I taught a six week class this summer on Mark Twain’s Western Years using Roughing It as my primary guide. In addition to rereading Roughing It, I read this interesting study about the Clemens brothers.
Philip Ashley Fanning, Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers,
Partners, Strangers (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama, 2003), 268
pages, no photos or maps
In much of Mark Twain's writings, his older brother Orion comes
across as a bumbling idiot. Was he? AOrion
had led and supported the Clemens family from an early age when their father
died. He also held a responsible
position in the Nevada Territory, the territorial secretary, a political
appointment he earned for his support of the Republican Party in the 1860
election. Like his younger brother, who
became Mark Twain, Orion desired wealth, but he was known to be a man of
principle and stuck to his principles even when they led to financial
shortcomings and failures. Philip
Ashely Fanning examines the relationship between these two brothers, who were similar
in some ways, yet very different.
Orion was ten
years older than Samuel Clemens, so when their father died, he became the
patriarch of the family. He worked in
various positions along the towns of the Mississippi, as a newspaper man, a printer
and occasionally as an attorney. At a
young age when Sam quit school, he went to work for his brother. This arrangement didn't work well. One of the stories told is that Orion decided
there were too many stray cats hanging around the print shop and had Sam
collect them in a sack and drown them, something that bothered the younger
brother who always had a soft spot for cats.
In 1852, Sam quits and heads out on a trip though New York, Philadelphia
and Washington DC, funded by working in various print shops and newspapers
along the way. He occasionally wrote articles
that appeared in his brother’s newspaper. During this time, Orion broke
with the family and became convinced that slavery was evil. This lead to him becoming a Republican and
working for the party in the 1860 election of Abraham Lincoln.
Coming back from
his trip east, Samuel Clemens continues to work in print shops and for
newspapers, until he concocts a plan to go to South America. On his way down the Mississippi, to New
Orleans, he changes direction and accepts an offer to "learn the
river." In 1858, Sam became a riverboat
pilot, an occupation that paid more than the Vice President of the United
States. At this stage, the younger
Clemens usurps his other brother’s position as the family
patriarch. After the Republican victory
in 1860 and the beginning of the Civil War, their role reverses with Orion
being offered a political position in Nevada as Sam finds him out of work. The two of them head west, with Sam bankrolling
the trip from his savings. Later, when
Sam (now known as Mark Twain) begins to write an account of his western
adventures, he depends heavily on his brother's journals to reconstruct (in a
humorous manner) the stage trip across the country. This account was published in his second
book, Roughing It. In Nevada, the brothers parted ways for a
period. Twain's practical jokes and
attempts at humor created problems for his brother and sister-in-law. Sam headed to California and then to the
Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) while Orion headed back to the Midwest.
Over the next
couple of decades, Orion found himself having to depend on his younger
brother's generosity both for money and positions. Orion, who was always honest, finds himself
excommunicated from his church after having expressed his beliefs. At Sam's encouragement, he beings to write an
autobiography. Sam begins to insist on rewrites
as a way to protect his own self-constructed myth. Orion seems to have compiled, even though
much of the autobiography has been lost (and may have been burned by Twain or
lost by his biographer).
Fanning presents
some interesting ideas concerning how Twain related to his older brother. He offers some interesting possibilities
concerning the brothers father's death, suggests that after Twain had thoughts
about killing his brother, and that Orion's time in Nevada was much more successful
than Twain would later acknowledge (he was often the acting governor and as
such helped settle a border dispute with California). He also demonstrates how the younger brother
encouraged his older brother to go into the ministry, even though later in life
Orion would find himself excommunicated because of his unorthodox beliefs
Although Fanning’s
book raises a lot of questions concerning the two brother's relationship, he
also helps redeem Orion for the "bumbling idiot" characterization in
which he's often been portrayed. Unfortunately,
due to loss of material (especially that which was written by Orion) and the
inability to know what's happening inside the mind of another, we will never be
able to really know for sure if some of Fanning's ideas are correct, but it is
safe to assume that Orion needs to be assessed in a different light. This, Fanning does, while also showing how
Twain, a wonderful author, had a mean streak and was not above throwing his
brother under the bus in order to make himself look better.