Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Like his successors, this “Ferguson” became the tail that wagged the dog, enacting some of the scams that would remain familiar with Yank tourists across three centuries. He elbowed his way into their mealtime company and managed to gorge himself or pound down a bottle or two of wine; he ignored instructions to lead them to a given destination, and instead lured them into shops in which his connection to the proprietor appeared suspiciously keen. “I shall visit Paris again some day, and then let the guides beware!” vows Mark Twain in Innocents. “I shall go in my war-paint—I shall carry my tomahawk along.”28 Mark Twain plays his “Fergusons” for laughs, but the guides bear symbolic resonance as well. They make apt escorts through the wasteland of fraud, decay, anthill opportunism, and diminished expectations that would comprise Mark Twain’s view of Europe at the dawn of modern tourism.

  In time, the world headquarters of “modern tourism” would shift to America, with excesses of hucksterism, historic-site hype and souvenir- mongering that would put the Old World to shame. Among the most energetically marketed “destination sites” of later centuries would be Hannibal, Missouri, where one could contemplate the house that Mark Twain lived in as a boy, pay admission to tour the cave he once explored, see a lock of his hair and articles of his clothing at the Mark Twain museum, purchase a T-shirt with his likeness, and have a dinner of Mark Twain Fried Chicken at the Mark Twain Dinette after a stirring ride on the Too-Too Twain.

  If only he could have lived to skewer it. In his day, the hucksterism still had some class. Inside a “temple” at midnight in the suburb of Asnières, Ferguson, Sam, Dan, and the Doctor found themselves witnessing the dance already synonymous with French high culture.

  …[T]he music struck up, and then—I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers. They were dancing the renowned “Can-can.” A handsome girl in the set before me…grasped her dresses vigorously on both sides with her hands, raised them pretty high, danced an extraordinary jig that had more activity and exposure about it than any jig I ever saw before, and then, drawing her clothes still higher, she advanced gaily to the centre and launched a vicious kick full at her vis-à-vis [partner] that must infallibly have removed his nose if he had been seven feet high. It was a mercy he was only six.29

  He happened upon another convergence with a decisive figure of his century—and in this case, of the next century as well. Standing on a board balanced on two barrels near the Arc de l’Étoile, Sam and his companions took in a parade that featured the crash of military bands, the national colors, file upon file of cavalry and artillery, and, finally, a great carriage bearing the leader of the Second French Empire, Napoleon III. His fellow passenger was Abdul Aziz of Turkey, Lord of the Ottoman Empire. Clemens ogled Napoleon, nephew of the Napoleon. Here was the escaped political prisoner, survivor of assassination attempts, president of France, victor in the Crimean War, rebuilder of Paris, and an architect of the 20th century’s longest-running conflicts. It was Napoleon III who had violently established a French presence, in 1858, in Vietnam.

  AT NOTRE Dame, a de rigueur stop for travel writers, the demands of descriptive prose seemed to weigh on Twain a little. “We had heard of it before,” he wrote. “…[I]t was like the pictures.”30 He perked up a bit only after a visit to the Morgue—the sight of a purplish, swollen drowned man on a slanting stone reawakened his descriptive brio. Arriving back at the port of Marseilles, Mark Twain was delighted to learn that the Quaker City’s crew had waged a three-night dockside brawl with some British sailors, and had ended up kicking some major Britannia butt. “I probably would not have mentioned this war had it ended differently.”31 The excursion sailed on to Genoa, where Mark Twain rated the women the prettiest in Europe. (Frenchwomen, he’d noticed, tended to have large hands and feet, and mustaches, and eat garlic and onions.) At the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, his group was shown a chest that contained the ashes of St. John—the second set of these he’d seen. After being asked by a local cleric to admire a portrait of the Madonna painted by St. Luke (“We could not help admiring the Apostle’s modesty in never once mentioning in his writings that he could paint”32), he did a little tallying of the relic count: a piece of the true cross in every church they’d gone into; about a keg’s worth of the nails; the crown of thorns in three locations; and enough of the bones of St. Denis for them to duplicate him, if necessary.

