The Twainian Volume 17 Number 2 (1958)
A VISIT TO FLORIDA IN THE YEAR PAINE PUBLISHED THE “BIOGRAPHY” 1912
(The following article is not generally available and has been referred to by many writers. Repeated inquiries justify the republication of the article almost in it’s entirety. Parts which are not reprinted herein have definitely been of little value to later writers and historians, parts largely speculative and not proven, or better treated by later writers such as Paine, DeVoto and Wecter).
A VISIT TO FLORIDA
(Birthplace of Mark Twain. The Story of the Great Humorist and Philosopher and his Equally Whimsical Uncle—Judge John S. Quarles.
T. V. Bodine in the Kansas City Star, May 19, 1912.)
In the much that has been written of Samuel L. Clemens and his genius, one very important and significant fact, it would appear, has been overlooked, or at least not stressed. Critical and literary curiosity has not yet prompted the savants to search for the beginnings of his greatness in the racial and spiritual ancestry, if the term is permissible, from which he sprang. Almost as little attention has been paid to the environmental influences of his early boyhood at the Quarles home near the picturesque village of Florida, Missouri, where he was born. The debt he owed to both was incalculable and is acknowledged in a way with the evident love in which, in his biography, he lingers over the days he spent in the home of his whimsical and kindly uncle and the scenes and events that made up the poetry of an untrammeled childhood.
Having in a general way uncovered the racial springs that fed his genius, one finds a satisfaction no less keen in tracing his literary beginnings and in determining the influence early environment exerted in shaping his thought and enriching his imagination. How deeply he imbibed and to what extent he was saturated with the unwritten literature of his people during his summer visits as a boy back to the home of his uncle, John Quarles near Florida, will perhaps never be fully realized. Those unfamiliar with the early life of Mr. Clemens have a vague notion that he was taken as a mere infant to Hannibal and never returned to the hamlet, where, by some dreary accident, he happened to be born. This is wholly incorrect and a notion which he never gave any direct encouragement. As a matter of fact, long periods of the most impressionable days of his life were spent at the home of his uncle near Florida, and John A. Quarles himself was no inconsiderable man. Of him the king of American letters himself says: “I have not come across a better man. I was his guest for two or three months every year until I was 11 or 12 years old, but I have never consciously used him or his wife in a book. It was a heavenly place for a boy, that farm of my Uncle John’s.” He goes on to describe the house and the Negro cabins, tells of the wonderful stories he heard there, and dwells on the beauty of a virginal land, but is quite naturally unconscious of the yet more definite influence those visits had upon the formation of the man he was to be. It was at the Quarles home he drank in the folklore of his race transplanted across seas, rivers and mountains, and became saturated with the poetry of them after it had been filtered through the imagination of the black bondmen. It was a reserve he could and did draw on through life to the world’s enrichment, and it is curious today, after the lapse of sixty years, to note with what persistency this same folklore survives in the vicinity of his birthplace. Those who remember to have read the ghost story of “The Golden Leg,” or to have heard the humorist himself in his early lectures elaborate its harrowing details to so unghostly though none the less startling denouncement, can hear the original from the lips of Monroe county Negroes today.
Yet he was subjected to even a more potent influence than that which an impressionable boy would develop listening to a wealth of legends as old as the race itself. That influence was the personality of John A. Quarles himself, whom, in time the Nation’s chief man of letters, with his big features, leonine head and long gray hair, even came to look like.
John Marshall Clemens, as his son has often made clear, was an absent minded, kind hearted visionary who dreamed dreams that never came true, and who as a result was a failure in a material sense a Colonel Sellers in real life, as his project to navigate Salt River demonstrated, and without doubt the original of that famous composite. The humorist’s mother, be it said reverently, and in the face of excusable romancing on his own part, was of the untutored pioneer type, unimaginative, or at least, as was too often the case despite our lamentations over vanished standards, dwarfed and arrested in her growth by overmuch of childbearing and the care of a too numerous progeny. Quarles was practical and efficient and seemed to have always entertained a kindly solicitude regarding his impractical brother-in-law and family, preceding them from Tennessee and sending for them soon afterwards— in the summer of 1832. He was a strong, virile, capable man, with sympathy and imagination, and is remembered today in the county where Mark Twain was born, not by reason of his name being associated with the humorist’s boyhood—which is all too frequent—but because of a certain individuality and potentiality of his own. Countless legends survive regarding him and in all we are treated to a pleasant surprise. In them we find that same whimsicalness of humor, the same sudden and delicious contrast, the same kindly philosophy, and in opposition the same deep seated brooding over the eternal question that distinguished his famous nephew.
