THE USEFUL & THE USELESS RIVER:
LIFE ON THE MISSISSIPPI REVISITED

In 1907, near the end of his life, Mark Twain interrupted a characteristically acerbic attack on Theodore Roosevelt to give us what well may be taken as his last significant statement about the river that flowed through much of his creative life:

The President is about to start out on another advertising tour; two or three weeks hence he is going to review the Mississippi River—that poor old abandoned waterway which was my field of usefulness when I was a pilot in the days of its high prosperity, nearly fifty years ago. He will start at Cairo and go down the river on a steamboat and make a noise all the way. He is ready to lend himself to any wildcat scheme that any one can invent for the bilking of the Treasury, provided he can get an advertisement out of it. This time he goes as cat’s-paw for that ancient and insatiable gang, the Mississippi Improvement conspirators, who for thirty years have been annually sucking the blood of the Treasury and spending it in fantastic attempts to ameliorate the condition of that useless river—apparently that, really to feed the Republican vote out there. These efforts have never improved the river, for the reason that no effort of man can do that. The Mississippi will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise; it has always torn down the petty basketwork of the engineers and poured its giant floods whithersoever it chose, and it will continue to do this.¹

The passage is as much an epitaph on a central source of his imagination as it is political fulmination. A "poor old abandoned waterway" whose only use is as the pawn of politicians, the Mississippi will yet "always have its own way," defying the pygmy like manipulations of man’s technology. Despite this tribute to its power, these words do not even hint at what the river meant to him as a creative artist. In the end, the river was only the field of his "usefulness" some fifty years ago. Once useful, now useless, tearing its way through man-imposed limits, the river serves Twain yet again as a metaphor for the great changes he saw in the American heartland and, perhaps, for his own course as man and artist.

This passage also forces us to look backwards to Life on the Mississippi (1883), Twain’s most complete effort to record "objectively" the subject of river lore that had simmered in his mind as early as 1866.² The greatest of Twain’s travel books, LOM is a

196

paradigm of all that we have come to see in his work as artistically and culturally significant. There is the superb account of piloting originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1875 (chapters 4 to 17) which fills most of Part I; the statistics, tall tales, anecdotes and descriptions of the burgeoning industrialism along the river in Part II; the striking contrasts between ante and post bellum America; the tension between America’s egalitarian and "vulgar" view of itself and the sophisticated foreign traveler’s view; the world of an idyllic Hannibal portrayed in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and the "realistic" town he saw in 1882; the struggle between romanticism" and "realism" in life and literature; and, finally, the many shifting points of view and personae that produce the whole spectrum of Twain’s humor and wit. It is all there in this oddly constructed work which Twain described upon completing it as a "wretched God-damned book."³

The difficulty was to create a full-length book around the Atlantic sketches. When his five-week tour of the river did not result in enough material to complete the book before the publisher’s deadline, Twain turned to other travel accounts to flesh it out.⁴ Nevertheless, a truly fascinating aspect of the book is the way it incorporates themes and ideas from his earlier work in the 1870s, and yet looks forward to later books like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).

Critics⁵ have long recognized the transitional nature of LOM in the Twain canon, pointing out the many parallels of theme and incident to Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (which lost its great keelboatmen chapter to it). Yet LOM is transitional in a much more significant sense than that of merely sharing themes. It should be seen, on one level at least, as forming the central panel of a "triptych" which comprises the "epic" of the Mississippi. As such, the structure, comic variety, and "factual" realism of LOM give us a multidimensional perspective of this epic subject. The book also offers a complex, mediatory vision of Twain himself, worked through several different personae, e.g., the historian of the opening two chapters, Huck Finn in chapter 3, the greenhorn pilot poised between youth and maturity in the Atlantic episodes, an angry social critic of Southern literary and cultural mores, a nostalgic observer of the scenes of his childhood, a tourist comparing his perceptions with the likes of Mrs. Trollope and Basil Hall, the tall tale spinner, and, finally, the "mature" writer whose fame is already signalled by the fact that a steamboat is named after him, but at a time when the romance of the calling has waned. This variety of point of view

expands Twain’s epic vision of the river culture which began in Tom Sawyer with its wise and wistful narrator reconstructing an essentially prelapsarian world, and which Twain completed by Huck’s account of a postlapsarian world where evil is seen through a comic imagination bent on preserving itself by the twin strategies of disguise and escape. LOM thus stands between the worlds of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, providing us with a historical, sociological, and autobiographical platform from which we can judge and understand the fiction.

