A COMPANION TO MARK '[WAIN
EDITED BY PETER MESSENT AND LOUIS J. BUDD
21
Mark Twain and Continental Europe HoIger Kersten
For nineteenth-century Americans, Europe was a fixed reference point in matters of history, culture, and politics. It represented the cultural richness of the past, but it was also a place that suffered from monarchic despotism, poverty, corruption, and other social and political ills. From this contrast emerged a basic ambivalence in which an appreciation ofEurope's cultural treasures struggled with a scorn for what appeared to be an ourmoded political system. Despite these shortcomings, however, the Old World exerted a fascination on a growing number of Americans who were attracted by unfamiliar scenery, strange customs, spectacular architecture, and other sights - to say nothing ofthe leisurely sea-voyage and the continental spas with their reputation for restoring good health. There were also those Americans who traveled to Europe in the hope ofescaping, at least temporarily, from the restraints ofnineteenth-century America's Victorian conventions. To them, Europe represented "diversity as contrasted with conformity, playas contrasted with work, pleasure contrasted with duty" (Dulles 1964: 4). All of these factors are mirrored in the career ofSamuel Clemens, in whose personal life and literary endeavors Europe occupied an important place. From a young age, he was aware of and interested in European history; he visited the Old World and wrote travel books about it; he used European settings and characters in The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and Joan 0/ Are, as well as in his short fiction and his essays; and his personal correspondence and notebooks are filled with observations and comments about Europe. Although Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, a frontier settlement remote from the cultural centers ofnineteenth-century America, he was not isolated from the Old World. Newspapers, periodicals, and especially the tremendously popular travelogues on Europe provided American readers with a steady flow ofinformation about it (Thorp 1948: 830ff.). Even first-hand experience with Europeans was possible through encounters with immigrants, whom Clemens met almost everywhere he went in America. l Throughout his life, further information and insights about Europe came from friends and neighbors, many ofwhom were experienced travelers. Clemens's own
immediate experience with the Old World started in 1867 when he boarded the Quaker City on its first pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. For him, it was the beginning of a series of trips to Europe that continued over the next 40 years.
From the Quaker City's arrival in European waters on June 29 to its departure on October 25 from Cadiz (Spain), Clemens and the ship's passengers visited several European countries, most of them located on the Mediterranean. Their first stop was the French port of Marseilles (July 4), from where Clemens traveled the next day to Paris, where he remained until July 11. Having returned to Marseilles, the group reached Genoa, in Italy, on July 14. They remained in Italy until August 11, briefly visiting a number ofcities including Milan, Venice, Florence, Pisa, Rome, and Naples. After a very short stop in Greece, where Clemens defied the quarantine regulations to pay a night-time visit to the Acropolis, the Quaker City continued its voyage to Constantinople (August 17-19), and then sailed on to Russia, with stops in Sevastopol (August 21), Odessa (August 22-24), and Yalta (August 25-28). The next stretch of the trip took them to the Middle East, the Holy Land, and Egypt. The party returned to Europe on October 13 for a briefstop in Cagliari, Sardinia, and spent the final days of the trip in Spain (October 18-25).2
In April 1878, Clemens returned to the European scene. In contrast to his first Old World trip, this was not a tourist excursion designed to cover as much territory as possible within a limited period of time, but a leisurely voyage with prolonged stays in Germany, Switzerland, and France. In Germany, Heidelberg (May 6-July 23) and Munich served as a base for visits to various places of interest, ranging from the immediate vicinity to more distant destinations. For four weeks (August 12September 16) the Clemenses visited Switzerland, and then moved on to Italy for the fall (September 16-November 14), staying in Milan, Venice, Florence, and Rome. After spending the winter in Munich (November 15-February 27), Clemens and his family again changed quarters to Paris, where they lived from the end of February until July 10. Traveling for slightly more than a week (to July 19) through various Belgian and Dutch cities, including Brussels, Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, they reached the final destination oftheir European sojourn, England. Here they spent most of their time in London, but also visited the Lake District before finally boarding the steamer Gallia in Liverpool on August 23 to return to the United States.3
Financial pressures and health issues prompted the Clemens family to return to Europe inJune 1891. Their first place ofresidence was France, where they spent about a month before visiting Germany and Switzerland briefly in August and September, returning to France in the fall to see Arles and Nimes. From mid-October to the end ofFebruary 1892 they lived in Berlin, a stay that afforded Clemens the honor ofdining with the German emperor, William II. April and May were spent traveling through the south of France and Italy before the family settled in Nauheim, Germany, while Clemens briefly returned to the United States for business. After his return to Europe, the family found convenient accommodation near Florence, where they lived for more than seven months (from late September 1892 to mid-June 1893). During most of 1893 and 1894, the Clemens family made their residence in different European cities,
among them Berlin, Munich, Rouen, and Paris, but Clemens's never-ending financial troubles at home required him to travel back to the United States several times. Sometimes members of the family accompanied him on these trips, but more often than not they remained behind. In May 1895 Clemens and his family briefly returned to the United States together before he, Livy and Clara took off on Clemens's world lecture-tour.
