Book review by George S: Sorry, but this won’t be an entirely objective review, because I didn’t so much read this book as wallow in it. Over the years I have seen three good stage productions of the Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein Showboat, as well as the 1936 and 1951 films. Reading the novel (the first half especially) brought back the pleasure of those productions by filling in the backstory and background detail.
Cover of the first edition.
The plot is simple enough. Captain Andy bought a showboat, despite his puritanical wife’s wishes, but she accompanied him on his travels through America’s rivers, together with their daughter Magnolia. Despite her mother’s wishes, Magnolia becomes stage-struck, and joins the boat’s acting company. She falls in love with Gaylord Ravenal, a professional gambler who takes on the job as actor when in hard times. She runs off to Chicago with him, and they live a precarious life together, until his gambler’s luck finally runs out. He leaves her rather than rely on the charity of her mother. Later she becomes a successful singer, singing the ‘negro’ songs she heard while on the showboat. Her daughter, Kim becomes a successful actress on the legitimate stage, a long way from the crude melodramas that were popular on the Mississippi.
What makes the book special is the wealth of background detail, and the author’s indulgence in the romance of the traveling showboat. There are vivid details of behaviour, of costumes, and of the river. Here is her description of the havoc caused by a storm:
Outside, the redundant rain added its unwelcome measure to the swollen and angry stream. In the ghostly gray dawn the grotesque wreckage of flood-time floated and whirled and jiggled by, seeming to bob a mad obeisance as it passed the show boat which, in its turn, made stately bows from its moorings. There drifted past, in fantastic parade, great trees, uprooted and clutching at the water with stiff dead arms; logs, catapulted with terrific force; animal carcasses dreadful in their passivity; chicken coops; rafts; a piano, its ivory mouth fixed in a death grin; a two-room cabin, upright, and moving in a minuet of stately and ponderous swoops and advances and chassés; fence rails; an armchair whose white crocheted antimacassar stared in prim disapproval at the wild antics of its fellow voyagers; a live sheep, bleating as it came, but soon still; a bed with its covers, by some freak of suction, still snugly tucked in as when its erstwhile occupant had fled from it in fright—all these, and more, contributed to the weird terror of the morning. The Mississippi itself was a tawny tiger, roused, furious, bloodthirsty, lashing out with its great tail, tearing with its cruel claws, and burying its fangs deep in the shore to swallow at a gulp land, houses, trees, cattle—humans, even; and roaring, snarling, howling hideously as it did so.
What makes this writing surprising is that Edna Ferber had apparently only once in her life seen the Mississippi river, when she was a child. Her original intention with this novel had been to write a novel set among the gamblers in the South Street area of Chicago- and that is what she does in the second half of the book. The material from the first half, however, came from her visit to Charles Hunter, who for many years had run the James Adams Floating Theatre along the coast of Carolina, and who told her ‘You must write about the Showboats.’ He spent an afternoon telling her tales of the river. One of the stories he told her was that of a couple who were accused of racial miscegenation in a state where that was illegal. The man cut his wife’s finger and sucked some of the blood from it, so that he could truthfully claim he had negro blood in him. This became the basis for the most dramatic episode in both novel and musical play (though the original anecdote apparently happened in a traveling fair, not on a showboat.)
Ferber lovingly recreates the atmosphere of the theatrical performances and their audiences, even though it is a nostalgia for something she had not herself ever seen.
The musical is fairly faithful to the first half of the book, but compresses the second half, and compounds the book’s happy ending with its own set of coincidences and lucky chances, sentimentalising what was anyway a fairly sentimental ending. The fate of Julie (the woman with negro blood) is harsher in the novel, where she is glimpsed in a brothel. In the show, her fate is less certain.
The biggest difference between book and show is in the portrayal of Joe and Queenie, the two black servants on the showboat. In the book they are hardly characters, just ciphers, mentioned in passing and taken for granted as part of the local colour, with no inner life. Oscar Hammerstein in his script fleshed them out. Joe becomes to some extent a caricature workshy feckless negro servant, and she is an equally stereotyped put-upon wife. Hammerstein saw rhat women standing by weak or unsatisfactory men was a key theme of the novel, and makes Queenie their spokeswoman; she joins Julie in singing ‘Can’t help loving that man of mine’, a song that will echo through the play. Joe in the play is given some now rather embarrassing comic dialog – but he is also given the great song ‘Old Man River’ which not only gives him a depth of character, but also expresses the wonder, dignity and power of the river that has been expressed by the narrative voice of the novel, but not by any of the characters.
The novel makes its stand on the question of race in the miscegenation episode, but Ferber seems to have less imaginative sympathy with the black population of the rivers than she does with the white.
Hammerstein’s musical opens challengingly with the words:
Niggers all work on de Mississippi,
Niggers all work while de white folks play.
The novel, by contrast, stresses the hardworking lives of all those who live along the river, from whose tough existences the visit of the floating theater was a welcome relief and excitement.
The failure to make the black characters more than tokens is a flaw in the novel, but reading it is still an immensely pleasurable experience. It creates a sense of nostalgia for a lost time and a lost form of entertainment that is not entirely sentimental.
