Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

by Justin Kaplan

  Clemens found in places such as Venice something of what Howells had reveled in during his four years as American consul there: a “vernal silence” and slowness that questioned ambition and invited surrender. The superiority of life in Europe to life in America lay in leisure and comfort, Clemens wrote, and having made this superficial and apparently static contrast, he explored it or implied it insistently. He measured American rush, gain, and early aging against a European standard; his own need to move, move, move, his restlessness and impatience expressed themselves in a heightened response to their opposites. Europe externalized what he did not have, made him question what he did have. In Milan the contrast struck him hard. The image, in The Innocents Abroad, is of a razor which refuses to hold an edge and which the barber puts aside for a few weeks while the edge seems to come back by itself: “What a robust people, what a nation of thinkers we might be, if we would only lay ourselves on the shelf occasionally and renew our edges.” The hand is that of Samuel L. Clemens, but the voice is that of Concord, Massachusetts, not of Hannibal, Virginia City, San Francisco, or Hartford. It was a way of writing about the sources of creative energy—in his later years he was fond of simple mechanistic images (“Waiting for the tanks to fill up again,” he would say during a “dry” spell)—remote in style and content from Mark Twain, the public humorist. His description of himself as “born lazy” may have the same content, phrased in socially acceptable terms, as Herman Melville’s “For the greatest efficiency the harpooners of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness and not from out of toil.”

  Like the tenderfoot roughing it in the West, the Innocent in Europe at first finds the customs of the natives alien and obscure. His visit is a process of education, and as his sense of superiority is shaken he begins to take on some of the power and wisdom of the natives, to be able to bear their laughter at him and eventually to share it. In Europe Clemens found not only a fresh subject but also a continuing challenge to his own attitudes and to conventional American values. His correspondence from Europe was often hasty. He padded, he filled up space with easy parody and straight guidebook information. Yet it has a vividness and responsiveness, a versatile style and a flexible point of view that his New York correspondence (which he complained had been “a perfect drag”) often lacked. In New York he had mentioned that he might write a book about the Quaker City excursion. Now his sense of the comic, inconsistent, variegated possibilities in his subject became stronger and stronger, and with a book firmly in mind he made plans for the coming winter.

  From Naples he wrote to Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada accepting a private-secretaryship Stewart had offered him in June. He expected to make it one of the “best paying berths in Washington,” he explained to his family, and he added that he would probably be able to find a job for Orion. To Frank Fuller, the willing impresario, who was still out about five hundred dollars on the Cooper Union debut, he reported in greater detail, but still he showed a certain secretiveness about his long-term plans:

  Don’t make any arrangements about lecturing for me. I have got a better thing in Washington. Shall spend the winter there. It will be well for both of us, I think—and surely must be for me—better than lecturing at $50 a night for a literary society in Chicago and paying my own expenses. I have calculated all that and there isn’t any money in it…. Winter after next will be early enough to dare that—and I may be better known then, after a winter spent in Washington. I must not commit myself on paper but will explain fully when I see you in October. I have had a good deal of fun on this trip, but it is costing like Sin. I will be a busted community some time before I see America again.