Now I do not say that Twain worked out consciously such a literary strategy, but that his development as a writer from the 1870s when he began to explore his past, to the 1880s when he had seemingly played it out, necessarily led to such an overarching structure. Indeed, all three books spring from a single impulse to explore the past, its innocence and ambiguities, in its relationship to the dominant cultural patterns experienced by Twain himself. All three were begun within two years (1874–1876), and LOM and Huck Finn were published within a year of each other (l883–l884).⁶ Regardless of the different circumstances that determined the writing of each book, what emerges is a full-blown trilogy with LOM as its historical and semi-autobiographical crux. It is the crux not only because it expands the range of points of view toward the river and its effects on personality and culture, but also because it presents his adult time perspective from which those effects can be understood. We gain both the past and the present with their implications for the future. And the combined levels of psychological and social realism filtered through Twain’s comic vision give the book and, by extension, the trilogy a native epic quality sought by critics and writers almost throughout the whole of American literary history.⁷ Even Twain’s whitewashing of some of the harsher aspects of the steamboating era—the prostitution and commercial cutthroatism—does not diminish a major achievement of the book: its universalization of an essentially regional portrait of America and its democratic "heroes." Yet through the book’s large social grasp runs America’s most nativist theme: the course of the self’s serio-comic relationship to nature and a pluralistic democratic society. Only in Twain’s work the theme is not carried by inflated metaphysical wings; rather, it meanders up and down the Mississippi which, as one critic puts it, Twain writes of "without any desire to humanise it out of its proper character."⁸ And that is why the strange and seemingly unbalanced, even chaotic structure of LOM is really quite organic to its proper subject. It epitomizes and dramatizes all of Twain’s work—

198

"American to the core,"⁹ as Frank Norris described it—and, linked with Huckleberry Finn, carries American literature to a nativist peak. LOM may meander but, like the Mississippi, meanders with significant purpose. Let us now examine in some detail the structure of the book from this angle of vision.

Part 1 is obviously built around the education of the cub-pilot and his relationship to the river. The goal is to achieve a form of self-reliance based on technological know-how, an esthetic or even religious appreciation of the natural ways of the river, and a body of moral values that creates human dignity. Men like Horace Bixby and Isaiah Sellers are of course the models. Against the great timeless background of the river-in-history, seen by DeSoto when the "Spanish Inquisition was roasting" people with a "free hand" (XII, 6),¹⁰ Twain celebrates Western civilization’s newest and perhaps best kind of hero. If the river has flowed through time and history punctuated by war and oppression—the works of great artists the only consolation—it now flows to be used for some greater ideal. We get many interesting facts about the Mississippi and passages from Francis Parkman’s "high culture" history of LaSalle, but all this is only to introduce in chapter 3 the primitive comic glory of American keelboatmen observed by Huck Finn lying his way down the river in his pursuit of freedom. The particular is measured against the universal, the now against all-that-has-been and must be condemned. Then, in chapter 4 (the first of the "Old Times" sketches), we break into the historical "present"—Twain’s youth—and see the "majestic, the magnificent Mississippi . . . shining in the sun" (XII, 33) and the young boy’s ambition to partake of its glory. It is the same Mississippi which "considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside aspect of rustiness and antiquity" (XII, 7), that is, the river that lends both age and youth to the American experience and which the true pilot harmonizes within himself. What follows are the great "Old Times" sketches in which Twain, appropriating an adult point of view sympathetic to the naive innocence of the cub, creates a comic version of an American rite de passage replete with moral and psychological inversions. Thus, he ironically comments on the "fact" that a Hannibal boy who became an apprentice engineer "shook the bottom out of all my Sunday-school teachings. That boy had been notoriously worldy, and I just the reverse; yet he was exalted to this eminence, and I left in obscurity and misery" (XII, 35). In chapter 5 the cub is disillusioned when he discovers that the mate he holds in awe is, like the Duke and Dauphin, a conning

