The highly touted bells and whistles were likewise disappointing. The daily newspaper, the Quaker Mirror, edited by Duncan’s teenage son George, was issued only once before the printing press broke. It contained mostly advertising and cost ten cents per copy, prompting most of the “subscribers” to cancel even before publication was suspended. The musical instruments promised in the tour prospectus, according to Reeves Jackson, the former assistant medical director of the U.S. Army of Virginia and the ship’s surgeon, turned out to be “a melancholy melodeon” and “a third rate pianoforte” incapable, “amid the general gloom that surrounded them, of emitting any but the most dismal sounds.” On June 24, the same evening Sam led devotions, some of the younger passengers enjoyed dancing quadrilles on the promenade deck “to the solemn wheezing of a melodeon,” Sam wrote, but so many of the straitlaced bluestockings objected to “even this melancholy orgie” that the “dancing was discontinued” at their insistence. Among their number was Bloodgood Cutter, who censured the behavior in an otherwise forgettable ode:
To thus dance on the ocean waves,
Seems like frolicking o’er our graves;
For my own part don’t it approve,
To condemn it now my pen doth move.
As late as 1907 Sam ridiculed the “incoherency,” “idiocy,” “windy emptiness,” and “putrid & insistent bastard godliness” of Cutter’s rhymes.
The ship’s ballyhooed library, moreover, turned out to contain little more than guidebooks to the Holy Land, two bound volumes of Harper’s Weekly, and over a dozen copies of the Plymouth Collection of Hymns. No wonder that six months later Sam assured readers of the San Francisco Alta California that the proposed “reciprocity treaty between Hawaii and this country . . . does not conflict with the Plymouth Collection of Hymns” and that in his incomplete novel “Cap’n Simon Wheeler, the Amateur Detective,” written in 1877, a copy of the Plymouth hymnal is a possible murder weapon. Worse yet, Jackson added, “private feuds and animosities” soon erupted among the passengers and “cliques were formed.” As early as June 17, a week into the voyage, the Reverend Henry Bullard of Wayland, Massachusetts, engaged Sam in “religious conversation” and afterward told Emily Severance “how much he hoped that from this voyage many souls might be born again.” The news was soon leaked in the U.S. press that the excursion had degenerated into “queer navigation, storms and ludicrous contretemps—a hodge-podge of psalm singing and sea sickness, high winds and long-winded exhortations.”4
Sam was clearly an object of earnest prayer. The pious passengers “never came near my stateroom,” he complained, and “called it a den of iniquity” because the “sinners” or the “unregenerated” or the “boys” or the “Quaker City night-hawks” (as Sam christened them) drank, smoked, and played cards there. The wheat and chaff soon blew their separate ways. “When we want to play old sledge,” Sam confided to a friend, “they want to have a prayer-meeting.” He might as well have invoked the metaphor of sheep and goats. Outspoken in his opinion of the pilgrims, he snorted in one of his Alta letters that “there were not blackguards enough on board in proportion to the saints—there was not genuine piety enough to offset the hypocrisy.” The church deacon William F. Church regarded Sam as “sinful, irreverent, profane.” William R. Denny, a former Confederate colonel from Virginia and a devout Methodist, described him in his journal as “a worldling & swearer,” “a wicked fellow that will take the name of the Lord in vain,” and one who was “no respector [sic] of persons,” though also “liberal, kind and obliging, and if he were only a Christian would make his mark.” Nina Larrowe of San Francisco, who had known Sam if only by reputation in both Nevada and California, betrayed her snobbery forty years later: he “was not respectable,” she insisted. “He was absolutely no good. Why, he drank and he swore” and “knew nothing of Eastern society.” He was a “nobody and he resented that no attention was paid to him.” Blood always tells, Larrowe implied, as long as it is blue.5
On this point, at least, there is a remarkable consensus among Sam’s family, friends, and acquaintances: he was well known for his salty language, yet it was rarely offensive. Howells, for example, referred to it as “pious profanity,” such as the phrase in a letter Sam wrote him in 1903: “quadrilateral astronomical incandescent son of a bitch.” Hamlin Garland later rationalized that Sam “swore with so much eloquence and with such an individual choice of words that we all excused it.” The longtime family maid Katy Leary similarly allowed that swearing was “part of him, somehow. Sort of amusing it was—and gay—not like real swearing, ’cause he swore like an angel.” His profanity “was seldom an offense,” according to Albert Bigelow Paine, because his “selection of epithet was always dignified and stately, from whatever source—and it might be from the Bible or the gutter.” Sam’s nephew Jervis Langdon remembered “hearing him swear only once, and that after I was grown up, which shows he was careful when the children were about. And what I did hear was entirely different from the heavy, guttural, vulgar thing we call profanity. . . . It came trippingly, almost musically, from the tongue. It was artistic compared with the ordinary variety.”6
