A Tramp Abroad (Penguin ed.), Page 2

  Composition faltered, though, and in January 1879, he reported that “I have torn up 400 pages of MS, but I’ve still got about 900 which need no tearing. They suit me very well.” In Paris, in April, he recorded that his fire went out the day he arrived; by May, however, he was up to manuscript page 1,959 and estimated that another “600 or 700 more will finish the book.” But it was not until his return to the United States that he delivered the bulk of the 2,600 manuscript pages that completed the book. He read proof in rapid order, and in March 1880, A Tramp Abroad was ready to sell. By late April 1880, Twain boasted to his English publishers that “no book of mine has made so much talk here since Innocents Abroad.” Excerpts appeared in the Boston Transcript, the Literary World, and the Chicago Tribune. Howells’s review in The Atlantic Monthly of May 1880 praised the “serious undercurrent” of A Tramp Abroad, and Twain responded that the review was “perfectly lovely.” By its first anniversary, A Tramp Abroad had sold over 60,000 copies in the United States. But it had been a long, dreary process of composition, revision, and editing that seemed endless to its author.

  Whatever the amount of labor involved, Mark Twain was discovering the harmonious tone for his most characteristic voice. As far back as 1871, he explained to his wife his formula for delivering a comic lecture:Any lecture of mine ought to be a running narrative-plank, with square holes in it, six inches apart, all the length of it, & then in my mental shop I ought to have plugs (half marked “serious” and the other marked “humorous”) to select from & jam into these holes according to the temper of the audience.

  In the mid-1870s Twain elaborated on his notion of a narrative plank punctuated with comic material when he offered advice to his Western newspaper friend, William Wright. Wright (who wrote under the pseudonym “Dan DeQuille”) intended to publish a history of the Comstock silver bonanza and a separate collection of humorous sketches. According to Twain, however, Wright’s method of composition was not only flawed, it was incorrect:Dan, there is more than one way of writing a book; & your way is not the right one. You see, the winning card is to nail a man’s interest with Chapter I, & not let up on him till you get him to the word “finis.” That can’t be done with detached sketches; but I’ll show you how to make a man read every one of those sketches, under the stupid impression that they are mere accidental incidents that have dropped in on you unawares in the course of your narrative.

  For Twain, the humorous sketch was interspersed with that factual, autobiographical, historical “narrative plank,” so that the two parts worked in felicitous combination. But Twain had more insight for Wright, and when Wright went to the Clemenses’ Hartford house to take lessons in book writing, Twain suggested that he “Bring along lots of dry statistics—it’s the very best sauce a humorous book can have. Ingeniously used, they just make a reader smack his chops in gratitude. We must have all the Bonanza statistics you can rake & scrape.” Twain’s narrative formulas were ones that he followed himself, and the result, as Bernard DeVoto said, was that Twaintook the humorous anecdote, combined it with autobiographical reminiscence, and so achieved the narrative form best adapted to his mind. . . . The mode of creation that expressed him was a loosely flowing narrative, actually or fictitiously autobiographical—a current interrupted for the presentation of episodes, for, merely, the telling of stories.

  It was a deliberate, crafted formula that brilliantly imitated informality, free association, and casual indifference to coherence and connection; a formula found throughout A Tramp Abroad. And even rural newspapers, the voice of Twain’s middle-class audience, noticed his unique formula. The Scranton Free Press said of A Tramp Abroad, “People do not like to read a volume of travels because it is dry and prosy, but when all this knowledge is combined with sparkling wit the reading becomes a pleasure instead of a task”; the Tolland County Leader echoed the fact that factual material “which if given by other writers would be dry and uninteresting is here fairly ‘sugar-coated,’ as none but Clemens knows how to do.”

  The quarter of the book that he estimated he had written by July 1878 was in the “disconnected form”: the collection of square plugs—anecdotes, tall tales, descriptions of scenic or historic sites, and critiques of European customs and society. Combined with the equivalent of his “narrative plank”—a burlesque walking tour and a caricature of the study of art and German—Mark Twain had the formula that permitted him to expand, contract, insert comedy, alternate serious and comic material (as in the German and French duels), and basically wander off his topic when something else interested him. Twain revealed one possible method of incorporating the “plug” into the “plank” in a January 1879 letter to Howells: “I have chartered it [the raft], & I shall pick up useful passengers here & there to tell me the legends of the ruined castles, & other things—perhaps the Captain who brought the news of the Pitcairn revolution.”

  For the present, however, he accumulated enough “disconnected” material to make an additional book’s worth, published in 1882 as The Stolen White Elephant. That collection included the title story along with “The Legend of Sagenfeld,” “Concerning the American Language,” “Paris Notes,” and “Mental Telegraphy,” all identified as left out of A Tramp Abroad. “The Professor’s Yarn” and “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn” were in reserve for inclusion very early in the process of composition. Several other passages left out of A Tramp Abroad made their way into his next travel book, Life on the Mississippi (1883), and one was reworked for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Some of the material originally written for A Tramp Abroad is still unpublished.