  Having exhausted the wonders of Genoa, Sam and his two “sinner” comrades escaped the Quaker City herd again, boarding a train to Milan and points east. They barreled toward a massed inventory of art, cathedrals, landmarks, relics, and curiosities that initially enchanted Sam, then excited his ravenous capacity to absorb minutiae and detail, and finally unleashed the full force of his indignation, which never quite subsided thereafter, and which annealed The Innocents as a liberating force in America’s self-definition.

  Like most of his books, Innocents is a grab bag of abrupt digression. A chilling memory, for example, evoked in Milan, became one of the more famous of his personal anecdotes in Chapter 18. His flashback occurred while a cathedral guide was showing the group a piece of sculpture: the anatomically perfect rendering of a man without skin. The figure’s exposed veins, muscles, tendons, and tissues horrified Sam, and he knew at once that these would enter his dreams. This awareness propelled him instantly back to Marshall Clemens’s law office, and the night when Sammy discovered the stabbed, glassy-eyed corpse in the moonlight. He ends his insertion of this incident with the thought, “I have slept in the same room with him often, since then—in my dreams.”33 The whiplash transition is vintage Mark Twain, an example of his indifference to narrative form or design. William Dean Howells expressed it best: Clemens “was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him.”34

  Sam’s mood burned off as his entourage slogged through La Scala theater and a Roman amphitheater; and, inevitably, found themselves inside the ruin of a small church (or chapel) that harbored the best-known painting in the world, Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Here, faced with the opportunity to posture again before a treasure of Western culture, Sam turned as contrary as a Missouri mule. He planted his feet and gave it the most withering comeuppance since the Squatter punched the Dandy into the Mississippi. The work was battered and discolored, “and Napoleon’s horses kicked the legs off most [of] the disciples when they (the horses, not the disciples,) were stabled there more than half a century ago.”35 He noted the dozen artists in the room, worshipfully copying the original, and said that he liked their work better. “Wherever you find a Raphael, a Rubens, a Michael Angelo, a Caracci, or a Da Vinci (and we see them every day,) you find artists copying them, and the copies are always the handsomest. May be the originals were handsome when they were new, but they are not now.”36

  Babbitt could not have put it better. But Mark Twain seems to have been after something subtler than mere yahoo bloviating. Art criticism wasn’t the point; national assertion was. (As was deep-dyed Protestant suspicion of Catholic iconography.) For better or worse, America was a country focused on the future, not on the past; a country of innovation and technology and commerce, not of dead painters and broken-down shrines; a country accelerating toward the perfectibility of man, not one stagnating in ancient glories. Mark Twain saw that it was time for America to be proud of this fact and to face down its sneering European tormentors, like the unflinching gunfighters of Washoe. If there was one thing that got Mark Twain crazier than the Old Masters, it was his fawning countrymen who came to genuflect and to posture before their works.

  They stand entranced before it [a da Vinci] with bated breath and parted lips, and when they speak, it is only in the catchy ejaculations of raptu
re:

  “O, wonderful!”

  “Such expression!”

  “Such grace of attitude!”

  “Such dignity!”

  “Such faultless drawing!”

  “Such matchless coloring!”37

  He concluded: “I envy them their honest admiration, if it be honest…But at the same time the thought will intrude…How can they see what is not visible?”

  When Mark Twain and his cohorts boarded a train for Como, on the shore of the lake that bore its name, his newfound malevolence toward things European intensified with every mile. The Italian women no longer simply had mustaches; they had beards, too. He took a look at storied Lake Como and decreed that Lake Tahoe was much finer. As for the rural countryside, “We were in the heart and home of priestcraft—of a happy, cheerful, contented ignorance, superstition, degradation, poverty, indolence, and everlasting unaspiring worthlessness.”38

  Venice, once the Autocrat of Commerce, Mother of Republics, was nothing but deserted piers, empty warehouses, vanished fleets. “She sits among her stagnant lagoons, forlorn and beggared, forgotten of the world.”39 The gondola that carried the trio to the hotel reminded him of a hearse. As for the gondolier, he was “a mangy, barefooted gutter-snipe with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred from public scrutiny” (his shirttail).40 Mark Twain, Dan, and the Doctor investigated the Bridge of Sighs, where men walked to their incarceration, lunacy, and death under the Doges and the hulking Cathedral of St. Mark.

