Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Before us, in the flooding moonlight, rose the noblest ruins we had ever looked upon—the Propylæ; a small Temple of Minerva; the Temple of Hercules, and the grand Parthenon.57

  But it was not these antiquities that dominated Sam’s imagination: it was something else, something suggested by the terrifying profusion of marble statues, many of them fragmented, which confronted him and his friends.

  …some of them armless, some without legs, others headless—but all looking mournful in the moonlight, and startlingly human!…The place seemed alive with ghosts.58

  Here, amid the oldest remnants he had ever seen, in a place as far as he had yet traveled—5,700 miles from Hannibal, nearly a quarter of the way around the globe—Sam Clemens found himself back in a kind of home. Here was the living dream world, the world inhabited by the Golden Arm; the world where Henry floated, and the essence of Laura Wright, and presences still waiting to reveal themselves. The moonlight melted the present into the past, reality into fantasy: gleaming Athens below them, the Temple of Theseus, Plato, Demosthenes, Mars Hill, Xenophon, Herodotus, the Bema, St. Paul. A biblical passage played at the edges of his mind. Its words eluded him, but later he looked them up. It was St. Paul’s reproach to the Athenian men for their worship of idolatry, as recounted in Acts 17.

  Then Paul stood in the midst of Mars hill, and said, Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious;

  For as I passed by and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription: TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom, therefore, ye ignorantly worship, him do I declare unto you.59

  It was a Twainian moment, a youthful prank, in the service of comic writing that touched deep dreams and fears.

  BACK ON board the ship, he headed east through the Dardanelles and into the Hellespont, Turkey’s flags visible on the shoreline; into the Golden Horn, and a brief stop at Constantinople—“the very heart and home of cripples and human monsters,”60 where one could see a three-legged woman and a man with his eye in his cheek. He disapproved of “Mohammedan” morals: “They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however.”61 Then, up the Black Sea to Russia. Brief stops at Sebastapol and Odessa, and then southward again, to Yalta, where they arrived on August 25. Here commenced an unscheduled two-day hobnob with emperors, empresses, dukes, and duchesses that had Sam gushing in his letters home.

  The Yalta stop was about business. The Quaker City’s owners were looking to unload the vessel, a fact not made prominent in the tour prospectus, and the tour was arranged partly to showcase her. Yalta harbored one of the residences of Aleksandr Nikolaevich Romanov—Czar Aleksandr II, the liberator of the serfs from a lineage of despots. The Quaker City money men considered the tsar a likely customer. Sam and the other passengers, just dimly aware of the sale notion, dismissed any thought that an emperor of Russia would take the slightest interest in their presence. To their surprise, the emperor sent an invitation, and the pilgrims elected sinner Sam to draft an acceptance. “The whole tribe turned out to receive our party,” an incredulous Sam wrote of the palace visit on August 26.62 He added later, “[T]he Emperor of Russia and his family conducted us all through their mansion themselves. They made no charge. They seemed to take a real pleasure in it.”63 Abandoning his jaundice, he detailed the royal family’s simplicity of dress, their courtesy, their ability to speak English, the charm of the fourteen-year-old Grand Duchess Marie, the tsar’s daughter. As for the tsar,

  He is very tall and spare, and a determined-looking man…It is easy to see that he is kind and affectionate. There is something very noble in his expression when his cap is off.64

  In his book, Mark Twain detailed his attempts to get his mind around the power of the man whose word could send ships flying through the waves, locomotives speeding across the plains, multitudes to do his bidding.

  I had a sort of vague desire to examine his hands and see if they were of flesh and blood, like other men’s. Here was a man who could do this wonderful thing, and yet if I chose I could knock him down…If I could have stolen his coat, I would have done it. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.65

  Sam’s notion of the tsar’s enchanted rule over a happy kingdom was a bit idealistic—Aleksandr II was assassinated by revolutionaries in 1881, and his grandson Nicholas II was inconvenienced by the Russian Revolution. But at the time he had a rose-colored view: at Yalta he’d danced an astonishing Russian dance for an hour with a pretty girl (“I have never ceased to think of that girl…Her dear name haunts me still in my dreams”66), and, better still, he got to see some ladies bathing naked near the ship.

