American fiction. He went on to write 28 books and numerous short stories, letters and sketches. The writer as a person Mark Twain grew to despise the injustice of slavery and any form of senseless violence. He was opposed to vivisection and acted as Vice-President of the American Anti-Imperialist League for nine years. Through his works he throws light on absurdities in humans. Ironically, still at times he was labeled a racist in his lifetime, and even afterwards. With time, his age and career progressed. But time made him lose his humorous and cocky tone of youth, and old age discovered him as a pessimistic activist, quite disillusioned with his times. This pall of depression affected even his work, and his characters were more and more driven by selfish motives. Still, the dark writings never dulled the gleam off his sharp wit. Today he is best remembered as a humorist, who used his wit and comic exaggeration to attack the false pride and self-importance he saw in humanity. Racist or activist: Twain Missouri was one of the fifteen slave states when the American Civil War broke out; so Twain grew up witnessing the racism, lynch mobs, hangings, and general inhumane oppression of African Americans. This kind of experience affected Twain deeply, though the effect was positive or negative is debatable. He has alternately been considered racist due to the character and theme of ‘Huck Finn’, and also lauded as a champion of anti-slavery rights. On it’s publishing, ‘Huck Finn’ was considered an adult fiction, and raked up enough controversy to get banned a year after its publication by the Concord Public Library of Masachusettes. The Library had found the common vernacular tongue used by the book’s African-American characters to be ‘course, demeaning and damaging’. However, Huck fans greatly outnumbered the condemners, and Hemingway was one of the many supporters of the book. To all this uproar, Twain had said, “I have no race prejudices... All that I care to know is that a man is a human being - that is enough for me; he can`t be any worse.” And in another letter, he had targeted the clergy saying, “There`s nobody for me to attack in this matter even with soft and gentle ridicule--and I shouldn`t ever think of using a grown up weapon in this kind of a nursery. Above all, I couldn`t venture to attack the clergymen whom you mention, for I have their habits and live in the same glass house, which they are occupying. I am always reading immoral books on the sly, and then selfishly trying to prevent other people from having the same wicked good time.” He never minced words, even when his witty barbs comically took himself in their target-range (he had said, ‘It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt,’ and then went on to say so much!) Legend after death Twain passed away on April 21, 1910. Ninety-nine years after his death, his popularity has made the government open his childhood home as a museum in Hannibal, and Calavaras County in California holds the Calavaras County Fair and Jumping Frog Jubilee every third weekend in May. November 30, 2009 is Mark Twain’s 174th birthday