Life on the Mississippi - Mark Twain [3]
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