Reading the early Twain classic, The Innocents Abroad, it is as if one can feel Samuel Clemens holding a straining Mark Twain by the leash. The sardonic voice of the incipient social critic is there, but it is still being kept in check by the more soothing tone of the mere "humorist"; the writer of palatable pleasantries.
Opening it, and going by reputation and title alone, one is hoping to find a book that makes satirical mincemeat of crass American manners and naivety while traveling overseas. But Clemens/Twain was aiming at a wider public than could withstand such mockery. Thus, most of the book's humor is at the expense of the travelers' hosts, rather than themselves, and it is not the sort of pungent wit to strain a nineteenth century sitting-room's intellect.
We learn that the Italians do not know where to find soap in a hurry, for instance, because they allegedly do not use the stuff. We discover that the beggars of Arabia are not shy in demanding bucksheesh. We are told that the native women of the Holy Land are "homely" and that the men kiss each other on the beard. And so forth.
In short, Twain flatters his readers' prejudices outrageously. All lands to the East of the Atlantic seaboard are apparently places of barbarism, despotism, penury, and stench. They are locales where the people do not bathe and often go about stark naked. And Twain does not even stop short of indulging in flare-ups of genocidal racism and violent fantasies, though he will occasionally pull back and say he is growing "unreliable."
Twain is at his best in this book when he allows himself to flirt with religious skepticism. His treatment of Europe's many "pieces of the true cross," a place in the Holy Sepulcher where stands a pole that allegedly marks the "center of the Earth," and where one can see "the dirt from which Adam was made," etc. are among the funniest in the book.
Here is the author indulging, for instance, in one of his moments of brief winking blasphemy: "The information the ancients didn’t have was very voluminous. Even the prophets wrote book after book and epistle after epistle, yet never once hinted at the existence of a great continent on our side of the water; yet they must have known it was there, I should think."
All of this sort of thing is cut short, and sternly so, however, as soon as we threaten to impinge too closely upon the strictly Protestant orthodoxies of Twain's presumptive readership. It is all well and good for us to mock at handkerchiefs purportedly showing the imprint of Peter's face, or to inveigh against the brutalities of the Inquisition. We must stop all that, however, and lapse into conventional piety, as soon as we get to the Holy Land itself.
That is why the last third or so of the book is by far the weakest. Twain starts to run out of material he can safely mock.
In the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, of course, there remain sufficient vestiges of "priestcraft" and "superstition" that he can have at it freely. But when he is shown the alleged site of the crucifixion, and shown a rent in the Earth where supposedly the earthquake that accompanied Christ's death clove the ground in twain, then suddenly our Voltairean skeptic puts on a serious and devout face.
If Twain hardly ever dares tweak his audience directly, however—at least not where it might hurt— it can certainly be said that the exaggerated loathing we are inclined to heap upon civilizations other than our own often reflects—if only implicitly—our fears and insecurities concerning ourselves. And Twain is no exception. His rants against Romanish superstition and despotism, indeed, often take on the appearance of a massive American self-projection.
Twain is wonderful, for instance, in denouncing the hideous discrimination, persecution, and cruelty to which Jews were subjected at the time by force of law in the Papal States. He adduces evidence of their segregation, their brutal treatment by hate-filled mobs, the denial of their basic freedoms. He contrasts these facts with the blessings of democracy that Jewish people allegedly enjoy in the United States.
Conspicuously absent from this comparison is any mention of the United States' own regimes of apartheid and lynching, or the practice of human slavery then only recently abolished. But can one not sense some acknowledgement of these guilt-specters in Twain's fevered denial of their existence, and his attribution of all vice and cruelty solely to the Italian Catholics?
