Volume 45 - No. 26
July 2, 2015
By Frederick Gomez
Mark Twain had a live-in nurse whom he did not take a shine to, regardless of her good intentions. He even avoided voicing her name, and merely referred to her as “No. 5.” In his most charitable moment, Twain describes her in his memoirs, as such: “She was as healthy as iron, she had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, and the digestion of a quartz-mill. She ate everything in sight, and washed it down with freshnets of coffee, tea, brandy, whiskey, turpentine, kerosene – anything that was fluid.” (“A Family Sketch,” a 64page handwritten memoir, unpublished for over 100 years, and kept in a vault at the University of California, Berkeley.) That Mark Twain (born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910) was a master storyteller is universally agreed upon. That he is required reading in the pantheon of great literature, is a great testament to our sense of value and greatly benefits our higher seats of learning, worldwide. And we are all too-familiar with his accolades, such as literature’s Nobel Prize-winning author, Ernest Hemingway’s pronouncement that: “All modern American Literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. American writing comes from that. There has been nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
And while it is true that this same Hemingway accused Twain of adding literary ‘fluff’ to his Huckleberry Finn masterpiece, which Hemingway described as ‘cheating,’ Hemingway nevertheless remained steadfast that there is no perfect anything and he continued to chant that Mark Twain’s masterpiece should be read, then re-read each year after that, just to remind us that it is the best book America has ever produced. Hands down.
And yes, I have read everything written by Mark Twain and I have chuckled, along with the rest of the world, at his hilarious anecdotes and observations of life. There seems to be no shortage of Mark Twain books, as well as biographies of the great man from Hannibal, Missouri. However, neither the books he authored, nor the biographies about his life, ever really seemed to drill deep enough to tap the well of his existence. In plain language, I wanted to see the deeply personal man
The Paper - 760.747.7119
website:www.thecommunitypaper.com
email: thepaper@cox.net
behind the genius; the cause behind the effect; not a cursory glance of him that his biographers superficially sketched.
What formed him? Yes, Tom Sawyer is a peek into his youth – but what shaped Tom Sawyer? I knew there was a deeper – much deeper – private life that the world had never really seen. He was no ordinary man. He lived a life most un-ordinary. And The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn were, yes, glimpses of Mark Twain’s youth growing up along the mighty Mississippi, but these narratives were caricatures at best, and not the true genesis nor the formula that begat Mark Twain, himself. First off, it should be made clear that this article has no intention
of debunking Mark Twain, either as an author or as a human being. Primarily, because I see no justification to do so. No one is perfect, and we all have serious flaws. To state otherwise would be the height of human arrogance, not to mention blind, Biblical conceit. Come with me now, as we board a time machine and journey back, back into the past to confront and experience the real Mark Twain, and see a world few have peered into. A world which has been – by and large -- overlooked. Much of Mark Twain, until now, has never even seen the light of publication. Why is this so? Well, that was the way Mark Twain, himself, wanted it. The author, himself, made this demand: that his true, unedited autobiography was not to be published until 100 years after his death. Yes, all this, plus other unpublished documents have
Mark Twain Continued on Page 3
made their respective way into print, and now we can better view this extraordinary man whom many scholars have tagged, “The Quintessential American Novelist.”
But, much of what constitutes Mark Twain, has always been there, scattered about in bits and pieces that have long-been published, fifty, eighty, a hundred years and more. These various snippets of his life just needed to be sewn together to better form a mosaic of the man’s primary inner core. There is a long-standing catch phrase which states that, “The Child is the Father of the Adult,” which means a child’s upbringing often determines the outcome of the adult-to-be in later years. This certainly seems to have played a major role in forming