Monday, August 24, 2015

Mark Twain and Orion Clemens


I taught a six week class this summer on Mark Twains 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 brothers 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 brothers 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 Fannings 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.

26 comments:

  1. Hardly heard anything about Orion. of course, I've read a fair amount of Twain's writings but not a lot about him.

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    1. Having been a student of Nevada, I've known a little more about him, but nothing about his later life.

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  2. You taught a 6-week class? Wow! Good for you! I always hear that I should teach a class about writing, etc. but I'm not sure if I'm the public face-to-face teaching type. It's always fascinating to learn about Mark Twain so thanks for this post! :)

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    1. Yeah, I have been known to teach a class or two...

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  3. I've read Roughing It many years ago and need to reread it. I also need to add this book to my every growing list. Thanks for the review.

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    1. Roughing It is a fun book that I read while heading West the first time, but it is not nearly as polished as list later works.

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  4. This subject for your class sounds incredibly interesting, I rather like learning behind the scenes life like this, although you just never know how much is perhaps a bit of fiction! I would like to hope the poor kitty story was in fact fiction, but I know this does happen even now. So very sad. Thanks for sharing Orion with us!

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    1. It also might have been a story which MT told to make his brother look bad.

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  5. Sibling relationships.....always complicated!

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  6. What an interesting and tumultuous sibling relationship.

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    1. It had to be tough for the older brother to live in the younger's shadow (Orion was 10 years older)

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  7. You have to be very sceptical when you are dealing with an artist of self promotion such as Twain. Being a well got young man with a brother's support wasn't really in the tram tracks of the self-made-man.
    But even if it was so, following the Fanning argument, the fluidity of economic life from the 1830 up to, well, the first world war was profound. But at all points along that timeline there was areas of profound growth. So you could very easily have brother A working as a town civil servant while the town was in the midst of a mining boom in 1850s only to have the town go bust. And if his investment, or just his job could vanish, probable both. Then you have the land expansion booms, only to end up 30 years later with fully a quarter the numbers of farmers.
    Then you have the religious aspect. Now I'm no expert on religion in the US beyond where it folded into general life. But I do know it would've been remarkably easy to fall foul of orthodoxy unless you were involved in the east's towns. Indeed, given the migrations into the west from Europe as well as the States east of the Great River it would've been downright impossible for a relatively uneducated preacher to hold a line.

    For what it's worth I'd try the State archives in Sacramento. If the brother negotiated a boundary it's likely a profile sits of him in some file. Money and prestige involved you see. :-)

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    1. The boundary issue is well documented--the 2500 page autobiography of Orion is what would be really a find, but it was probably burned as Twain spoke about burning parts of it.

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    2. Profiles are never compiled by the principals, nor even those close to them. If there was anything new to be found it would be in ancillary files.
      The curse with historical research these days is someone is ALWAYS digging in archives and worse finding tiny fragments which can sent a theory off around acute corners.

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  8. Sounds fascinating! I've long been a Twain fan. I took a class devoted to his work in college. A genius but a very strange guy. It's no stretch to imagine him as resentful towards a brother.

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    1. He did idolize his sister, Pamela,and his other two brothers died young and were lifted up in his eyes (actually he saw himself as responsible for both deaths)

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  9. Fascinating post, Sage. One containing puzzles I've long wondered about. Re. Orion Clemmens' excommunication, I believe it was thematized by this sentence transcribed from his interrogation by the Presbyterian session in Keokuk: "I consider it the duty of every man to think soberly upon these subjects, to make up his views satisfactorily to himself and then express them to others, in order that if he be in error he may be corrected and the truth reached through free, full and open discussion." Not the words of a fool, but of a keen mind dedicated to liberty and moral progress. From what his brother, Mark Twain, and others wrote of him I have always considered Orion Clemmens a highly intelligent and principled man who had a firm and practical understanding of his time.

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    1. It appears that even in his excommunication (which was not on moral grounds) he still took the high road. Of course, his moral stances often got him in trouble and made his brother made (Orion was a teetotaler in Nevada, which wasn't a popular position there then or today)

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  10. Terrific post! Your knowledge of the Clemmens family in general is quite impressive - I bet your summer class was a roaring success :-) Why on earth would Samuel have blamed himself for the deaths of his two younger brothers? Love that you post the moon phases...

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    1. Thanks for stopping by. Twain's first brother's death was when he was just a boy and it is mystery as to why he felt himself guilty of the death... But children often feel guilty for things they have no control over. The second brother, Henry, Twain had obtained a job for him on a steamboat. Twain then moved to another boat and the one his brother was on boiler exploded. Twain's boat was following it up the river and his brother lived for a few days (he was badly burned) and Twain was with him when he died in Memphis.

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  11. A different side of him! I had no idea Twain had ANY flaws...so this has been enlightening. I'd love to go to the Mark Twain house if I ever travel to New England again.

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  12. Nice review Sage !
    Of course I dont had any idea, only I read Mark Twain years ago.
    I would love read this book
    xo

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  13. This is really interesting. I didn't even know about "Twain's" brother!

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  14. I've yet to read Roughing It and I call myself a Mark Twain fan. Must correct this issue. And the book sounds interesting. It's hard to know the truth when people are involved.

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