by Ron Powers
Some scholars have discerned malice here. Smith quotes a British writer as suggesting that Miss Emerson’s “letter of bland forgiveness, gently rubbing it in all the time,” was “one of the most subtly irritating documents ever printed.”64
Whatever else one might make of Mark Twain’s Whittier birthday speech, this much seems irrefutably true: he had inaugurated a venerable institution of American popular culture: the celebrity roast.
* Winans and his partner, Major George Washington Whistler, had contracted with Czar Nicholas I of Russia in 1844 for the construction of a railroad line between Moscow and St. Petersburg, a venture that made both of them wealthy—hence the name of the “automated” house. The major’s son was the painter James McNeill Whistler, who worked briefly at the Winans Locomotive Company in Baltimore in 1854. James’s half-brother George Whistler married a daughter of Winans. Mark Twain encountered “two Whistler girls” seated at the (pivoting) dinner table on his tour of the house.
* A term for a con artist.
† Harte’s paternal grandfather, Bernard Harte, was Jewish. Interestingly, Sam Clemens himself had felt the sting of anti-Semitism as he struggled for acceptance with the Boston Brahmins. James Russell Lowell, for one, strongly suspected that Clemens was a Jew.
34
Abroad Again
(1878–79)
I haven’t done a stroke of work since the Atlantic dinner; have only moped around,” Clemens told Howells a day after writing to his presumed victims.
“…How could I ever have—
“Ah, well, I am a great & sublime fool. But then, I am God’s fool, & all His works must be contemplated with respect.”1
The oldest, most reliable solution beckoned: move. But where? Clemens prodded at Thomas Nast to revive his old idea of a joint tour, with Mark Twain lecturing while the cartoonist sketched out images on a large easel pad. Mark Twain estimated that the “swag” would total $100,000 in one hundred nights, after which the two could “retire from public life.”2 But Nast turned him down; he’d grown to hate the lecturing scene. His mother was the first to learn of his next plan: “Life has come to be a very serious matter with me,” Sam informed her in February. “I cannot write a book at home…Therefore, I have about made up my mind to take my tribe & fly to some little corner of Europe & budge no more until I have completed one of the half dozen books that lie begun, up stairs…We propose to sail the 10th April.”3 He elaborated to Mary Fairbanks that “I want to find a German village where nobody knows my name or speaks any English, & shut myself up in a closet 2 miles from the hotel, & work every day without interruption…”4
It would almost happen like that, but not on any preexisting project. Among the works that he longed to complete were The Prince and the Pauper, the mischievous family memoir “The Autobiography of a Damned Fool” (which Livy eventually made him give up); a draft of “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,” and a novel, which he never finished, Simon Wheeler, Detective. Tacked on to the scaffolding of the unproduced play, Cap’n Simon Wheeler, The Amateur Detective, this enigmatic, dream-ridden fantasy involves a young man who travels three days on horseback from Kentucky to a small Missouri town with the intention of shooting to death a cousin, who is described as sappy, sentimental, giddy, and thoughtless, to settle a family feud. Some scholars have seen in it a fictionalized fantasy of Sam Clemens murdering Orion.5 The unfinished work would take a backseat to a contract he was quietly negotiating for a book about this expedition, which he already imagined as a follow-up success to The Innocents Abroad: not with Elisha Bliss—he was fed up with Bliss and the American Publishing Company—but with Bliss’s son Frank, who was forming his own enterprise. With the shrewd instinct of the professional writer selecting a narrative foil, Sam arranged for Joe Twichell to join the entourage in August: the two chums would hike the mountains of Germany and Italy together, and Mark Twain would write up their adventures real and imagined in his book.
