This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
Mark Twain held a very peculiar idea about literature. He thought that books ought to tell the truth. It’s a lesson he learned from the river itself.
Twain's special enemies were the romance writers. He blamed the American Civil War on the novels of Sir Walter Scott, which made every Southerner a Colonel or a Judge, and he was suspicious of that liar, Shakespeare, whose Romeo and Juliet gave Tom Sawyer impossible dreams regarding Becky Thatcher.
Twain's own personal Goliath was the great James Fenimore Cooper whose Leatherstocking novels created a hopelessly idealized West. Cooper grew up on the frontier and ought to have known that one cannot track moccasin footprints in the middle of a rushing river or follow the path a cannonball has made through the woods straight back to the fort. Twain complained that Cooper's hero, Leatherstocking, spoke like an "illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Gift Book" and was able to hit the head of a nail from 300 yards and drive it into a tree, and see it go in.
It especially bothered Twain that readers thought this was great stuff. Didn't they realize these books were turning them into tourists? And Twain knew tourists. They were the passengers on steamboats who drank their whiskeys and saw pretty pictures as the boat slid down the river. Pilots like Twain, by contrast, knew every inch of the river, could read every ripple in the water and tell when it meant a snag or shallow water. For the pilot, Twain once wrote, the river was the most marvelous book ever read by man, full of exclamation points and italicized passages.
Mark Twain came to see the writer of books as a pilot, too, tasked with helping others see life clearly, to drink in its beauties and avoid its wrecks. The Mississippi and the river of Life: no one ought to be out on either river without a clear mind. If that meant poking holes in heads swelled by Cooper or Scott, or preachers or sappy poets, so be it.
I'm curious to know what you're reading these days.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.