tailtale spinner who said he was the son of an English nobleman though in reality a "half-witted humbug, an untraveled native of the wilds of Illinois, who had absorbed wildcat literature and appropriated its marvels . . . until he had come to believe it himself’ (XII, 43). Later, after the cub endures a catechism about the river by Bixby and nearly despairs, he stands in the pilot-house of a magnificent steamboat and once again believes that piloting is a "romantic sort of occupation after all" (XII, 53). In the next chapter Bixby makes the romantic potential a reality by executing a remarkable crossing. By contrast, the true comedy is in observing the unworldly but bumbling initiate managing his own crossing to an unassailable dignity that cannot be mocked. The process bears its self-reliant fruits when the cub finally stands up and fights the hated pilot, Mr. Brown, while the boat plows on with no one at the helm. But he is not punished for his "great crime" (XII, 175); on the contrary, he is rewarded by feeling like an "emancipated slave" while listening to George Ealer’s flute and readings from Shakespeare and Goldsmith. Among the monarchic pantheon of pilots there are the good Kings and the bad, the cultured and the uncultured, all there to teach the fledgling prince how to reign. Paradoxically, the most profound American and democratic values are realized through a strict but just aristocratic and authoritarian system.

Central to the meaning of LOM as a whole is the realization that such values, however learned, are in the service of a more universal life experience: that the American King’s triumph is circumscribed, even undercut—certainly humbled—by Nature itself. In a very real way, the pilot, with his "massed knowledge of the Mississippi and his marvelous facility in the handling of it" (XII, 108), overreaches himself and is "punished":

Now when I had mastered the language of this water, and had come to know every . . . feature as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which never could be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of that majestic river! (XII, 78)

Here is an esthetic—even moral—"fall," so common to Twain’s experience. Here is genuine loss. Nature’s most primordial and awesome element, the Mississippi, draws Twain to its heart in order to study its secrets, only to make the study rob him of the river’s glory. The acquisition of knowledge, as in the biblical account, involves the loss of innocence as well as the capacity to read Nature at its most fundamental and, therefore, most inspiring leVel, as a kind of primitive poetry. And the significance of this experience is com pounded

in Part II when we are told that the once lordly pilot had been made subordinate to the Captain—"The government has taken away the romance of our calling . . ." (XII, 233)— and that beacons and buoys "had knocked the romance out of piloting" (XII, 232). The reality of 1883 is, after all, a final consequence of the experience described in 1875. Curiously, Albert Bigelow Paine says that if Twain had visited the river ten years earlier "before [Twain] had become a theoretical pessimist, and before the river itself had become a background for pessimism, the tale might have had more . . . literary glamour and illusion."¹¹ But the pessimism—hardly "theoretical"—was already there in the 1870s. On the one hand, it was seeded in "The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut" (1876), in which Twain exposes "natural" man as a natural killer and, on the other, by the loss of the romance that once gave both his childhood and nature whatever glory and meaning they possessed, or seemed to possess. The Mississippi, therefore, gradually became "useless" to him simply as a man pursuing a romantic ideal though the process of its inspirational usefulness and consequent uselessness could be exploited by Mark Twain the artist. In Tom Sawyer the river is used as the reposeful and adventurous background for a childhood idyll; in Huckleberry Finn it takes on its fullest symbolic weight as the road to freedom and as a force of nature integrating both beauty and ugliness, safety and destruction, good and evil. But LOM presents us with the native core experience on which Twain’s sense of a fallen reality and ultimate pessimism were fixed. And it was only fitting that the cub-pilot, passing through his comic trials and taught by "gods" themselves, should confront that sad wisdom formally held and taught by his culture. Such is the realistic mythology Twain offers.