  What he did decide to include as “plugs” in his narrative plank vary widely in their quality. As Richard Bridgman has pointed out, “The result was a typically uneven performance, with some first-rate anecdotes, such as ‘Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn,’ but also long mechanical stretches and a good deal of filler.” But that was a significant aspect of Mark Twain’s pose as a writer—casual, spontaneous, low- (or at best, middle-) browed, unorthodox, indifferent to the rules of genteel society. A Tramp Abroad is, in a sense, a mirror in which we view not only what Mark Twain sees; we are also allowed to view Mark Twain “absorbing” the scenery in Europe, which provides much of the humor, as the perceiver and the workings of his perceptions are at least as interesting as the Black Forest or Heidelberg or the Alps.

  III

  A Tramp Abroad is a much more sedate book than its obvious predecessor, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Its author was a decade older, married and the father of two children; established in a handsome mansion in Hartford; and lacking, as he told Howells, the “calm judicial good humor” necessary to produce the satire with which the earlier book brims over. Its narrator is, indeed, less innocent, more world-weary, and possibly more foolish. The burlesque walking tour of Europe becomes strained and obvious; descriptive material occasionally grows tedious; and jokes sometimes extend longer than their optimum lifespan. The “tramp” through Germany (chapters 1-24), Switzerland (chapters 25-42), and France and Italy (chapters 42-49) concludes with a half dozen appendices of varying interest, suggesting Mark Twain’s weariness with his book and its contract.

  The mind composing the record of that tramp is, however, a wonder to behold. As Bridgman notes astutely, in his rush for movement Twain was committed totrying out other possibilities, quite unsystematically and without coming to any logical closure, for this was where the associative path led him. However bizarre and disconcerting such moments might be, he allowed them entrance to his page, for they represented a faithful record of the movement of his mind through unregulated complexities. . . . For our purposes they accurately display associative connections as well as underlying concerns in Twain’s mind.

  But Twain was also committed to form, and in chapter 23, he explicitly described the structure of A Tramp Abroad—not a book about walking, but one about talking: Now the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. . . . I
t is no matter whether one talks wisdom or nonsense, the case is the same; the bulk of the enjoyment lies in the wagging of the gladsome jaw and the flapping of the sympathetic ear. . . .

  There being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order, and so a body is not likely to keep pegging at a single topic until it grows tiresome. We discussed everything we knew, during the first fifteen or twenty minutes, that morning, and then branched out into the glad, free, boundless realm of things we were not certain about.

  In addition, the “form” is almost identical to that of the humorous mock-oral narrative that Twain admired and described at length in an essay called “How to Tell a Story”:The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular. . . .

  The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it. . . .

  To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.

  The technique is also the conversion of the associative ordering of autobiographical material to the realm of fiction. He was to perfect the method in his Autobiographical Dictations of the last years of his life, when he lay in bed almost every morning and talked about “the thing uppermost in a person’s mind” in order to achieve a truth that chronological order could not.

  The first segment of A Tramp Abroad ostensibly describes Heidelberg, particularly the University and the student corps. But Mark Twain deviates to describe the burlesque “Great French Duel” and to ridicule Richard Wagner (in chapters 9 and 10), and then jumps from a description of an old German actor to an anecdote of his own about an event on a Mississippi steamboat, which reminds him in turn of an anecdote involving the King of Bavaria. In chapter 26, watching fishers on Lake Lucerne sends him, incongruously, into an anecdote about Washington, D.C. “One day I thought I would stop and see a fish caught. The result brought back to my mind, very forcibly, a circumstance which I had not thought of before for twelve years.” And off we go with the story of “The Man Who Put Up at Gads-by’s.” In chapter 42, watching children playing at mountain climbing reminds the narrator of a similar scene of children in Nevada playing at silver-mining, and that leads him to an anecdote about a young boy playing God on Sunday. And in chapter 47, an incident triggers a reminiscence that occurred more than a decade earlier.

  It is not surprising that the most felicitous segment of the narrative plank of A Tramp Abroad is the raft trip, which glues together chapters 14-20. These chapters echo the contrast that Mark Twain was at the same time exploring in the manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (composed between 1876 and 1883, but not published until 1885). And with the same values (but not the same language) as Huck’s, the narrator rhapsodizes on the serenity of life on a raft:Germany, in the summer, is the perfection of the beautiful, but nobody has understood, and realized, and enjoyed the utmost possibilities of this soft and peaceful beauty unless he has voyaged down the Neckar on a raft. The motion of a raft is the needful motion; it is gentle, and gliding, and smooth, and noiseless; it calms down all feverish activities, it soothes to sleep all nervous hurry and impatience; under its restful influence all the troubles and vexations and sorrows that harass the mind vanish away, and existence becomes a dream, a charm, a deep and tranquil ecstasy.

  Less successful are the narrative burlesques of the ascent of the Riffelberg (chapters 37-39), which requires the services of 154 men (including fifteen barkeepers, three chaplains, and seven cows), and the climb of Mont Blanc by telescope (chapter 44).

