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By Root 455 0

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 Chapter XXXVI (“The Professor’s Yarn”) is freestanding material heaved in from the author’s stock of unpublished or discarded manuscripts.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