7

Mark Twain composed Following the Equator under at least double duress. Although the demands of business forced him to make twelve Atlantic crossings in four years (1891–1895), he had no intention of writing another travel book until a cluster of financial problems drove him into bankruptcy in 1894. Then after making an arduous lecture trip around the world, he had just settled in England to construct a money-making book when a cable arrived announcing the death of his favorite daughter Susy on August 18, 1896. He did not begin the book for another two months. Finally on October 24, 1896, he made this entry in his notebook: "Wrote the first chapter of the book today—Around the World " (MTB , 1026).

The combination of giving lectures on the international tour and recounting his reactions to the trip in a book was intended to regain him solvency. As he said in a well-known interview with the New York Times as he embarked on the voyage: "I am confident that, if I live I can pay off the last debt within four years, after which, at the age of sixty-four, I can make a fresh and unincumbered start in life." But he added: "I do not enjoy the hard travel and broken rest inseparable from lecturing, and, if it had not been for the imperious moral necessity of paying these debts . . . I should never have taken to the road at my time of life" (MTHHR , 182).

He was in fact fifty-nine when the trip commenced and in indifferent health. He was especially cursed with car-

buncles. "I'll go to Cleveland in a stretcher, sure," he observed shortly before he was to start (MTHHR , 158). Six months later, on board ship, approaching Ceylon, he again wrote: "I have been persecuted with carbuncles and colds until I am tired and disgusted and angry" (MTHHR , 190). At that point the trip still had six months to go. A. B. Paine reports that "the papers usually spoke of him as looking frail," and his wife wrote that "Mr. Clemens has not as much courage as I wish he had," a lack she attributed not only to his illnesses but also to his being "so impressed with the fact that he is sixty years old." Moreover, their bankruptcy understandably weighed on him. "He does not believe that any good thing will come, but that we must all our lives live in poverty. He says he never wants to go back to America" (MTB , 1017).

It would be difficult, then, to exaggerate the burden of wretchedness that bore down on Mark Twain before he undertook to write Following the Equator: it included debts, aging, illness, fatigue, and Susy's death. At the same time, he did enjoy much of the traveling. He had always taken pleasure in being lionized, and the exotic countries he visited kept him stimulated. Not only was he a celebrity in his own right, but his financial adviser, Henry Huttleston Rogers of Standard Oil, assisted when he could in seeing that Clemens was properly cared for. "The government railway treated us well," Clemens wrote from Calcutta. "Private car and elegant food etc." (MTHHR , 195). So Livy attested that "in spite of this sad undercurrent, we are having a delightful trip" (MTB , 1017). These fluctuating moods are visible in Following the Equator , although it must be said that on the whole, as far as humor is concerned, it is a flat and uninspired work.^[1] But new and serious social and

[1] Following the Equator has not been much commented on, and reactions to it have been both vague and mixed. James Coxcalls it "that last, and interesting, travel book" (The Fate of Humor [Princeton, 1966], 245fn.). Kenneth Lynn says it is "a sorry affair, the only uninteresting travel book Twain ever wrote" (Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor [Boston, 1959], 277). And in mediation, William Gibson proposes that it is "a decidedly better book than all but a few critics have said in print" (The Art of Mark Twain [New York, 1976], 158–59).

philosophic issues were coming to the fore in Mark Twain's mind. Although he claimed that he had consciously written the book for the "subscription market," that is, for "the factory hands and the farmers," since he believed that the audience who shopped at bookstores were "surfeited with travel-books," the serious social arguments do not seem directed toward the subscription-book audience (MTHHR , 249–50). Mark Twain's harsh criticism of the whites for their exploitation of people of color was far from guaranteed to win rural and working-class approval.

If the overall tone of the Equator were not determinable from the text itself, its chapter epigraphs would furnish evidence enough of a new authorial grimness. The book Pudd'nhead Wilson had appeared in 1894. Since then Mark Twain had accumulated a fresh store of the lawyer's steely maxims, designated as from "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar." Powerful, mordant, pessimistic, cynical, they now headed the Equator's chapters and dealt with the untrustworthiness of friends, the criminality of legislative representatives and of lawyers, the contradictoriness of man's nature, the pathos of life, and the desirability of death. In short, they capture Twain's increasing nihilism, a nihilism to which he was yielding in spite of an often buoyant and compassionate nature. The severity of his vision was bringing him to succinct statements: "Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead" (184).

