these had a strong influence on young Clemens. The first comic weekly was created as early as 1831 by William T. Porter, a Vermonter: The Spirit of the Times described itself as a “Chronicle of the Turf, Agriculture, Field Sports, Literature, and the Stage.” Addressing a masculine audience, it is remembered chiefly for its publication of tales based on the oral humor of the frontier, especially the Southern frontier. Many other magazines soon followed its example. Although not far removed from the real life of the people they portrayed, the stories they published were frequently tall tales. To increase his credibility and enhance the sense of contrast, the narrator was likely to maintain a poker face while he provided a “report.” The theme of many of these tales is the distinction between the false and the real and between the pretentious and the unsophisticated. Sometimes the teller is himself the unconscious victim in his story; often it is an Easterner who is outsmarted, even humiliated, for he is likely to be innocent, ignorant, naive. (Sometimes it is the reader who is taken in as well.)
Clemens found this concern with victimization and humiliation particularly congenial to his talents and attitudes. Huckleberry Finn and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” deal with these themes, to mention two examples. For a short time, Clemens adopted from the southern frontier stories the use of slang and elaborate misspellings. Also, like many of the writers of this school, he adopted a pen name. Among the writers familiar to Clemens in one way or another were George Horatio Derby, who became John Phoenix and told of his adventures in the California of the 1850s; H. W. Shaw, who, as Josh Billings, wrote about farming, exploration, and riverboating; and David Ross Locke, who adopted the name “Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, late pastor uv the Church uv the New Dispensation, Chaplain to his excellency the President, and p. m. at Confederate roads, Kentucky.” Most successful of all was Charles Farrar Browne, later to become Artemus Ward, a comic lecturer and crusader against insincerity and sentimentality. Clemens met Ward in 1863 and later made his humor the subject of a much-repeated lecture.
Young Clemens’s “Dandy” anecdote only faintly reflects the coarse and violent humor of these writers. Set in Hannibal when “the now flourishing young city … was but a ‘woodyard,’” it tells of a would-be gentleman, obviously from the East, who seeks to demonstrate his manliness to some young women by frightening a woodsman. But the Easterner, who ends up in the river, is “astonished” and humiliated. Clemens gives no characterization to his narrator, and the story is not told in dialect.
A sometimes overlooked fact about Clemens’s youth is that he smoked “immoderately,” one hundred cigars a month, according to his own account, when he was eight years old!10 Many years later, at the party given to celebrate his seventieth birthday, he noted, “I do not know just when I began to smoke, I only know that it was in my father’s lifetime, and that I was discreet. He passed from this life early in 1847, when I was a shade past eleven: ever since then I have smoked publicly…. Today it is all of sixty years since I began to smoke the limit.”11 The limit? Not specified, but apparently Clemens meant as often as he possibly could.
After demonstrating that his work could be published in the East, Clemens turned his attention to local publication. While Orion was absent from home in September 1852, Sam was able to publish several items, some as a consequence of his getting into an argument with the editor of the Hannibal Tri-Weekly Messenger, whom he tried to embarrass. Nearly forty pieces in all have been located in Hannibal newspapers: verses, burlesques, local items. They show much energy but little control. Several are signed “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins,” later simply “Blab” or the initials, W.E.A.B. Other brief pieces used famous pen names of the period such as the Rambler and the Grumbler. Somewhat more personal is “Oh, She Has a Red Head!” by a redhead who signs himself “A Son of Adam” and who argues that “red is the natural color of beauty.” In this piece the future public personality acknowledges his love of open display, which was to be lifelong. A satire of the Democratic governor and legislature, “Blabbing Government Secrets,” anticipates another of his future interests, public affairs.
In May 1853, Orion Clemens awarded young Sam “Our Assistant’s Column.” Not only did the column criticize newspapers that borrowed without credit: it attacked one “Mr. Jacques,” whose drunken mistreatment of his children he believed should be punished with tarring and feathering and being ridden out of town on a rail. (Huck considered this form of punishment cruel when applied to the Duke and the King.) While Orion was away, Sam published a headline in the paper:
TERRIBLE ACCIDENT!
500 MEN KILLED AND MISSING!!!
We had set the above head up, expecting (of course) to use it, but as the accident hasn’t yet happened, we’ll say
(To be Continued)12
Hannibal was a small world, remote from East Coast literature, but as a journeyman printer Sam Clemens could find work elsewhere. In June 1853, at the age of seventeen, he went to St. Louis, where he seems to have stayed with his sister Pamela (by then married to William Moffett), and for two months he worked as a typesetter on St. Louis newspapers. In mid-August, having been unable to find work there, he made his way to New York without telling his mother in advance. He was able to work there as a typesetter and remained for about two months. Two letters he wrote appeared in Orion’s newspaper. Sam explains how he traveled to New York in five days, by steamboat and train, with a little sightseeing in Chicago, Rochester, and Syracuse. In New York he saw two “wild men” from Borneo, a magnificent “fruit salon,” and the ships of New York harbor. He expressed pride in his type-setting ability. Young Clemens had already developed a literary technique he was to make good use of throughout his career, for instance, as when Huck Finn would relate his story, emphasizing the narrator’s response to what he sees. Of the wild men Clemens wrote, “Their faces and eyes are those of the beast, and when they fix their glittering orbs on you with a steady, unflinching gaze, you instinctively draw back a step, and a very unpleasant sensation steals through your veins.” In these early letters home, Sam identified himself not as a fledgling writer but as a printer, proud of his ability to set clean proof. He found satisfaction in his discovery that the New York printers had two libraries where he could “spend my evenings most pleasantly.” He soon became a lover of books and a lifelong advocate of libraries.
Other letters to his sister Pamela, written in September and October, describe New York sights, including the theater. They were not published until after his death. Soon Sam moved on to Philadelphia, and from there he wrote a series of letters that were published in the Muscatine (Iowa) Journal, partly owned by Orion, who had moved 120 miles up the river in September. After printing a portion of a letter dated October 26, 1853, apparently without permission, Orion had invited his brother to write letters for publication, and Sam accepted. The first four letters are somewhat impersonal accounts of Philadelphia and a February 1854 visit to Washington, D.C. With deep respect, the young Clemens described the monuments of American history, the grave of Benjamin Franklin, the Liberty Bell, and objects associated with George Washington. He saw Philadelphia as continuing the European cultural tradition. Some of his reverence was borrowed, for the two Philadelphia letters apparently were written with R. A. Smith’s Philadelphia as It Is in 1852 open in front of him. He had already stumbled upon the borrowing device of innumerable travel writers before him. In writing from Washington, his tone is similar to Smith’s as he describes the Capitol, the senators, and the members of the House of Representatives. He saw a printing press used by Benjamin Franklin and was intrigued by the patent office. One letter from Philadelphia reveals Sam’s amusement with obituary poetry, a lachrymose subject he would return to in his contributions to the Galaxy magazine and in Huckleberry Finn.
In the spring of 1854, Clemens was obliged to leave the East because of what he later called “financial stress.”13 He then took his printing skills back “to the Mississippi Valley, sitting upright in the smoking-car for two or three days and nights. When I reached St. Louis I was exhausted. I went to bed on board a steamer that was bound for Muscatine. I fell asleep at once, and didn’t wake for thirty-six hours.”14
