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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
Clemens’ complex feelings about his piloting days provide insights into his imagination and his identity problems. Despite his nostalgia, Clemens feared the river and exorcised his fears by imaginatively identifying with Horace Bixby, his former steamboating master. Drawing upon his recollections for “Old Times on the Mississippi” in 1874, Clemens became a figurative master pilot, using the same order of memory that Bixby demands of the cub. Clemens’ 1882 river trip was motivated in part by an unconscious desire to recover his intuitive “Bixby memory”; he was searching for both his former master and his own imaginative self. The trip, however, was a sign that his intuitive memory had failed him and he was depending on direct observation. His “invocation” of the hateful pilot Brown (with his chaotic, literal memory) at the beginning of the 1882 writing of Life on the Mississippi foreshadows Clemens’ failure to achieve imaginative coherence in the second part of the book.
1 Pascal Covici, Jr., “Dear Master Wattie: The Mark Twain–David Watt Bowser Letters,” Southwest Review, 45 (1960), 107.
2 20 Jan. 1866, Mark Twain Papers. I am grateful to Frederick Anderson for furnishing me with a copy of this letter. Although it has never been published in its entirety, parts were printed by Albert B. Paine in Mark Twain's Letters (New York: Harper, 1917), i, 101–02, and additional fragments were cited in Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume I (1855–1873), ed. Frederick Anderson, Michael B. Frank, and Kenneth M. Sanderson (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 94. Citations from this collection of letters will be identified by MTL, volume number, and page; and from this edition of the notebooks and journals by MTNJ, volume number, and page.
3 See p. 886 of this article.
4 Although Paine prints the last sentence of this passage as the opening of a new paragraph (MTL, i, 101), Clemens did not begin another paragraph until several sentences later.
5 My Dear Bro: A Letter from Samuel Clemens to His Brother Orion, ed. Frederick Anderson (Berkeley, Calif.: Berkeley Albion, 1961), p. 6.
6 Mark Twain's Letters to Will Bow en (Austin: Univ. of Texas, 1941), p. 14. Citations from this collection will be identified by MTLBowen and page number.
7 This idealization of a profession of which he had been a member must have been particularly appealing to Clemens, a man who was struggling at the time to develop his own confidence, both social and literary. In the same letter to Will Bowen (written soon after his return to San Francisco from Hawaii), Clemens revealed that he himself did not possess the pilot's indifference to “the world's opinion.” After dropping the names of “the American Ministers to China & Japan—Mr. [Anson] Burlingame & Gen. Van Valkenburg” (MTLBowen, p. 14), men he had met and spent time with in Honolulu, the humorist assured his friend that he knew “better than to get tight oftener than once in 3 months. It sets a man back in the esteem of people whose opinions are worth having.” Clemens, moralizing about his own actions, seems for the moment to have taken to heart the social advice that Burlingame had given to him in Hawaii: “Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb,” quoted by Albert B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912; rpt. [4 vols, in 2] New York: Harper [1935], i/ii, 287). See also Mark Twain's Autobiography, ed. Albert B. Paine (New York: Harper, 1924), ii, 125.
8 As a comment on Clemens' lovely ideal, we might consider Captain Emerson W. Gould's remark: “Mr. ‘Twain’ either magnified the authority he possessed as a pilot very largely, or ... was fortunate enough to get on to boats which were under the control of incompetent milk and water masters.... Good sensible pilots and those who desired to retain the respect of their employers and their positions, never assumed the authority they did not possess, nor arrogated to themselves the right to command the boat” (Fifty Years on the Mississippi; or Gould's History of River Navigation [Saint Louis: Nixon-Jones Printing, 1889], pp. 490–91).
9 MTNJ, i, 55, n. 7. As we know from his notation (at the “Cairo Bend” entry, interestingly enough), Clemens rediscovered Notebook 2 (the notebook he kept as a cub) on 8 Dec. 1880 (see MTNJ, i, 45–46; for a photograph of the page containing the notation, see Noel Grove, “Mark Twain: Mirror of America,” National Geographic, 148 [Sept. 1975], 308). Apparently, neither of the two extant piloting notebooks (nos. 2 and 3) was available to Clemens during the period that he was writing “Old Times on the Mississippi.” (I am grateful to Bruce T. Hamilton, formerly on the editorial staff of the Mark Twain Papers, for this information.) It is possible that Clemens did not have access to either of the notebooks for the twenty years or so he had been away from the river.
10 Henry Nash Smith has commented: “[Mark Twain] thought he needed a factual narrative as a basis [for a book], and if he could not set out from a pre-existent series of newspaper dispatches he believed he must make an actual journey—to England, to the Mississippi—in order to get the material for it” (Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962], p. 71).
11 The Love Letters of Mark Twain, ed. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper, 1949), p. 166.
12 Mark Twain-Howells Letters: The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William Dean Howells, 1872–1910, ed. Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, with the assistance of Frederick Anderson (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), i, 33. Citations from this collection will be identified by MTHL, volume number, and page.
