Thomas Ruys Smith - Deep Water: The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain

D EEP W ATER

Southern Literary Studies

SCOTT ROMINE, SERIES EDITOR

DEEP WATER

The Mississippi River in the Age of Mark Twain

THOMAS RUYS SMITH

LOUISIANA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS

BATON ROUGE

Published by Louisiana State University Press

Copyright 2019 by Louisiana State University Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing

DESIGNER: Michelle A. Neustrom

TYPEFACE: Whitman

PRINTER AND BINDER: Sheridan Books, Inc.

Portions of chapter 1 first appeared in The Mississippi Was a Virgin Field: Reconstructing the River before Mark Twain, 18651875, Mark Twain Journal, 53 (Fall 2015). Portions of chapter 4 and the epilogue first appeared in Roustabouts, Steamboats, and the Old Way to Dixie: The Mississippi River and the Southern Imaginary in the Early Twentieth Century, Southern Quarterly 52, no. 3 (Spring 2015): 1029.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Smith, Thomas Ruys, 1979 author.

Title: Deep water / Thomas Ruys Smith.

Description: Baton Rouge : Louisiana State University Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019029979 (print) | LCCN 2019029980 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7109-7 (cloth) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7286-5 (pdf) | ISBN 978-0-8071-7287-2 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Twain, Mark, 18351910Homes and hauntsMississippi River. | Twain, Mark, 18351910Criticism and interpretation. | River lifeMississippi River. | Mississippi RiverIn literature. | Mississippi River ValleySocial life and customs. | Mississippi RiverDescription and travel.

Classification: LCC PS1334 .S65 2020 (print) | LCC PS1334 (ebook) | DDC 813/.4dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029979

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019029980

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

For Tabitha and Delilah

Mark Twain and the Mississippi River are inseparable in my mind. When I told him that Life on the Mississippi was my favourite story of adventure [...] Mr. Clemenss manner changed. A sadness came into his voice. Those were glorious days, the days on the Mississippi. They will come back no more, life has swallowed them up, and youth will come no more. They were days when the tide of life was high, when the heart was full of the sparkling wine of romance. There have been no other days like them. ...

There he stoodour Mark Twain, our American, our humorist, the embodiment of our country. He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say like the river, Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.

HELEN KELLER, Midstream, 1929

CONTENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

D EEP W ATER

Introduction

THE MISSISSIPPI WAS A VIRGIN FIELD

The deep places in the river are not so obvious as the shallow ones
and can only be found by carefully probing it.
So perhaps it is with human nature.

HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Journal, 1859

The stream of our thought is like a river.

WILLIAM JAMES, ThePrinciplesofPsychology, 1890

No river of the world, great or small, is so wayward in its ways
as this wonderful stream. [...] He is never satisfied; always changing. Ever breaking away old boundaries, old landmarks, and making for himself new. In fact it seems that no landmark of his ever reaches the dignity of age. So soon as it has been sufficiently long established as to be called old, this grand old river of ours remorselessly demolishes it, and creates for himself new idols, in their turn to be broken and destroyed.

MAD FREAKS OF THE MISSISSIPPI,
Memphis OldFolksRecord, 1875

I n July 1895, near the start of his post-bankruptcy lecture tour around the world, Twain was holed up in a hotel room in Winnipeg, Manitoba, nursing a carbuncle. Already one of the most traveled Americans of his moment, he had a long journey ahead of himto Australia, New Zealand, India, South Africa. Still, as always for Twain, the Mississippi River was never very far away. A journalist for the WinnipegTribune was admitted to his room, and after some reminiscences about his early adventures, the reporter prompted the American writer to talk about the river: However excellent these European incidents may be [...] you doubtless consider the Mississippi your real field of work? You are, so to speak, the prophet of the Mississippi. Twains response was unequivocal: Yes, and the reason is plain. By a series of eventsaccidentsI was the only one who wrote about old times on the Mississippi. Wherever else I have been some better have been there before and will come after, but the Mississippi was a virgin field [...]. Here then was my chance, and I used it. Twain was, he felt, uniquely qualified to take the river as his real field of work. After all, he had been a steamboat pilot in his youth, more than thirty years ago now, and as far as Twain was concerned, no one could write that life but a pilot entered into the spirit of it. Yet most pilots did not run naturally to literature. They would have no connected style, no power of describing anythingjust an endless stream of details. Twain, though, was different. He, and only he, could tame the Mississippi in words.

Throughout his career, Mark Twain claimed the Mississippi River as his own. There were good reasons for that sense of ownership. By 1895 he had already completed a profoundly important sequence of river writings; though the Mississippi would never leave his imagination, he had made the enduring statements on the river that would stand as central pillars in his literary legacy. In very different moods, to very different ends, the Mississippi flowed through the heart of Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), TheAdventuresofTomSawyer (1876), LifeontheMississippi (1883), AdventuresofHuckleberryFinn (1884/5), and PuddnheadWilson (1894). The two decades at the heart of his life and writing career were dominated by shaping these interpretations of the river. Certainly for his contemporaries, to borrow Edwin Cadys words, Clemens owned the river.

Yet at the same time, the river was never his alone. While Twain wrote the defining portraits of the Mississippi in the nineteenth century, he was not, as he claimed in 1895, the only one who wrote about old times on the Mississippi. The Mississippi, to borrow Twains phrase ripe with images of conquest and desire, was not a virgin field. Walter Blair recognized many years ago that when Twain finally turned to the river in earnest, he had gravitated toward a popular subject, not pioneered a new one. Nor should we take Twain at his word when he claims that it was only a steamboat pilot entered into the spirit of it who could write about the river. Twain might have always privileged the view from the pilothouse, figuring it as a kind of panopticon, but the steamboat and the riverbank afford many vantage points from which to view the Mississippi, not all of them known to a pilot. Just as the river had already proved a fertile cultural symbol in the early decades of the nineteenth century, so, in the age of Mark Twain, did a wide variety of writers, artists, travelers, musicians, river workers, and engineers leave their mark on the Mississippi in manifold ways. At the same time that Twain was shaping and reshaping his imagined Mississippi, he was surrounded by others who were putting forward competing visions of the river and its ongoing significance for American life and identityin ways that chime with and challenge Twains narratives in equal measure. Long overshadowed by the image of Twains Mississippi, another river runs through this defining period in American culture. This river was a polyphonic place, not a monologue, composed of diverse voices each telling their own story of the Mississippi. For too long, Twains river has been read in a vacuum, not as part of a continuing conversation about the place of the Mississippi in Americas life and imagination. Framing his river books in this light gives us new landmarks by which to navigate them. In such company, Twains multivalent Mississippi begins to look rather different: no less distinctive or dominant and perhaps more singular than ever, but also part of a much wider miscellaneous and ambiguous chorus discussing the meaning of the river in American lifeand the meaning of American life on the riverat this crucible moment.