SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 21 (of 78)
A Most Prodigious Racket (1857 to 1861)
Chapter 21
A Most Prodigious Racket (1857 to 1861)
On the way down the Mississippi, I had become acquainted, little by little, with the steamboat pilot, a man named Horace Bixby; pretty soon, I was doing a lot of steering for him on his daylight watches.
I went to him to ask if he would take me on as an apprentice. He said he would—for five hundred dollars. One hundred dollars of which was to be paid up front, and the other four hundred once I started receiving wages (after my apprenticeship was up).
We shook hands on the deal, and I entered upon the enterprise of ‘learning’ twelve- or thirteen-hundred miles of the great Mississippi River with the easy confidence of my time of life. If I had really known what I was about to require of my faculties, I should not have had the courage to begin. I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide.
But learning the river was not as easy and carefree an undertaking as floating down the Mississippi on a borrowed raft. I had to learn every nook and bend and snag of the river between New Orleans and St. Louis, going upriver and down, by night and by day. At times it seemed beyond my capacity to cram such a wealth of knowledge into my brain. I recall complaining to Bixby at one point: “I haven’t got brains enough to be a pilot, and if I had I wouldn’t have strength enough to carry them around, unless I went on crutches.”
In spite of my misgivings, I eventually did learn the River, and became a good average pilot, and received my license.
What would have become of me if not for meeting Bixby when I did, and he being of a mind at that time to take me on as an apprentice? I should have drifted into the ministry, or the penitentiary, or the grave, or somewhere, and should not have been heard of again. This was one of the major turning-points of my life.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Evaluating his own skills as a steamboatman, Twain is recorded above as saying, “Eventually, I became a good average pilot.” Upon close examination, though, that appears to have been an overly modest assessment of his own skills. The following “triangulation” seems to indicate he was better than the average pilot: He remained employed at a time when many of his fellow pilots did not; his demanding “chief,” Bixby, had praise for his abilities; and finally and perhaps most tellingly, Twain never brought his boat to serious grief throughout the many years he operated up and down the river.
This downplaying of his skill wasn’t completely out of character, though, when we consider Twain’s oft-made claim that he was lazy. In actuality he was anything but. Twain was always a man of action and ambition, tirelessly working at his craft.
Clara Clemens had something to say about his false claim of being lazy. In her book My Father, Mark Twain, she wrote:
Father was always happiest when at work, and though he insisted upon calling himself a lazy man because he considered nothing work which was a pleasure, my impression is very strong that he often forced himself to go to work when he was not at all in the mood. Naturally, once he started the machine going, he found delight in its action.
And in fact, in 1895 Twain himself admitted that he was not lazy, writing the following:
I don't think there ever was a lazy man in this world. Every man has some sort of gift, and he prizes that gift beyond all others. He may be a professional billiard-player, or a Paderewski, or a poet—I don't care what it is. But whatever it is, he takes a native delight in exploiting that gift, and you will find it is difficult to beguile him away from it. Well, there are thousands of other interests occupying other men, but those interests don’t appeal to the special tastes of the billiard champion or Paderewski. They are set down, therefore, as too lazy to do that or do this—to do, in short what they have no taste or inclination to do. In that sense, then I am phenomenally lazy. But when it comes to writing a book—I am not lazy. My family find it difficult to dig me out of my chair.
The Paderewski Twain refers to above was a pianist/composer who in 1919 (following Twain’s death) briefly became the Prime Minister of Poland.
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Returning to the statement that Twain never brought his craft to serious grief: this does not mean he never had any mishaps at all. There were, in fact, three incidents of the “fender bender” variety. Indeed, Twain recorded the details of one of these (relatively minor) misadventures in chapter 49 of Life on the Mississippi:
I was bringing the boat into port at New Orleans, and momentarily expecting orders from the hurricane deck, but received none. I had stopped the wheels, and there my authority and responsibility ceased. It was evening—dim twilight—the captain’s hat was perched upon the big bell, and I supposed the intellectual end of the captain was in it, but such was not the case. The captain was very strict; therefore I knew better than to touch a bell without orders. My duty was to hold the boat steadily on her calamitous course, and leave the consequences to take care of themselves—which I did. So we went plowing past the sterns of steamboats and getting closer and closer—the crash was bound to come very soon—and still that hat never budged; for alas, the captain was napping in the texas. ... Things were becoming exceedingly nervous and uncomfortable. It seemed to me that the captain was not going to appear in time to see the entertainment. But he did. Just as we were walking into the stern of a steamboat, he stepped out on deck, and said, with heavenly serenity, ‘Set her back on both’—which I did; but a trifle late, however, for the next moment we went smashing through that other boat’s flimsy outer works with a most prodigious racket. The captain never said a word to me about the matter afterwards, except to remark that I had done right, and that he hoped I would not hesitate to act in the same way again in like circumstances.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.