Mark Twain and the Fortune-Teller

[groovedaddy]

At the age of 25, Sam Clemens had every reason to feel pleased with himself. He was already one of the “aristocrats of the river” – a Mississippi steamboat pilot earning the princely sum of $250 a month. His job gave him the leisure to continue his process of self-education during slow stretches aboard, as he dipped into the works of Darwin and Macaulay, Suetonius and Shakespeare. The income gave him the wherewithal to live like a prince: in the finest New Orleans restaurants, the youth from Hannibal, Mo. dined on shrimp and oysters, washed them down with good brandy, smoked the very best cigars, and bought his brother Orion a splendid $12 pair of alligator-skin boots.

On this particular day, he had just finished a voyage aboard the side-wheeler steamboat Alonzo Child, bringing her safely 500 miles upriver from New Orleans. But apparently his mind still dwelt upon something that happened just before his departure. When he sat down to write Orion a long letter, he said nothing about the journey, but a great deal about a curious encounter in the Crescent City a week or two earlier: a visit to a psychic.

That Feb. 6, 1861 letter is one of few detailed ones to survive from a pivotal time in Sam Clemens’s life. It casts a strange – perhaps even unearthly – light on the complicated young man who would soon be Mark Twain.

He had known about the fortune-teller for a long time; the only reason he finally went to see her – as he assured his brother, a bit too emphatically to be wholly convincing – was that he was bored. Madame Caprell’s advertisements and handbills, which she distributed liberally throughout New Orleans, touted her gifts as a “clairvoyant” and “seeress.”

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/mark-twain-and-the-fortune-teller/?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=thab1

[bemildred]

1. Mr Clemens was known to just make stuff up, and from early on in his career too.

I still like Life On The Mississippi the best of his books.

[TlalocW]

2. Really not that much to do with the fortune-teller

More just a short overview of his life focusing in particular on the main issues of the time (slavery, war). It would have been just as interesting without mentioning the fortune teller, who sounds like every other fortune teller - a hack and a fake.

TlalocW

[FailureToCommunicate]

3. Just finished Huck Finn, which I'd had to read back in Jr high days and

it certainly didn't make the big impression on me then as it did now! We see things -even the same things- differently as we grow up. Surly that happened to Sam Clemens. People change, usually for the wiser.
"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a terrific read, once you get the hang of his dialect writing. (Highly recommended also is audio edition with Elijah Wood narrating)



thanks for posting this, groovedaddy!

[Rageneau]

4. Twain lived the most productive and interesting life ever lived.

I aver that no one can point to a more interesting life than Clemens's. In his time, he not only wrote about everything, he also went everywhere, knew everyone and did everything worth doing. He was the close friend of the high and low alike, was a deeply loving husband and father, and was, as his friend WD Howells said, "the Lincoln of our literature."

A great, great, great man.