P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain

Susan Yund was a visiting professor from Missouri at the University of Minnesota back in 1976, when I was making one of my infrequent forays into the canebrakes of scholarship as a sophomore student. I met Ms. Yund at the Wilson library, where she tripped and spread a swath of documents along the path I was trodding to the Theravada Buddhism collection. As I helped her pick up her papers we conversed casually -- when she found out I had been a clown for Ringling Brothers, she became extremely excited. Because, it turned out, she was doing research on the little-known relationship between P.T. Barnum and Mark Twain!

I had never heard of anything going on between Barnum and the beloved author of Tom Sawyer, and when I mentioned this to her she insisted I come to a party she was having for her graduate students that Saturday at her rented home in the Seven Corners neighborhood -- I would hear all about their interaction, plus be the star of the show myself as a bona fide refugee from the modern Ringling clown alley. I wasn’t keen on being stared at by a bunch of research fellows who could probably give Erkel a run for his money -- but when she mentioned she would be serving Swedish meatballs and krumkake I acquiesced faster than you can say “Tom Thumb.”

Saturday night I showed up on her doorstep in brown corduroy pants and a dark green turtleneck -- which, with my ubiquitous glasses, gave me a studious, not to say avuncular, appearance that left quite an impression on the brainy bunch gathered in her living room.

“Who’s the stumblebum?” I heard one student whisper to his companion, a corpulent hoyden who was shoveling meatballs and noodles into her mouth like there was no tomorrow.

“Probably one of Yund’s charity cases -- I hear she takes in homeless people as a hobby” she replied between ravenous swallows.

I settled daintily on a butt-sprung chesterfield with a plate of goodies, wondering how soon I could decently excuse myself from this mare’s nest -- but Yund pinioned me with an exuberant introduction, as “one of those fabled troubadours of mirth -- a professional clown with the Barnum and Bailey Show,” and invited her students to pick my brains (assuming I had brought any with me.) The stony silence that greeted her invitation to grill me would have done credit to a mausoleum. Before I completely disintegrated from ignominy she kindly stepped in to announce a brand new bonanza for their research project -- a cache of letters from Mark Twain to P.T. Barnum that had recently been unearthed in Redding, Connecticut.

The hubbub this created quickly turned the spotlight away from me, thank goodness, and I sat back to listen in fascination to what Ms. Yund had to say.

It appears that back in 1889 P.T. Barnum felt inspired to offer Samuel Clemmens -- the redoubtable Mark Twain -- a well paid position as ‘Poet Laureate’ of Barnum & Bailey’s. His duties would be extremely light, and, in fact, the position would be a mere sinecure -- allowing Twain to continue on with his own writing projects. All Barnum wanted from Twain was a few quotable pages each season on the charms and benefits of Barnum’s circus -- which could then be incorporated into the florid lithograph advertisements that adorned many a barn and board fence back then. Twain had been polite but coy about Barnum’s offer. He was already a world-famous author -- but his financial involvement with the failed Paige typesetting machine had drained him dry and he was getting ready to move to Europe to cut down on living expenses. The idea of using his talent and image to tout a vagabond assemblage of clowns and tumblers both tantalized and repelled him. In the end, after a dozen or so letters back and forth, Twain had amiably declined Barnum’s invitation. Instead he set off on a frenzied lecture tour of the globe -- writing two books about his experiences as a celebrity tourist -- and eventually pulled himself out of the fiscal hole he had dug for himself.

Barnum appeared not to take Twain’s rejection much to heart -- the two exchanged Christmas cards until Barnum’s death in 1891.

Professor Yund quoted extensively from several holographic copies of the Twain letters to Barnum that Saturday evening. And while I did not get a copy of them from her, there was one brief paragraph that Twain wrote to Barnum that so stuck in my mind that I was able to write it down in my journal before going to bed that night. Here it is:

“Some may claim that the circus takes our coins in exchange for the doubtful pleasures of an overpriced candy apple and the tawdry appearance of some groveling buffoons -- but I cannot endorse such a heartless philosophy. To me, the circus brings a refreshing dew to the mind and heart. Your efforts to bring this balm to the American people is as praiseworthy as any missionary’s Bible-pounding in the benighted realms of Africa.”   

Soon after that evening at Professor Yund’s I gave up on my college education, again, and went back to the Ringling clown alley. I lost track of Yund’s research, but often wondered if she’d been able to write an extensive article or even a book about it. I remember her saying that there was big money in anything to do with Mark Twain. Long years later I did read about the results of her Twain/Barnum work. Turns out she had faked most of it. So they took away her robes and mortarboard, and she was now running a Bed-n-Breakfast in Hannibal, Missouri. She’d never written anything further about the spurious relationship between Twain and Barnum.   

So you can take the above ‘quote’ by Mark Twain with a huge grain of iodized salt. Still, I believe the sentiment expressed in that quote could have very well been in Twain’s heart -- even if he never put it on paper.