At times, the maxims fit the material that follows; more

often they stand independent of the journey's incidents, casting a pall across whatever humor Twain could generate. The issue of natural intention is addressed in the maxim for chapter thirty: "Nature makes the locust with an appetite for crops; man would have made him with an appetite for sand" (285). Similarly, while in New Zealand, Twain was shown a lignified caterpillar with a plant growing out of it as the result of fungal spores that this was "by design—Nature's design" (288). As other examples of such malign intentionality, he adds the attraction of moths to candle flames, the invasion of a starfish by parasites, and the "unperfected tapeworm" (288–89).

This brief flurry of indignation at the cruel ways of Nature presumably emerged from the blows it had inflicted on him and his family, especially in the past year, although earlier his only son, Langdon, had contracted a fatal case of diphtheria and more recently his daughter Jean had been diagnosed as an epileptic, so that Twain might well have felt himself and all living things in the grip of a mighty and inexplicably malevolent force. This feeling may account for his fatalistic reaction to the party's arrival in Hawaii. It being night, the ship anchored off Honolulu. After an absence of more than thirty years, he was "impatient" to land. But when morning came, "it brought disappointment, of course": an outbreak of cholera that prevented their going ashore.

Proximity to Honolulu unsurprisingly reminded him then of lepers and their dreadful deformities. One in particular, like Twain's Hannibal acquaintances, was "a brilliant young fellow, and very popular," engaged to "a beautiful half-caste girl." (He was "a half-white"—success, advancement, leadership were still white; characteristically, seductiveness and submissiveness were "half-caste." This inadvertent bias would be tempered before the trip was over.)

The young man, having contracted leprosy, was obliged to give up his career and fiancée and go to isolation on Molokai, where "he died the loathsome and lingering death that all lepers die." Twain underlines that all "these poor sufferers are innocent" (63).

The whole trip, undertaken reluctantly, started unpropitiously. Mark Twain, suffering from his carbuncle, remarked that the dictionary defined it as "a kind of jewel," but that "humor was out of place in a dictionary" (25). Their departure was delayed because of a raging forest fire near Vancouver, and just as they got under way, their deck chairs collapsed, which "brought us to shame before all the passengers" (16). All of these misfortunes are treated humorously, but the signs were ominous.

The captain of their ship, although the acme of excellence—young, "very handsome," "courteous"—nonetheless "was going home under a cloud" (27–28). On his first trip in command, he had run his ship onto the rocks, and although apparently blameless and already officially exonerated by the admiralty court, he still had to face the economic wrath of the shipowners back in Sydney. Later in the book Mark Twain inveighed against commercial shipowners for placing profits above human life. It was a subject about which he was unusually sensitive. One shipping company in particular "had discharged a captain for getting a boat into danger and had advertised this act as evidence of its vigilance in looking after the safety of the passengers." Twain, though, believed that the captain was no more than an expedient sacrifice—"thugging a captain costs a company nothing" (302).

His indignation was repeatedly ignited at the sacrifice of people to commercial gain. The New Zealand shipping company was "powerful," "it has a monopoly, and everybody is afraid of it—including the government's representative" (301). The experience, Twain thought, "was like be-

ing at home in America" (302). Later on, passing the Great Barrier Reef, Twain offered an almost identical indictment, recalling that a ship had struck the reef going "full-speed in a fog," with the loss of one hundred and forty lives. The captain immediately committed suicide, knowing "whether he was to blame or not, the company owning the vessel would discharge him and make a devotion-to-passengers'-safety advertisement out of it, and his chance to make a livelihood would be permanently gone" (311).

This preoccupation with the amoral depredations of business, especially in concert with imperialistic expansion, would appear more and more often in Mark Twain's writings after this. His own disastrous experiences in trying to run a publishing company and in technological speculation had sensitized him to commercial practices. Ironically, Twain's hostility enlarged just when he had become the intimate of such conservative magnates as Andrew Carnegie and H. H. Rogers. But whatever his overall contradictory feelings about predatory businessmen, Twain perceived and openly spoke out as a compassionate observer against inhumane and hypocritical social practices.

