Porkopolis, “Macfarlane,” and Coca (1856, 1857)
Chapter 20 of "Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs"
Chapter 20
Porkopolis, “Macfarlane,” and Coca (1856, 1857)
After working with my brothers Orion and Henry in Iowa for some time, I again felt as if I was getting nowhere save bored. So I went east once more, and spent the last two months of 1856 and the following two months of the next year in Cincinnati, working at my trade as a typesetter while boarding at a nearby house.
After those four months, I left Ohio for the Amazon. The reason I wanted to go to South America, and more specifically Brazil, was the prospect of mapping out a new career for myself by setting up a world trade in coca, springing that splendid enterprise upon an unsuspecting planet. I had gotten this idea from a book that related an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers. The account asserted that coca was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains there would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch of this miracle food and require no other sustenance.
So in early 1857 I took the Paul Jones to New Orleans with the intention of taking a ship from there to the Amazon. When I got to New Orleans I inquired about ships leaving for the Amazon and discovered that there weren’t any, and learned that there probably wouldn’t be any during that century. It had not occurred to me to inquire into these particulars before, so there I was. I couldn’t go to the Amazon. I had no friends in New Orleans, and no money to speak of.
EDITOR’S NOTES: The book that had fired Twain’s imagination with such delusions of limitless wealth just waiting to be gathered up was an 1854 publication entitled Exploration of the Valley of the Amazon, 1851–1852 by William Lewis Herndon, an explorer in the employ of the U.S. Navy, who died heroically in his mid-40s as he went down with his doomed ship after helping to save many others. This last voyage Herndon commanded was on a steamer which was transporting as much as 15 tons of gold.
Pará, the place in the Amazon where Twain had intended to set up his international coca trust (then legally used as an ingredient in patent medicines), is a state in northern Brazil bordered to the northwest by the small countries of Guyana and Suriname; on the northeast border lies the Atlantic Ocean.
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Twain often employed the literary device of using a “second self” as a foil, such as imaginary traveling companions to whom he attributed silly foibles and faux pas which were probably either his own or simply flights of fancy.
In accord with this, Twain wrote a story named Macfarlane in which he seems to be actually writing of himself when ostensibly describing a fellow boarder in Cincinnati. For example, that story says of “Macfarlane”:
He seemed to be as familiar with his Bible as he was with his dictionary.
In his writings, Twain almost constantly alluded to biblical passages, something which was much more readily recognized by his contemporaries—who were also often well-versed in the Bible—than it is to many today.
As for “Macfarlane’s” knowledge of the dictionary, this also seems to focus a spotlight on Twain himself, who was very meticulous about always using the right word, and never just the “almost-right” word. In Roughing It, he claims to have read the entire dictionary on the stagecoach ride from Missouri to Nevada, out of a warm interest in “how the characters would turn out.”
Twain also noted that Macfarlane was an autodidact (which Twain also certainly was, having left school early in order to go to work, but constantly reading, studying, observing, and meditating). He also wrote that “Macfarlane” considered himself a philosopher and a thinker—something Twain could have said about what confronted him while reflecting on what he saw when he gazed into the mirror.
In Macfarlane, Twain also attributes the following to that elusive and probably fictional friend, which sounds precisely like what Twain would say and write decades later:
He said that man’s heart was the only bad heart in the animal kingdom; that man was the only animal capable of feeling malice, envy, vindictiveness, vengefulness, hatred, selfishness … the sole animal that robs, persecutes, oppresses, and kills members of his own immediate tribe.
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When Twain was forty years old, he wrote a description of what he was like when he was only half that age (in other words, in 1855 and 1856):
A callow fool, a self-sufficient ass, a mere human tumble-bug imagining that he is remodeling the world and is entirely capable of doing it right. Ignorance, intolerance, egotism, self-assertion, opaque perception, dense and pitiful chuckle-headedness—and an almost pathetic unconsciousness of it all. That is what I was at 19 and 20.
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