THE CHICAGO OF EUROPE

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Twain, Mark, 1835-1910.

The Chicago of Europe, and other tales of foreign travel / Mark Twain ; edited and introduced by Peter Kaminsky.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-1-4027-5869-0 (hc-trade cloth : alk. paper) 1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910--Travel. I. Kaminsky, Peter. II. Title.

PS1302.K28 2009

818’.409--dc22

2009006805

10    9    8    7    6    5    4    3    2    1

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© 2009 by Peter Kaminsky
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For JFK
from the town of Narev
in present-day Poland

In the midst of his transports came an officer into the room, followed by the abbe, and a file of musketeers. “There,” said he, “are the two suspected foreigners.” At the same time he ordered them to be seized and carried to prison. “Travelers are not treated in this manner in the country of El Dorado,” said Candide.

—from Candide, by Voltaire

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION: Mark Twain’s Own Letters from the Earth

PART I: THE MISSISSIPPI

The Lure of the River

More River Thoughts

Steam Boat Magic and a Small Town Boy

The Face of the Water

Goin’ to the Theater in the Big City (A Letter from “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass,” 1856)

Mardi-Gras in New Orleans (A Letter to Pamela A. Moffett, 1859)

A Tour of New Orleans

The Scene of the Battle: Vicksburg

PART II: THE WEST

“Roughing It” Lecture

Among the Miners

The Killing of Julius Caesar “Localized”

A Trip to Tahoe

Off for San Francisco

A San Francisco Day Trip

San Francisco Weather and Other Natural Events

PART III: BACK EAST

Philadelphia: The First Visit

New York: The Overgrown Metropolis

New York: The Dreadful Russian Bath

New York: Changes in the City

New York: Street People

New York: Personal Ads

Plymouth Rock and the Pilgrims

First Visit to Boston

Boston: A Modern Cretan Labyrinth

Boston Antiquities

Boston Politeness

The Weather of New England

Niagara

Traveling with a Reformer

PART IV: TRAVELS IN THE PACIFIC

Our Fellow Citizens of the Sandwich Islands

Letters from Hawaii

Australians and Americans

Entering Sydney

Town of Wanganui

The Weet-Weet

PART V: EUROPE

The American Vandal Abroad

Old-Master Worshippers

Old Saint Paul’s

Concerning Chambermaids

Mark Twain’s Map of Paris

The Chicago of Europe

The Awful German Language

An Austrian Health Factory

Bayreuth

The Knighted Knave of Bergen

The Matterhorn and the Glacier

Rafting Down the Neckar

The Cave of the Specter

The Belated Russian Passport

Nude Bathers

Mark Twain in the Cradle of Liberty

A Holiday Flight through France

Versailles

The Story of Abelard and Heloise

The Famous Gondola

Italian without a Master

The Chief Charm of European Life

PART VI: AFRICA, INDIA, AND
THE HOLY LAND

The Taj Mahal

Another Living God

Smyrna

Damascus

The Sacred Sea of Galilee

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

PART VII: FANTASIES

Satan’s Letter

Cannibalism in the Cars

A Curious Pleasure Excursion

Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven

PART VIII: A FINAL NOTE

A Literary Nightmare

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION:
MARK TWAIN’S
OWN LETTERS FROM
THE EARTH

In the fall of 1995, I went to the White House with three close friends to pitch an idea to the Clinton administration’s White House social secretary, Ann Stock. We came to propose a new award recognizing the role of humor in our nation’s life. The glut of national awards for novelists, biographers, great moviemakers, architects, economists, relief pitchers, and defensive linemen could leave one with the impression that nearly everyone in public life spends their evenings in tuxedos and designer dresses handing out or tearfully accepting statuettes. But where was the national recognition for those who helped to lighten our spirits in times of scandal, fear, and a tanking stock market? Where was our Pulitzer Prize for comedy?

There was none, which was why we went to the White House to propose such an award: an all-star tribute to George Burns, who was about to celebrate his hundredth birthday.

