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Aspect I. Baffling Cultural Background Samuel Clemens¡¯ time (1835 --- 1910) was a period of transition between two centuries. Turning over the pages of American history, we find that the period was turbid, full of changes, and marked by uncertainty. A survey of the socio-cultural environments in which Clemens grew up may reveal the hidden reasons why he became so concerned with human nature and morality. Historical Perspective 1. Clemens¡¯ time was eventful. American fast territorial expansion resulted in wars, and the Indians the Mexicans, etc., eventually made the U.S.A. bordered on both the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Then, internal problems of slavery began to engage the whole American aggressive impulse. Following Lincoln¡¯s presidential inauguration in 1860, the Civil War broke out. It was estimated that one in every fifty Americans died in the four bloody years. By the time the South surrendered, the combined death-toll had reached the appalling figure of 650,000, far surpassing that of the Americans who died in World War II, namely, 400,000. as part of its price President Lincoln was assassinated. The reconstruction brought unprecedented prosperity to the North and promoted its industrialization and urbanization, while the South was reduced to sluggish poverty and racial terrorism for some generations (Sinclair 80 --- 100). In the late nineteenth century, there was strife between capitalists and workers. Open struggle eventually took away thousands of lives ¡°in pitched battles near the mines and factories¡± (118). In 1893, with the sudden collapse of the stock market, five hundred banks and nearly sixteen thousand businesses went bankrupt before the year was out. ¡°The American people were in the throes of a fiasco unprecedented even in their broad experience¡±, a London journal remarked (Kaplan 319). It was reported that over two and a half million men had lost their jobs in ¡°the bleak autumn and winter of 1893 --- 1894¡± (324). And as the new century dawned, wars were unleashed in other parts of the world. Wars raged in South Africa. The Americans were seen conquering the local people in the Philippines. And most of the Christian powers were fighting the Chinese Boxer Rebellion ¡°for trade rights¡± (Long 369). Indeed, Clemens¡¯ time was a very turbulent period in history. Such a queasy time was doomed to Clemens¡¯ unstable and even erratic personality. It has great effect on his personality, as well as on his fate. 2. This period was also clouded. On one hand, there was high hope. Clemens¡¯ own portrayal in his Roughing It of the ¡°flush times¡± in Virginia City may give us some idea. ¡°Joy sat on every countenance and there was a glad, almost fierce, intensity in every heart. Money was as plenty as dust¡± (Brooks, ¡°ordeal¡± 291). The economic metamorphosis the U.S. underwent at this time was quickly making the nation the richest society on earth. Between the outbreak of the Civil War and 1910, the national income of the U.S. grew more than six times, notwithstanding intense slumps in 1873 and 1893. And, owing to the expansion of arable land and the help of machines, farm production increased four times in value within the same period (Sinclair 117), shining new cities sprouted here and there. And there were vast opportunities of getting rich. ¡°The good lord gave me my money¡± was ¡°the Gospel of wealth¡± then. Enthusiastic Americans believed in progress and esteemed success; the philosophy of pragmatism was much articulated. ¡°Science was being pursued more searchingly than before¡± (Sinclair 102 --- 20). In mid-February, 1884, Clemens and Washington Cable talked about their great century and the vast advantages of living in it. Clemens believed that, in his lifetime alone, the human race had made more progress toward achieving its full stature than in any five centuries.¡± And they celebrated ¡°the triumph of democracy, the emancipation of serf and slave¡± (Kaplan 255). On the other hand, there was a good deal of pessimism and disenchantment, especially as the nineteenth century was approaching its close. Disturbing stories at home and abroad hit the headlines from time to time. Huge political corruption, reports of scandal in the decades after the Civil War, labour unrest, and uncertain international affairs --- all that shook the faith of many Americans. Walter Blair said that even the enthusiast about democracy, Walt Whitman, had written in Democratic Vistas (1871): ¡°Genuine belief seems to have left us ¡ the official services of America, national, state and municipal, in all their branches except the judiciary is tainted¡± (132). In 1879, Henry