Clemens reserved two staterooms on the steamship Holsatia, set to depart New York for Hamburg, Germany, on April 11. The entourage would include Livy and the girls, Livy’s friend Clara Spaulding, and the German nursemaid Rosina Hay. He told some friends and relatives that he expected to be gone between two and three years. Orion reached out to him in the weeks before departure, sending him some hopeful pages of a novel in progress. Sam wasn’t impressed. “You make it appear that you are rewriting a portion of Jules Verne’s book,” Sam chided his brother. “You will have to leave out your gorilla, your disordered compass & your trip to the interior world…I think the world has suffered so much from that French idiot that they could enjoy seeing him burlesqued—but I doubt if they want to see him imitated.”6 A month later, he added: “I shall speak [about offering it] to the N.Y. Weekly people. To publish it in that will be to bury it.”7
In the first week of April Sam dashed off alone to Fredonia for a farewell visit with the Clemens clan. Being again under the same roof with Jane and Pamela, reliving vestiges of the boyhood he had fled, must have merged in his night thoughts with the imminent voyage, and he composed a tone poem of remarkable despair in his notebook: half aphoristic, half syllogistic, all dark.
To go abroad has something of the same sense that death brings—I am no longer of ye—what ye say of me is now of no consequence—but of how much consequence when I am with ye & of ye! I know you will refrain from saying harsh things because they can’t hurt me, since I am out of reach & cannot hear them. This is why we say no harsh things of the dead.8
A good-bye visit to Olivia Lewis Langdon in Elmira, and then the entourage entrained for New York on April 10. They stayed overnight at the Gilsey House, and the next day they were at sea, leaving the sorrows of the Whittier speech behind. Six weeks later, Ulysses and Julia Grant and one of their sons, Jesse, embarked on their own tour of western Europe, then the Holy Land, and on into the Far East. Jesse, an innocent abroad at nineteen, scandalized Queen Victoria with his bad manners.
The two-week crossing was “almost devilish,” Clemens reported: sunlit skies alternating with storms of rain, hail, sleet, and snow. Hamburg proved a restorative port of call. The Clemenses entrained through the German countryside and a string of capacious hotels, and suddenly all dark weather was banished, external and internal. “What a paradise this land is!” Clemens rhapsodized. “What clean clothes, what good faces, what tranquil contentment, what prosperity, what genuine freedom, what superb government! And I am so happy, for I am responsible for none of it.”9 Livy rejoiced in the beauty of the land and the luxury of hotel life. She devoured all available sources of German culture, including the language, more or less. Hearing a woman exclaim, “Wunderschön!” at the sight of some flowers in a hotel dining room, she told her husband, “There—Gott sei dank, I understood THAT, anyway—window-shade!”10 Livy imposed the language on her small daughters. “Poor Susie!” Clemens told Howells. “From the day we reached German soil we have required Rosa to speak German to the children—which they hate with all their souls. The other morning in Hanover, Susie came to me…& said, in halting syllables, ‘Papa, wie viel Uhr is tes?’—then turned, with pathos in her big eyes, & said, ‘Mamma, I wish Rosa was made in English.’ ”11
Their first extended stay was at Heidelberg. The family put up at the Schloss Hotel on the side of a steep, thickly forested mountain overlooking Heidelberg Castle, the town, and the valley beyond. Clemens wired three hundred dollars to Joseph Twichell to cover his August crossing. “We are divinely located,” he told Howells, as his ecstasies of description surged to life once more.
Our bed-room has two great glass bird-cages (enclosed balconies) one looking toward the Rhine Valley & sunset, the other looking up the Neckar-cul de sac, & naturally we spend nearly all our time in these…
The view from those bird-cages is my despair. The picture changes from one enchanting aspect to another in ceaseless procession…To look out upon the Rhine Valley when a thunderstorm is sweeping across it is a thing sublime…And t
hen Heidelberg on a dark night! It is massed, away down there, almost right under us…Its curved & interlacing streets are a cobweb, beaded thick with lights…then the rows of lights on the arched bridges, & their glinting reflections in the water; & away at the far end, the Eisenbahnhof, with its twenty solid acres of glittering gas-jets, a huge garden, one may say, whose every plant is a flame.12
These and other notebook entries form the rough drafts of some of the luminous word-pictures in A Tramp Abroad, which Clemens began writing on the scene, in May. As is often the case, his transfer of the material from journal to manuscript was marked by an intense distillation, as in this passage from Chapter 2.
