(p. 202).
Another new characteristic is that Mark Twain begins putting more emphasis on his own reactions, his personal experiences, and less on the places he visited. He knew that he was not the first visitor to write about travels in the Old World; the special nature of his accounts was to come from the responses being his: Mark Twain’s anticipations and surprises. Since his strength was comedy, he prepared ridiculous expectations so that his actual experiences would unsettle him. Thus in Venice “the fairy boat in which the princely cavaliers of the olden time were wont to cleave the waters of the moonlit canals” turned out to be “an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clopped on to the middle of it” (pp. 97–98). Sometimes the technique is resorted to merely as a throwaway, as when he reports, “After a good deal of worrying and tramping under a roasting Spanish sun, I managed to tree the Barber of Seville, and I was sorry for it afterwards. With all that fellow’s reputation, he was the worst barber on earth. If I am not pleased with the Two Gentlemen of Verona when I get there next week, I shall not hunt for any more lions” (p. 55). He put less emphasis on his ridiculous self in the last letters, when the fact that he had few notes and many letters to write caused him to pad his account with biblical stories and even to translate King James version idioms into flat prose. The Alta half-seriously apologized for the thirty-fifth letter, marked by the reporter’s “strange conduct in presenting … information to the public with such a confident air of furnishing news” (p. 229).
Still it should be noted that even while he was traveling, the writer had begun to set higher standards for himself—or rather more genteel ones. On the Quaker City he had met a Cleveland, Ohio, woman, Mary Mason Fairbanks, who was also writing newspaper accounts of the voyage, and she served as his critic during the preparation of the last twenty or so letters; his continuing friendship with her and her husband would make him more conscious of genteel values. He refers to her in a revealing letter (the same one quoted previously) to John Russell Young, managing editor of the New York Tribune, on his return. “I stopped writing for the Tribune, partly because I seemed to write so awkwardly, & partly because I was apt to betray glaring disrespect for the Holy Land & the Primes and Thompson’s [authors of solemn travel books] who had glorified it.” But, he explained to Young, “coming home I cramped myself down to at least something like decency of expression, & wrote some twenty letters, which have survived the examination of a most fastidious censor on shipboard and are consequently not incendiary documents. There are several among these I think you would probably accept, after reading them. I would so like to write some savage letters about Palestine, but it wouldn’t do.” He enclosed letters he thought suitable, with the not very encouraging comments that “the letters I have sent you heretofore have been—well, they have been worse, much worse, than those I am sending you now.”
Clearly the writer was ambivalent. Exactly what was suitable for an Eastern audience, and how crucial was that literary market? Soon he was to meet a woman who would represent that audience for him; she would serve for many years as the censor he felt he needed. Olivia Langdon’s brother, who had been Clemens’s shipmate, would provide the necessary introduction. After his trip, however, he returned to New York on November 19, 1867, and went almost immediately to Washington, D.C., to take on for a short time a position he had accepted while still in Europe as secretary to Senator William Stewart of Nevada. Stewart later wrote an account of Clemens’s appearance when he arrived in Washington:
I was seated at my window one morning when a very disreputable-looking person slouched into the room. He was arrayed in a seedy suit, which hung upon his lean frame in bunches with no style worth mentioning. A sheaf of scraggy black [sic] hair leaked out of a battered old slouch hat, like stuffing from an ancient Colonial sofa, and an evil-smelling cigar butt, very much frazzled, protruded from the corner of his mouth. He had a very sinister appearance.4
Another sketch of a devil-may-care Clemens is provided by a journalist who visited him in his Washington room and later reported in the New York Evening Post on “How ‘Innocents Abroad’ Was Written.”
The little drum stove was full of ashes, running over on the zinc sheet; the bed seemed to be unmade for a week, the slops not having been carried out for a fortnight, the room foul with tobacco smoke, the floor, dirty enough to begin with, was littered with newspapers, from which Twain had cut his letters…. And there was tobacco, and tobacco everywhere. One thing, there were no flies. The smoke killed them, and I am now surprised that the smoke did not kill me too.5
Expecting the experience in the nation’s capital to be “better than lecturing for $50. a night for a Literary Society in Chicago & paying my own expenses” (as he wrote to his old friend Frank Fuller), he spent the winter in Washington, where in addition to his work as private secretary for Senator Stewart, he gave a lecture on his trip abroad, “The Frozen Truth.” His familiarity with the political scene was to prove useful in the writing of a novel. He also gave a humorous account of his Washington activities in “My Late Senatorial Secretaryship.”6 Continuing to act as a journalist, he made the New York Tribune office in Washington his headquarters. By December 4 he was writing a new series of letters for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, eleven letters in all, the last dated March 2, 1868. He identified himself in a letter to Mrs. Fairbanks as a “Tribune ‘occasional,’ Alta ‘special,’ “with “propositions from the Herald.” For the Alta he wrote fourteen letters, the earliest on the day after his arrival in New York, later ones in July 1868, and two in July 1869. He was soon to begin a series of letters for the Chicago Republican as well as some for the New York Herald.7 He was open to anything, for he was by now a highly ambitious journalist who could augment his income on the lecture platform. The successful Western journalist was becoming a successful Eastern one. His trip abroad had cured his depression, but it had not yet changed his life.
What he wrote is worth describing as a way of indicating his literary personality at this time, especially his little-known letters to the Enterprise. They are much better than the letters written at the same time for the Alta. According to his first letter, “To write ‘EDS. ENTERPRISE’ seems a good deal like coming home again.” Mark Twain is full of admiration for Washington, particularly the Capitol, which he has examined several times, “almost to worship it, for surely it must be the most exquisitely beautiful edifice that exists on earth to-day”8—this from his vantage point as recent world traveler. He is soon exploring political corruption and problems of poverty in New York. After describing life in a tenement, the struggles of a sixty-year-old ex-circus clown, now a “rag-picker and a searcher after old bones and broken bottles,” and the plight of poor little girls who nevertheless enjoy showing off their wretched “rusty rag dolls,” he presents the lessons he has learned about the possibilities of political action to redress social injustice.
In this city, with its scores of millionaires, there are to-day a hundred thousand men out of employment. It is an item of threatening portent. Many apprehend bread riots, and certainly there is a serious danger that they may occur. If this army of men had a leader, New York would be in an unenviable situation. It has been proposed in the Legislature to appropriate $500,000 to the relief of the New York poor, but of course the thing is cried down by every body—the money would never get further than the pockets of a gang of thieving politicians. They would represent the “poor” to the best of their ability, and there the State’s charity would stop.9
The longer he made Washington his headquarters, the more disenchanted Clemens became. In particular, he found the Democratic Party thoroughly corrupt, as he reported in a piece he wrote for the New York Tribune, “The White House Funeral.” Now identifying himself with both the Republican Party and the North, he satirized Andrew Johnson by providing his imagined farewell address: “My great deeds speak for themselves. I vetoed the Reconstruction Acts; I vetoed the Freedman’s Bureau; I vetoed civil liberty;… I vetoed everything & everybody that the malignant Northern hordes approved; I hugged traitors to my bosom;… I smiled upon the Ku-Klux;… I rescued the bones of the patriot martyr, Booth.”10
In the letters that he wrote for the Chicago Republican in January and February, Mark Twain worked hard at being funny. Valentine’s