  ON SEPTEMBER 5, the Quaker City pilgrims arrived at Smyrna, their portal into the Holy Land. Just before the passengers disembarked at Smyrna Bay, something had happened to Sam (or so he later claimed): a small moment, but one that would gain force in his imaginative memory until, when he spoke of it thirty-nine years later to the ever-credulous biographer Albert Bigelow Paine, it had taken on the proportions of an omen. He’d wandered into young Charley Langdon’s cabin, and Charley had handed him an ivory miniature for a look. On its surface was a tiny portrait of Charley’s twenty-two-year-old sister, Olivia. No painting of that description of Samuel Clemens’s future wife survives. A famous porcelaintype of Olivia made in 1868—she is looking off across her right shoulder, her hair done up behind, a knotted bow at her neck—is widely accepted as the image Charley handed to Sam, but that is because a Langdon family member later misidentified it to Paine. That and one other porcelaintype image, along with a watercolor miniature of her in 1864, show a young woman more ethereal than beautiful, with rather narrow-set eyes under dark brows; a small, composed mouth; and the sort of ears that might have drawn tugs from her schoolmates.

  Mark Twain told Paine that he regarded the image as “something more than a mere human likeness,”67 and asked Charley if he could have it (Charley said no). Perhaps all this is true; perhaps it is the bit of necessary mythologizing—the “Laura Wright moment”—that weaves through Mark Twain’s memories of the people whom he loved, or hated, most intensely.

  Reconnoitering the city then known as “Beirout” on September 10, the Quaker City passengers broke into smaller groups. The most ambitious of these would tackle “the long trip,” a trek fifty-five miles southeast to Damascus, then 150 miles south to Jerusalem, across treeless, sun-scorched terrain. The organizer was Colonel Denny, Methodist Sunday-school teacher and the excursion’s ranking authority on biblical history. Denny had spent the Atlantic crossing absorbed in his Holy Land guidebooks—books that Sam had grabbed and devoured as soon as Denny set them aside. With his newspaperman’s avidity for a good source, Sam began lobbying for a place in the colonel’s entourage. Denny put him off: his lifelong wish was about to come true, and he wasn’t going to have it ruined by a trashmouth like Sam Clemens.68 Sam prostrated himself. He promised that he would refrain from uttering one naughty or in-vain word for the duration of the trek. Denny relented, and Sam came aboard, along with Dan Slote, Jack Van Nostrand, and Julius Moulton of St. Louis. They joined “pilgrims” Denny; Dr. George Birch, a plump and somber gentleman from Hannibal; and two others who really pushed Sam’s buttons: the well-named William F. Church of Cincinnati, and Joshua William Davis of New York. The group delegated three of its members to procure pack mules, supplies, and guides. Sam passed the time strolling the city, its bright houses and streets yet more than a century away from bombardment. The women “cover their entire faces with dark-colored or black veils…and then expose their breasts to the public.”69

  When Sam saw what his cohorts had negotiated, he was staggered. For five dollars a day apiece, in gold, they would be accompanied by nineteen servants tending twenty-six pack mules that bore five circus-sized tents; eight iron bedsteads, each with its own mattress, pillows and sheets; washbasins, pewter pitchers, and
towels; carpets; candlesticks; cutlery; and a menu that included roast mutton, chicken, and goose; bread, tea, pudding, and apples, and coffee. Camping on Jackass Hill was never like this.

  Despite these luxuries, dyspepsia permeates Mark Twain’s reportage of the Damascus trek—and the rest of The Innocents Abroad. He was infuriated that the pilgrims collapsed an arduous three-day journey into two, so as to avoid travel on the Sabbath. Beside himself at the toll this took on the horses, Mark Twain raged, “It was not the most promising party to travel with and hope to gain a higher veneration for religion through the example of its devotees.”70 He plastered the “sinner” label on these hypocrites, “whose idea of the Saviour’s religion seems to me distorted.”71 Mark Twain’s descriptions of temples and ancient city walls from here on out were offset by bursts of dismay at the poverty he saw everywhere, and the shriveled, sickly, fly-bitten people who were its victims. Gray lizards caught his eye, and yellow, barren desert, and dust, and emptiness. It was as though he had been jilted yet again: the physical Holy Land was as devoid of the numinous as was his spiritual landscape. Even the grapes were smaller than the Sunday-school books had depicted them.