  Amidst these pallid ornaments of a white European past, Sam Clemens encountered a figure who embodied a version of the future nearly unimaginable from Sam’s own experience. Guiding the travelers through a trove of Renaissance art was a man who announced himself as the offspring of a South Carolina slave. The son of Missouri slaveholders, who had sneered as a teenager, “I reckon I had better black my face, for in these Eastern States niggers are considerably better than white people,”41 had for the first time encountered a Negro who knew lofty things he did not—the meaning of the word “Renaissance,” for instance. Sam was incredulous.

  He is well educated. He reads, writes, and speaks English, Italian, Spanish, and French, with perfect facility; is a worshipper of art and thoroughly conversant with it…He dresses better than any of us, I think, and is daintily polite.42

  In writing about this in The Innocents, he gave voice to a transitional opinion in his life and literature: “Negroes are deemed as good as white people, in Venice, and so this man feels no desire to go back to his native land. His judgment is correct.”43 As for Venice itself, the city reminded him of an Arkansas town under floodwaters. After similar cracks about Florence and Pisa, they went to Livorno (Leghorn), on the northwest coast of Italy, on July 25, where they reboarded the awaiting Quaker City. Sam felt as though he’d returned home. How jolly, how pleasant the ship was; how good the talk—probably because only about ten of the sixty-five “fossils” were aboard, the rest of them blessedly clattering around overland.

  Their onboard stay was brief. The authorities at Leghorn refused to believe that the large steamer from America was merely a pleasure excursion; they prudently theorized that its cohort of Bible-clutching, teetotaling, middle-aged passengers was in fact a cabal of dangerous revolutionaries with ties to the swashbuckling Giuseppe Garibaldi, the scourge of the Papal States and eventually the unifier of modern Italy. Alerted to a possible military quarantine, Sam, Dan, and the Doctor slipped aboard a French steamer bound for Civita Vecchia, from where they hopped a train headed for Rome. Sam arrived in the Eternal City irritated by the obligation of finding something new to say about this most overwritten (and Catholic) of European capitals: “What is there in Rome for me to see that others have not seen before me?…What can I discover?—Nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”44 So he turned the point-of-view spotlight 180 degrees around, imagining himself a Roman traveler writing his impressions of America, and produced fifteen hundred words of mockery at Italian deficiencies: “I saw common men and common women who could read…[I]f I dared think you would believe it, I would say they could write, also…Jews, there, are treated like human beings, instead of dogs…”45 He kept his imagination in high gear as his gaze returned to Rome. In describing the Coliseum in Chapter 26 of Innocents, he imagined ancient dry-goods clerks escorting young ladies to the contests and plying them with ice cream while gladiators carved one another up. He pretended to find an old copy of the “Roman Daily Battle-Ax,” which covered the carnage in the style of a Washoe drama critic:

  He was not thoroughly up in the backhanded stroke [of the broadsword], but it was very gratifying to his numerous friends to know that, in time, practice would have overcome this defect. However, he was killed. His sisters, who were present, expressed considerable regret. His mother left the Coliseum…A matinee for the little folks is promised for this afternoon, on which occasion several martyrs will be eaten by the tigers.46

  The three young men began to amuse themselves by playing dumb with their increasingly predictable guides rattling off their predictable spiels, and their deadpan wickedness made for some of the comic highlights of The Innocents Abroad. Their first target was “Michael Angelo,” who seemed to be credited for every artistic relic in Italy. (“In Florence, he…designed everything, nearly, and what he did not design he used to sit on a favorite stone and look at, and they showed us the stone.”)47 Soon Sam, the Doctor, and Dan were turning it back on their guides: “Statoo brunzo.” “By Michael Angelo?” “No—not know who.” Then, at the Forum: “Michael Angelo?” A stare from the guide: “No—thousan’ year before he is born.” An obelisk: “Michael Angelo?” “Oh, mon dieu, genteelmen! Zis is two thousan’ year before he is born!”48