When the global tour ended in October 1896 (and after the tragedy of daughter Susy's death), Clemens and his family decided to remain in Europe. In late July 1897 they moved from England to Switzerland to spend the summer in the little town of Weggis before continuing on to Vienna in late September. Vienna's newspapers proudly announced Clemens's arrival and quickly turned him into a local celebrity: "The Clemens apartments at the [Hotel} Metropole were like a court, where with those of social rank assembled the foremost authors, journalists, diplomats, painters, philosophers, scientists, of Europe, and therefore of the world" (Paine 1912: 1052). At the end ofMay 1898 the Clemenses moved into a summer house in the village of Kaltenleutgeben, whence they returned to Vienna for another prolonged stay from mid-October 1898 to May 26, 1899). After a series ofbriefvisits to Budapest (March 23-29) and Prague (May 26-30), the health of their youngest daughter, Jean, prompted them to seek special treatment for her, first in London and then in Sanna, Sweden, where the family arrived in early July 1899. Here, where they stayed until September, Clemens developed an intense enthusiasm for Sweden's sunsets: "America? Italy? The tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. And this one - this unspeakable wonder! It discounts all the rest" (Paine 1912: 1088). They spent the remainder of their extended European sojourn in London before returning to the United States in October 1900.
Not quite four years later, Clemens and his family returned to Europe yet again. Ten years after their pleasant stay in Italy, the Clemenses decided in October 1903 to go back to Florence, vainly hoping to improve Olivia's failing health. Her death, on June 5,1904, marked the end ofClemens's European sojourns, although he did return to the Old Continent once more in the summer of 1907 - to receive an honorary degree from Oxford University.
This brief summary of biographical facts regarding Clemens's travels to the Old World shows that his experience in Europe was extensive and varied. He set foot in all three countries that a contemporary had described as the "leading nations of Europe, - the French, the English, and the German" (Anon. 1861: 548) and he also caught glimpses of "minor" European destinations. He gave little attention in his commentaries to Spain, visited during the Quaker City cruise, though he spent seven days traveling through the country with stops in Seville, Cordova, Cadiz, and a number of villages in Andalusia. What he saw on this excursion remains unknown, since none of the impressions gathered there were ever published: "The experiences of that cheery week were too varied and numerous for a short chapter," explained the narrator of The Innocents Abroad, "and I have not room for a long one. Therefore I shall leave them all out" (Twain 1869: 637). As noted above, aquarantine during the Quaker
City's stopover in Greece reduced Clemens's opportunities for sightseeing to a clandestine visit to the Acropolis. Despite this very limited exposure to Greece, the narrator describes the country as "a bleak, unsmiling desert," and its people as living in "poverty and misery" (p. 370). Belgium and Holland, on the other hand, two countries which Clemens saw in the final days ofhis 1878-9 European sojourn, left a more positive impression on him. A notebook entry characterized Brussels as "a dirty, beauful [sic} (architecturally) interesting town," and the organ music he heard at the local cathedral impressed him as "majestic." In the Netherlands, a country "so green & lovely, & quiet & pastoral & homelike," Clemens recorded enjoyable sights and registered the appealing nature of the country, with its cleanliness, "lovely country seats," and attractive girls (Twain 1975b: 328ff.).
While Spain, Belgium, and the Netherlands were only summarily treated in Clemens's travelogues, his longer sojourns in France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria gave him more opportunities to observe the national customs and comment on the inhabitants' life as it appeared to him.
Clemens's first encounter with France and its people came during his Mediterranean cruise in 1867, when he visited Marseilles and spent nearly a week in Paris. His initial impressions were positive. He enjoyed the sights and "was impressed by French precision, neatness, and the beauty of the land culture, and people" (Rasmussen 1995: 300). The narrator in The Innocents Abroad spoke of the "noble city of Marseilles" (Twain 1869: 93) and "magnificent Paris" (p. 112). Even the French emperor made a positive impression on him: Napoleon III was "the representative of the highest modern civilization, progress, and refinement" (p. 126). But although the narrator exclaimed in ecstasy, "Verily, a wonderful land is France!" (p. 113), readers can never be fully convinced that the raprure was genuine. The comments on "extravagant honesty" (p. 113), the disillusioning and painful experience at the barber's shop (pp. 114ff.), the "harmless and unexciting" wines (p. 116), the annoying experience with a guide (p. 123), and the encounter with the Cathedral of Notre Dame, "the brown old Gothic pile clustered thick with stony, mutilated saints" (p. 130), raise doubts about how deep the admiration and enthusiasm really were.
