Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  Mark Twain burst into action; a schooner was due to leave for San Francisco the next morning. He interviewed the survivors in the Honolulu hospital and spent all night writing up the story, dispatching it on the schooner as she left port. A month later it was the lead story in the Sacramento Union; within another month it had national coverage, and a month after that was in newspapers all over the world. Mark Twain had landed himself a worldwide scoop.

  He returned home with a full-length magazine article and the bare bones of a lecture on the Sandwich Islands and the Hornet saga. Lecturing was big box office and big business in America. Twain’s ambition gander had been let out of its coop and he wanted to cash in while he and the story were hot. Against pretty well everyone’s advice, and his own nervous system as the big night arrived, he hired the biggest hall in San Francisco, the 2,000-seat Academy of Music. No doubt he did the mathematics: 2,000 seats at a dollar a time is $2,000, $500 for the hall, $500 for the posters, $1,000 for me.

  He took the whole endeavor very seriously; it has often been said the more comic the show, the more serious the prep. It has also been said that an amateur practices till he’s got it right, whereas a professional practices till he can’t get it wrong. The audience expected a lecture of one hour fifteen minutes, they did not expect a reading (Dickens excepted) and they did expect a performance. Twain honed and cut and polished and learnt his passages off by heart. He exaggerated his already exaggerated appearance, kept his auburn hair and moustache unkempt, and kept his matching clothes unpressed. He stretched his Missouri drawl to breaking point. He prepared the poster, now for sale on Mark Twain tee-shirts and drying cloths at the Mark Twain Museum, or indeed the Mark Twain Boyhood Home, the one just around the corner from the Mark Twain Dinette (best reached on the hop-on/hop-off Too-Too Twain) on the corner of Mark Twain Avenue and Sam Clements Drive, Hannibal, Missouri:

  A SPLENDID ORCHESTRA

  IS IN TOWN, BUT HAS NOT BEEN ENGAGED.

  ALSO

  A DEN OF FEROCIOUS WILD BEASTS

  WILL BE ON EXHIBITION IN THE NEXT BLOCK

  MAGNIFICENT FIREWORKS

  WERE IN CONTEMPLATION FOR THIS OCCASION.

  BUT THE IDEA HAS BEEN ABANDONED

  A GRAND TORCHLIGHT PROCESSION

  MAY BE EXPECTED; IN FACT, THE PUBLIC ARE PRIVILEGED

  TO EXPECT WHATEVER THEY PLEASE.

  DRESS CIRCLE $1. DOORS OPEN AT 7 O’CLOCK.

  THE TROUBLE TO BEGIN AT 8 O’CLOCK.

  The evening was a massive success. He was a natural public speaker, funny and intimate, who fed on and off audience participation. He understood shock and tension and the relief that humor offers from them: after explaining native practices he proposed to demonstrate what he meant by cannibalism by eating a baby on stage, if someone would be kind enough to offer him one. He then milked the pause of anticipation and strung out the surprise that no baby was forthcoming.

  He needed little encouragement to take this show on the road. For three months he filled theaters and dance-, church- and music-halls across California and Nevada, including a triumphant return to Virginia City where old embarrassments were conveniently forgotten. With each performance his act developed as he learnt what worked and what didn’t. Now knowing the Sandwich Islands/Hornet script backwards he ad-libbed freely, safe that he could return to base at any time. At the start of the tour his lecture was interesting first and humorous second and as one evening led to another the humor would come first and the interest would be the prop for the humor. He had ventured, somewhat unintentionally, into stand-up comic territory. But as any stand-up will confirm, touring is exhausting on mind and body, and was even more so in the days before confirmed bookings, smooth roads, air conditioning and the occasional massage. After three months Mark Twain was a wreck, but could at least enjoy the novelty of being a rich wreck, recovering in the Occidental, San Francisco’s glamorous hotel du jour.

  As he re-gathered himself in the Occidental he took stock. He was already the most famous, and now the highest earning, journalist/lecturer on the West Coast. Back east he was hardly known at all, although the Jumping Frog and Hornet stories would ring some bells and open a few doors. The Sandwich Islands lectures had anyway run their course. What he needed was a new platform, a new travel adventure like the Sandwich Islands but bigger, better. A voyage that left from the East Coast would be perfect, and he could then repeat the Sandwich Islands/San Francisco formula but to a bigger, better paying and more challenging audience.