13 MTL, i, 86. Although this is the last sentence of the text that Paine published, we cannot be sure that it was the last sentence of the letter. The manuscript, which is not in the Mark Twain Papers, may no longer exist.
14 For a general comment on this point, see Robert Regan, Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1966), p. 36.
15 Allan C. Bates, “Mark Twain and the Mississippi River,” Diss. Univ. of Chicago 1968, p. 299.
16 Life on the Mississippi, introd. Dixon Wecter (New York: Harper, 1950), p. 58. In most of the references to “Old Times on the Mississippi” in this essay, I have cited the text as it appears in the book. Only when there is a particular reason for doing so, have I cited the Atlantic Monthly text. Citations from the book will be identified by LOM and page number.
17 In a note to this passage, Henry Nash Smith and William Gibson explain that Van Wyck Brooks quoted these lines in The Ordeal of Mark Twain “in support of the view that ‘as a pilot [Clemens] had experienced the full flow of the creative life as he had not experienced it in literature ... that he had, in fact, found himself in his career as a pilot and lost himself with that career‘” (MTHL, i, 50, n. 1). Smith and Gibson go on to contradict Brooks's interpretation by referring to other comments by Clemens, comments in which he asserted his intention never to do any more piloting. The editors conclude by declaring that “The present letter was written when Mark Twain was under the spell of writing about his piloting days; if anything, it testifies to the boundless satisfaction he found in the act of composition.”
18 For a discussion that emphasizes the science in piloting, see Sherwood Cummings, “Mark Twain's Theory of Realism; or The Science of Piloting,” Studies in American Humor, 2 (1976), 209–21.
19 Certainly Clemens exaggerated the pilot's reliance on memory. Robert F. Stowell suggests that guidebooks not only helped “the apprentice learn ... the river but also served as maps to which the practicing pilot of a steamboat could add his own directions as conditions on the river changed” (“River Guide Books and Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi [sic],” Mark Twain Journal, 16 [Summer 1973], 21). Stowell claims that “there was no necessity for [the pilot] to attempt to keep the multitude of details of eleven hundred miles of river constantly in his mind when he could readily turn to such books as The Western Pilot.” Louis C. Hunter also mentions the value to steamboat pilots of Samuel Cumings' The Western Pilot. And Hunter adds: “By 1850 the expanding telegraph network had joined the larger river cities in the West, and by making available up-to-the-hour information on the stage and condition of the river at the numerous steamboat centers it proved of great value in the planning of trips” (Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History [1949: rpt. New York: Octagon, 1969], p. 246). Of course pilots would also gain information from one another.
20 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ed. Henry Nash Smith (Boston: Houghton, 1958), p. 80.
21 “The Art of Authorship” [1890], in Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, ed. Walter Blair (Boston: Houghton, 1962), p. 226.
22 “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” [1895], in The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1963), p. 168.
23 Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (1940; rpt. New York: Capricorn, 1968), p. 199.
24 Atlantic Monthly, 35 (June 1875), 726.
25 Mark Twain's Notebooks & Journals, Volume II (1877–1883), ed. Frederick Anderson, Lin Salamo, and Bernard L. Stein (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1975), p. 555. Citations from this edition will be identified by MTNJ, volume number, and page.
26 Compare Clemens' rendering of the river information on St. Louis that would be found in an association wharf box (LOM, p. 134) with the actual entry on St. Louis that he made as a cub pilot (MTNJ, i, 43).
27 Atlantic Monthly, 35 (June 1875), 721. When Clemens declared in the 22 May letter that he would “retire with dignity,” he may have been remembering the subtitle from the proof of the June number or from an actual copy of the issue.
28 This phrase occurs in a paragraph that Clemens canceled before he sent the letter. He wrote the paragraph in the hope that he would not have to supply the seventh number to the Atlantic but canceled it when he realized that it was too late for Howells to release him from the commitment.
29 For Life on the Mississippi Clemens divided the seven “Old Times” articles into fourteen chapters. To those fourteen he added three new ones dealing with pre-War piloting. The remainder of the book is composed (after a brief interchapter) of thirty-nine chapters based on his 1882 trip, appendixes of pieces from various sources, and three chapters of river “history” placed at the beginning of the book. In references to the second part of Life on the Mississippi I will frequently use the term “Part ii.”
30 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 12 May 1882, p. 2, col. 1.
31 Mark Twain & Huck Finn (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960), p. 289. Blair continues: “However, for a second time he rejected the idea of writing explicitly and at length about what some psychoanalytical biographers have decided was his happiest period, his days as a pilot.”
32 In late February or early March Clemens was thinking about his ignorance of steamboats. He wrote in his notebook: “although I was several years living constantly on steamboats, I never learned all the parts of a steamboat. Names of parts were ... in my ear daily whose office & locality I was ignorant of, & I never inquired the meaning of those names. For instance, I think I never saw the day that I could describe the marks on a lead line. I never knew what ... ‘in the run’ meant—I couldn't find the run in a boat to-day, & be sure I was right” (MTNJ, ii, 448). The narrator of Part n is certainly in many respects indistinguishable from the author.
