Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Another daughter, Jean, years later would die horribly on Christmas Eve, while visiting her father, when an epileptic seizure caused her to drown in a bathtub. She was twenty-nine. But perhaps nothing surpassed Twain’s grief at the loss of his wife, Livy, in Italy, where they had gone in search of the respite and climate that might aid her heart disease and difficulty in breathing. One evening he came to her “to say the usual good-night,” as he writes Howells, “& she was dead!” To his friend Twichell he describes how he sat with her body for the next twenty hours “till the embalmers came at 5; & then I saw her no more. In all that night & all that day she never noticed my caressing hand—it seemed strange.” It is all the more poignant to read that side by side with an early love letter to her, where he speaks of her “eyes that are dearer to me than the light that streams out of the Heavens.”

  • • •

  It would take tens of thousands of words to cover all of Twain’s nonfiction, but there is no question which book is at its summit: Life on the Mississippi. Who among us, as a child, has not dreamed of driving or piloting or captaining something greatly faster and more powerful than ourselves: a ship, a train, an airplane? I used to think this was a boy’s dream, but judging from the number of women in airline cockpits these days, many girls must have it too. Twain evokes his version of this dream in the marvelous passage where he first describes the “dead and empty” summer day in Hannibal: “the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty . . . one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep . . . a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk.”

  But then: “A film of dark smoke appears . . . 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 . . . and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. . . . The people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time.” And a wonder it is: two tall chimneys belching black smoke, a roaring furnace where you can see the flames, a glass pilot house on the highest deck, and within it the figure that every boy in Hannibal wants to become, the steamboat pilot. “Your true pilot,” Twain writes later in the book, “cares nothing about anything on earth but the river, and his pride in his occupation surpasses the pride of kings.”

  Part of the pleasure of reading Life on the Mississippi is that it verifies that childhood dream. Twain grew up to become a steamboat pilot, and, for those magic few years, his pride did surpass that of kings. He takes us into the intricacies of this trade: the rituals, the hierarchy, the sense of comradeship among the members of this elite fraternity, the danger they face of having a boiler blow up. And he makes us feel, without ever saying so directly, that learning the river—the bends, the shallows, the hidden sandbars, the eddies and currents, the sunken trees that could poke a fatal hole in your hull—and learning which of these things, like the sandbars or the course of the river in flood, will be constantly changing, is a metaphor for finding one’s way through life. It is even more challenging than life itself, because you have to learn to navigate this treacherous waterway in both directions, by day, by night, and in fog. Unlike so much of Twain’s other supposed nonfiction, here there are few tall tales: when he is writing about an extraordinary profession at the height of its glory, he had no need to make anything up.

  Something else that makes the book so unusual is that it is one of the very few American classics about work. As we hear pilots talking, we hear the language of this craft:

  “Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?

  “It was in the night . . . started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—quarter less twain—then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming—nine and a half.”

  When you think about our best-remembered works of literature, whether The Scarlet Letter, The Great Gatsby, The Sun Also Rises, or countless others, very few show us a line of work from the inside. In the second two, the very subject matter is people at leisure; reading the first, you wonder how the citizens of Puritan Massachusetts got any work done at all when they were so busy persecuting adulterers. (The shining exception among great American novels, of course, is Moby-Dick, written just a few years before Twain took to the river.) Other writers throughout history have taken pen names, but who besides Twain took one from work that he loved?

  One word of warning for anyone picking up Life on the Mississippi for the first time: don’t read the whole thing. Encountering many a work by Twain is like exploring a new city: some sights are to be savored, other neighborhoods skipped entirely. Here you should start with chapter 4 and end with chapter 21. These are the loving pages about being a young pilot on the river—the book’s emotional and aesthetic core. The rest is mostly fluff and could be boiled down to a quarter of its length. As with so much of his other writing, Twain could have used a good editor. He takes three chapters to warm up and then many more to cool down—largely a collection of stray bits of history and lore, plus an account of coming back to the river years later. The only moving part in these later pages is his sadness about what he finds as a much older man: steamboats have largely been replaced by trains, and for those still plying the water, dikes, beacons and powerful electric searchlights have made steamboating safer but less of an art. It is as if the Wright brothers had returned to the air today, to see how commercial flights all have to follow air traffic controllers’ orders and almost all of the time are flown by autopilot.

  • • •

  Newspaper articles, humorous sketches, speeches, diatribes, essays, and pamphlets flowed from Twain’s pen throughout his life. But just because there are various anthologies of his nonfiction, don’t assume that this word describes the contents. Many of these pieces may have some actual event as a kernel, around which Twain then spun a tale at least as fanciful as anything Tom Sawyer could have invented. “Mark Twain took a democrat’s view of fact and fiction,” his biographer Ron Powers writes; “he . . . let them mingle in his work without prejudice.” If he had lived long enough to write for the New Yorker, little of his supposed reportage could have gotten past its fact-checking department unscathed.