  Meanwhile, a few blocks away from the Occidental, the editors of the Daily Alta California were having circulation-boosting thoughts too. The Sacramento Union had stolen a march on them by sending this Mark Twain character to the Sandwich Islands. Twain had lucked out with the Hornet story it was true, but why not repeat the trick, only make it bigger, better and maybe he’ll luck out again, but this time luck out Alta-wise. Why not think big? They would send him around the world, first to New York, then across the Atlantic to the Great

  Exhibition in Paris, then onward stopping everywhere interesting eastbound until Japan and then back to San Francisco on the China Mail Steamship. It would be expensive but the Alta would own the copyright - an oversight on Twain’s part that would come back to haunt him with The Innocents Abroad5. In the meantime, with the Alta California deal in the offing, it seemed to him that once again Providence had stepped up to the crease, especially as the east about trip would give him time in New York to work on promoting his work there. A deal was struck to everyone’s satisfaction.

  In those days the best way to cross the country was not to cross it at all, but to take a steamer down to Panama, disembark and cross the twenty-mile isthmus on horse, re-embark on the Atlantic side and steam up to New York. So it was done, but it was a journey from hell. On the first night they encountered their first storm, a storm so bad that the crew readied the lifeboats while passengers prayed on their knees besides them. On arrival in Panama they disembarked straight into a cholera camp: thirty-five of the waiting westbound passengers and forty natives had already succumbed. The eastbound passengers picked up the disease too and within days of leaving Panama eight had died on board. On successive nights there were mechanical breakdowns and the steamer floundered. Nearly everyone was seasick. In desperation the ship put into Key West, Florida, to unload the dead and the dying. Half the healthy fled the wretched ship too. Five days later, and after two more breakdowns and a vicious Atlantic winter gale, on 12 January 1867 the thirty-one-year-old Mark Twain arrived back in New York. His Mark Twain was about to become our Mark Twain.

  But it was not going to be as easy as he thought. It had been fourteen years since the newly qualified printer had scraped along the bottom of New York. The vibrant city had changed in every possible way for the bigger: business and immigration were booming, politicians and hucksters were snaffling, culture and fashion were blooming. The publishers had moved from Boston; the academics from Philadelphia. As Twain advised his Alta California readers: “Make your mark in New York, and you are a made man.” It was still thus for Frank Sinatra one hundred years later.

  A tour of the publishing houses with a portfolio of articles, includ- ing a revised version of Jumping Frog, drew blanks. One publisher told him: “Books - look at these shelves. Every one of them is loaded with books that are waiting for publication. Do I want any more? Excuse me, I don’t. Good morning.” (The foolhardy publisher may or may not have been the one who a few years earlier had pronounced: “Whales, Mr. Melville?”)

  Yet if the larger imprints were closing their doors in his face, at least the newspapers and journals were opening theirs. The Saturday Press, the Sunday Mercury, the Weekly Review, Harper’s Monthly, the Evening Express and the New York Weekly all ran his stories, either fresh or reworked sketches. In the meantime, in a particular cold New York winter, he was waiting to see the spring schedules for the transatlantic crossings a
nd the resumption of the Alta California voyage.

  On one of these bitter mornings, 3 February, he went to church. More precisely, the editor of the New York Sun, to whom he was trying to sell a story, took him to church, all the way across the icy East River to Brooklyn. One can only imagine Twain’s horror when he discovered that this was not just any old church but a Presbyterian church, and not just any old Presbyterian church but a packed full Congregational church led by a charismatic preacher. The Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims of Brooklyn Heights even claimed direct congregational descent from the Plymouth brethren. That’s about as high as a low church can get, he might have said to himself.

