Christopher Flannery is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute and a contributing editor of the Claremont Review of Books. With the publication of Ron Chernow’s new biography, this is once again the season of Mark Twain. Chris reviewed Chernow’s biography for the Claremont Review of Books in “Pure gold” and drew on it for the American Mind column “To absquatulate.” I asked Chris if he had any stray thoughts left for us. It turned out that he did. “The art of the pause” was the first installment. This is the second:
“When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village [Hannibal, Missouri] on the West Bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman.” That’s how Mark Twain begins Chapter 4 of his Life on the Mississippi. In that book, he charmingly tells the story of how the young Sam Clemens did become a steamboat pilot and practiced his craft for four years.
In February 1857, 21-year old Sam apprenticed himself to 32-year old Horace Bixby, already a famous steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River (who would remain a pilot for the rest of Twain’s life). For the next two years Sam was a “cub” pilot learning to read the twelve-hundred-mile book of the river from St. Louis to New Orleans, night and day, high water and low water, upstream and downstream, memorizing every shifting island, sand bar, reef, and shoal. He became familiar with the leadsman calling out the depth. Each “mark” equaled six feet. “Mark twain” meant there were twelve feet of water, two fathoms, and it was safe.
In April 1859, he received his official license. He was a pilot “full fledged,” and he supposed and hoped he “was going to follow the river the rest of [his] days.” But, as he wrote, “the war came.” Looking back forty years later as the world-famous Mark Twain, he exclaimed: “Oh! that was the darling existence. There has been nothing comparable to it in my life since.”
In chapter 9, Twain describes the exhilarating result of acquiring the science of steamboat piloting. For a qualified steamboat pilot, the face of the water of the river must become “a wonderful book.” This book was “a dead language to the uneducated passenger,” but to the educated pilot it delivered
its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every re-perusal.
But as with all learning, there was a cost:
[W]hen I had mastered the language of this water and had come to know every trifling feature that bordered the great river as familiarly as I knew the letters of the alphabet, I had made a valuable acquisition. But I had lost something, too. I had lost something which could never be restored to me while I lived. All the grace, the beauty, the poetry had gone out of the majestic river!
I still keep in mind a certain wonderful sunset which I witnessed when steamboating was new to me. A broad expanse of the river was turned to blood; in the middle distance the red hue brightened into gold, through which a solitary log came floating, black and conspicuous; in one place a long, slanting mark lay sparkling upon the water; in another the surface was broken by boiling, tumbling rings, that were as many-tinted as an opal; where the ruddy flush was faintest, was a smooth spot that was covered with graceful circles and radiating lines, ever so delicately traced; the shore on our left was densely wooded, and the somber shadow that fell from this forest was broken in one place by a long, ruffled trail that shone like silver; and high above the forest wall a clean-stemmed dead tree waved a single leafy bough that glowed like a flame in the unobstructed splendor that was flowing from the sun. There were graceful curves, reflected images, woody heights, soft distances; and over the whole scene, far and near, the dissolving lights drifted steadily, enriching it, every passing moment, with new marvels of coloring.
I stood like one bewitched. I drank it in, in a speechless rapture.
Twain’s steamboat learning equipped him to look upon these glories only “without rapture.” The sun just meant that “we are going to have wind tomorrow.” The floating log meant that “the river is rising.” The slanting mark warned of a reef that would “kill somebody’s steamboat” some night.
[T]he romance and the beauty were all gone from the river. All the value any feature of it had for me now was the amount of usefulness it could furnish toward…the safe piloting of a steamboat. Since those days, I have pitied doctors from my heart.
