of nature thrilled its recognition. The fountain of my filial affection was stirred to its profoundest depth, and I gave way to tumultuous emotion. I leaned upon a pillar and burst into tears. I deem it no shame to have wept over the grave of my poor dead relative. Let him who would sneer at my emotion close this volume here, for he will find little to his taste in my journeyings through Holy Land. (chap. 53)
The passage, only part of which is quoted here, is stressed in the original publication, where a picture shows Mark Twain shedding pious tears. In 1902, a newspaper asked rhetorically, “Who is Mark Twain?” and answered, “The man who visited Adam’s tomb, the man who wept over the remains of his first parent. That beautiful act of filial devotion is known in every part of the globe, read by every traveller, translated into every language.”34
Although often undercut, Mark Twain’s dominant intention was to show reality as it is, uncolored by pretense, conventionality, and gentility, his familiar enemies. Here these targets are often specifically literary, with Prime’s guidebook at the head of the list. The narrator seeks to entertain himself, and thereby he entertains his readers. He finds that there is much fun in being playful, and so he improvises amusement—although doing so in the Holy Land is difficult, since playfulness is too close to irreverence. The author observed to his publisher, Bliss, that “the irreverence of the volume appears to be a tip-top feature of it, diplomatically speaking, though I wish with all my heart that there wasn’t an irreverent passage in it.” This lament made by the famous “Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope” presumably came from his desire to please the woman he was courting, who thought “a humorist is something perfectly awful”—as he explained in January 1869 to “Mother Fairbanks.” What he would have liked to make fun of was now “forbidden ground,” he had reported to this same friend a few months earlier.
Mark Twain’s weapon was style. In order to tell the truth, he showed what it is not. Sometimes what it is not is his invention, a kind of exercise in literary absurdity, as in the affectations of the Adam’s tomb passage or in the description of a Roman holiday slaughter as it might be described in the Spirit of the Times. These experiments are among the high points of the book, reminding readers constantly that it is a piece of writing they are reading, at a significant remove from the ostensible subject. The author in his first book—as distinguished from his Celebrated Jumping Frog collection—is not the same Mark Twain that readers had encountered earlier. Now he is specifically an author, one who draws attention to his stylistic repertoire.
Mark Twain’s iconoclasm is limited, however, as Bret Harte noted when he reviewed the book in the Overland Monthly. If Mark Twain rejected the art of the old masters, he shared with many Americans the bad taste that led him to admire such meretricious works of architecture as the Milan cathedral. Sometimes his uncertainty about what he could accept and reject leads to amusing passages, as when he attends a performance of the cancan in Paris. “I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers” (chap. 14).
Yet it was passages such as these that helped make The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress a great success. Published in July 1869, it sold 77,800 copies during its first sixteen months and approximately 125,000 in the United States during its first decade. The advertisements called Mark Twain “the people’s author,” and indeed he was. Reviews were generally favorable, both American and English, including one by the influential William Dean Howells, who wrote in the December Atlantic Monthly, “There is an amount of pure human nature in the book that rarely gets into literature.”35
In 1870, the English publisher John Camden Hotten published an unauthorized two-volume edition. The first volume was called The Innocents Abroad… The Voyage Out, and the second The New Pilgrim’s Progress… The Voyage Home. This edition was reprinted several times and also appeared in a one-volume edition. Later, Routledge published an authorized edition, revised by the author, who was paid $250 for it.36 In time Mark Twain’s writings were more widely sold in England than in the United States.
He was acutely conscious that he had written little during the time he was revising the Innocents, lecturing, and courting. In a letter to his family written in June 1869, he called this period “the idlest, laziest 14 months I ever spent in my life.… I feel ashamed of my idleness, & yet I have had really no inclination to do anything but court Livy.” Despite the book he had produced, he still thought of himself as a journalist. Among the pieces dating from this time are several sketches: “George Washington’s Negro Body-Servant,” published in the Galaxy in February 1868; “Cannibalism in the Cars,” published in the English journal Broadway in November, and “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins” in Packard’s Monthly in August 1869. The latter two were collected in Sketches, New and Old (1875).
One of these sketches was solicited by the American agent of George Routledge and Sons, the English publisher whose pirated Celebrated Jumping Frog had sold well. Routledge paid generously for “Cannibalism in the Cars,” a fact that the writer was not to forget.37 Another sketch, “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” deserves attention because it is the first evidence of what was to become an abiding interest: the subjects of twins, duality, and the problem of identity, themes to be associated throughout his writing with roleplaying. Actual Siamese twins were being exhibited in the United States when Mark Twain was writing a humorous sketch about the complications of two separate people being physically connected. That the consequences of the actions of each one were the same for both fascinated him: imprisonment and drunkenness for both, though one is blameless. Although not explicitly, the twins are by implication an instance of dual identity.38 One may presume that the writer’s interest in the subject resulted from his attempting, in his thirties, to take on a new identity, that of a candidate for gentility, in Van Wyck Brooks’s phrase. Would he be compelled to switch sides in the battle between authenticity and pretentious gentility?
Although he wrote several pieces for the Buffalo Express before he took up his responsibilities in that connection, his name appeared on nothing published there until he officially announced his presence on August 21. In his “Salutation” he promised—as if announcing his reformation, somewhat begrudgingly,
I shall not make use of slang or vulgarity upon any occasion or under any circumstances, and shall never use profanity except when discussing house-rent and taxes. Indeed, upon a second thought, I shall never use it even then, for it is unchristian, inelegant, and degrading—though, to speak truly, I do not see how house rent and taxes are going to be discussed worth a cent without it. I shall not often meddle with politics, because we have a political editor who is already excellent, and only needs a term or two in the penitentiary to be perfect.39
Here one can see the old Mark Twain peeking out as well as an interpretation of the new manner of life the writer was entering, uneasily
During the next thirteen months, Mark Twain published some fifty pieces in the Express, mostly in the period through April 1870, including a column of fillers entitled “People and Things” and a later one entitled “Browsing Around.” For two months he applied himself diligently. Ten Express pieces would make appearances in Sketches, New and Old. One that did not appear there, “Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, His Private Habits,” suggests a preoccupation with Clemens’s need to eliminate his habit of swearing, a frequent topic in his letters to Mrs. Fairbanks. “Mr. Beecher never swears. In all his life a profane expression has never passed his lips. But if he were to take it in his head to try it once, he would make even that disgusting habit beautiful—he would handle it as it was never handled before, and if there was a wholesome moral lesson in it anywhere, he would ferret it out and use it with tremendous effect.”40 “The Legend of the Capitoline Venus,” a condensed novel, tells the story of an artist who is denied the hand of the woman he loves until he raises fifty thousand dollars, a story that has autobiographical overtones because it was written while he was under pressure to demonstrate his eligibility for Olivia’s hand to her father.
Mark Twain’s most ambitious project for the Express was a series of letters written on the basis of an idea that engaged him for several years: writing travel letters while staying home by using