  The service was led by the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher6. Beecher had only been on his feet for a few moments before Mark Twain became trans- fixed by his performance. Looking at him, listening to him as a fellow public speaker, Twain noted “his rich, resonant voice, and distinct enunciation”, and observed how he “makes himself heard all over the church without very apparent effort... sparkling with felicitous similes and metaphors... using the language of the worldly... poetry pathos, humor, satire, and eloquent declamation were happily blended upon a ground work of earnest exposition... forsaking his notes he went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that... halting now and then to stamp his feet three times in a row for emphasis... ”

  Afterwards the Sun editor arranged an introduction to the charismatic preacher and Twain heard of a project that must have made every journalistic hair on his head stand on end. Beecher was organizing a tour of the Holy Land, as much to raise funds for his own forthcoming “fifth gospel” as to educate his congregation. It was already heavily subscribed; neither Twain, nor the Sun editor, nor anybody else had heard of it before as the hundred or so pilgrims/ passengers were nearly all from the Plymouth Church. Beecher showed them the prospectus:

  EXCURSION

  TO THE

  THE HOLY LAND, EGYPT, THE CRIMEA AND GREECE

  AND

  INTERMEDIATE POINTS OF INTEREST

  A first-class steamer, to be under our own command, and capable of accommodating at least one hundred and fifty cabin passengers, will be selected, in which will be taken a select company, numbering not more than three-fourths of the ship’s capacity. There is good reason to believe that this company can be easily made up in this immediate vicinity, of mutual friends and acquaintances.

  The steamer will be provided with every necessary comfort, including library and musical instruments.

  An experienced physician will be on board.

  Details of the itinerary were then listed below.

  The “first-class steamer” had in fact been selected, the 1,500-ton, side wheeled paddle steamer Quaker City. As the USS Quaker City she had fought with some distinction on the Unionist side in the Civil War, mostly on blockade duty in Chesapeake Bay. After the War she was decommissioned and sold at auction. No doubt the thought of being back on board a paddle steamer only added to Twain’s sense of anticipation. The fare was $1,250 in cash, payable to the Plymouth Church, and passengers were advised to take $500 in gold for use en route.

  Twain asked if there was space for one more, even if not “from the vicinity”? There could be, Beecher replied, he would check with Captain Duncan, who when not at sea served as the Plymouth Church’s Sunday school teacher. Without waiting for Captain Duncan’s reply Twain rushed off a telegram to the Alta California editors suggesting excitedly that this Beecher excursion outranked their previous plan for him and pleading for the $2,000 subscription. The Alta California team had as much of an eye for a scoop and serial rights as Twain and readily agreed. Wasn’t it typically ironic of Providence, he must have asked himself, that she comes skipping along to a Presbyterian church - of all places - to offer up The Big One on a silver collection plate?

  But like all best laid plans of mice and men the plot started to fall apart almost immediately. Firstly, Twain fluffed the interview with the teetotal and sanctimonious Captain Duncan. The potential Excursionist showed up at the Quaker City booking office with an equally inebriated friend after a good and liquid lunch. Twain introduced himself as the Reverend Mark Twain, a Baptist minister from San Francisco and the Sandwich Islands. Before committing to the trip he wanted to be assured that he could preach alongside the Reverend Beecher, on account of how the organizing reverend was of a different denomination. Duncan had the presence of mind to tell the Reverend Twain that he didn’t look like a Baptist preacher7 and didn’t smell like one either. The not-now so Reverend Twain observed back that “as a ceaseless, tireless, forty-year advocate of total abstinence the captain was a mighty good judge of second hand whisky”. They never did get along; one of Twain’s enduring pleasures on the Quaker City was winding up the already spring-taut Captain Duncan.

  In spite of Captain Duncan’s misgivings Twain’s place on board was in fact safe, as behind the scenes the Excursion was in some trouble. The main attraction, Henry Ward Beecher himself, had decided to pull out, citing congregational pressure for him to stay behind. Later, once his view of the whole affair had been tempered with jaundice, Twain believed he never planned to make the Excursion at all but just to milk the money from it. Thirty other Plymouth passengers withdrew with him, and his celebrity replacement, General Sherman, withdrew two weeks later. From being a well-funded Brooklyn Heights closed shop for Presbyterian pilgrims the Excursion was now scram- bling for passengers nationwide - it even found a local worthy from little Hannibal, Missouri. By the eventual date of departure, 9 June 1867, Mark Twain had been become the main celebrity, at least the only person whose name one or two of them might have heard of. More importantly it also enabled him to claim the stateroom, which soon became Refusenik HQ.

  A clear division among the passengers soon opened up. In Twain’s camp were the black sheep, mostly female and mostly journalists; he called them “the Sinners”. Sideline sinners included the ship’s doctor and purser, in fact anyone who hadn’t paid or volunteered to make the Quaker City excursion. Just outside the Sinner camp - at least in the early days - was a sulky high society teenager, Charles Langdon, sent by his parents on a sort of early version of the gap year. The parents wanted him to snap out of whatever he had snapped into, but one thing led to another and two years later he was to become Mark Twain’s brother-in-law.

  In the other, very much larger camp were the white sheep that Twain soon labeled the “New Pilgrims”. Beecher’s original passenger list was dominated by Plymouth Presbyterian worthies peppered with sundry WASPs, a Unionist general or two and the odd East Coast showbiz type. When he pulled out he opened the doors to dilution of the planned worthiness, and their places were taken by lesser-spotted versions of the same breed. These newly determined middle-class passengers, mostly from the professions, were all uniformly grey in spirit if not in color, sanctimonious and pious to the point of taxidermy, and desperate for social respectability and spiritual - or more precisely religious - salvation. A well-worn Bible was always close at hand, and the tut-tuts always close to lips. The Quaker City God Squad8 was guaranteed to bring out the Devil9 in Twain, and of course to provide him with wonderful source material for The Innocents Abroad.

  It is beyond the scope of this book to delve too deeply into the Excursion before it arrived in the Holy Land - far better to read a much better book, The Innocents Abroad, but within its scope to outline briefly the changes that came over Mark Twain as the trip progressed.

  He started off brightly enough. After ten days of storms, queasiness and Bible study the Quaker City arrived in Fayal in the Azores, then as now a Portuguese colony, to be met by locals “with brass rings in their ears, and fraud in their hearts”. Soon he was not the rose-tinted tourist of expectations, and noted: “The group on the pier was a rusty one - men and women, and boys and girls, all ragged and barefoot, uncombed and unclean, and by instinct, education, and profess
ion beggars. They trooped after us, and never more while we tarried in Fayal did we get rid of them.” He found that the “the community is eminently Portuguese - that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy,” which could explain why “Oxen tread the wheat from the ear, after the fashion prevalent in the time of Methuselah. The good Catholic Portuguese crossed himself and prayed God to shield him from all blasphemous desire to know more than his father did before him.”

  Gibraltar was the next stop, which he found as ghastly then as it is now, but he led a few of the Sinners on a side trip to Tangier. This was much more enlivening - the Exotic for which he had been craving: “And lo! In Tangier we have found it. Here is not the slightest thing that ever we have seen save in pictures - and we always mistrusted the pictures before. We cannot anymore. The pictures used to seem exaggerations - they seemed too weird and fanciful for reality. But behold, they were not wild enough - they were not fanciful enough - they have not told half the story. Tangier is a foreign land if ever there was one, and the true spirit of it can never be found in any book save The Arabian Nights. Here are no white men visible, yet swarms of humanity are all about us... There are stalwart Bedouins of the desert here, and stately Moors proud of a history that goes back to the night of time; and Jews whose fathers fled hither centuries upon centuries ago; and swarthy Riffians from the mountains - born cut-throats - and original, genuine Negroes as black as Moses; and howling dervishes and a hundred breeds of Arabs - all sorts and descriptions of people that are foreign and curious to look upon.”

  They sailed onto Marseille where he came across his first Ugly American. At first all was well. “We are getting foreignized rapidly and with facility. We have learned to go through the lingering routine of the table d’hote with patience, with serenity, with satisfaction. We take soup, then wait a few minutes for the fish; a few minutes more and the plates are changed, and the roast beef comes; another change and we take peas; change again and take lentils; change and take snail patties; change and take roast chicken and salad; then strawberry pie and ice cream; then green figs, pears, oranges, green almonds, etc.; finally coffee. Wine with every course, of course, being in France. With such a cargo on board, digestion is a slow process, and we must sit long in the cool chambers and smoke.”