The Life of Mark Twain Read online

  Instead he romanticized his experience on the river. As early as August 1866, writing to his friend Will Bowen, whose father had been a steamboat captain, Sam averred that the pilot “obeys no man’s orders & scorns all men’s suggestions.” Even kings were “slaves to other men & to circumstances” compared to the pilot. “The king would do this thing, & he would do that,” he explained,

  but a cramped treasury overmasters him in the one case & a seditious people in the other. The Senator must hob-nob with canaille whom he despises, & banker, priest & statesman trim their actions by the breeze of the world’s will & the world’s opinion. . . . [T]he only real, independent & genuine gentlemen in the world go quietly up & down the Mississippi river, asking no homage of any one, seeking no popularity, no notoriety, & not caring a damn whether school keeps or not.

  Almost a decade later, Sam echoed these sentiments in “Old Times on the Mississippi” (1875):

  I loved the profession far better than any I have followed since, and I took a measureless pride in it. The reason is plain: a pilot, in those days, was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth. Kings are but the hampered servants of parliament and people; parliaments sit in chains forged by their constituency; the editor of a newspaper cannot be independent, but must work with one hand tied behind him by party and patrons, and be content to utter only half or two-thirds of his mind; no clergyman is a free man and may speak the whole truth, regardless of his parish’s opinions; writers of all kinds are manacled servants of the public. We write frankly and fearlessly, but then we “modify” before we print. In truth, every man and woman and child has a master, and worries and frets in servitude; but in the day I write of, the Mississippi pilot had none.

  In 1874 he admitted to Howells that, were he single, he would happily return to the river. “I am a person who would quit authorizing in a minute to go to piloting. I would rather sink a steamboat than eat, any time.” In 1895 Sam described his Mississippi years as “the only period in my life . . . that I ever enjoyed,” and as late as 1908 in his autobiographical dictation he declared that piloting had not been “work to me; it was play—delightful play, vigorous play, adventurous play—and I loved it.” Yet two years earlier he confided to Paine that “never a month passes . . . that I do not dream of being in reduced circumstances, and obliged to go back to the river to earn a living. It is never a pleasant dream, either. I love to think about those days; but there’s always something sickening about the thought that I have been obliged to go back to them.”3

  Sam remained in St. Louis until April 29, 1857, when he began to apprentice under Bixby on the Crescent City—at 688 tons, twice the size of the Paul Jones, and one of the most luxurious boats on the river, outfitted (quite literally) with all the bells and whistles. As he remembered in “Old Times on the Mississippi,” his “master” had been “hired to go on a big New Orleans boat, and I packed my satchel and went with him. She was a grand affair. When I stood in her pilot-house I was so far above the water that I seemed perched on a mountain; and her decks stretched so far away, fore and aft, below me, that I wondered how I could ever have considered the little ‘Paul Jones’ a large craft.” He remembered, too, that on this cruise he thought “the highest bluff on the river between St. Louis and New Orleans—it was near Selma, Missouri—was probably the highest mountain in the world. It is four hundred and thirteen feet high.” The boat docked in New Orleans on May 4, reversed course on May 8, and arrived back in St. Louis on May 15. On his second trip to the Big Easy in late May, he visited the French Market and marveled at the produce on display and the “men, women of children of every age, color and nation,” a far cry from his racist observations about New York City crowds four years earlier.4

  In all, Sam completed five round-trips between St. Louis and New Orleans by the end of August, the first three aboard the Crescent City with Bixby. Next he cubbed on the Rufus J. Lackland, at 710 tons a boat even larger than the Crescent City, and then the John J. Roe, a bulky 691-ton freighter and “delightful old tug” so sluggish, he joked, that “upstream she couldn’t even beat an island” and “downstream she was never able to overtake the current.” The Roe, piloted by Zeb Leavenworth and Beck Jolly, was so slow that “we used to forget what year it was [when] we left port” and “when she finally sunk in Madrid Bend, it was five years before the owners heard of it.”5