His stories as a candidate for county judge, as a storekeeper at Florida, and later, during the Civil War, as landlord of the old Virginia House at Paris, the county seat, are told and retold by the older men today without thought or consciousness that they may be refringing on copyright or that the anecdotes in question had ever secured a larger audience than that immediate and present.
“The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was originally a Tennessee amphibian and was brought to Missouri by Judge Quarles, the story, along with many others just as funny, being weighed out with sugar and coffee as sold while a merchant at Florida, where he now lies buried. It was shrewdly aimed, along with the rest, to draw trade, and did, but not enough as the judge himself often remarked, to enable him to get the farm he had put into the store out of it. As told to him it was to the effect that he was out hunting wild turkeys in the Tennessee woods and was overtaken by rain, being forced to seek shelter in a deserted Negro cabin. While sitting there alone he noted a toad hopping across the floor toward him, and to amuse himself and pass the time began to catch random flies and toss them into the ever open mouth of the frog. When the flies gave out he invaded his shot pouch and began to toss the shot, one by one. The frog made no fine discriminations and swallowed them as readily as he had the flies, with the result that the judge was soon out of shot. Nothing else being offered the toad determined to wend his way, and here the funny part of the story, though not the funniest, came in. It tried several times to put the impulse into action, but the shot weighed it down, and it finally gave up and sat blinking in settled despair. A yellow jacket came sailing close by about this time and catching it and stripping it of its wings— so he said, and we must believe him—the judge tossed it toward the toad. The latter caught it and as it gulped down the live morsel received a farewell dig from the dying insect’s business end. In an instance, with one titanic effort—for a frog—the toad had expelled the uncordial guest and with it all the judge’s shot, enabling him to return home with a load in his gun and in no violation of an ancient superstition among hunters. Fifty years after, the story was told in a newspaper published in a Nevada mining town and made two continents roar. Never was literary genealogy more clear.
Another of the judge’s favorite stories to his customers was in regard to the trees in Tennessee, which, he said, were so high and so crooked that the lightning never struck them, being lost before it could reach the ground. You will immediately recall Mark Twain’s account of the circular driveway and the trouble his wife had with him concerning it. It was the captain of a Federal troop at Paris during the war who complained bitterly of the condition of a roller towel at the judge’s hotel, which had done valiant service the day before when a command of rebel guerillas had visited the famous hostelry.
“Sir,” responded the landlord, “two hundred men have wiped on that towel and you are the first to complain.”
Many another story, as quaint and as whimsical, is told of him, but there was another and serious side to the man whose name in the county now has vanished save as it is worn by a few Negroes who date back to the cabins Mr. Clemens so lovingly describes. The question of human destiny, the why, the whence, the whither, was always with him. Unable to reconcile it with the accepted dogmas of his people, and driven by the promptings of a vigorous mind and kindly heart, he became a “Universalist.” What that meant during the days following the revival of Paulinian teaching in the valley country, begun by Campbell, Stone and Raccoon John Smith in the early ’30’s and ’40’s, we of today cannot appreciate. It was even worse than being an “Infidel,” and often converted a man into a social pariah, though Judge Quarles did not suffer this fate, his natural kindness and his usefulness as a man and citizen saving him from the common penalty.
We are still told that he “could write a good hand,” which was the greatest accomplishment and the most coveted grace of his day, and that he was often called in to arbitrate differences among warring members of the community. The story still exists of an uprising against the Negroes by young hotheads in the vicinity of Florida, the slaves being charged not only with theft, but murder, and how he quieted it. It was this potentiality that doubtless saved him from religious persecution. In his religious attitude the resemblance between the two men is again discernable. Broken by many griefs, Clemens never seemed to lose the buoyancy and the trust which were his racial birthright. It has been said that his philosophy, while it flayed sham and championed truth as the supremest virtue, left a sense of final loneliness and lack of hope; that to the seer overborne by grief there was no island valley of Avilon, no place of healing somewhere beyond. This is a superficial understanding. Like all men close to the heart of the infinite there was no cocksureness in his thought. A heaven with metes and bounds, such as Milton laid off, in geographical survey fashion, was to him as grotesque as it was to John A. Quarles, and in Captain Stormfield it excited his gentle, yet always penetrating, satire. Again, like his kindly old uncle, he had the larger and fuller hope, and in the very goodness of things found the answer to the eternal question.
