Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Taylor had earlier been selected by the Centennial Commission in Philadelphia to write a national hymn, while Walt Whitman sat across the Delaware River in working-class Camden and issued a privately printed “Centennial Edition” of Leaves of Grass. Perhaps brooding over his exclusion from the hundredth-anniversary festivities for the nation that he had hailed in 1855 as “essentially the greatest poem,” Whitman had set off an Anglo-American debate in 1876 over the shabby treatment he felt he had received from the establishment. Describing himself in an anonymous article in the West Jersey Press of January 26, which was widely quoted in England, Whitman said that twenty years after the first edition of his book, he had been systematically ignored. Naming the Atlantic as among those literary magazines refusing to publish his poems, he added: “All the established American poets studiously ignore Whitman. The omnium gatherums of poetry, by Emerson [whose 1874 anthology Parnassus had failed to include a sample of Whitman’s work], Bryant, Whittier, and by lesser authorities, professing to include everybody of any note, carefully leave him out.”

  Among these “lesser authorities” Whitman doubtless included Taylor, who had become what was then the equivalent of today’s U.S. poet laureate, only after the centennial honor had been turned down in rapid succession by Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant. This lesser authority had also joined those critical of Whitman in the 1876 debate over the American treatment of Leaves of Grass. In a guest editorial in the New York Tribune of April 12, 1876, entitled “American vs. English Criticism,” Taylor had said of the transatlantic defense of Whitman that the English brain had become bored with respectable American utterances: “They are so tired of hot-house peaches and grapes, that they find a strange delight in the pucker of unripe persimmon. They place the simulated savagery of Joaquin Miller beside the pure and serene muse of Longfellow. Poe is exalted to the rank of a leader and pathfinder.” And Whitman, he said, they hail “in terms fitting to no one less than Homer and Moses combined.”8

  This was the writer Twain had celebrated at the farewell dinner at Delmonico’s in April. (In the wake of his Whittier birthday dinner speech, he planned to refer in this one [but didn’t] to “the dangerous weapon of speech.”)9 Taylor was also the one with whom he so looked forward to crossing the Atlantic—a smoking partner in a day when most men smoked cigars, but also a smoker with a heart condition that would help to end his life before the close of 1878. One wonders what they talked about during those two stormy weeks at sea. For in denouncing two years earlier the English preference for the unripe utterances of vernacular writers, Taylor had also taken aim at the postwar popularity of American humorists and, in particular, at Twain’s first great model in the genre, the “almost vanished” Artemus Ward. In 1876, at least, Taylor still thought George Horatio Derby, or “John Phoenix,” superior to Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or “Mark Twain.” Yet he was relieved that the recent “raptures [the English] bestow upon Mark Twain have [at least] not damaged the pure ideal of Humor which Lowell has given us.” Mark Twain was going abroad for more reasons than he realized.

  Bayard Taylor had not been in attendance at the Whittier speech, but he had likely heard all the stories about it by the time the two men crossed the Atlantic together. As the Holsatia prepared to sail, the press recorded the movements of the new minister and the new star on the literary horizon. “The new Minister,” the New York Times of April 12 reported, “was smoking another of those large cigars . . . when a peculiar-looking caravan drove down the pier. It might once have been a coach, but it had been transformed into a sort of pyramid on wheels. . . . The lifting of a few dozen trunks from the top of the pyramid disclosed the Gilsey House coach, shining with gilt. It has brought to the steamer Mr. and Mrs. Samuel L. Clemens, a lady friend of Mrs. Clemens, several children, and a nurse.” “Having checked off his family into the saloon,” the report continued, “he came out upon the deck to shake hands with the new Minister.” It went on to overhear their conversation, in which both men spoke words for public consumption, with Taylor as the straight man to Twain’s comic. On board the two talked more seriously, with Twain admiring Taylor’s formal learning and strong memory for reciting poetry. But by the turn of the twentieth century he would observe in his autobiography that although Taylor “had written voluminously in verse,” practically “all his poetry is forgotten.”10 At that juncture in history, Whitman’s had been largely forgotten, too, and Twain worried about the longevity of his own posthumous fame.