  Sam was enamored about this time with a pair of young women. The first was Emma Comfort Roe, the daughter of one of the owners of the John J. Roe. The second was the “prettiest” and “most accomplished” girl along the river, someone who lived in Napoleon, Tennessee, near Madrid Bend, Missouri (a town that has since washed away); this was likely Myra Robbins, whom he had met in St. Louis but who often visited a family farm near Napoleon and Point Pleasant, Missouri. According to Robbins’s descendants, she was one of Sam’s “sweethearts” and “something of a beauty.” He often brought her gifts and, on one occasion, he landed his boat at Point Pleasant and “sent a beautiful decorated cake” to her. He later asked permission to court her, but her father refused because “he did not approve of river men.”6

  During layovers in St. Louis, Sam resided with the Moffetts at their home on Locust Street and occasionally dined with his mother’s cousin James Lampton. A lawyer by training, Cousin Jim lived “in a tinted mist of magnificent dreams,” Sam remembered. According to Henry Watterson, he stood “in the relation of a second father” to Sam. He also was the model for Sam’s character Colonel Sellers in The Gilded Age (1873) and The American Claimant (1892), an inveterate optimist whose get-rich-quick schemes always turned to dust. As Watterson noted, “Never such a hero [as Jim Lampton] lived in such a fool’s paradise.”

  During his layovers in New Orleans, Sam worked as a watchman on the wharf for three dollars a night to earn his living expenses. He also acquired a smattering of the local French dialect so that he could converse with the Creoles, but not so well that he could speak it in France; in Paris a decade later Sam joked that he and his compatriots “never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language,” and in Montreal in December 1881 he similarly cracked, “I can speak French, but I cannot understand it.”7

  Sam was employed on the docks in St. Louis during the entire month of September 1857—one of the disadvantages of piloting, the periodic layoffs—before he and Bixby caught a ride on the 662-ton William M. Morrison on October 9, arriving in New Orleans seventeen days later. Bixby’s copilot on the Morrison was probably Isaiah Sellers, a venerable presence on the Mississippi since 1825, during the era of keelboats. During his thirty-five-year career, Sellers piloted boats on an estimated 460 round-trips between St. Louis and New Orleans. But Sam, as usual, was unimpressed by seniority or assumptions of rank. Sellers repeatedly slept through the start of his shifts, and Sam was responsible for waking him until, on one occasion, or so goes the story, Sam was “struck square on the nose by a heavy boot, and he didn’t like it much.” Sam retaliated by putting live frogs in Sellers’s boots and rubbing red pepper on his nose while he slept.8 He soon exacted an even greater measure of revenge.

  Sellers was a prominent antiunion man, another reason for Sam to dislike him. The St. Louis and New Orleans Pilots Association had existed since the 1840s but, according to Edgar Marquess Branch, “its push for high salaries and a stronger union began in earnest during May 1857” as Sam was apprenticing on the Crescent City. A resolution demanding higher salaries was signed by several pilots active in the association on August 28, the day before Sam arrived in St. Louis aboard the Roe. Among the signers were Bart and Will Bowen, Sam’s friends from Hannibal, both of whom had become pilots; Strother Wiley, the copilot of the Crescent City; Beck Jolly of the Roe; and William Brown and George Ealer, pilots with whom Sam would serve in the months to come. In March 1859, shortly before Sam earned his pilot’s license, moreover, the group was formally chartered by an act of the Missouri state legislature as the Western Boatmen’s Benevo
lent Association (WBBA). Ten days later, the St. Louis Missouri Democrat reported that “nearly every pilot of any standing” on the lower Mississippi had joined the organization, which was a more aggressive federation than the typographical unions Sam had joined earlier. Unfortunately, the pilots were fighting a failing rearguard action. As a result of the Panic of 1857 and the ensuing recession, Branch notes, “river commerce on the lower Mississippi rapidly declined by the fall of 1857” and by early 1859 “even the upper Mississippi pilots, formerly employed at $1500 a month, were working for as little as $200.” Still, Bixby became not only a member of the WBBA but its president. In other words, Sam’s abbreviated piloting career coincided with the heyday of the WBBA. He wrote Will Bowen in 1866 that “no king ever wielded so absolute a sway over subject & domain as did that old Association. . . . It was a beautiful system—beautiful.” As he later added, “it was perhaps the compactest, the completest, and the strongest commercial organization ever formed among men.” The union was given its death knell when the treasurer absconded with all its money.9