  IV

  Off Piraeus in mid-August Clemens had an adventure that supplied the material for an entire letter to the Alta California: wearing a red fez, he rowed ashore at night, evaded the Greek quarantine patrol, and, followed by barking dogs, climbed the Acropolis hill, where he fell into a mood of misty romantic Hellenism and had visions of the ghosts of Athenian heroes flitting past the Parthenon. After five days in Constantinople the excursion headed north through the Black Sea toward Sebastopol to visit the Crimean battlefields. Twenty hours’ run away, at Odessa, where they stopped to take on coal and where Clemens amused himself watching the ladies of the city bathe naked in the harbor, there arrived an invitation for the passengers to visit the Autocrat of all the Russias, Alexander II, in his summer palace at Yalta. Committees were formed, meetings were held, white silk neckties, kid gloves, and swallow-tailed coats were furbished up, and Clemens set to work writing a formal address, a job which was not his strong suit, he complained, and which put him behind once again with his newspaper correspondence. He finished it in time for the American consul to read it aloud to the Czar and his suite. The onetime Confederate guerrilla warmed to the responsibilities of spokesmanship, hailed Alexander’s emancipation of the serfs as one of the brightest passages in the history of mankind, and, reaching a certain high-water mark in Russian-American amity, concluded in a furious burst of good will: “That that friendship may still be here in times to come we confidently pray; that she is and will be grateful to Russia and to her sovereign for it, we know full well; that she will ever forfeit it by an unpremeditated, unjust act or unfair course, it were treason to believe.” After the Czar, in white frock coat and pantaloons, had handed over this “rusty-looking document” to be “filed away among the archives of Russia—the stove,” he and his family took the American visitors on a tour of the palace. “They made no charge,” Clemens observed. Later on, in a talk with Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the chief director of the Russian railways, Clemens regained his normal stance. The Baron, “a man of progress and enterprise,” told him that nearly ten thousand convicts were peaceably employed by him. Clemens responded with the blend of hoax and hyperbole that Europeans were learning to expect from American humorists: “We have eighty thousand convicts employed on the railways in California—all of them under sentence of death for murder in the first degree.” He told his California readers, “That closed him out.”

  In Constantinople again, Clemens sat solemnly before the camera of Abdulah Frères. Along with the promise of a photograph, he sent to his family in St. Louis a detailed accounting of his newspaper work so far, asking them to match his catalogue against back issues of the Alta California. He listed forty-five letters—about ninety thousand words—representing nine hundred dollars at the rate of twenty dollars a letter, a substantial core of raw material for a book. On a visit to Scutari, on the other side of the Bosporus, the day before leaving for Palestine he stumbled on one of those apparent bonanzas that always competed with his literary plans: “Found a gold mine—good live quartz—the gold in snuff-colored suphurettes—ought to be very valuable here, where the labor is so cheap. Its presence,” he concluded in his notebook, “is unsuspected.” He passed this one up. On his last day in Constantinople, while Slote feverishly acquired Oriental souvenirs, Clemens frugally bought himself a Bible—not, as the Reverend Mr. Bullard might have hoped, for his devotions, but as a reference book for his Holy Land correspondence. In an offhand display of trustfulness and skepticism the new owner wrote on the flyleaf: “Sam L. Clemens—Constantinople, September 2, 1867. Please return this book to Stateroom No. 10 in case you happen to borrow it.” That Sunday, Captain Duncan, who wished to sail with the evening tide, noted in his diary: “Coaling going on forward and Mr. Bullard preaching aft. It is to be hoped that our devotions will offset our wickedness in breaking the Sabbath.” On its way out of the harbor that Sabbath night the ship tore the mainsail of a schooner, fouled a buoy, impaled one of its lifeboats on the bowsprit of yet another vessel, and left behind the body of a fireman who had either jumped or fallen from the ship while drunk, shocking the passengers less by his loss than by the condition in which he had been rushed into eternity.

  A few days later Clemens amused himself in Smyrna and Ephesus with such anomalies as an oyster mine where, with his prospector’s eye, he made out
three distinct veins of oyster shells and broken crockery in a hillside five hundred feet above sea level, a new railroad that shrieked its way between the two cities, and a purely vernacular rendering of the tale of the seven sleepers. His vision, colored by the American present with its saloons and oyster restaurants, its addiction to whiskey and poker, was a foretaste of his impatient, mocking vision of Palestine and the remote, scarcely relevant past.