Eugene Lampton, aged 76, a first cousin of Mark Twain and his boyhood playmate at Florida, is the humorist’s only surviving relative in the section of Missouri where he was born and grew to manhood. Lampton is a preacher of that same Paulinian gospel, softened and made more tender by his sense of the human need, and is now filling what is probably his last pastorate in the church of Disciples at Madison, Monroe County. He is a gentle, sweet faced old man and shows the same poetry whimsicalness, the same facile humor and the same talent for details that distinguished his cousin in dealing with the events of those far-off days. The two met for the last time at Hannibal in 1901 and what occurred is best told in the preacher’s own words, as it may throw additional light on a mooted subject and strengthen the contention that humor and poetry were a racial as well as a family inheritance:
His Learning to Hyperbole.
“Sam said that he remembered distinctly having wrestled with me on a bed at grandmother’s on which some kinsman at the time lay dying. I knew he didn’t remember any such thing, but there was a little grain of truth in most everything he said, if you were patient enough to look for it. We were about 5 years old at the time and mother said we were always wrestling about on the floor like a couple of young bear cubs, the occasion in question was no exception, but was on the floor, instead of the bed and no one was dying. The story of him being left behind when the family moved to Hannibal—forgotten—was another one I recalled and admonished him about at the time. The real facts of the case are this:
We lived in the country about four miles from Florida and Uncle John and Aunt Jane, with their family, lived in the town itself, where Uncle John was in business. It was their custom every Saturday or so to come out to our house and remain over Sunday. On the occasion in question Uncle John could not come on Saturday and sent Aunt Jane ahead with the rest of the children, telling her he would keep Sam, then 5 years old, with him and bring him out Sunday morning. Sunday morning came, and with it Uncle John, but no Sam. Immediately there was a commotion—I remember the incident perfectly—and when importuned about the missing boy by his anxious mother, the father, a very absent minded man, declared frankly that he had fed him that morning and had then come away and forgotten him. Father immediately got on a horse and went to Florida and in a couple of hours returned with the future great, unperturbed, sitting safely on the saddle before him. There was more rejoicing over the lamb that had been lost and found than over all the rest of us children who had never been forgotten. It was a way Sam had of occupying the center of the stage, and he kept it up through life. This is the truth of the story about him being left behind when the family moved to Hannibal. As you see, he had some foundation. He never prevaricated outright, and sometimes I think he must have seen Henry walking near a bed of coals and sat near while grandfather stirred a toddy. Other corrections ought to be made.
Perhaps the one and most notable thing the elder Clemens did, or at least the thing by which he will be longest remembered in the county of Monroe, resulted in it being deprived by legislative enactment of a row of its richest sections along the southern and northern borders. He was among the first to agitate the possibilities of Florida as “The head of navigation” on Salt River, then as now a negligible but beautiful little stream, and later led the fight to make Florida the county seat. This failed, Paris being centrally located, and he then launched the project to divide the county east and west, leaving Paris as capital of the west half and making Florida the capital of the east half. It persisted several years after he moved to Hannibal and finally, there being politicians in those days as now, resulted in the artifice of cutting off a row of sections on the north and south ends as a compromise. This left the county too small to divide further and laid the county seat fight forever. Audrain and Shelby counties profited and a look at the offset in the northwest corner of the county as it lies today will show how the necessary amount of rich prairie was taken. The Monroe Countians even then were true Bourbons and never forgave the ravishment. The part of the population ceded to Shelby maintained moral allegiance to the mother county until a new generation came on, and the cut-off is still looked on as a miniature Alsace-Lorraine. The “compromise” ruined the political career of one of the brightest men and ablest lawyers the county and the state had in those days—Major Howell. His colleague in the matter was Major Penn, father of that Miss Arzella Penn, now Mrs. Fowkes of Hannibal, who was the humorist’s ideal of feminine beauty as a boy. He fared better.
