5

Much of A Tramp Abroad is based on a walking tour that Mark Twain made in the summer of 1878 through the Black Forest and Alps with his friend Joe Twichell.^[1] He regarded the trip as "a rich holiday," but its transformation into a marketable product proved less restful (MTL 1:338). Writing Howells early in its composition, he observed that "a man can't write successful satire except he be in a calm judicial good-humor—whereas I hate travel, & I hate hotels, & I hate the opera, & I hate the Old Masters—in truth I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANY-thing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it & curse it, & foam at the mouth,—or take a club & pound it to rags and pulp" (MTHL 1:248–49). By the time the manuscript was at the printers, the Tramp had become for Mark Twain "that most infernally troublesome book" (MTHL 1:290). Its illustrations gave him trouble, he was fighting Canadian pirates, he had numerous other speaking, writing, and business obligations that kept him on edge, his family had been steadily on the move, Livy had been ill, and he himself had endured bouts of rheumatism and dysentery.

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, especially in the latter reaches where others' accounts of Alpine climbing exploits and accidents were copied out verbatim. The tone is sometimes casual and

[1] Their itinerary is detailed in N&J 2, 46–49.

cheerfully irreverent, sometimes irritable and contemptuous. Overall, the composition is loose, as Mark Twain acknowledged when after a digression of some fifteen pages he began chapter nineteen: "However, I wander from the raft" (171). Such casual devices opened the narrative to any anarchistic invention, which liberated his imagination but also permitted numerous pointless and mediocre pages. At its best, the Tramp has such inspired stories as booking passage for Zermatt on a glacier, discovering after a night's sleep that it has not moved, and deciding that it must have run aground (454). But elsewhere, Twain was so distracted or uninterested that he included the flattest of anecdotes.

Despite the maddening swamp of detail in which Mark Twain found himself immersed, he responded enthusiastically to the order and efficiency of German life. Although he regarded Germans as warmhearted "children of impulse," for him they were admirably well-behaved children (93). Despite the gory wounds they produced, their dueling clubs mesmerized him. He admired the fortitude of the young male participants, especially in comparison with the French. Their artificial, histrionic dueling practices roused him to heights of savage comedy when he described an imaginary duel between M. Gambetta and M. Fourtou. (Leon Gambetta was the well-known contemporary French republican; "Fourtou" probably is a variant on foutu, a vulgarism meaning, approximately, "done for" or, more directly, "screwed.") The conclusion of that duel was that Gambetta collapsed backward onto Twain, with the result that Twain was "the only man who had been hurt in a French duel in forty years" (80, 82). French civilization always seemed degradingly effeminate to Twain. He thought Louis XVI "contemptible" as a king for having been no better than a "female saint" in his conduct. As in the Innocents, Twain preferred forceful masculine action. Had Napoleon been in Louis's place, Twain remarks, the Swiss guards would never have been massacred. And al-

though they would have no memorial today, still "there would be a well-stocked Communist graveyard in Paris which would answer just as well to remember the 10th of August by" (261).

Given such aggressive ferocity, one can see why Mark Twain turned by preference to German culture. Throughout the Tramp, he placed a series of German legends, some authentic, some invented. Almost all of them involve romantic or marital love in which the men are saved by, betrayed by, or do injury to women. The problems of the first, "The Knave of Bergen," are unusually interesting. The legend involves a knight encased in black armor who appears at a royal masked ball. His dancing and conversation please the queen, but when he is obliged to unmask, he turns out to be the executioner of Bergen. Enraged by his presumption, the king orders him to be executed, but the executioner argues (not very coherently or plausibly) that since the punishment will not expunge the ostensible disgrace, the king should knight him instead. The king does so, uttering a sentence of ineffable incoherence: "Well then, and gave him the knight-stroke, so I raise you to nobility, who begged for grace for your offense now kneels before me, rise as a knight" (21).

I can think of no justification for including a story so lamely concluded save that Mark Twain, the Westerner who had stormed the bastions of Eastern culture with his audacity, felt an affinity with the knave-executioner. A jester, who had married far above his station (Livy's father, a wealthy coal dealer, being the king, as it were, of Elmira, New York), he had become the part owner of a newspaper and had gained entrance to the central repository of culture, the Atlantic Monthly. In one undiplomatic speech, he had mocked the elders of the cultural pantheon, to the distress of Howells and even at times of himself. He was an untrustworthy barbarian, a knave, and in one sense of the

book's title, a "tramp"—a vagabond, a ne'er-do-well—abroad. In an unused preface to the book, Twain confirmed a modified version of this association. "I perceived that in using the word Tramp I was unconsciously describing the walker as well as the walk" (MTLP, 109–10).

If the presence of "The Knave of Bergen" is most easily accounted for as a psychologically compelling analogue to Twain, on other occasions Twain could fuse his own sense of the world's constitution in objective and controlled art. "Jim Baker's Bluejay Yarn" is as finely accomplished as any tale Twain ever wrote. A blue jay, sprightly and intelligent, discovers a hole in which he might store acorns. Unfortunately, the hole is in the roof of a cabin, so that hard as he works to fill it up, he never succeeds. But as he has reasoned the project out for himself as plausible, he stubbornly keeps working at it. "Well, you're a long hole, and a deep hole, and a mighty singular hole altogether—but I've started in to fill you, and I'm d-----d if I don't fill you, if it takes a hundred years!" (39–40). Eventually, the reality is discovered, whereupon all his fellow jays laugh wildly at "the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled" (41).