In the final chapter of Part I, the full force of its truth is dramatized. Immediately after his triumph over Brown, we see the cub-pilot afraid of the responsibility of standing a daylight watch. He has not yet mastered the river and now cannot travel with Brown. Transferred to another boat, he chats with his brother Henry, soon to leave on the Pennsylvania. They talk of steamboat disasters:

One was then on its way to us, little as we suspected it; the water which was to make the steam which should cause it was washing past some point fifteen hundred miles up the river while we talked—but it would arrive at the right time and the right place. (XII, 177-78)

The Pennsylvania explodes and Henry dies, though Ealer cleverly manages to save himself and his flute. Brown is killed; the maimed

and dying are everywhere, vividly etched by Twain’s careful mixture of dramatic journalism and controlled personal involvement with the agony of his dying brother. Faulty boilers, human error, perhaps~ the indifferent power of the river there at the right time and place, an instrument of destiny—all these factors create the catastrophe. The cub-pilot will endure, plagued by guilt for Henry’s death, as we know. Yet Twain the artist chose to round out his account of piloting days with this event but not merely because it was a dramatic scene to exploit. He must balance comedy with tragedy. This provides the reader with a tonal, if not chronological, transition to Part II in which the high romance of the pilot’s life will be tempered with stories of his precarious and often tragic calling. Above all, he must remind himself and the reader that to celebrate life on the Mississippi is both to celebrate and to suffer the human condition.

And now, twenty-one years later, having wound through a life from miner to "scribbler of books" (XII, 185), Mark Twain is ready to confront the past yet again, but a past which he surely knew was radically changed and waiting to assault his time-geared imagination. Having now no unifying theme similar to that developed in Part I, he is forced to explore the reality of change from his Janus-like perspective of looking both backward and forward. His point of view must be—by necessity—that of the familiar visitor, tourist, social critic, and raconteur because he had become, in fact, all of them. No wonder then that Part II wanders and shifts, embracing the dynamics of change in nature, society, and the self. A thematic structure unfolds itself, spun out of the threads of Part I and pulled toward three clear subjects: the rise and impact of technology on the river civilization; exploration of the false romanticism in both ante- and post-bellum South—the Sir Walter Scott disease; and a "realistic" confrontation with his childhood memories and home. Each subject or theme counterpoints its source in Part I. Technology triumphs over nature and reinforces the already created spiritual and esthetic separation between observer and the river. But technology and industrialism, though they manifestly dissolved the "glory" that was steamboating and its unique hero, must also be praised since they evidence "progress, energy, prosperity" (XII, 193). The change must be praised, not only because it is good in itself but also because it is there to replace the loss natural mastery brought about earlier. Mark Twain may lament the disappearance of the woodyard man and his way of life, but he does not really believe in his survival for society as a whole. And how much better the use of derricks to

unload boats! Indeed, why this was not thought of before only shows "what a dull-witted slug the average human being is" (XII, 198). The condemnation is extreme, of course, but by the 1880s, dealing in extremes was, for Twain, a more characteristic reflex than ever before.

In addition, technology offers a new esthetic experience to replace the old by way of compensation for the death of "romance": "The finest thing we saw on our whole Mississippi trip, we saw as we approached New Orleans. . . . This was the curving frontage of the Crescent City lit up with the white glare of five miles of electric lights. It was a wonderful sight, and very beautiful" (XII, 403-4). Now we know that part of the reason for Twain’s affirmation of technology and industrialism was that his trip to Europe in 1879 left him with a healthy respect for American know-how, something he never really lacked, but could be made unsure of.¹² It is true that he cannot resist the temptation to undercut the new culture, as when he seriocomically remarks that the great "civilization" of St. Paul, Minnesota, was founded by a Canadian who sold whiskey to Indians. "The result is before us" (XII, 481) is his ironic comment. But despite this and the fact that technology had destroyed the "romance" of the river, I do not believe that LOM reflects any real ambiguity about its value. The true essence of that authentically American romance had been lost anyway. So long as the river was to be read and challenged, it had its sublime usefulness; that gone, the river could carry only essentially useless, though colorful, social and economic relics like lumber rafts with their "fiddling, song-singing, whiskey drinking, breakdown dancing rapscallions. . . ." Instead, we have men of a "sedate business aspect, with not a suggestion of romance about them any more" (XII, 476). In the very next paragraph, however, Twain describes a dangerous night crossing made possible by the aid of electric lights. Water and trees now "glare as of a noonday intensified. The effect was strange and fine, and very striking" (XII, 476). No; Twain accepts the new order with its new effects. Only in the following years dominated by his involvement with the Paige Typesetting machine and other personal and economic problems does the ambiguity emerge, fully dramatized in A Connecticut Yankee. LOM represents Twain’s last true affirmation in this realm of American change.

