by Ron Powers
The writer was the thirty-nine-year-old Mary Mason Fairbanks, former schoolteacher and presently the wife of Abel Fairbanks, owner and publisher of the Cleveland Herald. Her Cleveland friend, Emily Severance, agreed; to her, this Mark Twain was “the ruling spirit” of the voyage, “a capital person for ocean life.”4 Another shipboard correspondent, Miss Julia Newell of Janesville, Wisconsin, commented to her hometown Gazette on “the only notoriety we have…rather a handsome fellow.” This fellow, the alert Miss Newell strongly suspected, harbored an intent “to be funny for the amusement of the party,” although she judged the effort partly thwarted by his “abominable drawl,” which she, for one, found exasperating.5 A fourth approving female was the seventeen-year-old Emma Beach, daughter of Moses Beach, the New York Sun editor who was aboard. Sam and Emma developed an affection for each other that continued after the voyage, which led some in Emma’s family to believe that he was courting her.
Mary Fairbanks and Julia Newell were only the latest to notice the “something” that drew people to the small, long-talking young man with the auburn hair and mustache. But they, and the other passengers, could scarcely suspect the power with which he had begun to notice them. For literary foils, Sam scarcely needed to aim his gaze. Wherever he glanced, characters wandered innocently into his crosshairs, plentiful as the population of a Dickens novel. He’d inventoried at least two before the ship left New York Harbor. “That Frenchy-looking woman with a dog—small mongrel black & tan brute,” he scrawled in his notebook in regard to one passenger, whom he went on to sketch as “a married woman of 30, with dark skin, inclined to hairiness, & a general suggestion all about her of coarseness & vulgarity.”6 Of another: “He says the most witless things & then laughs uproariously at them…He laughs dreadfully at everything & swears its good, d—d good, by George. I wish he would f—”7 After a few days at sea, he homed in on yet another: “Stupid remarks & ? from ? every now & then—make him a character.”8
He could scarcely get his fill of a bird of plumage who announced himself as the COMMISSIONER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO EUROPE, ASIA, AND AFRICA. “I fell under that titular avalanche a torn and blighted thing,” Mark Twain recalled.
I said that if that potentate must go over in our ship, why, I supposed he must—but that to my thinking, when the United States considered it necessary to send a dignitary of that tonnage across the ocean, it would be in better taste, and safer, to take him apart and cart him over in sections, in several ships.9
The abundance of these sorts of graying greenhorns and pious fuddy-duddys—so grating against Sam Clemens’s temperament and therefore so priceless for Mark Twain’s literature—was inevitable, given the Quaker City’s revised passenger list. The ship’s company, originally conceived by Duncan as an array of the Eastern Protestant social aristocracy, garnished by celebrities from the military and the theater, had transmuted itself, week by downscaling week, into a sampling of the solid, and stolid nouveau American middle class. New Yorkers, Brooklynites, and Long Islanders still comprised a demographic majority, but cancellations and lagging sales had obliged Captain Duncan to accept bookings by wayfarers from such outposts as Plaquemine, Louisiana; Circleville, Ohio; Hydeville, Vermont; Aurora, Illinois; and Fulton, Missouri. Also represented were New Orleans, San Francisco, Boston, Pittsburgh, St. Paul, Elmira, and St. Louis. There was even a Hannibal fellow aboard: Dr. George Bright Birch, who joined Sam and his coterie on a trek to the Tomb of St. John in Samaria, where a small boy threw a rock at him. These “pilgrims,” as Mark Twain designated them, tended to be pillars of the emerging Main Street community: financially successful, amply upholstered, gray-haired, and itching to prostrate themselves before the storied ruins and sacred shrines that they’d read about in travel books since their childhoods. Medical doctors, clergymen, retired military officers, and “professors” were well represented. Sanctimony ruled among them, flavored with naïveté, boorishness, and a rather un-Christian penchant for swiping relics from those selfsame ruins and shrines once the prostrating was over with.