Florida a Place Apart.
With the settlement of the county seat fight, the removal of Clemens with his restless and disturbing spirit, and the realization on the part of the people that Salt River was not navigable and could never be made so, Florida, as a possibility, began to wane, though remaining a trading point of some importance until 1869, when the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad was built through the county and left it ten miles to the south. Following that it became a prey to the slow decay that saps inland towns deprived of daily communication with the world outside. This isolation was rendered more pronounced with the advent of the rural route and the abolishment of the local postoffice and the substitution of a daily mail route from Stoutsville, a hated and modern rival on the road ten miles north. Bitter hurt as added to humiliation a few years later when Stoutsville, overconfident, tried also to move the historic Masonic lodge to the railroad, urging that members there should not be subjected to the inconvenience of riding ten miles to lodge. The grand lodge of the state saved the birthplace of Mr. Clemens this last cruel indignity by chartering a separate lodge at Stoutsville and leaving the original body at Florida intact. It still meets the first Friday night before the new moon in each month, free from cowans and eaves-droppers, and the men who make up its membership are for the most part sons and grandsons of those whose names appear on its ancient charter. Race solidarity has been preserved at Florida, and its very isolation has served to preserve the atmosphere of a former day, to save it, as the sentimentalist views it from the blight of too much modernity. Barring diminution in its population, it is today pretty much as it was seventy-five years ago. Though in one of the biggest and most progressive counties in the state and itself in the heart of a rich farming community, it seems of itself and apart, a tiny spot in the great valley and onsweeping industrialism has passed by and left untouched.
Seen on a June day (the summer sun shines softly there) it seems like some old hidalgo drowsing over delectable and never-to-be relinquished memories, oblivious to the decay about it and ignorant of the on-pressing life beyond its doorway. One feels instantly the all-pervading indolence and is struck at a glance with the beauty even of its dilapidation-scattered cabins and old houses, now deserted, with sections of weather boarding torn off. It nestles like some picturesque Welsh hamlet amid a circle of enclosing hills, and from the county seat twelve miles west, the view is panoramic. The first object to arrest attention on nearing it from this direction is a huge Indian mound from the summit of which rear two tottering white tombstones. The mound, old men say, was partially excavated once, and a huge jaw bone, along with spear heads, bits of pottery and other relies, recovered, but very early it was made a family burying plot by some pioneer with poetic eye—a Pollard—and prepares one today for entrance into the strange and enervating quietude that prevades the hamlet over which it has so long stood sentinel.
Far to the east the eye rests on the line of towering hills, still forest crowned and steeped in blue haze, which hold back the waters of the Mississippi, while to the south, across cliff and stream, shimmer the fat prairies which the humorist’s elders in that far off day thought would never be subjugated, but would remain forever a heritage for the cattle of their children’s children. The stubborn globe has been broken, the blue stem banished, the flies driven hence, and the land now sells for double the price of the farms in the timbered uplands and in the rich bottoms subject to overflow.
To the north is another chain of hills with hazy, tree clad summits, and standing in the village burying ground, a bare knoll in one corner of the town, one can hear on a June morning the chug of the big engines of the Missouri, Kansas & Texas Railroad, just behind them and ten miles away, as they make their way laboriously up the heavy grade toward the watershed forty miles distant, It is the only direct echo from the outside to reach Florida, the only audible hint it received that a life tense, pressing, dynamic, is moving on just beyond earshot. Glancing down the dusty street to the east again one catches a glimpse of the old Buchanan house, deserted now, perhaps haunted, but once the pride of the whole community, its social center and its one pretentious home. Here came John Marshall Clemens and his wife to sit, and here came the boy, Samuel Clemens, to play with the other children, all welcome within its hospitable shade. It is a 2-story brick, still in a fair state of preservation, and seems to resent the intrusion of the modern and busy little smithey nestling close to it as well as to view sullenly its later and more modern rival down the street— a small bank building built of concrete blocks,
It is the burying ground itself, however, that lends the finishing touch to the enchantment and that brings unconsciously a mingled inward suggestion of lines from Gray’s Elegy and Swinburne’s “Forsaken Garden.” Like all old burying grounds in country communities, it is overgrown with brambles, buck bushes and locust sprouts, fully half of its two hundred graves being hidden beneath such growth. Occasionally a cluster of wild roses clambers over some slanting slab, and save for the drone of a random and wandering bumblebee in golden doublet or the quick glide of a serpent beneath your feet somewhere, one hears no sound after stepping from the oak stile, the musical call of quail in a far-away meadow or the caw of a distant crow may break upon your ears, but aside from this there is only silence—silence pendulent, trembling, all pervading and desolate.
