Just like the great river bisects the country, this
combination memoir/travel book by Mark Twain bifurcates in many ways. It is shaped as a contrast of opposites, a
dualism in perspective. I had intended
for this exploration of Life on the
Mississippi to be held to one post, but the complexity of the work
stretched this into two posts. It may
just be a memoir and a travel log, but it captures the life and times of two
moments in the history of the country, that of pre and post Civil War
America. The work is not as simple as it
appears on the surface.
The memoir was written in two distinct moments. The first part of the novel was written in
1876, the second in 1883, where the two parts were married together. Second there are a multitude of contrasting perspectives:
the inexperienced versus the skilled; the innocent versus the jaundiced; the
child versus the adult; the virtuous versus the reprobate; the rural versus the
industrial; the north versus the south; the pre-civil war versus the post; the
upstream versus the downstream, as Twain voyages aboard Mississippi
riverboats.
That first part, the first twenty-one chapters, is a
look back to his childhood growing up on a riverside town and of his initiation
into the piloting of river steamboats.
Desire and Romanticism shapes the young boy, and the elder Twain looking
back feels nostalgia of an innocent time.
He becomes a trainee pilot, a cub pilot.
WHAT with lying on the
rocks four days at Louisville, and some other delays, the poor old 'Paul Jones'
fooled away about two weeks in making the voyage from Cincinnati to New
Orleans. This gave me a chance to get
acquainted with one of the pilots, and he taught me how to steer the boat, and
thus made the fascination of river life more potent than ever for me.
It also gave me a
chance to get acquainted with a youth who had taken deck passage--more's the
pity; for he easily borrowed six dollars of me on a promise to return to the
boat and pay it back to me the day after we should arrive. But he probably died
or forgot, for he never came. It was
doubtless the former, since he had said his parents were wealthy, and he only
traveled deck passage because it was cooler.
['Deck' Passage, i.e. steerage passage.]
I soon discovered two
things. One was that a vessel would not be likely to sail for the mouth of the
Amazon under ten or twelve years; and the other was that the nine or ten
dollars still left in my pocket would not suffice for so imposing an
exploration as I had planned, even if I could afford to wait for a ship. Therefore it followed that I must contrive a
new career. The 'Paul Jones' was now
bound for St. Louis. I planned a siege against my pilot, and at the end of
three hard days he surrendered. He
agreed to teach me the Mississippi River from New Orleans to St. Louis for five
hundred dollars, payable out of the first wages I should receive after
graduating. I entered upon the small enterprise of 'learning' twelve or
thirteen hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence
of my time of life. If I had really
known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the
courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in
the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it
was so wide.
The boat backed out
from New Orleans at four in the afternoon, and it was 'our watch' until eight.
Mr. Bixby, my chief, 'straightened her up,' plowed her along past the sterns of
the other boats that lay at the Levee, and then said, 'Here, take her; shave
those steamships as close as you'd peel an apple.' I took the wheel, and my heart-beat fluttered
up into the hundreds; for it seemed to me that we were about to scrape the side
off every ship in the line, we were so close.
I held my breath and began to claw the boat away from the danger; and I
had my own opinion of the pilot who had known no better than to get us into
such peril, but I was too wise to express it.
In half a minute I had a wide margin of safety intervening between the
'Paul Jones' and the ships; and within ten seconds more I was set aside in
disgrace, and Mr. Bixby was going into danger again and flaying me alive with
abuse of my cowardice. I was stung, but
I was obliged to admire the easy confidence with which my chief loafed from
side to side of his wheel, and trimmed the ships so closely that disaster
seemed ceaselessly imminent. When he had
cooled a little he told me that the easy water was close ashore and the current
outside, and therefore we must hug the bank, up-stream, to get the benefit of
the former, and stay well out, down-stream, to take advantage of the latter. In my own mind I resolved to be a down-stream
pilot and leave the up-streaming to people dead to prudence.
-from Chpt VI, “A Cub Pilot’s Experience”
But later we find he has become a fine upstream
pilot as well. Here he finds details the
splendor and magnificence of a pilot’s life in the golden age of Mississippi
river steam boating.
By the time we had gone
seven or eight hundred miles up the river,
I had learned to be a tolerably plucky up-stream steersman, in daylight,
and before we reached St. Louis I had made a trifle of progress in night-work, but only a trifle. I had a note-book that fairly bristled with
the names of towns, 'points,' bars, islands, bends, reaches, etc.; but the
information was to be found only in the notebook--none of it was in my head. It made my heart ache to think I had only got
half of the river set down; for as our watch was four hours off and four hours
on, day and night, there was a long four-hour gap in my book for every time I
had slept since the voyage began.