  In Smyrna also, by a chance occurrence that compounded the deepest personal commitment with the almost comically trivial, he saw the grave and delicate face of Olivia Langdon. “I saw her first in the form of an ivory miniature in her brother Charley’s stateroom in the steamer Quaker City, in the Bay of Smyrna, in the summer of 1867, when she was in her twenty-second year”—so, thirty-nine years later, with circumstantial understatement, he recalled this episode which he had already made part of the mythology of love in America. It was the sort of happening that he was fond of dramatizing into a “turning point”: now an ivory miniature; two months later the chance invitation to write a book which became The Innocents Abroad and made him “at last a member of the literary guild”; another time a fifty-dollar bill he said he once found on the street in Keokuk, which heartened him to set off for the Amazon to seek a fortune in cocoa but led to his becoming a pilot instead; or the loose page he found blowing down the street in Hannibal which fired his passion for Joan of Arc; or the bout of measles caught from Will Bowen at the age of twelve which, by an exercise in selection and abridgment, he concluded was the reason he had become a writer. As he grew older he felt more and more certain that he was living in a universe which had no meaning or purpose; from these accidents, real or created, he derived for his sprawling and disorderly life the kind of order and meaning found in fiction and in dream.

  At Beirut the passengers left the ship for nearly a month of traveling in Palestine, a harsh test of expectations inflamed by too much reading of Scripture and William Prime’s devotional and damp-eyed guidebook, Tent Life in the Holyland. For their five dollars a day in gold they traveled like pashas, not roughing it in blankets on the ground, as Clemens half-seriously expected, but sleeping in stately, carpeted tents on real beds, after a huge European dinner of mutton, chicken, and goose, served on a table laid with silver and starched linen. By day the Americans rode single file on horseback, armed against the sun with white umbrellas lined with green cloth, a white cloth wrapped around their heads, thick green spectacles with blinders shielding their eyes, bouncing, short-stirruped, on their bony hard-trotting mounts, their elbows flapping like the wings of roosters about to crow. “I wouldn’t let any such caravan go through a country of mine,” Clemens said. He felt the absurdity of it early, and he mocked it with more vigor and bitterness after his mood had been soured by a hard ride, brutal on the horses, in order to reach Damascus before the Sabbath (“When did ever self-righteousness know the sentiment of pity?” he asked), and by an attack of cholera morbus once he got there. When Slote also came down with it, the pilgrims were all for leaving him behind while they made for Jerusalem, and the conflict became open. “Gentlemen, I understand you are going to leave Dan Slote here alone,” Clemens said. “I’ll be goddamned if I do.” But Damascus gave him his only pleasant recollections of the Holy Land, he said in his notebook. His stay there was also the high point of his friendship with Slote, which during the next sixteen years was put to the test of a number of joint business ventures and failed it. (In February 1882, just ten days after Slote died, Clemens concluded, with the vindictiveness he reserved for his joint-venturers, that his old friend had not really been a robber, just a pickpocket.)

  By this point in the journey Clemens had fallen into a gloom of the dead past. At the ruins of Baalbek, where the sun god had been worshiped, he marveled, a little hollowly, only at the size of the stones and at the ingenuity which had quarried, dressed, and raised them. The contrasts he used came too glibly, a mechanical formula for disposing of the past: the blocks were as big as omnibuses or freight cars or streetcars, with none smaller than a carpenter’s chest and some larger than the hull of a steamboat. Faced with the reality of latter-day Palestine seen through dust and heat and not through the eyes of guidebook authors who said they wept when they entered Jerusalem, his drawling, anecdotal reporting became laconic, epithetic. The Arabs, he said, were “ignorant, depraved, superstitious, dirty, lousy, thieving vagabonds” who lived in caves, holes, and nasty mud cabins along with lice, fleas, horses, and jackasses amidst a shabby landscape of rocks and camel dung. What Palestine needed was a coat of paint. He renamed the cities of Canaan and Galilee Baldwinsville, Dutch Flat, Jonesborough, Jacksonville, Steubenville. By the time he reached Jerusalem his last vestiges of religious sentiment were gone—even the most pious travelers, he noted, had become a little glassy-eyed—and he became openly derisive. He shed mock tears over Adam for missing the telegraph, the locomotive, the steamboat, the Paris Exposition, and even the Flood. Moses took forty years to lead the children of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land; the overland stage could have done it in thirty-six hours. The Jordan was just a creek, the Dead Sea a fraud, and in comparison with Lake Tahoe the Sea of Galilee looked like any ordinary city reservoir and was just about as big; still, an Arab boatman, to take a party sailing on its hallowed waters, demanded eight dollars—“Do you wonder now that Christ walked?” The man whom Bullard had hoped to save now amused himself with a fantasy about the boyhood of Christ: in front of the house was the sign “J. Christ & Son, Carpenters and Builders”: “Recall Infant Christ’s pranks on his school-mates—striking boys dead—withering their hands—burning the dyer’s cloth, etc.” By an ironical twist which delighted him, the Quaker City became a refugee ship for pilgrims fleeing the Holy Land, for it left Jaffa for Alexandria carrying in addition to its regular passengers forty peculiar waifs, part of a band of one hundred and sixty Maine farmers who had been led to Palestine by a man named Adams to await the Second Advent. Prophet Adams, Clemens said, had been drunk since September 1866; the crops they raised all went for taxes; and as for the rumor that they practiced free love, it was probably baseless, Clemens decided after looking at the ladies—opportunity perhaps, but no incentive. His own goodbye to the Holy Land, that howling wilderness instead of a garden, was a savage joke: “No Second Advent—Christ been here once, will never come again.”

