“Old Times on the Mississippi.” Here he writes:
It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghasdy stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it. (p. 238)
Later he would compare the unromantic outlook of the physician and that of the steamboat pilot, who can no longer appreciate the beauty of the river.
This appreciation of the blessings of innocence and ignorance contrasts sharply with another observation, one that shows he had not forgotten that his Western experiences had led him to shed some of his illusions. He writes, “I am waiting patiently to hear that they have ordered General Connor out to polish off those Indians, but the news never comes. He has shown that he knows how to fight the kind of Indians that God made, but I suppose the humanitarians want somebody to fight the Indians that J. Fenimore Cooper made. There is just where the mistake is. The Cooper Indians are dead—died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry, and sentiment, and soft soap, and magnanimity” (p. 266).
Despite uncertainties about his literary identity, Mark Twain tried out a version of his Sandwich Islands lecture. He badly needed the money for the trip he was about to take.35 In May he appeared at the Cooper Institute, the Athenaeum in Brooklyn, and at Irving Hall in New York, with his friend from the west Frank Fuller as manager. His topic was the Sandwich Islands; the lectures were well received, to the lecturer’s great relief. He considered these lectures “a first-rate success”; he “came out handsomely” (pp. 178–79). He had been painfully aware that there were many competing attractions.
Later he would build effectively on this success; now his real interest was the trip he was about to undertake. He wrote to his mother on June 1 of being “wild with impatience to move—move—move!” A week later he complained that he had written himself “clear out” in his letters to the Alta, “the stupidest letters that were ever written from New York.” He had written ten letters in less than three weeks, letters vastly better written than the bulk of his western journalism. He was also writing for the New York Sunday Mercury, where five pieces appeared, in addition to “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,” and he had written for the Tribune and the Saturday Evening Express.36
Presumably his impatience was chiefly over his dissatisfaction with his career as a writer and his failure to achieve any sense of fulfillment. He was thirty-one years old and had not yet discovered fully his métier. He was growing, intellectually, very fast, even though he considered himself, he wrote his mother, “so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.” Meanwhile, his European trip was in his mind not a great opportunity but—as he wrote to his friend Will Bowen—simply an occasion for fun.
CHAPTER THREE
Turning Point
In 1909, only a year before Sam Clemens’s death, Harper’s Bazar published “The Turning Point of My Life,” his last work written for publication. Here he described the composition of The Innocents Abroad as “the last link” in the chain of events that had made him “a member of the literary guild.” All the links he described were no doubt important, but the great good fortune of traveling through the Mediterranean on the Quaker City, on assignment, and then having the opportunity to write a book about his experience was crucial. The voyage, which lasted just over five months, from June to November 1867, was the first made by an American ship to the Old World exclusively for pleasure. Clemens was to see the Azores, Gibraltar, Tangiers, Marseilles, Paris, several Italian cities, Athens (just a peek, it turned out, because the ship was quarantined), Constantinople, Sevastopol, Yalta (where he met the czar), Ephesus, Beirut, Damascus, Jerusalem and the Holy Land, Egypt, Spain, and Bermuda (five days), which was to become one of the author’s favorite places. He was also to encounter, more frequently than he might have wished, the other seventy-five passengers and the ship’s officers. He soon found they were, as he wrote in October to Joseph Goodman back in Virginia City, “the d dest, rustiest, ignorant, vulgar, slimy, psalm-singing cattle that could be scraped up in seventeen States,” and following his return he referred in a letter (to John Russell Young) to “the Quaker City’s strange menagerie of ignorance, imbecility, bigotry, & dotage.” In truth, however, his associates on ship were probably not very different from the readers he would address when he came to write a book about his experiences; they were just wealthier.
His immediate task, he had been instructed, was “to write at such times and from such places as you deem proper, and in the same style that heretofore secured you the favors of the Alta California.”1 He was expected to produce, according to his later testimony, fifty letters, for which he was to be paid twenty dollars per letter, and in due time the Alta published that number.2 He wrote several others that apparently never arrived. He also had commissions from the New York Tribune (for that paper he wrote only seven letters, far fewer than he had planned) and for the New York Herald (in which only three unsigned pieces appeared). Half the trip expenses were to come from the fees the Alta was to pay him; he expected to profit chiefly from the other assignments, the ones that, as it happened, he could only partially complete. For one thing, it was difficult to write on board ship, as he complained in a letter written from Naples in August, and he could not write on shore because of his continual need to be sightseeing. Thus in his October 1 Alta letter he reported that he was on the Quaker City for the first time in six weeks but that his “anticipations of quiet are blighted” by “one party of Italian thieves fiddling and singing for pennies on one side of the ship, and a bagpiper, who knows only one tune, on the other.”3
The letters Mark Twain produced for the Alta were written for the audience he had been addressing for years. Not intended to constitute a complete account of the voyage, they focus somewhat erratically on this attraction and that topic. At the end of his sixth letter he is in Paris, though he has surprisingly little to say about that great city; the next is from Genoa, where he announces, “I want to camp here” because of its beautiful women. A few pages later he is inspired to write an account of his companion Brown’s French composition to his hotel keeper in Paris. A casual journalistic style permitted movement forward and back in time.
In other respects, these Alta letters are like earlier ones about Mark Twain’s Hawaiian and American travels and adventures. Brown appears once again, intermittently. There are humorous passages and serious ones, a good deal of irreverence, and a pronounced chauvinism. Few things that the traveler saw struck him as better than what America had to offer. Sometimes he stretched a point to demonstrate to the Old World that America was actually more advanced. When the head of the Russian railroad system told him that he employed ten thousand convicts, Mark Twain topped him: “I said we had eighty thousand convicts employed on the railways in California—all of them under sentence of death for murder in the first degree.” “That,” he explained, “closed him out” (p. 162).
A significant new feature, on the other hand, is the continuing narrative, determined by the prearranged itinerary of the Quaker City. What, one wonders, will Mark Twain do and say in Venice or in Jerusalem? There is also the letter writer’s running feud with his fellow voyagers, the “pilgrims,” who were altogether different in their piety and hypocrisy from his usual associates. In the Holy Land, for example, when he drank at “Ananias’s well,” he noted that “the water was just as fresh as if the well had been dug only yesterday.” He then went on: “I was deeply moved. I mentioned it to the old Doctor, who is the religious enthusiast of our party, and he lifted