Fuller organized the Pacific slope people then in the city to attend the lecture in order to fill out the audience. Then he got James W. Nye, the territorial governor of Nevada when Twain was living there, to agree to introduce Twain at Cooper Union. In fact, Fuller paid for both the hiring of the hall and the advertising. As it turned out, though, the other governor out of Sam’s past, Jim Nye, never showed up on the night of the lecture (later allegedly calling Sam “a damned Secessionist”).11 But Nye’s unexpected absence contributed to Mark Twain’s success, because it was that night he began the practice of introducing himself. Fuller had also papered the house with free tickets, certainly insurance against the stiff New York City competition of other events planned for the same evening.
“Mark Twain will deliver a Serio-Humorous Lecture Concerning Kanakadom, or the Sandwich Islands,” the flyers said. In terms of the suspense and uncertainty, it was a reenactment of his first lecture in San Francisco, when the “trouble” began at eight. Now it was “the Wisdom will begin to flow at 8.” It was the same lecture, but it wasn’t the same lecturer. For now Clemens had stepped more confidently into the role of Mark Twain, as not only an experienced lecturer but also (by now) the author of a just-published book. Once onstage and clearly abandoned by Nye, he lampooned the missing governor to all the fellow westerners in the audience. Nye had also gone missing as governor of Nevada, often leaving Orion Clemens to do all the heavy lifting. Nye, as noted, had most likely taken the job only to be available for one of the first senatorial spots once Nevada achieved statehood. Twain’s allusion to Nye was a little payback for Orion, who had been exploited by this slick politico.
The Cooper Union lecture marked a new high in the career of Mark Twain as he prepared to embark on the Quaker City. “I was happy, and I was excited beyond expression,” he remembered. “I poured the Sandwich Islands out on to those people with a free hand, and they laughed and shouted to my entire content. For an hour and fifteen minutes I was in Paradise.”12 If the Jumping Frog book failed (which it did, at least in the sense that it sold far fewer copies than he expected and he received no royalties from Webb) and if the travel writing fizzled, Twain was still assured of regular employment on the lecture circuit, even though he would come to despise its stress and discomfort. On the success of Cooper Union, he was invited to give the same lecture at the Brooklyn Athenaeum on May 22 and back in New York at Irving Hall on May 23.
With lecture fees in his pocket and his fare on the Quaker City paid, he could now turn his attention fully to the cruise, which was still somewhat in doubt because of the loss of the Beecher congregation, Beecher himself, and now General Sherman, who said he had to go out west to hunt Indians. “If the ship sails,” Sam told the folks in St. Louis, “I sail in her—but I make no calculations, have bought no cigars, no seagoing clothing,—have made no preparations whatever—shall not pack my trunk till the morning we sail.” The ship would sail with slightly more than half of the proposed quota of 110 passengers. Moses Beach, editor of the New York Sun and a long-standing member of Plymouth Church, more or less filled in for Beecher, his Brooklyn neighbor, as the nominal elder of the cruise. Two days before the ship sailed, he held a get-acquainted reception for the passengers at his home. “Yes, we are to meet at Mr Beach’s next Thursday night,” Sam told his mother; “ & I suppose we shall have to be gotten up regardless of expense, in swallowtails, white kids & everything en régle.” What he didn’t tell his mother is that the night before sailing he got drunk with friends, including his new shipboard roommate Dan Slote, a Brooklyn businessman who smoked as much as Clemens. Slote’s shipboard luggage included, Sam noted approvingly, three thousand cigars.13
17 Pilgrims on the Loose
Dan Slote and Mark Twain would have a future together, but their relationship would rupture in the end over a business deal gone sour. The humorist made few enemies during his lifetime, but anybody who wronged him, who betrayed his confidence, crossed the Rubicon. A potbellied merchant in his late thirties, Slote was one of Twain’s innermost circle of friends on the trip. He could well afford a cruise that was six or seven times more expensive than the average round-trip crossing to Paris on a Cunard liner. In fact, he left the ship in Egypt and remained abroad for a few more months. By contrast, of course, Twain was earning his way by providing the Alta with fifty letters at twenty dollars apiece.