Clemens had an opportunity to renew his acquaintance with France during his second extended European visit in 1878-9. His letters and notebooks covering the period of his sojourn in Paris from February through mid-June 1879 show an intensive mental engagement with the country. In his attempt to compose A Tramp Abroad, his forthcoming travel book and second travelogue about Europe, Clemens produced a significant number ofmanuscript pages dealing with France but ultimately decided not to use them. For reasons that are not entirely clear, Clemens was developing a strong distaste for French morality. Experiencing the "cancan" for the first time, the narrator in The Innocents Abroad had simply stated that "French morality is not ofthat straight-laced description which is shocked at trifles" (Twain 1869: 136). The 1879 notebook, however, did not employ such diplomatic rhetoric, containing sentences such as "'Tis a wise Frenchman that knows his own father" (Twain 1975b: 309), "France has usually been governed by prostitutes," and "France has neither winter nor
summer nor morals" (p. 318). To Clemens, France appeared as a "nation of savages" (p. 321), and not even the French language was exempt from his diatribes: "It is the language for lying compliment," he noted, "for illicit love & for the conveying of exquisitely nice shades of meaning in bright graceful & trivial conversations" (p. 320).4
Despite his negative attitude, Clemens returned to France on several occasions. In June 1891 he and his family passed through Paris on their way to Aix-Ies-Bains, a health spa which helped soothe Clemens's rheumatic pain. He praised the beneficial effect in "Aix, the Paradise of the Rheumatics," but said nothing to revise his former and probably persisting rejection ofthe French way oflife. Other brieftrips that same year provided opportunities for the Clemens family to visit Arles and Nimes, and in March 1892 they spent three weeks in Menton, a resort town on the Mediterranean (Rasmussen 1995: 156). The fragment "Down the Rhone" came out of his travel to the south of France, but went unpublished until after Clemens's death (when it appeared in the collection Europe and Elsewhere). It contains nothing substantial about France or the French: just a few complaints about unsatisfactory cream, dark wallpaper, and houses built of stone which, according to Clemens, breed "melancholy thoughts in people used to friendlier and more perishable materials of construction" (Twain 1963: 604). In the mid-1890s he returned to France once more, spending most ofhis time in Paris, but none ofhis impressions found public expression in any ofhis writings.
Despite Clemens's five visits to Italy, which added up to more than a year and a half of his life, the country does not figure largely in his writings. Two humorous essays, "Italian without a Master" and "Italian with Grammar," describe the narrator's strenuous efforts to deal with the Italian language (Twain 1906: 171-85, 186-96). The most comprehensive treatment of selected sights in Italy came out of his brief initial encounter with the country during the Quaker City cruise, although the months spent in Italy in 1892-3 and 1903-4 must have familiarized him much more fully with Italian life and culture.
Clemens's attitude toward Italy is not easily summarized. Although he found a great deal to like there, he was oftwo minds about Italians (Scott 1969: 55). The passages dealing with the different Italian cities the Quaker City tourists visited create an incoherent picture. Genoa, their first stop in Italy, struck the narrator as "a stately city" with attractive people and unusually beautiful women (Twain 1869: 160). Immediately afterwards, however, the narrator qualifies his praise by pointing out that "the palaces are sumptuous inside, but they are very rusty without" (p. 162). His reports on Genoa epitomize another pattern to be found in his reports about the Old World - his interest in the new, for items that signaled material progress and technological advance. Railroads and highways captuted his attention much more than the well-known cultural treasures of the countries he visited (Ganzel 1968: 128).