  Critics and biographers have speculated that Twain was lying low by going abroad after the Whittier speech, but like so many great writers, he never lost faith in his talent—or, for that matter, in the speech he had given on that December evening in 1877. As noted, his letters of apology to the three supposedly offended auditors were sent mainly to console Livy and especially to protect his friend Howells, whom he feared had been the one truly hurt by the affair. Rather, Twain was going abroad to finish, as he had told his mother, at least one of a “half dozen books” he had begun. The editors at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California at Berkeley speculate that these unfinished works may have included drafts of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (a work that would require many more years of simmering); The Prince and the Pauper; a play entitled “Simon Wheeler, Detective” (a failure that he later tried to turn into a novel); “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool” (featuring his bungling brother Orion, whose antics almost got him into one of the stories that fill in the narrative plank of A Tramp Abroad); a burlesque diary of Methuselah; and of course, Huckleberry Finn.11 Yet once they reached Hamburg on April 25 and Twain was able to spend the next fifteen months traveling around Europe, his fancy turned to yet another book, indeed another travel book, that would become A Tramp Abroad in 1880. (Then, “tramp” often indicated a walk or trip, not just a homeless person.) Travel books would always be Mark Twain’s refuge from the responsibilities of the novelist, whose work required a firmer structure. Yet A Tramp Abroad, as the editors of the Penguin edition of the book note, also returns to the narrative plank of earlier books such as Roughing It by interspersing humorous sketches with autobiographical and historical matters.12

  After the Holsatia reached the port of Hamburg, the veteran travel writer began immediately filling up notebooks that would provide the grist for his next book. He noted how clean the northern city and indeed all of Germany looked. There were no beggars, or “tramps,” in the country, and their absence here was contrasted with their numbers in neighboring countries, especially France and its section of the Alps. He had little patience for the idle poor at this stage in his life; panhandlers would come right up to the front door of his mansion in Hartford. The Clemens party visited different German cities, including Frankfurt, before settling into the grand Schloss Hotel in Heidelberg, overlooking the Rhine Valley and the rapidly flowing Neckar River. They stayed in Heidelberg from May 4 until July 23, when they traveled to Baden-Baden, on the edge of the Black Forest, to await the arrival of Joe Twichell. He was coming over at Twain’s expense for the month of August.

  They were all straining to learn and speak German, which Twain would famously satirize in an appendix to A Tramp Abroad (“The Awful German Language”). One journal entry directly anticipates a portion of what got into print. “Some of the words,” he wrote in his journal while still in Heidelberg, “are so long that they have a perspective . . . like the receding lines of a railroad track.” Students dueling at the University of Heidelberg also caught his attention. “One knows a college bred man,” he noted, “by his scars.”13 A Tramp Abroad is an uneven medley that reflects the occasionally different points of view of this writer in exile, some of which are deadly serious and others of which are utterly hilarious. His somber descriptions of the student warriors who coolly smoke cigarettes and sip wine before doing battle bespeak his undisguised horror at the violence. Like Huck following the slaughter of Buck Grangerford and other warriors of the Tennessee and Kentucky b
ackwoods, this narrator sums up the student injuries as a “fearful spectacle . . . better left undescribed.” Still, the former Buffalo journalist who had ridiculed the French for their quick surrender during the Franco-Prussian War then undercuts this serious meditation on the calm brutality of German dueling with a chapter titled “The Great French Duel.” Since French duels are performed in the open air, the narrator says dryly, “the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold.”14

