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 up his hands and said, ‘Oh, how wonderful is prophecy!’ … I start a bogus astonisher for him every now and then, just to hear him yelp” (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