He and Slote occupied No. 10 on the Quaker City, the double cabin originally reserved for General Sherman and his daughter Minnie. Slote was also his closest male companion. Others included Abraham Reeves Jackson of Philadelphia, officially the ship’s surgeon and unofficially the “guide-persecuting ‘Doctor’ ” when the American pilgrims reached Europe. A little later in the cruise, Twain’s first circle included Julius Moulton (“Moult”) of St. Louis. About ten years younger than Twain, Moulton was also writing travel letters for a newspaper, even though his most recent job had been chief engineer on a railroad. Another member of this group, Jack Van Nostrand of New Jersey, didn’t make the best first impression on Twain, but he soon warmed to the “good-hearted and always well-meaning” twenty-year-old, who may have gone to sea for his health. He died of tuberculosis about ten years later. He is referred to as the Interrogation Point in The Innocents Abroad.
There were seventeen women among the passengers. The most prominent as far as Mark Twain was concerned was Mary Mason Fairbanks, the thirty-nine-year-old wife of Abel Fairbanks, the part owner of the Cleveland Herald. She was also contributing letters to the newspaper. In her second of twenty-eight letters, she described Twain as “perfectly mirth-provoking” as he sat “lazily” at the ship’s table “scarcely genteel in his appearance” but nevertheless interesting and attractive. “I saw to-day at dinner,” she wrote, “venerable divines and sage looking men, convulsed with laughter at his drolleries and quaint original manners.”1 Mary Fairbanks would become “Mother” Fairbanks to Twain, and, in the letters he wrote not only to the Alta but also to the New York Tribune (signed) and Herald (unsigned), she would be the one who always tried to adjust his quaint manners.
Another who was struck by the humorist’s folksy manners was young Charles Langdon, the seventeen-year-old son of Jervis Langdon of Elmira, New York, owner of coal and lumber interests in New York and Pennsylvania. The senior Langdon had made a fortune during the Civil War and, before that, had befriended Frederick Douglass, whose abolitionist campaign he quietly supported. He had sent his son abroad mainly to keep him away from the local taverns. What better place for him than on a cruise full of rich Christians? He had an older sister, Olivia Louise Langdon, who was twenty-one. Mention of the western humorist in letters home sparked an interest in Olivia that her younger brother immediately tried to discourage.
Langdon liked all the passengers, he told his mother on their second day at sea (actually the side-wheeler with sail was still in the New York lower harbor because of stormy weather), “but I am afraid we have some hard cases with us.” On July 11, he wrote in response to questions about Twain that his sister had conveyed through their mother, “Now let me see what Libbie says & answer her questions. . . . I would say . . . that in regard to Mark Twain she is very much misstaken. He is one of the hardest characters we have with us.” He added that Sam (and implicitly his companions) “drink a great deal.” In a letter of August 21–22 he wrote that Twain’s “moral character” was “anything but good.” Charlie would soon change his opinion (though never completely) about his future brother-in-law. By September he had even shown Twain a picture of his sister and was urging his mother to get the back numbers of the Alta to read his letters.2
The other passengers, to name only a few, were colorfully interesting: William Gibson of Jamestown, Pennsylvania, a physician who, with an overblown sense of self-importance, carried with him a letter of introduction from the Department of Agriculture addressed “To the United States Ministers & Consuls in Europe, Asia & Africa”; the self-appointed poet Bloodgood Haviland Cutter of Long Island, called the
“Poet-Lariat” in The Innocents Abroad, who provided rhymes for almost every occasion; Frederick H. Greer (“young Wm. Blucher”), who was constantly distracted by the change of ship’s time as it sailed east; and Colonel William R. Denny of Winchester, Virginia, who kept, next to Twain’s, one of the fullest records of the trip.3
Denny, as he described himself, was someone about whom “not much of good can be said . . . except that he tries to do right and finds himself in the wrong very often.” Apparently something of a moralist, he described Twain in terms similar to Charlie Langdon’s first impressions: “Saml L Clemens of Sanfrancisco California a wicked fellow that will take the name of the Lord in vain, that is no respector of persons, yet he is liberal, kind and obliging, and if he were only a christian would make his mark.”4 One can well imagine how shocking, initially at least, Twain’s liberal use of “damn,” “goddamn,” and “hell” would have been to these overly saturated Christians. The origin of his behavior was the West of Nevada and California, not the “South” of Missouri and the Mississippi Valley, where manners sometimes disguised immorality. Twain was like a man just back from a war zone in terms of polite society.
