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Despite following his well-turned-out novels The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883) reneges on this format and it returns to the miscellaneous writing that had generally characterised his earlier career. As with any nineteenth-century literary magazine, Life on the Mississippi is packed with short stories, anecdotes, gossip about famous people, humorous sketches and, of course, in its original edition, illustrations. But this narrative is not fixed in time and one cannot just dip in anywhere, as they would with a journal.

It proceeds firstly as a memoir of Twain’s experiences as a “cub” or apprentice pilot and secondly as the type of journalistic travelogue that would be familiar to his readers from his literary breakthrough The Innocents Abroad (1869). The memoir commences in 1857, when Twain had entered into his apprenticeship with the veteran pilot Horace Bixby on the steamboat Paul Jones. The second time around it was 1882 and Twain was snooping along the river again in search of fresh material.

Clearly the divide that runs through this book leaves the memoir and the modern-day travelogue looking like they are stranded on opposite riverbanks. Anybody in their late forties would become a little wistful if they revisited a location where they had worked as a twenty-one-year-old. Nevertheless it is important not to de-historicise Twain’s nostalgia. It was not a regular current of history that had run between the memoir and the travelogue but a spectacular, dizzying torrent. These twenty-five years were a period of unprecedented dynamism that would not only render the paddle steamer largely obsolete – or sweep away many more than had ever sunk in the Mississippi – but transform the lives of millions of people and showcase the USA’s exceptionalism.

Steamboats had been battered by gunfire during the American Civil War and their passengers had decamped to the railroads. The picture of paddle steamers innocently travelling up and down between the North and the South had rather faded anyway. The South was impoverished, the North was industrialising, and ever more Americans were migrating to the West. The Mississippi might gather together waters from across the USA in its great fist but this symbolism of national unity was no longer as prominent or immediate as it once had been.

As with Roughing It (1872), Twain’s memoir of the Wild West, Life on the Mississippi puts forward a narrative that increasingly resembles the particular phenomenon that it is describing. The mass of stories, jokes and anecdotes in Roughing It is akin to a load of rubble that we have to “read,” just as a miner would a deposit. It is up to us to pick out the real specks of truth and to discard the fool’s gold. Similarly, the text in Life on the Mississippi will behave ever more like the river itself.

For one thing it visits one subject after another, in a pattern that is both linear and miscellaneous. For another, just as the course of the Mississippi was never settled for good, with its floods and avulsions sweeping away towns and adding brand new land to territorial America, Twain’s narrative can only reflect what he has seen and submerge what he has forgotten or never noticed to begin with. There are plenty of additions as well. Twain had shown a willingness to record everything, about every interesting personality or cultural detail that he had encountered. His narrative’s surface brilliance aspires to mirror as much of the Mississippi as possible.

There is a racing river of literary criticism for you to ride upon if you want to know what the Mississippi symbolises in this book. Let us just get our feet wet rather than being swept away. The solution can be never nailed down since Twain is clearly attracted to the Mississippi as a kind of magical metaphor. One minute it is suggestive of historical writing and the next it is exemplifying history itself. Rather than being a metaphor it is more a force that takes the shape of the different metaphors that Twain pours it into.

Whereas Roughing It had tried its darnedest to cram all of the Wild West into a single book, Life on the Mississippi clearly wants to be the book of the USA’s most emblematic river. The problem was that Twain would publish the book of the Mississippi, if not of the USA altogether, a year later. This is his novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, an “unpublished chapter” of which is featured as an exclusive short story in the Life on the Mississippi miscellany. The extract is presented almost as a passenger that has boarded Life on the Mississippi from another vessel, an ailing one that might reach its destination in “five or six more” years. With its epic raftsmen’s braggadocio, this chapter will amaze the book to such an extent as to recall the motif of the rustic storyteller who has boarded from some lonely stretch of the river. Thomas Bangs Thorpe’s famous “tall tale,” “The Big Bear of Arkansas” (1854) is narrated by just such an “intruder,” to a steamboat cabin that is otherwise loaded up with the bland bourgeoisie.

Life on the Mississippi is always a greatly more minor book than Huckleberry Finn, despite its encyclopaedic enormity. It nonetheless remains an interesting, perplexing project in itself because of its watery shapelessness or its narrative fluidity. I imagine that most readers will so enjoy Twain’s good-humoured prose that they will never stop to ask what they actually want from this book. The reader who would prefer a memoir will have to settle for something rather less, since Twain tends to shift into a blank, matter-of-fact reporting when writing about the most profound events in his own life. When remembering the death of his brother, Henry, following the boiler explosion on board the steamboat Pennsylvania in 1858, the narrative is characterised by a simple absence of humour rather than developing any new depth or quality. Perhaps Twain had thought that he was setting an example here, given the dim view that he had typically taken of sentimental literature.

