Details
CLEMENS, SAMUEL LANGHORNE ("Mark Twain"). Autograph manuscript of Chapter 4 from The Gilded Age ("The Steamboat Explosion") with a number of revisions, deletions and additions by Twain, n.p., n.d. [c.l873]. 39 pages, 8vo, paginated 62 through 100, written in dark ink on rectos only of 39 sheets lined notepaper, first page a bit soiled and with a strip of old newprint or printer's proof adhering to it (obscuring a few words), some inky printer's fingerprints in margins, the last page bearing pencilled note on verso: "Please read this and return it at 2 p.m. if you possibly can. We wish very much to cast it [stereotype it?] this afternoon E.Blair Jr." [of The American Publishing Co.]; enclosed in a silk-lined red morocco protective box, covers elaborately gilt-tooled with floral and foliate designs, the box fitting into a dark blue morocco solander case with broad borders gilt-tooled and onlaid with scrolling foliage, leaves and red roses,spine similarly gilt-tooled in 4 compartments and gilt-lettered in 2, by Adams of New York.
A VIVID ACCOUNT OF STEAMBOATING ON THE MISSISSIPPI, REVEALING THE SOURCE OF THE PSEUDONYM "MARK TWAIN"
A remarkably fine early Chapter from this essentially rather flawed book. The Chapter is a detailed account of a steamboat trip down the Mississippi by Squire Hawkins, one of the book's principal characters. The chapter ends in tragedy when the steamboat Hawkins is riding on races another steamboat. The chapter begins: "Early in the morning Squire Hawkins took passage in a small steamboat, with his family & his two [originally Twain wrote 'three'
salves, & presently the bell rang. The stage-plank was hauled in & the vessel proceeded up the river." After some initial fright, when "the gauge-cocks sent out an angry hiss," and at the "shivering of the boat under the beating of the wheels," the passengers relaxed. "...Then the voyage at once became a glorious adventure, a royal progress through the very heart & home of romance....They sat by the hour in the shade of the pilot house on the hurricane deck & looked out over the curving expanses of the ["mighty" is deleted] river sparkling in the sunlight. Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current with a verdant world on either hand; & remote from both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water & the helping eddies were, & shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows & littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these 'points' she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the 'bight' of the great bends & thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out & skirted a high 'bluff' sandbar in the middle of the stream & occasionally followed it a little too far & trenched upon the shoal waters of its head -- & then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but 'smelt' the bar, & straightaway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward & passed her under way, & in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the bar, & fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing -- & the pilot was lucky if he managed to 'straighten her up' before she drove her nose into the opposite bank....Now & then small log cabins appeared in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women & girls in soiled & faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against wood-piles & rail-fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show....Sometimes she stopped a moment at a landing & took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of slouchy white men & negroes stood on the bank & looked sleepily on with their hand in their pantaloons pockets -- of course, for they never took them out except to stretch, & when they did this they squirmed about & reached their fists into the air & lifted themselves on tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment....."
Later, the boat races another steamboat, and chances a short-cut through a narrow "chute" of water in the twilight. Clemens gives a
vivid, dramatic sequence which reveals the source of his familiar pseudonym. The boat's "leadsmen" stand at the bow of the steamboat, checking the depth of the river with a weighted line, and calling out the river depth to the pilot as he gingerly navigates the dangerous passage: "'Seven feet!' 'Sev - six and a half!' 'Six feet!' 'Six f---' Bang! She hit the bottom!....The escape-pipes belched snowy pillars of smoke aloft, the boat ground & surged & trembled -- & slid over into -- 'Mark Twain!' 'Quarter her ----' 'Tap! tap! tap!' (to signify 'Lay in the leads.') And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand...."
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, l873), was a collaborative effort by Twain and his friend Charles Dudley Warner to write a "contemporary" novel which satirized American society and politics of the time. "With their main plots staked out, Clemens and Warner began working like tunnel crews boring from opposite sides of the mountain,...Clemens wrote the first eleven chapters [including this one] at white heat....In general, as he [Clemens] liked to say, he contributed the fact and Warner the fiction" (J. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mr. Mark Twain, l966, pp.160-161). In spite of the novel's flaws, and its commercial failure, Clemens, "even in this first, faltering attempt at extended fiction...threatened established molds, carried realism farther than any other novel of his day, and began to discover the immaginative and structural use of what he had known, seen, and been" (ibid., p.164). Moreover, "writing sustained fiction forthe first time, Mark Twain found a matrix for the materials of his past: the Tennessee land, steamboating on the Mississippi...." (ibid., p.170).
