A River Runs Through Him
Very nice article on the Mississippi River’s influence on Mark Twain, by Laura Barton in Intelligent Life:
“NOTICE—Neither the Mark Twain Museum nor the City of Hannibal employs Mark Twain impersonators or look-a-likes.” This poster, hanging in the window of a justice of the peace, tells a cautionary tale about the Missouri town where Mark Twain grew up: half a million people now flock here each year, drawn by the legend of the man himself and his immortal creations Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer.
Hannibal is a city of some 17,750 people which labels itself “America’s Home Town”. On the outskirts there is industry—food-processing and cement and agricultural chemicals—but at its heart there is tourism. The main drag is a run of fudge shops and ice-cream parlors, art galleries and antiques stores, and Twain is everywhere: there’s a Tom Sawyer Diorama Museum, a Mark Twain Hotel, Dinette, Motor Inn and River Boat, the Mark Twain Caves and a Mark Twain Museum.
It is evening, midweek and out of season, and the streets of Hannibal are quiet except for the workmen restoring Becky Thatcher’s house and the chirping of crickets. A handful of teenagers cluster near the Twain Museum, where a sign advises: “America’s Official Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher appear here every Friday and Saturday at 11:30am, Sunday 1pm”. The air is still warm, but the light casts cool, sharp shadows on the path down to the riverbank and splays itself in great burnished ripples across the river.
Here, 700 miles from the headwaters, the Mississippi stretches three-fifths of a mile wide, far across to the dark, wooded banks of Illinois. It runs north into Iowa and south to Kentucky, but right on this particular curve the river lies deep and silty, its banks rich with black walnut, maple and hickory trees, and the water itself, dappling blue and gold and olive-green. Standing here, I agree with Twain, who called this view “one of the most beautiful on the Mississippi”.
Mark Twain died 100 years ago this April. He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 40 miles from this spot, in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. He seemed to steal into writing, first as a composer of humorous verse, then as a travel writer, before he wrote “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, which drew heavily on his youth here in Hannibal. For me as for millions of schoolchildren around the world, “Tom Sawyer” was a first encounter with Twain. Not yet in my teens, I was swept up by tales of playing pirates on river islands, murders in graveyards, hidden treasure and getting lost in underground caves. But even at that stage, it was his tone as much as his material that made an impression: he tugged at your sleeve and wheedled his way past your reservations with a naive, bobbing enthusiasm. Like Sawyer himself, he was the best kind of bad influence.
In later years, studying American Literature with a capital L, I returned to Twain— to Sawyer and his partner-in-crime Huck Finn, as well as to the political satire “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”, to his journalism, commentary and his travel writing—“Innocents Abroad”, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” and “Life on the Mississippi”. He could be verbose, and a grouch, and at times he was all elbows and sharp teeth, but he was also piercingly funny, and few could turn a phrase quite so neatly: “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds,” for example, or “Sometimes I wonder, whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.” He was a great social commentator too, an opponent of imperialism and racism, a supporter of women’s rights and labour unions. But more than anything it was his voice that caught me; like that of Walt Whitman, it rang out as something new, something uniquely and compellingly American.
To know Twain fully, you first have to know the river…
Continue reading. I fully agree with the sentiment, and Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi is still a wonderful read. I wrote my senior essay in college on Twain, a paper titled The Education of Huckleberry Finn, and over the years I realized how I was going in the right direction but barely scratched the surface. Occasionally I think of returning to the essay, expanding the part on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a book that set the stage for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