  Twichell arrived in Baden-Baden on August 1. He was deeply touched by his friend’s invitation and thrilled at the expectation of their almost exclusive time together. “To walk with you, and talk with you, and sleep with you, and say my prayers with you, and see things with you, for weeks together,” he had written on June 8, “why, it’s my dream of luxury.”15 For the next month, they made excursions together through the Swiss Alps, sojourns punctuated by regroupings with the rest of the Clemens party at various cities and spas. Much of Twain’s travels with Twichell, who became “Harris” in the travel narrative, formed the backbone of his book. While waiting for him in Baden-Baden, Twain, who had what sounds like the gout, took advantage of the medicinal baths. This detail didn’t get into A Tramp Abroad, but it sets the stage for Huck’s up-a-stump encounter with the harelip at the Wilks residence in Huckleberry Finn. In fact, the encounter with the American lady in chapter 25 of A Tramp had doubtless suggested the entire scene. The narrator’s pretending to remember the woman from “back home” when he doesn’t remember her at all is as hilarious as Huck’s trying to support his own pretense of being an Englishman in chapter 26 of Huckleberry Finn. It is also reminiscent of his earlier battle of wits with Judith Loftus, the backwoods river wife who sees through Huck’s masquerade as a girl.

  This particular scene in A Tramp is a parody of the American tourist and his glaring ignorance of all things foreign. In a bet with Harris the narrator pretends to confuse a young American woman with somebody else as a way of striking up a conversation with her and ends up in “the tightest place I ever was in.” The intended victim of the ploy is immediately convinced that they are the oldest of acquaintances and proceeds to allude to a series of mutual friends. It culminates with the mention of old Darley, who would attempt to enter the house during the winter. “I was rather afraid to proceed,” the narrator writes. “Evidently Darley was not a man,—he must be some other kind of animal,—possibly a dog, maybe an elephant.”16 Like Huck with Joanna Wilks, the narrator gets into a “sweat”—until he discovers that Darley is a black slave. On another occasion, the narrator meets a bore about to enter Harvard who repeats himself endlessly, reminding us of Twain’s earlier skits using mindless repetition. This story also smacks of Twain’s slights to the Boston intelligentsia, following the Whittier speech.

  On August 9, Sam and Joe took a boat trip down the Neckar, which Twain turns into a rafting trip in chapter 14. “The motion of the raft,” the future chronicler of that most famous boy on the river writes, “is the needful motion; it is gentle, and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm, a deep and tranquil ecstasy.” “It’s lovely to live on a raft,” Huck tells us in chapter 19 of his “autobiography.” He and the runaway slave Jim “had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them.”17 Like childhood itself to Twain’s mind, the raft on the river is a sanctuary from the cruelties and paradoxes of life ashore, though this spell is soon broken by the appearance of the two frauds being chased out of a river town they have been caught bilking.

  A Tramp Abroad consists of forty-nine relatively brief chapters that cover Twain’s time in Germany, Switzerland, France, and Italy. The unspoken running joke is that their tramps through the Alps (in which they, for example, climb Mount Blanc by telescope) are largely devoid of any real hiking, because they take the train or some other conveyance at the earliest opportunity. The narrative plank creaks more than once during this exercise in absurdity, but it is saved by its humor, more or less. This is assuredly true with Twain’s now celebrated story imbedded in chapters 2 and 3, “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn.” The bird becomes frustrated at trying to fill up a hole with acorns, only to discover that it is a bottomless pit, in reality an empty miner’s cabin with a hole in the roof. The plot itself isn’t funny or in any way the point, but the characterization of an animal with human qualities is. “Animals talk to each other,” we are told. “And as for command of language—why you never see a blue-jay get stuck for a word. . . . They just boil out of him!” Twain employs incongruity in suggesting, for instance, that jays never use bad grammar, “don’t belong to no church,” and haven’t “any more principle than a Congressman . . . a jay can out-swear any gentleman in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can; but you give a blue-jay a subject that calls for his reserve powers, and where is your cat?”18 Twain was falling back on the humor of the Old West, where he had in fact first heard this story from one of the Gillis boys. That humor would shine much more consistently through his magnum opus, but first he had to find his way back home.