Clemens's narrator did not shy away from mentioning the aspects of Italy that struck him as unpleasant. He found "deformity and female beards ... too common in Italy to attract attention" (Twain 1869: 199). More important was his political obser-
vation regarding the clash between the splendor of the church buildings and the poverty ofthe mass ofthe people: "for fifteen hundred years, (Italy} has turned all her energies, all her finances, and all her industry to the building up of a vast array of wonderful church edifices, and starving halfher citizens to accomplish it," the narrator commented, adding a sweeping generalization, "She is to-day one vast museum of magnificence and misery It is the wretchedest, princeliest land on earth" (p. 258). His encounter with Italian art triggered a similar response. For Clemens, these artworks were a constant reminder of a strictly hierarchical society that cared little for the average citizen but benefited the rich and the mighty, regardless oftheir moral record. The narrator deplored the connection between the immoral and exploitative aristocratic patrons of art and the dependent artists who sold their talent to them: "I keep on protesting against the groveling spirit that could persuade those masters to prostitute their noble talents to the adulation of such monsters as the French, Venetian and Florentine Princes of two and three hundred years ago" (p. 260).
Venice did not live up to this American traveler's expectations either. "This Venice," he stated, "is fallen a prey to poverty, neglect and melancholy decay" (Twain 1869: 217). His remark may have reflected the actual state of affairs in Venice at the time, but it may also have been influenced by the time constraints that marred the visit. Under pressure to write about five thousand words aday for the travel letters to be sent to the Alta California, he simply may not have had enough leisure to indulge in the beauty of the city (Ganzel 1968: 143). This, and a host of other factors, prevented Clemens from producing a comprehensive written record documenting what he saw and how he reacted toward it. The gaps in his reporting do not necessarily reflect a lack of interest in, or an attitude of indifference toward, the sights that were there to be admired. Similarly, it was the loss of letters and notebooks containing detailed information on Florence and Rome, rather than Clemens's supposed impatience with the treasures ofart upon which their reputation rested, that led to an inadequate representation of these cities in Innocents Abroad. The loss of notes taken to keep track of the many sightseeing opportunities was particularly unfortunate because the Quaker City's tight schedule produced such a quick succession of impressions that it was hard to remember the numerous events with sufficient precision in the absence of such aidesmemoires. Afterafull day ofsightseeing the sensory overload produced disorienting psychological effects at night: the travelers went to bed "with drowsy brains harassed with a mad panorama that mixes up pictures ofFrance, ofItaly, ofthe ship, ofthe ocean, of home, in grotesque and bewildering disorder" (Twain 1869: 201).
Of the various places Samuel Clemens visited in Europe, the German-speaking countries had the most profound impact on him. For one thing, his life in America had provided many opportunities for contact with German immigrants and German Americans. Additionally, he had prepared for his sojourn in Germany and Austria many months before his departure on the 1878 trip by taking German lessons and collecting information about the place that would become his temporary home. As a result, he knew much about the country, its people, and its culture before he set foot on German soil for the first time.5 The most comprehensive literary record of his
sojourn in Germany is A Tramp Abroad. However, while this book contains the largest number ofpages written about the subject, it is not a comprehensive rendition ofthe impressions and experiences gathered during the 1878-9 visit. Clemens saw different regions and visited various cities in Germany, but his travel account concentrates on Heidelberg and the Neckar region. Despite this limited scope, the prospectus produced to advertise the new publication informed potential buyers that A Tramp Abroad was "a gossipy record ofthe author's pedestrian tour through Germany and other parts ofEurope." Calling Clemens "perfectly familiar with the whole country he visited and the people he met," it cast him as an expert on German affairs.6
Readers who took seriously Twain's direct reference to The Innocents Abroad in an interview given to reporters in New York City (in which he said that the new book was "entirely solemn in character, like the 'Innocents Abroad,' and very much after the general plan of that work" {Budd 1982: 50]) might have been disappointed by the way in which A Tramp Abroad differed from its predecessor. The "Mark Twain" in this latter book limited his observations to the more or less traditional pattern of the American travel account on Europe, focusing mainly on the landscape and the people. According to the narrator's view, Germany, in the summer, was "the perfection of the beautiful" (Twain 1880: 126). He spoke positively about the German people, who appeared to him "warm-hearted, emotional, impulsive, enthusiastic, their tears come at the mildest touch, and it is not hard to move them to laughter" (p. 93). The numerous remarks about the German language, both in the travel account and in the appendix, "The Awful German Language," testify to the interest Clemens took in it. While learning German was portrayed as a frustrating endeavor for the narrator, the language itself received praise for its expressiveness. It was deemed "surpassingly rich and effective" in words which describe pathos, love, home life, outdoor nature, and the creatures and the marvels offairyland (p. 615). The seriousness ofthis statement is borne out by the fact that the German language occupied a special place in the life of the Clemens family: they organized a German-language class in their Hartford home, their children were partially reared by German nursemaids, and Samuel Clemens wrote affectionate notes to his wife and children in German (see Kersten 1998: 203-4). The last entry in his notebook was in German (Hill 1973: 265), and when, on the occasion of his wife's burial, he chose what was perhaps one of the most meaningful phrases of his life, he determined to express his final benediction in German.7
While the impressions recorded in A Tramp Abroad convey a very incomplete picture of Germany in the late 1870s, Clemens's notebooks indicate that he was paying attention to a broad range of issues of current and historical interest, including political events and questions ofsocial importance. Ultimately, however, his notes must have appeared too provocative to him to be included in the final version of the book. There was no way for Clemens to publish in print what he wrote privately in a letter to W. D. Howells: namely, that the German empire, ruled by Bismarck's strong hand, impressed him with its prosperity, its "genuine freedom," and its "superb government" (Twain and Howells 1968: 109).8 It also seems doubtful that many of
his countrymen would have appreciated seeing Emperor William I, the personification of the German monarchy, equated with Abraham Lincoln, America's foremost democratic hero. Clemens, however, apparently thought nothing of mentioning the two men in the same sentence: "It is worth something to be a Lincoln or a Kaiser Wilhelm," he wrote to Bayard Taylor, "and it gives a man a better opinion of the world to see it show appreciation of such men - & what is better, love of them" (Schultz 1936: 49).