33 Quoted by Paine, MT: A Biography, i/ii, 739.
34 Quoted by Paine, MT: A Biography, i/ii, 739.
35 Leo Marx, “The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn,” American Literature, 28 (1956); rpt. in Henry Nash Smith, ed., Mark Twain: A Collection of Critical Essays, Twentieth Century Views (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1963), p. 55. Although most critics regard Part ii as chaotic, one man has recently argued for the coherence of the entire book. See Stanley Brodwin, “The Useful & the Useless River: Life on the Mississippi Revisited,” Studies in American Humor, 2 (1976), 196–208.
36 Clemens' attitude toward the structure of his narrative is revealed by a comment he makes near the middle of Part ii: “Here is a story which I picked up on board the boat that night. I insert it in this place merely because it is a good story, not because it belongs here—for it doesn't” (LOM, p. 304).
37 MT in Eruption, p. 217. Clemens continues his description of the memory of the teller of “His Grandfather's Old Ram”: “the sort of memory which is too good, which remembers everything and forgets nothing, which has no sense of proportion and can't tell an important event from an unimportant one but preserves them all, states them all, and thus retards the progress of the narrative, at the same time making a tangled, inextricable confusion of it and intolerably wearisome to the listener” (pp. 217–18).
38 Mark Twain to Uncle Remus, 1881–1885, ed. Thomas H. English (Atlanta, Ga.: The Library, Emory Univ., 1953), p. 17.
39 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 13 May 1882, p. 8, col. 2. The Globe-Democrat report is accurate; Livy mailed a letter of 27 April to “Mr. C. L. Samuels / St. Charles Hotel / New Orleans” (MTNJ, ii, 458, n. 84).
40 Referring to the period when Clemens was writing the second part of Life on the Mississippi, Guy A. Cardwell observes: “He seems to have convinced himself quite positively that Sellers wrote under the pen name ‘Mark Twain,’ and this is almost surely not true” (“Samuel Clemens’ Magical Pseudonym,” New England Quarterly, 48 [1975], 189). For a comprehensive and balanced discussion of Clemens' pseudonym, see Cardwell's essay (pp. 175–93).
41 That the erroneous story remained an important “fact” for Clemens is suggested by a remark he made in 1888 to Major Jack Downing, a former Mississippi pilot. After retelling the story, Clemens declared: “it is about the only fact that I can tell the same way every time” (MTL, ii, 497). In 1906 Clemens was still telling the story and calling Isaiah Sellers “the oldest steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River, and the most respected, esteemed and revered” (MT in Eruption, p. 228).
42 Mark Twain, Business Man, ed. Samuel Charles Webster (Boston: Little, 1946), p. 199. The letter, written to Charles Webster from Elmira, was dated “Sept. 19/82.”
43 On 30 Oct. 1882, Clemens wrote to Howells: “The weather turned cold, and we had to rush home [from Elmira], while I still lacked thirty thousand words. I had been sick and got delayed. I am going to write all day and two thirds of the night, until the thing is done, or break down at it. The spur and burden of the contract are intolerable to me. I can endure the irritation of it no longer. I went to work at nine o'clock yesterday morning, and went to bed an hour after midnight. Result of the day, (mainly stolen from books, tho' credit given,) 9500 words. So I reduced my burden by one third in one day. It was five days work in one. I have nothing more to borrow or steal; the rest must all be writing” (MTHL, i, 417). Hamlin Hill has shed some additional light on Clemens' problem: “The composition of Life on the Mississippi had been difficult in spite of the River trip. In an undated fragment (TS in M[ark] T[wain] P[apers]), MT asked J[ames] R O[s-good] to ‘set a cheap expert to work to collect local histories of Mississippi towns and a lot of other books relating to the river for me.’ On 22 July [1882], W. Rowlands replied for JRO that they were mailing Emerson's Magazine with J. A. Dallas's ‘Up the Mississippi’ and ‘a lot of books relating to travel in the U.S. by English people in the first half of this century; twenty-five volumes in all‘” (Mark Twain's Letters to His Publishers, 1867–1894, ed. Hamlin Hill [Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1967], p. 158, n. 2). For a full discussion of the genesis and composition of Life on the Mississippi (and an argument for a “plan” for the book), see Horst H. Kruse, Mark Twains Life on the Mississippi: Eine entstehungs- und quellengeschichtliche Untersuchung zu Mark Twains “Standard Work” (Neumuenster: Karl Wacbholtz, 1970). Kruse remarks in the “Summary” of his study: “Life on the Mississippi emerges as the product of a deliberate plan, conceived as early as 1866, and cherished for more than a decade and a half, until finally, in the spring of 1882, Mark Twain was able to return to the Mississippi for the express purpose of collecting material for his book” (p. 175).
44 Mark Twain, Business Man, p. 207. Clemens' penciled remark to Charles Webster was written across a 3 January letter from James R. Osgood & Co. On 15 January, Clemens wrote to George W. Cable from Hartford: “I have just finished my book at last” (Guy A. Cardwell, Twins of Genius [n.p.: Michigan State Coll. Press, 1953], p. 89).
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