The young captain also gained Mark Twain's sympathy, one may suppose, because he had struck the rocks when his "narrow and difficult passage" had been "densely befogged with smoke"—precisely the nightmarish black wall Twain had always feared on the river (28). So too the harbor at Sydney, Australia, featured a precipice "like a wall" with but a single unobtrusive entrance through it (110). In his telling of the wreck of the Duncan Dunbar there, Twain not only emphasized the deceptiveness of the harbor entrance but also heightened the sentimental drama involved in the wreck there. He insisted that the ship "was bringing back a great company of mothers and daughters, the long-missed light and bloom of life of Sydney homes; daughters that had been years absent at school, and mothers that had been

with them all that time watching over them" (111). That scenario may have been true, although it seems a little improbable, but one can readily understand how gripping the scene would be for this father of three daughters, one of whom had just died. The captain of the Duncan Dunbar, like Clemens pouring money into the Paige typesetter, "steered straight for the false opening, mistaking it for the true one. He did not find out that he was wrong until it was too late" (111).^[2] Virtually unmonitored as much of this last travel book proved to be, Twain's storytelling in it often turns to private musing. This story and the special emphasis of its telling are clear examples of Mark Twain's drawing forth and shaping experience to entertain an audience, but also to achieve personal catharsis. Twain selected the story in the first place because he was preoccupied with piloting disasters; he heightened the special pain of the loss of "all that fair and gracious company" because he had recently lost his own daughter (111–12).

If the pathetic was in Mark Twain's soul during the writ-

[2] Clemens's notebook entry reads: "It was dark & he mistook the false Heads for the real; struck, & his ship went to pieces like a box of matches." He also notes of the passengers: "They had their best clothes on & all. Sydney waiting for them—daughters educated in England, & well-to-do people returning from a holiday" (Notebook no. 38 [May–July 1896], MTP ). The Duncan Dunbar carried sixty-three passengers and a crew of fifty-nine; only one of the latter survived. A recent account of the disaster does not refer to any special concentration of women and children among the passengers, but it does insist, in contradiction of Twain, that "the captain had not mistaken The Gap for the Harbour entrance . . . he had miscalculated his leeway" (P. R. Stephensen, The History and Description of Sydney Harbour [Adelaide, 1966], 28). For a contemporary newspaper account of the wreck, see The Sydney Scene, 1788–1960, arranged and introduced by Alan Birch and David S. Macmillan (Melbourne, 1962), 150–52.

ing of the Equator, so was his sense of the lugubrious. The "Sweet Singer of Michigan," Julia Moore, enters the book three times with her doggerel mourning (108, 325, 406). Given his own loss, it seems grotesque for Twain to quote her as he does. Here, for example, is her tribute to an only son who died while away from home (as Susy had died while the Clemenses were across the Atlantic): "He was taken sick and lived four weeks, / And Oh! how his parents weep, / But now they must in sorrow mourn, / For Billy has gone to his heavenly home" (325).

Twain himself attempted elegies for Susy on the anniversary of her death in 1897, 1898, and 1902.^[3] Psychologically, it would seem that he occasionally had to mock the very grief that seized his household through the person of Julia Moore. Generally speaking, though, signs of unmitigated and even invented pessimism permeated the book. In recounting a shuffleboard tournament on shipboard, for example, Twain said that he had lost, whereas in a letter to Rogers, he reported that he had won (70–72; MTHHR, 187). So too when he viewed the Southern Cross, it seemed to him "out of repair," "out of true," but insofar as he could imagine it constituting a shape, it struck him as "a sort of coffin" (79). When the passengers engaged in a competition to provide an incomplete story with a happy ending, no one, including Twain himself, could do so (47). Reflecting on another story told of "two strange and solitary beings" who were picked up at sea, Twain was reminded of all those "errant waifs who cannot name their lost home, wandering Children of No-where." The very idea stimulated him to ponder the "island wilderness of the Pacific." It was a region, he said, with particular charm "for the bruised spirit of men who have fought and failed in the

[3] See Arthur L. Scott, On the Poetry of Mark Twain with Selections from His Verse (Urbana, Ill., 1966), 30–32.

struggle for life in the great world" (99–100). As early as the tenth chapter, Pudd'nhead Wilson is quoted as saying: "Everything human is pathetic." Furthermore, Twain succinctly specified the wellspring of his art: "The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven" (119).

One way Mark Twain coped with the world's horror was to stare directly at it. One cannot altogether attribute the suffering, violence, and morbidity in Following the Equator, or in Twain's other works, to Twain himself; a measure of such horrors was integral to the age. As an example, in the text Twain remarks of the moa bird of New Zealand (which even then was extinct): "The Moa stood thirteen feet high, and could step over an ordinary man's head or kick his hat off; and his head too, for that matter" (102). The illustration shows an aborigine riding on a moa. Both he and the bird are looking back to where the great ostrich-like foot is kicking the head off a white man while blood spouts copiously from his neck.^[4] Even if the illustration augmented Twain's remark, the audience was presumably not offended by the gratuitous gore.