Yet he was relatively famous. Twenty-seven-year-old Emily Severance, traveling with her banker husband, was fascinated with Twain and became something of a confidante. Another female passenger, Julia Newell, the most outgoing of the women and another newspaper travel writer, from Janesville, Wisconsin, would make one of the ship’s side trips (through Spain) with Twain and some of his circle. On June 22 she described him to the Janesville Gazette as “a rather handsome fellow, but talks to you with an abominable drawl that is exasperating.” She added, “Whether he intends to be funny for the amusement of the party, I have not yet ascertained.”5 Miss Newell also became friends with Dr. Jackson and, after his wife died, married him in 1871. Emma Beach was another of the female cohorts, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Moses Beach. Young Emma was one of Twain’s favorites, and he may have had for her more than an avuncular attraction.
The voyage of the Quaker City began on June 8 (the vessel actually leaving the harbor on June 10 because of the storm) and concluded on November 19, 1867. During those nearly six months, the ship stopped in various European ports, skirted Russia, and allowed side visits through the Holy Land and elsewhere. By the last week of June the ship had reached Gibraltar, and Twain with a party of seven took a steamer to Tangier. The Quaker City docked in Marseille on July 4; here Twain, Dr. Jackson, and Slote took the train for Paris. Unfortunately, Twain lost the original letter he apparently wrote about this leg of their European tour, and so the reader of The Innocents Abroad is consequently disappointed at the treatment of France by one of the world’s great Francophobes.
By the middle of July, the ship had stopped in Genoa, from which the same trio took a train for Milan and Como, and then went by steamer to Bellagio on Lake Como. The Quaker City docked in Naples for the first eleven days in August, seven of which it was quarantined. On August 7 Twain and his friends left the ship for Ischia, Mount Vesuvius, and Capri. On August 14 he and three companions violated the Athens quarantine and hiked to the Acropolis. The ship docked at Constantinople on August 17. By the end of the month, the ship’s party had seen Sevastopol, Odessa, Yalta, and (for the second time) Constantinople. It was from Smyrna on September 6 that most of the passengers took a train to Ephesus. Four days later, the Quaker City reached Beirut. Twain and seven other passengers set out the next day on an overland journey through the Holy Land. They rejoined the ship in Jaffa early in October. By the end of that first week, Twain’s party arrived at Alexandria and took a train to Cairo and the pyramids at Giza, returning to the ship two days later. By mid-October, the ship was headed home, with only two extended stops at Gibraltar and Bermuda. From Gibraltar, Twain traveled through Spain. The stop in Bermuda was the first of eight visits he made during his lifetime, the last indeed only weeks before his death.6
In going abroad for the first time aside from his visit to Hawaii, Mark Twain had something of what we today would call an “attitude.” Many before him had worshipped at the shrine of Europe and the Old World. One of them was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, as good a versifier as Poe, but also a poet whose work was often undercut by the love of things European. Longfellow, as we shall see, would become another of those three drunks in Twain’s Whittier birthday speech ten years hence. Following the example of Washington Irving’s dreamy recollection of England in The Sketch-Book (1819–20), Longfellow, after spending more than three years in Europe, wrote Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea (1833–34), which overflowed with German romanticism and American deference to the Old World.
The New Pilgrim’s Progress, as Twain originally titled it (he was persuaded to use this as the subtitle for The Innocents Abroad) rejected not only the typical guidebooks of the day, which told Americans what to admire and how to behave, but also the dictum that European culture was superior to American culture. “What is there in Rome,” he would ask in chapter 26 of America’s first honest travel book, “for me to see that others have not seen before me? . . . What is there for me to feel, to learn, to hear, to know, that shall thrill me before it pass to others?” In other words, what could this civilization that represented what Emerson had once called “the dry bones of the past” really teach him? But if he were Roman, what wonders would he discover by going to America? He would say upon his return: “I saw there a country which has no overshadowing Mother Church, and yet the people survive. I saw a government which never was protected by foreign soldiers at a cost greater than that required to carry on the government itself. I saw common men and common women who could read.”
