Mark Twain abroad

A Tramp Abroad, Mark Twain

I enjoyed The Innocents Abroad so much last year that I soon lined up more of Mark Twain's travel writing.  Though I started this book a couple of times, I never got too far with it.  This time I drew it from the book box, and when I finally settled down with it, I enjoyed it even more than the first.  Written eleven years later, it is more pure comedy, often at Twain's own expense, frequently at his fellow travelers', especially young Americans.  But in other ways, he has mellowed.  He doesn't have the chip on his shoulder, the constant need to assert the superiority of the United States, to compare everything unfavorably with "back home."  The all-American attitude creeps in every once in a while, but he is far from the typically "ugly American" tourist of his 1867 travels.

Twain announces at the start of the book,

One day it occurred to me that it had been many years since the world had been afforded the spectacle of a man adventurous enough to undertake a journey through Europe on foot.  After much thought I decided that I was a person fitted to furnish mankind this spectacle. So I determined to do it.  This was in March, 1878.

He hires an agent to accompany him, a Mr. Harris, and they set out with three goals: to take a walking tour, to study German, and to study art.  As well as a traveling companion, Harris is there as Twain's proxy.  He sends Harris off to do anything that he doesn't want to do himself, or is too lazy to do, but still plans to write about (and claim the credit for).  The editors of the Penguin Classics edition that I read point out that in fact Twain traveled to Europe in the spring of 1878 with his family, and they label this book "autobiographical fantasy."  They add, "Twain's travel narratives are as 'fictional' as his novels are 'autobiographical.'"  However you want to classify this book, fact or fiction, it is great fun.

In Twain's account, their travels begin in Germany.  From the start, this book reminded me of Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men on the Bummel.  Despite constant protestations that his is meant to be a walking tour, he jumps on every train, horse, wagon, or boat that passes by, with transparent excuses like the roads are uphill, or the sun is up.  There is a hilarious account of a trip down the Neckar River to Heidelberg on a raft of very small poles, which sometimes seems to foreshadow Huck Finn and other times reads like a perilous ocean voyage, complete with storms and near-shipwreck (or raft-wreck, to be technical).  Any time Twain and his agent set out to actually walk somewhere, they mosey along, often losing their way and frequently quarreling.  Like Jerome, Twain also becomes fascinated with the custom of dueling among university students.  He gives a detailed account (over three chapters) of an afternoon spent watching the duelists in action. He follows that with a burlesque of a French duel at which he claims to have stood a second.

From Germany the account moves to Switzerland, where Twain becomes equally fascinated with the Alps and mountaineering.  These chapters are an interesting mix.  Twain recounts various expeditions, discussing seriously the dangers and the frequent loss of life.  He writes lyrically about the scenery, the majesty of the different mountains, particularly Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn.  In between, he tells a ridiculous story of a expedition he organizes, consisting of 198 people (including 15 bartenders and a Latin scholar), to ascend a minor point that didn't even need a guide.  When he and Harris arrive at the village near Mont Blanc, on the other hand, he just tries to buy the certificate awarded to those who made the ascent, claiming it's for a sick friend.

From Switzerland, he travels on to Italy. Here he himself admits that he has come to appreciate art much more than when he traveled with the Innocents.  Of course, his tongue is firmly in his cheek.  This book is illustrated with Twain's own "art," which can only charitably be called primitive.  In one of the last chapters, he discusses why Art can be indecent and Literature cannot.  He is rather indignant that the statues in Florence have been "fig-leaved."  But that is nothing compared to his anger over Titian's Venus of Urbino, which he considers the most pornographic picture ever painted, hanging in the Uffizi "for anybody to gloat over that wants to..."  Yet, he says, if he tried to describe what the picture shows, his work would be banned as obscene.  It's a weirdly serious chapter in the midst of this crazy book.