  30 Down and Out in Paris and London

  It can be safely said that by March 1879 Mark Twain had come to hate the French and, by that summer, was reassessing his high estimate of the British. It may have been the weather, for the winter of 1879 was one of the most severe in France and indeed Europe. Yet his moodiness toward the French should have been uplifted somewhat by his Parisian surroundings. The Clemens party lived in the luxurious Normandy Hotel, on the corner of rue de l’Échelle and rue St. Honoré, in the very center of the City of Light, on its elegant Right Bank in the first arrondissement. The hotel was adjacent to the Palais Royal and what is today the city’s old opera house, which was brand new in 1878. The area was then—as it is now—one of the most expensive and delightful places to stay in Paris. Just north of the rue de Rivoli and within walking distance of the Tuileries and the Louvre, the Clemenses’ hotel was virtually across the street from the famous Théâtre Français. As Livy told her nephew, the hotel was a “much more expensive place than we intended to stop in, but we could not suit ourselves better.”1

  It is difficult to say just what set off this irritation engulfing his most recent impressions of both France and England. It may have been partly the letdown after Joe Twichell went back home in September 1878. He wrote “Old Joe,” whose companionship he valued second only to that of his wife: “It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday & this morning when I woke, I couldn’t seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, & the pleasant tramping & talking at an end.”2 Or it may have been the sudden death of Bayard Taylor in Germany that December. Twain had written him a letter from Munich, where the family had resided for three months before coming to Paris on February 28, only a week before the new American ambassador’s death, wishing him a speedy recovery from a recent illness. Taylor, while he favored the New England writers of Emerson’s generation, had, two years earlier, accepted Mark Twain as “distinctly American in our literature” because his art was “truly, vigorously, and picturesquely embodied.” And because—unlike Whitman’s—it could be read aloud during the family hour, or “under the evening lamp,” as it was known in the nineteenth century.3

  Curiously, Taylor’s Victorian attitude toward literature was no more moralistic than Twain’s hostility toward the French. In that same (anonymous) editorial in the Tribune of 1876, Taylor had criticized Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a vulgar revival of “the old Greek reverence for the human body and delight in all its functions.” Similarly, in notes for a chapter about French morality (ultimately excluded from A Tramp Abroad), Twain exploded in a burst of puritanical denunciation. Mixed in with his complaints about the French weather (“this eternal winter”) were castigating remarks about the French cult
ure of sex. “Frenchman speaking admiringly of a little girl,” he wrote, “ ‘What! seven years old & still virtuous?’ ” (His first daughter, Susy, had just turned seven.) Even the company of the great Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev and other now famous writers didn’t distract him from his Francophobia. “ ’Tis a wise Frenchman that knows his own father,” he wrote in his journal on May 12. He noted that married women had lovers and that “every man in France over 16 years of age & under 116, has at least 1 wife to whom he has never been married.”4

  Here was Mark Twain—who as a carefree bachelor had very likely explored the darker precincts of New Orleans, Virginia City, San Francisco, and Honolulu—attacking the French for doing, as the joke would have it, what they knew best. Married for almost a decade in 1879, and as faithful as he had once predicted to his sister-in-law that he would be, after admitting that while still single he had slept with chambermaids, he now found not only Frenchmen but the entire nation of France “wholly savage” and in dire need of American and English missionaries. “Scratch an F,” he raged, “& you find a gorilla.” America, on the other hand, wrote the coauthor of The Gilded Age and the marital adventures of Laura Hawkins, “is the most civilized of all nations. Pure-minded women are the rule, in every rank of life of the native-born. The men are clean-minded, too, beyond the world’s average.”5

  Mark Twain was clean minded, too. At least that was his reputation, to all, that is, but his former cronies in the West and those select readers of the privately circulated 1601, an off-color parody of European aristocratic manners in which Queen Elizabeth and other members of her court politely discuss such crude matters as flatulence, sexual intercourse, and masturbation. In the age of Victoria (when the double standard in matters of sex was supposedly for the protection of “women and children”), the satire was perhaps a natural runoff from his study of sixteenth-century British history, begun before his latest trip abroad and undertaken for the composition of The Prince and the Pauper. That novel, featuring the brutality of English life three hundred years earlier but which Twain suspected came right up to the present, may have triggered his shift in attitude toward the British, even before he imploded on the French. Indeed, he claimed in his Paris journal that up to the previous century, British civilization had been no better than that of the Zulus or the Shoshone Indians.6