"Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs" — Chapter 4
Tuesday Serialization of the fact-based biography masquerading as an autobiography
Chapter 4
Presidential Predictions (1840)
My first teacher, Mrs. Horr, a New Yorker who had married a Hannibal cooper, was perhaps the first person to envision for me a celebrated future. When she predicted that I would one day become President of the United States and stand in the presence of kings unabashed, I took it to heart and thought my neighbors should hear about their great fortune in knowing me as a lad. So, I went door to door proudly promulgating this prediction, proclaiming my grand future for all to hear. Paradoxically, though, my neighbors did not seem as enamored with this news as I was. I think I even detected in some of them a distinct tendency to doubt the likelihood of such a thing ever taking place.
It is no matter, though. It is no harm to be an ass, if one is content to bray and not kick.
Although I haven’t yet become President, I have certainly known a number of them. I have dined in the White House many times. Also, as prognosticated by Mrs. Horr, I have “stood in the presence of kings unabashed” (and other members of the regal tribe, such as Princes of Wales, as well as uncountable numbers of Lords and dignitaries of various sorts).
That is nothing, though. I have stood in the presence of people better than those, too. And even lived in the same household with them.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In 1870, Twain sent Mrs. Horr, who was then eighty years old and again residing in New York, a copy of The Innocents Abroad, a book wherein Twain does some early hobnobbing with royalty, a sort of pastime which would only increase in frequency over time.
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Indicating that Tom Sawyer was probably based more on Twain himself than anybody else, the following appears in the novel of that boy’s adventures, after his testifying in court against the terrifying Injun Joe:
Tom was a glittering hero once more – the pet of the old, the envy of the young. His name even went into immortal print, for the village paper magnified him. There were some that believed he would be President, yet, if he escaped hanging.
This “some...believed he would be President” part is probably an allusion to Mrs. Horr’s predictions for young Samuel Clemens. Remember, too, that he ended up working for “the village paper” in “St. Petersburg” (Hannibal).
The book’s amazon page is here.