The Shape of the River

I’ve been reading Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883), which is supposedly the first book that was written on a typewriter. The first, and by far the best part recounts his life as a young man learning to pilot a steamboat. It’s an example of what, for lack of a more elegant term at hand, I’ll call the literary how-to book, because it is of interest not for its characters or external descriptions, but rather for its explanation of how to complete a task. I use the word “literary” because there is not enough information available for we, as readers, to learn to pilot the boat. The pleasure is in watching the character learn.

The Mississippi, as it is described here, is a very strange place. The pilots before the Civil War had to memorize exactly what the river looked like in order to navigate, even though the contours of the river were always changing as the mud shifted about and altered the shorelines.

“ ‘You see, this has got to be learned; there isn’t any getting around it. A clear starlit night throws such heavy shadows that if you didn’t know the shape of the shore perfectly you would claw away from every bunch of timber, because you would take the black shadow of it for a solid cape; and you see you would be getting scared to death every five minutes by the watch. You would be fifty yards from the shore all the time when you ought to be within fifty feet of it. You can’t see a snag in one of those shadows, but you know exactly where it is, and the shape of the river tells you when you are coming to it.’ ”

The rest of the book takes place several decades later when Twain was a famous, middle-aged writer, and steamboats were mostly obsolete, and he sailed down the river again, from St. Louis to New Orleans, so he could bask in nostalgia. As with most travel books, certain parts of it are dull. I have a theory, though I’m not sure if it is true, that books and articles written in the 19th century are more poorly written, on average, that those of today. This was when writing was one of the only methods of documentation available (before we had radio, TV and so forth), so if you saw something happen, the only way you could publicize it was to write about it. If writing is the dominant medium, then of course most of it is going to be mediocre, whereas today if you can’t write something that is worth reading then there isn’t much of a point. Ah well; I haven’t read enough popular Victorian literature to know if I am right, and at any rate, I don’t mean to slander Mark Twain, who continues to tingle me exquisitely. He has a fascination with new technology in general and electric light in particular.