One thinks Heidelberg by day—with its surroundings—is the last possibility of the beautiful; but when he sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way, with that glittering railway constellation pinned to the border, he requires time to consider upon the verdict.13
Capturing the physical world—terrain, weather, architecture—with words is one of the commonest errands of literature, at least through the modernist era; but the art of it is often a lot more elusive than the passage on the page might make it appear. Mark Twain accomplished this lapidary miracle again and again, from the Mississippi River as “national banner” in The Gilded Age through the Acropolis by night in The Innocents Abroad through the Rockies as “Sultans of fastness” in Roughing It through the interior of a cave in Tom Sawyer. Verbal description was among his greatest literary gifts; yet today it ranks among the least remarked, behind his aphorisms and comic tales. Even as Mark Twain was reaching the zenith of this lucidity, technology had begun to devalue visual prose writing as surely as the railroad devalued the steamboat. All those engraved steel-plate illustrations in his big books, working at cross-purposes with the intimate linguistic collaboration he elicited from his readers, were only the beginning. Newspaper rotogravure ushered in the photojournalism age in the 1890s; movies soon followed; and finally television, and typographic language shriveled before each new wave. Iconic images ruled the world’s imaginative consciousness. Virtually the first iconic image to saturate the mass media, of course, was the face of Mark Twain.
“I HAVE some good news to tell you…we’ve quit feeling poor!” Sam crowed to Howells in June.14 Livy’s inherited interest in her father’s company (since renamed McIntyre Coal, with Charley Langdon as president) had remained constricted since the financial panic of 1873. Now, income had begun to flow again as the business recovered. The surge of income would allow the Clemenses “to live in Hartford on a generous scale,” Sam exulted, and immediately turned plutocrat: “[O]f course the communists & the asinine government will go to work & smash it all.”* Livy computed the family’s monthly expenses at $250 a month, a tenth of their household budget back on Farmington Avenue. Europe’s remarkable affordability was an amusement to the Clemenses now; in little more than a decade, it would prove a critical necessity.
The strongest evidence of Sam’s psychic revival lay in his renewed appetite for writing: letters, manuscripts, and, strikingly, his journal entries. Wild, eclectic, aphoristic, confessional, experimental, packed with diamond-sharp slivers of sight and sound and mise-en-scène, his notebooks from this sojourn show a writerly mind fully regathered and primed for work. Even his chronic kvetching is buoyed with exuberance. “Drat this German tongue,”15 he wailed gleefully to Howells after two weeks of lessons in which he rapidly fell behind Livy’s and the children’s progress. His notebook records the early contours of what became a tour de force in Appendix D of A Tramp Abroad: “The Awful German Language.”
A dog is der Hund the dog; a woman is die Frau the wom[an]; a horse is das Pferd, the horse; now you put that dog in the Genitive case, & is he the same dog he was before? No sir; he is des Hundes; put him in the Dative case & what is he? Why, he is dem Hund. Now you snatch him into the Accusative case & how is it with him? Why he is den Hunden? But suppose he happens to be twins & you have to pluralize him—what then? Why sir they’ll swap that twin dog around thro’ the four cases till he’ll think he’s an entire International Dog-Show all in his own person. I don’t like dogs, but I wouldn’t treat a dog like that. I wouldn’t even treat a borrowed dog that way.16
Some of the words are so long that they have a perspective. When one casts his glance along down one of these, it gradually tapers to a point like the receding lines of a railway track.17
He sketched out a rough draft of what would become one of his most famous aphorisms: “He would rather decline 2 drinks than one German verb.”18