At the store you asked the former postmistress, a most courteous woman by the name of Miss Lizzie Young, now keeper of a small millinery stock, if Judge Quarles was not buried there, and she said:
“Yes—by the side of his first wife. The stone is down and leans against hers, and you will know it by the square and compass. He was a Mason, you know.”
“And the Clemens children ” you interrogate further.
“Oh, yes—poor little dears! They are buried there somewhere, but the weeds have covered them up. One was named Margaret. You will have to hunt for her.”
Margaret—Asleep, Forgotten.
And venturing forward with a secret fear of snakes and a feeling uncanny, to say the least of it, you spend the morning cutting brambles with your pocketknife, and are about to abandon the search when you uncover a tiny, tottering little double headstone with a fluted top. Bending, you read: “Margaret L. Clemens, aged 10, Born --18. Died --18.” The rest is obscured, and on the other side of the double stone the inscription has been eroded completely. The spirit is upon you, and looking up at the distant hills wrapped in June silence, you wonder— are bound to—which was the most fortunate after all, the girl child reaching her tender length in this desolate bed, asleep and forgotten these seventy-five years, or the younger brother who reached the great river yonder, and the world beyond it, drank of what it had to give of honor, joy, tears and laughter, and alike went his way, bowed by the eternal grief. The sense of what Carlyle called the “time spirit” oppresses you as it never did before.
You find the grave of Judge Quarles, as directed, under a pretentious little mausoleum of shimmering marble which he built to cover his wife, and stopping to decipher the crude legend beneath the ancient emblem wonder as earnestly if the world will ever be conscious of the really great debt it owes to him and these others sleeping here. Out of the buck bushes a dozen modern granite stones arise, polished and glistening, and the names of them can be found in any story of middle class English, Welsh or Scotch life. De Morgan uses them often—Vance, Philips, Vaughn, Poage, Meredith, Chowning, Utterback, Scobee—names associated in the humbler records with the subjugation of a continent. In the very center rises a granite shaft to that Doctor Chowning who furnished all his own medicine and whose doses were so generous that no one ever complained of not getting the worth of his money.
As you drive down the dusty road-way an old lady in a lace cap bows at you from a porch behind a mass of trumpet vines. Further down a slender, erect, military man with gray hair is standing beside his horse waiting for an old Negro who is ambling toward him from a neighboring cabin, and you fancy his eyes are fixed on that gently inclined roadway to the north, now flecked with sunshine, above whose rim nearly fifty years ago another great one burst for the first time on the country’s vision, The gray haired man is one of twelve hundred Confederate soldiers the county furnished in two years, and was in the command that fled before Grant at Florida and afterwards fought him to the death at Vicksburg. So runs the “Road to Yesterday,” and nor does it end until you reach the prairies with their red barns and windmills.
For forty years, by some strange magic, Florida managed to keep at least one “oldest person” who had known the Clemenses, all of whom performed one office or another at the birth of their remarkable child, but time, with a titanic effort, has at last removed the long list of god-mothers, close friends, etc., and since the death of Aunt Eliza Scott a few years ago all pretense in the matter has dropped.
A thousand years, practically, we are told, are required to make a genius, and after visiting Florida you are not surprised that the currents running through untold generations centered here in so poetic an environment, and emerging, threw into the lap of the world the “son of laughter and the heir to tears.” Indeed, the impression is strong that, having exhausted itself in one supreme effort, Florida has sunk into endless repose and relaxation and is drowsing the years away. The atmosphere is one in which a genius might well have been born, the race from which anything might have been and still may be expected.