Not all of them, unsurprisingly, were as diverted as Mary Fairbanks by Sam’s drolleries. Almost before the American landfall faded away, he had become for many the ship’s bad boy: a card-playing, Sabbath-ignoring, horse-billiards-organizing,* tippling scourge whose language could occasionally leave one gasping for fresh air. Miss Newell had taken care to read the Jumping Frog book after learning that its author would be among the passengers, and she disclosed to the citizens of Janesville that in one passage, a description of how he cured a cold, “he profanely says: ‘That after taking a quart of warm water or salt water…he thinks he threw up his immortal soul.’ ”10
This less than enchanted attitude toward the Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope was well expressed by Colonel William R. Denny, of Winchester, Virginia, and late of the Confederate army, who opined in his journal that Mark Twain was a worldling and a swearer, and fingered him as a ringleader of the dubious nightly dances on deck. Mrs. Nina Larrowe, smarting several months later from the book that resulted, declared that she’d known right away that this Mark Twain was no good. “Why, why, he drank and he swore…When he went on to the Quaker City he was nobody and he resented that no attention was paid to him. Nobody thought he would ever be anything under the sun.”11
Sam rejoiced from the get-go in their every foible, and noted it down: how they strove to become fluent in shipboard jargon, speaking carelessly of the “for’rard cabin” and the “fo’castle,” and replacing “half-past six” with “seven bells”; how nearly half of them began the excursion as self-appointed “correspondents,” scribbling away at long dining tables of an evening after prayer meeting (one of them ruefully admitted to him after a few days that he was “as much as four thousand pages behind hand”);12 how, during the nightly dances on the upper deck, “When the ship rolled to starboard the whole platoon of dancers came charging down to starboard with it…and when it rolled to port, they went floundering down to port with the same unanimity of sentiment.”13
Sam insulated himself from the pilgrims inside a small group of younger bloods, whom he called the “Quaker City night-hawks,”14 and, much later in his book, the “sinners.” Their home base was Clemens’s smoke-filled cabin, No. 10. Dan Slote, Sam’s roommate, paid his dues with constant, inspired wisecracking. Equally droll and irreverent was the deadpan Dr. Abraham Reeves Jackson, the ship’s surgeon (“The Doctor, in the narrative”), of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, who became a scourge of pesky tour guides. There was also John A. Van Nostrand (“Jack”), of Greenville, New Jersey. “Sinners” on the fringe may have included Frederick H. Greer, one of several models for “Blucher,” of Boston, and Julius Moulton (“Moult”). Then there was a slim seventeen-year-old scion of the Elmira social elite, a youth suspended in that magical interlude between callow wonderment and heavy drinking. His name was Charles Jervis Langdon. His parents had nudged him aboard the Quaker City in the hope that a European/Middle Eastern voyage would enrich his intellect and spirit, and also, perhaps, to get him out of the house. Charley Langdon may have been the model for the character “Interrogation Point” in the book. More pertinently still, he had a sister.
“Brown” was present, too, for a while. In his first few letters back to the Alta, Mark Twain employed the make-believe vulgarian as he always had under the old conventions of the “frame” story: as the common man’s ambassador, speaker of sentiments too frankly coarse (and vice versa) for the narrator of polite literature. “Brown” gradually died out of Mark Twain’s dispatches, and remains absent from the revised account that became The Innocents Abroad. Mark Twain continued to assign pseudonyms to actual shipboard personalities, some of them composites; but in a stroke of intuition with profound results, he absorbed “Brown” into his own voice. For the first time, the author of a travel book spoke frankly as dissenting satirist as well as “responsible narrator.” This liberating authorial scope brought Mark Twain to his full maturity as a literary artist, wrot
e “The End” to America’s reflexive subservience toward Old World aesthetics and pieties, and gave The Innocents its lasting greatness.
After ten days of stormy seas, evening prayer meetings, nightly Bible study, and constant seasickness, the pilgrims fetched up at their first port of call, the Azores island of Fayal. They were carted ashore by Portuguese boatmen “with brass rings in their ears, and fraud in their hearts.”15 Sam and some friends sashayed down the main street, Mark Twain later noting tactfully how the high, wide hoods of the women resembled circus tents. “Blucher” sprang for dinner for ten, and turned white when he received the bill—twenty-one thousand seven hundred reis. He cheered up on finding that this equaled $21.70 in American dollars. Hiring some saddled donkeys, half a dozen of the men found themselves in an uncontrolled stampede. In Innocents, Mark Twain reports that Blucher’s donkey darts inside a house, scraping Blucher off at the doorway; Blucher remounts, only to instigate a collision that has everyone piled up in a heap. His private notebook account of the episode, which he left unpublished, would have confirmed every dark suspicion of him among the good pilgrims.