This story also parallels Mark Twain's own activities and temperament. He worked himself to distraction on projects as ill conceived as the jay's. Estimating, for example, that A Tramp Abroad required twenty-six hundred pages of manuscript, he wrote almost four thousand to achieve that length, discarding many of them. (MTB, 663, 650). Such prodigious expenditures of energy were typical of his compositional habits. Of an uncompleted narrative, "Simon Wheeler," Twain wrote Howells in 1898: "I didn't finish the story, though I re-began it in several new ways, & spent altogether 70,000 words on it, then gave it up & threw it aside" (MTHL 2:674–75). And throughout the eighties he was investing in the prototype for the Paige typesetter,

sometimes throwing as much as two thousand dollars a month down that bottomless hole, until by 1894 he finally bankrupted himself.

The example of the ant suggested to Mark Twain another satire on enormous energy expended to no practical end. Observing an ant at work in the Black Forest, Twain discovered the absurdity of regarding it as a model of industry. The ant seemed to have neither a plan nor common sense. Its actions were aimless, awkward, and, when it encountered a fellow ant, quarrelsome. To Twain the ant seemed to have no legitimacy as a "moral agent," and although it did have strength, so did a toadstool. A toadstool could burst out of the ground, lifting "twice its own bulk into the air." In fact, Twain mused, "ten thousand toadstools, with the right purchase, could lift a man, I suppose." Then the devastating query: "But what good would it do?" (219).

Although Mark Twain admired German industry, he also understood its limitations. The Black Forest farmhouses established in his mind the conjunction of wealth and excrement. Rich farmers had huge piles of manure before their front doors. "When we saw a stately accumulation, we said, 'here is a banker'" (210). The prevalence of this stinking treasure inspired the plot of a "Black Forest Novel." In it a worthy but poor young man desperately digs for roots and by chance strikes a manure mine—"a limitless Bonanza, of solid manure!" (212).

Such comic avatars of vitality as the blue jay, the ant, the toadstool, and the poor young man capture Mark Twain's own sense of the self engaged in the world's business. One works industriously but hopelessly like the blue jay trying to fill a hole; one works furiously but without a plan like the ant; one works powerfully but to no significant end, like the toadstool; and one works diligently like the poor young German and is delighted to find—excrement.

Sometimes the seemingly inescapable presence of excrement overwhelmed Mark Twain. Of the Swiss canton of Valais, he aid, "Its alleys run liquid dung—these villages are the shackliest & vilest we have seen anywhere. This canton may be called the fundament of Switzerland" (N&J 2, 148–49; also 167). In the Tramp, this journal entry becomes wading "ankle deep through the fertilizer-juice" of the "reeking lanes" of the village of Saint Nicholas (398–99, 403). This revulsion is turned into denominational hostility that is vented in the comic rage of Twain's fictional companion, Harris, "a rabid Protestant." He begins by saying that "in the Protestant cantons you never see such poverty and dirt and squalor as you do in this Catholic one; you never see the lanes and alleys flowing with foulness" (403). This initial observation quickly rises to condemnatory extravagance: Protestant cantons don't have lop-eared dogs. They have road signs, flower boxes, "acres of cats," and "you never see a speck of dirt on a Protestant glacier" (404). The subject of filth was very much on Twain's mind, then, especially "during this walk from St. Nicholas," which was for him the most offensive of the Catholic villages (486). Saint Nicholas himself had earlier proved to be an imposter, for Twain scourged him as a man who, although lauded as "the peculiar friend of children," had in fact deserted his own ten children to become a hermit (325).

Such a world was seriously distorted, but unable to discover why, Mark Twain again elected to satirize Christianity. He spoke with irritable contempt of "the cracked-pot clangor of the cheap church bells" in America on Sundays (401). Or, taking note of a grave in Switzerland, he observed that it held a farmer who had lost his balance while plowing and fell fifteen hundred feet, to which he adds a footnote: "This was on Sunday. M.T." (485). Shortly, he was reminded of a preacher's son who was enjoined to play "only things that are suitable to the Sabbath day." The father later

looks in to see his children playing the Expulsion from Eden, with the son "standing in an imposing attitude . . . with a dark and deadly frown on his face. What was meant was very plain—he was personating the Deity!" (489).

But attacking Christianity was wearing thin for Mark Twain. The source of disharmony lay far beneath people's mindless rituals and superstitions. Twain inhabited a secular world that made such terrible demands on his energy and so lacerated his sensibilities that at times he could only snort with indignant laughter. But this world also threatened genuine dangers. Sometimes Twain responded to the manifest perils of the mountains with a wild, surrealistic humor: riding a glacier like a train; taking an enormous roped party on what was in effect a simple mountain stroll; ascending Mont Blanc by telescope (419–50, 454–57, 515–19).

At other times, though, he conceded the authentic horror of falling from heights. The latter part of the Tramp is filled with precipices over which various persons plunge to their deaths. Twain dwelt on a scene of an old climber examining a sack containing the remains of friends who had dropped into and been absorbed by a glacier forty years earlier: "'This is Balmat's hand, I remember it so well!' and the old man bent down and kissed it reverently, then closed his fingers upon it in an affectionate grasp" (469). The grisly lugubriousness of this scene, which is actually illustrated in the original edition, may seem exaggerated. Yet it renders some of the distress Twain felt in the presence of a remorseless reality. Shortly he would experience analogous feelings as he took the trip down the Mississippi in search of lost time and comrades. As we shall see, his morbidity persisted—expanded in fact.

Another of Mark Twain's responses to nature's hostility to man was to create a sentimentally defiant image. The higher reaches of the Alps, with their lack of vegetation,

struck him as a "grisly desert," a "smileless desolation" (371, 370). There was nothing, he said, "but death and desolation in these hideous places." Yet in the midst of "the most forlorn and arid and dismal" place of them all, he found a blue forget-me-not that impressed him as trying "to make a whole vast despondent Alpine desolation stop breaking its heart over the unalterable" (371). So he plucked it and sent it to a friend.^[2]

Analogous images appear regularly in Mark Twain's writing. The party of miners lost in the Nevada snowstorm is almost next to a stage station (RI, chap. 33). In the Tramp, Twain places another party on the Rigi-Kulm mountainside, lost on a foggy night, seated miserably in a chill, muddy darkness, and terrified by a "vast body" that showed itself for an instant, like "the face of a precipice" (293–94). Ultimately, this fearful looming turned out to be the summit hotel. Twain was constantly trying to conjure away the terror of the void by laughing at it or by showing that the gallant little flower can outshine the dreariest landscape or that help is nearby, would we only look. But he could never permanently dispel the apprehension that all these versions of relief were nonsense.

