Life on The Mississippi (2 page)

His friend and literary confidant William Dean Howells called him “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. . . . No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery.” He married into an abolitionist family, and his next-door neighbor in liberal-minded Hartford was the author of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
the novel that awakened the nation’s conscience to the sin of slavery. And so in middle age, he returned to his native region with conflicting emotions: nostalgia and hostility, affection and outrage. Even before leaving on his trip South in 1882, he had begun to tell himself what he expected to find: a region barren of progress, he wrote in his notebook, expert only in the arts of war, murder, and massacre, given to “flowery and gushy” speech and pretentious architecture. For all its vaunted graciousness and refinement, the culture of the antebellum South, he said, had been an anachronism borrowed from the novels of Sit Walter Scott. It was “a pathetic sham,” like “The House Beautiful” (Chapter XXXVIII): the town or village’s finest dwelling, a two-story frame building fronted with fluted columns and Corinthian capitals made of pine painted white to look like marble and evoke the bygone glory of Greece, a civilization and economy, like that of the prewar Cotton Kingdom, founded on human bondage. “In the South, the war is what A.D. is elsewhere. They date from it,” he writes. “All day long you hear things ‘placed’ as having happened since the waw; or duin’ the waw . . . ‘Bless yo’ heart, honey, you ought to seen dat moon befo’ de waw!’ ” The Old South still hadn’t grown up.

Mark Twain’s acerb, profoundly felt, and hilarious chronicle of old times and present times on the Mississippi is social history and personal history, an alloy of anecdote, statistics, and river lore, true story, tall story, and dubious story, including the unverifiable claim that he borrowed his pseudonym from Captain Isaiah Sellers, the supposed Methuselah of the piloting profession. Like
The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It,
earlier books that had established Mark Twain’s reputation,
Life on the Mississippi
is the work of a brilliant travel writer and incomparable humorist. It is also a fable about the education of a literary artist as well as a pilot and the roles of imagination, memory, training, and intuition.

 

Mark Twain had been planning the book that became
Life on the Mississippi
for nearly two decades before he published it in 1883. In January 1866, a few months after he announced to his family that he had had “a ‘call’ to literature”—“to excite the
laughter
of God’s creatures”—he planned to write a book about the Mississippi. “I expect it to make about three hundred pages, and the last hundred will have to be written in St. Louis, because the materials for them can only be got there. . . . I may be an old man before I finish it,” he said then. Five years later, he told his wife, Olivia, he intended to go back to the river and spend two months taking notes: “I bet you I will make a standard work.” Nothing came of this plan either. Late in 1874, struggling to come up with an idea for an
Atlantic Monthly
article and complaining that “my head won’t ‘go’,” he suddenly (by his own account) discovered—or rediscovered—a perfect, untapped subject: “Old Mississippi days of steamboating glory and grandeur as I saw them (during 5 years)
from the pilothouse.
” “I am the only man alive that can scribble about the piloting of that day,” he told Howells. The subject was not only his alone but seemingly inexhaustible. “If I were to write fifty articles they would all be about pilots and piloting.” He settled down to work with the enthusiasm and optimism he tended to show at the beginning and middle of any new project.

Always a storyteller favoring atmospheric over literal truth, in order to enhance the drama and credibility of his narrative he changed some of its main circumstances. He was not, as he claims, an untraveled boy of seventeen, when Horace Bixby signed him on as his “cub.” Instead, he had been twenty-two years old and had already worked far from home as a printer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. Until he realized that he needed both money and a ship to take him from New Orleans to Brazil, he had even contrived a visionary scheme to go up the Amazon and perhaps corner the market in coca, the shrub source of cocaine, an elixir reputed to have invigorating properties. And so far from being a shore-bound innocent—“I supposed all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river”—he had rafted on the Mississippi and studied steamboats since childhood.

“ ‘Cub’ Wants to Be a Pilot”—the first of seven installments, written in rapid succession, of a series titled “Old Times on the Mississippi”—came out in the
Atlantic Monthly
in January 1875. It opens with the words “When I was a boy”—Mark Twain’s mantra for unlocking imagination and memory—and leads to one of the classic passages in American literature: “After all those years I can picture that old time to myself, the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning. . . . ” The cry of “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin!” also announces the arrival of Mark Twain, future author of
Huckleberry Finn,
and declares that his surge of power and spectacle, along with a prose manner that is both distinctively American and distinctively his own, derives not from polite or traditional literary sources but from “the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun.”

“The piece about the Mississippi is capital,” Howells wrote. “It almost made the water in our ice-pitcher muddy as I read it.” From the poet and journalist, and former private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, John Hay, born and raised in Warsaw, Illinois, fifty miles up the river from Hannibal, came another validation and tribute. “I don’t see how you do it. I knew all that, every word of it—passed as much time on the levee as you ever did, knew the same crowd and saw the same scenes—but I could not have remembered one word of it. You have the two greatest gifts of the writer, memory and imagination.”