  Leaving Damascus, the group endured temperatures so hot that Sam thought he could distinguish each ray of sun as it struck his head. The Americans were wrapped in white, festooned with green sun goggles, clutching white umbrellas. “I thanked fortune that I had one, too, notwithstanding it was packed up with the baggage and was ten miles ahead.”72 At the village of Banias, he brooded on the “incorrigible pilgrims,” who

  have come in with their pockets full of specimens broken from the ruins. I wish this vandalism could be stopped. They broke off fragments from Noah’s tomb; from the exquisite sculptures of the temples of Baalbec; from the houses of Judas and Ananias…from the worn Greek and Roman inscriptions set in…the Castle of Banias; and now they have been hacking and chipping these old arches here that Jesus looked upon in the flesh. Heaven protect the Sepulchre when this tribe invades Jerusalem!73

  This, along with the Sabbath tongue-lashing and other sarcasms directed at the “tribe” through the rest of the book, would arouse outrage among them after The Innocents Abroad was published. Which was more or less what Mark Twain intended.

  AT TIBERIAS, the pilgrims came alive with excitement. Here lay Galilee, the sea the Apostles sailed, and whose waters Jesus bestrode. “To stand before it in the flesh…to sail upon the hallowed sea, and kiss the holy soil that compassed it about,” Mark Twain wrote, “these were aspirations they had cherished while a generation…left its furrows in their faces and its frosts upon their hair.”74 Mark Twain watched as these middle-aged innocents, frantic to “take shipping” on waters, hailed a passing ship and asked their newest “Ferguson” to find out the price:

  “How much?…how much to take us all—eight of us, and you—to Bethsaida [i.e., the other side]…we want to coast around every where—every where!—all day long!—I could sail a year in these waters!…ask him how much?—any thing—any thing whatever!—tell him we don’t care what the expense is!”

  Ferguson told the pilgrims that the boatman wanted two Napoleons, the equivalent of eight dollars. One or two countenances fell. Then a pause.

  “Too much!—we’ll give him one!”

  I never shall know how it was—I shudder yet when I think how the place is given to miracles—but in a single instant of time…that ship was twenty paces from the shore, and speeding away like a frightened things! Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore…75

  The pilgrims caved in and offered the two Napoleons, shouting themselves hoarse, but it was too late.

  How the pilgrims abused each other! Each said it was the other’s fault, and each in turn denied it. No word was spoken by the sinners—even the mildest sarcasm might have been dangerous at such a time.76

  Well, not exactly. Sam overheard a sarcasm of inspired sacrilege uttered by Jack Van Nostrand, but waited until his late-life biographical interviews with Paine to disclose that as the older men reeled over the two-Napoleon fee, and the boat receded, the young sinner turned to the fuming colonel and asked, “Well, Denny, do you wonder now that Christ walked?”77

  The “boatman” episode marks a turning point in Mark Twain’s reportage. For the first time, he brings his fellow passengers into the narrative for truly critical scrutiny. He draws a distinction between the older “pilgrims” and his group of “sinners.” He makes it clear where his sympathies lie—a groundbreaking switch of allegiance in an America that still reflexively lined up on the Puritan side of any good-versus-evil dichotomy. From this point on, the misbehavior of the pilgrims was fair game to Mark Twain.

  In Jerusalem, at the tomb of Adam, Mark Twain’s satirical voice stirred again.

  There is no question that he is actually buried in the grave which is pointed out as his…because it has never yet been proven that that grave is not the grave in which he is buried.

  In one of the book’s best-known passages, Mark Twain erupts in mock grief.