  Presented with a letter allegedly written by Christopher Columbus, the Doctor shrugs: “Why, I have seen boys in America only fourteen years old that could write better than that.”49 Then they hit upon a bit of shtick that gave them no end of pleasure: the soulful query raised about every personage mentioned to them” “Is—is he dead?” “That conquers the serenest of them,” Mark Twain noted with evil satisfaction. “Our Roman Ferguson is the most…long-suffering subject we have had yet…We have enjoyed his society very much. We trust he has enjoyed ours, but we are harassed with doubts.”50

  This antic mood did not last. In Rome, a city that he found appallingly squalid, Sam beheld a dark dream world where suffering and cruel death had ruled for twenty-five Catholic centuries: a world of graves and tombs and torture chambers; of slaughter as a spectator sport; of the Catacombs where corpses rotted into skeletons; of the Capuchin Convent with its architecture of human bones; a world in which the radiant/terrible Jesus Christ of his Presbyterian boyhood ranked only fifth among holy personages, behind the Virgin Mary, “The Deity,” Peter, and twelve or fifteen popes and martyrs.51 He imagined himself and his friends “moldering away ourselves, and growing defaced and cornerless.”52 Escape from this gloom was at hand: “We will go to Naples.”53 He and his friends headed there by train on August 1, 1867.

  SAM KEPT in touch with Jane Clemens and the family in St. Louis with upbeat letters along the route. He was less faithful to his professional obligations. Like the amateur “correspondents” he’d privately ridiculed early in the voyage, he fell behind: of the fifty Alta letters he had contracted to produce over the twenty-five-week round trip, he’d managed only five in five weeks, plus one to the New York Tribune. But he had been corresponding on his own behalf. He wrote to Frank Fuller in New York, instructing his agent not to line up any lecturing dates for him upon his return: “I have got a better thing, in Washington. Shall spend the winter there.”54 Sam had been offered a position as private secretary to William M. Stewart, the Republican senator from Nevada, whom he had known in Washoe. Two days later, Sam accepted Stewart’s offer, and conjectured to his mother that he could secure an office for Orion as well. Orion was frantic for work; he had begged for a position as a job-printer in several shops in St. Louis, and had been i
gnored or turned down.

  The “sinners” made an ascent of Mount Vesuvius and viewed some volcano-rendered skeletons at Pompeii. The anonymous bones and brief inscriptions led him later to insert a fake historical note “forty centuries into the future” that revealed the “unsubstantial, unlasting character of fame” as it touched a certain Civil War hero.

  URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a cotemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote ‘Rock me to Sleep, Mother.’55

  On the morning of August 11, the Quaker City—its passengers fully united for the first time in several weeks, dominoes and prayer meetings rampant—sailed for Piraeus, the port of Athens. Here the tenor of The Innocents Abroad subtly changes: Sam’s distaste for Europe’s fetishizing of its Christian history gives way to awe in the presence of a more ancient, phantasmal past—“the great Past,” Mark Twain called it, the past of Agamemnon and Achilles. He felt a compulsion to touch it. Quarantined yet again outside the harbor—another cholera scare—the Quaker City passengers could only gaze wistfully through telescopes at the square-topped Acropolis and the Parthenon that crowned it. Disembarking was forbidden. Rumors of punishment by prison sentences swept the ship. “Forbidden” had inflamed Sam as a boy, as it did now. He enlisted three other daredevils, including William Denny, the same Denny who had branded Sam a worldling and a swearer in his journal. Sam privately returned the distaste, but he had begun to cultivate the ex-Confederate officer’s friendship for strategic reasons. Drs. Birch and Jackson were the other two cohorts.56 Around midnight, the four paddled ashore in a small boat and made for the Acropolis. Twice, they were spotted; twice, they went unchallenged. They stole some grapes and were shouted at. Thwarted before a locked gate, they made noises that emptied a garrison of four Greek guards, who accepted a bribe to let them in.