This was the New World idealism of Cotton Mather, who wrote in The Wonders of the Invisible World (1692) of an Englishman returning from the Puritan settlement and declaring before Parliament: “I have been seven years in a country where I never saw one man drunk, or heard one oath sworn, or beheld one beggar in the streets all the while.” Twain was writing a new, albeit secular pilgrim’s progress, one about an America that had survived a terrible quarrel with itself to become truly whole as a nation—at least in terms of its foreign policies and overall government. It mirrored Twain’s own quarrel with himself—that individual who would soon be learning to combine his various skills into one unity of purpose. This southerner-turned-westerner-turned-easterner, as his makeup would ultimately develop, had not come east to sit at the feet of New England culture, the way his future friend and literary confidant William Dean Howells had done. Indeed, his European trip was merely a dress rehearsal for his invasion of New England culture as a modern-day Brother Jonathan, whose shrewdness was not to be confused with any European sense of refinement.
In his epistles to the Alta and elsewhere, he lambasted many of these traditions and cultural sanctities. The critiques would soften when the travel letters were turned into a book. In fact, he was terrified when the Alta later threatened to make a book out of the original letters. It was bad enough that the newspaper was still publishing them well into 1868 when he was at work on the book version of these critiques. “My publishers want me to write the book all over new, & not mind what the Alta does—but that won’t do,” he told Mary Fairbanks.7 Based as it ultimately was on the Alta letters, the book—indeed Mark Twain’s literary debut as the author of a real book—was irreverent enough to be funny to the masses. Even the use of the term “poet-lariat,” which he applied to the doggerel-spouting Cutter, was an offhand critique of the world of English poetry and its poet laureates such as Wordsworth. Notre Dame, that most famous of European churches, was described as a “brown old Gothic pile.” “The handsomest women we have seen in France,” he would remark in chapter 15, “were born and reared in America.”
In Italy, he even went after great art (reminding us of Van Wyck Brooks’s famous remark that Mark Twain was an artist who hated art).8 “Anyone who is acquainted with the old masters,” he says in chapter 19, “will comprehend how much ‘The La
st Supper’ is damaged when I say that the spectator cannot really tell whether the disciples are Hebrews or Italians.” Later (in chapter 27) he decries the excess of Michelangelo and the other painters of old who “fairly swarm” the Vatican and radiate outward through Italy by saying: “I do not want Michelangelo for breakfast—for luncheon—for dinner—for tea—for supper—for between meals.” He and the other Old Masters “painted Virgins enough and popes enough and saintly scarecrows enough to people paradise almost, and these things are all they did paint.” Finally, “I have never felt so fervently thankful, so soothed, so tranquil, so filled with a blessed peace as I did yesterday when I learned that Michelangelo was dead.”
Religion, of course, comes in for a sanitary ribbing. Before the American Publishing Company would agree to publish The Innocents Abroad in 1869, Elisha Bliss had to overrule his board of directors by threatening to issue the book himself.9 This was because of the irreverent nature of the book’s comments on religion, which were still tame, especially when compared to several of Twain’s late-life (and unpublished until after his death) satires on heaven and the Bible. When the firm published The Innocents Abroad, for example, it also issued J. E. Stebbins’s Illustrated History of the Bible; Its Origins, Truth, and Divinity. In Twain’s book (chapter 27), his insouciant group of “incorrigible pilgrims,” who readily pilfer sacred artifacts, ask whether a mummy is dead, while addressing their foreign guide as “Ferguson.” The Sea of Galilee (chapter 48) is best seen in the pitch black of night; its beauty, Twain implies, is merely the extension of religious ideologies about the Holy Land. In chapter 53 these simpleminded religionists weep at the tomb of Adam.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 17