Traveling with Mark Twain and Eddy Harris on the Mississippi River

Except for the five years I lived in Texas, I’ve never lived more than 15 miles from the Mississippi River. In known and unknown ways, the river has shaped my life. 

My earliest memory of the Mississippi was, oddly enough, a man-made extension of the river. It’s called the Industrial Canal, in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans. My mother was raised in the Lower Ninth, and when I was a child two of her sisters lived them, one of them about 50 feet from the levee. And nothing was more natural and occasionally terrifying than to run up the levee and see the ships moving to and from the river. It was terrifying because my cousins and I were always warned by my uncles about the dreaded nutriathat inhabited the levee. We never saw one, but we always believed the stories. Why would our uncles lie to us?

We’d walk the top of the levee toward the Mississippi. It wasn’t far, perhaps 500 yards. But we’d pass what were known then and now as the “Steamboat Houses,” built by ship captains for their families. Colorfully painted and decorated with architectural gingerbread, they were set back from the levee with the main living quarters on the second floor (a hedge against a levee break or flooding during a hurricane). 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: A “steamboat house” on the Industrial Canal extension of the Mississippi River in New Orleans; Infrogmation via Wikimedia.

The Charlatan’s Boy by Jonathan Rogers

I was about 10 pages into The Charlatan’s Boy by Jonathan Rogers when I wondered whether I was reading Rogers or Mark Twain. My question was answered at the end of this comic, crazy novel in the author’s note: Rogers credits Twain as a major influence.

The novel falls within a sub-genre of literature known as “southwestern humor” that existed in the 19^thcentury and included Twain as well as authors like George Washington Harris. It’s funny, irreverent, and often downright rude. It also influenced a considerable number of writers in the 20^thand 21^stcenturies including William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and even Cormac McCarthy. A classic of southwestern humor, almost a throwback to its origins, in Donald Harington’s 1975 The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks.

The Charlatan’s Boy, published in 2010,is a tale of a con man’s travels through the large (and fictitious) island of Corenwald. If the people, towns, and villages resemble the American West of the early 19^thcentury, well, it’s likely they were meant to. The boy of the title is Grady, who serves both as a main character and the narrator. He’s been with Floyd (or “Perfessor Floyd”) for as long as he can remember, traveling from town to town with “the ugliest boy in the world” act. Grady, of course, serves as the star, and even Grady admits the title is well-deserved.

When Grady loses an ugliest boy contest, he and Floyd both realistically acknowledge that no one will want to see the world’s second most ugly boy, and Floyd has to forage for a new act and a new con. He decides upon creating a Feechie scare. 

The Feechies are a – perhaps –mythical people who live in the swamp named for them in southern Corenwald. Floyd, aided by Grady, begins a quiet rumor campaign, claiming that the Feechies have had it with “civilized people” and are about to start a war. Floyd has a gift of understanding human nature, and he knows that no right-thinking person will believe in Feechies, until they do. And his proof will be Grady, trotted out as a Feechie captured years before. The campaign works better than Floyd and Grady could hope – and then it works too well.

Jonathan Rogers

Rogers is also the author of The Wilderking Trilogy: The Bark of the Bog Owl, The Secret of the Swamp King, and The Way of the Wilderking; and three non-fiction works, The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O’Connor, Saint Patrick, and The World According to Narnia. He received his undergraduate degree from Furman University and his Ph.D. degree in 17^thcentury literature from Vanderbilt. He lives in Nashville.

The Charlatan’s Boy is a wild, funny romp of a novel, with scenes as crazy as Twain’s buffalo climbing a tree in Roughing It. But it’s also a story about relationships, people’s willingness to be duped, and a boy’s hunger for belonging. 

Top photograph by Linnaea Mallette via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Mark Twain: "Chasing the Last Laugh" by Richard Zacks

The Panic of 1893 began with European banks worrying about a coup and wheat crop failure in Argentina. Within a very short period of time, the panic had spread to the United States, and a severe depression began. Stock prices collapsed, more than 500 U.S. banks closed, farms were abandoned, and more than 15,000 businesses failed. The effects didn’t occur overnight, but they happened fairly rapidly.

One of the businesses that eventually failed was the Charles Webster publishing firm. It was owned by Mark Twain. Twain desperately sought to keep the business afloat, while at the same time investing heavily in a linotype machine that would have brought a fortune had it worked. It didn’t. Twain and his family lost nearly everything and he was left heavily in debt, a debt his wife insisted that he pay.

As popular historian recounts in Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour, Twain did the only thing he knew to do, the thing he had come to intensely dislike. He went on the lecture circuit. In fact, he went on the global lecture circuit.

The itinerary took Twain, his wife Livy, and their daughter Clara (two other daughters stayed in New York) first across the northern United States to Seattle, and by boat to the Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), India, South Africa, and then England. The trip took close to a full year: Twain spoke hundreds of times, occasionally to half-filled auditoriums but more often to houses so packed that extra engagements had to be scheduled.

