BOOK REVIEW

Powers, Ron.  _Dangerous Waters:  A Biography of the Boy Who Became Mark
Twain_.  New York:  Basic Books, 1999.  Pp. 328.  Selected bibliography,
notes, index.  Cloth, 5-3/4" x 8-1/2".  $23.00.  ISBN 0-465-07670-X.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

        Harold K. Bush, Jr.
        <[log in to unmask]>
        Saint Louis University

Copyright (c) 1999 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


As we learn in the opening pages of this wonderful volume, the full story
of the life and times of Sam Clemens had been, for a very long time, either
neatly laundered or altogether suppressed.  Such mythologized versions of
the legendary writer emerged from numerous sources, not the least of which
were his daughter Clara and his notoriously questionable biographer Albert
Bigelow Paine.  In particular, the early days of Clemens's life, which are
the focus of this volume, had remained largely whitewashed and unexamined
in great detail at least until the publication of what has remained for
some 47 years the standard account of his youth:  Dixon Wecter's excellent
Sam Clemens of Hannibal (1952).  In the intervening years, biographers have
paid scant attention to Clemens's youth:  Justin Kaplan ignored it
altogether, for instance, while Andrew Hoffman gave it only a couple of
thin chapters.

Ron Powers's recent volume, a thoroughly informed and elegantly written
work that will be of interest to both scholars and general readers, steps
in to present the content of the first twenty or so years of Clemens's life
in rich and nuanced ways.  In taking on this topic, Powers does rely
heavily on key earlier studies, especially Wecter's.  But Powers transcends
Wecter's achievement in several important ways.  In particular, Powers is
able to draw upon the very rich tradition of Twain studies over the nearly
half century since Wecter's publication.  Moreover, and related to this, is
the ready availability of numerous primary and secondary sources not
available so many years ago.  More to the point of this book's originality,
Powers brings to his work a vivid understanding of the Hannibal scene that
results from his own childhood in Hannibal.

Finally, I would like to suggest that Powers's book is outstanding in its
stylistic and "readerly" attributes.  Powers, a Pulitzer-Prize winner and
author of at least eight other volumes, brings to bear the full range of
his writerly talents in capturing with verve and at times great humor these
early pre-Mark Twain days.  For example, in largely dismissing Van Wyck
Brooks's dark assessment of the effect of the death of John Clemens on
young Sammy, Powers writes:  "Brimming with Freudean theory and burdened by
his sobersided brahmin's tin ear, Brooks swooped down on this episode and
used it to form a pathological view of Twain that would set the terms of
debate for forty years" (135).   Powers describes a stinging response to
one J. T. Hinton published by the young Clemens in the _Hannibal Journal_:
"This flotilla of heavily armored prose, so conventional in its mid-century
context, was no match for the sleek torpedoes that came foaming back. . . .
[T]wo more jackknife-wrought woodcuts appeared" (187).  And here he evokes
Clemens's first visit to New York:  "Like Walt Whitman across the East
River in Brooklyn, like Thomas Wolfe eighty years in the future, and like
the ten thousand young journalist-writers who were their heirs, he bestrode
the million-footed city, was caught up in the manswarm, heard the blab of
the pave, sensed the souls moving along, listened to the living and buried
speech that was always vibrating there" (226).

Perhaps some might demur to such flowery prose stylings in a book of this
sort.   For me, though, the book is a great pleasure to read--and yet one,
despite its artistry and frequent breeziness, that will supply even the
most acute Twain scholars with insight and ideas for further research.  I
was particularly struck by Powers's insistence on the rather dark aspects
of Twain's childhood--a preoccupation signalled, I guess, by the chosen
title.  These times were, under Powers's microscope, pretty dangerous
times.  Fortunately, the author convinces us that much more should be said
about the apparently deep and profound impression that many of these events
and cultural manifestations left on the subject of the book.

The volume is written from a largely chronological structure, and yet the
individual chapters tend to become brief essays on particular themes or
events.  Chapter 3, for instance, nicely evokes African American
storytelling and spiritual singing, showing how these aspects of black
language began early on to work their way into Clemens's imaginative
enterprise.  Chapter 7 provides a lengthy listing of the many gruesome
experiences of violence, death, drowning, murder, mayhem, and corpses to
which Sammy Clemens was privy in his youth.  Chapter 9 covers the emergence
of southwest humor and the meaning of "rough-and-tumble"--barbarous joking
that featured, among other things, an unusual interest in gouging out a
person's eyeballs.  Chapter 12 gives nice coverage of the neglected topic
of Clemens's earliest sketches and other writing--many of which he snuck
into the paper when his older brother Orion left the Journal in his care.
Chapter 15 is a brief meditation of Twain's romanticized view of the river
itself--with interesting deliberation on why he never seemed to critique
this myth, despite the fact that he did virtually every other myth of the
19th century.  Chapter 16 is a brilliant reading of the death of his
favored brother Henry, contextualized in a rendition of the culture of
riverboats in which the fatal explosion of the Pennsylvania occurred on
June 13, 1858.  With this traumatic event, writes Powers, the childhood of
Sammy Clemens came to a stirring close.  And for all practical purposes, so
does the book--after a final chapter rehashing Twain's last visit to his
hometown in 1902.

Interwoven throughout the story are little tidbits of historical concern
that help to explain important aspects of the ethos of the young Clemens:
information about the Postal Act of 1792, for example, a statute that
allowed all publishers to receive competitors' papers with no cost of
postage, a single law that Powers uses to explain much about Clemens's
earliest readings.  We learn about the outlaw John Murrell; about the
Nullification Crisis of 1833; about the connection between Southwest humor
and Whiggery; and about the fascination and danger of riverboat racing.  In
short, this is a provocative and highly informative work covering the
foundational period of Twain's career, a period that has heretofore
received scant attention.

The story by Powers is an easy read, highly enjoyable, yet also deeply
informed.  I should like to say that there are some weaknesses.  For
example, I am always a bit surprised to see how little coverage issues of
religion and churchgoing are given in works about Twain.  Surely more than
the 2-3 pages mention of these matters could be offered.  Additionally,
some readers may be put off by the scant scholarly apparatus here:  Powers
does footnote, but never gives page numbers, only book titles.  This would
make it challenging to locate the more esoteric quotations.  These are, at
most, minor quibbles.  More importantly, I highly recommend this volume:
it is a wonderful read, and it sheds much light on this fascinating period
of the great author's life.


Harold K. Bush, Jr., author of _American Declarations:  Rebellion and
Repentance in American Cultural History_ (Urbana:  University of Illinois
Press, 1999), is assistant professor of English at Saint Louis University.
His essays on Mark Twain have appeared in a variety of publications,
including _American Literary Realism_ and _American Quarterly_, and are
forthcoming in _The New England Quarterly_ and _The Oxford Historical Guide
to Mark Twain_, edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin.