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Lesson Six Mark Twain --- Mirror of America
Noel Grove
1
Most
Americans
remember
Mark
Twain
as
the
father
of
Huck
Finn’s
idyllic
cruise
through
eternal
boyhood
and
Tom
Sawyer’s
endless
summer
of
freedom
and
adventure.
In-
deed,
this
nation’s
best
-loved
author
was
every
bit
as
ad-venturous,
patriotic,
romantic,
and
humorous
as
anyone
has
ever
imagined.
I
found
another
Twain
as
well
–
one
who
grew
cynical,
bitter,
saddened
by
the
profound
personal
tragedies life dealt him, a man who
became obsessed with the frailties of the human
race, who saw clearly ahead a black
wall of night.
2
Tramp
printer,
river
pilot
,
Confederate
guerrilla,
prospector,
starry-eyed
optimist,
acid-tongued
cynic:
The
man
who
became
Mark
Twain
was
born
Samuel
Langhorne Clemens and
he ranged across the nation for more than a third
of his life,
digesting the new American
experience before sharing it with the world as
writer and
lecturer. He adopted his pen
name from the cry heard in his steamboat days,
signaling
two fathoms (12 feet) of
water -- a navigable depth. His popularity is
attested by the
fact that more than a
score of his books remain in print, and
translations are still read
around the
world.
3
The
geographic
core,
in
Twain’s
early
years,
was
the
great
valley
of
the
Mississippi
River,
main
artery
of
transportation
in
the
young
nation’s
heart.
Keelboats
，
flatboats
,
and
large
rafts
carried
the
first
major
commerce.
Lumber,
corn,
tobacco,
wheat,
and
furs
moved
downstream
to
the
delta
country;
sugar,
molasses,
cotton,
and
whiskey
t
raveled
north.
In
the
1850’s,
before
the
climax
of
westward expansion, the vast basin
drained three-quarters of the settled United
States.
4 Young
Mark Twain entered that world in 1857 as a cub
pilot on a steamboat.
The
cast
of
characters
set
before
him
in
his
new
profession
was
rich
and
varied
a
cosmos. He participated
abundantly in this life, listening to pilothouse
talk of feuds,
piracies, lynchings,
medicine shows, and savage waterside slums. All
would resurface
in
his
books, together with the colorful
language that he soaked up with
a memory
that seemed
phonographic
5 Steamboat decks teemed not only with
the main current of pioneering humanity,
but its flotsam of hustlers, gamblers,
and thugs as well. From them all Mark Twain
gained a keen perception of the human
race, of the difference between what people
claim to be and what they really are.
His four and a half years in the steamboat trade
marked the real beginning of his
education, and the most lasting part of it. In
later life
Twain
acknowledged
that
the
river
had
acquainted
him
with
every
possible
type
of
human
nature.
Those
acquaintanceships
strengthened
all
his
writing,
but
he
never
wrote
better than when he wrote of the people a-long the
great stream.
6
When railroads began drying up the demand for
steam-boat pilots and the Civil
War
halted commerce, Mark Twain left the river
country. He tried soldiering for two
weeks
with
a
motley
and
of
Confederate
guerrillas
who
diligently
avoided
contact
with the enemy. Twain quit after
deciding, “... I
knew more about
retreating than the
man that invented
retreating. “
7 He went west by stagecoach and
succumbed to the epidemic of gold and silver
fever in Nevada’s Washoe region. For
eight months he flirted with the colossal wealth
available to the lucky and the
persistent, and was rebuffed. Broke and
discouraged, he
accepted a job as
reporter with the Virginia City Territorial
Enterprise, to literature’s
enduring
gratitude.
8
From the discouragement of his mining failures,
Mark Twain began digging his
way to
regional fame as a newspaper reporter and
humorist. The instant riches of a
mining strike would not be his in the
reporting trade, but for making money, his pen
would prove mightier than his pickax.
In the spring of 1864, less than two years after
joining the Territorial Enterprise, he
boarded the stagecoach for San Francisco, then
and now a hotbed of hopeful young
writers.
9 Mark
Twain honed and experimented with his new writing
muscles, but he had
to leave the city
for a while because of some scathing columns he
wrote. Attacks on
the city government,
concerning such issues as mistreatment of Chinese,
so angered
officials that he fled to
the goldfields in the Sacramento Valley. His
descriptions of the
rough-country
settlers
there
ring
familiarly
in
modern
world
accustomed
to
trend
setting
on
the
West
Coast.
“It
was
a
splendid
population
–
for
all
the
slow,
sleepy,
sluggish-brained
sloths stayed at home... It was that population
that gave to California