The Rigi-Kulm presented a series of related experiences of comic frustration. Here Mark Twain once again set a goal—to enjoy "that wonderful spectacle, an Alpine sunrise"—that he then failed to achieve. On the first attempt, "fagged out" by the arduous climb, he and his companion sleep in a halfway station until "half past three in the afternoon," thereby missing the sunrise and suffering "a bit-

[2] Cf. Walter Blair's remark: "Although the passage is marred when Twain has the flower chirrup inane advice about cheering up, by then it has embodied his dilemma pictorially. Otherwise its emotional freighting is a puzzle" (Mark Twain and Huck Finn [Berkeley, 1962], 344).

ter disappointment" (290–91). They continue to climb, though, until they reach the summit hotel, where again they fall exhausted into bed. Awakened the next morning by an Alpine horn, they rush out to a viewing platform and ecstatically contemplate the sun just above the mountaintops, until they suddenly realize that it is going down instead of coming up. They had again slept through the day and were now watching a sunset (299). On their third try to see a sunrise, they notice only a delicate lightening of the atmosphere. After puzzling over this phenomenon, they realize that they have been looking at the western, rather than the eastern, horizon (302).

This series of misadventures is offered as spirited farce, but one can discern an underlying significance: dawn, rising expectations, hope, a fresh beginning—all these promises of America were denied Mark Twain because he had arrived too late, because he had mistaken one phenomenon for another, because he had looked in the wrong direction. For a man as intent on establishing and advancing himself as Twain, this particular frustration had a special poignancy because, although others might judge him to have achieved a spectacular success, in his own mind he remained uneasy and insecure. He seemed doomed to misunderstand the rules of the game, supposing there were any. As he observed in his notebook in May 1879: "When I get beyond 6 times 7 is 35 I'm done" (N&J 2, 310). Later that rueful note would be attributed to his shrewd but equally beleaguered and largely helpless young hero Huck Finn.

Lacking a philosophy, a system, or even a set of conventions that he could both respect and effectively use in the conduct of life, Mark Twain mocked a number of conventional practices available to him in his more narrow role as a writer, for to his mind they represented illusory ways of organizing and controlling the mercurial world. Various

literary subgenres are parodied through the Tramp . An "Official Report of a Visit to the Furka Region," for example, is punctuated throughout with foreign terms: "The wlgw was very severe; our sleeping place could hardly be distingueè from the snow around it, which had fallen to the depth of a flirk during the past evening, and we heartily enjoyed a rough scramble en bas to the Giesbach Falls" (319). Why employ such verbal rubbish? "To adorn my page," Twain replies. "They all do it." Who is "all"? "Everybody. Everybody that writes elegantly" (321).

Although Mark Twain scorches such pretentiousness, he is capable of satirizing its polar opposite, the writer who lacks a specific vocabulary and so substitutes an all-purpose term when needed—in this instance, thing . The subject is the European manner of harnessing a horse: "The man stands up the horses on each side of the thing that projects from the front end of the wagon, and then throws the tangled mess of gear on top of the horses, and passes the thing that goes forward through a ring, and hauls it aft, and passes the other thing through the other thing" (329).

Mark Twain also mocks the jargon of the fashion world, describing the costume of a Swiss waitress that "consists of a single gros de laine, trimmed with ashes of roses, with overskirt of sacre bleu ventre saint gris, cut bias on the off side" (340). Similarly, Twain reflected irreverently, in scientific language, on the clear mountain air: "I had a theory that the gravitation of refraction, being subsidiary to atmospheric compensation, the refrangibility of the earth's surface would emphasize this effect in regions where great mountain ranges occur, and possibly so even-handedly impact the odic and idyllic forces together, the one upon the other, as to prevent the moon rising higher than 12,200 feet above sea level" (507).

These parodies all concern systems of language and attitude that have become sufficiently mechanical and materi-

alistic to merit satirical dismissal. The ease with which they pretended to convey truth in fact concealed reality. Given Mark Twain's persistent probing after final truths, his parodies are ultimately serious critiques. An accurate match of language and experience, Twain believed, would provide him access to reality, and for the main part of his career he dedicated himself to trying to find the right voice to convey his perceptions.

That search for accuracy often turned to associations. Following them involved exploratory travel through the mind's landscape, well off the standard tourist itineraries. Rhetorical form distorted reality. The mind could be taught to follow accepted verbal patterns so that language could be used as a pragmatic instrument. Most people, for economic as well as psychological reasons, had therefore to adapt their verbalizing to a narrow range of expression. They neither had the time to reconcile in words any apparently eccentric reactions they had, nor were they in a position to display the peculiar disorderliness of their thinking processes, even though in times of passion or intoxication or weariness, when the inner monitors had temporarily relaxed their vigilance, evidence of such mental unruliness might reveal itself. Otherwise, only such persons as the child, the self-sufficient rural figure, the worker without hope of advancement, the outlaw who had already consciously repudiated social conventions, the rich who had inherited or gained immunity, and the cantankerous old—only those felt free enough "to speak their minds."