George published his Progress and Poverty. In the beginning part of the book, he described the opportunities and expectations of the early nineteenth century. Then he proceeded to develop his main idea: disappointment had followed disappointment. ¡°If the ideals on which America was founded were being rapidly stained by political practice,¡± he claimed, ¡°so also was the paradisiacal surface of the continent suffering a comparable degradation from the rapid urbanization and industrialization of the period¡± (Tanner 162). The same theme was repeated in Henry Adam¡¯s History (1889), which is ¡°a massive demonstration of the inevitable failure of idealism¡±(162). In sum, Clemens¡¯ time was also one when high hope now and then flickered under the gush of gloomy and discouraging air. Personal Perspective 1. The little world was drab and tragic. The early social setting Sam (as Clemens¡¯ family called him) was born into could be partly seen in the early pages of his The Gilded Age: That weary, discouraged father struggling against conditions amid which, as he says, a man can do nothing but rot away, that kind, worn, wan, desperately optimistic, fanatically energetic mother, those ragged, wretched left in the bottom of a frying-pan.¡± (Brooks, ¡°ordeal¡± 286) Van Wyck Brooks wrote that in those raw frontier towns or villages, an occasional circus or minstrel show was the only relief from the mud and pigs (¡°Times¡± 80). And the morality of the place was that ¡°of a slave-holding community, fierce, arrogant, one-sided. The religion was Calvinism in various phases, with its predestined aristocracy of saints and its rabble of hopeless sinners¡± (Clemens, Will, 18). The writer Mark Twain tended to present the more idyllic side of his early life, as seen in ¡°Huckleberry Finn¡± and ¡°Tom Sawyer¡±. As a matter of fact, there were ¡°far less heavenly associations for him¡± (Lauber 48). In his community, there were never-do-wells, criminals and lunatics. There were also unhappy marriages, adulteries and the grotesque stories as told in Sherwarld Anderson¡¯s books (ibid). it was not rare for Sam to see violence and death. Clemens recalled in his autobiography that before he was seventeen, he had seen a death by fire, a hanging and four murders (Blair 55). Life was often hard to maintain. Death might happen at any moment, in the home or on the street. No family ¡°could escape death rituals, with a ring of mourners around the sufferer¡±, Lauber described, ¡°waiting to make their good-bys and to hear the final words¡±(27). Such was also the case with the Clemens. Poverty and bankruptcy had followed the Clemens family. In his childhood, Sam had personally attended three death rituals for his family members: one at his nine-year-old sister Margaret¡¯s death, one when his brother Benjamin died in 1842, and the last one for his father¡¯s demise (Lauber 27). With the above information in mind, one certainly can sense the dreary and horrid sides of Sam¡¯s early milieu. 2. Sam was exposed to opposing influences. a. Early religious education versus sceptical surroundings. Sam received strict formal religious training at his mother¡¯s insistence. Being a Presbyterian, his mother required him to go to Sunday school and church, where he was inculcated with ¡°the Calvinistic doctrines of hell-fire, predestinations and God¡¯s wrath¡± every week. Further, his mother and elder sister, by turn, supervised regularly Sam¡¯s reading of the Bible ¡°as the literal world of God¡± (Wiggin 86). Sam sometimes had to do an additional evening service for any extraordinary pranks or didos he was discovered to have been guilty of. Therefore, it is said that, ¡°before his childhood ended, he had learnt to know the Bible, to fear God --- the wrathful, implacable, all-seeing Calvinistic God and feel guilt¡± (Lauber 23). Sam¡¯s fear of God later found its expression in ¡°Tom Sawyer¡±. When Tom Sawyer recovered from an illness and learnt during his sickness all his friends had been ¡®saved¡¯, he crept home to bed realizing that he alone of all the town was lost, forever and forever and that the raging storm outside was aimed at his sinful self: ¡®He covered his head with the bedclothes and waited in a horror of suspense for his doom¡¯. (Lauber 24) Sam Clemens¡¯ early religious inculcation must have had, thereby, an effect on him similar to that on Tom (ibid). However, deep down under, the frontier then had an inarticulate ¡°dislike of authority and restraint, minister, school teacher¡±. Sam¡¯s father actually nursed scepticism, though he never openly defied ¡°Hannibal¡¯s valued religion as a guide to life¡±. But at home, Sam very possibly had heard those doctrines questioned (Long 355). Besides, the