Review by Edward Tanguay December 18, 1995

I've made it to Rome and I'm enjoying the trip! As I hang out here at the Roman Coliseum at the midway point, I'll ask myself why this book is so enjoyable. Firstly, I'm getting a sense of mid-19th-century Europe which has an intrigue as a window to the past without knowledge of the 20th century. The poverty surprises me. The sense of nationality and military readiness is frighteningly vivid. (No wonder Europe has erupted in two world wars since then.) Secondly, the descriptions of Italy are simply informative and enjoyable since I have never been to that country. Lake Como is now on my list of places to see in Europe. You know when Twain complements something it must be good, as not much escapes his ceaseless criticism and wit!

And, oh, the most wonderful thing about Twain is he is so refreshingly politically incorrect! When traveling in foreign lands, we all have a sense of the correct way to do things, how the economy should be run, and what healthy hygiene is, but we usually keep this to ourselves and publicly "enjoy the unfamiliar." Not so with Twain! Twain is your traveling inner voice! Twain is everything that you would love to say but do not! He starts promptly on arrival in the Azores:

The community is eminently Portuguese--that is to say, it is slow, poor, shiftless, sleepy, and lazy. and it keeps it going in Africa:

The general size of a store in Tangier is about that of an ordinary shower bath in a civilized land.

and once he gets going, he doesn't stop. French barbers get in his line of fire ("they have no barbershops worthy of the name in Paris-- and no barbers, either, for that matter"), as do European tourist guides ("those necessary nuisances"), Moorish women (the Moors, who do not let Christians in their Temples, generally do not get a good review), hotel waiters ("that is the strangest curiosity yet--a really polite hotel waiter who isn't an idiot"), the Lord of the Ottoman empire is not spared in the least ("representative of a people by nature and training filthy, brutish, ignorant, unprogressive, superstitious--and a government whose Three Graces are Tyranny, Rapacity, Blood" not to mention that he is also "the genius of Ignorance, Bigotry, and Indolence"), the town of Civitavecchia ("it is well the alleys are not wider, because they hold as much smell now as a person can stand, and of course if they were wider they would hold more, and then people would die"), even the American Indians ("those degraded savages who roast their dead relatives")--Twain rails everyone. He even lets you know when ("and now that my temper is up, I may as well go on and abuse everybody I can think of"). For Twain, every country except the United States is an "uncivilized land" where inhabitants struggle through life steeped in various kinds of backwardness and inefficiency, their inhabitants "looking upon a bar of soap as a curiosity."

The only other travelogue done with this level of irreverence and sense of humor that I have enjoyed as much as this one is William Buckley's travel journal of when he went to China with Nixon in 1974 ("Nixon casually gets up from the dinner table, unplanned, and begins walking around the dining hall toasting each of the 100 Chinese guests which immediately throws every member of his Secret Service into a sudden frenzy" and Buckley's very Twain-like ". . . and, oh God, if you miss your bus! You would have to make your own arrangements from Shanghai to Peking. You might as well make your own arrangements to launch as Cape Canaveral").

Another wonderful thing about Twain are simply his descriptions. He describes scenes so that you think you are there: the waltzers on the reeling ship, the effect of the 21,700 Reis bill on the diners in the Azore restaurant, the description of the Oracle which I include here because I loved it so much--he really nailed a personality type with this one:

Speaking of our pilgrims reminds me that we have one or two people among us who are sometimes an annoyance. However, I do not count the Oracle in that list. I will explain that the Oracle is an innocent old ass who eats for four and looks wiser than the whole Academy of France would have any right to look, and never uses a one-syllable word when he can think of a longer one, and never by any possible chance knows the meaning of any long word he uses or ever gets in the right place; yet he will serenely venture an opinion on the most abstruse subject and back it up complacently with quotations from authors who never existed and finally when cornered will slide to the other side of the question, say he has been there all the time, and come back at you with your own spoken arguments, only with the big words all tangled, and play them in your very teeth as original with himself. He reads a chapter in the guidebooks, mixes the facts all up, with his bad memory, and then goes off to inflict the whole mess on somebody as wisdom which as been festering in his brain for years and which he gathered in college from erudite authors who are dead now and out of print.

This book is full of precise and vivid Twain language ("he addressed her from the North Pole of his frozen heart") even though it was early in his career. His humor kills me sometimes. Complications of the tourists with the foreign language come up frequently and are usually always funny, for instance, the part about the tourists wanting to walk across the Frenchman's boat as a bridge to the pier when the French boatman then began rowing them out into the sea as if they wanted to go somewhere in the boat! And the following little note about understanding a foreign language is excellently described:

. . . and we must sit long in the cool chambers and smoke--and read French newspapers, which have a strange fashion of telling a perfectly straight story till you get to the "nub" of it, and then a word drops in that no man can translate, and that story is ruined. An embankment fell on some Frenchmen yesterday, and the papers are full of it today--but whether those sufferers were killed, or crippled, or bruised, or only scared is more than I can possibly make out, and yet I would just give anything to know.

