Twain Dreams: The Enigma of Samuel Clemens

Could some kind of Mark Twain revival be afoot in this, the 175th-anniversary year of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical that more consistently than any other provided a home for Twain’s writing during the half-century-long major phase of his career? 1 The signs are come unto us. The writer Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, in which Everett reimagines the story of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s raft mate on the Mississippi, the self-emancipated Jim, took home last year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Only two months ago, we got a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it. Jim is the title, and subject, of Fishkin’s latest. So, we have James and Jim, barely a year apart. Meanwhile, the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor has taken on new significance as a sort of dissenter’s pulpit. This year’s winner, the comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien, seized the moment of his acceptance speech, delivered in March onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington—where the previous month, the board of trustees had been ousted by President Trump and replaced with a shock brigade of his sort of people, among them the country singer Lee Greenwood, of “Proud to Be an American” fame, all in the interest of ushering in a new “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” with Trump himself at the head, as chair, lobbing brain-damaged non sequiturs about this one time he saw Cats—and used it, O’Brien did, to speak out not-so-subtly against the regime. “Twain hated bullies,” O’Brien told the crowd, a statement largely true (although Tom Sawyer was a bully at times, and a manipulative narcissist at all times). O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks. But this is pedantry on my part.2 Most recently, a major new Twain biography has been published, by Ron Chernow, one of our great Biographers of the Great (on some future day he, Walter Isaacson, and Jon Meacham will write biographies of one another, and the faces on Mount Rushmore will simultaneously explode). The mere fact that Chernow has chosen Twain to stand in as the sole littérateur on his list of targeted cities, a lineup that otherwise comprises none but political or financial world-shakers, e.g., Washington, Hamilton, Grant, Morgan, and Rockefeller—says something about Twain’s place in our collective cultural memory, his “ongoing relevance,” maybe, although, in this case, not exactly: relevance would imply that he continues to play a loosely agreed-upon role in our self-understanding, or that his life and work imply some standard we fear to disappoint, whereas with Twain it seems more the case that we go on suspecting he hides some meaning, some message that we could probably use, behind the bushy eyebrows and mustache, but are less and less able to name or remember. He doesn’t quite haunt us. O’Brien had to perform some impressive textual excavation to make Twain serve the night’s theme. The author “populated his works with abusers such as Huck Finn’s alcoholic father and Tom Driscoll in Pudd’nhead Wilson,” the comedian said, “and he made his readers passionately hate those characters.” Ah, yes, Tom Driscoll, born 1/32 black, swapped out in infancy by his mother and raised as a lazy white Southern aristocrat . . . or possibly the other, “real” Tom Driscoll, born white but raised enslaved? . . . Either way, God damn them and Pap Finn! The comedian Dave Chappelle, who won the 2019 Mark Twain Prize, may have shown wisdom in keeping his own Twain references more oblique. He said nothing, in fact, about Twain. At one point he reportedly put his face down beside the bronze trophy bust of Twain that the organizers placed onstage for the ceremony, and grinned enigmatically. What did that mean? Something about Twain and race and America and now? Could he feel Everett’s novel coming, know that the script was about to be flipped?

I grew up so hopelessly steeped in the cult of Twain that I have to perform a mental adjustment to understand how a Twain revival could be possible. How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent? My sportswriter father, who died when I was in my mid-twenties, worshipped Twain, to the extent of wearing, every year on specific occasions, a tailored white suit. With the shaggy hair and Twainish mustache that he maintained year-round, the object of the homage was unmistakable. I was raised in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, and in the late Seventies, when I was a boy, some of the last of the old-time steamboat races were held there. One of my earliest memories is of being taken down to the riverfront at the age of four to watch that spectacle. Twain’s face was everywhere. It was on TV, in a disturbing Claymation film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, which, I have since learned from the internet, gave bad dreams not just to me but to my whole microgeneration. Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories. Hadn’t I loved the part when such and such happened? When Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than hand over Jim to be reenslaved? No, more than that, more than any “rather,” did I grasp the fact that Huck actually believed he would go to hell for this loyalty to Jim, and chose it regardless? My answers, no matter how much forced enthusiasm I tried to pump in behind them, always left him a little crestfallen, a little chagrined. In his smoke-filled basement office, he would play his recordings of Hal Holbrook doing Twain. When I was cast in the role of Joe Harper, in our seventh-grade production of Tom Sawyer, he grew briefly delighted, and suggested I revisit the novel for character insights, but the show bombed. We had too little talent for too many parts. I remember our Injun Joe, a kid named Kevin. Bless him, he had one line, and the line consisted of a single word—“Bah!”—and somehow he kept fucking it up. It required a kind of genius to fuck up this line, but he did it every time, in a different way. The director would clutch the top of her head and scrunch up a fistful of hair and say, “Oh, Kevin!” I may be tidying the timeline somewhat here, but I’m pretty sure that the school play marked the end of my father’s efforts to inspire me with his devotion. He had already inflicted on me, though, some guilty shadow of it.

It would be perverse or less than forthcoming to depart from the topic of one’s unusually fraught youthful encounters with Mark Twain and leave the following facts unmentioned.

When I was twenty, my older brother had a terrible accident, involving near-electrocution by a guitar amplifier. This happened in Kentucky on April 21, 1995, on the eighty-fifth anniversary of Mark Twain’s death. My brother flatlined and was resuscitated multiple times. There was a period of about forty-eight hours when we didn’t know if he would survive or be a vegetable or what. He made a complete recovery, which his own doctors at the hospital did not hesitate to describe as a miracle. A popular reality-TV show made an episode about it. Today my brother lives in London and is married and still plays in a band.

While he was in the other world, he witnessed a scene, or underwent an experience, and was briefly able to speak about it, in this world, before it faded from his mind. I wrote it down in a notebook I kept at the time, a record of the many strange remarks he made during those days. My father later worked it into a documentary poem that he sent around to the family. My brother had been sitting there in his hospital bed, his face (it seemed to me) very serious and emotional, and I asked him if he was okay.

“I was thinking about the vision I had when I knew I was dead.”

There was silence.

“I was on the banks of the River Styx,” he said. “The boat came to row me across, but . . . instead of Charon, it was Huck and Jim. Only, when Huck pulled back his hood, he was an old man—like, ninety years old.”

I wrote about this once before, twenty-five years ago, but something that failed to occur to me then is that my brother said nothing about Jim’s age. It is not specified in the novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Jim is usually taken by scholars to be in his late twenties or early thirties. It seems that, in the vision, Jim was still that age, or not remarkably older. Yet Huck had grown ancient.

Also, they were in hell.

“What is your name, my boy?”

“Dey calls me Jimmy, sah, but my right name’s James, sah.”

—Mark Twain, “Sociable Jimmy,” New York Times, November 29, 1874

Like Kafka when he went to see the aeroplanes at Brescia, did I not come to Percival Everett’s James with a kind of hostility? And if the answer is yes, what was the source of it? Certainly not any sense that a sacred cow of some kind had been violated, although the way I wrote “certainly” there makes me wonder if, in fact, it was that. Yes, there may have been some childish instinct to defend Twain. But Mr. Everett, you must realize that Twain himself saw Jim as fully human, and in the context of the time . . . Hilarious. Everett knows this as well as anyone. Twain’s “humor and humanity,” he acknowledges in the acknowledgments, “affected me long before I became a writer.” 3 No, this hostility was more an expectation that the “brilliance” of the concept—Jim becomes James, the runaway becomes the self-emancipated, the boy (in the racist sense) becomes a man, and the whole polarity of the narrative, in which Huck’s choices matter, while Jim’s are incidental, has been reversed—would prove greater than the novel could possibly prove good, and that the story, as a result, would amount more or less to an extended skit, throughout the interminable course of which you would have to keep reminding yourself how brilliant the idea was, to make your hand turn the actual pages. The worst kind of book, the kind we are assailed by in this era, the kind of book people tell you they “loved,” and you think to yourself, They cannot possibly have read the book I tried to read. And often if you ask probing questions you find that they have not done so, or that they, like you, tried and failed, but came away loving the book nonetheless, or feeling a need to say as much, and after a while, when you have been burned enough times, it can feel like this is what books have become, things not to read but to love.

You know the story about Hemingway and Joyce’s Ulysses? A “most goddamn wonderful book,” he called it, but when Hemingway died and they examined his copy, a third of the pages were “uncut”—they had never been read. Or even seen! Well, obviously there is a place for books like that in the world.

Hemingway also said, or had the character of himself, “Papa” (!), say, in one of his books, Green Hills of Africa, which is classified as non-fiction but contains many scenes that read not quite plausibly as such, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But then Papa adds,

If you read it you must stop where Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.

So many things about this oft-quoted statement are hard to understand. It’s the best American novel, but we should not read the last twelve chapters? That’s the final almost one hundred pages of the book. Ordinarily that would constitute a significant knock on a novel’s quality. Hemingway means that there is something deep and intrinsic in the good parts, qualities so important that they outweigh otherwise fatal formal defects. Hemingway is, by the way, technically correct to suggest the cut, in the sense that a good editor, the best editor, might have made the same suggestion to Twain. The chapter that Hemingway recommends be the last chapter is the aforementioned crucial chapter, the one in which Huck decides to go to hell rather than betray Jim. It is also the chapter in which Huck learns that Jim has been kidnapped and temporarily sold back into slavery by a confidence man. The novel would thus end in existential tragedy, with Huck making his moral choice and losing Jim anyway. Huck: bereft. Jim: reenslaved. Tom: who gives a shit. We are reminded (I am reminded, by a piece that Greil Marcus wrote for the Los Angeles Times twenty-eight years ago, on the occasion of the last Twain revival) that the critic Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, called Huck “the first Existentialist hero”:

He is the product of no metaphysics, but of a terrible breakthrough of the undermind of America itself. In him, the obsessive American theme of loneliness reaches an ultimate level of expression, being accepted at last not as a blessing to be sought or a curse to be flaunted or fled, but quite simply as a man’s fate. There are mythic qualities in Ahab and even Dimmesdale; but Huck is a myth: not invented but discovered by one close enough to the popular mind to let it; this once at least, speak through him. Twain sometimes merely pandered to that popular mind, played the buffoon for it, but he was unalienated from it; and when he let it possess him, instead of pretending to condescend to it, he and the American people dreamed Huck—dreamed, that is to say, the anti-American American dream.