folklore of Whites and Negroes of the neighbourhood featured such topics as witches, ghosts, death, and putrefaction, differing sharply from those recommended by the local authorities on juvenile literature (Blair 55). Sam had received a considerable portion of his early education from the open woods, from playing with children of both poor White and Negro families. In his autobiography Clemens said he was the playmate to all Negroes, even made friends in the Negro quarters. His great and faithful ally and adviser there was uncle Daniel --- ¡°later fictionalised as Nigger Jim¡±. Clemens said he knew the look of uncle Daniel¡¯s kitchen. He remembered that ¡°white and black children grouped on the hearth. with the firelight playing on their faces and shadows flickering up the wall,¡± listening to folktales of Black Africa, often-frightful ghost stories (Lang 285). Hence, the natural and sceptical social influence often ran in sharp contrast with what was taught in Sunday School and church, complicating Clemens¡¯ early education. b. Mother¡¯s influence on Sam of hatred for cruelty versus Sam¡¯s personal witness to human cruelty. Little Sam loved playing outdoors. It is said that the child had got so wild that his mother had to spend a lot of time civilizing him, teaching him Calvinistic virtues. Her influence on Sam was later compared to Aunt Polly¡¯s on Tom Sawyer and Miss Watson¡¯s on Huck Finn by many critics. Those two characters are portrayed as motherly figures who ¡°keep pecking the children, trying to teach them to spell, to pray and to keep their feet off the furniture¡± (Marx 353). One other special trait Sam¡¯s mother demonstrated was her hatred for all cruelty. In his autobiography, Clemens reminisced about her defending a girl from her reckless father, upbraiding the man¡¯s conscience and dormant manhood. In another anecdote, he described his mother as one who, seizing a drayman¡¯s whip, convinced him never to beat his horse again (Sloane 59). On the other hand, ¡°the ghastly stuff, terror, murder, revenge and death, depicted in Tom Sawyer were not irrelevant to Sam¡¯s Hannibal,¡± Blair wrote. ¡°Located on the rough frontier, it had been more violent than most small towns¡±(55). Young Sam had seen an abolitionist attacked by a mob that would have lynched him, but for a Methodist¡¯s timely plea that he was man (ibid). He also remembered looking on a slave auction and ¡°seeing a dozen black men and women chained together lying in a group on the pavement, waiting shipment to a Southern slave-market¡± and their faces were the saddest he ever saw (Paine 48,9). He had also once caught sight of ¡°the much mutilated body of a slave who tried to escape¡± (Lauber 41). On the street, in the broad daylight, one drunkard was killed because he had insulted a prosperous merchant. And another young man was stabbed to death by his drunk comrade, without any interference. ¡°I saw the red life gush from his breast,¡± Clemens stressed (Long 98,9). Those and quite a number of other instances of human violence and cruelty were actualities to Sam Clemens. They were contradictory to what he saw in his mother¡¯s examples. 3. A wider gamut of humanity passed before his eyes as he attempted at various jobs before becoming a full-time writer. Clemens had worked as a printer, a river pilot, a miner, a prospector, a stamp mill labourer, and a reporter before he got married in 1875. his experience as a printer in the printing houses at various cities gave him the taste of the hardship of working at a machine. Those tolerant, honest labourers impressed him. So did their natural and coarse manners. Clemens thought life on the Mississippi enabled him to be familiar with men of diverse nature. But his novel Life on the Mississippi seemed, for the most part, a portrayal of the romantic side of the boat-life, with its sordid side untouched. According to Habermell, who became a steamboat-man in 1844, boat crew were tough, fond of playing mischievous jokes on each other, and engaged in card playing, Rough-and-Tumble fighting and card stealing and cheating. ¡°Ashore they frequented theatres which ladies never attend, salons, gambling joints and bawdy houses.