“It’s Lovely To Live on a Raft”:
Mark Twain and a Sense of Place
by Philip Martin
Director, Great Lakes Literary, LLC

“There are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” – Willa Cather

“Shakespeare tells the same stories over and over in so many guises that it takes a long time before you notice.” – Howard Nemerov

“The two most engaging powers of a good author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new.” – William M. Thackeray

These quotes focus on the core of the writer’s task. Good stories touch on familiar things, yet offer a fresh take that makes each tale original. To look at one famous example:

Samuel Clemens, writing as Mark Twain, is best known for his masterpiece Huckleberry Finn (1885). Curiously, that work shares many points of plot, character, and theme with another work about a white orphaned boy befriended by a black man, published a few years earlier on the other side of the Atlantic: Sir Gibbie (1879), by novelist George MacDonald.

MacDonald is best known as an early fantasy writer of books like At the Back of the North Wind (1871), The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and The Princess and Curdie (1883), books that influenced C.S. Lewis and many other British writers. But MacDonald was also admired by American Samuel Clemens. The two had met in 1873 in the U.S., where the MacDonalds attended a concert by the Jubilee Singers, a group of freed slaves, and again in England when the Clemens family visited the MacDonalds.

As scholar Kathryn Lindskoog (1934–2003) has pointed out in an article first published in The Mark Twain Journal, Vol. 30, No. 2, Fall 1992 (also found on her website, http://www.lindentree.org/salty.html), it is possible that during their visits, the two authors had discussed some motifs around which both would write similar stories.

As Lindskoog notes: “Both Sir Gibbie and [the later work] Huckleberry Finn explore questions of ethics and truth through the life of an unusually bright and unusually unfortunate boy. Both are set in the colorful region where the author spent his boyhood. Both were written for children as well as adults. And they have at least twenty plot elements in common.” (And Samuel Clemens was quite familiar with Sir Gibbie; in 1880 he had bought a twenty-cent paperback edition of MacDonald’s book.)

In Lindskoog’s list, shared plot items include:

• The hero is a motherless, bright-spirited boy with an alcoholic, negligent father. He is occasionally helped by kind women; one thinks of him as a lost lamb. Illiterate when the book opens, he learns to read in the course of the story.
• The boy becomes a runaway who lives off the land.
• The boy finds a foster-father figure in a good-hearted black man.
• The boy meets and loves a girl who is being cheated out of her inheritance. With great effort, he restores it to her.
• The boy is futilely sought by his townspeople as the supposed victim after a break-in by (real or imagined) murderers.
• The boy eventually finds a loving home with a friend's relatives, a elderly rural couple with large hearts.

Both novels use thick dialect and share other distinctive points: a dramatic raft journey, false piety and sermonizing, an outrageous fraud who claims a fake heredity title, and more elements of plot, character, and theme.

Yet the novels are dramatically different. Samuel Clemens may have adopted plot items from MacDonald’s tale, but freshened and reinvented his version with his uniquely rich humor, homespun philosophy, and a powerful sense of place. With details drawn from his deep knowledge of the Mississippi River (from his work as a professional pilot), and with the backdrop of the issue of slavery and its treatment of black men like Jim, Huckleberry Finn became a great literary work, while Sir Gibbie sank into relative obscurity.

Here is a famous section from Twain’s novel, a brilliant description of the leisurely days of the raft trip shared by the boy Huck and runaway slave Jim. Rich in details, the passage is worth studying as a prime sample of how to develop a sense of place. More than a setting, the river comes alive. It becomes almost a living character. The humans observe it closely, are deeply affected by it, and come to love it dearly. Clemens weaves a tale of two human beings, bonding together on a journey – a “road-trip” story – yet delivered here in a way that makes Huckleberry Finn a uniquely American masterpiece, set on the mighty Mississippi.

From Huckleberry Finn (Chapter 19):

Two or three days and nights went by; I reckon I might say they swum by, they slid along so quiet and smooth and lovely. Here is the way we put in the time. It was a monstrous big river down there – sometimes a mile and a half wide; we run nights, and laid up and hid daytimes; soon as night was most gone we stopped navigating and tied up – nearly always in the dead water under a towhead; and then cut young cottonwoods and willows, and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim, so as to freshen up and cool off; then we set down on the sandy bottom where the water was about knee deep, and watched the daylight come.

Not a sound anywheres – perfectly still – just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs a-cluttering, maybe. The first thing to see, looking away over the water, was a kind of dull line – that was the woods on t'other side; you couldn't make nothing else out; then a pale place in the sky; then more paleness spreading around; then the river softened up away off, and warn't black any more, but gray; . . . and you see the mist curl up off of the water, and the east reddens up, and the river, and you make out a log-cabin in the edge of the woods, away on the bank on t'other side of the river, being a woodyard, likely, . . . then the nice breeze springs up, and comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they've left dead fish laying around, gars and such, and they do get pretty rank; and next you've got the full day, and everything smiling in the sun, and the song-birds just going it!

A little smoke couldn't be noticed now, so we would take some fish off of the lines and cook up a hot breakfast. And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along, and by and by lazy off to sleep. Wake up by and by, and look to see what done it, and maybe see a steamboat coughing along up-stream, so far off towards the other side you couldn't tell nothing about her only whether she was a stern-wheel or side-wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn't be nothing to hear nor nothing to see – just solid lonesomeness.

Next you'd see a raft sliding by, away off yonder, and maybe a galoot on it chopping, because they're most always doing it on a raft; you'd see the axe flash and come down – you don't hear nothing; you see that axe go up again, and by the time it's above the man's head then you hear the k’chunk! – it had took all that time to come over the water.

So we would put in the day, lazying around, listening to the stillness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steamboats wouldn't run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing – heard them plain; but we couldn't see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly; it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says:

"No; spirits wouldn't say, 'Dern the dern fog.'"

Soon as it was night out we shoved; when we got her out to about the middle we let her alone, and let her float wherever the current wanted her to; then we lit the pipes, and dangled our legs in the water – we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us – the new clothes Buck's folks made for me was too good to be comfortable, and besides I didn't go much on clothes, nohow.

Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark – which was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two – on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts.

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

Once or twice of a night we would see a steamboat slipping along in the dark, and now and then she would belch a whole world of sparks up out of her chimbleys, and they would rain down in the river and look awful pretty; then she would turn a corner and her lights would wink . . . and leave the river still again; and by and by her waves would get to us, a long time after she was gone, and joggle the raft a bit, and after that you wouldn't hear nothing for you couldn't tell how long, except maybe frogs or something.

After midnight the people on shore went to bed, and then for two or three hours the shores was black – no more sparks in the cabin windows. These sparks was our clock – the first one that showed again meant morning was coming, so we hunted a place to hide and tie up right away.