We dreamed it together . . . how lovely.

Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. Jim is not stolen from “the boys.” Tom is not there when it happens. Nor is Jim “stolen.” Huck does not own him. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner, when he finds out that Jim has been caught, in order to conceal their true relationship: Jim is his friend, and Huck is helping him escape. It is not possible for Jim to be “stolen” from the boys, or even from Huck. And don’t say, “Oh, you know what he means . . .” No, it was the wrongest possible word Papa could have used.

Those details aside, what on earth does Hemingway mean when he says, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”? People have wondered, psychoanalyzed. Hemingway could be so fantastically full of shit. There was nothing before? But there were Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe and . . . There had been “nothing as good since,” i.e., between 1885 and 1935, when Hemingway published those sentences? But there had been Henry James and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Speaking of Faulkner, what did he mean, twenty years later, when he called Twain “the father of American literature”?

If we could get under and behind this tradition of hyperbole, figure out what motivates it, we might learn something not only about Hemingway and Faulkner but about ourselves and this country. Why has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion? Presumably the answer involves some variant of whatever instinct prompted Everett to subvert (and thereby affirm the power of) the very book that gave rise to this glorification.

James is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Everett accomplished the task that was necessary to make this so: not to criticize Twain and his novel (though he does that often enough and subtly enough) but to provide the element most sorely missing from those original Adventures, namely, the interior life of Jim. The first sentence made me burst out laughing: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Or rather I burst out laughing ten sentences later when it is revealed that those little bastards are Huck and Tom. Much further into the story, the choice of insult will provide the matter for a deeper joke, one that may even transcend the status of a joke.

The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James 4 an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd, in a way. Jim becomes not just James but a heroic scholar-in-exile, of the kind that one might occasionally have encountered not among the enslaved or formerly enslaved, as a rule, but in the free black communities of the South, the social context that produced a writer like David Walker (of Walker’s Appeal). By drafting James as a man born enslaved who rose to this level of cultural sophistication by reading books in the library of his owner, Everett has situated James’s backstory among an infinitesimally tiny group of historical destinies. One is meant to think, perhaps, of Toussaint Louverture in his Haitian cabin, reading the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. All but unique, in other words, and therefore—one could argue—a flawed lens through which to view James’s full humanity.5 But these passages, and the cluster of authorial decisions behind them, are redeemed by, of all things, laughter. At least, I’m pretty sure that I can hear Everett laughing behind them, or smiling, anyway. He hears the thing in me (and, I have to assume, in many other readers) that starts to rise up and protest, “Hey, come on, did you have to make him an intellectual?,” and the writer in him laughs. I see you little bastards hiding out there in the tall grass. James and I will decide what he dreams about.

Twain was interested all his life in what he called “mental telegraphy,” the capacity of human brains to transmit and receive information to and from other brains, at a distance. We smile at it now, but this was one of the ways in which Twain was very much of his time—“unalienated,” in Leslie Fiedler’s phrase, from the American popular mind. A famous instance of this phenomenon—a specific subspecies known as “simultaneous dreaming”—supposedly happened to a person he knew well, a woman whose family was intimately attached to his own, in Elmira, New York, where his wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon, came from, and where the Clemenses spent almost every summer for decades. The name of the woman, the dreamer in this case—or one of the two dreamers who had the same dream—was Adele Amelia Gleason. She was also, I have discovered, the author of a reminiscence of Twain that is unknown.

The Gleasons of Elmira were a fascinating family, and I mean that not in a facile or phatic way. The mother, Rachel Brooks Gleason, was one of the first licensed female doctors in America—by most accounts the fourth. The father, Silas, was also a doctor. Their only daughter, the dreamer Adele, became a doctor, too. It would be truest to describe them as a family of healers. And they were Northern progressives of the classic late-nineteenth-century stamp: Feminists and advocates for the rights of the poor. Abolitionists and, later, ardent supporters of freedmen’s schools.

The Gleasons were best known, though, for operating, in Elmira, what was called a hydropathic sanitarium, or more colloquially a “water cure.” It was known up and down the eastern seaboard. People in Elmira referred to it as simply “the Cure.” It had been built on the site of a sulfurous spring, and you drank a lot of sulfur-infused water while you were there, and took a lot of baths. Mainly, though, you just chilled out. And this is why hydropathy was not like many of the other quack medical therapies of the not-quite-modern era. It did not involve any bad ideas. No snake oil, for the most part—no sketchy procedures, no unscrupulous claims. You drank a lot of water, ate healthy food, did gentle exercise, and avoided stress. Naturally, people did get better.