“What will you call it?” Ann asked.

It was a no-brainer really. How could you not call it the Mark Twain Prize? Everyone likes Twain. At the height of the Cold War, even the Russians and the Red Chinese liked Twain. Just say the words “Mark Twain Prize” out loud—it sounds like an award that has been around forever.

“Sold!” Ann said. But neither she nor we had counted on Grand Inquisitor Ken Starr and his obsessive (and ultimately fruitless) pursuit of alleged Whitewater misdoings. The Clinton White House did not think that involving itself in the world of comedy and unpredictably opinionated comedians made for good politics in the upcoming election year.

We feared that our surefire idea was dying on the vine. But then Ann left the scandal-beset West Wing and took a job at the Kennedy Center. She had not forgotten our idea and arranged a meeting for us with the center’s senior staff.

Our pitch took about a minute: Humor is popular. You need more humor in Washington. Pretty much everyone in America likes our great comics. So let’s have an award, invite a lot of funny people, and call it the Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.

“Sold!” they said.

By that point, George Burns had departed the scene (he died in March 1996), but the Mark Twain Prize lived on, going that first year to the brilliant—and gravely ill—Richard Pryor. It was a ribald and rousing evening of comedy; “the funniest night ever in Washington, D.C.,” many said, perhaps as much a recognition of the low bar for humor in our nation’s capital as it was a tribute to our show.

Nonetheless, the idea stuck. The Mark Twain Prize is now in its twelfth year and has been presented to Pryor, Carl Reiner, Jonathan Winters, Bob Newhart, Whoopi Goldberg, Lily Tomlin, Lorne Michaels, Neil Simon, Steve Martin, Billy Crystal, posthumously to George Carlin in 2008, and to Bill Cosby in 2009.

Not only is Twain’s legacy the inspiration for the award, but it has been part of the ceremony every year. Alluding to Richard Pryor’s near-fatal free-basing accident in year one, presenter Robin Williams recalled it was Twain who said, “The source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow.” In explaining why a gloves-off antiwar sketch had been cut from a Lily Tomlin network special in the 1970s, playwright Eve Ensler observed that Twain also received a thumbs-down from “the suits” at his publishers when he submitted his scathing antijingoist poem “War Prayer.” Just six weeks after 9/11, Whoopi Goldberg travelled to a still-numb Washington to accept the Twain Prize and recalled that it was Twain who first remarked, “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand.”

So that’s how the Twain Prize was born, which explains how I, as one of its creators, have come to be asked to survey and select from Mark Twain’s writings on travel. Apart from being exceptionally good at travel writing, Twain was also among the first modern travel writers. Before him, there really was no such creature as the casual American traveler or anything we would recognize as modern travel writing in the American vein. This is not to say that Twain single-handedly and consciously created a new form of literature. It is much closer to the truth to say that he was a peerless observer of his fellow humans and that he happened to come of age just at the time that the steamboat and railroad made it relatively easy for someone struck with a will-o’-the-wisp to light out for a pleasure trip to a distant place.

In earlier times, those who wrote of their travels were more likely to be cast from the Marco Polo mold of intrepid adventurers whose memoirs were a mixture of fact interlaced with fable whenever things got boring. It made for a good read, and if you were stuck for a colorful idea, you could pretty much say what you wanted because who was going to fact-check you anyway? Alexander the Great’s horse was actually a unicorn? There was a warrior king in the Ethiopian outback, still very much alive, who had once dined with St. John the Evangelist? Apparently, all it took for such “facts” to enter the historical record was that some sunstruck monk had sworn them to be true.

There were so few sources to verify or disprove the wildest reports and the tallest tales that merely having traveled qualified anyone to write anything without fear of contradiction. In those olden times, travel to foreign lands required a major commitment. Itineraries of a few months, such as the ones Twain undertook when he set out for Hawaii in 1866 or his grand tour of Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, would have taken years to complete. Where the medieval pilgrim or the Renaissance merchant might have encountered kidnappers, slavers, cannibals, and cutthroats along the way, Twain’s traveling contemporaries often risked nothing worse than indigestion or an ill-informed tour guide.