Sir Walter Scott, the source of the South’s "jejeune romanticism" (XII, 375), was another matter.¹⁴ Compared with the authentic romance embodied by the river, "the Middle-Age sham civilization" Scott conveniently represented would have to appear childlike and

unreal. Of course, Scott reflected more than medievalism; he was, to Twain, a catch-all symbol of the Thomas Nelson Page school of Southern literature dedicated to glossily embalming an ante-bellum vision of slavery and plantation life that Twain knew never existed; of a style of architecture blatantly contrary in spirit to the technological forces of the time; and, finally, of the reactionary enemy of the French Revolution. These charges, however half true or wholly untrue, are significant for other than sociological reasons. Ultimately, Scottism represented a form of childlike play—the fantasy world of Tom Sawyer—that Twain, made a "man" by the river, would have not only to reject, but also to destroy. By extension, the whole South would have to be destroyed literarily for harboring those fantasies so appealing to his imagination but so contrary to the "realism" and self-reliance engendered by both river and pilot. This is not to say that Twain’s antiromanticism did not begin long before Scott became fixed in his mind as the complete villain. But I am suggesting that possibly it was cohered into a settled, if sometimes wavering, disposition by the river experience itself. Identifying him-self with G. W. Cable and Joel Chandler Harris as the only writers who knew how to use Southern material effectively for genuine realistic, social, and satiric purposes, Twain was really telling us that he had escaped the seductive traps of an idealized past and so could claim recognition as a modern writer at one with his burgeoning, enlightened age. Even the so-called suppressed chapter on the South’s penchant for violence, dueling, and single party voting suggests this, and I think LOM suffered by its excision.¹⁴ Through his sweeping cultural generalizations, Twain was trying to be regional and national, critical and explanatory, if not apologetic, about the civilization he had to bring to literary life. And perhaps that is why we also get so many economic statistics on the growth of the South. It is as if Twain must give us the most concrete, unassailable evidence he can of that growth, even while acknowledging that it bred a crass materialism. He had expected "great and strange changes in the river, but was not quite prepared for towns like Natchez becoming manufacturing centers and attracting "Brisk men, energetic of movement and speech; the dollar their god; how to get it their religion" (XII, 328). Twain demonstrates this through a brilliant dialogue between two salesmen planning to con the public with imitation butter and cotton-seed "olive" oil. The "real" South—the real America—may well be characterized by the vulgarity so correctly pointed out by Mrs. Trollope, but there were genuine historical and cultural reasons for this. Presumably, "progress"

would bring change. Twain is angry at the river towns because they have not availed themselves of new economic possibilities which would create "intellectual advancement and the liberalizing of opinion" (XII, 303). Towns like Natchez will thrive, others will fade. But "The House Beautiful," that absurdly comic amalgam of Southern aristocratic pretensions, sentimental patriotic and religious art, nouveau riche gaudiness, and frontier rawness will remain: "Not a bathroom in the house, and no visitor likely to come along who has ever seen one" (XII, 322). Like the steamboat, it is a pure manifestation of "flush times" with all its contradictions, glories, and absurdities. Still, although distressed by the backward flow of a diseased romanticism and the lost art of learning the river, Mark Twain sees that they have usefully forced him to face the promises and failures of American life.

Yet the truest and deepest drama of promise and failure sprang from Twain’s lifelong confrontation with the living ghosts of his childhood. Now, stepping ashore at Hannibal, he has a "realizing sense of what Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity" (XII, 428). He is a boy again, "simply . . . dreaming an unusually long dream" (XII, 429). The French Revolution and dreams! Pointedly using the imagery of freedom and release, Twain must still face the reality of his return to the past. His reflections, his retreat into the reverie of dreams, so obsessive a theme in his later works, are "spoiled" by his realization that in "fifty houses down yonder" he would find "either a man or a woman who was a baby or unborn when I noticed those houses last" (XII, 429). The reality of change strikes deeper into the core of his life than any historical or cultural perception could. And so he must find a point of view—emotionally and physically—that would afford a measure of transcendence. What else to do but climb Holiday’s Hill and look down over a wide expanse of the river. He sees that the river "had suffered no change; it was as young and fresh and comely and gracious as ever it had been; whereas, the faces of others would be old, and scarred with the campaigns of life . . . and would give me no uplifting of spirit" (XII, 429). The most profound use of the river is to enable him to come to terms with time itself. In this there is freedom and release, too, as well as the affirmation of promise, if only because the river cannot "fail." Coming down from the hill, Twain must face human change and doing so releases his only psychological defenses: irony and humor. Talking to an "old gentleman" he hears of this one s death and that one’s failure and of the "stupid ass" who succeeded

