Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" by Frederick Turner Read Free Book Online

mother’s side! Look at me! I take nineteen alligators and a bar’l of whiskey for breakfast when I’m in robust health, and a bushel of rattlesnakes and a dead body when I’m ailing!
    Brilliant stuff here in which the writer packs into this formulaic comic boast not only Mississippi River lore but really a century of the American experience with its violence, its color, its astonishing vitality.
    But Twain sets himself an even greater challenge when two chapters later he tries to reproduce the daily language of the men who worked the gaudy steamboats. Formulaic comic boasts were one thing, but the ordinary language of a workday spent on the docks and decks under all kinds of conditions was another, for these men were the cultural descendants of those Twain had said were the coarse, foul-witted, profane frolickers who haunted the river’s “moral sties.” He remembered—or claimed to—a particular mate from his own days as a cub pilot, a great, stormy fellow with a blue woman tattooed on one arm and a red one on the other and who was a genuine artist in his command ofprofanity. When this man gave an order, Twain tells us, “he discharged it like a blast of lightning, and sent a long, reverberating peal of profanity thundering after it.” For example: “‘Aft again! aft again! Don’t you hear me? Dash it to dash … !’” And, “‘you dash-dash-dash-dashed split between a tired mud-turtle and a crippled hearse horse!’” This leaves a considerably less pungent impression than do the comic boasts, because here the attempt to portray the everyday realities of river life runs aground on the social and literary realities Twain had come to know so well. There were many things that simply couldn’t be written in literature, even if they were the commonplace realities of American life.
    It could well be argued—and doubtless has been—that literature is the better for these prohibitions, that there is nothing artful at all in giving readers the real words the tattooed mate might have used on his deckhands, because such words could only be the crude verbal clubs such a man would have had at hand, as a man in a brawl might grab whatever weapons there were—hatchet, cudgel, bottle. But we are obliged to remember here Twain’s strong anti-literary, anti-establishment bias, plus the fact that in writing about the river he was writing about the thing he loved more than anything else in life, except possibly his family.
    First and last, Twain’s literary persona and thus his financialsuccess depended on the popular perception of him as a kind of outlaw who had—somehow—learned to wear a cravat and to read and write. And this wasn’t all a pose, either: there were several notable instances in which Sam Clemens went far out of his way to antagonize members of the so-called “Genteel Tradition,” as when he savagely mocked Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow as they sat at the head table at the birthday dinner for John Greenleaf Whittier in 1877. And as for the river and its life, what Twain must surely have yearned to do was to give his readers the authentic, one-hundred-proof, forty-rod stuff he knew—language, behavior, and all. We need to take him seriously when he says after attempting to reproduce the tattooed mate’s profane outburst, “I wished I could talk like that.” He could—in private—up in his dressing room, in the bathroom, or down at the billiards table where a missing shirt button, a dull razor, or a bad shot would cause him to break out his own formidable arsenal of words and expressions he’d picked up on the river.
    Not in print, though, with the single exception of the privately circulated story “1601,” which purported to be an account of conversation around Queen Elizabeth’s fireside in which Her Majesty endeavors to learn who it was among Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Francis Bacon, Sir Walter Raleigh, and others who had blown a terrific fart.