Still, full relaxation of the filtering and channeling mechanisms in the mind that selected appropriate verbal responses and arranged them in communicable order was likely to constitute a symptom of madness. The "word-salads" of certain forms of schizophrenia illustrate arbitrary verbal associations powerful and persistent enough for so-

ciety to judge the speaker mentally incapacitated. Nonetheless, in this century radical versions of the mind verbalizing have been explored in conspicuously central works. James Joyce represented some thought processes in colloquial clusters of truncated associations, whereas Gertrude Stein produced austerely subjective records of her verbal reactions to the objects in her immediate world. Further, much work on the possibilities of language has been carried on by poets, philosophers, linguists, and literary critics in this century, leading to a general awareness that verbalization is a symbolic, not a mimetic, activity. The human agent wishes to give apprehensible form to certain inchoate feelings and images, but the medium of the language necessarily adapts these mental materials to its own special structures. Such adaptations involve selection rather than detailed imitations, for nothing verbal could provide an accurate model of anything mental. The verbal rendition becomes something symbolic standing for something else in the consciousness. In short, portions of the subject are selected and inevitably distorted in order to represent the whole.

Associations serve as bridges from one part of reality to another. In the metaphoric act, the aggressive, powerful behavior of a warrior has long been compared to that of a lion. Even in its usually abbreviated expression ("He is a lion") the comparison, although trite by now, is susceptible to analysis and extension. Reflecting on the attributes of a lion, one might develop further associations: he is handsome; he is proud; he is protective. Such associations are confined in a fixed channel, though, one meant to convey the strength and nobility of the warrior.

Other associations are available as well, but because they threaten to destroy the carefully guarded image, they are normally suppressed. On the other hand, for the humorist they are gifts. In drawing out the suppressed parts of a metaphor, Mark Twain discovered both humor and a source of

fresh perspectives. Suppose the metaphoric comparison of warrior to lion were elaborated: "He copulates twenty times a day," or "He lets the female do the work," or "He roars a lot, then goes to sleep." Any of these comparisons does accurately describe the behavior of the male lion, but because they all furnish unexpected and irreverent perspectives on the subject, they are liable to strike us as funny. Equally important, though, such unconventional associations may also afford another way of understanding some part of the world. Like lions, men of power often do gather a harem about them and let underlings do most of their work. Toward the end of Twain's life, men like Zola, Frank Norris, and Dreiser were actually presenting versions of that reality, although not as humor.

The unexpected images of humor often implicitly criticize not only the person being treated irreverently but also overused images and language. Mark Twain habitually selected "inappropriate" associations to set off explosions of humor. When he was on the lecture platform, his employment of the theatrical pause enhanced the effect. As he stood there, silently ruminating, the audience could feel him sorting through various possible phrasings until at last, in mischievous triumph, he selected the observation that was unexpected but revealingly right. For example, at his seventieth birthday dinner, he observed that he had "always bought cheap cigars—reasonably cheap, at any rate. Sixty years ago they cost me four dollars a barrel, but my taste has improved, latterly, and I pay seven now. Six or seven. Seven, I think. Yes, it's seven. But that includes the barrel" (MTSp, 258–59).

At times the unconventional association could misfire. After having described imposters who had identified themselves as Longfellow, Emerson, and Holmes at the Whittier birthday dinner, Twain recalled that "now, then, the house's attention continued, but the expression of interest in the

faces turned to a sort of black frost. I wondered what the trouble was. I didn't know" (MTSp, 71). That was the rare occasion when he had misjudged his audience, but in entering unfamiliar areas Twain risked such misjudgments. In "How To Tell a Story," he argued that "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, if my position is correct."^[3] This activity he sometimes attributed to a simple, guileless narrator, whose wandering consciousness was easily diverted into new subjects far from the narrative's main road. But he himself also played a version of that role in his public persona. On the lecture platform his delivery was "peculiarly slow." Paul Fatout has characterized Twain's casual manner as differing from the vigorous norm of speakers of his day. "Chatting conversationally, wrinkling up his nose and half closing his eyes, he lounged loosely upon and around the desk, occasionally marching and counter-marching for a short space, once in awhile vaguely gesturing with one hand, or quizzically pulling his mustache. In these ways he varied so much from the conventional that critics called him eccentric."^[4] One can see how this casual strolling through the associative byways of the mind became analogous to traveling. One may have an itinerary but is nonetheless always ready for side adventures, even though they turn out to be dead ends, or dangerous. More often than not, though, the result is entertainingly revealing, as when Twain refuses to fall into raptures before Leonardo's Last Supper because he sees the grotesque abuse and deterioration of the painting.

Occasionally he pushed further, trying out other possi-

[3] In How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (New York, 1900), 11.

[4] Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington, Ind., 1960), 86, 76.

bilities, 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 its unregulated complexities. Sometimes these associations established authentic relations among otherwise disparate subjects. When he encountered children playing at mountain climbing on a manure pile (improbably "roped together with a string" and carrying "mimic alpenstocks and ice-axes"), they reminded him of children in Nevada playing at silver mining. In these games, he recalled, there were always two "star roles, the one who fell down the shaft, and the one who rescued him" (487). This memory of role playing generated by the sight of the Swiss children on a manure pile in turn reminded Twain of the preacher's son who played the part of a disapproving God, scowling at his younger sisters, enacting the expulsion from Eden (488–89).

By describing these scenes that were related in his mind, Mark Twain managed to produce two more printed pages as he drove himself irritably to complete what had begun to seem an interminable book. The three topics are not particularly funny or original, but for our purposes they accurately display associative connections as well as underlying concerns in Twain's mind. In the past four years he had published Tom Sawyer and had worked on both Huckleberry Finn and The Prince and the Pauper, which is to say that Twain's imagination was already inhabiting the realm of childhood and its fantasies. We also know that the oppressiveness of American Christianity was a persistent obsession for him. Sunday in America meant to him "stay in the house and keep still." By contrast, "Sunday is the great day on the continent,—the free day, the happy day" (231). The little boy who assumed the role of God had first pre-

tended he was driving horsecars; then he played at being a steamboat captain, then at leading an army. But each time, his father stopped him, insisting that the boy should only do what was suitable for Sunday, which, as it turned out, was to play God with that "dark and deadly frown on his face." Twain's comment: "Think of the guileless sublimity of that idea." Then, absolved from further comment by the looseness of the travel book's format, he abruptly starts a new paragraph: "We reached Vispach at 8 p.m., only about seven hours out from St. Nicholas" (489).