Livy, Twain’s wife, had done multiple stretches with the Gleasons as a young woman, including a long stay after an accident she suffered as a teenager, when she fell on the ice and lapsed into a sort of paralysis afterward. (People said it was neurasthenic, in her head.) It would be hard to overstate how much she, and Twain, trusted the Gleasons. Twain described Mother Rachel as “almost divine.” Her popular book on women’s health, Talks to My Patients, was reviewed by this magazine in 1870, and praised for its “sound philosophy” and “sterling common-sense.” She was also a midwife who safely delivered (or “caught,” as the midwives say) all four of the Clemens children. When Livy fell ill, Twain arranged for Rachel to come and stay with the family. He himself spent plenty of time at the Cure. The Clemens cottage stood right across the road from the place, up on East Hill, overlooking Elmira. A woman named Hettie Devinny Wagner, who had spent time at the Cure as a sickly girl, later remembered,

Many a time Mark Twain, or members of his family, came over for special baths for which the place was noted; their cottage had no modern plumbing in those days. If Doctor Gleason was not busy, he and Mark Twain would sit on one of the long porches and spend many minutes in happy talk.

It was during one of these visits, most likely, that Twain met the Gleason daughter, Adele.

She was described, when young, as “exceedingly beautiful”—the future President Garfield once stuck his head out the window of a moving train car to get a glimpse of her on the platform (he professed to have been concerned for her safety)—and she was possessed of an authentic literary streak that rendered Twain an object, in her eyes, of particular interest. She wrote poems and stories and a novel. The work is good enough, in places, to have remained compelling. In her short fiction, she paid close attention to the inner lives of black people—servants, mainly, who passed through her orbit—rendering their speech in the heavy dialect that, like Twain’s efforts in that line, offends our sensibilities now. Her best stuff is probably her poetry. Her collection of 1888 is strangely titled Songs and Verses for Christmas, “strangely” in that it consists entirely of hauntingly mournful elegies to lost or broken love, such as “The Storm”:

As bends the tree in the wind
Before the rain,
So do I bow, when thou comest,
In sudden pain.

It seems likely that Adele was a lesbian. There is nothing explicit on that, in the documents, but several aspects of her biography point to it, starting with her lifelong unmarried status and, for that matter, lack of any recorded attachment to a man. Many of the poems speak achingly of love for a woman. In “Pine Lake,” for instance:

Beam of the golden sun, kiss her gold hair,
Kiss it as I would
Were I but there.

A sentence in an anonymous review of Adele Gleasons’s one published novel, The Georgia Belle, from the Elmira Telegram of October 13, 1895, suggests that her sexual and romantic inclinations were not a secret. “It is more than suspected,” wrote the reviewer, “that Miss Gleason has an ardent fancy toward and a deep affection for the beautiful young women of Dixie.”

Born on Christmas Eve, in 1850, she took her medical degree at the University of Michigan. “The daughter, M. Adele Gleason,” wrote an Elmira journalist, “promises to be to the generation of women to which she belongs what her mother was to those who preceded her.” She campaigned on behalf of prostitutes and unwed mothers. She traveled all over—to London and Scotland, Denmark and India, even to Iceland, and to California (where she bought a piece of land from the son of John Brown—the John Brown, the one who led the raid on Harpers Ferry—and built her own sanitarium). During World War I, she joined the American ambulance corps in France, serving in the bandage room of the hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, treating “the wounded from Ypres and other devastated places.” In Buffalo, New York, she founded a “social settlement” called Mortimer House, giving embroidery and gardening classes to children, taking in strays. It was a beloved institution in that city for years. For part of that time, she was living with a woman named Margaret Taylor, a teacher who was her “assistant in social settlement work,” and in 1907 a newspaper item finds them on their way to Georgia, “for a spring vacation.” Could this be the Georgia Belle? Did they briefly have happiness?

One gets the sense that she suffered. Think of being who and what she was, in the America of that time, going everywhere and doing all that good, with a bulb so bright, and that passion. It seems that her mental health was not always strong. There are reports, along the path, of undisclosed illnesses that sound suspiciously like nervous breakdowns. In 1902, she appears in the diary of—of all people—Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the lesbian writer and feminist activist, famous even today for her story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” about a woman’s all but literal imprisonment in the strictures of the patriarchy. On December 6, 1902, Gilman writes,

Rise early for 8 am train. Hour late. . . . Go to Buffalo. . . . Sleep two hours—walk two miles—dine lightly & lecture on Public Ethics again. Very well indeed. . . . Dr. Adele Gleason—a shocking wreck. Poor woman! & she was so glorious.

She died in an insane asylum, in 1930. She is buried in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, not far from Twain.

Her dream, the simultaneous dream, had taken place in 1892, when she was forty-one and living with her parents at the Cure. Look online and you’ll find that the dream is not forgotten, in the world of folks who study the paranormal. It was first reported in June of 1895, in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (an issue of which, from that same year, mentions recent writing by Mark Twain, for Harper’s Magazine, about his “experiences in what is termed Mental Telepathy or Mental Telegraphy”):

The night of Tuesday, January 26th, 1892, I dreamed between two and three o’clock that I stood in a lonesome place in dark woods. That great fear came on me; that a presence as of a man well-known to me came and shook a tree by me, and that its leaves began to turn to flame.