After completing The Gilded Age, Twain's next project was a series of articles on the subject of Mississippi River steamboat piloting, entitled "Old Times on the Mississippi"; he returned again to his formative years as a pilot in Life on the Mississippi (l883) and, late in life, in his Autobiography (l908).
A VIVID ACCOUNT OF STEAMBOATING ON THE MISSISSIPPI, REVEALING THE SOURCE OF THE PSEUDONYM "MARK TWAIN"
A remarkably fine early Chapter from this essentially rather flawed book. The Chapter is a detailed account of a steamboat trip down the Mississippi by Squire Hawkins, one of the book's principal characters. The chapter ends in tragedy when the steamboat Hawkins is riding on races another steamboat. The chapter begins: "Early in the morning Squire Hawkins took passage in a small steamboat, with his family & his two [originally Twain wrote 'three'
salves, & presently the bell rang. The stage-plank was hauled in & the vessel proceeded up the river." After some initial fright, when "the gauge-cocks sent out an angry hiss," and at the "shivering of the boat under the beating of the wheels," the passengers relaxed. "...Then the voyage at once became a glorious adventure, a royal progress through the very heart & home of romance....They sat by the hour in the shade of the pilot house on the hurricane deck & looked out over the curving expanses of the ["mighty" is deleted] river sparkling in the sunlight. Sometimes the boat fought the mid-stream current with a verdant world on either hand; & remote from both; sometimes she closed in under a point, where the dead water & the helping eddies were, & shaved the bank so closely that the decks were swept by the jungle of over-hanging willows & littered with a spoil of leaves; departing from these 'points' she regularly crossed the river every five miles, avoiding the 'bight' of the great bends & thus escaping the strong current; sometimes she went out & skirted a high 'bluff' sandbar in the middle of the stream & occasionally followed it a little too far & trenched upon the shoal waters of its head -- & then the intelligent craft refused to run herself aground, but 'smelt' the bar, & straightaway the foamy streak that streamed away from her bows vanished, a great foamless wave rolled forward & passed her under way, & in this instant she leaned far over on her side, shied from the bar, & fled square away from the danger like a frightened thing -- & the pilot was lucky if he managed to 'straighten her up' before she drove her nose into the opposite bank....Now & then small log cabins appeared in little clearings, with the never-failing frowsy women & girls in soiled & faded linsey-woolsey leaning in the doors or against wood-piles & rail-fences, gazing sleepily at the passing show....Sometimes she stopped a moment at a landing & took on some freight or a passenger while a crowd of slouchy white men & negroes stood on the bank & looked sleepily on with their hand in their pantaloons pockets -- of course, for they never took them out except to stretch, & when they did this they squirmed about & reached their fists into the air & lifted themselves on tip-toe in an ecstasy of enjoyment....."
Later, the boat races another steamboat, and chances a short-cut through a narrow "chute" of water in the twilight. Clemens gives a
vivid, dramatic sequence which reveals the source of his familiar pseudonym. The boat's "leadsmen" stand at the bow of the steamboat, checking the depth of the river with a weighted line, and calling out the river depth to the pilot as he gingerly navigates the dangerous passage: "'Seven feet!' 'Sev - six and a half!' 'Six feet!' 'Six f---' Bang! She hit the bottom!....The escape-pipes belched snowy pillars of smoke aloft, the boat ground & surged & trembled -- & slid over into -- 'Mark Twain!' 'Quarter her ----' 'Tap! tap! tap!' (to signify 'Lay in the leads.') And away she went, flying up the willow shore, with the whole silver sea of the Mississippi stretching abroad on every hand...."
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, l873), was a collaborative effort by Twain and his friend Charles Dudley Warner to write a "contemporary" novel which satirized American society and politics of the time. "With their main plots staked out, Clemens and Warner began working like tunnel crews boring from opposite sides of the mountain,...Clemens wrote the first eleven chapters [including this one] at white heat....In general, as he [Clemens] liked to say, he contributed the fact and Warner the fiction" (J. Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mr. Mark Twain, l966, pp.160-161). In spite of the novel's flaws, and its commercial failure, Clemens, "even in this first, faltering attempt at extended fiction...threatened established molds, carried realism farther than any other novel of his day, and began to discover the immaginative and structural use of what he had known, seen, and been" (ibid., p.164). Moreover, "writing sustained fiction forthe first time, Mark Twain found a matrix for the materials of his past: the Tennessee land, steamboating on the Mississippi...." (ibid., p.170).
After completing The Gilded Age, Twain's next project was a series of articles on the subject of Mississippi River steamboat piloting, entitled "Old Times on the Mississippi"; he returned again to his formative years as a pilot in Life on the Mississippi (l883) and, late in life, in his Autobiography (l908).