Once the Tramp was under way, Mark Twain made an overt point of acknowledging the casualness of his narrative by remarking after telling an anecdote, "But I digress" (345). In fact, though, even at their most abrupt moments his associative sequences still exhibit a degree of mechanical coherence. Having, for example, recounted the legend of a crusader who mistakenly killed his beloved while she was singing, Twain begins the next chapter: "The last legend reminds one of the 'Lorelei.'" This rudimentary signal of a mental relation permits him then to tell the story of the Lorelei; to provide Heine's lyric in German, plus the music for it; to offer his own translation of Heine's poem, which he then compares with an atrocious rendering by another; to provide a series of bizarre sentences drawn from a picture catalogue that was "written in a peculiar kind of English" (like the translation); and finally to bring the chapter to a serenely arbitrary conclusion: "But meantime the raft is moving on" (140–49).

"The last legend reminds one of the 'Lorelei.'" To be re minded is literally to be drawn back into the mind, there to follow other branching attachments. If the relations are subjective, like Proust's madeleine generating images out of the involuntary memory, for the perceiver they are no less authentic. The compelling seductiveness of such relations for Twain was that they often involved subjects of the

greatest power for him, namely sex, suffering, and death. He addressed them regularly in his work, but never, for him, satisfactorily. Following associative logic, though, gave him entrance to the underworld of his mind. At the same time, yielding to the stimulus of the Lorelei of association involved dangers for a writer comparable to those run by any seaman hypnotized by her song. In Twain's translation: "He sees not the yawning breakers, / He sees but the maid alone: / The pitiless billows engulf him!—/ So perish the sailor and the bark" (146). The associative Lorelei threatened to engulf him in the tumultuous ocean of the mind. But the seduction of her voice was strong.

As the years passed, Mark Twain struggled intellectually with his dissatisfactions in what he called his "Gospel," What Is Man? Concerned lest its unorthodox ideas injure his public reputation, he finally published it anonymously, not even allowing it "to be copyrighted in his name."^[5] In this book, he tried to convince himself that man was not responsible for the contents of his mind, or for his behavior. As the wisdom figure, the Old Man, says: "No man ever originates anything. All his thoughts, all his impulses come from the outside " (WIM, 129). The Old Man's pupil, a Young Man, is set an exercise to demonstrate that if he were to leave his mind "to its own devices it would find things to think about without any of my help, and thus convince me that it was a machine" (181). The Young Man then describes a classic associative sequence that occurred while he was shaving: an image of a yellow cat comes spontaneously to his mind; it reminds him of a cat he once saw in boyhood in a church, which had become tangled in flypaper to the amusement of the congregation; the spectators, suppressing their laughter, produced tears; those tears reminded the Young Man of a Darwinian story in which a father in Tierra

[5] Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God's Fool (New York, 1975), 131.

del Fuego hurled his child against some rocks, whereupon the weeping mother took the dying child to her breast. Finally, the most personal association for Twain and at the same time the least explicable, for it has no link, comes when the Young Man recalls "an ever-recurring and disagreeable dream of mine. In this dream I always find myself, stripped to my shirt, cringing and dodging about in the midst of a great drawingroom throng of finely dressed ladies and gentlemen, and wondering how I got there." With that, the Young Man summarizes the phenomenon: "And so on and so on, picture after picture, incident after incident, a drifting panorama of ever-changing, ever-dissolving views manufactured by my mind without any help from me" (181–82).

The uncontrolled action of the mind is accurately rendered here, even though with "and so on and so on" the rendition stops just at the edge of the most problematic situation. Twain famously broke through the barrier to forbidden material once in the winter of 1896–1897, when in his notebook he recorded a dream he had had of "a negro wench," eating "a mushy apple pie—hot." He purchased a pie for himself. She then made him "a disgusting proposition," and when he first countered sarcastically, then asked for a spoon, she took hers from her mouth and offered it to him, whereupon he awoke (MTN, 351–52).

If he could demonstrate that the mind operated mechanically, Mark Twain would be freed from any responsibility for its functioning. But the insufficiency of the solution he laboriously worked out in What Is Man? forced him to keep addressing the problem. This led him to dreams again, like those recorded in that series of fantasies printed posthumously in Which Was the Dream? Ultimately, though, the conclusion to "No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger" conceded his inability to comprehend the workings of his mind. All he could do was deny its reality. "Nothing exists,"

says the Satan figure; "all is a dream." Worse, that dream was "frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams." The narrator is brought to perceive that "there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream" (MSM, 404–5). That was the desperate, nihilistic conclusion to which Twain was driven by his inability to fathom the governance of the mind.

Before he reached this end, though, he tried bravely, if sporadically, to find a way through the passages of his mental caverns without becoming irredeemably lost. His memory of the caves of his boyhood Hannibal reflects his image of the mind. From Tom Sawyer comes this description: McDougal's cave was "but a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran into each other and out again and led nowhere. It was said that one might wander days and nights together through its intricate tangle of rifts and chasms, and never find the end of the cave; and that he might go down, and down, and still down, into the earth, and it was just the same—labyrinth underneath labyrinth, and no end to any of them. No man 'knew' the cave. That was an impossible thing" (204).

Even when he was not attempting to map the subterranean depths of his mind but was only ambling along in a casual way over its surface, Mark Twain enjoyed illustrating its quicksilver shifts. One chapter in the Tramp is explicitly dedicated to the pleasures of free-flowing conversation. The advantage of a pedestrian tour, Twain says, is that "there being no constraint, a change of subject is always in order" (221). In this instance, "constraint" represents social expectations and the requirements of business. Under relaxed circumstances, one more nearly approaches "naturalness," while at the same time there is an exploratory aspect to entering "the glad, free, boundless realm of things we were not certain about" (222).