Such comments grew out of Clemens's increasing dissatisfaction with America. If Clemens had ever had an unequivocal sense of America's superiority over the Old World, by the late 1870s it was crumbling. At this point in his life, America did not live up to its claim to be the land of the free, the antipode to a Europe governed by ruthless autocrats. In fact, to him, political freedom in the United States seemed weaker than anywhere else in the world. "[W}e are ruled by a King just as other absolute monarchies are," he wrote in a fragment of the A Tramp Abroad manuscript. "His name is The Majority ... Our King rules with a rod ofiron. Ours is an Absolute Monarchy" (Scott 1969: 96-7). Such a belief made it difficult to produce the "sharp satires on European life" Howells had encouraged him to write (Twain and Howells 1968: 120). Without a sense ofAmerica's moral superiority, it was pointless to criticize Europe's political system. Ultimately, however, Clemens decided not to include any of these powerful and explosive statements in the travel book he was writing, mainly for economic reasons. Any hint ofwhat might have been construed as an unpatriotic position would certainly have harmed his reputation, his popularity, and, by extension, his economic success as a writer. Consequently, his narrator retained the role of an inoffensive observer engaged in a private pedestrian tour.
Clemens and his family returned to Germany in 1891-2. But despite the fact that he came into contact with a significant number of prominent people, including the Prince ofWales and the German emperor, the literary record ofthis sojourn is limited to a few articles written for the New York Sun (Scott 1969: 171-2). "The German Chicago" was a journalistic piece devoted to Berlin, painting a positive picture oflife in that city. "At the Shrine ofSt. Wagner" described his visit to Bayreuth, the site of the Wagner music festival. And "Marienbad, a Health Factory," prompted by his visit to this well-known Bohemian spa, collected a variety ofgeneral, rather disconnected impressions gathered during his time there.
The 1878-9 European sojourn also included a stay in Switzerland: the first ofthree visits to this country which added up to a total ofapproximately four months spent in its different towns and villages. The most detailed literary reflection on Switzerland is found in the second halfof A Tramp Abroad. Most ofthe chapters dealing with the experiences of the protagonist and his traveling companion, however, consist of burlesque adventures in the mountains. The reader finds few specific comments on life in Switzerland, and no political remarks at all. Although the narrator described the country as "simply a large, humpy, solid rock, with a thin skin ofgrass stretched over it" (Twain 1880: 483), the tone of the chapters conveys a sincere enthusiasm for Switzerland's impressive peaks, beautiful valleys, lakes, rivers, and waterfalls.
Holger Kersten
Clemens's next visit to Switzerland, in 1891, found a brief reflection in a letter he wrote for the New York Sun. The title of the piece, "Switzerland, the Cradle of Liberty," announced a political focus but, very much like the other travel letters written during this period, it simply strung together a series of more or less unrelated observations. The introductory section, however, does emphasize the exemplary character of the Swiss political system: "It is healing and refreshing to breathe in air that has known no taint of slavery for six hundred years," Clemens wrote, distinguishing Switzerland from the neighboring monarchies. The high degree ofmorality he observed there emerged, he concluded, from the fact that political struggles in this country had always been "in the interest of the whole body of the nation, and for shelter and protection of all forms of belief." Such moral rectitude, the letter-writer thought, was "worthy to be taught in schools and studied by all races and peoples" (Twain 1963: Ill).