Speaking of America, and contrasting it with the Papal States, he writes:
Jews, there, are treated just like human beings, instead of dogs. They can work at any business they please; they can sell brand new goods if they want to; they can keep drug-stores; they can practice medicine among Christians; they can even shake hands with Christians if they choose; they can associate with them, just the same as one human being does with another human being; they don’t have to stay shut up in one corner of the towns; they can live in any part of a town they like best; it is said they even have the privilege of buying land and houses, and owning them themselves[...] they never have had to run races naked through the public streets, against jackasses, to please the people in carnival time; there they never have been driven by the soldiers into a church every Sunday for hundreds of years to hear themselves and their religion especially and particularly cursed; at this very day, in that curious country, a Jew is allowed to vote, hold office, yea, get up on a rostrum in the public street and express his opinion of the government if the government don’t suit him! Ah, it is wonderful.What Twain here does not say, and which groups of people—and their circumstances in the United States— he does not describe, are almost more audible from this passage than the things he is saying, and the people he is describing.
It is not solely insights such as these that kept me going through the 500-some pages of The Innocents Abroad, however. It is also that the book, for all its faults, is so tremendously, gallopingly readable. It is like a mountain of delicious spaghetti that one can never get to the bottom off, that one wolfs down as rapidly as possible. It is easy to see why the book delighted Twain's audience, and why it launched his career.
It is the ultimate crowd-pleaser, in short; so long as one does not happen to belong to any of the innumerable human groups Twain goes out of his way to insult. Indeed, if one is a nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxon Protestant living in the United States in modest yet prosperous surroundings, it is an unmitigated delight. All others, myself including, will find things in it that will make for a disappointment, even as we enjoy ourselves along the way.
The Penguin Classics edition before me is not without its copy errors—forgivable in so lengthy a tome. I do not know if these are original to the book's first print edition, which the editors say was the base text, but I note that the Project Gutenberg version—which allegedly draws on the same version—does not include the same typos. I note them here, for the benefit and convenience of future editors:
p. 49 "an angle [sic]" - should be "angel" in context.
p. 54 "flout [sic] their riches in the Emperor's face" - the mistaken word choice seems to be Clemens's own—it appears, at any rate, in the Gutenberg version
p. 71 Twain refers to the characters in Dumas père's famous novel as "heroes of 'Monte Christo'" —an idiosyncratic spelling at best that is not reflected in the Project Gutenberg version
p. 77 "Bastile [sic]" needs another "l," as Gutenberg recognizes
Note: Twain always uses "staid" for the past participle of "to stay," which is no longer in use but could well have been proper in his day.
p. 104 "on parle française [sic]"— sans "e," please
p. 105 Has "whisky" although Gutenberg spells it "whiskey"—which was it?
p. 113 "apparent (to them,)"—Gutenberg forgoes that odd extraneous comma
p. 119 "divided their conquests equably[.]" Surely he means "equitably."
p. 126 "Shakspeare [sic]" —an unusual spelling that is not replicated in the Gutenberg version, nor used by Twain later on when speaking of the great dramatist (compare p. 170).
Note: Twain always spells it "undreampt" when this word, with its distinctive mélange of consonants, comes into use. I prefer this to the modern spelling, sans p, since a friend once tried to insist to me that "unkempt" is the only word in the English language in which the letters "m," "p," and "t" appear in succession, and this gives me a way to confound him.
p. 156 "chorusses [sic]"
p. 207 "Humboldt country [sic]"—should be county
p. 212 "spring mattrass [sic]" Perhaps an older spelling, but it is not one replicated in Gutenberg
p. 222 "so jealousy [sic] guarding"— we need to make that an adverb
p. 263 "among the hurrying feet; are the famed dogs of Constantinople"— we need a comma there, if anything, not a semicolon
p. 270 "no gainsaving [sic]"
Note: Among Twain's defunct spellings of foreign locales and terms: "Bagdad," "Bosporus," "Phenician," etc. He also spells the name of the Philistine felled by David "Goliah."
p. 365 "bored our [sic] with eye-holes"
p. 456 "in consequence of this. I find [...]" we need a comma rather than period.
p. 470 "Revised Statues [sic] of the State of Missouri[.]"
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