  The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depths, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative…[H]e died before I was born—six thousand brief summers before I was born. But let us try to bear it with fortitude.78

  At Bethlehem, they paused near the walled olive garden where the shepherds saw the angels on the first Christmas. “[T]he pilgrims took some of the stone wall and hurried on.”79 A visit to the grotto where Christ was born. And then a long downhill trek to the Mediterranean coast. At the end of September, the passengers reassembled on the ship from their various expeditions. The end was drawing near.

  After a stop at Alexandria, the Quaker City steamed west across the Mediterranean on October 7, the first leg of the voyage back home to an America-that-was-becoming.

  It is fair to say that Mark Twain remained unswayed by the charms of the Holy Land. Magdala? “Not a beautiful place,” he’d told his readers. “It is thoroughly Syrian, and that is to say that it is thoroughly ugly, and cramped, squalid, uncomfortable and filthy.” Galilee? “Dismal and repellant.” The Dead Sea? “It is a scorching, arid, repulsive solitude.” Palestine? “Desolate and unlovely.” Cheops? “A corrugated, unsightly mountain of stone.” The region as a whole? “No Second Advent,” he scrawled in his notebook—“Christ been here once—will never come again.” His judgment was not unremittingly negative. In one of the last thoughts that he entered from Europe in his notebook, he conceded,

  Tomb of the Virgin would draw in New York.80

  * In chapter 4 of The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain describes this game as “a mixture of ‘hop-scotch’ and shuffle-board played with a crutch” (p. 39).

  20

  In the Thrall of Mother Bear

  (October 1867–New Year’s Day 1868)

  Strained civility and moody games of dominoes ruled the shipboard atmosphere during the voyage home. The passengers had been at close quarters for six months, save for overland excursions, and most of them were bored to death with one another. Among the few enthusiasms that united many of them were degrees of disrelish for Sam Clemens. Complaints to Captain Duncan about Sam and his fellow “fast young men” escalated. They had mostly endured Sam’s outlaw ways, these gray-haired Christian citizens, during the outward voyage. His card playing, his smoking, his champagne guzzling, his wisecracks, his swearing—these failings could be tolerated as long as Sam and his friends confined their debauchery to cabin No. 10, or at least to the forward deck, which they generally did. Bad publicity about the pilgrims back home—that was something else entirely.

  In October, Mark Twain’s lampooning of his fellow passengers had completed the loop from the Quaker City to American newspapers and back again to the ship. It was during a weeklong stopover at Gibraltar that the passengers got their first inkling of how they were being depicted in print. Sam and the “sinners” were away from th
e ship when the evidence arrived via mail from America. Amid the letters and newspapers was the September 19 New York Tribune, carrying Mark Twain’s letter describing the visit to the tsar. It reported in part that the Russians were

  able to make themselves pleasant company, whether they speak one’s language or not, but our tribe can’t think of anything to do or say when they get hold of a subject of the Czar who knows only his own language…However, one of our ladies, from Cleveland, Ohio, is a notable exception to this rule. She escorts Russian ladies about the ship, and talks and laughs with them, and makes them feel at home…I wish we had more like her.1

  Another letter, signed “United States Officer” in the Brooklyn Eagle, characterized the Quaker City passengers as “a hard, rough-looking set of people; mostly backwoodsmen and country farmers” that included, “as ‘Mark Twain’ expresses it, ‘thirteen women and two ladies,’ besides a party of fast young men.”2 The letter was likely written by an American naval officer who’d visited the ship. The passengers would have recognized the source, even if the officer hadn’t mentioned it. Sam and his friends boarded the Quaker City at Cadiz on the morning of October 25, unaware of the furor on board. Sam was rescued from the passengers’ wrath by Charley Langdon, who intercepted the arrivals and gave them a quick summary of what had happened, and of which passengers were mad about it, and how mad. Sam slipped into cabin No. 10 and stayed there for a few days, until certain tempers had cooled down. He began a play that mocked the prissiness of his shipboard critics. One of the characters, no doubt echoing an actual complaint, whined of Sam’s crowd: