Young Mark Twain

This story about Sam Clemens comes from “Dangerous Water,” by Ron Power (1999, Basic Books), one of two credible biographies that focus on his boyhood in Hannibal, Missouri. It happened in or around 1851, four years after his father died, and a dozen years before Clemens took up the name Mark Twain.

Sixteen-year-old Sam was working as a typesetter and sometime editor at the Hannibal Courier, a failing little sheet through which he was trying to support his widowed mother and six siblings. Sam’s boss, Joseph Ament, was “penny-pinching, peevish and sour-tempered,” and paid Sammy nothing but meals at the Ament home, a place to sleep on the Courier floor, and an alleged two suits of clothes a year.

Ament actually paid him one suit a year, castoffs, which were so big, Twain wrote half a century later, that “I had to turn up his pants to my ears to make them short enough” to wear. In a rival newspaper, a few years later, Sam described Ament as “a diminutive chunk of human meat.”

Sam’s mother sent him to work for Ament in 1848, when Sammy was 12. “His original duties were to fetch water, build the fire in winter, and learn what he could about setting type.”

So Ament, not a scrupulous newsman, could hardly crack the whip when he turned over editing duties from time to time to 16-year-old Sammy, and the skinny little redhead played a few pranks in the Courier’s pages.

For instance: Printing an epistolary feud between two supposed Hannibal residents, both of whom Sam invented. Or picking fights with editors in nearby towns, to see how they liked it, and whether it could bolster either newspaper’s circulation.

His best gag came when Alexander Campbell, a leader of the Christian sect known as the Campbellites, passed through town and delivered a stem-winding sermon on the town square, about Hell, Heaven and associated topics.

(The Campbellites espoused “primitive Christianity,” one of whose tenets was to purge music from churches. That doesn’t sound really “Christian,” does it, to gin up a fight over sacred music? Or are such fights an essential part of modern religions?)

The dazzled townspeople took up a collection and delivered $16 to the Courier offices, to have the sermon printed up as a booklet: the most money the Courier staff had ever seen in one place.

After setting up the eight-page pamphlet, Sam and his fellow apprentices “were aghast to find that they had left out a couple of key words.” So Sam and his co-conspirator, Wales McCormick, reduced the name “Jesus Christ,” which appeared in the same lines as the missing words, to “J.C.”, and the lines fit. Then they sent the proof sheets to the illustrious preacher.

Within the hour, Campbell showed up at the printshop, hurling invective at the young compositors.

“So long as you live, don’t you ever diminish the Savior’s name again,” he blustered. “Put it all in.”

So they reset the final three pages of the jeremiad, and “restored the Savior’s name to its fullest majesty,” giving it an extra syllable that has lasted to this day. They named him Jesus H. Christ.

Is that blasphemous? I don’t believe so. The Campbellites might disagree.

In the final chapter of “Dangerous Water,” citing a story in the May 30, 1902, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Powers describes the ecstatic reception Mark Twain received on his last visit to Hannibal: a secular hero, awaited and followed by adoring crowds. He may have been the first national celebrity who was neither war hero nor politician or athlete. (The first World Series was in 1903.)

When I told this story to my friend Brooks as we strolled around the dog park, he recalled the “Left Behind” books and movies, about the few “true Christians” who survive after everyone else on the planet disappears.

“What if instead of the people, all the churches disappeared?” Brooks asked. “What would happen then?”

We decided that the survivors would hunt down someone else to worship — Christian or not, worthy or not — anyone, so long as they had someone or something to worship.

Who do you suppose someone like that might be?