Some Twain Sources and How They Affected His Sense of Self

Abstract

The idea of Twain’s sources usually leads back to the matter of Hannibal and the types Twain met on the Mississippi. People in Sam Clemens’ childhood obviously influenced his characters. Some of his other sources were literary, and especially in the medieval stories that his western friends found so far from his real vein he leaned on Lecky and Mallory and other historical sources. Back in America, he light-fingered a poem from a midwestern source for Emmeline Grangerford’s sentimental poetic effusion almost word for word. The literary comedian Charles Heber Clark, aka Max Adeler, launched an angry charge of plagiarism at Twain over A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Twain and Howells poured over Adeler’s The Fortunate Island (1882) to discover what might account for the substantial similarities Adeler had noted. Twain denied the charge despite the similarity of the plots.1 Plagiarism charges aside, however, I am more interested here in the alchemy by which Twain transmuted literary sources into his own gold. The three literary transmutations discussed here suggest how Twain’s mind worked to reformulate his experiences into visionary statements. The young reporter Mark Twain of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise was well aware of the grotesquely overinflated self-importance that infused every moment of the Nevada territorial legislative session, as suggested by his reworking of the Nevada seal into the figure of a jackass rabbit with the motto “Volens Enough, but not so Damn Potens” [Ready Enough, but not so Damn Able] in relation to their distance from the Union in the midst of its Civil War. Later, in 1867, his sense of this political quality found expression in “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress,” a piece which transforms a radical political speech into slapstick Juvenalian satire. That capability would bring