The half-English, half-French letter to the landlord was nicely done as well. (A letter in this form went around the Internet not too long ago supposedly from the president of Australia to Chirac in response to the French nuclear tests in the Pacific Ocean.)

I liked Twains insight regarding the artists who created the famous paintings of the past centuries:

Their nauseous adulation of princely patrons was more prominent to me and chained my attention more surely than the charms of color and expression which are claimed to be in the pictures.

I'm looking forward to the rest of this book because I know Twain is going to be irreligious and disrespectful as always. Twain can get a bit sharp at times (his sarcasm about the Romans, gladiators and the Church in Rome, for instance, was a bit too sharp) but when he is able to keep his wit fine tuned he's an enjoyable and humorous critic. Religion gets Twain riled, so it will be interesting to see if he can keep his head and good humor while traveling in the Holy Land!

Edward Tanguay

*** The Innocents Abroad, by Mark Twain
*** Notes on the SECOND half
*** by Edward Tanguay
*** December 26, 1995

In the afterword to my edition of this book, Leslie Fiedler accurately describes this book as an "occasionally mad, often tedious, but somehow eminently satisfactory travel book." As Twain was leaving Jerusalem, I felt a bit travel weary myself, having read description after description of important biblical places of interest.

For Twain, Europe is old, historical, and backward. America (except the Indians--they are just backward for Twain) is new, future-oriented, and progressive. He demonstrates this in his comparison of the Vatican offering money for old artifacts that people dig up and the American government offering money for new ideas:

The Vatican and the Patent Office are governmental noses, and they bear a deal of character about [the respective faces].

Throughout the book, Twain degrades the silly and unclean ways of the old world. As someone, Peter I think, pointed out in an early message, this says more about Twain than the Old World, namely that he was a bit immature at the time or just representing the cultural immaturity of the times. But painting a picture of Europe from an American perspective is nothing new. As Leslie Fiedling points out, this is something Americans need to do:

We Americans, on the other hand, are plagued by the need to invent a mythological version of Europe first, something against which we can then define ourselves; since for us neither the Old nor the New World seems ever given, and we tend to see ourselves not directly but reflexively: as the Other's Other.

Twain both discovers his cultural roots in Europe as well as uses Europe as a springboard from which to show how sparkling new and effecient and clean the American way of life and government is. In our next book _The American_, Henry James is going to create another Europe from which he can begin to define his idea of an American.

Was there any symbolic significance in Twain's comments that both Venice and the Sea of Galilea both looked better during the night as opposed to the bright light of day? Also, Greece seemed to have a magical charm when they were running around at night. For Twain, Europe is the place of myths and fantasy, but when seen during the day, it is simply backward.

Speaking of the commando mission in Greece, I sat up in my chair when Twain and his crew jumped off the boat and snuck onto Greek territory for a commando raid! Finally, I though, adventure!

There was instantly a banging of doors and a shout. Denny dropped from the wall in a twinkling, and we retreated in disorder to the gate. Xerxes took that mighty citadel four hundred and eighty years before Christ, when his five millions of soldiers and camp followers followed him to Greece, and if we four Americans could have remained unmolested five minutes longer, we would have taken it too. The garrison had turned out--four Greeks. We clamored at the gate, and they admitted us. [Bribery and corruption.]"

That had Huck Finn written all over it! The lack of adventure and intact stories made this book tedious. I sat up in my chair again when Twain told the "The Legend of the Seven Sleepers." He could have put a lot more sub-stories and adventures in this book.

Twain was the author of this book, but was he also the narrator? It is documented that Twain made this precise trip in 1867 (or 1869) and sent back pages of his journal to be published, but it is not clear that the narrator of _The Innocents Abroad_ is the Mark Twain himself. Would Twain want to have ascribed to his name those comments on the American Indians or the following politcally loaded statement about the country of Turkey:

I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little-not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining rod or a diving bell.

How much does Twain hide behind the narrator of this travel book and how much will he account for?

Twain was a young author when he wrote this, but there are descriptions in this book which promise the later accuracy at describing scenes. I'll leave you with two of my favorites:

The waters of this placed suterranean lake are the brightest, loveliest blue that can be imagined. They are as transparent as plate glass, and their coloring would shame the richest sky that ever bent over Italy. No tint could be more ravishing, no luster more superb. Throw a stone into the water, and the myriad of tiny bubbles that are created flash out a brilliant glare like blue theatrical fires. Dip an oar, and its blade turns to splendid frosted silver, tinted with blue. Let a man jump in, and instantly he is cased in an armor more gorgeous than ever kingly Crusader wore. Wretched nest of human vermin about the fountain--rags, dirt, sunken cheeks, pallor of sickness, sores, projecting bones, dull, aching misery in their eyes and ravenous hunger speaking from every eloquent fiber and muscle from head to foot. How they sprang upon a bone, how they crunched the bread we gave them! Such as these to swarm about one and watch every bite he takes, with greedy looks, and swallow unconsciously every time he swallows, as if they half fancied the precious morsel went down their own throats . . .

Edward Tanguay

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