Twain's German studies seem to go about as well as his art studies.  Fortunately for him, he finds English-speakers almost everywhere in Germany.  This book includes his famous essay on "The Awful German Language," one of several appendices.  The title page of the "Appendix" section has a quote from Herodotus, "Nothing gives such weight and dignity to a book as an Appendix."  This book has six!

The Classics Challenge: June with Mark Twain

This is the sixth month of the Classics Challenge, hosted by Katherine at November's Autumn. Our Challenge this month: "Sometimes we come across a scene or description that creates such vivid imagery it moves us. Select a quote from the Classic you're currently reading and create, what I call a visual tour."

I recently read Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad (my review is here). This is from Chapter XXXI, "The Buried City of Pompeii."

It was a quaint and curious pasttime, wandering through this old silent city of the dead - lounging through utterly deserted streets where thousands and thousands of human beings once bought and sold, and walked and rode, and made the place resound with the noise and confusion of traffic and pleasure.

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And so I turned away and went through shop after shop and store after store, far down the long street of the merchants, and called for the wares of Rome and the East, but the tradesmen were gone, and the marts were silent, and nothing was left but the broken jars all set in cement of cinders and ashes; the wine and the oil that once had filled them were gone with their owners.

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Compare the cheerful life and the sunshine of this day with the horrors the younger Pliny saw here, the 9th of November, A.D. 79, when he was so bravely striving to remove his mother out of reach of harm . . .

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I was lucky enough to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum, and though the streets were far from deserted when I was there - packed with tourists like me - Twain's descriptions still resonated with me.

A side note: I apologize for all the blank spaces in this post. I detest and abhor the new blogger interface, I find it very difficult to use compared with the previous version, and missing important features. I cannot figure out something simple like how to eliminate those extra spaces.

An irreverent pilgrim

The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain

The subtitle to this book, an account of a voyage in 1867, is "The New Pilgrims' Progress; Being Some Account of the Steamship Quaker City's Pleasure Excursion to Europe and the Holy Land; With Descriptions of Countries, Nations, Incidents and Adventures, As They Appeared to the Author."

Many years ago I watched a TV adaptation of The Innocents Abroad. It featured a handsome young Sam Clemens making friends on the voyage with two shipmates, one a beautiful young woman. The three shared many adventures together as the inevitable romantic tensions developed, both young men falling in love with the heroine, who was then forced to choose between them. I can't find this version listed anywhere, but I have the clearest memory of watching it, and under its spell I quickly went looking for the book at the library. Reading it was a complete disappointment. Not only was there no shipboard romance, which I'm sure was my primary interest at that age, but I thought Twain's humor labored, his language verbose, and the book dauntingly long. I gave up after only a few chapters and mentally filed it away as unreadable.

Recently I've had a recurring feeling that I should try reading this book again. I looked for it at the library last weekend, and then remembered that I'd downloaded a copy to my new Nook. So that Saturday I sat down with it, and by the end of the first chapter I was hooked. In the years since I first tried to read this, I've read a lot of Victorian writers, and what then seemed liked overly ornate language now feels very familiar and comfortable. In fact, Twain's narrative voice here reminded me of George Templeton Strong's diaries, the last volume of which I recently read. (I can't find any mention of Twain in the diaries, but I think Strong would have enjoyed this book.) I have also read quite a few traveler's tales lately, including Isabella Bird and Anthony Trollope's books on America, and it was an interesting contrast to read about Americans abroad, though Twain's tour didn't take him to Britain. And then of course in those years I have traveled myself, though not as widely as Twain.

The Quaker City was set to sail from New York in early June of 1867. This first organized American tour of Europe and the Middle East made headlines across the country. But the ticket price of $1250 (almost $20,000 in 2012 dollars, six times the passage on a Cunard liner) put it out of most Americans' price range, even without the recommended $5 per diem for tours and other expenses when the ship was in port ($77 in today's money). I learned from the introduction that Twain traveled as a correspondent for the Daily Alta California of San Francisco. General William Sherman and Rev. Henry Ward Beecher were supposed to join the excursion, but they both had to cancel, leaving Twain, already known as a journalist and humorist, the big celebrity draw.