Maybe there would be a happier product if Twain had tipped his cub pilot off the dry land of autobiography and into the weightlessness of fiction. When the “memoir” chapters of Life on the Mississippi had been written, however, for serialisation in the Atlantic Monthly Magazine in 1875, St Petersburg was not yet a setting and Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were not yet ready-to-go characters (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer would be published a year later). Twain was admittedly half way to superimposing Sawyer or somebody like him over his own biographical self in this memoir. The cub portrayed in the illustrations to Life on the Mississippi is significantly younger than Twain had been when he had begun his apprenticeship.

Or instead of a memoir, or a fictional adventure, do we really want this book to be a handy encyclopaedia of Mississippi lore? Life on the Mississippi is most successful as this kind of book, with Twain’s own perspective becoming rather like a boat that is pushing through a river of factual information, providing a privileged, close-up view over everything it encounters. This work was always required to be informative by the specific commercial circumstances behind its production. It had been issued as a subscription book, a product that was “not for sale in the book-stores” and that was instead canvassed door-to-door. When it was being brandished on people’s doorsteps, the subscription book had needed an abundance of illustrations and a diversity of content to put the best face on its appeal. Hence the curious, amphibious status of Life on the Mississippi, as half story and half magazine, or as a magazine with a plot.

Beginning with The Innocents Abroad, all of Twain’s major titles had been sold via subscription. The literary historian Everett H. Emerson has described this model of publishing, as it had been available to Twain at the start of his career:

The typical buyer lived in a small town and was without access to a bookstore. He wanted, or it was supposed by such publishers that he wanted, big books with many pictures… He did not want ‘literature’ but information.               

In his tribute “Mark Twain and the Old-Time Subscription Book” (1910), the humourist George Ade recalls discovering Twain’s works amongst his household’s “front-room literature.” Ade’s piece vividly conveys the revolution that was then occurring on “that center table of the seventies” with its “marble top” spread out in the “subdued light that filtered through the lace curtains.” He remembers the “distended, diluted, and altogether tasteless volumes” that had been arranged presentationally on this table. And suddenly The Innocents Abroad was gatecrashing. In being here, “it had to be so thick and heavy and emblazoned with gold that it could keep company with the bulky and high-priced Bible.” It would nevertheless strategically commit to this.

Even so, Twain’s books were not merely trying to lurk undetected. He was here partially to subvert the subscription book but also to sincerely change its overall character. To pilot it, one might better say, as a party of respectable steamboat passengers might find themselves all in the hands of a plucky boy. The point here is that the importance of the boy is accepted on Twain’s steamboat, just as on that mahogany table in the front room, besides The Bible and Ivanhoe and Noble Deeds of the Great and Brave, descriptions of Twain and of the ordinary Americans who he had met on the Mississippi are allowed to mingle unchallenged.

One should keep in mind the literary historian James M. Cox’s reminder that Twain had been a “traitor” during the Civil War. The golden good humour that Twain would later perfect had allowed him to smooth his way back into the USA. He had therefore had the skillset and the mindset of an entryist before he had ever approached the subscription book.

Many of the features of Life on the Mississippi become immediately explicable once its status as a subscription book is factored in. It is almost as if Life on the Mississippi is one of those thickly-hatched illustrations and the subscription-book model is the light source that starkly determines everything. The illustrations themselves had probably done much to shape how the narrative within Life on the Mississippi would read. There is a characteristically self-referential joke about this when one of Twain’s fellow passengers goes into florid raptures over the passing riverbank. “‘Have you ever travelled with a panorama?,’” Twain probes at last. Of course, the man has been employed as the “delineator” of a moving panorama and he has been describing this picture to Twain rather than what he can see with his own eyes.

If, instead of Life on the Mississippi, Twain had submitted a book in which a rather older Tom Sawyer had enlisted as a cub pilot, the hundreds of illustrations would have been trapped on board a steamboat, or else stuck on the riverbank watching the steamboat. Perhaps I am overmagnifying the problem here, since The Adventures of Tom Sawyer had broken through into publication without an encyclopaedic range of illustrations. Yet if you flick through Life on the Mississippi trying to see how the illustrations could have written the book, you will soon grow cynical and then you will begin to wonder at your own cynicism.

Was Twain’s hilarious and now much-quoted roasting of the historical novelist Sir Walter Scott really only included so that they could crowbar in an illustration of some medieval knights jousting? Did Twain deplore cock-fighting even as he knew that it would lead to the issuing of yet another eye-catching illustration? More sinisterly, was Twain’s general aloofness from the racism of the Gilded Age allowed to lapse, as a commercial concession, when it came to some of this book’s painful depictions of black people as grinning simpletons? Alternatively, it could be that the portraits of black people were a vague nod in their direction, to indicate that they were being included. A memoir by Harriet Wasson Styer, who had canvassed books during the 1870s, reveals that black people had occasionally subscribed to Twain’s titles, perhaps as a means of buying their way deeper into the life of their nation.