  By October 9, 1867, two days after these refugees had been unloaded, the passengers were involved in a full-scale dispute over the route home. “Coaxing won’t do, abuse tried and successful,” Duncan noted in his journal. “Sharp words exchanged. Prayers omitted.” And on this note the excursion drew to an end, with Clemens desperate now to be off and away from this ship and all it stood for. The power of Mary Fairbanks’ cool, restraining hand had begun to wane a little; he was determined to even the score with the pilgrims. He started to write a play about the trip. The hero is a correspondent named Mark Twain who comes equipped for the voyage with four reams of paper and a barrel of gin; the villains are dotards, old maids, and cripples, all of them pious, backbiting hypocrites. But it was more of a fit than a fiction, he recognized, and he gave it up, sent what he had written to Webb, just to show him that it could be done, and then succeeded in putting it out of his mind altogether. “I hate both the name and the memory of Charles Henry Webb, liar and thief,” he declared categorically in 1905, “and I know of no such play. I have no memory of it.”

  On November 19, the day Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor to begin his final American tour, the Quaker City returned to New York and discharged its angry humorist, his oppressors, their baggage, and their souvenirs: a Syrian eagle for the Central Park Zoo, a tree from the Mount of Olives to be dressed into pulpit furniture for Plymouth Church, Sebastopol relics, chips of monuments and mosaics, mummies for Barnum’s Museum, water from the Jordan and the Pool of Bethesda, and, in addition, turbans, scimitars, fezzes, horse pistols, harem slippers, carpets, ottomans, filigree work, narghiles—all swelling the flood of e
xotic debris that furnished forth the cluttered period in American homemaking. Clemens fled like someone released from long captivity. That evening he planned to return to the fold briefly and have dinner with Mary Fairbanks and Charley Langdon at the St. Nicholas Hotel. But as he was on his way to meet them an editor sent by young James Gordon Bennett of the Herald caught up with him and persuaded him, with no great difficulty, to come to the editorial rooms and write an article about the trip. Clemens gave up the dinner. It was more than a social delinquency, for, having chosen to escape Mrs. Fairbanks’ moderating influence, he now gave vent to his stored-up rage and sense of affront. “The pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse,” he wrote. The coffee was “unendurable,” the food “not strictly first class,” and the passengers patriarchs and “rusty old bachelors” who managed to accomplish quite a bit of damage. “The people stared at us everywhere and we stared at them. We generally made them feel rather small, too, before we got done with them, because we bore down on them with America’s greatness until we crushed them.” For all their pretensions as travelers and culture hunters, they had cared nothing for Europe or for any other place, he said. They only wanted to get back home. “Homesickness was abroad in the ship—it was epidemic. If the authorities of New York had known how badly we had it, they would have quarantined us here.” It was a good night’s work, this exercise in ridicule and exposure, and he was pleased. It would “make the Quakers get up and howl in the morning,” he boasted to his family after midnight from his room at the Westminster Hotel. “You bet you when Charles Dickens sleeps in this room next week it will be a gratification to him to know that I have slept in it also.”