The last ofClemens's three visits to the Alpine republic occurred in 1897 and took the writer and his family back to Weggis, where he worked on a number of unfinished projects. None of them dealt with the village, or with Switzerland. That he enjoyed the sojourn, however, is clear from the letters he wrote to his friends in America. He told his Hartford friend Joseph Twichell that Weggis was "the charmingest place we have ever lived in for repose and restfulness" (quoted in Paine 1912: 1045). Despite this positive environment, Clemens's literary endeavors did not progress much. None of the four or five books he was working on at the time was completed. Perhaps the limited social life led to a feeling offrustration and prompted him to complain that beautiful Weggis "was wasted on the 'ignorant, poor, goodhearted jabbering animals' who lived there" (Scott 1969: 232).
At the end of September 1897 Clemens and his family left Weggis for Austria, where they would stay for 22 months. In contrast to the quiet atmosphere in Switzerland, life in Vienna put him in touch with a large number ofprominent public figures. He enjoyed the hospitality extended to him by the Austrian aristocracy, the attention that was lavished upon him by Vienna's diplomatic community, and the intellectual stimulation that came from his contacts with prominent journalists, literary authors, and other celebrities. It may have flattered him and thus contributed to his general appreciation oflife in the Austrian capital that Vienna lionized him to such an extent that he became "a privileged character" there (Paine 1912: 1051). The time Clemens spent in Vienna was a tonic that helped him overcome the disappointments and emotional pressutes that had marred the previous years. Much ofwhat he saw there fed his intellectual cutiosity and stimulated his thinking and writing in a variety of ways. Some ofhis experiences may have alerted him to new subject matter, new ideas, new ways oflooking at life; others appealed to him because they confirmed, reinforced, or expanded ideas he himselfhad noutished for some time (Dolmetsch 1992: 15). At any rate, it was a period full ofcreative energy, a time in which Clemens wrote more prolifically than in almost any other phase ofhis long career, although little ofwhat he composed during this period was published during his lifetime.9
The time spent in Austria was undoubtedly an inspiration to Clemens, and yet few ofthe ideas and thoughts spawned there relate to or reflect his actual sojourn in Vienna
Twain and Continental Europe
and Kaltenleutgeben. There were occasional journalistic pieces that described and commented on contemporary issues (e.g. "Stirring Times in Austria" and "The Memorable Assassination"). The setting of No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger, it is true, is medieval Austria, and its themes were doubtlessly influenced by the Viennese background (Dolmetsch 1992: 297); but it is not a story about Austria or Austrians. It is, rather, "a psychic adventure, a journey into the deeper mind and beyond" (see Twain 1982:). Nothing of what Clemens wrote in Austria is comparable to the type of travel description supplied in The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad.
Regardless of how intensely European scenes and events found their way into Samuel Clemens's writing, there can be no doubt that his exposure to Europe had a significant influence on him. In official statements, however, Clemens tried to downplay its impact, and he tended to repeat what his narrator had stated in the conclusion to A Tramp Abroad: "Europe has many advantages which we have not, but they do not compensate for a good many still more valuable ones which exist nowhere but in our own country" (Twain 1880: 580). The underlying notion that, for Clemens, life in America was preferable to that in Europe has become a widely accepted truth in Twain scholarship. Recently, Jeffrey Melton has refreshed the image ofClemens as an irreverent traveler: "Touring eastward in The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad," he writes, "Mark Twain repeatedly snubs the grandiose pretensions of the cultures he encounters." But if Samuel Clemens was convinced of "the failure of the Old World civilizations" (Melton 2002: 59), the question remains why he returned to them so often.
The reasons why Clemens went to Europe were always complex. To some extent, the journeys leading to the writing of The Innocents Abroad and A Tramp Abroad were motivated by a professional impulse. The Quaker City excursion seemed attractive because it promised "a vast amount ofenjoyment for a very reasonable outlay" (Twain 1975a: 301) and because such a trip was supposed to make it easier for the aspiring author to earn his living as a writer of travel letters for the San Francisco Alta California (Ganzel 1968: 7-8). The second trip to Europe was also undertaken in the hope of stimulating his literary creativity. The plan to write a new book for the subscription market obviously had a financial dimension, and it tied in with Clemens's desire to economize: "We are in Europe mainly to cut down our expenses," he explained in a letter to Mary Mason Fairbanks (quoted in Kaplan 1966: 213). Psychological reasons may also have played a role in his decision to put some distance between himselfand his homeland (and particularly his feelings of guilt and humiliation following the Whittier birthday dinner). This combination ofeconomic and psychological pressures may have affected Clemens's mood in such a way that he saw going to Europe as an escape and a liberation. "Life has come to be a very serious matter with me," he wrote his mother in early 1878 (Twain 1920: 177), and he gloomily recorded the hope that his absence might numb his pain: "To go abroad has something ofthe same sense that death brings," he wrote in his notebook, "I am no longer of ye - what ye say of me is of no consequence" (Twain 1975b: 64). This general feeling of frustration may explain an even more striking entry in his notebook: "One feels so cowed, at home, so unindependent, so deferential to all sorts ofclerks and little officials, that it is good
to go and breathe the free air of Europe and lay in a stock of self-respect and independence" (p. 56).