Early on, Mark Twain reports the story of a professional diver who descended to a sunken passenger ship where he was "paralyzed with fright" from seeing numerous "dim corpses making for him" (57). As in Twain's earlier travel volumes we are also treated to extended descriptions of criminal violence, sometimes not even composed by Twain but merely inserted from newspapers or books. In New Zealand he revives the "Maungatapu Murders" of thirty

[4] Following the Equator used eleven illustrators as well as photographs. Dan Beard did this full-page illustration of the moa, and as in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the job afforded him an opportunity to punish the ruling class, for the decapitated white man is wearing a pith helmet, a monocle, and spats.

years earlier, producing explicit descriptions of strangling, shooting, and stabbing (305–7). In India, two chapters' worth of detailed attention is devoted to the practice ritualistic murder. Twain speculated that the reason the Thugs killed was "partly piety, largely gain," but he thought the chief fascination of killing for them was the "sport" of it (436). This idea gave rise to a much more damning proposition: "The joy of killing! the joy of seeing killing done—these are the traits of the human race at large" (437). And in fact, probably not consciously, Twain was pandering to exactly those preoccupations in the Equator . He pushed the point further. "We white people are merely modified Thugs; Thugs fretting under the restraints of a not very thick skin of civilization" (437). As evidence, he adduced the spectacles of the Roman Colosseum, the burning of Christians by the Inquisition (he had just published Joan of Arc ), the Spanish bullfight, and rabbit hunting. He paused for a moment to reflect that some progress had been made—"we no longer take pleasure in slaughtering or burning helpless men"—but then he plunged back into his description of the deceptiveness and murderousness of the Thugs (437).

The account of a prisoner in the Black Hole of Calcutta is also quoted at length. The prisoner's experience, which involved strenuous but civilized efforts to survive, was inspirational in its own way, since although eventually he fell unconscious, he was nonetheless saved. Perhaps Mark Twain too would in time be spared further suffering and would undergo a similar "resurrection from this hole of sorrows" (522). Among other reasons, we tell stories for comfort.

The famous "Great Mutiny" among the native garrisons of India again provided Twain with ample gruesome and pathetic stories, often quoted directly from contemporary sources. Men are beaten into the mud with cudgels, infants are torn to pieces, ladies' apartments are discovered "ankle-

deep in blood," bodies are stripped and flung into dry wells (554–55). It is curious that following these horrible scenes of the Black Hole and the Great Mutiny, Twain should pass with no more transition than paragraphing to the most commonplace enumeration of tourist sights. "There was plenty to see in Calcutta, but there was not plenty of time for it. I saw the fort that Clive built; and the place where Warren Hastings and the author of the Junius Letters fought their duel; and . . ." (522). Such flat enumerations appear to serve as emotional calmatives, as decompression chambers following extended exposure to the pressures of human cruelty.

The overwhelming evidence Twain accumulated in the Equator that the innocent suffer inevitably raised the question why . Cast in the terms available to Mark Twain, the question concerned God's intention or, even more centrally, God's nature. Twain addressed the problem indirectly, in the voice of others, in fact at two discreet removes. To compare Hindu gods with the Christian one, Twain employs the voice of a missionary who in turn is reporting the argument of "a good old Hindoo gentleman" (133). The Hindu says that Christianity has not made greater inroads in the East because Indians "recognize a god by the work of his hands." Therefore one determines which gods are the stronger "by comparing the known works of his own gods with the works of others; there is no other way" (133). By this pragmatic test, the Hindus have found their deities much superior to the Christian God.

This is a devastating conclusion—so much so that Mark Twain was unwilling to take direct responsibility for it, however much he might believe it. He was always skittish about directly addressing religious issues in public. But the year after the Equator was published, he began to develop his ruminations on the matter extensively. They would finally appear anonymously as What Is Man?, published in

1906 in an edition limited to 250 copies that were not put on sale. Twain's ideas were already simmering as he prepared the Equator, although he thought that he had successfully concealed their presence. In an extraordinary letter to Howells, dated April 2, 1899, he said: "I wrote my last travel-book in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through heaven. Some day I will read it, & if its lying cheerfulness fools me, then I shall believe it fooled the reader. How I did loathe that journey round the world!—except the sea-part & India" (MTHL 2:690).