¡± Occasionally, they committed rapes. ¡°Some boats had in residence broad-minded waitresses¡± (Blair 39). Working on the mines, Clemens found himself in another mixed and violent society. Clemens later presented art of his mining experience in his Roughing It. We can find materials, however, suggesting a far grimmer side of the camp life. Brooks wrote that, among those camps countless types of men could be encountered; there were educated men, ex-ministers, ex-doctors and penniless counts and marquises; there were also Sicilian bandits, blackguards, galoots (¡°Times¡± 101). There were also murders, fatal duels, suicide and hangings. ¡°There were toughs and criminals, who killed, sometimes in anger or for pleasure, sometimes to acquire a reputation, for ¡®bad men¡¯ were respected and timid soul was lost¡± (Long 123). No wonder some critic would comment that Clemens had met ¡°more kinds and castes and conditions of Americans, observed the Americans in more occupations and mood and temper than any other major American writer¡± (De Voto 13). Such a socio-cultural background offered Clemens a rich store of human knowledge, which baffled young Sam, and would keep demanding his comprehension and integration, as he grew older. Aspect II. Personal Catastrophes Despite literary fame, individual popularity, world acclaim, and a beautiful happy marriage, Clemens actually ¡°felt himself cursed by the fates¡± (Long 263). His journey of life was marked by drastic ups and downs, often zigzagging dangerously between the edges of madness and sadness. He had once been a pauper, toiling at various printing houses, or prospecting, digging on some barren hillsides in hope of finding gold or silver. At other times, he posed like a master on the Mississippi with an enviable good salary of a pilot. And he was seen enjoying a princely status when he became a famous writer, the rich husband of a much-beloved wife, the father of three delightful children, occupying the most fanciful mansion in a district of well-to-do and reputable residents, ¡°courted, praised, sought after and universally love¡± (De Voto ¡°symbols¡± 141). However, because of his neglect of the needs of himself, Clemens was never really free for long from frustrations, and was inescapable from eventual defeat. The following is a very brief account of the misfortunes related closely to his loss of hope for himself and the human race. Disastrous Financial Setbacks Clemens had always dreamed of some miracle which would afford him a luxurious life and would liberate him once for all from financial worries. He went in for speculation with little luck. But his good luck came with the publication of Grant¡¯s Personal Memoir, which allow him a profit of 200,000 dollars at least (Kaplan 278). The huge profit made him delirious and covetous for even more money. That, unfortunately, only touched off a series of failures for him in the years to come. First, his publishing business started a declining course. The successive, ambitious undertaking to duplicate his Grant success by publishing The Life of Pope Leo VIII in 1887 and by aiding a celebrity. H. W. Beecher, in writing his autobiography did not ¡°bring in a gold harvest for him but fell considerably short of the promised minimum.¡± At the same time, the firm¡¯s bookkeeper and cashier, F. M. Scott, embezzled about 25,000 dollars and disappeared. To make matter worse, Clemens began to use his publishing house ¡°as a private bank to finance the Paige machine¡±. In so doing, he left the house ¡°undercapitalised, over expanded¡±. And he borrowed heavily in order to publish a ten volume Library of American Literature (Kaplan 318,9). With the crash of the stock market in June 1893, Clemens¡¯ publishing business, ¡°an unsound enterprise even in the most favouring business circumstances¡±, fell among the first ruined. Taking the advice of a wealthy and powerful friend, Rogers, he went into voluntary bankruptcy proceedings, which finally imposed on him a debt of 100,000 dollars. Almost simultaneously, Clemens¡¯ high hope in the Paige typesetter also turned out to be a mirage. For a dozen years Clemens had been feeding this machine with the money he earned from his writings, his publishing business and, at difficult times, even with a good amount of his wife¡¯s inherited fortunes. For the machine, the Clemens had to economize sometimes. Even their youngest daughter would say the machine was not ready when she did not want to buy something. We know for sure that the machine had absorbed a total of 190,000 dollars in thirteen years (1880 --- 1903), not to mention such psychological prices as anxieties Clemens had to pay for. With such a dramatic financial deterioration, Clemens, already at an age of well over fifty, was never to recover completely from the blows. Familial Disintegration Because of bankruptcy, Clemens¡¯ family unavoidably tasted the disgraces. Their fashionable mansion at Farmington Avenue had to be stripped bare. Furniture, carpets and books were all locked in the warehouse. They had to dispense with all luxuries for a time. Their piano, pew and horses were sold out. They dismissed the butler and coachman, and spent the next eight years in Europe and as a