By Twain’s time, travel and travel writing had passed from the province of adventurers and explorers and had acquired the character of amusing and interesting everyday letters to one’s friends and family. As Twain observed in A Tramp Abroad:

Seventy or eighty years ago Napoleon was the only man in Europe who could really be called a traveler; he was the only man who had devoted his attention to it and taken a powerful interest in it; he was the only man who had traveled extensively; but now everybody goes everywhere; and Switzerland, and many other regions which were unvisited and unknown remotenesses a hundred years ago, are in our days a buzzing hive of restless strangers every summer.

Technological advances that made travel less rigorous and more affordable—the steamboat, its ocean-going brother the steamship, and the railroad—all occurred around the time of Twain’s birth in 1835. In the next thirty years, tracks were laid across the continents, ocean travel became an affair of weeks rather than months and years, and communications, following the invention of the telegraph, became nearly instantaneous. In such a world, shrunk more in those few decades than in the previous ten thousand years, facts were checkable, tall tales were easily cut down to size, and a traveler could pretty much get from anywhere to anywhere else.

Before Twain the man, gave us his travel writing, Clemens the boy looked on in wonderment as the watery highway of the Mississippi flowed past his ramshackle boyhood hometown, Hannibal, Missouri. To us, Hannibal has come to signify small-town America in the years when our national character—full of hope, not entirely trusting of outsiders, and eager for new experiences—was being born. To Twain, though, it was a small, circumscribed place, somewhere to leave just as soon as he could. The river called to him, stirred his soul, and eventually became the highway that transformed the spirit of young hayseed Sam Clemens into the clear, penetrating, guileless voice of Mark Twain.

The picture that Twain paints of that little town and his youthful spirit in Life on the Mississippi is so vital and full of excitement that the reader can believe for just a moment that he or she, too, is a young boy stuck in Nowheresville, when, with the booming blast of a ship’s claxon, a steamboat arrives, serving up a glimpse of all the romance, riches, and adventures the wider world has to offer. Little Hannibal and its young inhabitants are awakened from their provincial slumber, if only for a few minutes. The feeling of wonder Twain conveys reminds me of nothing so much as Richard Dreyfuss’s character when he sees the aliens walk down the gangplank from their spacecraft in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. “Take me with you!” his eyes seem to beg. If you want to understand what Mark Twain felt, consider his words as he relives those moments when the steamboat came to town:

After all these years, I can picture that old time to myself now, just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning; the streets empty, or pretty nearly so; one or two clerks sitting in front of the Water Street stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall, chins on breasts, hats slouched over their faces, asleep—with shingle-shavings enough around to show what broke them down; a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk, doing a good business in watermelon rinds and seeds; two or three lonely little freight piles scattered about the “levee,” a pile of “skids’” on the slope of the stone-paved wharf, and the fragrant town drunkard asleep in the shadow of them; two or three wood flats at the head of the wharf, but nobody to listen to the peaceful lapping of the wavelets against them; the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun; the dense forest away on the other side; the “point” above the town, and the “point” below, bounding the river-glimpse and turning it into a sort of sea, and withal a very still and brilliant and lonely one. Presently a film of dark smoke appears above one of those remote “points,” instantly a negro drayman, famous for his quick eye and prodigious voice, lifts up the cry, “S-t-e-a-m-boat a-comin’!” and the scene changes! The town drunkard stirs, the clerks wake up, a furious clatter of drays follows, every house and store pours out a human contribution, and all in a twinkling the dead town is alive and moving. Drays, carts, men, boys, all go hurrying from many quarters to a common center, the wharf. Assembled there, the people fasten their eyes upon the coming boat as upon a wonder they are seeing for the first time. And the boat is rather a handsome sight, too. She is long and sharp and trim and pretty; she has two tall, fancy-topped chimneys, with a gilded device of some kind swung between them; a fanciful pilot-house, a glass and “gingerbread,” perched on top of the “texas” deck behind them; the paddle-boxes are gorgeous with a picture or with gilded rays above the boat’s name; the boiler deck, the hurricane deck, and the texas deck are fenced and ornamented with clean white railings; there is a flag gallantly flying from the jack-staff; the furnace doors are open and the fires glaring bravely; the upper decks are black with passengers; the captain stands by the big bell, calm, imposing, the envy of all; great volumes of the blackest smoke are rolling and tumbling out of the chimneys—a husbanded grandeur created with a bit of pitch pine just before arriving at a town; the crew are grouped on the forecastle; the broad stage is run far out over the port bow, and an envied deckhand stands picturesquely on the end of it with a coil of rope in his hand; the pent steam is screaming through the gauge-cocks, the captain lifts his hand, a bell rings, the wheels stop; then they turn back, churning the water to foam, and the steamer is at rest. Then such a scramble as there is to get aboard, and to get ashore, and to take in freight and to discharge freight, all at one and the same time; and such a yelling and cursing as the mates facilitate it all with! Ten minutes later the steamer is under way again, with no flag on the jack-staff and no black smoke issuing from the chimneys. After ten more minutes the town is dead again, and the town drunkard asleep by the skids once more.

When Twain was seventeen years old, he left Hannibal, but to the extent that each of us is inescapably a product of a time and a place, Hannibal never left him. As shrewd as Huck, as friendly as Tom, Twain sized up new places and new experiences as carefully and as skeptically as the pennywise dry-goods merchant in Hannibal might have done as he felt the heft of a bolt of bombazine on offer from a fast-talking riverboat peddler.

Twain drifted into writing, as many do, because, to quote Clark Gable’s character in The Misfits when asked why he put up with the punishing profession of capturing wild horses, “It beats wages.” His early pieces are interesting, if only because they offer a glimmer of the writer he was to become. Had his output stopped after a few years of these occasional reports on his travels for small-town papers, it’s likely no one would have long remembered Mark Twain. In fact, he wasn’t even called Mark Twain at that time. His early writings either appeared under his own name, Samuel Clemens, or bore such fanciful bylines as Adrastus W. Epaminondas Perkins and Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. It was under this last nom de plume that he published his first travel piece in the Keokuk Iowa Daily Post in 1856 (“Goin’ to the Theater in the Big City”). Adopting the voice of the rube, which he would later perfect and add depth to with Huck Finn, he described a visit to the theater in St. Louis in a pitch-perfect example of a deadpan bumpkin humbling the sophisticates.

Though Twain wouldn’t adopt his pen name until 1864, the transformation of Sam Clemens into Mark Twain began in the four years he spent as a river pilot on the Mississippi, from 1857 to 1861. This was his university among the travelers and traders, the carousers and hard-bitten crewmen, the colorful men and women of the river towns. Getting out on the river, literally into the flow of a larger world, was nothing short of transformational for the small-town boy; he wrote this:

I became a new being, and the subject of my own admiration. I was a traveler! A word never had tasted so good in my mouth before. I had an exultant sense of being bound for mysterious lands and distant climes which I never have felt in so uplifting a degree since. I was in such a glorified condition that all ignoble feelings departed out of me, and I was able to look down and pity the untraveled with a compassion that had hardly a trace of contempt in it.

You see this same sense of enthusiasm in the letters that he sent back to his family during his riverboat days. They also reveal an increasingly confident writer and perspicacious observer of places and people. For example, there is an 1859 letter that he sent to his sister from New Orleans (see page 14). Even at this early date, it shows all the depth of observation and curiosity that would come to characterize Twain’s travel writing for the rest of his life. It’s not the breezy insouciance of Innocents Abroad quite yet, but it is very good. Think “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with the promise but not yet the polish of Sgt. Pepper’s.

The Civil War destroyed commerce on the Mississippi and abruptly ended Sam Clemens’s riverboat career. It was a small setback for river boating and a huge boon for American literature that Clemens headed west, following his brother Orion, who took up a federal post in Nevada. The milieu of instant-millionaire miners (and equally instantly destitute ones), dance-hall girls, gun-toting desperadoes, and blowhard politicos made for a colorful cast of characters in the stories Clemens began to file for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. Though these pieces were conceived as newspaper stories and not pure travel writing, Clemens had begun his career of reporting on new places, new people, and new experiences. Read today, these dispatches today, they are as much a window into far-off places as are his writings from Florence and Jerusalem.

Much of this material, along with his subsequent work for the Sacramento Union, would appear later in Roughing It, which, although it covers his early experiences in the West, was first published in 1872. Twain had originally organized the material as a lecture. So, rather than heavily excerpting that book, as most collections of his work do, I thought readers would like to see one of the two existing transcriptions of the actual lecture. After flipping a coin, I settled on the one that appeared in the (Lansing Michigan) State Republican in 1871 (see page 31).

Another piece that drew on his experience in the West is the flat-out comedic “The Killing of Julius Caesar Localized” (see page 48). It presents Caesar’s assassination as it might have appeared had Twain reported on it for the Virginia City paper. Apart from the fun of it, I think it sheds a light on one of Twain’s gifts as a travel reporter: Wherever he went, he could relate events to the everyday experiences of his American readers, always driving home the more general theme that there are scalawags, charlatans, and miscreants everywhere.

By 1866, West Coast newspaper editors knew they could rely on Twain for a steady output of entertaining writing. The Sacramento Union agreed to foot the bill for a trip to Hawaii; in return, they received twenty-six columns. More important for our story, he used his columns as a basis for his first public lecture. At that event, in San Francisco on October 2, Twain expected at best a half-filled auditorium, mostly the result of papering the seats with friends and friends of friends. Instead, it was a sell-out crowd.

Flush with success, he added sixteen dates to his lecture tour, and it was at this time that the familiar Mark Twain persona took form—perspicacious, outrageous, flamboyant. In an era when there was no TV and no radio (no recorded anything), public lecturing was big-time showbiz. Twain, an authentic, unbamboozled, funny American truthteller was a bracing and entertaining tonic for a nation seeking to move past the legacy of death and destruction wrought by the Civil War.

From this point on, Twain realized that anytime he needed some extra cash, he could write about and talk about travel. The high-paying banquet circuit was hungry for good speakers, and Twain was the best. His observations on New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and other American locales (often delivered as after-dinner speeches) are as full of fun and brio as anything that appeared in his more famous travel books. Though he was writing about New York for the California Alta in 1867 (see page 78), his shrewd observations on city life could have been penned yesterday:

The old, genuine, traveled, cultivated, pedigreed aristocracy of New York, stand stunned and helpless under the new order of things. They find themselves supplanted by upstart princes of Shoddy, vulgar and with unknown grandfathers. The incomes, which were something for the common herd to gape at and gossip about once, are mere livelihoods now—would not pay Shoddy’s house-rent. They move into remote new streets up town, and talk feelingly of the crash which is to come when the props are knocked from under this flimsy edifice of prosperity.

On the heels of his triumph as a lecturer, Twain, bankrolled by the California Alta, signed on as correspondent with a group traveling to Europe and the Holy Land on an oceangoing paddle wheeler, The Quaker City. If it seems odd that a tour of the Holy Land was tacked on to the end of a fun European jaunt, I suspect the reason is that Americans back then still saw themselves as a puritanical people, distrustful of pleasure for pleasure’s sake. The idea of traveling simply for enjoyment was morally ambiguous. The high-minded bona fides for this trip were secured when it was announced that abolitionist Henry Ward Beecher was to be among the party. Although he eventually bailed out, visiting the actual places where the famous scenes of the Bible transpired was thought to be ennobling enough to ensure that the trip would be justified as a sort of religious pilgrimage.

In his accounts of this visit to the Old World, Twain is simultaneously awestruck, like the young boy in Hannibal entranced by the approach of a smoke-puffing paddle wheeler, and eager to cut through the fawning reverence of pomp and majesty with which his compatriots deferred to Europe. He cleverly damns with excessive praise, using descriptions as gushing as the most effusive travel agency brochure, whether depicting the wonders of Versailles in The Innocents Abroad (see page 295) or portraying St. Paul’s Cathedral in a fictionalized guidebook that appears in his unpublished English Journals (see page 180). Likewise, no one but Twain could have taken the tragedy of Heloise and Abelard and reduced it to a sitcom domestic mishap, as he did in The Innocents Abroad (see page 298), which was his first best seller and the product of his Quaker City trip.

Though The Innocents Abroad was the first work exploring Twain’s concurrently rapt and sardonic view of Europe, its mores, and its languages, it wasn’t his last. As a writer—that is, someone who made his living through the use of language—he was both fascinated and confounded by the infernal goulash of European languages, and he took every opportunity to let his readers know it both in this book and through the rest of his work: See Italian without a Master (page 308) and The Awful German Language (page 203), where he wrote, “My philological studies have satisfied me that a gifted person ought to learn English (barring spelling and pronouncing) in thirty hours, French in thirty days, and German in thirty years. It seems manifest, then, that the latter tongue ought to be trimmed down and repaired. If it is to remain as it is, it ought to be gently and reverently set aside among the dead languages, for only the dead have time to learn it.”

While Twain loved the art, the history, and the culture of Europe, he was loath to risk being confused with his Euro-worshipping countrymen, who were, as he was, among the first generation of middle-class tourists. Nowhere did he demonstrate this contrast more fully than in “The American Vandal Abroad” (see page 173), a speech retrieved by one of his biographers, Albert Bigelow Paine.

On the one hand, Twain presents, and eviscerates, the kind of boob who pinballs from monument to monument and from Titian to Tintoretto, as if he were checking off bird sightings on a nature walk, rarely stopping to experience what it is he is seeing:

The Vandal goes to see the ancient and most celebrated painting in the world, The Last Supper. We all know it in engravings: the disciples all sitting on one side of a long, plain table and Christ with bowed head in the center—all the last suppers in the world are copied from this painting. It is so damaged now, by the wear and tear of three hundred years, that the figures can hardly be distinguished. The Vandal goes to see this picture—which all the world praises—looks at it with a critical eye, and says it’s a perfect old nightmare of a picture and he wouldn’t give forty dollars for a million like it (and I indorse his opinion), and then he is done with Milan.

On the other hand, just a few pages later, Twain gives us an appreciation of the beauty of Venice that is as wondrous and lyrical as anything written by John Ruskin:

[U]nder the mellow moonlight the Venice of poetry and romance stood revealed. Right from the water’s edge rose palaces of marble; gondolas were gliding swiftly hither and thither and disappearing suddenly through unsuspected gates and alleys; ponderous stone bridges threw their shadows athwart the glittering waves. There were life and motion everywhere, and yet everywhere there was a hush, a stealthy sort of stillness, that was suggestive of secret enterprises of bravos and of lovers; and clad half in moonbeams and half in mysterious shadows, the grim old mansions of the republic seemed to have an expression about them of having an eye out for just such enterprises as these. At that same moment music came stealing over the waters—Venice was complete.

Contrast this with his descriptions of the Holy Land. In reading his reports, one feels that Twain regarded that part of his trip the way a twelve-year-old boy might receive the news that, instead of playing baseball on a hot summer day, he would have to put on an itchy suit to attend a Sunday school lecture on the evils of tobacco and alcohol. A perfect example is Twain’s reporting on a visit to the Sea of Galilee (see page 351):

If these unpeopled deserts, these rusty mounds of barrenness, that never, never, never do shake the glare from their harsh outlines, and fade and faint into vague perspective; that melancholy ruin of Capernaum; this stupid village of Tiberias, slumbering under its six funereal plumes of palms; yonder desolate declivity where the swine of the miracle ran down into the sea, and doubtless thought it was better to swallow a devil or two and get drowned into the bargain than have to live longer in such a place; this cloudless, blistering sky; this solemn, sailless, tintless lake, reposing within its rim of yellow hills and low, steep banks, and looking just as expressionless and unpoetical (when we leave its sublime history out of the question) as any metropolitan reservoir in Christendom—if these things are not food for rock me to sleep, mother, none exist, I think.