As we've already seen, Mark Twain had been in distress while writing the Equator, and no doubt it had been a strain for him to maintain the humorous mask. Since the book contains a generous measure of suffering and indignation, though, it can hardly be said to exist in an unchanging climate of "lying cheerfulness." Rather, as was normal for Twain, he exhibited extreme fluctuations of mood, drifting in a sea of fundamental optimism at one moment, drowning in embittered cynicism at another. Such manifestations of extremes may bear upon the book's title. As was usually the case for him, the title came hard. In fact, the book ultimately appeared under two titles, for in England it was published as More Tramps Abroad . Before selecting that name, Twain had cast about in an uninspired way, trying out variants of his first great success: "Another Innocent Abroad," "An Old Innocence Abroad" (MTHHR, 275). He also considered "Imitating the Equator," saying that its meaning would be that "the equator goes around the world" (MTHHR, 269). Some versions of that must have been in his mind with the American title, Following the Equator, but its meaning is not immediately evident, especially since Twain's literal path, although crossing the equator several times, tends to follow the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The title also has two submerged meanings, however. To follow or imitate the equator was to adhere to a middle

course, to avoid the polar extremes. It also meant coming around again to where one had started, in Twain's case, to Southampton, England, a conclusion that was at once reassuring in its symmetry and frustrating in its lack of progress.

Mark Twain's disgust with the ultimate absurdity of human life was pressing hard within him in 1899: "Since I wrote my Bible (last year) which Mrs. Clemens loathes, & shudders over, & will not listen to the last half nor allow me to print any part of it, Man is not to me the respect-worthy person he was before; & so I have lost my pride in him." Still, he avowed he would not try to publish his ideas. "For I don't wish to be scalped, any more than another" (MTHL 2:689). Nonetheless, he regarded humans as "God's beloved vermin," "the nasty, stinking little human race," "a poor joke—the poorest that was ever contrived—an April-fool joke, played by a malicious Creator with nothing better to waste his time upon" (MTHL 2:692, 689).

Mark Twain could never have proposed directly this contemptuous characterization of man and his God in a book for which he had crucial commercial aspirations. Still, the pressure of such ideas in his mind made an impress on Following the Equator . Back when he had been in his middle thirties and was contemplating the fraudulences of the Holy Land in The Innocents Abroad, he was still operating largely in a Christian context. In Asia, though, whole new cosmic systems appeared, believed in by millions of people. So Pudd'nhead Wilson now offered a definition of faith as "believing what you know ain't so" (132).

During his journey through India, Mark Twain encountered two living gods. The claim that he had nicknamed his servant "Satan" permitted this incongruous exchange when the servant appeared. "What is it, Satan?" "God want to see you." "Who? " "God. I show him up, master?" (366). The first of these gods living on earth, the object of the devo-

tion of "multitudinous followers," magnetized Twain's attention. "I was looking upon a god, an actual god, a recognized and accepted god; and every detail of his person and dress had a consuming interest for me" (366–67). As it turned out, the "Awful Visitor" came to discuss "a feature of the philosophy of Huck Finn" (367).

Impressed by the exalted level of his readership, Twain in Benares presented the second living god he met with a copy of Huckleberry Finn . The act is described with a faint edge of facetiousness, yet Twain clearly meant it when he said, "I knew that if it didn't do him any good it wouldn't do him any harm" (512). He was not only consorting with gods; he could even think of enlightening them. Reflecting on the encounter, he initiated the problematic but undeveloped argument that we revere only things integral to our own culture—"parents, religion, flag, laws." These, he said, involve "feelings which we cannot even help." But he doubted the reality of fundamental belief: "Deep down in our hearts we are all irreverent" (514).

As this line of thought was broaching dangerous areas, its implications were left unexamined. Mark Twain himself was not a man without reverential feelings, however much he scoffed, but he could not locate a subject permanently worthy of his devotion, except perhaps, like Huck, certain scenes of natural beauty, and of suffering innocence. For example, he reflected at length on the custom of suttee in which the Indian widow voluntarily cremated herself on her husband's funeral pyre. At first Twain supposed that it must be public opinion that drives the widow to such an unnatural act, but he then was presented with an instance in which, after suttee had been outlawed in a district, a widow insisted on immolating herself against all entreaties. Twain concluded: "It is fine and beautiful. It compels one's reverence and respect—no, has it freely, and without compulsion" (456).