Twain then illustrates the fertile proliferation of a day's

conversation. It begins with a discussion of awkward grammatical constructions that are compared in number to the milk teeth. This provides a transition to the subject of dentistry. Both subjects had been presaged in the prologue to this episode by Twain's progression from "talking" to "the movement of the tongue" to "the wagging of the gladsome jaw," although he does not seem aware of this developing imagery of the mouth (221). In any case, the talk then passes successively through various topics until it reaches a long anecdote concerning a skeleton placed by pranksters in a bed to frighten a young bumpkin, Nicodemus Dodge. Although the distance is considerable between the onset of the conversation and this point, Twain insists on the underlying coherence of the sequence: "By a logical process the conversation melted out of one of these subjects and into the next" (223).

We possess the notebook entries in which this chapter began. First came a long entry concerning Mark Twain's pain from having bitten down too hard on a grape seed. This may eventually have suggested the whole complex of imagery involving the mouth. Then comes a line on Nicodemus Dodge. Finally, he puts down an example of the grammatically impacted sentence with which this sequence in the Tramp begins (N&J 2, 137–38).

We can see two kinds of associative writing operating in this chapter. The first is overtly mechanical: "Dental surgeons suggested doctors, doctors suggested death, death suggested skeletons" (223). The second is deeper, more personal, and unconnected with this particular conversation in any obvious way. During this period Mark Twain was regularly immersing himself in what Henry Nash Smith has called "the matter of Hannibal."^[6] So it is not by chance that the skeleton referred to in the associative se-

[6] Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), 74.

quence is said to be that of "Jimmy Finn, the village drunkard" who had sold his own bones when he "lay very sick in the tanyard a fortnight before his death" (228). That image had long been in Twain's memory, for he had written about Jimmy Finn as early as 1867 in a dispatch to the Alta California . There, Finn "sold his body to a doctor for a quart of whiskey."^[7] This strong personal linkage in Twain's mind between the specific person Jimmy Finn and the image of a skeleton explains how Jimmy Finn entered the anecdote of Nicodemus Dodge, even though the associative connection is not available in the Tramp itself.

The mind's vagaries were always a compelling subject for Mark Twain. If they were an important source of his humor, they also hinted at epistemological revelations. In "Old Times on the Mississippi," for example, he described at length a pilot named Brown who could forget nothing. He remembered not only the contours of the river that escaped the young Twain but everything else as well. This made him tedium exemplified, for his narratives were clogged with detail. He could not tell a straight story. Twain outlines the unraveling of a typical Brown account where the narrative "drifts," where one detail calls up another, where "pork and hay would suggest corn and fodder; corn and fodder would suggest cows and horses; cows and horses would suggest the circus and certain celebrated bare-back riders; the transition from the circus to the menagerie was easy and natural; from the elephant to equatorial Africa was but a step; then of course the heathen savages would suggest religion" (LOM, 86).^[8]

[7] Walter Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, 11.

[8] In "Mark Twain: The Writer as Pilot," Edgar J. Burde argues that whereas "Old Times on the Mississippi" represents the intuitive authority of Bixby's memory, the lack of control in the later part of Life on the Mississippi is reflected in the indiscrimi-nately littered mind of the pilot, Brown (PMLA 93, no. 5 [October, 1978]: 887). In "Mark Twain: The Pilot and the Writer," Edgar M. Branch vigorously contests this argument (Mark Twain Journal 23, no. 2 [Fall 1985]: 28–43).

Now manifestly Mark Twain was here describing his own sense of the mind's wayward functioning, except that by unrelenting development he had elevated the pilot's infirmity to a caricature of actual experience. As Brown tediously and mechanically recapitulates the past, he becomes the target of the humor. Yet the very looseness of an associative narrative constitutes one of Mark Twain's creative triumphs—the story of grandfather's old ram (RI, chap. 53). In "Old Times," Brown superficially sounds like Jim Blaine. "And the said Captain Hardy wore yarn socks winter and summer just the same, and his first wife's name was Jane Shook—she was from New England—and his second one died in a lunatic asylum" (74). But even though the associative method is similar, the richness of Blaine's imagination as well as the color of his dialect is missing from the pilot's speech. Mark Twain never soared higher than in his creation of Blaine's warm, interested, kindly mind. "Old Squire Hogadorn could carry around more mixed licker, and cuss better than most any man I ever see. His second wife was the widder Billings—she that was Becky Martin—her dam was Deacon Dunlap's first wife. Her oldest child, Maria, married a missionary and died in grace—et up by the savages. They et him, too, poor fellow—biled him" (RI, 347).

The intentions of the pilot Brown and of Jim Blaine are identical. Each undertakes to discuss a subject—a dog, a ram—yet never reaches it. But Brown constructs his narrative by mechanical addition, whereas Blaine practices a fertile multiplication. Twain had difficulty, though, in gaining any sustained access to this method, for what could jus-

tify it? In the case of Brown, the justification was his character as an unimaginative bore, possessed with total recall. Blaine's wandering memory was unleashed by alcohol. And in the Tramp, the casual circumstance of a forest stroll with a friend encouraged the free flow of associations. But the motivation for each of these associative flows was particular, unique. The associative technique remained largely unavailable to Mark Twain.