Exhilarated by his rediscovered subject matter, Mark Twain believed at first he had enough material in hand to make a book to be published at the end of 1875. He was off by eight years and the several hundred additional pages that he needed to fill out his book and meet the length and bulk requirements of the subscription publishing trade. To pad it out he borrowed extensively, perhaps 11,000 words in all, from other writers, including the historian Francis Parkman. Chapter XXXVI (“The Professor’s Yarn”) is freestanding material heaved in from the author’s stock of unpublished or discarded manuscripts. Almost the whole of Chapter III is the raftsman’s chapter, 7,000 words or so, borrowed from
Huckleberry Finn,
“a book which I have been working at, by fits and starts, during the past five or six years, and may possibly finish in the course of five or six more.” Other material adapted from the novel includes the Darnell-Watson feud (Chapter XXVI) and the period-piece description of “The House Beautiful” (Chapter XXXVIII). Eventually he accumulated more filler material than he needed and moved chunks of it to appendices.

His six-week trip to the river gave him material and impetus for two books he was writing more or less simultaneously:
Huckleberry Finn
and
Life on the Mississippi,
both of them narratives that flow downriver into the deep South. The two books finished, he made preliminary notes for a third, this one never written: with Huck Finn cast as a cabin boy on a steamboat, it was to “put the great river and its bygone ways into history in the form of a story.”

“I never had such a fight over a book in my life before,” he told Howells as
Life on the Mississippi
was about to go to press: “I will not interest myself in anything connected with this wretched God-damned book.” His publisher insisted on some last-minute cuts (about 15,000 words in all) of material thought likely to offend loyal Southerners and sentimental Northerners. Olivia Clemens, always Mark Twain’s editor, was not only late in getting to the proofs but with 50,000 copies of
Life on the Mississippi
already printed, ordered two illustrations deleted—one showing a chopfallen corpse with staring eyes; another, the author being cremated, with an urn initialed “M.T.” standing in the foreground to receive the ashes. It was to be more than sixty years from publication in 1883 that
Life on the Mississippi
came near the 100,000 sale its author hoped for it.

 

In 1880, a twelve-year-old Dallas schoolboy named Wattie Bowser sent Mark Twain a fan letter asking him for his autograph and to say whether he would be willing to change places with Wattie and to be a boy again. The answer was yes, but with one main condition: “That I should emerge from boyhood as a ‘cub pilot’ on a Mississippi boat, and that I should by and by become a pilot, and remain one.... And when strangers were introduced I should have them repeat ‘Mr. Clemens?’ doubtfully, and with the rising inflection—and when they were informed that I was the celebrated ‘Master Pilot of the Mississippi, ’ and immediately took me by the hand and wrung it with effusion, and exclaimed, ‘O, I know
that
name very well!’ I should feel a pleasurable emotion trickling down my spine and know I had not lived in vain.” He was remembering the grandeur that surrounded the lightning pilot, the gold-leaf, kidglove, diamond-breastpin sort of pilot who answered to no man and spoke in commands, not requests.

“Master Pilot of the Mississippi” is a figure of speech for the literary achievement of Mark Twain, a name born on the river and meaning two fathoms, or twelve feet of depth: for the moment safe water, but not by much, for a shallow draft steamboat. It was a name so linked with the river that Mark Twain’s young daughter, Clara, hearing the leadsman on a steamboat sing out his soundings, once said, “Papa, I have hunted all over the boat for you. Don’t you know they are calling for you?”

“Your true pilot,” he writes, “cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.” The evolution under Horace Bixby of “cub” into licensed pilot is also the story of Sam Clemens’s evolution from novice writer to the literary master Mark Twain. The lessons he learned on the river have the resonance of lessons learned about writing and put into practice year after year. “There is one faculty which a pilot must incessantly cultivate until he has brought it to absolute perfection. Nothing short of perfection will do. That faculty is memory. He cannot stop with thinking a thing is so and so; he must
know
it. . . . With what scorn a pilot was looked upon, in the old times, if he ever ventured to deal in that feeble phrase ‘I think,’ instead of the vigorous one ‘I know!’ ” Along with memory, intuition, and trust in instinct, “he must have good and quick judgment and decision, and a cool, calm courage that no peril can shake.” The great river itself had been an alphabet, a language, a primer, and a book with “a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one you could leave unread without loss.” The next such story, after
Life on the Mississippi,
was to be
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
.

 

—Justin Kaplan

But
the basin of the Mississippi is the
BODY OF THE NATION. All the other parts are but members, important in themselves, yet more important in their relations to this. Exclusive of the Lake basin and of 300,000 square miles in Texas and New Mexico, which in many aspects form a part of it, this basin contains about 1,250,000 square miles. In extent it is the second great valley of the world, being exceeded only by that of the Amazon. The valley of the frozen Obi approaches it in extent; that of the La Plata comes next in space, and probably in habitable capacity, having about
of its area; then comes that of the Yenisei, with about
; the Lena, Amoor, Hoang-ho, Yang-tsekiang, and Nile,
; the Ganges, less than ½; the Indus, less than ⅓; the Euphrates, ⅕; the Rhine,
. It exceeds in extent the whole of Europe, exclusive of Russia, Norway, and Sweden.
It would contain Austria four times, Germany or Spain five times. France six times, the British Islands or Italy ten times.
Conceptions formed from the river-basins of Western Europe are rudely shocked when we consider the extent of the valley of the Mississippi; nor are those formed from the sterile basins of the great rivers of Siberia, the lofty plateaus of Central Asia, or the mighty sweep of the swampy Amazon more adequate. Latitude, elevation, and rainfall all combine to render every part of the Mississippi Valley capable of supporting a dense population.
As a dwelling-place for civilized man it is by far the first upon our globe.