  With wages falling in the wake of the Panic, Bixby—who held licenses to pilot on the lower Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Missouri Rivers—decided to steer shallow-draft steamboats on the Missouri above St. Louis where he “could make a lot more money.” Because Sam “had not wanted to learn the Missouri,” Bixby added, “I struck a new bargain with him and turned the teaching job over” to pilots Brown and Ealer on the Pennsylvania, a three-year-old, 486-ton side-wheeler captained by John S. Kleinfelter. Sam soon despised Brown, “with his snarling ways & meannesses,” but became fast friends with Ealer, who “was a prime chess player and an idolater of Shakespeare.” Ealer “would play chess with anybody, even with me,” Sam remembered. “Also—quite uninvited—he would read Shakespeare to me; not just casually, but by the hour, when it was his watch, and I was steering.” Ealer “knew his Shakespeare as well as Euclid ever knew his multiplication table.”10 The pilothouse on the Pennsylvania became a classroom.

  In his free time, too, Sam was an avid reader. In his autobiography he recalled reading by the light of Donati’s Comet, “the most illustrious wanderer of the skies that has ever appeared in the heavens within the memory of men now living,” during the autumn of 1858. “It was a wonderful spray of white light,” he noted, “a light so powerful that I think it was able to cast shadows—however, necessarily it could, there is no occasion to seek for evidence of that; there is sufficient evidence of it in the fact that one could read . . . by that light.” Abraham Lincoln similarly viewed the comet from a hotel in Jonesboro, Illinois, on the night of September 14, 1858, and Nathaniel Hawthorne observed it from the hills of Tuscany during the first week of October. While it is impossible to know what Sam read by the light of the comet, his literary tastes were catholic, even if his religion was not. He became familiar with the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, Oliver Goldsmith, Thomas Gray, Thomas Hood, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Alexander Pope, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Jonathan Swift, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, and William Wordsworth. He developed a liking for the novels of Charles Dickens, and he sprinkled allusions to Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Dombey and Son, and the Pickwick Papers throughout his writings. He thrilled to Elisha Kane’s Arctic Explorations (1856), and he was convinced by Delia Bacon’s The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakespeare Unfolded (1857, with an introduction by Nathaniel Hawthorne) that Francis Bacon was the author of the plays attributed to the bard. As early as 1858 Sam wrote Orion that he considered “the grandest thing” in John Milton’s Paradise Lost “the Arch-Fiend’s terrible energy!” He read John Cleland’s erotic novel Fanny Hill (1748) no later than 1862, and he was infatuated with the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson that promulgated “the great law of compensation—the great law that regulates Nature’s heedless agents.” Or, as he explained it by analogy, “the same gust of wind that blows a lady’s dress aside and exposes her ankle fills your eyes so full of sand that you can’t see it.”11

  But of all authors Thomas Paine may have exerted the most influence on him. He had read Paine’s “The American Crisis” as early as October 1853. As a cub pilot, he read The Age of Reason “with fear and hesitation, but marveling at its fearlessness and wonderful power.” Years later he added that it “took a brave man before the Civil War to confess that he had read” the book. Sam spouted Paine’s deist doctrines, particularly his mechanistic view of creation, until the end of his life. In his Christmas 1865 column for the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle, Sam paid tribute to Paine’s principled opposition to “the Christian superstition.” Yet as “clear and vigorous as was his intellect,” he conceded, Paine underestimated the staying power of Christianity and its resistance to rationalism. “He was nevertheless an able writer,” Sam concluded, “and thoroughly honest in his convictions. Disgusted by hypocrisy and bigotry, he made war upon religion, fully believing that he was doing a good work.” In The Crusade of the Excelsior (1887) by Bret Harte, one of Sam’s friends in San Francisco in the mid-1860s, the character Martinez, modeled on Mark Twain (the names share six letters in sequence), rails against the Catholic Church and quotes Paine. In all, Sherwood Cummings argues, it is “nearly impossible to exaggerate the impact of The Age of Reason on the mind of Samuel Clemens.” According to Minnie Brashear, Paine offered Sam “his first glimpse of what seemed to him a worthy ideal of life and thinking different to that approved in his Hannibal world.” His admiration for Paine supplied him with a point of contrast between the conjoined twins Luigi and Angelo in the first chapter of Those Extraordinary Twins (1894): the religious skeptic Luigi reads The Age of Reason, while Angelo reads a seventeenth-century Christian devotional tract titled The Whole Duty of Man. As late as 1894 Sam criticized those “who call it a sin to respect Tom Paine or know of his great service to his race.”12

