Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Both travel books—The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It—remain eminently readable today, at least by those who still read and appreciate the historical value of travel experiences either in the new world of American tourism or the Wild West of the nineteenth century. The personality of the storyteller comes right to the fore in Roughing It. He employs a “Prefatory” the same way he would later in Huckleberry Finn, warning off any high expectations while at the same time encouraging them. “This book,” the author writes, “is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation.” The market was already flooded with narratives of recent travel in the West, so that Twain had to carve out his particular approach. “It is a record,” he continues, “of several years of variegated vagabondizing, and its object is rather to help the resting reader while away an idle hour than afflict him with metaphysics, or goad him with science.”3 It is this easy going narrator, who is obviously not as straightforward as he seems, who makes this western tale unique even today. Like the Innocents, this book was plentifully illustrated, and it is indeed something of an injustice to publish Twain’s writings today without the original illustrations. He was after the masses, as he once said, and the illustrations were a key part of his content.

  In The Green Hills of Africa (1935), written in the same loose-narrative tradition of Roughing It, Ernest Hemingway included the now often quoted statement that American literature begins with one book. He was talking not about Roughing It, of course, but about Huckleberry Finn, where he found the origins of the American vernacular in fiction. This biographer once asked Mary Hemingway about the so-called Hemingway Code, in which human beings are seen as having only one life to live and so must live it bravely. It was at one of those faculty receptions, given for Mrs. Hemingway, who had come to campus to speak on her book about her experiences (not his, as my class discovered) in World War II, How It Was (1976). “My dear boy,” she answered, “Ernie wasn’t concerned with philosophical meanings; he just wrote stories.” It can be said, of course, that all classical writing, including American writing, starts out as something other than “Literature.” Emerson’s essays are secularized sermons. Melville’s Moby-Dick is, on one level at least, a maniacal travel account of his whaling experiences, something he had avoided in his tales of the sea up to its publication. Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter may depend in part on the author’s ancestral history with incest in the symbolic rendering of Hester as lover and mother. These works become American classics, as Professor Smith says of Roughing It, when the universality of their experiences is demonstrated and dramatized.

  The classic quality in Roughing It is more clearly seen in the first half, but it may be unfair to deem the rest of the book inferior simply because it falls back on the anecdotal nature of American humor that is imported piecemeal from earlier publications. The reason is that his newspaper journalism is here sculpted into literature in which many of the episodes go deeper into the folly and the fatality of the human condition. In chapter 48, for example, we encounter Twain’s dislike of the jury system, which, he had earlier hinted in the Express, was to blame for the acquittal by reason of insanity of the murderer of Albert D. Richardson. Arguing that only ignoramuses could qualify for jury duty, he said of one murder trial he allegedly witnessed in Virginia City, “It actually came out afterward, that one of these latter [jury members] thought that incest and arson were the same thing” (321). This line is the recycling of the comment in the Hawaii letters about the Wisconsin state legislator who confused arson with illicit sex and thought the legal system ought “either to hang him or make him marry the girl!”4 It is clear that for Twain jurors and congressmen were first cousins.

  Some of Twain’s most memorable and humorous stories and sketches first appeared in the latter part of Roughing It. “Somebody has said that in order to know a community, one must observe the style of its funerals,” he wrote in chapter 47 of what would become known in the Mark Twain canon as “Buck Fanshaw’s Funeral.” Its point of departure is the death in a gunfight of a well-known Virginia City figure called by the fictional name Buck Fanshaw. (Its real-life elements may come from a story about the demise of a gunfighter in the San Francisco Call of February 3, 1866.) After taking another jab at juries for failing to determine the obvious cause of Buck’s death, Twain gives his readers a virtuoso performance of the slang in Silverland that is equal to the finest examples of the tall-tale brag of the Old Southwest. In preparing a local minister (a “fledgling from an eastern theological seminary”) to give the “Obs’quies,” Buck’s friend Scotty Briggs describes Buck as “one of the whitest men that was ever in the mines. . . . He warn’t a Catholic. Scasely. He was down on ’em. . . . He was the bulliest man in the mountains, pard! He could run faster, jump higher, hit harder, and hold more tangle-foot whisky without spilling it than any man in seventeen counties.”