The party started at 10 A.M. Dan was on his ass the last time I saw him. At this time Mr. Foster was following, & Mr. Haldeman came next after Foster—Mr. Foster being close to Dan’s ass, & his own ass being very near to Mr. Haldeman’s ass. After this Capt. Bursley joined the party with his ass, & all went well till on turning a corner of the road a most frightful & unexpected noise issued from Capt Bursley’s ass, which for a moment threw the party into confusion, & at the same time a portughee boy stuck a nail into Mr. Foster’s ass & he ran—ran against Dan, who fell—fell on his ass, & then, like so many bricks they all came down—each & every one of them—& each & every one of them fell on his ass.16
Back under way, the voyagers endured another week of gale-force winds and churning seas, and then, on the morning of June 29,
we were fairly within the Straits of Gibraltar, the tall yellow-splotched hills of Africa on our right, with their bases veiled in a blue haze and their summits swathed in clouds…On our left were the granite-ribbed domes of old Spain.17
Soon the Rock of Gibraltar loomed over the ship. As the passengers scampered ashore to investigate on muleback, Sam fastened his attention on a new object for his off-center reportage, the yammering local guide parroting the same packaged information as the next yammering guide, and the next one after him. After the third repetition of, “That high hill yonder is called the Queen’s Chair,”18 and the long explanation why, the narrator-Twain begs for relief as a helpless orphan in a foreign land. He would encounter variations of this stock figure often; and, in lampooning them, further obliterate the proscenium between common reader and rarefied writer.
The Innocents were never far from his noticing eyes, and ears. He began to deepen his portraiture of the more interesting specimens, scarcely bothering to camouflage their real-world personas. The Oracle, in real life the blustery Dr. Edward Andrews of Albany, he presented as “an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one.”
…He reads a chapter in the guide-books, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which has been festering in his brain for years…19
But Mark Twain rather liked the Oracle, he averred. Less congenial to him were “a poet and a good-natured enterprising idiot on board, and they do distress the company.”20 The former tended to inflict his fellow passengers with such verse as “Apostrophe to the Rooster in the Waist of the Ship”; the latter, the selfsame “Interrogation Point,” Mark Twain evaluated as “young and green, and not bright, not learned and not wise,”21 a lad capable of accepting uncritically the description of a mountain eight hundred feet high with a two thousand-foot-high tunnel running through it. The model for “Interrogation Point” was not among the many passengers outraged when they saw their foibles revealed to the world in print—fortunately for the sake of Sam Clemens’s romantic hopes.
With the ship taking on coal at Gibraltar, Sam and a half-dozen others took a small craft to Tangier, with its 2,200-year-old Roman fountain. This was the first undiluted “foreign” locale Sam had experienced, a city out of the Arabian Nights teeming with cloaked Bedouins and turbaned Moors, “no white men visible.”22 Pretty soon Sam and his friends were wearing Moorish garb, too. The exotic atmosphere thrilled him. He seems to have half-imagined himself into antiquity; he stuffed his notebook (and much of a chapter) with straightforward details of the city’s history and its ancient stories. He resurfaced long enough to note that “Blucher” jeopardized everyone’s life by nearly riding his mule into a mosque. The pilgrims were all back at sea in time to celebrate the Fourth of July with cannon thunder at daylight. “In the afternoon the ship’s company assembled aft, on deck, under the awnings; the flute, the asthmatic melodeon, and the consumptive clarinet crippled the Star Spangled Banner, the choir chased it to cover, and George came in with a particularly lacerating screech on the final note and slaughtered it. Nobody mourned.”23 Then, the following evening, the Mediterranean coast of France.
MARK TWAIN never met a genre he didn’t like to lampoon, and travel literature was ripe for it.
