on December 1: If “a great change had taken place in Mr Clemens,” “from what standard of conduct,—from what habitual life, did this change, or improvement, or reformation; commence?”31 Olivia’s father, Jervis Langdon, asked Clemens for the names of people in the West who might serve as references. When Clemens supplied six, Langdon asked a former employee living in San Francisco to interview the six, as well as some others Clemens had not named. Feeling uneasy about what Langdon might hear, Clemens confessed to him, “I think that much of my conduct on the Pacific Coast was not of a character to recommend me to the respectful regard of a high eastern civilization, but it was not considered blameworthy there, perhaps.” He then provided the names of additional references. One result of Langdon’s inquiry was this comment from a Presbyterian deacon: “I would rather bury a daughter of mine than have her marry such a fellow.”32 Meanwhile, Clemens was assuring Olivia of his transformation: “I am striving & shall still strive to reach the highest altitude of worth, the highest Christian excellence.” Ultimately Clemens was able to present himself in a way that both of Olivia’s parents found they could accept, and a formal engagement was announced. Clemens told his family, “She said she never could or would love me—but she set herself the task of making a Christian of me. I said she would succeed, but in the meantime she would unwittingly dig a matrimonial pit & end by tumbling into it—& lo! the prophecy is fulfilled.”
After finishing proofreading on the Innocents, Clemens devoted some attention to the question of where he would settle. “I want to get located in life,” he told Olivia in May, 1869. In his thirty-fourth year, he did not have much to show for his years thus far, or so it clearly seemed to the man approaching marriage. For a time Cleveland attracted him; there Mrs. Fairbanks’s husband was publisher of the Herald. But he decided against it because, as he told them in August, “It just offered another apprenticeship—another one, to be tacked on to the tail end of a foolish life made up of apprenticeships. I believe I have been apprentice to pretty much everything—& just as I was about to graduate as a journeyman I always had to go apprentice to something else.” Instead, with a large loan from Jervis Langdon and with installments to be paid later, Clemens purchased a one-third interest in the Buffalo Express and became its associate editor, to “do a little of everything,” as he reported to the Fairbankses. For a time Clemens supposed that he was making a real commitment to the paper. In September 1869, he received a letter asking if he would still be lecturing. He replied, “I hope to get out of the lecture-field forever.… I mean to make this newspaper support me hereafter.”
Finally, in August 1869, The Innocents Abroad was published, substantially different from the Alta letters from which it was derived. New sections had been added about Paris and Egypt and notably one on the Sphinx. Also inserted were accounts of the narrator’s movement from place to place. The changes were made for several reasons. The most obvious resulted from Mark Twain’s recognition of the difference between writing for a newspaper and writing a book. In attempting to address a different audience, an eastern one and one that included women such as the woman he was to marry, he dropped local references and eliminated certain coarse expressions, such as “slimy cesspool” and “bawdy house.” (The author had warned Olivia not to read Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote, or Shakespeare’s plays because they contained “grossness.”) He also removed several but by no means all of the irreverent comments that had characterized his treatment of the Holy Land. The character Brown was completely eliminated, never to reappear in Mark Twain’s writings, but while dropping Brown’s vulgar remarks, Mark Twain retained the merely ignorant comments and assigned them to others. Some he kept for himself, as he sought to flesh out the character of the narrator. Perhaps to compensate for such changes, the writer added to his criticisms of the hypocritical pilgrims. The presence of that theme is underscored by the subtitle he gave his book, The New Pilgrims’ Progress.
More important, Mark Twain sought to give the account a shape, a sense of design, by developing theme and attitude. He made the account more subjective by placing greater emphasis on the narrator. As he notes in the preface, the book suggests “to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who had travelled in those countries before him.” The eyes of Mark Twain were unique, however, for they saw what was funny, what evoked personal memories, and what demonstrated the ways in which reality often differed from expectations. In his Western writings he makes fun of genteel falsehoods and naive tenderfeet and identifies himself as a rugged veteran. Now he himself is often an innocent, and his illusions are stripped away.
What is Europe for the visiting American? Often Mark Twain asserts that it is a misrepresented product, created by years of anticipation. Nothing proves to be as advertised, neither Parisian barbers, Arabian horses, nor the Holy Land itself. Even Jesus Christ, Mark Twain explained, would never visit there again, having had the misfortune of seeing it once, which was surely enough. The author is the victim of misleading expectations, though frequently he has no one to blame but his overly gullible self. Nonetheless, he gets revenge by exploding superstitions, myths, and legends; indeed, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish passages of genuine sentiment from burlesque imitation, even though the “genuine” passages were written in a deliberate effort to gratify his new audience. For example, the drafts surviving at Vassar College of the Sphinx description show that he worked hard at this passage, which became a favorite in his lectures. He knew his live audiences liked such purple prose:
After years of waiting, it was before me at last. The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never anything human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond everything of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blending at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed. (chap. 58)
The passage goes on and on.
In The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain adopts an identity, though he does not wear it consistently. He is the honest innocent who is ready to become the skeptic; the iconoclastic democrat; at worst, the ignorant philistine. Usually his good nature and sense of humor ingratiate him with the reader, and his report remains good fun. Indeed, Mark Twain’s basic technique was to appear playful.33
Again and again, Mark Twain contrasts reality with his own expectations, sometimes by quoting what previous visitors, especially pious ones, had reported. He pretends to be particularly disappointed by the Sea of Galilee, which emerged as “a lake six miles wide and neutral in color; with steep green banks, unrelieved by shrubbery; at one end bare, unsightly rocks, with (almost) invisible holes in them of no consequence to the picture; eastward, ‘wild and desolate mountains’ (low, desolate hills, he [William C. Grimes, a fictitious author] should have said); in the north, a mountain called Hermon, with snow on it; peculiarity of the picture, ‘calmness’; its prominent feature, one tree.” To this he adds, “No ingenuity could make such a picture beautiful—to one’s actual vision” (chap. 48). Aware that the reality he encountered was not all that his readers wanted, he provided a second account on another level that emphasizes not the actual lake but the people and events it had witnessed.
One of the writer’s most difficult problems in transforming his wisecracking letters into a book acceptable to Middle Americans was coping with his skepticism. He could scoff, imperiously, at Roman Catholic traditions, such as those linked with Veronica’s handkerchief, but he obviously could not make fun of Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the piety of those who visited it. Still he found an outlet, a permissible one, by reporting his ecstasy in being able to visit “Adam’s tomb,” which he places within the same church. Burlesquing the responses of such visitors as William C. Prime, author of Tent Life in the Holy Land (1857), he exclaims:
The tomb of Adam! How touching it was, here in a land of strangers, far away from home, and friends,