Mark Twain also contemplated the Parsee "Towers of Silence," where corpses were exposed to the vultures, and the Hindu cremation-ghat, where corpses were burned. But no consoling truths came forth at either place, only revulsion and mystery (371–77, 500–502). He was constantly driven back into life, which, if anything, became all the more enigmatic. In the Darwinian universe, the duckbilled platypus is proposed as the prime example of survival of the fittest. Twain's account of it, being decidedly sacrilegious, was again put in the mouth of another, this time a young English naturalist not otherwise identified (100). "Ornithorhyncus" did not enter the Ark. "It nobly stayed out and worked the theory." As the "e pluribus unum of the natural world" the platypus is supremely adapted. "It is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and vermifuginous." "It is clearly a bird, for it lays eggs and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal, for it nurses its young; and it is manifestly a kind of Christian, for it keeps the Sabbath when there is anybody around, and when there isn't, doesn't" (102–5). The grotesqueness of this creature successfully adapted to the rigorous variety of the world provides amusement to Mark Twain, but underlying his description is a sense of the farcical developments necessary to survive. The platypus offers Twain no more answer than the anomalous Pteraspis that refused to evolve offered Henry Adams.

Touched in throughout the Equator are other attempts to reach clarity about a satisfactory life. These involve color, sensuality, and sexuality. The tropical silks of Ceylon ravished Mark Twain. His page describing the native costumes is crossed with amazed gratitude. The panorama they created was "stunning," "exquisite," "harmonious," "splendid," "and made the heart sing for gladness" (340). When his daughter Clara was married in 1909, Clemens wore his scarlet Oxford gown (representing his honorary doctor of letters degree) over white flannels (MTB, 1524). It was that

man who responded to the brilliant Ceylonese display with unreserved enthusiasm: it was "glowing, flashing, burning, radiant; and every five seconds came a burst of blinding red that made a body catch his breath, and filled his heart with joy" (340).

Then "into this dream of fairyland and paradise" Twain marched a band of Christian schoolgirls. Their clothing was "a grating dissonance . . . was unspeakably ugly! Ugly, barbarous, destitute of taste, destitute of grace, repulsive as a shroud" (343).

In these opposed responses, one of passionate celebration, the other of disapproving disgust, Mark Twain's sensual nature is visible as well as the mantle of repression that normally covered it. Behind his enthusiasm for "that radiant panorama . . . that incomparable dissolving-view of harmonious tints, and lithe half-covered forms" was, to be sure, sexuality, display conceived for physical attraction, but that was a subject Twain could barely approach (340–43). Later in the book he did focus on the worship in India of the lingam. At the commencement of creation, it had been "no larger than a stovepipe." Now, "priapus-worship" is found to be universal. The lingam was "on view everywhere, it is garlanded with flowers, offerings are made to it, it suffers no neglect" (480, 482). Just how this and other such references passed Livy's editorial pen is not clear, especially since in editing the manuscript of the Equator, she firmly declared: "Change Breech clout. It is a word that you love & I abominate. I would take that & offal out of the language. Also stink."^[5] Perhaps the sheer volume of lingams overwhelmed her. So omnipresent were the phallic representations in Benares that Twain concluded the city might well have been named Lingamburg (504).

[5] Cited in Paul J. Carter, "Olivia Clemens Edits Following the Equator," American Literature 30, no. 2 (May 1958): 203. WhenA. B. Paine quoted this passage in MTB, he dropped "Also stink" (1040). On the whole, Carter finds Livy less prudish than usually supposed. His evidence has been amplified by Sydney J. Krause in "Olivia Clemens's 'Editing' Reviewed," American Literature 39, no. 3 (November 1967): 325–51. In his 1974 New York University dissertation, "Mark Twain's Passage to India: A Genetic Study of Following the Equator, " Francis V. Madigan, Jr., argues that Livy must have known the meaning of the word lingam: Bayard Taylor had used it in one of his travel books; and "the Victorians seem to have been willing to permit discussion of such 'indelicate' subjects as long as the words themselves were technical or foreign" (339).

That, however, is as far as Mark Twain's flirtation with sexuality goes, except insofar as men are concerned. Here he manifested some interest combined with a slight uneasiness. In Ceylon his servant was a "gentle, smiling, winning young brown creature" with "beautiful shining black hair combed back like a woman's." Twain found him "and his outfit quite unmasculine," so that "it was an embarrassment to undress before him" (336–39).