  Nevertheless, this meandering inconsistent wandering provides the casual association that allowed Twain to insert such delightful comic narratives as “The Great French Duel,” “The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby’s,” “Nicodemus Dodge,” and “The Awful German Language.”

  Twain’s most successful and hilarious tall tale in A Tramp Abroad is the incongruous deadpan story, “Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn,” in chapters 2 and 3. As Walter Blair says, just as Huckleberry Finn is the greatest of Twain’s longer comic works, “Blue-Jay Yarn” is the greatest of the shorter ones. Although it does not have the depth, the scope, or the variety of the novel, it is equally characteristic, and judged on its own terms it is in some ways superior: it has fewer flaws and greater unity. Besides, it is delightfully funny.

  Twain decided that “Blue-Jay Yarn” deserved to be among his most celebrated short works. Alongside “The Celebrated [or Notorious] Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) and “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Old Ram” from chapter 53 of Roughing It (1872), the “Blue-Jay Yarn” appeared in Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888), an anthology of his works that he helped compile.

  The success of “Blue-Jay Yarn” stems partly from its ability to mesh incongruities and absurdities in playful combination, but also from its ability to mix and modulate the voices of Mark Twain, Jim Baker, and a flock of jays. Through the use of the humanized blue-jays, Twain blends fantasy and reality by offering readers the realistic narrative voice of Jim Baker and the improbable narrative voices of the loquacious birds that surround him. And through Twain’s frame-narrative voice, we learn from the beginning that he too knows thatanimals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I never knew but one man who could . . . This was Jim Baker . . . Baker said, that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the blue-jays were the best talkers he had found among birds and beasts.

  As Blair noted, it was in the winter of 1864-65 that Twain heard the oral version of “Blue-Jay Yarn.” While staying with Jim Gillis and his partner Jim Stoker, Twain was himself the audience for “Jim Gillis’s yarn about the blue-jays,” a story that Twain described in his notebook as “charming,” “delightful,” and “full of happy fancies.” The reins of the story are given to Jim Baker, and just as the talkative jay drops acorns into a “bottomless” knot-hole in the plank roof, Twain uses Baker and his feathered friends to fill one of the holes in the narrative-plank of A Tramp Abroad with a story reminiscent of his journalistic tall tales.

  They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon the whole region ’peared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him.

  The charm of Twain’s “Blue-Jay Yarn” derives from exactly these qualities: humanized animals and deadpan, humorless, erratic narration. Just as there is no apparent reason for the jay’s fascination with filling the “bottomless” hole, there is no logical reason for including “Blue-Jay Yarn” in a European travel book. But by his use of free association and the frame-narrative, Twain gives us a tale that mirrors the pattern of the oral tradition, a style of writing that stressed manner over matter and form over substance.

  As the reader forgets Twain’s travels in Europe with his companion and focuses upon the “humanized” voices that fill the story, Twain deftly toys with the reader’s human characteristics. The apparent differences between squawking birds and squawking humans is less significant than their similarities. In the end, the jays and the reader learn that the hole cannot be filled, and the forest erupts with laughter as the birds “guffawed over that thing like human beings.” Twain’s humanization of the bluejays is a negative comparison: “a jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise.”

  Ultimately, A Tramp Abroad is about talk and voices, not simply five thousand bluejays. Subjects include the impossibility of translating from German to English or vice versa (chapters 1, 9, 16, and 18), the impossible a
bsurdity of the German language (Appendix D and Appendix F), the pedantry of using obscure foreign terms (chapter 30), and the inane language of several young Americans in Europe (chapters 20, 27, and 38). Twain described A Tramp Abroad himself as “a gossipy volume. . . . It talks about anything and everything, and always drops a subject the moment my interest in it begins to slacken.”

  In Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman proclaimed (perhaps more hopefully than accurately),. . . this is no book,

  Who touches this touches a man, . . .

  It is I you hold and who holds you

  I spring from the pages into your arms. . . .

  Whether Whitman was correct or not, the reader who holds A Tramp Abroad holds the essential personality of Mark Twain. The book gives us a spectrum of his voices, in addition to those of others: the “inspired idiot” literary comedian who ascends the Riffleberg (chapters 37-40) in a week, when the trip ordinarily takes only a few hours, or who seems incapable of seeing the sun rise on the Rigi-Kulm (chapters 28 and 29); the moralist who is outraged at some European art (chapter 50); the pragmatic sceptic regarding Romantic German legends (chapters 15, 16, 17, and 19). In short, Twain is boisterous and playful story-teller, whose reporting with his camera-eye was always subservient to pleasing his audience. A Tramp Abroad defines the character who remains America’s most complex fictional creation.

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING

  Albert Bigelow Paine’s multi-volumed biography of Mark Twain, commissioned and begun before Twain’s death, is still the major biographical source. In the years since its publication in 1912, a mountain of information, research, and criticism has been published. The following materials focus on A Tramp Abroad—its creation, publication, reception, and place in Mark Twain’s canon.