Writing Life
Rereading Twain on Travel
by Peter Rose

"Bummer!" That's what my teenage grandsons said when I slipped on the ice and broke my ankle last New Year's eve. Two days later I reluctantly canceled a long-planned trip to join a contingent of travel journalists in San Diego for what some might call a boondoggle but I saw as a bonanza, a conference at sea. For weeks I had looked forward to workshops on writing and photography and to exchanging ideas with colleagues. Instead, I sat propped up in a reclining chair with my leg in a boot-like cast and plenty of time to feel sorry for myself, stare at my laptop, and ruminate about what might have been.

Then, resigned to my fate, I decided that, with a minimum sentence of six weeks under house arrest, I would spend the time reading -- actually rereading -- some favorite travel books and maybe even write something about the experience.

My wife went to the library and got what I wanted, a small array of volumes that ranged chronologically from Tocqueville to Theroux and included works by much admired recent chroniclers, including the late Bruce Chatwin, Peter Matthiessen, Jon Krakauer, Jonathan Raban, John McPhee, and John Berendt. Auspiciously placed at the top of the pile of books now stacked next to my chair was The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain.

My ambitious exercise started and, it turned out, ended right there. Rereading Twain's trans-Atlantic odyssey to Europe, North Africa and the Middle East, once again confirmed my long-held belief that he is truly the godfather of American travel journalism and, though he wrote other travel books, that The Innocents Abroad is the flagship volume.

The story began in 1867, when, at the age of 32, Twain persuaded the publisher of the Daily Alta California to sign him on as a correspondent to write about the first organized Grand Tour cruises to Europe. A short while later, he and around 150 other passengers sailed from New York on the chartered steamship, Quaker City.

True to the terms of his assignment, the reporter sent regular dispatches back to his editors. After returning to the U.S., he edited his field notes and columns and published them in a large volume with sixty chapters of smoothly interlocking vignettes.

What is most striking about the book is that its author recorded impressions of just about everything, starting with preparation for the voyage. He wrote about shipboard protocols and the routines of both crew and paying guests, descriptions of on-board programs that ranged from dancing to the rhythms of the ship's orchestra on the upper deck to church services to drinking in the saloon they called "The Synagogue," and discussions that invariably reflected curiosity about what the Americans, most of whom had never been abroad, would encounter. Later, even the tiresome prattle of bored tour guides was recounted alongside the excitement of the travelers' experiences in what they were taken to see.

Replacing the sort of sentimentality that prevailed in many accounts of travel in the mid-19th century with his own brand of candor. Mark Twain's "Baedeker" was free wheeling and unrestrained. Sometimes its word portraits were almost painterly; more often they were tinged with irony. For example, on entering the Mediterranean, he wrote, "The picture . . . was very beautiful to eyes weary of the changeless sea . . . . But while we stood admiring the cloud-capped peaks and the lowlands robed in misty gloom a finer picture burst upon us and chained every eye like a magnet – a stately ship, with canvas piled on canvas till she was one towering mass of bellying sail!" By contrast, referring to those required visits to "must-see" museums and their holdings, he wrote, "We galloped through the Louvre, the Pitti, the Uffizi, the Vatican – all the galleries – and through the pictured and frescoed churches of Venice, Naples, and the cathedrals of Spain; some of us said that certain of the great works of the old masters were glorious creations of genius (we found it in the guide-book, though we got hold of the wrong pictures sometimes)."

Later, describing the Holy Land, while revealing genuine awe at seeing certain historic sites, Twain commented on the pious pilgrims of various faiths who visit the sacred sites, then, with impish abandon, noted that, "They will tell of Palestine, when they get home, not as it appeared to them, but as it appeared to Thomson and Robinson and Grimes [writers on these places] -- with the tints varied to suit each pilgrim's creed."

While sometimes revealing Twain's own prejudices, frankness pervades the entire work -- as does its freshness. Reading again what it is like to pass the Pillars of Hercules that mark the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea, see the Duomo and Santa Croce in Firenze, wandering the streets of Pompeii, climb up to the Parthenon, stare down on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and walk through famous forums and fields of battle for the first time evokes an odd sort of déjà vu. I had similar reactions upon first seeing each of these same iconic sites a century later.

Sensitive to his readers back in California, Twain was also wont to make some homey comparisons. "The celebrated Sea of Galilee is not so large as Lake Tahoe . . . . And when we come to speak of beauty, this sea is no more to be compared to Tahoe than a meridian of longitude is to a rainbow. The dim waters of this pool can not suggest the limpid brilliancy of Tahoe."

Withal, the Tahoe-like brilliance of Twain's travel prose and the verve of its unique rendering combined to give readers of his day -- and ours, too, a true sense of being there.

Mark Twain was a great writer and a consummate humorist. Not even the most curmudgeonly of today's travel journalists can do better in succinctly characterizing the sense of the wonder of what it means to be a first-time innocent abroad than the man who wrote, "It's amazing, in Paris even the children speak French."

ASJA member Peter Rose, who recently spent two months as an armchair traveler, is a sociologist, writer, and editor of www.SoGoNow.com an online travel magazine.