Associations can also be present but unacknowledged or even unrealized by the author. These last constitute a more complicated area for interpretation. Although some of Mark Twain's references and images are reasonably comprehensible, others are at best obscurely provocative. As an example involving literal images. Mark Twain elected to make half a dozen or so drawings for the Tramp, initially intending them as one of the book's running jokes. As he wrote Twichell: "I shall make from 10 to 20 illustrations for my book with my own (almighty rude and crude) pencil, and shall say in the title page that some of the pictures in the book are from original drawings by the author. I have already made two or three which suit me. It gives me a bellyache to look at them" (MTLP, 111). After enumerating the illustrators who contributed to the Tramp, its title page does add "with also three or four pictures made by the author of this book, without outside help." But it must be said that none of them seems particularly amusing, and most are not only technically crude but also virtually meaningless. I cannot pretend, then, to offer much interpretative help with them. Nonetheless, their enigmatic presences should be mentioned, for although Mark Twain mocked his lack of artistic skill throughout his career, he persisted in printing his atrocious sketches.

Here, he offers a drawing of a man on a tower, where the sizes are disproportionate, and a lively one of a horse drawing a wagon full of passengers, in which "several blem-

ishes" still remain (104–5, 125). He is confident, however, about having solved the problems of his first subject: "The man on top, looking at the view, is apparently too large, but I found he could not be made smaller, conveniently. I wanted him there, and I wanted him visible, so I thought out a way to manage it; I composed the picture from two points of view; the spectator is to observe the man from about where the flag is, and he must observe the tower itself from the ground. This harmonizes the seeming discrepancy" (104–5). In the book, he makes an ironic point of his artistic gifts. "My study of Art in Heidelberg has been a noble education to me. All that I am to-day in Art, I owe to that" (563; see also 100).

Several of the drawings in the Tramp represent something broken. For example, the first is entitled "piece of sword." it is supposedly a line drawing of a portion of a sword fractured in a duel, made by "tracing a line around it with my pen" (68). That being approximately what it appears to be, and no more, the source of humor remains obscure. Equally banal are his drawings of an Etruscan tear-jug with a hole in it and a cracked Henry II plate.

These are followed by a full page printed in facsimile of the manuscript, discussing a small drawing of a cat and a mouse in the upper left-hand corner of the page (185–86). These figures supposedly represent a valuable ceramic piece, but why Twain reproduced his handwriting, let alone the drawing itself, is lost somewhere in his psyche. He did like cats. And the concluding reference to "the Chung-a-Lung-Fung dynasty" does offer faint echoes of male drinking (Chug-a-lug) and of sexual engagement ("Fung"), but these are thin and dubious responses. What, then, was Twain's intention? His presentation is so loose that one is not even sure whether the cat and unmentioned mouse are intended as ceramic objects or as designs on a ceramic piece.

Two other inexplicable drawings appear on a single page. Purporting to show rafts on the Neckar River from above, they invite the imagination to interpret them, especially the lower, but without assistance, so that one must conclude that these drawings either verge on the forbidden or are exceedingly insignificant.

Mark Twain's notebooks offer no clue to the meaning of these drawings, except in one case. In his notebook he drew a sketch of the Jungfrau, where the peak appears between two other, rounded, peaks (not unlike elevated knees) with a decided nipple on its tip (N&J 2, 141). When he rendered the drawing for the book, he altered it slightly: the side peaks were crosshatched, trees were added to the top of the one on the left, and the prominence of the nipple was reduced (346). One can never be altogether sure whether private or inadvertently created associations have led one to attribute meaning where it does not exist. Here, however, the name Jungfrau encourages anatomical interpretation. Further, we know that such associations were in Twain's mind on this trip. A pair of towers on a Munich cathedral stirred the following response in his notebook: "Frauenkirche—cow-teats" (N&J 2, 318).

In general, despite the breadth of his experience, Mark Twain accepted the prohibitions of his adopted society against sexual references in literature, yet he chafed against them. In the Tramp, he complained vociferously about the differing moral standards that society demanded of literature as opposed to painting and sculpture. "Art is allowed as much indecent license to-day as in earlier times—but the privileges of literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed within the past eighty or ninety years" (577). This accords with his observation in his notebook: "By far the very funniest things that ever happened or were ever said are unprintable (in our day). A great pity. It was no so [sic ] in the freer day of Boccacio [sic ] & Rabelais" (N&J 2, 87). A few moments later, having remembered an anecdote that amuses him, he counseled himself: "Try the whole story, with dashes to represent swearing & obscenity" (N&J 2, 87). In the Tramp passage, he went on to say that "Fielding and Smollett could portray the beastliness of their day in the beastliest language," whereas contemporary writers might not, not even when they used "nice and guarded forms of speech" (577). Although Twain appears to be speaking on behalf of freedom of expression, to do so in terms of "indecent license" and "beastliness" signals his own reservations about unmonitored expression.

Such ideas lead Mark Twain to a specific diatribe of considerable and surprising violence concerning Titian's painting, the Venus of Urbino . The first draft in his notebook had called her "purely the Goddess of the Beastly (Bestial)" (N&J 2, 319). But because the fingers of her left hand quite explicitly rested between her legs on her mons, Twain indignantly expanded this reaction for the book to say that Titian had painted "the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses" (578). There's no humor here, no distance to his outrage. Nor, although couched in this

form, is this essentially a plea for greater liberty of expression in literature. Twain thought he disapproved of censorship, but in most matters he willingly tolerated it.

These issues were too powerful and complicated for Twain to have thought through. In her diary in 1906, his secretary, Isabel Lyon, recorded that Twain had told her, concerning his autobiography, that "there were the Rousseau confessions, but I am going to leave that kind alone, for Rousseau had looked after that end."^[9] In his later private life and writing he tended to be silent about or to disapprove of license in sexual matters. It's worth noting that whatever its public reputation, 1601 is much more scatological than pornographic. Twain preferred to leave sexual irregularity to the French. They, he told his notebook, were "the nation of the filthy-minded." They have, he thought, "bestialities which are unknown in civilized lands" (N&J 2, 323).