On his part, Sam reacted to the strictures of the pilgrims like Holden Caulfield in the company of phonies. He sketched one of the married women aboard ship, probably Larrowe, in decidedly unflattering terms: she was “inclined to hairiness” and had “a general suggestion all about her of coarseness & vulgarity.” He complained a few days later that “one or two people in our party” were “an eternal annoyance to everybody”—particularly Edward Andrews, aka the Oracle, a physician from Albany, New York, who habitually garbled information gleaned from guidebooks. Andrews was “an innocent old ass,” Sam declared, who did not “know enough to come in when it rains, but who eats for four, and is vulgar, and smells bad. . . . and never uses a one-syllable word when he can ‘go two better.’” As late as 1909 Sam remarked on the smug appearance of Louisa Griswold’s husband Stephen, jotting on a photograph of him: “The real old familiar Plymouth-Church complacency. . . . It is the way God looks when He has had a successful season.” To judge from evidence in his notebook, Sam realized the comic possibilities of writing about some of these passengers soon after sailing.7 He popularized if he did not invent the stock character of the ugly American.
He quickly wearied of the dreary routine and sanctimony of the passionless pilgrims and retreated to a close(d) circle of friends. In addition to Mother Fairbanks, Jackson, and Dan Slote, they included twenty-four-year-old Julius Moulton, aka Moult, from St. Louis; twenty-year-old Jack Van Nostrand from New Jersey, “a charming, good-natured, long-legged” lad who was “as delicate in his feelings, as clean and pure and refined in his feelings as any lovely girl that ever was”; Emily Severance and her husband Solon; Emma Beach; thirty-four-year-old Julia Newell from Janesville, Wisconsin; and seventeen-year-old Charley Langdon of Elmira, New York, son of a self-made coal and timber mogul. Sam first mentioned “Charlie” in his Quaker City notebook for June 8: he was an “innocent young man—who is good, accommodating, pleasant & well-meaning, but fearfully green & as fearfully slow,” whom he nicknamed Interrogation Point. Charley had reputedly been hustled off on the trip by his parents to prevent him from sowing more wild oats in Elmira or, as Emily Severance’s daughter put it more tactfully in 1938, “in the hope that he might recover from a love affair.” Captain Duncan had promised Charley’s parents to be his escort and guardian, though he seems to have mostly ignored him on the voyage. On his part, Charley reported to his mother the first day at sea that he was wary of some of the passengers, no doubt Sam and Dan Slote among them: “I am afraid we have some hard cases with us.” After a month he wrote to correct his sister Olivia’s favorable opinion of the humorist, noting that “in regard to Mark Twain she is very much mistaken. He is one of the hardest characters we have with us.” He reiterated the point in late August: Sam was “just what he passes for[:] a very funny man. His moral character is anything but good.” Charley’s
comments were hardly an auspicious introduction of Sam to his future wife and mother-in-law, particularly because a “good moral character” had been a precondition of selection to the passenger list. To a few folks aboard ship, according to Fairbanks, Sam “revealed his true character, but, with a perversity on his part induced by the unmerited criticism of some of the company, he exaggerated his faults to others.” He invoked a metaphor from silver milling—the melding of mercury to silver—to explain the rift: “We didn’t amalgamate—that is all. Nothing more than that. . . . There was a little difference of opinion between us—nothing more. They thought they could have saved Sodom and Gomorrah, and I thought it would have been unwise to risk money on it.”8
After sailing twenty-four hundred miles in ten days, the Quaker City reached the Azores, an archipelago colony of Portugal a thousand nautical miles from Lisbon, early on the morning of June 21. Bursley anchored the ship in the Bay of Horta, on the east side of the island of Fayal, to weather a gale. There the excursionists suffered the first in a series of inconveniences at the hands of petty bureaucrats that would repeatedly mar their holiday. As Moses Beach explained, their landing was postponed for hours by
the visits of health and custom house officers and the making out of almost impossible declarations as to who we were and where bound. Nor did they neglect to ask for the place of birth, and the faith in which each passenger was baptized, the pounds of coal and of ice, the quarts of water, and the bottles of wine on board, as well as the weights of anchors and the sizes of cables, to say nothing of trying hard to learn just how many crackers were left in the locker and how many grains of powder had been taken out of the magazine. In a word, Job’s patience could not have sufficed to answer all the ridiculous questions solemnly asked by the Portuguese officials. . . . The whole proceeding from beginning to end was, and necessarily, a farce.
