The Sociable Sam Clemens: Mark Twain Among Friends

Samuel Clemens joked in one of his lectures that he had met "uncommonplace characters . . . Bunyan, Martin Luther, Milton, and . . . others,"¹ but it is not a stretch to say that he knew most famous Americans and many notable Europeans, Australians, and other international figures between the Civil War and World War I. In 1881, he asked President-elect James A. Garfield to renew a political appointment as the District of Columbia's Recorder of Deeds for "a personal friend," Frederick Douglass.² In 1904, he mourned the death of African explorer henry Stanley, writing, "I have known no other friend & intimate so long, except John hay," then Secretary of State.³ In the 1890s he not only discussed psychology with William James (and likely with Sigmund Freud as well) but also befriended the teen-aged Helen Keller, noting with mock envy, "If I could have been deaf, dumb, and blind I also might have arrived at something."⁴ As early as 1892, however, his social network had already grown so wide that eleven-year-old jean Clemens, impressed that her parents had received a dinner invitation from Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany following events with other dignitaries, remarked, "Why papa, if it keeps going on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody left for you to get acquainted with but God."⁵ Yet sociable Sam Clemens was more than a famous man who knew other famous folks. The biographical, literary, and cultural significance of his personal and professional relationships drives a large scholarly literature.⁶ But his sociability deserves attention on its own, because from the start of his career, his writings grew from and through interactions with others.

Take "Sociable jimmy," a character sketch that Mark Twain drafted in a hotel room, fifty-three lectures into a five-month, seventy-six town tour in 1871. Jimmy was probably six- or seven-year-old William Evans, who had charmed Clemens when delivering a room-service dinner. Jimmy's comic naïvete matched his status as an African American youth with little power yet much knowledge—at least of facts, if not their significance. He confessed that his father "used to git drunk, but dat was befo' I was big . . . . Jis' takes one sip in de mawnin' now." He shared the local knowledge that "deys been cats drownded in dat water dat's in yo' pitcher." And he explained that "Some folks says dis town would be considerable bigger if it wa'n't on accounts of so much lan' all roun' it dat ain't got no houses on it."⁷ The glow of Jimmy's talk stayed with him, as he reported two weeks later when learning that his wife Olivia and a neighbor had both liked the sketch, which he had sent her for safekeeping. "I think I could swing my legs over the arms of a chair & that boy's spirit would descend upon me and enter into me," he wrote.⁸ And when "Sociable Jimmy" appeared in the New York Times on November 29, 1874, Mark Twain declared its significance as fidelity to life: "I wished to preserve the memory of the most artless, sociable, and exhaustless talker I ever came across," he explained in the introduction. "I took down what he had to say just as he said it—without altering a word or adding one."⁹ That's probably not the case, to judge by his tinkering with the representation of another African American oral performance, published the same month and with same truth claims, but the unself-conscious talk in "Sociable Jimmy" was so novel that one scholar views the boy as the model for Huck Finn.¹⁰

That claim is also debatable, since Sam's older sister Pamela, like most from their home town, recognized Huck as Tom Blankenship, son of the town drunk.¹¹ Clemens endorsed that view in a letter to a childhood friend, but in public he always insisted that Huck had no one model,¹² and he mocked Hannibal for honoring Blankenship's house as Huck's, noting that it "saves the...