Whipsawed by such contradictory impulses as this desire to have the artistic freedom of a painter yet also feeling that a public representation of sexual behavior was corrupt, Mark Twain turned with relief in the Tramp to an account of a raft trip on the Neckar. The account was long, extending some sixty pages (123–83). Yet the trip never took place. Twain did make a voyage by boat on the Neckar from Heilbronn to Hirschhorn on August 9, 1878 (the itinerary is in N&J 2, 47), but the only related entry reads: "At this castle passed a raft" (N&J 2, 134). However, the idea of a raft on a river remained profoundly important to Twain. Not the piloting of a steamboat, though. The world of the raft for Huck and Jim was first evoked in Twain's writing in the summer of 1876 in the early chapters of Huckleberry

[9] Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God's Fool, 136.

Finn. He permitted reality to intrude violently in chapter 16, however, by having a steamboat smash through the raft. When he took up the manuscript again sometime between the spring of 1880 and the summer of 1883, he produced the familiar idyllic description of raft life: "We said there ain't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft" (chap. 18).

In the Tramp the raft is similarly extolled. Its gentle, gliding, noiseless motion makes existence "a dream, a charm, a deep and tranquil ecstasy" (126). But the destructive impulse was in him too, for just before he decides to take a raft trip, he says that he had been sitting "for hours," watching rafts on the river below, "hoping to see one of them hit the bridge-pier and wreck itself sometime or other, but was always disappointed" (124). And the imaginary trip finally concludes in a glorious, destructive collision, engineered by Mark Twain himself. The calamity he had so fervently hoped to observe, he created by stepping ashore just as the raft headed straight for a bridge. "The next moment I had my long coveted desire: I saw a raft wrecked. It hit the pier in the center and went all to smash and scatteration like a box of matches struck by lightning" (182–83). One will not often see quite so baldly dramatized the opposing needs for placidity and action, for passive drift and aggressive destruction, but both were central to Mark Twain's personality, and the travel book afforded him the imaginative space in which to gratify these psychological needs.

As Mark Twain pulled the Tramp together, he was in a typical frenzy of activity, trying to master his professional life. April 15, 1879: "Perkins says your father didn't promise to get my stock out of the Pub. Co. free of loss. I ain't prepared to say he did—and I wouldn't want him to do a thing

he couldn't do, anyway. But I want him to get rid of all of my stock but about 5 or 10 shares at the best figure he can before he leaves the concern. What is that stock worth, now?" (MTLP, 112). May 10, 1879: "Our government will charge 25 per cent duty on the cost of the plates, nothing on the artist's work. (I have been consulting the law, at the consulate.) This will add $125 or $150 to the total cost (I don't know what the freight will be on a box of plates,)—and the total cost of the 210 pictures will then be, say, $1325 or $1350, artist's work included " (MTLP, 114). June 10, 1879: "All right—have just written Perkins that Tom Sawyer fills the Riley contract, and instructed him to have the Co endorse all my contracts as completed and deduct $2000 from copyrights now due, in satisfaction of the Riley debt" (MTLP, 116).

In the Tramp, the anecdote "The Man Who Put Up at Gadsby's" offers a counter to all such frantic efforts at controlling events in one's life. Gadsby's was a Washington hotel, and "to put up there" meant to "take it easy" rather than try to rush things through the processes of government. The story came to Mark Twain as he was exercising his own patience while waiting to see a fisherman actually catch a fish from the lake at Lucerne. He then remembered a friend suggesting comparable patience once to a young man who had come to Washington to obtain a postmastership. The friend tells the story of a man who cheerfully accepted endless delays in getting action from the federal government. The young man listens to the story of the protracted stay at Gadsby's, then asks: "But what's it all for? " The answer is a fundamental one for Twain: "O, nothing in particular." The young man presses for the relevance of accepting delay: "Well, where's the point of it?" The answer comes blandly: "O, there isn't any particular point to it" (270). Therefore it is generally best to meet the frustrations of life by putting up at Gadsby's—that is, by being patient

and not pushing for immediate results or looking for any meaning to one's frustration.

Comparable patience is called for by parts of Mark Twain's travel writing. They don't yield meaning instantly, for there is no immediate point to them. Upon reflection, though, they sometimes do make sense if understood as expressions of his harried, pessimistic, highly articulate sensibility. For example, near the end of the book Twain contemplates the cathedral of Venice and praises it because he finds it out-and-out ugly, unlike most famous buildings, which are a "mixture of the ugly and the beautiful. . . . No misplaced and impertinent beauties are intruded anywhere; and the consequent result is a grand harmonious whole, of soothing, entrancing, tranquilizing, soul-satisfying ugliness." His conclusion is simply stated: "St Mark is perfect" (567). Is it mere happenstance that there is no possessive, that it doesn't read: "St Mark's [cathedral] is perfect"? I'm not inclined to think so.^[10] The ironic self-sanctification and perfection (of consummate ugliness) is very much in Twain's sly style.

Such self-deprecation also appears in two jokes that Mark Twain reprints from the German humorous papers. They conclude the final appendix, and so the book as a whole. In the first, a "most dilapidated tramp" is seen contemplating some coins and concluding that the begging business is near its end. "Only about five marks ($1.25) for the whole day; many an official makes more!" (631). Here both the "tramp" and the "mark" are presented as of little moment.

The last anecdote concerns a "commercial traveler" (one definition of Mark Twain in his present role). He wishes to

[10] In his notebook, it is "Saint Peter's," but usually "St. Mark," although on one occasion he does write "St. Mark's" (N&J 2, 196, 197, 222).

show his samples to a merchant, but the merchant emphatically turns him away, upon which the salesman pleads, "But do you mind letting me look at them! I haven't seen them for three weeks!" (631). Which is to say that an exhausted and irritable Mark Twain elected to end his book with two weakly humorous anecdotes, both involving pathetically unsuccessful figures, a beggar and a salesman. Like himself, tramps abroad.