With the publication of Innocents Abroad in 1869, followed by that of its prequel, Roughing It, in 1872, Twain’s repertoire of travel writing reached its pinnacle. He was, by turns, the mistrustful Yank, the lyrical vagabond, the lover of art, the hater of art lovers, the humanist, the misanthrope. He would produce two more pure travel books—A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897)—which have Twain the traveler at his best but also, for long stretches, Twain the writer at his less than greatest. Lengthy passages in both books are quoted directly from tour books and local legends, and while they up the page count, they add little to the books.

A Tramp Abroad, some observers have suggested, was occasioned by Twain’s desire to get out of America for a while after what he felt was the most disastrous public appearance of his life, a speech on the occasion of John Greenleaf Whittier’s seventieth birthday. William Dean Howells was there, as were Ralph Waldo Emerson and, of course, Whittier. Twain had no idea that it was such a serious event and essentially winged it, mocking the Eastern literary establishment. It was, by all accounts, a total bomb and a great embarrassment. In its aftermath, Twain decided to take the family to Europe, financing the trip with another book. Although he was clearly out of sorts, and even downright grumpy, the real and brilliant Twain could not help but shine through as well. His nonascent of the Matterhorn (see page 246) reads like a Europeanized version of his trip to Lake Tahoe in Roughing It: lyrical, personal, big in scope, yet full of carefully chosen detail. Likewise, the journey described in “Rafting Down the Neckar,” in A Tramp Abroad (see page 255), in its bold outlines, could have been written by any number of people, but not with the same feel for the rhythms of a riverscape and the variety of people and places that the author of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi brought to such a journey.

Following the Equator, like the companion lecture tour that financed his around-the-world travels to Australia, India, and Africa, was written to help him climb out of the mountain of debt into which he had fallen as a result of his ruinous investment in a supposedly revolutionary printing technology. Added to that was the devastating loss of his daughter Susie in 1896 as he was about to start writing the book. Doing the only thing that he knew how to do to preserve his sanity, he soldiered through a manuscript that he described as having been written “in hell” but which he hoped came off as an “excursion through heaven.” It is neither, but, even in this desperately written volume, the curious world traveler comes through. The tragic yet comic story of Australia’s aborigines, “The Weet-Weet” (see page 163), is the work of a man familiar with racial injustice but at the same time not blind to the foibles of all races.

This collection concludes with a section of whimsical pieces. “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” is as fanciful as the travels of Swift’s Gulliver (with a bit of Baron Munchausen thrown in). “Letters from the Earth,” the putative reports on humanity sent back from heavenly messenger Lucifer (before he was excused from archangeldom), reminds me in its fierce deadpan of Voltaire’s The Huron, where a Native American “savage” writes about his encounter with “civilized” Europe. And speaking of savages, you will never find more droll barbarism than “Cannibalism in the Cars,” where, day after day, a railway car full of congressmen debate which of their number would make the more appropriate meal for the rest of the snowbound group.

When my grandpa Jan, who was a printer and poet by trade, died, my brother Don placed a copy of Letters from the Earth in his grave. We are not a religious family, and in our home, the collected works of Mark Twain—a faux calfskin set popular in workingmen’s libraries of the 1930s—occupied the place on our bookshelves that is reserved for Scripture in others. Grandpa loved Twain for his humanism and for his blasphemous irreverence. We wouldn’t have had the one without the other. I trust, and hope, you will find both between the covers of this book.

—PETER KAMINSKY
Brooklyn
January 2009