  This story provides today’s reader with not only some rough humor but also something like an ethnographic treatise on the 1860s slang of the Nevada Territory. Meanwhile, “The Story of the Old Ram” (chapter 53 of Roughing It, also known informally as “My Grandfather’s Ram”) not only resurrects Twain’s digression tale but also employs (contrary to Howells’s claim in My Mark Twain) intemperance as the basis for humor. In later years it became one of Twain’s more popular platform pieces, this in spite of continuing temperance campaigns after the Civil War. Jim Blaine, the tale’s narrator, reminds us of Jim Smiley of the Jumping Frog story. He is the interior narrator who talks in the vernacular, while the outside narrator—in the tradition of American humor—speaks in standard English. And like the opening narrator of the Jumping Frog story, this one is tricked by “the boys” into asking Blaine to tell his pointless story.

  It is pointless because Blaine is drunk—“tranquilly, serenely, symmetrically drunk”; in other words, “a stalwart miner of the period.” At last the boys sitting around Jim Blaine’s cabin are told: “Sh—! Don’t speak—he’s going to commence.” Three sentences into Blaine’s monologue, the subject of his grandfather’s ram disappears forever. It would be one thing to simply follow a digression faithfully, but Mark Twain’s wit uncovers genius in the details. We go from Bill Yates to Seth Green to Sarah Wilkerson to Sile Hawkins, who is really “Filkins” (“Si Hawkins” will resurface in The Gilded Age), to a Miss Jefferson, who lent her glass eye to old Miss Wagner, “that hadn’t any, to receive company in,” and so on down the line of absurdity. There is also a wooden leg in this procession of body parts reminiscent of “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man.” And there is even a parting shot at the notion of divine authority in a woman who “married a missionary and died in grace—et up by the savages. They et him, too, poor feller—biled him.” But not to worry: “Prov’dence don’t fire no blank ca’tridges, boys. That there missionary’s substance, unbeknowns to himself, actu’ly converted every last one of them heathens that took a chance at the barbecue.”

  The ways of Providence weren’t so funny in Mark Twain’s final years if we are to accept the persistent claim that they were deeply pessimistic. (They were, but he never lost the sense of himself as the humorous butt of the cosmic joke.) He later wrote parodies about heaven, according to Edgar Lee Masters in his castigating biography, when he should have been satirizing the material and political corruption of his own country. Born in 1868, Masters, now an almost forgotten poet save in college anthology selections from his 1915 Spoon River Anthology, comes across in his biography of Lincoln as a neo-Confederate who imagined that with the Civil War, Lincoln and the Republican Party had sold the ideals of Jefferson down the river. More influential critics have castigated Twain for his abandonment of essentialism for what became relativism in the twentieth century. When he first presented an early chapter of the deterministic What Is Man? to the Monday Evening Club of Hartford on February 19, 1883 (then entitled “What Is Happiness?”), it was met with scoffs and jeers.5 It is very possible that the scholarly emphasis on his late-life pessimism
even today would not be so strong if he had become a muckraker instead of an immoralist attacking Judeo-Christian ideology. In other words, the most effective way to undermine his brutal satires on conventional religious beliefs, published after his death, was to suggest that he was philosophically naive and even childish when it came to the push and shove of eternity. But the mere fact that Twain could have made so much fun of man’s insignificance in the cosmos (for example, as a diseased microbe in the body of a drunk) confirms not only his credentials as a supreme satirist but his maturity and indeed courage in the face of nothingness.