After Sam finally touched land, he was among a group of passengers welcomed at the home of Charles W. Dabney, the U.S. consul. “His house is commodious,” Sam reported, “and stands in the midst of a forest of rare trees and shrubs and beautiful plants and flowers. The grounds contain eighteen acres and are laid out with excellent taste.” During a donkey ride around the island, according to Newell, Sam was accosted by a “poor old crone, with just one tooth,” who begged him for charity. He replied, to the amusement of his companions,
in a most grave and confidential tone saying—“My dear madam, I don’t know what it can be in my appearance which has so fascinated you. I assure you I look much better when I have on my best clothes. It is impossible for me to return your affections, for I am engaged—but for that it might be otherwise.” The poor old thing could not understand a word, of course, but took it for encouragement, and became more and more impressive in her gestures. The whole thing was simply ludicrous.
Sam noted in his journal that “fornication with such cattle would come under the head of the crime without a name.” Reminiscing about his day in Fayal months later in The Innocents Abroad (1869), he betrayed his xenophobia: the Portuguese inhabitants on the islands were “slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy.”9
The Quaker City weighed anchor the morning of June 23 and six days later arrived on the continent at Gibraltar, where the passengers scattered like marbles. They planned to rejoin the ship later at its stops in Marseilles, Leghorn, or Naples. While most of the pilgrims headed north to Spain and England, Sam, Colonel Denny, James H. Foster of Pittsburgh, Dan Slote, and a couple of others, accompanied by five bottles of champagne and seventy-five cigars, steamed forty miles south to spend a night in the ancient city of Tangier, Morocco. “This is the infernalest hive of infernally costumed barbarians I have ever come across yet,” he reported to his family, though he expressed modest enthusiasm for it in an Alta letter: Tangier was “full of interest for one day, but after that it is a weary prison.” It was remarkable not for “its civilization” but for its exotic fashions. Sam and his companions bought “Moorish costumes,” including red fezzes, to wear back to the ship.10
They returned to the Quaker City on July 1 before its evening departure for France. They left the ship in Marseilles on July 4 and, to escape the dust while it was recoaling, registered at the Grand Hotel de Louvre et de la Paix, where they first encountered the French system of hostelry. As Jackson explained in a letter dated July 5,
The great governing principles of the hotel system here is that the guest pays for just what he gets, which is clearly right and proper. But every item, even the most minute, is found in your bill. If you order a bath, you are shown to the bath room and find besides the bath-tub and the water, nothing in the way of necessary conveniences except a couple of towels. If you wish soap you call for it and it appears in your bill as an extra charge. Combs and brushes are not furnished at all. If you desire them, you call the waiter and, if you make him understand your unusual wish, he proceeds to the proper authority and obtains permission to go out and purchase them for you. So that unless you go properly prepared for the operation, the taking of a bath in France is a rather serious matter. All this results, I presume, from the fact that the French people rarely wash themselves lower down than the shirt collar.
