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Mark Twain: The Writer With the Texan Drawl Comment

Article by Satis

posted on 04.05.10

MARK TWAIN: The Man With the Texas Drawl (Satis Shroff

‘Mark Twain’s pith and wit are phenomenal in American literature,’ says Michael Shelden in his book Mark Twain: Man in White(Random House 522pp.,$30). The author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was a man named Samuel Langhorne Clemens and he used a psydonym: Mark Twain, which has become a household name in all English speaking countries.

Drawing from his own boyhood experiences, he wrote the story of a journey along the Mississippi river on a raft with his companion Jim, an Afro-American runaway. The two travellers encounter robbers, murderers, fighting families, tricksters and a motley of characters. And all that deepens the friendship between the pale Huck and Jim. Jim learns, at the end of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, that he is no longer a slave but a free man. A new vista opens up for Jim, for he can now work to buy his wife and children. How would Twain have reacted, or Jim for that matter, if he knew that Barak Obama is the US President now. I can see tears of joy and disbelief rolling down his cheeks. Thick friends they were: Tom, Huck and Jim, eh?

The story published in 1884 has become a classic. In Twain’s work, even mundane things in life are blown up and given importance. Mark Twain, excuse me, Sam Clemens was born in 1835 in a small community in Florida (Missouri). The family moved to a hamlet called Hannibal which had a port, and there began his life-long love with the Mississippi. His parents had four other children. The port town of Hannibal was made famous by Sam Clemens and he gave it the name St. Petersburg where his fictitious protagonists live. Mark Twain is actually the water depth measurement for the possibility of boat-passage. Mark One was 1 fathom deep (1,8m) and Mark Twain measured two fathoms (3,6m). If the depth of the river had no bottom it was certainly over 5 fathoms deep.

Samuel’s father was a Justice of Peace but when he was eleven years old his father died, which meant the end of Sam’s formal schooling. Since he had to earn money for the family, he started as a printer’s apprentice, which was the beginning of his close association with set types with words on them.

The US won a war in 1812 against the troops of Great Britain which resulted in a great immigration movement of pioneers from the east side of the US to the west. In six years after the war six western territories became states and slavery was still rampant in those days. In 1817 there were eleven (slave) free states and eleven slave states. The US Congress passed a law in1808 making it illegal to bring slaves into the US. However, the slaves and their children born before 1808 were still sold by slave traders.

Sam gathered his experience as a printer in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Washington DC an finally landed in the year 1850 in Iowa where he worked under his brother Orion. He began writing stories and humorous sketches for local newspapers and mags. He acquired his own style because he’d set and printed the works of many other writers. Even though he worked as a printer, he had his developed his ideas, dreams and fantasy. As a child Sam had always wanted to run a steamboat. Since there were no nautical maps, the beginners were taught by the river, and they had to learn the currents of the Mississippi during the different seasons, the pitfalls and changes brought on by the long river during floods and droughts. Sam made good use of his knowledge in Huck Finn’s adventures, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Life on the Mississippi.

We know that Mark Twain had a wonderful sense of humour, wrote biting satire and was also a bitter cynic. He had serious doubts about the stupidity of humans and was broken through his own tragedy. Nevertheless, he was a humanistic visionary and was ‘ahead of the rest’ like his protagonist Huckleberry Finn in a different and better society.

In 1853 Sam Clemens decided to leave for the US east coast since he was a qualified journeyman printer. In the year 1860 there were 3,000 different newspapers in the US. An illustration of the power of the written word can be witnessed in the story of Samuel Langhorne Clemens when he was working as a journalist as he spoke to a lady who was running his household. Young Samuel commented about the forthcoming harvest and said it’d be a poor one. She differed in her opinion. After that Sam wrote an article about an expected bad weather.

On the next day, the lady said to him, ‘You were right. It’s going to be a bad harvest, it was in the newspaper today.’

Samuel travelled the world. He went with his family to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, France and England to gather material for a humorous travelogue. He wrote, lectured and did book readings and was one of the greatest figures in America’s literary life. After the success of Tom Sawyer’s Adventures, he embarked on a journey per ship to Hamburg in April 1878 and undertook a trip to the middle mountains of Germany and the Black Forest. He loved to collect bombastic German words and wrote a travelogue with the title A Tramp Abroad in 1880. He had a southern drawl and could make the audience laugh their guts out. He had the dead pan technique for his humorous tales. His tales were tall at times.

Despite all the love, admiration and recognition from the society, he was very critical about it. He wanted to write out of his heart and spare no feelings and prejudices. Was Sam Clemes tired of Mark Twain towards the end? Samuel Langhorne Clemens died at the age of 74 on April 21, 1910.
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Autor Biographie

Satis Shroff ist Dozent, Schriftsteller, Dichter und Kunstler und außerdem Lehrbeauftragter für Creative Writing an der Albert Ludwigs Universität Freiburg. Er hat sechs Bücher geschrieben: Im Schatten des Himalaya (Gedichte und Prosa), Through Nepalese Eyes (Reisebericht), Katmandu, Katmandu (Gedichte und Prosa mit Nepali autoren) Glacial Whispers (Gedichtesammlung zwischen 1997-2010). Er hat zwei Sprachführer im Auftrag von Horlemannverlag und Deutsche Stiftung für Entwicklungsdienst (DSE) geschrieben, außerdem drei Artikeln über die Gurkhas, Achtausender und Nepals Symbolen für Nelles Verlags ‚Nepal’ und über Hinduismus in „Nepal: Myths & Realities (Book Faith India). Sein Gedicht „Mental Molotovs“ wurde im epd-Entwicklungsdienst (Frankfurt) veröffentlicht. Seine Lyrik sind in Slow Trains, International Zeitschrift, World Poetry Society (WPS), New Writing North, Muses Review, The Megaphone, Pen Himalaya, Interpoetry publiziert worden. Er ist ein Mitglied von Writers of Peace, poets, essayists, novelists (PEN), World Poetry Society (WPS) usw.

Satis Shroff lebt in Freiburg (poems, fiction, non-fiction) und schreibt über ökologische, medizin-ethnologische und kultur-ethnische Themen. Er hat Zoologie und Botanik in Nepal, Sozialarbeit und Medizin in Freiburg und Creative Writing in Freiburg und UK studiert. Da Literatur eine der wichtigsten Wege ist, um die Kulturen kennenzulernen, hat er sein Leben dem Kreatives Schreiben gewidmet. Er arbeitet als Dozent in Basel (Schweiz) und in Deutschland an der Akademie für medizinische Berufe (Uniklinik Freiburg). Ihm wurde der DAAD-Preis verliehen.
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