  Starting with chapter 63, he recycled some of the Sacramento Union letters from Hawaii, cutting out substantial sections from thirteen of twenty-five letters, but revising the wording only of the parts he reused. Here the subject of missionaries continues and is contrasted with the literally stark naked innocence of the natives. (When he encounters a bevy of nude native women bathing in the sea, he leaves out of the Roughing It version the statement that he not only ogled them but also “went and undressed and went in myself.”)6 Here also we find the clear implication that these white missionaries have come to the earthly paradise to infect it with the Big Lie. They show the island innocents “what rapture it is to work all day long for fifty cents to buy food for next day with, as compared with fishing for pastime and lolling in the shade through eternal summer. . . . How sad it is to think of the multitudes who have gone to their graves in this beautiful island and never knew there was a hell!”

  In chapter 77 the narrator encounters on the island of Maui another of those mysterious strangers who appeared to Mark Twain (and within him) from time to time. This stranger is naturally a storyteller, indeed a teller of tall tales who repeatedly contradicts the narrator’s sense of reality by pointing to what he claims to be an even more remarkable fact than the one the narrator has just mentioned. He will appear again and again in the fiction of Mark Twain and finally emerge as the odd but gifted printer’s apprentice in “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger,” who, it turns out, is Satan’s nephew. “Somehow,” Twain tells us, “this man’s presence made me uncomfortable.” Ultimately, the mysterious stranger is shown to be the biggest liar of all, who when found one day “hanging to a beam of his own bedroom,” has even lied in his own suicide note. (“No. 44,” however, shows the incongruence of lies about life in telling the Truth about human life.) In real life, Twain had encountered in the town of Lahaina the eccentric Francis A. Oudinot, a Southern sympathizer hiding out from the Civil War. In his lie, he claimed to be a descendant of the famous marshal of Napoleon’s army, Charles Nicolas Oudinot (1767–1847).7 But he was probably just another “American claimant,” a type of liar that Mark Twain would depict as the Duke and the King in his most famous book. He was about to discover their prototype in his next literary sojourn—in England and the land of titles.

  24 A Book about the English

  In the spring of 1872, following the success of Roughing It, Mark Twain considered himself not only a successful humorist but also a proven travel writer. His next sojourn would, he thought, take him to a book about the English. After spending the summer with his family at a seaside resort in Saybrook Point, Connecticut, he sailed by himself that August to England. Just before his departure, he told Orion about his self-pasting scrapbook, the only invention that would ever earn him any sizable sum of money, outside his inventions in fiction. By now Orion had lost his job at the American Publishing Company after alerting his brother to Bliss’s financial shortcuts on the production of Roughing It and was trying to reinvent himself again. Whatever Orion touched turned to dust, while whatever his brother touched now turned to gold.

  This Midas touch did not extend to his book about the English, however, which never materialized. But in the process, or the lack of it, he discovered that he was now the most popular American writer abroad. Such fame had its own problems. He was immediately embraced by the English and was invited everywhere by anybody of note. He thus found little time to work on his book—“too much sociability,” as he told Livy. The other obstacle had to do with his intention to write a satire about English customs. The warm British hospitality, though, made him reluctant to mock their customs. He told Mrs. Fairbanks that his newfound English friends had taken him right into their inner sanctuary, it seemed. How could he make fun of them without violating their trust?1 He would eventually write another kind of book about the English in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) that wouldn’t be very flattering, but for now he was stopped in his tracks when it came to the English.

  One has to wonder why, except for the need of another travel subject, he set out to write the satire in the first place. Did he harbor the American disapproval of social rank based on birth? His uproarious lampoons of royalty in Huckleberry Finn and frontal attack on English nobility in A Connecticut Yankee had to originate somewhere. There were the family tradition on his mother’s Lampton side that they were heirs to the Earl of Durham and the belief on his father’s side that the Clemenses went back to the English Clements, who were of noble blood, but Twain put no stock in it, as he told a distant relative, Jesse Leathers, in 1875. He would, however, try for such a title if he thought there was “a reasonable chance to win it.”2 As it turned out, he was treated so thoroughly like royalty that he was paralyzed to write about the British in any disrespectful manner.