To a great extent, Sam relied on Jackson’s letters for information, if not inspiration. He made much the same point as Jackson in The Innocents Abroad: “We are sufficiently civilized to carry our own combs and toothbrushes, but this thing of having to ring for soap every time we wash is new to us and not pleasant at all. We think of it just after we get our heads and faces thoroughly wet or just when we think we have been in the bathtub long enough, and then, of course, an annoying delay follows.” In fact, Sam “borrowed” from Jackson repeatedly, not only in his own letters written during the cruise but during his revision of them in The Innocents Abroad months later. As Robert Regan has concluded after a close comparison of Jackson’s travel letters and Sam’s account of the Quaker City voyage in both his Alta letters and Innocents, Sam “transformed Jackson’s material into something quite his own, but there can be little question that the material was in the first instance Jackson’s.” The similarities between Jackson’s and Sam’s Quaker City writings are too close and too frequent to be brushed aside. Whereas Jackson wrote, for example, on July 11, 1867, “a Swiss, who looked so exceedingly like a retired pirate that we dismissed him,” Sam wrote, “One looked so like a very pirate that we let him go at once.” Whereas Jackson wrote on July 22, “Venice is a very Paradise for cripples, there being no use for a gentleman’s limbs,” Sam wrote in his Alta letter dated July 29 that Venice “must be a paradise for cripples, for verily a man has no use for legs here.” Despite such parallels Richard S. Lowry asserts, like Regan, that Sam “skirted” but did not cross “the line of plagiarism.”11
On July 6 Sam, Jackson, and Slote took a train to Paris for several days of sightseeing. They registered at the Grand Hôtel du Louvre on the rue de Rivoli and hired a guide to escort them around the city. Surprisingly, they explored the Exposition Universelle, the world’s fair that had originally attracted Sam to Europe, for only a couple of hours one afternoon. Instead they kept up a frenetic schedule touring other sites. They frequented “all the great churches [including Notre Dame] and museums, libraries, imperial palaces, the sculpture and picture galleries,” including the Louvre as well as the Tuileries, the Morgue, the tomb of Napoleon, the Madeleine, the Pantheon, and the Jardin Mabille, a so-called pleasure garden located in the fashionable neighborhood of Faubourg Saint-Honoré. There Sam first observed—ostensibly while peering through his spread fingers—a performance of the cancan, a dance he thought almost as lascivious as the hula. After all, the “idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible” and “kick as high as you can.” The Danish author Hans Christian Andersen may also have been in the crowd that evening. Andersen later wrote a fairy story, “The Wood-Nymph: A Tale of the 1867 Paris Exposition,” partly set in the Mabille garden. A few years later, Charley Stod
dard was much less circumspect than either Sam or Andersen in reporting details of his visit there. After midnight, according to Stoddard, the more traditional entertainments were replaced by dances by young women “whose audacious costumes are at first a little startling. Their light chemises slide from one fair shoulder and fall upon the bosom with exceeding grace. Their brief skirts seem scarcely to disguise the full outline of their figure; but why should it? Follow them in the dance and you will see how their perfect limbs, cased in finest silk, are no longer trammeled with even so slight a covering.” They perform the cancan and conclude the night with a “bacchanal.”12
Sam and his friends also visited Versailles on the outskirts of the city. Despite his professed disdain for monarchy, he was overwhelmed. “If I live a thousand years, I shall never see anything so lovely,” he wrote the Alta. “Everything is on so grand a scale. Nothing is small—nothing is cheap. The statues are all large; the promenade is vast; the palace is grand; the park covers a fair-sized county; the avenues are interminable.” Much as he had contrasted the opulence of Fifth Avenue in New York with the squalor around the Five Points, he contrasted Versailles with the working-class neighborhood of Faubourg Saint-Antoine and its “misery, poverty, vice and crime.” He used the same literary device to describe the military parade of Napoleon III and Abdul Aziz, the sultan of Turkey, along the Champs Élysées on July 11. Sam considered Napoleon, though a despot, “the greatest man in the world to-day” because he had “taken the sole control of the Empire of France into his hands and made it the freest country in the world—perhaps—for people who will not attempt to go too far in meddling with governmental affairs.” Four years later, of course, his regime collapsed under assault by the Prussian Army in only six weeks. As for the sultan, he was “a very dark and a very common looking moustached and whiskered Mahommedan”—a fit ruler for a people who were “by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious.” Sam also crossed paths in the Paris hotel with the “altogether lovely” Lillie Hitchcock, his friend from San Francisco. “I did so yearn to kiss her for her mother but it was just my luck—her mother was there herself.” In all, as Sam reported to his family, he enjoyed a “gorgeous time in Paris.”13
The Life of Mark Twain Page 60