in St. Louis—"The noblest market in the world for that kind of property" (XII, 432). Finally inquiring about himself, Twain learns that "Oh, he succeeded well enough—another case of a d_-----d fool. If they’d sent him to St. Louis, he’d have succeeded sooner" (XII, 433). Having placed his fame in a proper and characteristically ironic perspective—much as he had done earlier on seeing a steamboat named after him—he can now begin to penetrate seriocomically the "Presbyterian" quality of his life as a young boy.¹⁵ We see him agonizing over the drowning of Lem Hackett, who "loaded with sin . . . went to the bottom like an anvil" (XII, 434), and, Tom Sawyer-like, tormented by his own failure to "reform." We see him carrying the "weighty cargo" of guilt over giving matches to the tramp who then burned himself to death, and we see his disillusionment in experiencing his grotesque liar-hero, Stavely, unmasked. This is the troubled, guilt-ridden, lie-fed boy who will one day be taught true confidence and courage by Mr. Bixby ("Didn’t you know there was no bottom in that crossing?"). Young boy, young man, adult: the circle of experience is drawn over the river, its radii touching at various points the flow of national life.

In the end, because of its variety, Part II projects a complex and energetic quality. Even the con game stories like "The Professor’s Yarn," "A Burning Brand," and the Poesque narrative of Karl Ritter’s dying confession, though they seem to be merely "fillers" into its triple-themed structure, actually reinforce the overall theme of mutability and the deceptiveness of human affairs along the river. Indeed, these con game stories are part of a thematic web whose ironic center is located in the conning Twain himself experiences when he attempts to travel incognito and is hilariously exposed, once again, by a pilot’s tall tales of government alligator hunting along the Mississippi. "The buzzard is the sacred bird of the South," the pilot tells his famous observer, and "the alligator is the sacred bird of the government, and you’ve got to let him alone" (XII, 204), thus neatly inserting into the comic discourse two satiric symbols of the predatory culture exposed throughout the book. When the pilot finally trips himself up, he turns to Twain—whose identity he has known all along—and cries: "you take her and lie awhile—you’re handier at it than I am: Trying to play yourself for a stranger and an innocent!" (XII, 207). The mask is ripped off revealing Twain’s profound psychic and literary obsession with the sometimes comic ordeal of the "innocent" stranger trapped in a fallen world. "Reality" triumphs in the arena of a cheating, lying, struggling, changing, unsure, self-reliant, self-sacrificing, nobly aspiring society, seeking its own forms of romance and growth. Twain’s oft-quoted comment that he had already met every well drawn character in fiction and biography on the river (XII, 163), though no doubt an exaggeration, is therefore testimony to the complexity of experience that shaped his own mind and art. For the river made him at least face his life and the American experience on their most fundamental levels. It gave him an image of timelessness, change, genuine loss, and genuine hope. In a sense, the river had done all it could for him. If at the end of his life his "symbol of eternity" (XII, 235) appeared useless to him, it was only because in LOM and its two flanking masterpieces, he had exhausted all its secrets. Time no longer seemed contained in the harmonious flow of the river. For the rest of his creative life he would continue to explore the false "romance" of the historical past, the political and social horrors of a postlapsarian world, and most significantly, the theology of heaven and hell where time becomes part of the absurd disorder he saw in his life, in his society, indeed, in his universe.¹⁶