  Sam’s initial service on the Pennsylvania (November 2–26, 1857) ended when the ship collided during a race with the Vicksburg some twenty-eight miles above New Orleans. Kleinfelter and the other owners of the Pennsylvania sued in federal court to recover $5,500 in damages and losses and, though he had not been on duty, Sam was deposed as a witness. “I am learning the river—have been learning it, now, about ten months,” he testified, and affirmed that the “officers and crew which the ‘Penn’ had at the time of the collision were all of them capable sober and patient.” Despite his testimony, the judge found “that the collision was the result of improper management on the part of the officers of the Pennsylvania,” which meant that its owners were liable for both damages and court costs. The ship was also dry-docked for repairs until January 13, 1858.13 Meanwhile, Sam apprenticed on two other steamboats: the D. A. January, on which he cubbed for Ed Montgomery (December 13–22, 1857), and the New Falls City, a spanking-new 880-ton side-wheeler captained by Montgomery and piloted by Leavenworth (January 14–20, 1858).

  In early February 1858 Sam transferred back to the refitted Pennsylvania in New Orleans. After the boat finally reached St. Louis on February 14, Sam secured a job aboard the vessel for his brother Henry, who was unemployed and living alone in a St. Louis boardinghouse, as a “mud clerk” or purser’s assistant. While it was an unpaid position, it offered room, board, and a chance for promotion. In fact, Horace Bixby had begun his career on the river as a mud clerk at the age of eighteen. Henry joined the crew in mid-February and performed such duties as measuring woodpiles and counting coal boxes. His first round-trip between St. Louis and New Orleans took three weeks (February 17–March 9) rather than the normal two because of freezing weather. On the day of departure, only fifteen miles below St. Louis, the crew was required “to hunt the channel” in the ice for several hours. “The next day was colder still,” Sam wrote Orion and Mollie, and “I was out in the yawl twice” with crewmen sounding the channel. They were marooned on a sandbar for four hours in rain and sleet before the Pennsylvania rescued them. The next day, February 19, “was terribly cold,” too. Sam was “out in the yaw
l from 4 o’clock in the morning till half past 9 without being near a fire. There was a thick coating of ice over men, yawl, ropes and everything else, and we looked like rock-candy statuary.”14

  In all, Sam and Henry made five round-trips together between St. Louis and New Orleans aboard the Pennsylvania from February to June 1858. These weeks were mostly memorable because Sam met his femme idéale—literally the girl of his dreams, the only sweetheart he was never able to forget—in the Crescent City the evening of May 16. He was instantly smitten. Laura Wright was the fourteen-year-old daughter of a county judge and “rich man,” Sam remarked in 1906 (at least “as riches were estimated in that day and region”), who lived in Warsaw, Missouri, about two hundred miles west of St. Louis. She was a mere “slip of a girl,” a “frank and simple and winsome child who had never been away from home in her life before.” The Pennsylvania docked beside the John J. Roe, Sam’s former boat, and he had gone aboard to greet his friends when “out of their midst, floating upon my enchanted vision,” emerged “that comely child, that charming child.” Nearly a half century later he still remembered “that unspoiled little maid, that fresh flower of the woods and the prairies.” He imagined her “with perfect distinctness in the unfaded bloom of her youth, with her plaited tails dangling from her young head and her white summer frock puffing about in the wind.” The descriptions are depressingly similar to Humbert Humbert’s visions of the twelve-year-old girl in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. Sam’s infatuation with Laura Wright is the earliest evidence of his disturbing tendency, especially pronounced late in his life, to fixate on innocent young maidens. “Confound me if I wouldn’t eat up half a dozen of you small girls if I just had the merest shadow of a chance,” he wrote Belle Stotts a couple of years later.15