The bulk of Twain's narrative focuses on the time he spent in France, Italy, Constantinople, Palestine, and Egypt. He was very impressed with the order and prosperity that he found in France, comparing it favorably with Italy and almost every other place he visited. Italy was a big disappointment to Twain, its Roman glory buried under centuries of dirt, poverty and ignorance, much of which he attributed to the Roman Catholic Church (a criticism he repeated constantly during his Italian stay). He was also underwhelmed by Italian art and architecture, and he suspected that his fellow travelers were just parroting guidebooks in their admiration.

There are constant tensions in this book that make it unsettling reading at times. Twain and his fellow pilgrims sailed with high expectations, based on years of reading, of both literature and history, ancient and modern. Through illustrations in the books they read, they had clear pictures in their minds of what they were going to see, and of course the reality often failed to meet their expectations. (I remember finally getting to the front of the crowd before the Mona Lisa, and my first reaction: "It's so small!") Though they wouldn't have used this term, the travelers also suffered from burnout, trying to see too much in too short a time. As Twain wrote, "One can gorge on sights to repletion as well as sweetmeats," and he also perfectly captured "museum fatigue." Writing about Raphael's Transfiguration, he said,

"Is it not possible that the reason I find such charms in this picture is because it is out of the crazy chaos of the galleries? . . . If this were set in the midst of the tempest of pictures one finds in the vast galleries of the Roman palaces, would I think it so handsome?"

Twain's narrative also shows the tension of the New World meeting the Old, not to mention the Ancient. Like other Americans abroad, he reacted by asserting the superiority of the United States, its scenery, religion, politics, education, and commerce. Perhaps he was reacting in part to travelers like Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens, with their very unflattering pictures of America. Yet at the same time, Twain mocked himself and his fellow pilgrims for their provinciality, their inability to speak foreign languages, their unthinking assumptions. He was particularly embarrassed by the sight of his fellow tourists in Palestine, "this fantastic mob of green-spectacled Yanks, with their flapping elbows and bobbing umbrellas," desecrating the "impressive religious solemnity and silence [that] rest upon the desert and the mountains that were upon them in the remote ages of antiquity . . ."

A third source of tension is suggested in the book's subtitle, "The New Pilgrim's Progress." For many of those on board the Quaker City, this was indeed a modern pilgrimage, and they tried to maintain a proper atmosphere, with prayer meetings and hymn singing. For them, the real goal and purpose of the trip was Palestine, with its myriad Old and New Testament scenes. Twain, though well-versed in the Scriptures and raised a Protestant, took a much more secular and worldly approach. He gathered around him a few fellow "sinners" who sometimes enjoyed baiting the pilgrims and mocking their enthusiasms. He was particularly horrified and mortified by their brazen theft of relics, and their willingness to damage ancient structures.

The incorrigible pilgrims have come in with their pockets full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah's tomb; from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbec . . . Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!"

I hope that his account of a pilgrim climbing up the Sphinx with a little hammer was apocryphal.

I had forgotten how funny Mark Twain can be, though sometimes the joke is barbed. This was not always a comfortable book to read, and far from "politically correct" (though there was much less anti-semitism than I expected). In his conclusion, Twain wrote that

"Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime."

I think it's time for another look at Mark Twain. I will be looking for his other travel writings, including Life on the Mississippi, which I read and enjoyed years ago.

On a side-note, I started reading this on my new Nook, and after the first couple of chapters, I headed off to Barnes & Noble to find the actual book (it was a pleasant surprise to find two copies on the shelves). The main drawback I'm finding with the Nook is the difficulty of flipping back and forth, and the slowness of "turning" the pages back frustrates me. I have yet to read a complete book on it, though I expect that will change when I get around to reading the ebooks that aren't readily available in print.