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, and all who cared for me, thus to discover the grave of a blood relation. True, a distant one, but still a relation. The unerring instinct 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
