A History of American Literature Since 1870

by Fred Lewis Pattee

With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent his boyhood and young manhood near the heart of the continent, along the great river during the vital era when it was the boundary line between known and unknown America, and when it resounded from end to end with the shouts and the confusion of the first great migration from the East; he lived for six thrilling years in the camps and the boom towns and the excited cities of Nevada and California; and then, at thirty-one, a raw product of the raw West, he turned his face to the Atlantic Coast, married a rare soul from one of the refined families of New York State, and settled down to a literary career in New England, with books and culture and trips abroad, until in his old age Oxford University could confer upon him—"Tom Sawyer," whose schooling in the ragged river town had ended before he was twelve—the degree that had come to America only as borne by two or three of the Brahmins of New England. Only America, and America at a certain period, could produce a paradox like that.

Mark Twain interpreted the West from the standpoint of a native. The group of humorists who had first brought to the East the Western spirit and the new laughter had all of them been reared in the older sections. John Phœnix and Artemus Ward and Josh Billings were born in New England, and Nasby and many of the others were natives of New York State. All of them in late boyhood had gone West as to a wonderland and had breathed the new atmosphere as something strange and exhilarating, but Mark Twain was native born. He was himself a part of the West; he removed from it so as to see it in true perspective, and so became its best interpreter. Hawthorne had once expressed a wish to see some part of America "where the damned shadow of Europe has never fallen." Mark Twain spent his life until he was thirty in such unshadowed places. When he wrote he wrote without a thought of other writings; it was as if the West itself was dictating its autobiography.

I

The father of Mark Twain, John Clemens, a dreamer and an idealist, had left Virginia with his young wife early in the twenties to join the restless tide that even then was setting strongly westward. Their first settlement was at Gainsborough, Tennessee, where was born their first son, Orion, but they remained there not long. Indeed, like all emigrants of their type, they remained nowhere long. During the next ten or eleven years five other children were born to them at four different stations along the line of their westward progress. When the fifth child arrived, to be christened Samuel Langhorne, they were living at Florida, Missouri, a squalid little hamlet fifty miles west of the Mississippi. That was November 30, 1835. Four years later they made what proved to be their last move, settling at Hannibal, Missouri, a small river town about a hundred miles above St. Louis. Here it was that the future Mark Twain spent the next fourteen years, those formative years between four and eighteen that determine so greatly the bent of the later life.

The Hannibal of the forties and the fifties was hardly a town one would pick deliberately for the education of a great man of letters. It lay just a few miles above the northern line of Pike County—that Pike County, Missouri, that gave name to the shiftless, hand-to-mouth, ague-shaken type of humanity later to be celebrated so widely as the Pike. Hannibal was not a Pike community, but it was typically southwestern in its somnolent, slave-holding, care-free atmosphere. The one thing that forever rescued it from the commonplace was the River, the tremendous Mississippi, source of endless dreams and romance. Mark Twain has given us a picture, perfect as an etching, of this river and the little town that nestled beside it:

After all these years I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer's morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breast, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in water-melon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered around the "levee"; a pile of "skids" on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the "point" above the town, and the "point" below, bounding the river glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of these remote "points"; instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, "S-t-e-a-m boat a-comin'!" and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.... The furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deck-hand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gage-cocks; the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight, and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.[25]

It was the romance of this river, the vastness and the mystery of it, the great unknown world which lay beyond those "points" where all things disappeared, that made of the boy a restless soul, a dreamer and an idealist—that made of him indeed the Mark Twain of the later years. His books nowhere rise into the pure serene of literature unless touched at some point by this magic stream that flowed so marvelously through his boyhood. The two discoverers of the Mississippi were De Soto and Mark Twain.

The first crisis in the boy's life came in his twelfth year, when the death of his father sent him as an apprentice to a country newspaper office, that most practical and most exacting of all training schools for youth. Two years on the Missouri Courier, four years on the Hannibal Journal, then the restlessness of his clan sent him wandering into the East even as it had sent Artemus Ward and Nasby into the West. For fifteen months he served as compositor in New York City and Philadelphia, then a great homesickness for the river came upon him. From boyhood it had been his dream to be the pilot of a Mississippi steamboat; all other professions seemed flat and lifeless compared with that satisfying and boundless field of action; and it is not strange that in April, 1857, we find him installed as Horace Bixby's "cub" at the beginning of a new career.

During the next four years he gave himself heart and soul to the almost superhuman task of committing to memory every sandbar and point and landmark in twelve hundred miles of a shifting, treacherous river. The difficulties he has explained fully in his book. It was a college course of four years, and no man ever had a better one. To quote his own words:

In that brief, sharp schooling I got personally and familiarly acquainted with all the different types of human nature that are to be found in fiction, biography, or history. When I find a well-drawn character in fiction or biography, I generally take a warm personal interest in him, for the reason that I have known him before—met him on the river.[26]