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My Life on the Mississippi,
or why I am not Mark Twain
by Richard Bissell
Chapter One
“Banned in Dubuque”
“Theodore Roosevelt is substantially and to all effects and purposes, insane, and ought to be in an asylum.”
Who said that?
Well it wasn’t my old man, it was America’s Sweetheart, lovable, funny old Mark Twain.
Mark Twain was a nut.
He had small delicate hands, with which he kept a lifetime Shit List of people he didn’t like. Once you were on that list you never got off. And he did not forget his dead enemies; their deaths represented further impudence. The deader they got the madder he got.
The doctors wouldn’t let him into the room to see his wife Livy when she was sick. They figured rightly that laying eyes on him would give her a relapse. When they lived in Riverdale in 1902 the doctors wouldn’t let him in to see her for over five months.
He used to wait on Sundays in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel in New York until church was out, then walk down Fifth Avenue in his white suit so everybody coming from church would gawp at him.
His hatreds and ‘personal vendettas’ were sometimes so persistent and intense that his wife said “you seem almost like a monomaniac.”*
* Justin Kaplan (Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain), like The Shadow, sees all, knows all.
William Dean Howells said that Livy was glad to be sick and confined to her room in order to get away from the constant repetitive bickering and hollering about ‘the damned human race’.
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835. Died Redding, Connecticut, 1910.
Unfortunately he wagged his head from side to side when he walked, a peculiarly unattractive trait bringing to mind somehow Franklin Roosevelt, Jimmy Cagney, and Felix the Cat.
His faithful and true lifelong friend Howells said that Clemens smiled at you with ‘remote absence’. I know it well. That’s my cousin Archie. “You were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.” Actually it doesn’t bother me to see that scrim come down between Archie and me. But some people find it very trying.
Mark Twain never went to the theatre. You know why, don’t you? Just like my cousin Archie — hates the theatre, won’t go, says it’s a fraud, tickets too high. That’s not the reason, the reason is, there are people up there on the stage talking and talking and talking and he never gets a chance to talk. Can’t say a word. This is the most unendurable torture to a natural born wind artist and compulsive interrupter; he has got to blow every so often, like a whale, or die right in the fourth row.
America’s favorite chucklesome after-dinner speaker loathed banquets, was in mortal agony listening to the other speeches, and finally worked out a system where he sneaked in after the guzzling and preliminaries, gave his talk, and faded out again into the street.
Because I myself write books about the Mississippi River, because I used to be a pilot on the Mississippi River and hold a pilot’s license on the Mississippi River today, the critics for twenty-three years have been calling me ‘a modern Mark Twain’. Now is this fair?
I wasn’t born in a little frame shanty down in Missouri, wouldn’t think of it. I was born in splendor at the top of the Fourth Street elevator in Dubuque, Iowa, Key City to the West, greatest state in the Union. Missouri — no thanks!
When my wife is sick the doctors don’t send me down to the Elks Club.
I don’t wag my head when I walk and I don’t have small, delicate hands, either. Beautiful, strong, capable artistic hands, maybe.
The way it happened was, after I gave up steamboating on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the Tennessee, the Cumberland, the St. Croix, the Kanawha, the Tygart and the Monongahela I wrote a novel* (“picaresque,” brother Mycroft said and he began to talk about Cervantes) about towboating on the Upper Mississippi. It was published in Boston by William Dean Howells’ old outfit, so I was in good company there. * A Stretch on the River (Boston, Atlantic, 1950). Everybody was surprised, especially the folks on Arlington Street in Boston, when the book started getting ‘hailed’. It was hailed in the New York papers and it was hailed in Boston, Providence, Fall River, and Worcester, as well as down in Philadelphia and clear across the continent to the Sacramento Valley. It was one of the biggest hailstorms on record and it was a straight case of “. . . not since Mark Twain . . . .” “. . . in the tradition of Mark Twain . . . .” My luck being what it is, the publishers had expected to sell only about 23 copies, so when the hailing hit, most of the bookstores were without any stock. I have since learned that even if a book, any book, sells 100,000 copies, the book stores still don’t have any stock. Or sometimes they have some copies but they are in with the law books by mistake. Anyway the Chicago Trib said “. . . roughest, rawest . . . Mark Twain . . . .” And the Philadelphia Bulletin’s Mr. Bernard Bergman said “. . . takes its place with Mark Twain . . . poetry . . . .” St. Louis Post Dispatch: “. . . lusty, bawdy . . . virile . . . poetry . . . women . . . fun . . . .” Time said “. . . Mark Twain . . . .”
In Dubuque my book was simultaneously hailed by the newspaper and banned by the Catholic Mothers Purity Association. They even had a hearing on it during which Paul Engle, poet laureate of Iowa, testified in my defense. That sets me into a more popular category than Mark Twain right away. Was he ever banned in Hannibal? Getting your books banned in Boston used to be easy enough, but get these headlines: MODERN MARK TWAIN BANNED IN DUBUQUE!!
