Life on The Mississippi Read Online Free Page A

speed was desirable, nor are we ever—despite all the statistics—told just what it was that those boats were carrying at such great risk. Cotton, of course, was one of the main commodities, but human beings—slaves—were another. Commerce it was that dictated such daring and often destructive feats of navigation, as it was commerce that gave the railroad eventual precedence over the riverboat. Perhaps Twain made no mention of commercial considerations for the sake of avoiding the obvious, but the result was also to avoid a few painful facts concerning the specifics of commerce on the Mississippi before the war.
    Thus, in Twain’s account of his education as a pilot, a massive blank space is concealed, suggesting that the pilothouse was indeed located at a remove from the steamboat, perched high on the superstructure called the “Texas” because of its being a detached part of the whole—a situation evoking the status of the independent republic of Texas before it jointed the Union. The pilothouse was constructed to give great visibility of the river ahead but it also acted to shut off those who worked there from certain realities of life along and on that river, the commerce to which Twain in the second half of the book (the postbellum half, as it were) is so very much alive. Only when he leaves the pilothouse for the world of commercial exchange, a world now sanitized of slavery and its attendant sins, does Mark Twain bring himself (and us) into direct confrontation with the realities of river life. The situation evoked in the first part of the book, in which the young Sam Clemens seeks to become part of that brotherhood who possessed the “right stuff,” gives a contemporary validity to the title of “pilot,” being those warriors who fly so high as to be strategically removed from the targets on which their bombs fall.
    It needs to be said that the emphasis on commerce that distinguishes the second part of Twain’s river book is undoubtedly a subtexual counterpart to the autobiographical element of the first part. By 1885, Sam Clemens was often overextended in his business dealings, leading to his eventual financial ruin, but for whatever reason Life is fairly afloat on the facts of finance, extending even to figures of speech. Thus we read that the shifting channel of the river has caused entire islands to “retire from business” and towns and plantations to “retire to the country”; Mark Twain, drawing humorous and exaggerated conclusions from scientific data, “gets wholesale returns of conjecture out of . . . trifling investments of fact”; the steamboat he boards upon his return to the river is so dirty it is “taxable as real estate”; the Mississippi when about to erode away an island is said to have “a mortgage” on which it is about to “foreclose”; and an anonymous author is said to have published a book with “no brand given.” The consistent parade of commercial figures of speech reveals the author’s attitude toward his materials, that “trifling investment of fact” from which he hopes to receive a “wholesale return.”
    Uniting these commercial elements is the underlying theme of loss, not only of the steamboat’s hegemony but the heroic status of the river pilots after the war. In effect, Twain’s book is about a “Mississippi Bubble” unimagined by John Law, in which the profitability of steamboat commerce is deflated by the rise in importance of the railroad. Here is another theme painfully relevant to modern Americans, for what Twain expresses in this book is the kind of commercial spirit, enterprise floated by debt, that Americans continue to espouse at great risk. Life on the Mississippi is an important cultural artifact, anachronistic perhaps, but, like the Mississippi steamboat itself, it presents a palatial, gilded exterior that hides a few grim and grimy facts, standing as Henry Clay early noted for the most optimistic aspects of nineteenth-century life as