The dream was so vivid that I said to the man of whom I dreamed when I saw him four days later, “I had a very strange dream Tuesday night.” He said, “Do not tell it to me; let me describe it, for I know I dreamed the same thing.”

When Mark Twain died, on April 21, 1910, at the age of seventy-four, Adele was living in India, teaching physiology and gynecology at a mission medical school in Rajahmundry (today Rajamahendravaram), near the Bay of Bengal. She read that her beloved neighbor had died in bed of a heart attack at his Connecticut mansion, Stormfield, named in part for a character in the last book he published during his lifetime, Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, which was excerpted in this magazine, in two parts, in 1907 and ’08, and that somewhat uncannily—given Twain’s reported prediction that he would soon “go out” with Halley’s Comet, which had been in the sky when he was born—concerns the travels of a deceased outer-space captain (a proto–Hunter Gracchus of the stars) who half-unintentionally falls into a race with a giant comet that pulls him off course.

Twain had been in bed for some days, fading. His heart was failing. He had always smoked too much—twenty cigars a day, supplemented by puffs on a pipe. “When he had passed the point of speech,” one of the news reports read, “and it was no longer certain that his ideas were lucid, he would make the motion of waving a cigar and, smiling, would expel empty air from under the moustache still stained with smoke.” His daughter Clara, his only surviving child, was nursing him. Livy had given birth to four altogether, three daughters and a son. The eldest, a boy, Langdon, was born weak and lived barely a year and a half. The first daughter, Susy, had died of spinal meningitis back in 1896, when she was twenty-four. The youngest, Jean, had died only four months before her father, there in that same house, Stormfield. She had an epileptic seizure in the bathtub. And Olivia, his Livy, she had already been gone six years. She was never well, and her heart had given out in 1904. Too many losses. The papers all mentioned that brokenheartedness had brought on his final decline.

Adele sat down immediately and wrote an essay about Twain, a remembrance of the man, and sent it off to the Civil and Military Gazette, in Lahore (today Lahore is in Pakistan, but back then it was in the territory that the British called the Raj, and English-speaking people would have placed it in India). Twain himself had passed through Lahore, in the spring of 1896, on the world travels that a year later he described in Following the Equator.

On a Wednesday night in March, according to the Civil and Military Gazette, he lectured in a “queer rambling style” before a “large and enthusiastic audience.” The crescendo came when he read aloud the passage involving that moment, the famous moment, in “the story of Huck Finn and Jim the slave,” those deathless sentences “with whose humour such a quaint strain of pathos is blended,” and which describe “the struggle of a sound heart against a deformed conscience.” At the end of the struggle, the reporter had Twain say, “My conscience was very sick, but I myself was powerful glad.” That language does not appear in the novel itself. Either Twain read a variant draft or the reporter mistranscribed his remarks. Most likely the latter. Huck is not being cute, at that moment in his and Jim’s story, after he has decided, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” (Those italics on “go”!—the full meaning of them, of the sound of them, could never be explained to a non-native speaker, and can hardly be parsed by a native one; they represent, without a doubt, a high-water mark in the history of idiomatic American prose; to have italicized “I’ll” or “hell” would have put the emphasis on Huck’s personal heroism, but to italicize “go” indicts, instead, an entire monstrous moral code: “Fine, you motherfuckers. I’ll go to hell, before I send Jim back to the plantation.”)

Adele sits there at her desk at the mission school in Rajahmundry and pours out her memories, then sends them off to the editors of the Civil and Military Gazette, which publishes them days later. Her essay appears on Friday, April 29, 1910. Twain has been dead hardly a week. What she writes is splendid, unforgettable. It has never been noticed or quoted or cited before, not even by the Twain scholars. I am not sure how that happened, how it slipped through the net. I suppose its being published in Lahore had much to do with it. All curiosities of syntax and typography are [sic].

SAMUEL L. CLEMENS
(specially contributed.)

As I knew him in the many summers he lived on estates joining ours in Elmira, N.Y., U.S.A., his wife’s birth place; the wonder of Mark Twain’s real personality increased. He reminded one of one of the many definitions of genius, a constant capacity for growth. The reproach of age is that it is “stale, flat and unprofitable.” Mr. Clemens’ age was always youthful, not in the way of amusement or of seeking amusement, for he seemed never to require them in an artificial sense. He found amusement and intense interest in everyday things about us, and in every-day people which those very people themselves were incapable of finding. I said once.

“Mr. Clemens, you have been guest of Emperors and Princes and Presidents and Magnates and Artists and—

“Yes,” he broke in with a quizzical smile “and of boarding house keepers!” “And” I resumed, “what is the best, the very best time you ever had or have, in your life?”

“The best time I ever had or can have is when I feel a new idea, one I have never had before, coming into my mind. Then I want to share it with other people.”