My chief was presently
hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed my satchel and went with
him. She was a grand affair. When I stood in her pilot-house I was so far above
the water that I seemed perched ona mountain; and her decks stretched so far
away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered
the little 'Paul Jones' a large craft. There were other differences, too. The
'Paul Jones's 'pilot-house was a cheap, dingy, battered rattle-trap, cramped
for room: but here was a sumptuous glass temple; room enough to have a dance
in; showy red and gold window-curtains; an imposing sofa; leather cushions and
a back to the high bench where visiting pilots sit, to spin yarns and 'look at
the river;' bright, fanciful 'cuspadores' instead of abroad wooden box filled
with sawdust; nice new oil-cloth on the floor;a hospitable big stove for
winter; a wheel as high as my head, costly with inlaid work; a wire
tiller-rope; bright brass knobs for the bells; and a tidy, white-aproned, black
'texas-tender,' to bring up tarts and ices and coffee during mid-watch, day and
night. Now this was 'something like,'
and so I began to take heart once more to believe that piloting was a romantic
sort of occupation after all. The moment
we were under way I began to prowl about the great steamer and fill myself with
joy. She was as clean and as dainty as a drawing-room; when I looked down her
long, gilded saloon, it was like gazing through a splendid tunnel; she had an
oil-picture, by some gifted sign-painter, on every stateroom door; she glittered
with no end of prism-fringed chandeliers; the clerk's office was elegant, the
bar was marvelous, and the bar-keeper had been barbered and upholstered at
incredible cost. The boiler deck (i.e.
the second story of the boat, so to speak) was as spacious as a church, it
seemed to me; so with the forecastle; and there was no pitiful handful of
deckhands, firemen, and roustabouts down there, but a whole battalion of men.
The fires were fiercely glaring from a long row of furnaces, and over them were
eight huge boilers! This was unutterable
pomp. The mighty engines--but enough of this.
I had never felt so fine before. And when I found that the regiment of
natty servants respectfully 'sir'd' me, my satisfaction was complete.
-from Chpt VI, “A Cub Pilot’s Experience”
The second part of the work, Twain decides to return
to the river a couple of decades later and journey incognito. He wants to see what is changed on the river
from the pre-Civil War days to the industrialized Gilded Age.
AFTER twenty-one years'
absence, I felt a very strong desire to see the river again, and the
steamboats, and such of the boys as might be left; so I resolved to go out
there. I enlisted a poet for company,
and a stenographer to 'take him down, 'and started westward about the middle of
April.
As I proposed to make
notes, with a view to printing, I took some thought as to methods of procedure. I reflected that if I were recognized, on the
river, I should not be as free to go and come, talk, inquire, and spy around, as
I should be if unknown; I remembered that it was the custom of steam boatmen in
the old times to load up the confiding stranger with the most picturesque and
admirable lies, and put the sophisticated friend off with dull and ineffectual
facts: so I concluded, that, from a business point of view, it would be an
advantage to disguise our party with fictitious names. The idea was certainly good, but it bred
infinite bother; for although Smith, Jones, and Johnson are easy names to
remember when there is no occasion to remember them, it is next to impossible
to recollect them when they are wanted. How
do criminals manage to keep a brand-new ALIAS in mind? This is a great mystery. I was innocent; and
yet was seldom able to lay my hand on my new name when it was needed; and it
seemed to me that if I had had a crime on my conscience to further confuse me,
I could never have kept the name by meat all.
We left per
Pennsylvania Railroad, at 8 A.M. April 18.
-from Chpt XXII, “I Return to My Muttons”
And so he is going incognito since in the interim
years he had become world famous as a writer.
The fact that he left by railroad is germane. What in the 1850s was the most natural way to
head down the center of the country, that is by river boat, was now
outdated. The industrial revolution had
created better, more efficient means of traversing the huge country, railroad.
The further we drove in
our inspection-tour, the more sensibly I realized how the city had grown since
I had seen it last; changes in detail became steadily more apparent and
frequent than at first, too: changes uniformly evidencing progress, energy,
prosperity.
But the change of
changes was on the 'levee.' This time, a departure from the rule. Half a dozen
sound-asleep steamboats where I used to see a solid mile of wide-awake ones! This was melancholy, this was woeful. The
absence of the pervading and jocund steam boatman from the billiard-saloon was
explained. He was absent because he is
no more. His occupation is gone,
his power has passed away, he is absorbed into the common herd, he grinds at
the mill, a shorn Samson and inconspicuous.
Half a dozen lifeless steamboats, a mile of empty wharves, a negro
fatigued with whiskey stretched asleep, in a wide and soundless vacancy, where
the serried hosts of commerce used to contend!