  His shorter pieces cover a spectrum from those that seem embarrassingly flat or eccentric today to a few like “A Telephonic Conversation” that can still make us burst into laughter, as we hear him describing the frustration of overhearing one end of a call:

  Pause.

  Perhaps so; I generally use a hair-pin.

  Pause.

  What did you say? [Aside] Children, do be quiet!

  Pause.

  Oh! B flat! I thought you said it was the cat!

  Pause.

  Since when?

  Pause.

  Why, I never heard of it.

  Pause.

  You astound me! It seems utterly impossible!

  Pause.

  Who did?

  Pause.

  Good-ness gracious!

  Pause.

  Well, what is this world coming to? Was it right in church?

  Pause.

  And was her mother there?

  Pause.

  In the vast miscellany of his sketches and articles for newspapers and magazines can be found enough ammunition to supply either side in the famous argument between the critics Van Wyck Brooks and Bernard DeVoto over whether or not this son of the frontier was lethally tamed by his mother, his wife, his wealth, and his long years in the more genteel culture of the East Coast. They show us a Twain who fluctuates between the daringly subversive and the conventional prejudices of his time (about American Indians, for example), a
nd also a Twain who had some decided quirks—a fascination with clairvoyance, for one thing, and the conviction that someone other than Shakespeare wrote those plays.

  But these writings also show us something deeper: a man becoming keenly aware of the injustices of his age. From the young Sam Clemens whose father and uncle owned slaves and who even briefly joined a unit of Confederate irregulars (an episode he considerably embellished in “The Private History of a Campaign that Failed”), he grew into the Mark Twain who felt that slavery was America’s original sin. Huckleberry Finn is surely the most eloquent expression of that feeling in all our literature, a portrait all the more slyly powerful because Huck believes he will be doomed to hell for helping the enslaved Jim—Miss Watson’s lawful property—escape down the Mississippi toward freedom.

  Twain understood, more clearly than most white Americans, that the Civil War had changed too little and that for former slaves, the United States could still be a place of lynchings and terror. One act of generosity he made would reverberate decades after he was dead. He supported the studies of a number of black students, among them one of the first men of color to enter Yale Law School. Twain met him only briefly and may have forgotten his name, but he told the school’s dean that he would help pay the expenses of “this young man”—who was working odd jobs on the side to make ends meet—until he graduated. The student was Warner T. McGuinn, who became a respected lawyer and Baltimore city council member and who, decades later, himself mentored and referred cases to a grateful young black attorney just starting out on his career. That lawyer was Thurgood Marshall, who argued the successful Brown v. Board of Education case that ended legal school segregation in America and who became the first black justice of the United States Supreme Court. We can imagine the smile that would have brought to Twain’s face.

  As Twain aged, he came to see that the racism so intertwined with American slavery took other forms around the world—and it was a world he saw as much or more of than almost any other American writer of his day. As he puts it in one article, “I think I have no color prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse.” While staying in Vienna in the late 1890s, he presciently observed—unlike virtually any foreign journalist of the time—just who were always the first victims of ethnic nationalist demonstrations. “In some cases the Germans [were] the rioters, in others the Czechs,” he wrote in Harper’s, “and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no matter which side he was on.”

  Although he had spoken as early as 1867 about the harmful impact of American “civilization” on Hawaii and had noticed how brutally Chinese immigrant laborers were treated in California, it was mostly during the last fifteen years of his life that Twain’s ire focused on the worldwide drive for colonies, fueled by “the white man’s notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” When he circled the globe on his lecture tour in 1895 and 1896, he encountered evidence at almost every stop. In Australia he saw how British settlers had displaced and almost exterminated the Aborigines and how they had put South Sea islanders to work in harsh conditions on the sugar plantations. In India he noticed how a white man punched his servant in the face, and he sensed the deep desire of many Indians for self-rule. His reaction to South Africa was different from that of almost all Americans and Europeans of this time, who saw the territory just through the lens of the conflict over land and mineral wealth between white Britons and white Afrikaners, or Boers, which would culminate in the Boer War of 1899–1902. Twain, however, felt that the underlying crime was that both groups “stole the land from the . . . blacks.”

  He was appalled when, in the treaty ending the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired a colony of its own by buying the Philippines from Spain, for $20 million. “I am opposed,” he declared in an interview, “to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.” This didn’t stop him, however, from thoroughly enjoying the company of the great imperialists of the age, whether the explorer Henry Morton Stanley, the bellicose Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, or the young Boer War hero Winston Churchill.