A more ambiguous paragraph concerns the fruit of the durian, well known because although its rind gives off a dreadful odor, its flesh is delicious. Mark Twain's description begins in a peculiar way that may signal an underlying playfulness: "I wonder if the dorian, if that is the name of it, is another superstition" (478). He makes a point about the name of the fruit, including italicizing that name, even though the fruit is normally known as the "durian." On the other hand, Oscar Wilde had published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1891, at which time it became the center of furious social censure because of its overt hedonism and because of the barely concealed bisexuality of the principal character. When Wilde sued the marquess of Queensberry in 1895 for criminal libel, the marquess having alleged that the book

was "calculated to subvert morality and encourage unnatural vice," Wilde was questioned sternly about such sentences as "I quite admit that I adored you madly," directed by one man toward another.^[6] And in the summation of Wilde's second trial, the judge characterized some of the sentiments expressed in The Picture of Dorian Gray as "revolting to humanity."^[7] Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison and was released in May 1897, just as Mark Twain, who was then living in England, was completing Following the Equator. So although it is far from demonstrably the case, there is reason to suppose that Twain was not just describing a peculiar fruit but was also making a joke for the attentive. "Fruit," by the way, is moralistically designated in Eric Partridge's Dictionary for the Underworld as having been a slang term "since before 1933" for "a passive male degenerate." Given the context, then, Mark Twain's words are potentially a deliberate double-entendre: "By all accounts, it was a most strange fruit, and incomparably delicious to the taste, but not to the smell. . . . We found many who had eaten the dorian, and they all spoke of it with a sort of rapture" (478–79). Homosexual activity was presumably off-limits for Twain, but given his frontier experience, the subject was hardly unknown to him.

On the next page, as Mark Twain describes Benares and the lingam, the two become fused, and then the dorian re-

[6] H. Montgomery Hyde, Oscar Wilde (London, 1976), 210, 211.

[7] Ibid. , 265. Note also that in Twain's story "Hellfire Hotchkiss," the father of a man named Oscar Carpenter says Oscar is "a girl in disguise. He ought to be put in petticoats" (S&B, 178). For this reason, Hamlin Hill observes that "it is possibly no coincidence in the naming of Oscar that Oscar Wilde's trial and conviction for sodomy had occurred in 1895, two years before the composition of 'Hellfire Hotchkiss'" (Hamlin Hill, afterword to Wapping Alice, by Mark Twain [Berkeley, 1981], 77.)

appears. "The site of the town was the beginning-place of the Creation. It was merely an upright 'lingam' at first, no larger than a stove-pipe, and stood in the midst of a shoreless ocean. This was the work of the God Vishnu. Later he spread the lingam out till its surface was ten miles across. Still it was not large enough for the business; therefore he presently built the globe around it. Benares is thus the center of the earth." With Benares and the lingam in effect identical, Twain then devotes the next paragraph to the history and conditions of "it." "It was Buddhist during many centuries—twelve, perhaps—but the Brahmins got the upper hand again, then, and have held it ever since. It is unspeakably sacred in Hindoo eyes, and is as unsanitary as it is sacred, and smells like the rind of the dorian" (480).

Whether this is deliberate play, subterranean association, or mere chance, one can't determine. But it is demonstrable that near the end of the Equator, Twain was preoccupied with transsexuality, or at the very least with a blurring of genders. The book's last anecdote concerns an unmarried English military surgeon who built a career in South Africa and India. Somewhat wild as a young man, he had nonetheless become a master at his profession. Moreover, in a duel "he killed his man" (711). A mystery always surrounded him, though. When he died, it was at last revealed that he was a woman. Disgraced in England, she had taken on a new identity in the colonies (712). Such a person existed. Dr. James Barry (1795–1865) was inspector general of the British Army Medical Department. His entry in the Dictionary of National Biography observes that "there was a certain effeminacy in his manner which he was always striving to overcome." His case is a seemingly strange note on which to bring a travel book to an end, but hardly out of harmony with Mark Twain's habits. Such confusions of identity attracted him, especially those involving the ambiguities of sex. Well-known instances of transvestism in

Twain's works include Huck dressed as a girl (chaps. 10–11); Tom Driscoll disguised as several women in Pudd'nhead Wilson, and his mother Roxy as a man (chaps. 7, 10, 18, 19, 21); and Merlin playing an old peasant woman in Connecticut Yankee (chap. 44). Dr. James Barry was but a variant of that aggressive soldier named Joan whose biography Twain had written. In his notebook Twain added: "She (Dr. Barry) was evidently a person of high station. She had been seduced when a girl—as shown on the post mortem. An assumed name. The question is, who was she?"^[8]