That he associated freedom and independence with Europe was an indication that Clemens's opinion of his home country had reached a low point in the late 1870s. How else could such a comment be explained in America, whose self-definition hinged on the idea that it was, in contrast to Europe, "the land of the free"? In Europe "man is a ward under guardianship," an anonymous reviewer had written in 1861, "a pupil under discipline at school, a pauper to be cared for, a vagabond to be put in the pound, a thing to be looked after and watched; but not a man who can take care of himself, provide for his own safety and interests, and get his own living generally" (Anon. 1861: 539). But none of these received notions about personal and political freedom seemed valid for Clemens at this stage of his life. He evidently wanted to put some distance between himself and the daily hassles and cares of his life in Hartford, and he looked for a way to vent his frustration and disillusionment with America. Europe seemed to be the environment in which he might achieve this.
The contrast between Clemens's public statements about the advantages of life in America, on the one hand, and the privately held view that something was seriously wrong with his country, on the other, points to the ambivalence that is ubiquitous in his writings about Europe too. His depiction of Europe and his attitude toward it cannot be easily summarized and categorized. More than once the voices represented in his books admitted that it was impossible to give an adequate rendition ofimpressions collected abroad. The full travel schedule ofthe first European tour led to bodily and mental exhaustion which affected the traveler's capacity for perception and evaluation. "How the fatigues and annoyances of travel fill one with bitter prejudices sometimes!," exclaimed the narrator in The Innocents Abroad, going on to point out the arbitrary nature of single impressions: "I might enter Florence under happier auspices a month hence and find it all beautiful, all attractive" (Twain 1869: 247). In A Tramp Abroad, the narrator conceded that much ofwhat he had written might actually be incorrect. Comparing notes with his travel companion, he noticed "that each ofus by observing and noting and inquiring, diligently and day by day, had managed to lay in a most varied and opulent stock ofmisinformation" (Twain 1880: 165). Even in his antipathy toward the French, Clemens admitted that the narrow basis for statements about things seen in a foreign country militates against a definitive truth: "I generalize with intrepidity from single instances," he wrote in his notebook. "When I see a man jump from the Vendome column, I say, 'They like to do that in France'" (Twain 1975b: 318).
Additionally, the time gap between the actual visit and the act ofwriting and revising influenced the rendition ofthings seen and events experienced. Whenever Clemens was unable to use the travel letters and notes from his European trip as a basis for the chapters he was writing because they had been lost, he found himself in a difficult situation. It was simply impossible for him to recreate the experience in his mind many months after the event. The conclusion to The Innocents Abroad, written a year after the Quaker City trip had ended, displays the narrator's awareness of the fact that
the time elapsed between the original event and the literary account had mitigated the emotional response to the excursion: "I am moved to confess," the narrator says, "that day by day the mass of my memories of the excursion have grown more and more pleasant as the disagreeable incidents of travel which encumbered them flitted one by one out of my mind" (Twain 1869: 648).
It is also important to remember, despite the claim that The Innocents Abroad represents Europe seen freshly with the narrator's own eyes, that its composition and publication were heavily influenced by economic factors. "Every book [Twain} ever wrote," Kenneth Andrews stated, "was constructed with its prospective sale as the important condition of its composition" (Andrews 1950: 156-7). By Clemens's own estimate, the most profitable way to sell books was the subscription book market. In 1881 he explained that a subscription book "will sell two or three times as many copies as it would in the trade, and the profit is bulkier because the retail price is greater" (Twain 1999: 134). By calculating how he might address his books to the widest audience, he had to cater to the tastes of subscription book buyers - his financial success depended upon it. Against this background, his writing may be said to be as much a reflection of what he thought his audience wanted to read about Europe as a faithful rendition of his own observations.