  The purchase of the Philippines led to one of the most shameful episodes of American imperialism. Not surprisingly, Filipino nationalists who had fought for independence from Spain had no wish to see themselves colonized anew by the United States. The brutal Philippine-American War that broke out in 1899 was one of naked conquest that saw American troops use widespread, systematic torture. The war spurred Twain’s “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” He took his ironic title from the Gospel according to St. Matthew, which refers to “the people which sat in darkness” as those not yet enlightened by Christ’s good news. There had been much talk about how it was America’s duty to bring Christianity to the backward Filipinos. President William McKinley, for instance, ignoring the fact that millions of Filipinos were already Catholics, declared that he wished “to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them.”

  Against Washington’s claim that it was fighting this war on the other side of the world only for the most high-minded of motives (does that sound familiar?) Twain lumped the new American imperial venture with the seizure by Britain, France, Germany, and Russia of territory in Africa and China. He followed up his widely reprinted pamphlet with “To My Missionary Critics” and several other articles. In Massachusetts, the Springfield Republican called him “the most influential anti-imperialist and the most dreaded critic of the sacrosanct person in the White House.” In 1901, succeeding the assassinated McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt became that person. When Roosevelt, who ardently craved an American colonial empire, heard a crowd cheering for Twain, he angrily muttered that anti-imperialists like him should be skinned alive.

  Soon Twain spoke out for another anti-imperial cause. Artfully outflanking larger European countries, King Leopold II of Belgium had made himself an early beneficiary of the rush for African colonies. The deadly forced labor system Leopold devised for extracting the Congo’s vast wealth in rubber and ivory attracted the attention of a brilliant young British journalist, Edmund Dene Morel, who mounted against Leopold the biggest international human-rights campaign of its time. Morel came to visit Twain in 1904 and persuaded him to make three trips to Washington to lobby President Roosevelt and the State Department to bring pressure on the king and to write about the Congo. The result was “King Leopold’s Soliloquy,” which the author’s usual publishers found too acid for their taste. Twain gave it, and the royalties from it, to the American branch of Morel’s Congo Reform Association, which published it as a pamphlet in 1905. Although the king’s soliloquy is imaginary, it is based on real events and has quotations from eyewitness testimony. Morel’s campaign tools included a slide show of atrocity photographs, some of which were included in “King Leopold’s Soliloquy.” Twain’s Leopold rages against “the incorruptible kodak . . . The only witness I have encountered in my long experience that I couldn’t bribe.” The pamphlet clearly stung its target; the king’s formidable public-relations apparatus issued a 47-page response entitled “An Answer to Mark Twain.”

  Remarkably, for decades after Twain died, such pieces of his writing largely disappeared from new editions of his work. “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” and several other attacks on imperialism were not republished until more than half a century after his death. Sanitizing Twain’s legacy were his authorized biographer and literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, and the author’s one surviving child, his daughter Clara, who lived to the age of eighty-eight. They were eager to have the public remember only Twain the humorist, the sage of Hannibal, the kindly white-suited figure with the big mustache and flowing mane of white hair. The Twain who had been the strident opponent of colonial conquest they shoved out of sight.

  In the various volumes of the writer’s speeches, letters, notebooks, and other work that he edited, Paine downplayed, greatly condensed, or simply omitted many of Twain’s comments on events li
ke the Philippine War. In his three-volume biography, he never even mentioned that Twain was a vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League. When Paine edited a collection of the letters, for example, one sentence where Twain had written “I am going to stick close to my desk for a month, now, hoping to write a small book, full of playful and good-natured contempt for the lousy McKinley” ended simply with “hoping to write a small book.” Paine’s versions of various Twain texts were long accepted as authentic by later editors, who had no idea that they had been bowdlerized. Happily, by the late 1960s scholars had discovered and undone enough omissions for opponents of the Vietnam War to be able to use his prophetic work in support of their cause. What greater testimony to Twain’s subversive side could there be than that he was censored for so long after his death?

  2016

  TWENTY-ONE

  A Literary Engineer

  THE NEW JOURNALISM OF THE 1960S AND 1970S from Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, and others made the biggest collective splash in recent American nonfiction and certainly enlarged our idea of what the genre could do. But will people still be enthralled by Thompson’s psychedelic ramblings or the early Wolfe’s strings of italics and exclamation marks fifty or a hundred years from now? More lasting, I think, a grand pointillist mural of our time and place, as expressed in the lives of an encyclopedic range of people, will be the work of John McPhee.