A River Runs Through It
Shortly before he died in 1986, the great 20th century Argentine man of letters, Jorge Luis Borges, made a pilgrimage to Hannibal, Mo., to pay homage to his great 19th century American cohort, Mark Twain. Upon arriving in town, the blind octogenarian was escorted to the Mississippi River levee. Despite his meticulous three-piece suit and to the surprise of all present, Borges walked into the muddy waters until the river rushed up around his chest. “Now,” he declared, “I understand the essence of America.”
Borges’ baptism in the United States’ Father of Waters made a fitting tribute to his literary hero: No American writer put more effort into promoting the Mississippi than former riverboat captain Twain. His work began in defense, after Charles Dickens visited Cairo, Ill., where the Ohio and Mississippi rivers converge, and expressed his revulsion by calling America’s great waterway “a slimy monster hideous to behold” in his 1843 “American Notes for General Circulation.” Still more rankling, Herman Melville, who never so much as saw the river, parroted Dickens’ faulty impression in “The Confidence Man: His Masquerade,” in which Melville claimed that “Fever and Ague” were the patron saints of the Mississippi.
Infuriated by this misinformation, Twain set out to defend his beloved “Big Muddy” in “Tom Sawyer,” “Life on the Mississippi” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” So powerful was Twain’s argument that the Dickens-Melville denigration of the river as a swirling sewer faded from fashion, replaced by Twain’s world of riverboat pilots, prank-playing boys and magnolia-scented tall tales. For all his efforts, however, among the great 20th century American modernists who were born or raised along the banks of the Mississippi River--Richard Wright, T.S. Eliot and F. Scott Fitzgerald--none was quite taken in by Twain’s enthusiasm. To them, the Mississippi was most notable as a metaphor for the nation’s racial divide and social stratification. Unlike Twain’s, their bleak memories of life along the river don’t amount to the stuff of annual festivals. But make no mistake: The soulful Mississippi River courses through their work, often in currents too deep to be obvious.
Wright was born in Roxie, Miss., “too far back in the woods to hear the train whistle and you could only hear the hoot owls holler.” When he left the Mississippi delta in 1927, the region’s fertile soil was depleted from planting too much cotton, the insatiable boll weevil had marched up from Mexico and decimated the crops and heavy flooding of the Mississippi River had left many plantations devastated. The floods made such an impact on Wright that he wrote three stories about them: “Down by the Riverside,” “Silt” and “The Man Who Saw the Flood.” It haunted Wright that African Americans, and particularly the most impoverished sharecroppers, were routinely killed by Mississippi River floods as their better-positioned white neighbors looked on and did nothing to help them, a disturbing behavior that he expanded on in his essay “How Jim Crow Feels.”
Nothing improved when Wright’s family moved to 20 E. Woodlawn Ave. in Natchez, just blocks from the Mississippi River. The horrific opening of his autobiographical narrative “Black Boy” in fact takes place in this house--a scene of the 4-year-old author torching the parlor curtains and getting whipped so hard by his mother with an elm tree branch that he loses consciousness and remains plagued by hallucinations of the event into adulthood. “For a long time I was chastened,” Wright confessed, “whenever I remembered that my mother had come close to killing me.” To escape his household’s turmoils, Wright would walk to the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi and watch the steamboats. “There was,” Wright described it, “a vague sense of the infinite as I looked down upon the yellow, dreaming waters of the Mississippi River far from the verdant bluffs of Natchez.” Yet when his family moved again, traveling up the river from Natchez to Memphis by steamboat, the viciously bigoted pilots the Wrights encountered displayed none of the tolerance of Twain’s good-humored versions.
A diametrically different social upbringing along the great river informs the work of Eliot--born Sept. 26, 1888, in a large two-story house at 2635 Locust Ave. in St. Louis--who embraced the Mississippi in metaphorical terms and constantly drew upon its force for imagery in his poems and plays. “I feel,” Eliot wrote late in life to a St. Louis newspaper editor, “that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river which is incommunicable to those who have not.”