The tour was a moneymaking event, to be sure, but it became something of a triumph for Twain the writer and speaker and Twain the man.

The tour has always been covered in other biographies, but not to the detail Zacks includes. And the story is in both the overview and the details – the overlay of late 19^th century imperialism, the British Raj in India reaching its apogee, the stark realities of race in South Africa, the responses of the audiences, the specific stories Twain told at each of the performances, how the newspapers covered him and his stories, what played well, and what didn’t.

This could get tedious, but in Zacks’ hands it becomes rich and illuminating. He tells a wonderful story, pulling from the correspondence of Twain, the family, friends and relatives, and robber baron H.H. Rogers, who did more than anyone else (including Twain) to extricate the author from his legal and financial ordeals.

Richard Zacks

Zacks is the author of a number popular histories, including History Laid Bare (1995); An Underground Education (1999); The Pirate Hunter (2003); The Pirate Coast (2006); and Island of Vice (2012). He’s also been a freelance journalist, writing for such publications as The Atlantic and ESPN.

Chasing the Last Laugh is a fascinating account of a major American author who stared financial (and social) ruin in the face, and ultimately didn’t blink. And managed to entertain a lot of people along the way.

Top photograph: The frontispiece of Following the Equator, the book Twain wrote after he concluded his around-the-world speaking tour.

Van Wyck Brooks and “The Ordeal of Mark Twain”

Mark Twain lived from Halley’s Comet to Halley’s Comet. Literally. He was born in 1835, a year the comet appeared, and he died in 1910, 75 years later and the year for the comet’s return. His biographers haven’t often noted this, directly suggesting a prediction of his fame and that the prediction came true.

Cultural historian Van Wyck Brooks noted this as well, in both his The Ordeal of Mark Twain, published in 1920, 10 years after Twain’s death, and The Times of Melville and Whitman, published in 1947. In between the two works, however, Brooks’ understanding of Twain had changed.

In 1920, Brooks saw Twain as an ultimately failed artist. In 1947, he saw Twain as one of the three American writers – Herman Melville and Walt Whitman being the other two – who had essentially created a national American literature.

In a way, both assessments were, oddly enough, correct. (A review of the book in The New York Times in 1920 faulted Brooks for overstating his case, and for drawing his conclusion first and then finding the evidence to support it.)

In The Ordeal of Mark Twain, Brooks starts with the phenomenon about Twain’s last years that everyone was well aware of. The great American humorist, the man with comic insights into almost all things American, had become a pessimist. His last works were fairly bleak. His letters to friends suggested much the same. And no one who knew Twain was particularly surprised, given the series of family tragedies he endured (the death of his son, two daughters, and his wife), the bankruptcies he experienced, and the changing times themselves.

Twain had lived during a period when America was transformed from an agrarian society, experienced a great Civil War, and became an industrial power (with its wealth and abuses) and an imperialist power. The America he knew as a teen and young man had disappeared, and what had replaced it wasn’t exactly inspiring.

Mark Twain in 1871

Brooks, however, had an argument about Twain to make in 1920. He didn’t discount Twain’s family and personal experiences, but he saw a tension in Twain from the very beginning, a tension that led directly to Twain’s pessimism in his later years. The soul of the artist competed with the need for approval. The writer competed with the capitalist. Tracing this tension back to Twain’s earliest days, Brooks called it the pioneer competing with the poet, the “splendid genius which had never found itself.”

Twain the writer, already famous because of Innocents Abroad, became Samuel Clemens the capitalist, to please his father-in-law. Twain the champion of the slave Jim competed against Twain the friend of some of the biggest names in industrial history. Twain the author was also Twain the publisher.

Van Wyck Brooks

The tension between the two sides of Twain, Brooks argues, can be found in his marriage, his books, his humor, his letters, and even in his autobiography. He determined that his autobiography would not be published for 100 years after his death. Yet some 26 installments were actually published while he was still alive, and even when the University of California Press began to publish it (in three volumes) in 2010, it seemed rather already familiar.

Brooks further argues that Twain knew very well that there was something decidedly different between himself and a great writer. And yet, in 1947, Brooks’ judgment has shifted, and he says little about the Twain of his 1920 book. The Mark Twain of The Ordeal of Mark Twain is not the Mark Twain found in the pages of The Times of Melville and Whitman.

And yet there is something recognizable in the picture of Twain that Brooks draws in the earlier work, something that is familiar to all authors, and this may be the point that Brooks missed. The need for approval (the “pioneer”) and the creation of art (the “poet”) are perhaps less in tension with each other and more two sides of the same essence.

Related:

Van Wyck Brooks, Washington Irving, and Literature

Van Wyck Brooks, William Prescott, and History

Van Wyck Brooks and The Flowering of New England

Van Wyck Brooks: A Tale of Two Publications

“The Times of Melville and Whitman”