Toward nightfall…we steamed into the great artificial harbor of this noble city of Marseilles, and saw the dying sunlight gild its clustering spires and ramparts, and flood its leagues of environing verdure with a mellow radiance that touched with an added charm the white villas that flecked the landscape far and near.
He added, in brackets, “[Copyright secured according to law.]”24
The positioning and the brio of this particular little spitball suggest that he was by now in charge of his own insurrectionary voice, and aware of its pulverizing potential upon all that had gone before it. He was lighting a dynamite fuse, as he knew, at the foundation of a venerated literary edifice. Since the 16th century, books of travel had found devoted readerships in Europe and then in America. Rich in character, description, and incident, books of travel spoke through their own stiff stylistic conventions to the human hunger for story, especially as the emphasis shifted from scientific observation to adventure. Their narrative discharge appealed in particular to Protestant readers, subscribers to a Puritan disapproval for the novel. These books spoke also to a lingering sense of estrangement. Many Americans harbored an instinctual desire, laced with anxiety, to make a reckoning with the Old World of their origins. Envious of Europe’s historic continuity from their perspective of flux and change, cowed by European contempt for their still-new society as culturally bereft and a little barbaric, and always avid for tales of exotic lands, Americans loved to embark on these proxy journeys.
Not even the founding fathers of American literature were immune from this tug. Most (save Emerson) had written accounts of their transatlantic ramblings; most of these efforts generated only mild interest. Washington Irving produced his Spanish Sketchbook after living for most of 1829 in the crumbling Moorish palace, the Alhambra. The most visible monument to his scrupulous work of history and folklore is the Washington Irving Hotel (three stars, fully equipped bathroom, direct-dial phone), planted right next door to the Alhambra. James Russell Lowell (apartment complex in Kansas City) published a collection of his European travels. Nathaniel Hawthorne (House of Seven Gables in Salem, costumed guides) did not leave New England, but he crafted sketches from the remoter northern terrain in the 1830s; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poster available at $5.99 online) and James Fenimore Cooper (poster) were among others who traveled and wrote.
The reigning travel writer before Mark Twain’s arrival on the scene was William Dean Howells’s old idol, Bayard Taylor. The frustrated poet’s popular books about Egypt, Africa, and China, along with his innovative practice of traveling for the purpose of writing about it, established him as America’s first professional in the calling. Mark Twain was about
to place Taylor, stylistically speaking, on a slow boat to China.
SAM ALIGHTED on French soil at a dead run, hired a guide, and hit the sightseeing trail, Dan and the Doctor (Jackson) in tow: “we only wanted to glance and go—to move, keep moving!”25 Marseilles exposed these “travelers” for the tourists they were, and then exposed them to a new tourist phenomenon, the Ugly American. At a restaurant on that first night, the three rolled out their textbook French, only to see their hostess stare at them in bewilderment until one of them blurted something in his native tongue, which triggered the response: “Bless you, why didn’t you speak English before?—I don’t know anything about your plagued French!”26 A night or so later, they were embarrassed by a boorish Yank who loudly instructed the restaurant at large in the virtues of drinking wine with meals, and brayed about how he was “free-born sovereign, sir, and American, sir, and I want every body to know it!”27 His sort would soon be swarming the Continent.
The pilgrims toured the ancient prisons on the island Castle d’If, dank cells mythified by Dumas and the Man in the Iron Mask. Cells and dungeons formed a powerful claim on Sam’s attention on this trip. Then Sam and his two sidekicks broke free from the Quaker City congregation that had already marginalized them and launched out on a weeklong rail odyssey through the heart of France. Arriving in “magnificent” Paris on July 6, Mark Twain suspended his facetious voice and opened himself to the city that had fired his imagination since his boyhood. Satisfying food in tidy restaurants, polite waiters, music in the air, brilliant streets, dainty trifles in the stores and shops. Even the mustaches on the Frenchmen knocked him out. En route the next morning to the International Exposition, which Sam had dreamed of taking in since Washoe days, the three were taken in by the first of several calculating rascal-guides who surface in The Innocents Abroad. The name on his business card was the most un-French “A. Billfinger.” The three redubbed the man “Ferguson,” a moniker that became the standard nickname for all guides thereafter.