INNOCENTS1 ABROAD Going East Innocents Abroad In June, 1867, Samuel Clemens was 31 years old, and the United States was 90. After years of uncertainty and struggle, the future was looking bright for both of them. America had come through the war between North and South that threatened its existence as a nation. It was finishing the railroad that would span the continent from east to west. It probably was already beginning to feel the summons to the central place on the international stage that it would claim by the end of the century. America’s rise to its role as world power occurred during the same years as Clemens’ rise to the status of world celebrity. Clemens’ strug- gle toward that place dated back to his childhood. The family he had been born into, like many on the country’s southwestern frontier, was always rich in social pretensions and chronically strapped for cash. Before his death in 1847, John Clemens, Sam’s father, store-keeper, sometime lawyer, land speculator, kept restlessly searching for suc- cess, which explains why in 1839, four years after Sam had been born in a cabin in Florida, Missouri, the family moved to the economically more promising river town of Hannibal. Unlike Tom Sawyer, how- ever, John Clemens found no treasure in the village. When he died, Sam was 12; the loss forced him to work to help his mother make ends meet. He stayed in school long enough to complete nine years of education in a series of one-room schoolhouses, but by the time he was 15 he was working fulltime. For the next 15 years his employ- ment history suggests he inherited both his father’s restlessness and his economic bad luck. Sam’s first association with words and writing came through a series of jobs in printing offices, first in Hannibal, Mark Twain-C01 1 09/07/2003, 2:11 PM GOING EAST then in St Louis; at seventeen he ran off to see the World’s Fair in New York, and worked in print shops there and in Philadelphia for about half a year before coming back to the Mississippi. In 1857 he apprenticed himself to Horace Bixby to become a riverboat pilot, gain- ing his license two years later. Piloting was a well-paying, prestigious job, but in 1861 the Civil War halted commerce on the river. After two weeks in an irregular Confederate militia unit, Sam ran off again: he lit out for the Territory of Nevada in company with his brother Orion, who had just been appointed territorial secretary. Safe from the War, he vowed to himself not to go home again until he had made a fortune. There were fortunes to be made on this frontier – in timber, in silver, in mining speculations – but Sam found no treasure either. Intermittently during these years he had written and published a number of short pieces in various newspapers. In keeping with the journalistic conventions of the day, he signed these pieces with pseu- donyms, including “W. Epaminondas Adrastus Perkins” and “Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass.” While looking for precious metals in the deserts of Nevada, he submitted several letters to the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise under the pen name “Josh,” and their popularity resulted in the offer of a position on the paper. With no prospects as a prospector, Clemens became a professional writer in September, 1862. As a frontier newspaperman, he wrote mostly news stories, though he first began to acquire a name for himself with some hoaxes published as news. In February, 1863, that name became “Mark Twain,” when for reasons that remain unknown he decided to sign three political reports from the territorial capital of Carson City with those two words. “Mark Twain” was no overnight sensation, and the next several years display the same pattern of restlessness. By 1864 he was work- ing as a reporter in San Francisco, and in 1866 became a traveling correspondent for two different California papers, traveling first west- ward to Hawaii (then called the Sandwich Islands) and next eastward, to New York. But he had found his calling: as he put it in a letter to Orion in the fall of 1865: “I have had a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order – i.e. humorous.”1 His ambivalence about (to quote another phrase from that letter) “seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures” was real – “Poor, pitiful business!” is how the letter winds up – and would persist throughout his career. But by the time 2 Mark Twain-C01 2 09/07/2003, 2:11 PM INNOCENTS ABROAD “Mark Twain” was three years old – by June, 1867 – that persona had already brought Clemens two different kinds of national recognition. His humorous sketch, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” had leaped from the pages of New York’s Saturday Press (where it first appeared in November, 1865) and into newspapers across the country, where it made a big splash with the American reading public. And less than a year later he proved he could excite their laughter by talking as well as scribbling when he revised his Hawaiian correspondence into a humorous lecture called “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands”; he performed it first in San Francisco, then toured with it through a dozen Pacific slope mining towns, gave it again in St Louis and elsewhere when he revisited the Mississippi in early 1867, and then delighted two different audiences in New York City with it. At the end of April he even brought out a book: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. It was not just the frog who was becoming a celebrity. In June, 1867, Mark Twain (to use the name by which the country was beginning to know him) and America were ready to take on the world. At least, that is one way to understand the cruise of the Quaker City, the six-month trip to Europe and the Holy Land (as the Middle East was then called) that became the basis for the book with which Twain’s literary career was really launched. The trip itself was a first: by chartering a sea-going side-wheel steamship to take them to the Old World, the 60 Quaker City passengers became America’s first organ- ized tour group. As American tourists heading east, however, they sailed on what Twain refers to as “the tide of a great popular move- ment.”2 As Henry James’ tales of such “innocents abroad” as Daisy Miller affronting her destiny in Europe suggest, during the last third of the 19th century more and more Americans made pilgrimages to the cultural shrines of London, Paris, Rome and the other stops on the Grand Tour. Many went still further east, to Palestine, to visit the sites made sacred by their Biblical associations. Conceived by the fashionable Plymouth Church in Brooklyn, the Quaker City expedition advertised itself as an “Excursion to the Holy Land,” but on the way there were arranged stops at “Intermediate Points of Interest” across the Mediterranean, with plenty of time provided for junkets to places like Paris, where another World’s Fair was in progress. People for whom the words “Mark Twain” conjure up the image of a poor white boy and an enslaved black man floating down a river on 3 Mark Twain-C01 3 09/07/2003, 2:11 PM GOING EAST a raft might have a hard time locating him on the Quaker City trip. Most of his fellow passengers were eminently respectable, genteel, devout and well-to-do. Samuel Clemens, for example, could not have afforded the trip: the $1,250 cost of his passage and his expenses on land were paid by the Alta California, a San Franciso paper. But Clemens was a very ambitious man. He accepted without any conscious mis- giving the advice he was given in the Sandwich Islands by diplomat Anson Burlingame: “Never affiliate with inferiors; always climb.”3 The Quaker City trip gave him a chance to take two steps upward. He apprenticed himself to another passenger, a slightly older woman named Mary Fairbanks, wife of a wealthy Cleveland publisher. For the next several years, until his career was established, he called her “Mother” and referred to himself as her “Cub,” and from her took lessons in navigating the tastes and proprieties of the middle class audience he knew he wanted to reach. And through his roommate on the cruise, a young man named Charley Langdon, the son of a rich coal dealer in Elmira, New York, he would meet the woman he married, Charley’s sister Olivia. With that marriage the child from a cabin in the southwest would find entrance into the mansions of the east, where he spent the rest of his life. The almost sixty reports he wrote for the Alta and several New York papers also attracted the attention of the publishing world. One pub- lisher in particular, Elisha Bliss, head of the American Publishing Company in Hartford, was particularly attracted by one letter, the irascible “valedictory” to the trip Twain printed in the New York Herald the day after the Quaker City docked. There Twain calls the pilgrimage “a funeral excursion without a corpse” (644), and said that life with his fellow-passengers, whom he calls the “saints,” consisted of “solemnity, decorum, dinner, dominoes, devotions, slander” (645). Some of those passengers publically took offense at Twain’s satirical account, and in the controversy thus stirred up Bliss saw publicity, popularity and profits. His company published books “by subscrip- tion,” which meant that customers bought them from door-to-door sales agents.