Books: Great American Boyhood

SAM CLEMENS OF HANNIBAL (335 pp )—Dixon Wecter—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

“The Adventures of Tom Sawyer . . . was made by Mr. Mark Twain,” explains Huckleberry Finn in opening the tale of his own adventures, “and he told the truth mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

Mainly, and with no more stretch than a sly grin puts on a freckle, Huck was right. The golden dream of boyhood, the soft summer’s day that Mark Twain invoked for the world in Tom and even more richly in Huck, was in fact an almost total recall of the halcyon days of his own childhood.

The real Tom Sawyer was very like the real Mark Twain, a redheaded little river rascal named Sam Clemens, with a gleam in his eye and a snake in his pocket, who lived in the drowsy Mississippi River town of Hannibal, Mo. in the 1840s. In Sam Clemens of Hannibal, the story of Sam’s Great American Boyhood is told for the first time in full detail by the late Dixon Wecter, editor of the still unpublished* Mark Twain Papers.

Dreams in the Stable. To begin with, and for a long time afterward, Sam, as even his own mother admitted, was “a poor looking object to raise.” However, “I felt it my duty.” she said, and she did; for, as Sam explained. Jane Clemens was a woman tender as she was brave—the kind who “always warmed the water before drowning the kittens.” She was also, as Sam said seriously, a “beautiful spirit” with a “great heart” and an “enchanted tongue.” From her he drew the mother wit and nerve that carried him to success.

Right from the first, Sam had what must have struck his family as an unusual sense of humor. Almost as soon as he could walk, he grabbed a handful of worms and happily devoured them. Mother topped that gag with a dose of salts. Soon after that, Sam took to sleepwalking, wound up one night in a stable, “astride the old gray horse”. . . yelling like a wild Indian and [thinking] he was running a race.”

Next, the family endured a period of trial by water. Six times he was hauled out of the neighboring creek, “in a substantially drown [sic] condition.” Mother remained calm. In the manner of Tom’s Aunt Polly, she reflected: “People who are born to be hanged are safe in the water.”

Saints of Skulduggery. Sam soon moved into a wider field—school. Pockets bulging with Sawyerian equipment (“Fishhooks, twine, white alleys and other marvels, Barlow knives, jew’s-harps, hunks of maple sugar, birds’ eggs, potato guns, and perhaps a picture of Adam and Eve without a rag”), Sam was soon leader of the school gang and the bane of his teacher’s existence.

But it was after school, in company with the comrades he later canonized as saints of skulduggery, that Sam executed his really important exploits. There was, for instance, the diligent excavation on Holliday Hill (the Cardiff Hill of the books) that freed at last the great boulder which, as Sam and a friend gazed in ecstasy, shot down the slope, scattered a woodpile, leaped over a passing dray and wrecked a cooper’s shop—at which point the boys felt a call from elsewhere, and went there.

Most of Sam’s family were “abandoned Presbyterians,” and so church was also available as a place for mischief. Once Sam and a friend were almost caught playing euchre in the parish house. In desperation they stuffed the pack into the sleeves of the preacher’s “baptising robe.” Next time the preacher was immersing converts, the cards slid out of his sleeve one by one, and floated serenely down the river, “the first cards being a couple of bowers and three aces.” Caught and flogged, Sam (or maybe it was the friend) sobbed through his tears: “I don’t see how he could help going out on a hand like that.”

Models in Manuscript. Author Wecter brings to life the real models of dozens of people and incidents in Mark Twain’s books. Huck Finn was Tom Blankenship, the happy, shiftless son of a ne’er-do-well drunk. Sid Sawyer was modeled after Sam’s own brother Henry. “Injun Joe,” sometimes known as “Injun Aleck,” was a drifter from Oklahoma who, according to rumor, had once “somehow lost his interest” in his mother, and hanged her. There really was a cave downriver from Hannibal, too, and Sam himself was once lost in it with a young lady.

Sam’s glorious boyhood came to a close all too early. When he was eleven, his stern, unpractical father died a bankrupt, and after a year or so Sam was put to the printer’s trade to help support the family. There was variety in the shop, all right (as when a cow wandered in one night, upset a tray of type, munched on several ink-rollers, wandered out again), but the golden days were almost over, and Sam began to wonder how he could ever get them back. Wecter’s book leaves him still wondering, as he wondered all his life, until at last he reached the conclusion that “I should greatly like to re-live my youth, and then get drowned.”

*One of the stories never published in full, Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, and one that has never appeared in a book, Letter from the Recording Angel, both twanging good Twain skepticism, will be issued together next week in Report from Paradise (Harper: $2.50).