Here was desolation, indeed.
'The old, old sea, as
one in tears,
Comes murmuring, with
foamy lips,
And knocking at the
vacant piers,
Calls for his long-lost
multitude of ships.'
The towboat and the
railroad had done their work, and done it well and completely. The mighty
bridge, stretching along over our heads, had done its share in the slaughter
and spoliation.
Remains of former steamboat men told me, with wan satisfaction, that the bridge
doesn't pay. Still, it can be no sufficient compensation to a corpse, to know
that the dynamite that laid him
out was not of as good quality as it had been supposed to be.
The pavements along the
river front were bad: the sidewalks were rather out of repair; there was a rich
abundance of mud. All this was familiar
and satisfying; but the ancient armies of drays, and struggling throngs of men,
and mountains of freight, were gone; and Sabbath reigned in their stead. The
immemorial mile of cheap foul doggeries remained, but business was dull with them;
the multitudes of poison-swilling Irishmen had departed, and in their places
were a few scattering handfuls of ragged negroes, some drinking, some drunk,
some nodding, others asleep. St. Louis
is a great and prosperous and advancing city; but the river-edge of it seems
dead past resurrection.
Mississippi steam boating
was born about 1812; at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty
proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life
for so majestic a creature. Of course it
is not absolutely dead, neither is a crippled octogenarian who could once jump
twenty-two feet on level ground; but as contrasted with what it was in its
prime vigor, Mississippi steam boating maybe called dead.
It killed the
old-fashioned keel-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less
than a week. The railroads have killed
the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the
steamboats consumed a week in doing; and the towing-fleets have killed the
through-freight traffic by dragging six or seven steamer-loads of stuff down
the river at a time, at an expense so trivial that steamboat competition was
out of the question.
-from Chpt XXII, “I Return to My Muttons”
In that interim period, Twain had also left living in
the south and became a northerner. The
return to southern culture certainly pulls him back into his roots, providing a
divide between who he was and who he is now.
As one might expect with Twain, language is part of the dichotomy. Here he has traveled down to New Orleans and
starts hearing distinctions.
I found the
half-forgotten Southern intonations and elisions as pleasing to my ear as they
had formerly been. A Southerner talks
music. At least it is music to me, but then I was born in the South. The
educated Southerner has no use for an r, except at the beginning of a word. He says 'honah,' and 'dinnah,' and
'Gove'nuh,' and 'befo' the waw,' and so on. The words may lack charm to the
eye, in print, but they have it to the ear. When did the r disappear from
Southern speech, and how did it come to disappear? The custom of dropping it was not borrowed
from the North, nor inherited from England. Many Southerners--most
Southerners--put a y into occasional words that begin with the k sound. For instance, they say Mr. K'yahtah (Carter)
and speak of playing k'yahds or of riding in the k'yahs. And they have the
pleasant custom--long ago fallen into decay in the North--of frequently
employing the respectful 'Sir.' Instead
of the curt Yes, and the abrupt No, they say 'Yes, Suh', 'No, Suh.'
But there are some
infelicities. Such as 'like' for 'as,' and the addition of an 'at' where it
isn't needed. I heard an educated
gentleman say, 'Like the flag-officer did.'
His cook or his butler would have said, 'Like the flag-officer done.' You hear gentlemen say, 'Where have you been
at?' And here isthe aggravated form--heard a ragged street Arab say it to a
comrade:' I was a-ask'n' Tom whah you was a-sett'n' at.' The very elect
carelessly say 'will' when they mean 'shall'; and many of them say, 'I didn't
go to do it,' meaning 'I didn't mean to do it.'
The Northern word 'guess'--imported from England, where it used to be
common, and now regarded by satirical Englishmen as a Yankee original--is but
little used among Southerners. They say
'reckon.' They haven't any 'doesn't' in their language; they say 'don't'
instead. The unpolished often use 'went' for 'gone.' It is nearly as bad as the Northern 'hadn't
ought.' This reminds me that a remark of a very peculiar nature was made here
in my neighborhood (in the North) a few days ago: 'He hadn't ought to have
went. 'How is that? Isn't that a good
deal of a triumph? One knows the orders
combined in this half-breed's architecture without inquiring: one parent
Northern, the other Southern. To-day I
heard a schoolmistress ask, 'Where is John gone?'This form is so common--so
nearly universal, in fact--that if she had used 'whither' instead of 'where,' I
think it would have sounded like an affectation.
-from
Chpt XLIV, “City Sights”
For Twain the sound of a language, its nuances, are just as much a locator of time and place than is the rugged landscape.
