Twain and Mardi Gras

February 16th, 2010 - By j guevara

Today is Mardi Gras, a party not always celebrated in literature. Both Tennessee Williams and William Faulkner, each of them once resident in New Orleans, hated what they saw as organized and desperate gaiety. But a twenty-three-year-old Samuel Clemens loved every minute, mask and madame of it, declaring that “an American has not seen the United States until he has seen Mardi-Gras in New Orleans.” Clemens made the St. Louis-New Orleans trip a handful of times while an apprentice pilot; the comment above comes from his March 9, 1859 letter to his sister, written the day after docking in New Orleans and literally bumping into the fun:

I posted off up town yesterday morning as soon as the boat landed, in blissful ignorance of the great day. At the corner of Good-Children and Tchoupitoulas streets, I beheld an apparition! — and my first impulse was to dodge behind a lamp-post. It was a woman—a hay-stack of curtain calico, ten feet high—sweeping majestically down the middle of the street…. Next I saw a girl of eighteen, mounted on a fine horse, and dressed as a Spanish Cavalier, with long rapier, flowing curls, blue-satin doublet and half-breeches…. And then I saw a hundred men, women and children in fine, fancy, splendid, ugly, coarse, ridiculous, grotesque, laughable costumes, and the truth flashed upon me—“This is Mardi-Gras!”

“Mardi-Gras,” an illustration from the first edition of Life on the Mississippi

Clemens spends the day wide-eyed, rapt by “…giants, Indians, nigger minstrels, monks, priests, clowns … the ‘free-and-easy’ women [with] costumes and actions very trying to modest eyes.” And then came the night, with the Mystic Krewe of Comus in torchlight procession:

…Then followed tall, grotesque maskers representing some ancient game … then the Queen of the Fairies, with a winged troop of beauties … then the King & Queen of the Genii, I suppose (eight or ten feet high) …followed by a couple of infinitesimal dwarfs … then figures whose bodies were vast drums, trumpets, clarinets, fiddles … followed by others whose bodies were pitchers, punch-bowls, goblets … then gigantic chickens, turkeys, bears, & other beasts and birds—then a big Christmas tree, followed by Santa Claus, with fur cap, short pipe, &c., and surrounded by a great basket filled with toys—and then—well I don’t remember half….

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 3:02 am and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.