He had the intense hatred of being interrupted that all authors and artists have, yet a gentle humility, touched with sadness or quaint jests, was to me most prominent in his character. His way of serving others was very characteristic. A hunch backed old negro by great courage had saved the lives of Mrs. Clemens’ two daughters when, as children with their aunt, they were driving down the steep hill from the place he summered in.6 To see Mr. Clemens sighting this old man, as he walked up the steep hill beside his team of poor old horses, and see him in his ever spotless white suit, run down the road to help the old negro block the wheel, and rest the horses, or walk beside him talking and telling him stories to make him laugh was a pleasant sight. He used to say “A man must be either a genius or a fool to be interesting; God spare me the average.” He often said a farmer with whom he talked one evening paid him the greatest compliment he ever received. As he was parting from his chance acquaintance he remarked, “I must go home now.” “Where do you live?” asked the farmer. “Over there,” said Mr. Clemens pointing to the house, “Lord! be you him?” was the man’s amazed response. . . .

The birth of each of his children was celebrated by a thank offering, in the form of a well cut stone trough placed at the roadside for the use of the horses as they toiled up the steep hillside. His helpful goodness, his shrewd insight, his peculiar way of helping people just in the nick of time, made the difference between success and failure; hope or despair, to many hundred people during his life time.

He would neither hide nor exhibit his charities. If he met an old doctor or clergyman, whom he knew and trusted, at dinner or in an afternoon of relaxation, he would sidle up to him or her and extend a few bills in a tight ball with the peculiar awkward twist of his left arm, and say, “Here take this. I feel about that much, but I don’t know who it ought to go to.” . . .

In his never failing devotion to his wife there was an element of anxious humility most touching to see. The fact that she wanted anything, or that he had displeased her in any way, was more absorbing to him than any honour or success in life. His wife’s last request was that he should stay with Jean, and he husbanded his failing strength in every way after her death to fulfil this request. The picture of their playing chess together shows her head as classic in its beauty as Portia’s might have been. It will be the treasure of some art gallery.7 The tragic—or shall we say, beautiful—death of this daughter must have left him with little motive for this life. . . .

His carelessness of practical things caused him to be cheated and defrauded frequently, to the indignation of his wife especially; but the gentleness of his forgiveness of a wrong was trying sometimes. But noble and generous he always was. His wife’s interest in India was very great, her letters from this country remarkable. He said to us: “India demands a new life,” then with a half given sigh “I want to live it but I can’t.”  . . .

Every country holds some of his personal friends who will never forget Samuel L. Clemens.

adele a. gleason

Adele Gleason’s profound reminiscence of the man she knew as Mr. Clemens is a striking example of the extent to which, even with a figure as archivally picked-clean as Mark Twain is (and has long been, for the most part), discoveries remain to be made. Granted, nothing in this one rewires any major critical or biographical assumptions, but neither are its revelations inconsequential. The handful of remarks attributed to or quoted by him are of such a choice nature—“Lord! be you him?”—that they now can do as they were meant to and enrich the corpus of his dicta and mots.

There is an intimate focal depth in Gleason’s tribute, which brings us close to Twain in a manner that, even after one has read through thousands of pages by and about him, seems no less rare. Ron Chernow’s new biography, titled simply (boldly?) Mark Twain, obviously makes no mention of the text. There is no shame or negligence in that—it has been lost for more than a century. It is more of a problem that Chernow makes no mention of the Gleasons, and fails to discuss the Cure, where more than one member of the Clemens family convalesced. He does not even name Dr. Rachel Brooks Gleason. This is hard to understand in a book of more than a thousand pages (especially when Rachel is written about more than once in Ron Powers’s excellent twenty-year-old Mark Twain: A Life, and the significance of the Gleason connection is clearly established in Laura E. Skandera-Trombley’s Mark Twain in the Company of Women).

In Chernow’s defense, hard decisions—on what gets included and what left out—are the cost of doing business for a biographer who wants to produce a readable life, and his Twain is eminently readable. Anyone’s biography could run to a million pages, if everything were thrown in, and when the life in question is Twain’s, among the most multifarious and eventful and acquaintance-rich and correspondence-producing in the whole of the nineteenth century—“A many-sided man, this Mississippi pilot,” wrote the editor Charles Vale (Sing, Muse, of this many-sided man!)—those decisions must be cold-blooded indeed, and will involve an unavoidable measure of arbitrariness. But the name Gleason should be in there.

Before I lodge a final grumble about stuff that Chernow’s biography leaves out, let me say that he gets a mighty amount in. He has wrestled the white-suited whale of Twain into a sturdy aquarium tank. That being said, how could he leave out the Sergeant Fathom and steamboat Arago letters, the parodies of newspaper reports on river conditions that Twain wrote and published in 1859 and ’60 during his stint as a licensed pilot on the Mississippi? Chernow has this slight paragraph, which stops just short of alluding to their existence:

Even though Sam Clemens published little during his four-year stint on the river, he squandered nothing from a literary standpoint. He harvested the anecdotal riches of serving on more than a dozen boats and was so content that he foresaw a peaceful, never-ending life afloat. “Time drifted smoothly and prosperously on, and I supposed—and hoped—that I was going to follow the river the rest of my days, and die at the wheel when my mission was ended.”