  Practically the only Englishman not to show him respect was the publisher John Camden Hotten. He had published the first English unexpurgated edition of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass without paying the author any royalties. But Hotten, exploiting the absence of an international copyright law (not enacted until 1891), republished any American who sold, and that certainly included Mark Twain, whose books and uncollected sketches he had been reprinting since 1870, beginning with The Innocents Abroad.3 Starting with Roughing It, Twain learned to publish his books separately in England, before the American editions (thereby securing both copyrights), but even this approach backfired when Canada, even though it was then formally part of the British Empire, pirated Tom Sawyer after it was published in England and months before it came out in the United States. As a result, cheap copies of the book flooded the U.S. market and undersold Twain’s own edition. Twain would actually travel to England to be on British soil when The Gilded Age came out in 1873, but he didn’t take that precaution in publishing Tom Sawyer, instead finding a representative in the American expatriate Moncure Conway, whom he met in England in 1872.

  Perhaps if he had encountered more Hottens, Twain might have gone ahead with his book about the English. By November, however, he was telling his mother and sister that he had more or less given up on that subject. He had made some notes toward it, but those that survive do not suggest it would have been much of a success. Otherwise, he had had such a good time being wined and dined and making after-dinner speeches that he had literally fallen in love with “these English folks.”4 He hated to leave them, but departed on November 26, planning to return that spring with his wife and little Susy. In terms of literary output, he was somewhat at a standstill because, though he may not fully have realized it yet, he was passing out of his phase as a travel writer.

  Although he had shelved the English book, he would not soon give up on the English. In fact he returned to England twice in the next two years, allowing only a day or two in the United States between his second and third crossing of the Atlantic. This suggests immense physical stamina on Twain’s part, for shipboard travel was arduous and often dangerous. On his first return from England, his ship had weathered extremely stormy seas. He and Livy visited England and later Scotland and Ireland between May and November 1873. Only weeks later he was back in England for a lecture tour on Hawaii and his adventures in Roughing It. He was without his wife again, to her deep regret (she had insisted that he return from his first unaccompanied visit to England in 1872), and he would not sail home from Liverpool until January 1874. His daily companion for the next two months would be his
old friend from California, Charles Warren Stoddard.

  Stoddard was a homosexual visiting a country where sodomy was a criminal offense punishable by incarceration. A more famous writer and homosexual, Oscar Wilde, would suffer this penalty some two decades later. And like Wilde, Stoddard very much admired Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, which celebrated “manly love,” or what Whitman called “Adhesiveness,” a term adapted from his study of phrenology. Apparently, few aside from gay readers believed that by the term “manly love” Whitman meant homosexual intimacy. Stoddard did, however, and he had repeatedly asked Whitman in 1870, after his own sexual liberation in Hawaii in the 1860s, to please comment on the “Calamus” poems. Stoddard, as he would suggest in his South Sea Idylls (1873), based on his sojourn in Hawaii, was not interested, in the words of an early twentieth-century critic of his book, in “customary brown maidens with firm breasts, lithe limbs, and generous impulses [something Twain had certainly noticed in his letters to the Sacramento Union], but the strong-backed youths, human porpoises who drive their canoes through the mists of the storm.” “In the name of Calamus,” he begged Whitman, “listen to me!” Whitman for his part finally answered, on receipt of “A South-Sea Idyll,” an abbreviated version of the longer work that Bret Harte had published in the Overland Monthly in 1869. “I do not of course object to your emotional & adhesive nature,” the poet told Stoddard, but he also warned him against “extravagant sentimentalism.”5

  Stoddard had come to London in October as an occasional foreign correspondent for the San Francisco Chronicle. Ambrose Bierce and Joaquin Miller, California writers of the Twain-Harte era, who were then living in England, had also encouraged him to come abroad because he could easily increase his income, they said, by selling magazine articles to the British. Yet Bierce, who evidently knew Stoddard more intimately than Miller, warned him to avoid any homosexual trysts. “You will, by the way, be under a microscope here,” he told him. “Your lightest word and most careless action noted down, and commented on by men who cannot understand how a person of individuality in thought and conduct can be other than a very bad man. . . . Walk, therefore, circumspectly . . . avoid any appearance of eccentricity.”6