#4 in a series (read the whole blog)

It’s serendipitous that this book opens with a piece called "The Tennessee Land." For it sheds light on two subjects that were to haunt Clemens for his entire life – divided identity and money.

As I mentioned earlier, this volume starts with a lot of material, titled “Preliminary Manuscripts and Dictations 870-1905,” that does not form part of the autobiography proper. As I also mentioned, I don't think that distinction is that important. Anyway, "The Tennessee Land" is the first piece in that preliminary section.

“The Tennessee Land” was written by Samuel Clemens in 1870, when he was 35 years old, just married and had recently published his first book, “The Innocents Abroad.” A weird and wonderful send-up of the Grand Tour, “The Innocents Abroad” sold more copies than any other of Clemens’ books in his lifetime and remains one of the best-selling travel books of all time.

It is also one of the founding texts of a uniquely American strain of writing. Whether they know it or not, every gonzo journalist, every non-fiction writer who hides behind the mask of an unreliable narrator, every self-referential, self-ironizing virtuoso like David Foster Wallace, is coming out of the slick young dude from Hannibal, Mo.

The piece – given its title by Clemens biographer Albert Bigelow Paine -- concerns a “monster tract of land” that Clemens’s father, John Marshall Clemens, bought before Samuel was born. The 75,000 acre parcel cost Marshall $400, which “was a good deal of money to pass over at one payment in those days – at least it was so considered away up there in the pineries and the ‘Knobs’ of the Cumberland Mountains of Fentress county, East Tennessee.”

Marshall Clemens was sure that the vast land would provide for his heirs forever. He was wrong, and for his son Samuel, the purchase “laid the heavy curse of prospective wealth upon our shoulders…It was a woeful mistake, but fortunately he never knew it.”

Twain (I’m just going to call him that from now on – I’ve now established that I do know that his real name was Samuel Clemens, and Mark Twain is the way I think of him) writes that his father was wiped out by “the great financial crash of ’34…He was a proud man, a silent, austere man, and not a person likely to abide among the scenes of his vanished grandeur and be the target for public commiseration.”

So he and his family “journeyed many tedious days through wilderness solitudes, toward what was then the ‘Far West,’ and at last pitched his tent in the almost invisible little town of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri. He ‘kept store’ for several years, but had no luck, except that I was born to him.”

Love that last clause. Twain sticks little wisecracks like that in everywhere, even in the most austere pieces. He can’t help himself. He would have made bunny-ears behind Saint Peter as he was ushered through the Pearly Gates.

The self-taught lawyer moved to the nearby town of Hannibal, “rose to the dignity of justice of the peace…and was doing tolerably well, for that age of the world…when ill fortune tripped him once more.” Twain’s father stood security for some debts held by another man, who defaulted, leaving him holding the bag and ruining him again. He died soon thereafter, age 49. His father’s ruin, Twain writes, “condemned his heirs to a long and discouraging struggle with the world for a livelihood.”

The theme of divided identity runs through Twain’s writings.

Huck and Tom, the id and ego of Twain himself, are the most famous manifestations of this theme, but there are many others. According to Twain biographer Ron Powers (I’m reading his 2005 book “Mark Twain: A Life” now, and it’s fantastic), this obsession can be traced to Marshall Clemens.

“The extraordinary twins conjoined in Marshall Clemens’s frame were contradictory almost beyond caricature,” writes Powers.

“One was the Judge: an educated, eloquent, ambitious man, claimant to the British peerage, a natural civic leader, apostle of the Southern honor code, a visionary of the America to come…The Judge’s aims were constantly thwarted by Marshall, the proud idealist and frustrated intellectual whose honor code was exploited by lesser, stupider men; who wrecked his health at an early age, married a woman vengefully on the rebound, proved too visionary by a century in his greatest land investment, stood behind bad loans, and thus remained poor for most of his life.”

And that early experience of poverty, along with the chimera of vast wealth conjured up the monster Tennessee land, stayed with Twain forever. His obsession with money, his contradictory and paradoxical attitudes towards wealth, his near-tragic addiction to speculating in doomed ventures like Paige’s typesetting machine – all can probably be traced to his father’s strange and sad career.

More soon.