family, were never to live in that mansion again (Kaplan 311). Later, burdened by debts, Clemens rented it to a friend, and prepared for a lecture-tour around the world. Here, when embarking upon the tour, Clemens made another unforgivable blunder: he left his two daughter at his friend Warner¡¯s house, which was located near his Hartford mansion now rented out. There, lodged alone at someone else¡¯s house, with her parents abroad to earn money. Susy must have felt that splendid mansion a standing mockery of her father¡¯s bankruptcy. The memory of the by-gone prosperity and joy, the present loneliness and perhaps the old neighbours¡¯ pitiful look and gossip, soon had their effect on the tender --- minded Susy. Within a year, the pure, lively girl died suddenly of meningitis at the age of 24. Jean, long diagnosed to have been suffering from epilepsy, had to be constantly sent to the sanatorium for the next dozen years of life. The loss of Susy seriously undermined Mrs. Twain¡¯s frail body. Clemens described her as falling into a state of ¡°submergence¡± and ¡°clearly declining into full invalidism¡± (Kaplan 339). Books were no longer of any interest to her, and she refused to see anyone; she would sit ¡°solitarily day after day wondering how it had all happened¡±. And for many years, their house was pervaded by a mournful air. ¡°The holidays and anniversaries passed and were marked only in sorrow¡± (Kaplan 39). Privately, Clemens felt himself estranged from his family members. Finally, in 1904, his wife died of hyperthyroid heart disease at the age of 59. And Jean, after several more epilepticseizures, was found dead a day before the Christmas Day of 1909, also in her twenties. Meanwhile, Clara got married and left her father, after surviving the seemingly, hereditary nervous breakdown. Hence, the once enviable happy family was gone for Clemens, now and forever. The Decline of Health and Literary Talent Soon after the bankruptcy, Clemens courageously declared that he would pay his creditors a hundred cents for each dollar. He felt inwardly, however, tried and depressed. Approaching the finish of his debt-cleansing endeavour for almost a year, Clemens was dealt even heavier blows: the deaths of Susy and the Paige typesetter. Clemens survived the maddening sequence of disasters but, as its price, his health and literary talent were severely impaired. 1. The failure of his capricious but usually exuberant health. Clemens¡¯ health might be deemed troublesome. His biographer states that Clemens was high-strung since early childhood: he had sleepwalked the night after one of his sister died; at twenty-three, his hair turned grey ¡°in the tragic experience of his brother¡¯s death¡±, and he could be sickened at the sight of a killed bird the way others might be at a human corpse (Brooks 287, 8). As an adult, he loathed exercise, considering it too tiresome. He chiefly depended on alcohol and cigar to maintain his creativity. For a long time, he smoked forty cigars a day. His self-neglect was such that. In his early forties, he was already visiting doctors for diseases like dysentery, hernia or chronic constipation (Kaplan 220). During the winter of 1891 --- 1892, Clemens was in bed for over a month ¡°with what started out as racking cough and turned into influenza and congestion of the lungs. He came out of his sickroom at the end of February with one lung permanently damage¡± (Kaplan 315). Under the enormous strain of bankruptcy, he was further racked by bronchitis, rheumatism and intermittently, by a psychosomatic condition: whenever he wanted to write, his right arm would start aching (Pettit 159); and by occasional scalp pain, so that for a period, he had to have all his hair cut off. Consequently, he often felt tired to death, and imagined himself in a sort of physical collapse (Kaplan 332). He was to die of angina at the age of seventy-five. 2. Blasted talent. As if physical torture was not enough for him, Clemens also discovered, to his dismay, that his writing talent was quickly deserting him. He ended his lecture-tour in London in 1895, in order to write a book about his trip. Clemens hoped that, with the publication of that book, he would be able to pay off his creditor $100,000. However, the writing turned out to be his ¡°most laborious and sometimes agonizing task¡± (Smith 143). What he finished was a novel called Following the Equator, which became ¡°the dullest of his books¡± (De Voto, ¡°Symbols¡± 143). But he would not admit that his literary genius had evaporated. He wrote obsessively and told his priest friend Joseph H. Twichell that he did not know he had so many stories to tell.
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