Times have changed. Last year a Dubuque lad published a book about growing up in the parochial schools there that I wouldn’t lend to a lascar coal passer, but no word has been heard from the Catholic Mothers. A lot has happened in 23 years. Most of it unfortunate.
So that’s how it is that when I stop at the store in Beetown, Wisconsin, to get two bottles of Dubuque Star beer and a box of Uneedas, the store lady says, “Say — I seen you someplace in the paper already. Ain’t you that modern Mark Twain from over at Dubuque?” And I have to admit I am.
And it explains why I am besieged for ‘Modern Mark Twain’ autographs whenever I stroll down Michigan Boulevard, Powell Street, or Fifth Avenue.
But I don’t think I am really much like Mark Twain. Maybe I write better, but listen, folks, he came from Missouri and for a chalk-talk man he did all right. I just had the advantages is all. He would of been the first to admit it.
And I’ve got some pretty nice tattoos, also. If Mark Twain had had any tattoos don’t you just think he would have talked them up? You know it. And Albert Bigelow Paine, when he wrote the authorized and stodgy biography, don’t you know if his subject had had glorious cutaneous stars, eagles, tigers, and anchors like I have, how he would have bragged them up? Kaplan* knows more about Mark Twain than anybody and he never says a word about tattoos.
* Kaplan.
If we are going to be geniuses together, it is all right with me. But it’s not just roses all the way. He had his ups and downs the same as I have had and not everybody thought he was such hot stuff.
In a standard late nineteenth century work called American Literature, one Professor Charles F. Richardson does not mention Mark Twain under fiction at all, and gives him three lines under humor, saying “temporary amusement, not literary product, is the thing sought and given.” That’s enough out of you, Richardson. But he was not alone.
“Grandma,” I asked my grandmother Bissell one wintry afternoon in the 1920’s, high on the hill over the Mississippi in Dubuque. “If Mark Twain is one of our greatest American writers, why does he sometimes say ‘he don’t’ and ‘she don’t’ instead of ‘he doesn’t’ and ‘she doesn’t’?”
“Because he didn’t know any better,” she said.
“He was very common, you might say trashy,” she added.
“But Grandma, at school Miss Sheridan says . . . .”
“Hark!” she said. “What’s that noise?” All the Bissells were great at shouting “Hark!”
“They’re just putting coal in Mrs. Burch’s coal chute,” I said.
“Mark Twain! Good heavens what are we coming to?”
“But Miss Sheridan at school says he was a genius. ‘Genius in its purest form’ she says.”
“Genius fiddlesticks! Sitting around there in Hartford drinking whiskey with his cronies and smoking cigars — forty cigars a day — tell your Miss Sheridan that. As far as I can see he never dined alone with his family, always had somebody to prance and spout in front of, that ruffian Bret Harte, or some illiterate steamboat pilot or such, anybody would do him. I declare if it came dinnertime and nobody there but his wife and the girls, I’ll wager he went out in the street and collared the first three or four people he met. And then, every single meal so they say, while everybody is eating, he’s up from the table maundering up and down jawing a mile a minute. Can you imagine Mr. Holmes or Mr. Hawthorne showing such disgraceful manners?
“Here’s your genius for you. At one of these dinners Mark Twain and a gentleman from the neighborhood decided to write a book together, on a bet with their wives. Richard, geniuses do not collaborate. Can you imagine Charles Dickens getting full of wine and deciding to collaborate on a book with some man from across the street?”
“Well, no I can’t, I guess,” I said. “Who was the man?”
“Charles Dudley Warner, and the book, which was outrageous, was The Gilded Age.”
“Who was Charles Dudley Warner, Grandma?”
“Oh heavens my dear, a complete nobody. To give you some idea, he was the editor of one of those atrocities called Treasury of the World’s Best Literature or some such title. You can imagine that if you like.”
I tried to imagine it but couldn’t get very far with it.
“Of course,” she said, “he realized later that the book was a very skimpy affair which is putting it mildly, but he never could admit he was wrong about anything, oh certainly not, not the great Mark Twain, so he said it was Warner’s fault, that Warner had talked him into it. Oh he was a devious one, a mean one.”
“I guess you don’t like Mark Twain very much,” I said.
“A buffoon,” she said. “Here, here’s a good book for a boy to read on a nice snowy afternoon,” and she gave me my grandfather’s copy of Lavengro by George Borrow.
But a lot of people felt that way about Mark Twain and a lot of them still do. This doesn’t make it any easier for me being “A Modern Mark Twain.”
MARK TWAIN IN VENICE
“You enter, and proceed to
that most-visited little gallery
that exists in the world
— the Tribune — and
there, against the wall, without
obstructing rag or leaf,
you may look your fill upon
the foulest, the vilest, the
obscenest picture the world
possesses — Titian’s Venus.”