Another series of entries testifies to the price he paid for his famously sensitive ear. “But the piano is the special hell—how it racks one’s head!”19 “The hated Cuckoo-clock.”20 “Heard cuckoo in woods…first cuckoo I ever heard outside of a clock. Was surprised to see how closely it imitated the clock…The hatefulest thing in the world is a cuckoo clock.”21 “Curse the eternal hotel fashion of noisy pets.”22 “Drat this stupid ‘yodling.’ ”23 “Church bells are usually hateful things…”24 “Still that ringing goes on. I wish to God that church wd burn down.”25 A special source of acoustical hell was the opera. “Lohengrin…accomplished for me what no circumstance…has ever been able to do before…it gave me the headache.”26 “[The music] so reminds me of the time the orphan asylum burned down.”27 “I hate the very name of opera—partly because of the nights of suffering I have endured in its presence, & partly because I want to love it and I can’t.”28 In his resulting book, he devotes an efficient two chapters to a thorough demolition of Wagner, German opera, opera in general, and opera audiences, warming himself up with a two-pronged assault on German theater and German language. Seeing King Lear played in German was a mistake, he says; his party “never understood anything but the thunder and lightning; and even that was reversed to suit German ideas, for the thunder came first and the lightning followed after.”29
The Clemens party moved on to Baden-Baden in July (notebook entry: “See Naples & then die.—but endeavor to die before you see B.B.”30). There, a week later, they greeted Joe Twichell. The arrival of Mark Twain’s friend and compliant foil pushed his manuscript-on-the-go to full cruising speed at Chapter 11, and crystallized its design. For the ensuing thirty-five chapters (four short of the conclusion), Twichell co-stars with the narrator as the prim and naïve “Harris.” Now the extended joke of the “tramp” sets in: the narrator and his friend are embarked on a planned foot tour of Europe. “I…start on pedestrian tours,” he later explained to Howells, “but mount the first conveyance that offers…endeavoring to seem unconscious that this is not legitimate pedestrianizing.”31 An onset of rheumatism in Clemens’s legs made the comic conceit all but unavoidable.
Twichell arrived in the nick of time. Clemens’s inspired word-portraits at the manuscript’s outset had given way to darker preoccupations. Dueling, a normative (if disfiguring) practice among German students, seized his attention, probably on the surge of painful old Washoe memories reawakened. He devoted most of five early chapters to bloody descriptions of student duels and their aftermath, and eventually posited himself as a fictional second in a duel between Frenchmen.
With Livy, the children, and the staff stashed safely in Baden-Baden, Clemens and Twichell stepped off into the Black Forest. The Hartford preacher, still rugged at forty, must have set a challenging pace for the short-legged and now achy-legged author—although in A Tramp, it is the dandified “Harris” who huffs and puffs to keep up. They roamed and rambled throughout August and the first month of September, and the book narrative swelled, first in Clemens’s overflowing notebooks and then on the draft page.
They run into cuckoos and beer gardens and the Empress of Germany, and then a gigantic French Countess: “—did wish I might venture to ask her for her dimensions.”32 “Harris” twits the narrator about butchering the native tongue during a confidential chat on a train: “Speak in German,—these Germans may understand English.”33
Mark Twain worked out the rudiments of a runn
ing joke.
Guidebook says no tourist should fail to climb the mountain & enjoy the view. Hired boy to climb the Mt & examine (or enjoy?) the view. He felt well repaid for all his trouble.34
On August 9, Twichell and Clemens boarded a boat at Heilbronn for an excursion down the Neckar River. They stopped for cold beer and hot chicken along the way, and continued toward Hirschhorn in a smaller craft. Sam maintained his near-preternatural gift for spotting undraped females while traveling: “a dozen naked little girls bathing” just below Jagtfeldt,35 and, a little later on, a “[s]lender naked girl” who “snatched a leafy bow of a bush across her front & then stood satisfied gazing out upon us as we floated by—a very pretty picture.”36 (In A Tramp Abroad, he estimates her age at an eyebrow-raising twelve. Luckily, the illustrator upholds Victorian propriety by giving the protective bush enough foliage to cover the entire Saturday Morning Club.)
This little side trip undergoes a deeply freighted transformation in A Tramp Abroad. Mark Twain, writing in Munich in early 1879, spins it into a nonesuch adventure: “I am going to Heidelberg on a raft. Will you venture with me?”37 “Harris” recedes into an amorphous “party,” the narrator takes over navigation duties, and a mock-heroic odyssey ensues: At first, “The motion of the raft is…gentle, and gliding, and smooth…it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience…all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream…”38 Steamboats pass them by, old tales are told. Then a frightful, if comically miniature storm (“the sea was running inches high”39), forces all on board to shore. After some dry-land adventures, the narrator secures another raft for the final leg of the voyage into Heidelberg. A bridge looms; the narrator-navigator realizes a collision is inevitable and “judiciously stepped ashore.”