These sentences breezily pass over a crucial period in Twain’s development as a writer. The omission seems especially odd when we consider the great importance that Chernow places on Twain’s piloting days. He titles his prelude “The Pilot House”—the implication being that this provides a kind of guiding (as it were) metaphor for both Twain’s life and Chernow’s book—and he repeatedly quotes Twain’s fond memories of that short chapter in his career (“Verily, all is vanity and little worth—save piloting”). The pen name, Mark Twain, derives (as we used to learn in school) from a boatman’s call. “By the mark, twain!” meant that the water was two fathoms deep—or twelve feet, according to the leadsman’s weighted sounding rope—and by extension that it was safe to keep going: there was enough water for the boat to float through and not run aground. A hopeful cry, then.

Twain consistently lied about where he’d got the name from—the idea of using it, that is. He claimed that he had essentially stolen it, albeit in an act of homage, from an older riverboat pilot—one of the original Mississippi steamboat men—Isaiah Sellers, who (according to Twain) used to generate occasional on-the-spot reports of river conditions and send them to the Picayune in New Orleans, signing himself “Mark Twain.” These reports were said to be amusingly all-knowing in tone. “Hoary” would be the word, I suppose. Twain writes about them, and Sellers, in Life on the Mississippi, and even quotes one of the alleged reports: “My opinion is that the water will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June,” etc.

A fatal difficulty arises in that scholars have gone looking for these items, in the old newspapers, and they appear not to exist. Certainly there are none signed “Mark Twain.” Sellers existed—we can confirm that—but there is no evidence of his having published anything at all, much less under the famous pen name. An independent Twain scholar in Texas, named Kevin Mac Donnell, has recently discovered a far more likely source: a humor sketch, from a magazine published in 1861, that featured a character called Mark Twain. This would explain not only where the name came from but why Twain may have felt motivated to lie about it—he had basically plagiarized it, and not by way of honoring an obscure figure whom he felt bad about having lampooned, but from a popular source. Off the rack, as it were.

The reason that Chernow’s failure to take cognizance of the steamboat Arago seems problematic enough to nitpick has nothing to do with the business of the pen name, which Chernow does discuss. He even deals with Isaiah Sellers, on one page, and alludes to the theory about the humor magazine, Vanity Fair (neglecting to mention that this was not the modern-day publication). What matters is that Twain emerged as a stylist during this phase. He located the mask. We know that he himself saw it this way, because he writes, in Life on the Mississippi, that “one of these [Sellers] paragraphs . . . became the text for my first newspaper article.”

Mind you, these river parodies were not the real debut of Twain in print. There had been earlier pieces, as early as 1851, written for his brother Orion’s newspaper in Missouri. “A Gallant Fireman” is one. But to read those is to know that you are reading juvenilia. Whereas, when we come to the essay that ran in the New Orleans Daily Crescent in 1859, we hear Mark Twain. He did not sign himself that way—his adoption of the pseudonym was still a few years off—but as “Sergeant Fathom” (which is on its way to Mark Twain, thematically). Here he is, moving along the great American river, which he knows almost by muscle memory, mocking authority.

“My opinion,” he writes, “is that if the rise continues at this rate the water will be on the roof of the St. Charles Hotel before the middle of January. The point at Cairo, which has not even been moistened by the river since 1813, is now entirely under water.”

I started laughing when I read the word “moistened.” It is no small thing to make a person physically laugh at the remove of 166 years. And how cryptically thrilling to know that the deckhands are laughing with you down the hallway of time. They hold their sides, tears in their eyes, as Twain impersonates the ancient mariner (one of Twain’s friends, Bart Bowen, had “insisted on showing it to others and finally upon printing it”). Nor is the piece merely silly. It involves a kind of time travel, offhandedly surreal, back into an older and weirder America. “In the summer of 1763,” writes Sergeant Fathom,

I came down the river on the old first “Jubilee.” She was new, then, however; a singular sort of a single-engine boat, with a Chinese captain and a Choctaw crew, forecastle on her stern, wheels in the center, and the jackstaff “no where,” for I steered her with a window shutter, and when we wanted to land we sent a line ashore and “rounded her to” with a yoke of oxen.

A scrap of textual evidence from a year later suggests that these early river satires were noticed and read with pleasure. They represented, in other words, not only some of Twain’s first appearances in print (where his brother was not the editor), but the dawn of his identity as a writer, in the public mind and in his own. In September of 1860, the River Intelligence column of the Sunday Delta in New Orleans reports, “By far the best thing we have read since the days of the Sergeant Fathom letter, [is] a Pilots’ report, emanating from Sam. Clemens, of the Arago.” Whether this writer realized that Sam Clemens had also been responsible for the Sergeant Fathom letter is not clear, but a reputation was growing.

