Roughing It by Mark Twain
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I grew up with dozens of images of the gold rush. But they never cohered into any solid idea of what those prospectors were actually doing. Running a sieve through stream water? Dynamiting mountainsides? Hitting the ground with a pickax? So I was happy to learn from Roughing It what sort of process ‘pocket mining’ was.
You take a bucket of dirt from a hillside. Mix it with water in a pan. Slosh it around in a circle. The dirt and lighter rocks fall out; flecks of gold, which is heavy, sit in the center. I knew that.
But here’s what I didn’t know: the pocket miners aren’t after these flecks of gold. Gold is valuable, but amounts that small wouldn’t be worth your time. They’re after the big hunk of gold that those little flecks washed off of.
Western hills erode a lot. When there’s a pocket of gold, it scatters pieces of itself downhill in the shape of a fan. The pocket is the fan’s handle. (The fan image is from Twain.) So the prospector sweeps side to side, and when a bucket of dirt doesn’t yield any gold, he knows he’s off the edge of the fan.
As he finds the edges, he moves uphill, until finally he finds the big pocket, hauls it away and cashes it in.
It struck me that panning for gold is a good metaphor for the creative process. Each draft of a story is another bucketful of dirt. Feedback and time are the water that washes away what’s not gold. Don’t settle for the little bits of gold. They are not part of your finished work. They’re clues to it.
There’s a lot of weird stuff in this book about Chinese people and native Hawaiians. I don’t want to be too hard on him because he seems to be trying to give them the benefit of the doubt. With the Internet, I expect to be able to learn about other cultures in their own voices. From their own authorities. He didn’t have that advantage.
But I do think that Mark Twain’s information was perhaps not entirely accurate. So, sorry Samuel. Parts of your work have not stood the test of time. Also, the contemporary ear does not like the sound of many of the terms he uses. I’m trying to be polite about it.
But the landscape descriptions are compelling. Twain has a beautiful facility with the English language. And the comic moments are genuinely funny.
There’s a wonderful ironic story at the end about a guy who tells huge lies. Twain gets so sick of him that he goes back to San Francisco. But this guy tells exactly the same kind of lies that Twain has been telling the whole book long! The difference is that Twain is self-deprecating, and always gives you a wink at the end of a joke. This guy was trying to trick people, for the sake of his own pride.
This kind of ironic self-commentary is hard to parse. If he’s like the guy, then it’s self-parody and he’s not like the guy. (Who would never make fun of himelf.) If he’s not like the guy, then he’s wildly exaggerating the guy’s foibles, and he’s like the guy. It twists in on itself like a snail shell. Very high-grade irony.