Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

This is not a review; no ordinary civilian can "review" a hundred-and-forty-year-old pillar of his country's literature. Perhaps some exalted literary types, the sorts who sit on chairs bearing other people's names and sonorously declaim to students (rarely) and the wider public (regularly) their Revealed Truths, could do so, but I think they more often celebrate or reconsider books of that caliber. So maybe that's what I'll be doing here today.

I went through a Mark Twain phase as a young man, reading great swaths of his work in my early twenties - all of the travel books, the big two-volume Collected Tales from Library of America [1] - though, looking back, I don't think I've spent as much time with his novels. (I read Tom and Huck in school, and the later sequels - which are about as good as late sequels written to make a buck ever are - out of morbid curiosity.)

But I just reorganized my to-be-read shelves, just before a week-long vacation over the Fourth of July. The point of the reorg was to get most everything into one sequence, taking what were hidden clusters of Library of America and Everyman's Library books and integrating them into the main alphabetical sweep. The point was, I hoped, to actually read some of those gigantic books that have been sitting quietly so long, and I guess it's working. (I also want to somewhat replenish the shelves with newer books, since I still have clear evidence that I worked in SF publishing up to 2007, got review copies regularly up to about 2013, and am still living in those ruins - but that's a different, more complicated problem.)

And so I realized I have six big fat books of Twain, on the next shelf I was picking from. Shockingly, I don't have the Library of America Innocents Abroad/Roughing It, which would normally have been my first choice, so instead I jumped into Life on the Mississippi for the first time in about thirty years.

Life is a curious book, not entirely one thing or another, published in 1883 and looking backwards to a golden age a generation earlier. Twain was a steamboat pilot, having trained just before the Civil War, and the first half of Life is a somewhat potted history of the Mississippi River and then a memoir of his time as a cub pilot - how he learned the river, what the work was like, his mentors and compatriots, and similar subjects. Twain goes out of his way to make himself seem younger and more callow than he actually was: he was about 21 when he got the piloting job, and had been working as a journalist for nearly a decade. (Careers started early in the 19th century.) My sense is that this was a deliberate career move for him; piloting was a high-paid, high-status, respectable trade, and he was looking to set himself up for life - though the War, of course, broke that for Twain as for everyone else.

Here's an example of that possibly faux-naif tone, from p.263 of the edition I read:

Here was something fresh - this thing of getting up in the middle of the night to go to work. It was a detail in piloting that had never occurred to me at all. I knew that boats ran all night, but somehow I had never happened to reflect that somebody had to get up out of a warm bed to run them, I began to fear that piloting was not quite so romantic as I had imagined it was; there was something very real and work-like about this new phase of it.

The back half of Life, once Twain runs out of memoir and the War sent him scrambling west to do something else, chronicles a long trip down and back up the Mississippi, on steamboats, what seems to be the year or so before the book was published - so twenty-two years or thereabouts since the last time he'd been in that region. So he set off for St. Louis - with "a poet for company, and a stenographer to 'take him down'" - and from there went south to New Orleans and then north all the way to St. Paul.

Both halves of the book are filled with random stories - many of them frontier-style tall tales, not designed to be entirely believed - that Twain remembers from his early days or is told by new acquaintances or just digs out of other books and research. So this is a rambling, discursive journey - not unlike the big, wide, meandering Mississippi itself, Twain would probably say.

The joys are in the discursions, the random asides, the bits of humor. Twain was always a lively writer - lively by the standards of his more sedate time, and still reasonably lively in our day. Here's one of my favorite asides, from p.382:

The Mississippi is a just and equitable river; it never tumbled one man's farm overboard without building a new farm just like it for that man's neighbor. This keeps down hard feelings.

Most of all, Life is interesting as a view of a time now very distant in history - Twain is a modern enough voice that the reader will mostly be in sympathy with his viewpoint, so it can be read with pleasure instead of fighting through differences of opinion. There will be some differences of opinion, I'm sure, and some readers will have many - but, for book a century and a half old, the style and tone are reasonable. And, most importantly, Twain is always funny and insightful - wry, thoughtful, interesting, with a turn of phrase or viewpoint that's more complex than you expect.

I still think what I really want to re-read is Roughing It, which was written much closer to the events it depicts. Maybe that will be soon. The thing about great writers is that they're always there on the shelf when you need or want them.

[1] I particularly remember reading one of them while helping my brother move into a NYU dorm, one of his years there. There was no room for me in the car, with our mother driving and him in the passenger seat and massed boxes behind, so I took a bus in, got there first, and sat in Washington Square reading Twain and waiting for them.