His dapper youth shared nothing with Wright’s but the river, Eliot being the firmly upper-middle-class son of a brick manufacturer and a novice poet. Eliot’s boyhood also had little else in common with the straw-hat, Huck Finn bumptiousness of Twain’s: The future poet of “The Waste Land” attended Smith Academy, founded by his paternal grandfather, and some of the short stories and verse he contributed to the Smith Academy Record include scenes set along the Mississippi. Although he soon headed to Massachusetts’ Milton Academy before entering Harvard College in 1906, Eliot never forgot the waters he grew up on. “The river cast a spell over the entirety of my life,” he explained. “It was my Harvard.”
To Eliot, the Mississippi’s fascination wasn’t about people but as a force of nature like the vast Atlantic Ocean he experienced through summering in Gloucester, Mass. In later life he contemplated writing a book of childhood reminiscences titled “The River and the Sea,” celebrating his memories of the two great natural forces that pervade his poetry. Although he never got around to that one, some of Eliot’s finest works derive in part from his feel of the Mississippi. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example, refers to the name on an old red-brick furniture warehouse that still stands along the levee in St. Louis. The poem’s fictive fog is actually soot from the smokestacks of the factories that lined the riverbank and once fouled the water and poisoned the air. Yet Eliot also saw through the industrial haze to pen his greatest ode to the Mississippi River in his deeply religious and philosophical 1941 poem “The Dry Salvages”:
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable ...
His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, ...
And so it remained in Eliot, flowing through his soul long after he abandoned St. Louis. His contemporary and compatriot genius with the American language, Fitzgerald, was born 550 miles up the river from St. Louis, in St. Paul, Minn., on Sept. 24, 1896, in a six-unit brick building at 481 Laurel Ave., just a mile and a half from the river’s banks. St. Paul at the turn of the last century was conservative and provincial, although the Mississippi River had ceased to be the city’s primary lifeline to the world beyond with the advent of the railroads.
As a boy, Fitzgerald saw the great river as a mere mercantile highway utterly devoid of romance, just a stretch of ugly warehouses and docks full of bums. The city had turned its back to the river, which Fitzgerald noted in his 1922 story “The Popular Girl”: “The continuity of these mausoleums was broken by a small park, a triangle of grass where Nathan Hale stood ten feet tall with his hands bound behind his back by stone cord and stared over a great bluff at the slow Mississippi. Crest Avenue ran along the bluff, but neither faced it nor seemed aware of it, for all the houses fronted inward toward the street.”
Today, however, St. Paul is reclaiming the finer heritage of its riverfront, where Fitzgerald’s fans can now visit the row house where he is said to have been conceived, as well as the Victorian-era house that F. Scott and wife Zelda rented at 626 Goodrich Ave., described in his 1921 essay “Author’s House.” Already a celebrity after the wild success of his first novel, “This Side of Paradise,” Fitzgerald is thought to have written large chunks of his second major work, “The Beautiful and the Damned,” in the Goodrich Avenue house’s tower room, which afforded a bird’s-eye view of the Mississippi River. “It’s small up there, and full of baked silent heat until the author opens two of the glass windows that surround it and the twilight blows through,” he wrote about his St. Paul aerie. “As far as your eye can see, there is a river winding between green lawns and trees and purple buildings and red slums blended in by a merciful dusk.” Fitzgerald also worked in St. Paul on his “Tales of the Jazz Age,” his lauded collection of short stories, and wrote other stories about the area, though he never returned to St. Paul after he and Zelda left the Midwest in 1922.
Fitzgerald’s signature sense of social stratification may well have developed from growing up in “genteel shabbiness” in St. Paul, where the Mississippi River served as a demarcation line, the poor living down on the river flats and the rich above them on the bluffs. The brilliant youngster forded the gap, organizing high-toned secret clubs, riding in sleighs to Town and Country events, studying at the posh local Ramaley School of Dance and mingling with the city’s finest families despite his empty pockets.
In 1996, St. Paul threw a centennial bash to celebrate Fitzgerald’s achievements, an event spearheaded by National Public Radio host Garrison Keillor. “Mississippi River towns have given birth to numerous writers of merit,” he declared. “The delta claims Faulkner; St. Louis T.S. Eliot; and St. Paul has F. Scott Fitzgerald. We’re proud of him.” Keillor’s acknowledgement is true of all the great American modernists, including Wright, if only one looks close enough at their work to see it.