As he found out to his dismay, his reputation as a humorist also circumscribed the range ofhis literary creativity: "Even when ... he is in a serious mood and would like to talk sense on grave topics," one reviewer noted, "the despotic public won't let him." At the same time, Clemens's humor and his writing style left readers "at a loss to determine whether Mark is indulging in a vein of sarcasm, or whether he is fairly describing something that he really saw" (see Budd 1999: 190). Those familiar with the conventions of Western humor, however, would no doubt have noticed, and enjoyed, the "odd mixture ofsober truth, droll exaggeration, and occasional buffoonery, all mixed up together in the most incongruous way" (Budd 1999: 191). This was, after all, his trademark style: layered, ambivalent, even self-contradictory. Stringing together incongruities and absurdities in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, Clemens produced many vignettes which captured individual aspects of life observed in different European countries at different points in time - but this technique makes it difficult to extract an unambiguous image ofEurope from the record he left behind. His writings were never intended to produce a coherent whole, and since they were produced over a long stretch oftime, it is perhaps only natutal that they changed and developed with the expanding mind oftheir author. Clemens knew that it was impossible to encapsulate the essence ofa nation within the confines ofa story, an essay, or even a book. "When a thousand able novels have been written," he declared, "there you have the soul of the people, the life of the people, the speech of the people; and not anywhere else can these be had. And the shadings ofcharacter, manners, feelings, ambitions, will be infinite" (Twain 1897: 188).
While it is beyond doubt that Samuel Clemens's writings contain critical remarks about the Old World, these self-conscious observations imply that his position toward Europe was too complex to be reduced to the single adjective "irreverent."
His substantial travel experience effectively undermined the notion that some people or nations might be superior to others. He realized early on that being exposed to other cultures did achieve an important effect in that it "rubs out a multitude of... old unworthy biases and prejudices" (Twain 1976: 35). Indeed, as time went on, Clemens became convinced that all humans, regardless of their national background, were equally corrupt. During his sojourn in Vienna, this conviction culminated in the conclusion that it was enough to know "that a man is a human being, ... he can't be any worse" (Twain 1996b: 253-4).
In the final analysis, Europe was much more to Clemens than an easy target that allowed him to affirm asense ofAmerican self-confidence. Considering that his periods in Europe were prompted by attempts to find the leisure for his literary endeavors, to improve his financial situation, and to restore the health ofhimselfor other members ofhis family, one might suggest that he came to Europe in search of remedies for his artistic, economic, and health-related problems. For his career as an author, the Old World was a source of inspiration, suggesting settings, characters, and topics to be used in his writing. On a more abstract level, it may have offered him "a convenient staging ground for exploring his fears, desires, and ideas about women, men, and their relations with each other" (Stahl 1994: 177). In his private life, it was a tonic applied to bring about his own and his family's mental and bodily regeneration. It also provided him with a much-needed distance from his own country, allowing him to think about and express his reservations against life in America. Ultimately, traveling and living in Europe proved to be a formative element in Samuel Clemens's personal and literary life. Here he found both the leisure and the critical distance he needed to complement and balance his development as a person and a writer.
NOTES
In Life on the Mississippi, Clemensclaimedthat duringhistrainingasaMississippipilothe "gotpersonallyandfamiliarlyacquaintedwith aboutallthedifferenttypesofhumannature thataretobefoundinfiction,biography,or history"(Twain 1883: 217). Hisencounters with German immigrants and German AmericansaredocumentedinKersten(1993).
2 Foradetaileditineraryofthe Quaker City trip seeTwain(1996b:392ff.).
3 Detailed information about the 1878-9 sojournissuppliedinTwain(1975b:41ff.).
4 Aportionofthismaterialwaslaterpublished under the title of "The French and the Comanches"(Twain1962:181-90).Seealso Twain(1975b:323ff.).
5 SeeKersten(1993,1998).
6 Quotes from the prospectus of A Tramp Abroad (MarkTwainPapers,BancroftLibrary, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley; hereafter MTP).
7 ThesimplemarkeratOliviaClemens'sgrave bearstheinscription"Gottseidirgnadig,0 meineWonne!"{Godbemercifultothee, 0 myjoy!}.SeePaine(1912:1223).
8 EvenClemens'snephew,SamuelMoffett,mentioned"Bismarck'sgagginglaws"inaletterto hismother:SamuelMoffetttoPamelaMoffett, 21March1879(MTP).
9 Amongtheprojectsheworkedonwere What is Man?, the Mysterious Stranger manuscripts, sectionsthatwouldbecomepartofhisautobiography,portionsof Christian Science, and"The ManThatCorruptedHadleyburg."
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