What had changed? Grief and trauma had deepened him and his voice, for one. His younger brother Henry, who followed him into the riverboat line, had been blown up in a boiler explosion in June of 1858, not even a full year before the first of these parodies was published. Twain raced to Memphis, where the bodies and survivors had been brought ashore, and got there in time to watch Henry die, horribly scalded, on a cot in an improvised hospital. He never stopped blaming himself.

He had dreamed Henry’s death, just a month before it happened. “In the dream I had seen Henry a corpse,” he writes in his Autobiography. “He lay in a metallic burial-case. He was dressed in a suit of my clothing . . . ”

My failure to rise more eagerly to Chernow’s biography might have more to do with genre than with the book itself—or rather it may be the genre that I mind in the book—the relentless march of linear chronology, so at odds with the way life and its endless circlings operate. The piling on of details is meant to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject, but the process somehow insulates us from the inner life. A flattening effect becomes a deadening effect. When Twain died, one of the reports included a marvelous anecdote from his early years, meant to illustrate his sometimes “leisurely” habits:

An old pressman who was printer’s devil in an office where Mark was an editorial writer tells this anecdote of his habits of work:

“One of my duties was to sweep the room where editors worked. Every day Mark would give me a nickel to get away from him. He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs.”

There is such skilled comedy in this vignette. The boy has been told to sweep the office. There sits Clemens, loafing. The boy approaches. He needs the man to move his legs, so he can get under with the broom. Tell you what, youngster, I will PAY you to leave me alone. No, better: “to get away from him.” Their absurd bargain becomes a ritual: “every day.” The rhythm, the language, everything.

Here’s Chernow: “Sam stuck to his lazy, messy habits, as one old pressman learned when he tried to sweep around him. ‘He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs.’ ” But the “old pressman” didn’t learn it. The boy he had once been did, the printer’s devil. And the boy didn’t learn it “when he tried to sweep around him”—sweeping around him is what he did do, what he was forced to do—he learned it when he tried to get the man to move, so he could sweep under him. The good but rhetorical sentence “He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs” is preserved, but the best part, the gratuitous “nickel to get away from him,” is gone, and with it goes Clemens, the real presence.

The moment, the one in which Huck decides he’ll go to hell: “there is no more significant passage in Huckleberry Finn than that in which Huck struggles with his conscience over the knotty problem of his moral responsibility for compassing Jim’s emancipation.” That’s Archibald Henderson, initiating a tradition in 1911, a year after Twain’s death.8 Percival Everett does not include the moment in James. I had wondered, going in, how he would handle it. He doesn’t. That tracks with the original story. When the moment occurs, in Mark Twain’s novel, Jim is not present. He has been “stolen.” So he is not there to see anything. And what would he see? A young boy sitting in a tent, maybe wringing his hands, groping in the cave of his conscience for some thought that will allow him to do what his fear wants him to do, but his better angels won’t allow. (“I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him.”) Everett gives the agonizing either-or decision to James instead. At a dramatic moment on the river he must choose whom to save: his friend Norman, who is black but passing as white, or the boy, Huck, who is . . . well . . .

Some pages later, Jim learns that his wife and child have been sold away.

“Jim, they were sold.”

I had heard his words clearly, but I said, “What?”

“They were sold.”

Just what happened next is blurry in my memory, but I remember being on my knees. I cried, really cried. I realized that Huck was hugging me. I could feel his concern through his hands.

Of everything I have ever read about Sam Clemens, the pages that did most to clarify my sense of the relationship that existed between the man and his art are to be found in the introduction to a book titled Mark Twain and the South, by the late American historian Arthur G. Pettit. “Having learned about the man’s protean personality,” Pettit writes, “we find that his feelings on race and region move in an intelligible direction . . . there is a clearly traceable movement away from the white South and toward the black race.”

Then this remarkable paragraph:

Unlike most Missourians or other Americans, the Clemenses sometimes owned a few slaves, and Clemens himself accepted the South’s peculiar institution well into his twenties. His early notebooks and journals are liberally sprinkled with jokes about black body odor, fried nigger steaks, black sexual promiscuity, and the evils of miscegenation. Yet he eventually married into an abolitionist family, befriended Frederick Douglass, financed a black artist’s apprenticeship in Paris, and supported several black students through Yale Law School. As Mark Twain he lectured in all-black churches, championed the cause of Booker T. Washington, wrote blistering essays about atrocities committed against blacks, and gave large doses of dignity and power to three of the outstanding black characters in nineteenth-century literature. He began his career as a segregationist, turned himself into a champion of interracial brotherhood, and ended his life as a prophet of racial war.

Can there be any doubt that therein hunkers the secret of the enduring power of the moment? Huck’s redemption was Mark Twain’s. Or so Clemens hoped. And we seem to have always wished that this redemption might be ours someday, as a nation—the real end of the novel, as old Papa had it (though to read Everett’s James is to wonder if it wasn’t a beginning, instead, so generative has it proved). Everett has climbed into Twain’s dream and dreamed it with him. Dreamed the same dream differently. And now the dream is altered. Is that what a real myth is, a dream that runs along beneath the dreamers, like a river? Some voice goes on insisting that we are on this raft together.