Photo via Library of Congress
It was about the
first of September, 1867, in Constantinople. A group of eight Americans walked
into the studios of Abdullah Frères, three Armenian brothers who were renowned
photographers — “photographers to the Sultan”, as they promoted themselves.
Abdullah Frères were famous for their views of Constantinople and their
portraits of prominent figures in the Ottoman empire. But the photographs they
took of the Americans that day might be the most historic images they would
make. For the American tourists were passengers on the Quaker City, the first American cruise ship to tour the
Mediterranean. And among their number, not yet 32, was a young man named Sam
Clemens, just beginning to make a name for himself as Mark Twain.
In his photograph
from Abdullah Frères, Twain is a youngish man with dark, scraggly hair — how
different from the gray-headed elder statesman we usually imagine! — but his
face is still distinctly Twain’s. The same narrow eyes, the same mustache, the
same look of vague disapproval all stare back from the studio portrait. “They
take the finest photographs in the world here,” he wrote back to his mother.
At the time, Twain
was a journalist who had managed to finagle his way onto the Quaker City cruise. He had convinced his
employer, the Daily Alta California
of San Francisco, to pay for his fare, in return for covering the journey in a
series of letters to be published in the paper. The letters proved popular.
That led to a book, The Innocents Abroad,
or the New Pilgrims’ Progress (dedicated by Twain to “my aged mother”), published
150 years ago this year.
Tom Sawyer and
Huck Finn may rule children’s literature lists and school curricula today, but
in Twain’s lifetime it was his autobiographical works that sold the best — Roughing It, Life on the Mississippi,
and, above all, The Innocents Abroad.
That judgment wasn’t restricted to 19th-century buyers, either; George
Orwell, for one, considered them “his best and most characteristic books.”
What made The Innocents Abroad such a success? For
one thing, travel literature was popular with audiences, and Twain’s book fit
in the genre, if somewhat uncomfortably. Twain keeps writing of his disappointment
with the people and places he meets, especially in Palestine. This was nothing
new in travel writing. What was new
was Twain expressing that disappointment by mocking and insulting travelers and
travel writers for paying lip service to the pieties of travel, with their
expressions of awe and sentimentality. And he pioneered the image of the
boorish American traveling overseas, even titling his lecture tour promoting
the book “The American Vandal Abroad.”
But it was all an
act. From his first national success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras
County,” and even before, Twain was honing his brand of sleight of hand and
misdirection in print. Part wisecracking comedian, part con-man, Twain was
something new — and distinctly American — on the literary scene. With The Innocents Abroad, we are lucky that
we have so many steps of the con in evidence. Between his travel notebooks, his
letters, and the final product, we can see Twain constantly reworking his
humor. Sometimes this is to smooth off the rough edges to make it appeal to an
Eastern audience, and not just the readers of the Daily Alta California. Other times, it is apparently just to make
it funnier.
At the time, The Innocents Abroad was widely hailed
as a masterpiece of humor. Critics and other writers hailed the funniest scenes.
A favorite was Twain at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, weeping over the
grave of his ancestor Adam — as in Adam and Eve — because they never had the
chance to meet. If the absurdity weren’t clear enough, Twain often marked such
jokes by footnotes: “Stated to me for a fact. I only tell it as I got it. I am
willing to believe it. I can believe any thing.”
Reading through the
book today, though, we become less sure what to make of Twain’s humor. Some of
it is deeply disturbing, as Twain describes meeting “the wildest horde of
half-naked savages” and pictures himself daydreaming about exterminating
tribes. This has to be black humor, we tell ourselves, but when we read other
writing of the time we begin to wonder. “I believe in the existence of inferior
races, and would like to see them exterminated,” Arthur Evans (not yet the
famed discoverer of Minoan culture on Crete) could casually write about the
Bosniaks of the Balkans, just a few years later.
So perhaps it is
not surprising that, even though it seems unlikely that anyone would take The Innocents Abroad as a serious
representation of the people and places it describes, this is precisely what
has ended up happening. Twain’s morbid joke that train engines in Egypt used
mummies for fuel (“sometimes one hears the profane engineer call out pettishly,
“D—n these plebeians, they don’t burn worth a scent — pass out a King!”) has
led to claims up to the present that this was once a common practice in the
country. There is a famous quote at the end of the book about the positive
effects of travel — “fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and
many of our people need it sorely on these accounts” — coming after Twain has
spent some 600 pages viciously mocking the lands he has visited, the people who
live in them, his fellow travelers, and anyone else in sight. Yet the quote is
famous because it is often taken as a serious argument by advocates for travel,
with Twain hailed for his progressive views.
Above all, it is
Twain’s description of 1860s Palestine that has come to be treated humorlessly
as documentary evidence. Everyone from Benjamin Netanyahu to Alan Dershowitz,
and many in between, have taken The
Innocents Abroad at face value here. At least, they have taken parts of it
at face value — the parts where he describes Ottoman Palestine as desolate and
empty (and not the parts where he doesn’t). They use the same few quotes, with
the same ellipses, and in one case give the same wrong location for the scene
Twain was describing.
All of this was
far in the future when Twain was first approached by a publisher in November of
1867, days after his return, about turning his letters into a book. He clearly
had his records of the trip on his mind when he wrote to Emma Beach, one of his
fellow travelers on the Quaker City, a
month and a half later. Looking for his photographs from Abdullah Frères — the
ones he had praised so highly to his mother — Twain found he had misplaced
them. “I have searched everywhere for my photographs, but I cannot find a
single one,” he informed her. “Those Constantinople pictures were very bad,
though. I might almost as well send you a photograph of the Sphynx — it would
look as much like me.”
If there’s a
lesson to be learned here, in other words, it’s how dangerous it is to take
anything Mark Twain says at face value.