The more general political vagueness within Life on the Mississippi was equally a part of its address to subscribers. Twain remained noncommittal about the Civil War because he did not want to alienate former Unionists or Confederates when his canvassers came to their houses. In this respect Life on the Mississippi appears surprisingly similar to many of the stories that Edgar Allan Poe had written for commercial magazines. The open-ended allegories that are present within “The Black Cat” and “The Gold-Bug” (both 1843) had been crafted to keep as many (white) readers engaged as possible, regardless of whether they were for or against slavery.

The complex pressures that the subscription book had placed on Twain would carry him towards a honey spot in the sensibility of the USA’s cultural mainstream, a rare and seemingly classless position that figures such as Walt Disney and Steven Spielberg would also reach a century later. However believable Twain’s claims are about where he had found his nom de plume, “Mark Twain” is a ready synonym for this honey spot. A steamboat captain, Isaiah Sellers, had “used to jot down brief paragraphs of plain practical information about the river, and sign them ‘MARK TWAIN.’” This is piloting jargon for “two fathoms,” or water that is just safe enough and not too deep. Or, when translated into literary terms, writing that is suitable for young readers and not overly intellectual.

The reader of Life on the Mississippi will be versed in the considerable skill that the pilot needs to travel over such water, without running aground or capsizing. This book similarly had to identify the most favourable depth, to achieve an infinitesimally calculated balance between being intelligent and fun, irreverent and decent, innocent and grand. But if Twain’s book makes all sorts of concessions, for the sake of consensualism or “safety,” in order to get the subscribing public behind it, then what reward does it eke out in return? Or rather, if there is an agreed direction, what subtle diversions can Twain get away with?

Once again in the American Renaissance, the miscellany is providing a simultaneously competitive and supportive space. It should be remembered that the public had never purchased the original short stories by Poe, as far as we can ascertain. They had instead distantly bought copies of titles such as the Southern Literary Messenger or Graham’s Magazine. In these, Poe’s stories would have to stand out, glittering with meaning, and catch the eye before the page turned. The reader of Life on the Mississippi has to equally decide what is the equivalent of “Berenice” by Poe, or the sincere and original content, and what is the easy reading of “Marrying Well, a Moral Tale” by Charles Brown (Poe’s alcoholism becomes comprehensible once you begin to read the rest of the Southern Literary Messenger). There is soon a paranoia about what Twain had genuinely wanted to communicate from within his miscellany. If we are floating up a riverbank, where is the truest point for us to disembark?

The parts of this book that are heartfelt, and not merely thrown in to continue the fun, have to be always guessed at. You might suspect that Twain’s merciless roastings of Sir Walter Scott and the spiritualist Mr Manchester had been allowed to sidle in following the effect created by the Huck Finn chapter. Or maybe the readers who had been attracted by the book’s intellectual sensations are being additionally exposed to the working-class lyricism of the raftsmen who Huck meets. Maybe the book’s confessions of boyish guilt, for being responsible at a tangent for the deaths of the schoolboy Dutchy and “the town drunkard” Jimmy Finn, are what it is really here to unload. Or maybe absolutely nothing in this book is sincere and all of the honest content can be instead found in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

In retrospect that Huck Finn chapter – the first that many readers would experience of Twain’s most famous novel – appears to resemble an advert for Huckleberry Finn or even a prospectus book for it. Canvassers had carried these truncated volumes to give potential subscribers a taster of the text and to show off the illustrations. How strange that a narrative that is always implicitly comparing itself to the material power of the Mississippi river, to add and delete from the world, would end up tethered at every point to the subscription’s book’s commercial demands, as though it was following a riverbed. It begs the question of whether the pilot is a masterful or controlling figure, or simply a poser who is following the currents wherever they go.

I think that this scotches any interpretation of Life on the Mississippi as a vengeance upon Bixby, the veteran pilot, by Twain, his humiliated understudy. It is true that Bixby can only ever read the river, however brilliantly, whilst Twain would break into a new world where he could actively author his own narrative. But Twain had always understood the powerlessness of the bestselling writer since he had first glimpsed this powerlessness in the consummate pilot, whose job is to survive, and to not add to the wrecked steamboats that dot the bed of the Mississippi. However much Life on the Mississippi may sparkle on the surface as a magazine, the depths below tell of an inescapable absence of freedom.

[Previously on Tychy: “Book Review: The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier.“]