Mark Twain's Letters: vol. 1, 1853-1866.

FROM SAM CLEMENS TO MARK TWAIN

SAM CLEMENS'S first surviving letter dates from his arrival in New York to see the World's Fair in 1853; it is devoted primarily to the hour he spent watching the two "Wild Men of Borneo," while the "infernal abolitionist" prompt the following: "I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people." The gullible 17-year-old bigot addressed these sentiments to his mother, and they were promptly printed in the Hannibal Journal by his brother Orion. Sam's juvenile racism underwent a radical reversal during the Civil War, but there was no need for an equivalent change in his writing style. Because Sam, coming from a newspaper family, often wrote with an eye for publication, even his earliest letters are exceptionally readable today.

The early letters frequently juxtapose inside jokes with travelogue descriptions, juggling the responsibilities of a roving reporter with those of son and brother. In fact, several letters to the Muscatine Tri-Weekly Journal (Orion had moved to Iowa) consist solely of snippets from the St. Louis papers and seem to be more in the line of hack reporting than correspondence. But, by the age of twenty, Sam had developed a splendid playfulness in writing to his female correspondents: one letter to his girlfriend, Annie Taylor, consists of a long description of "a religious mass-meeting of several millions" of bugs that accompanied him during late-night typesetting, ending with his combing "976 beetles" out of his hair the next morning.

Unfortunately, little correspondence survives from Sam's four years on the river, starting as a cub pilot at the age of 21: years described in some of the best writing produced by Mark Twain--or anyone else--in Life on the Mississippi. We do have an agonized letter telling his sister that their brother Henry had just died, from injuries suffered when a steamboat exploded--a steamboat that Sam had left earlier in the trip because of an argument with another pilot. Though the writing is conventional, even stilted, the pain, exhaustion, and survivor-guilt come through:

The horrors of three days have swept over me--they have blasted my youth and left me an old man before my time. Mollie, there are grey hairs in my head tonight. For 48 hours I labored at the bedside of my poor burned and bruised, but uncomplaining brother, and then the star of my hope went out and left me in the gloom of despair.

In 1861, with the beginning of the Civil War, the Union closed down the river. After serving two weeks as a Confederate volunteer (a stint undocumented in letters), Sam, at the age of 25, went west with Orion, who had received the government post of Secretary of the Nevada Territory. The next four years, spent in Carson City, Aurora, and Virginia City, are well represented here, in a nice counterpoint to the hilarious account in Roughing It. We see Sam endlessly speculating in mining stocks, whose price might rise or fall a thousand per cent in a month. (As a reporter, Sam often got stocks free, with the hope or understanding that he might puff the latest gold mine in the paper, and cause an immediate rise in the value of its stock.) The mining schemes he outlines in letters to Orion when they are separated by a few miles involve such complex wheeling and dealing that one turns with considerable relief to his letters home: "No flowers grow here, and no green thing gladdens the eye. The birds that fly over the land carry their provisions with them." He takes occasional camping trips to Lake Tahoe, always described with rapture: "The Lake seems more supernaturally beautiful now than ever. It is the masterpiece of the Creator."

Soon his reporting had the byline Mark Twain--briefly, he even used it to sign his letters home. Between practical jokes, comic reporting, and mock feuds with the Unreliable (a reporter for a rival paper), he became a local celebrity. He was elected governor of the Third House of the Legislature, a colorful group of fun-loving legislators, reporters, and other interested parties; he had a night-long spree with the older humorist Artemus Ward. After a drunken column offended a women's group, challenges were issued for several duels, none of which took place.

A visit to some California mining camps led to the "Jumping Frog" tale and the realization that with its publication in New York, Mark Twain might soon be famous. The immediate result was this postscript to a letter home: "You had better shove this in the stove--for if we strike a bargain I don't want any absurd 'literary remains' & 'unpublished letters of Mark Twain' published after I am planted."

This concern continued. After his mother's death most of his letters to her were burned by her executor, on instructions from Sam found in the letters themselves. Judging by those that survive, this was a loss to literature as well as to biography.

The Letters are part of the University of California's monumental edition of the Mark Twain papers. The editorial apparatus is a bit overwhelming, but very useful: counting introductions, exhaustive footnotes, appendices, textual commentaries, etc., more than half of these pages have been written by the editors, but everything seems justified. Many of the letters are collected for the first time, and even after this volume was set in print, these energetic researchers found one more, written to the Virginia City Enterprise to announce Twain's forthcoming lecture: "Our circus is coming. Sound the bewgag." For the record, after checking the textual apparatus, I'll correct the only typo I found ("lines" for "lies"), in a similar announcement several days later: "[I shall] disgorge a few lies and as much truth as I can pump out without damaging my constitution." Mark Twain's constitution was quite hale in those days.