HOFSTRA UNIVERSITY

    ¹Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard Devoto (New York: Harper, 1940), pp. 18–19.
   ²See Guy A. Cardwell, "Life on the Mississippi: Vulgar Facts and Learned Errors," E5Q: A Journal of the American Renaissance, 19 (4th Quarter 1973), 283–84. In January of 1866 Twain wrote to his mother and sister about getting materials for a Mississippi book and then again to Livy in 1871 about taking a two-month trip to the river to write a "standard work."
   ³Mark Twain, Business Man, ed. Samuel Charles Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), p. 207.
   ⁴See Dewey Ganzel, ‘Twain, Travel Books, and Life on the Mississippi," American Literature, 34 (March 1962), 40–55.
   ⁵An excellent analysis of this issue and the idea of "romance" in LOM is in Roger B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), chap. 5. Also see Marion Montgomery, "The New Romantic vs. the Old: Mark Twain’s Dilemma in Life on the Mississippi, "Mississippi Quarterly, 11(1958), 79–82, and Barriss Mills, "‘Old Times on the Mississippi’ as an Initiation Story," College English, 25 (1964), 283–89. Important, too, is Leo Marx’s treatment of style, particularly relating to LOM’s famous sunset passage, in "The Pilot and the Passenger: Landscape Conventions and the Style of Huckleberry Finn," American Literature, 28 (May 1956), 129–46.
   ⁶The "Old Times" sketches were composed between Oct. 29, 1874, and May of 1875. The rest was composed after the 1882 trip. Tom Sawyer was completed by July of 1875 and published in 1876. Huckleberry Finn, started soon after the completion of Tom Sawyer, was of course not published until 1884.
   ⁷A good account of the critical problems is Robert Falk, The Victorian Mode in American Fiction 1865–1885 (East Lansing: Michigan State Univ. Press, 1964), passim, but esp. pp. 159–66.
   ⁸Charles Whibley, in Blackwood’s Magazine, Aug. 1907, rpt. in Mark Twain: The Critical Heritage, ed. Frederick Anderson (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1971), p. 275. Most contemporary critics of LOM agreed with Lafcadio Hearn’s judgment that it was Twain’s most "serious creation" to date.

    ⁹Frank Norris, "An American School of Fiction?" in The Responsibilities of the Novelist (1903; rpt. New York: Hill & Wang, 1967), p. 271.
   ¹⁰The Writings of Mark Twain, ed. A. B. Paine, 37 vols. (New York: Harper, 1923). All references to Life on the Mississippi will be to this edition.
   ¹¹A. B. Paine, Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Harper, 1912), p. 746.
   ¹²See Howard G. Baetzhold’s study, Mark Twain & John Bull: The British Connection (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), esp. chaps. 3 and 4. For a good study of the impact of technology on LOM, see Thomas H. Pauly, "The ‘Science of Piloting’ in Twain’s ‘Old Times’: The Cub’s Lesson on Industrialization," Arizona Quarterly, 30 (Spring 1974), 229–38.
   ¹³The best general discussion of this issue is by Sydney J. Krause, Mark Twain as Critic (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1967), pp. 162–89. Excellent, too, is Louis J. Budd’s account of Twain’s Buffalo Express editorials (1869) which viciously attacked the Southern preoccupation with chivalry and the like. In Mark Twain: Social Philosopher (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1962), pp. 50ff. Budd also perceptively remarks that LOM marks "the first full blare of Twain’s modernism" (p. 89).
   ¹⁴But see Guy A. Cardwefl, "Mark Twain, James R. Osgood, and Those ‘Suppressed’ Passages," New England Quarterly, 46 (June 1973), 163–88. Cardwell persuasively argues that Twain’s own literary judgment determined the excisions rather than any fears of loss of sales. I have read the holograph manuscript of the J. Pierpont Morgan Library which includes these passages, and I feel they give Part II a more dynamic sociological and literary scope. The excisions can be read in the appendix to the Limited Editions Club edition of LOM (New York, 1944).
   ¹⁵But see my "Mark Twain’s Theology: Banished Adam and the Bible," Mississippi Quarterly, 29(1976), 167–89, in which I study the effects of the Bible on his "Presbyterian conscience" and his art.
   ¹⁷Indeed, shortly after completing LOM, Twain began the work that would lead to the determinism of What is Man? See Baetzhold, p.70. For a study of his late theological writings, see also my "Mark Twain’s Masks of Satan; The Final Phase," American Literature, 45 (May 1973), 207–27.