Sometimes distortions of identity were easily corrected. Once Mark Twain was stopped by an Irish door guard, who asked his name. "Mark Twain." The guard was skeptical: "H'm. H'm. Mike Train. H'm. I don't remember ut" (420). Through cleverness, however, Mark Twain prevailed. In another instance in the Equator, a more severe threat was made against his identity. Twain had long suffered, he said, from "lecture-doubles" and had taken legal steps to prevent them from appearing in public and exploiting his reputation (160). One day a letter came for Twain's wife, commiserating with her over the death of her husband in Melbourne at the end of a lecture tour in Australia (159). Since the imposter had apparently died, Twain decided not to pursue the matter, but when he finally reached Australia, he was confounded to learn that the journalists there had never heard of anyone pretending to be him. Only later in the journey did a pleasant, "educated gentleman" confess to having written the make-believe letter of condolence to Mrs. Clemens (244, 250). Moreover, he also admitted to having single-handedly created

[8] Notebook no. 38 (May–July 1896), 58, MTP . In her dissertation, "Mark Twain's Impostures of Identity" (University of California, Berkeley, 1983), Susan Gillman very usefully analyzes Twain's preoccupation with issues of identity and authenticity.

"the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle, Ireland" (246). This club had initially flattered Twain, then later irritated him because of its incessant flow of questions about his work and requests for his photograph. Now he had met the creator not only of a false death for Twain but also of a false celebrity. These revelations carried with them the enigma of existence. Here a whole enterprise supposedly celebrating Mark Twain's genius had turned out to be not only an irritant but ultimately also an illusion, just like the report of his death. Yet at the time, the perpetrator of the hoax told Twain that creating it had diverted him from thoughts of suicide (249). So had fictions ironically interacted with and affected the lives of both men.

As Mark Twain traveled through the Pacific and into Asia, the local conditions often stimulated his sympathy for the downtrodden. Although the whites had to endure certain infamies during the Indian mutiny, usually the colonized people of other races were abused and hence received Mark Twain's concern. He remembered the abduction of natives from the Pacific island archipelago to work on Australian plantations (81–82). When he actually arrived in Australia, he began to reflect bitterly on the white assumptions of superiority to the "naked skinny aboriginals" and on the various means by which the natives had been exterminated and their land expropriated (207, 211–13). Their treatment struck Twain as "robbery, humiliation, and slow, slow murder" (213). This perception was a clear advance on his part from his old Southern-tainted jokes about miscegenation societies and his fierce contempt toward the American Indians he had encountered in the West. Disillusioned in many respects by the exercise of commercial and political power, and sensitized by the experience of writing first Huckleberry Finn and then Pudd'nhead Wilson, Twain now easily extended his support to the oppressed.

Moreover, he appreciated their physical beauty and

skills. In Fiji the young girls were "easy and graceful, a pleasure to look at"; the young matrons "incomparable for unconscious stateliness and dignity"; and the young men "majestic" (94). In Ceylon he celebrated "beautiful brown faces, and gracious and graceful gestures and attitudes and movements" (343). In India he observed that "usually the man is a nobly-built great athlete, with not a rag on but his loin-handkerchief," and the woman "a slender and shapely creature, as erect as a lightning-rod" (346). After a time Twain pondered his reactions and concluded that "nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare" (381). To make his point, he compared the "splendid black satin skin" of the Zulus and the "rich and perfect tint" of the Indians with the complexions of the whites who were "streaming past this London window now" (381, 383). The result he found to be degrading: with one or two exceptions, "sallow," "unwholesome," and "ghastly" were the adjectives that these English faces stimulated in him (382).

After considering the superlative performances of the aboriginal trackers in Australia, he decided that they represented "a craft, a penetration, a luminous sagacity and a minuteness and accuracy of observation" simply not possessed by anyone else (174). It was an encomium he had been reluctant ever to extend to the American Indian. Twain was similarly impressed by the aboriginals' stoicism, and as evidence of it he cited three detailed examples, after warning: "Do not read the following if horrors are not pleasant to you" (219).

Still, the aboriginals did not ultimately seem to be a superior race to Mark Twain, any more than the Europeans or the Polynesians. He reflected thoughtfully on their "freckled" character, quite as mixed and diverse as that of his own tribe (214). Concluding a long list of instances of the extraordinary contradictions of the aboriginal, Twain

wrote: "Within certain limits this savage's intellect is the alertest and the brightest known to history or tradition; and yet the poor creature was never able to invent a counting system that would reach above five, nor a vessel that he could boil water in" (215). After accumulating evidence about the treatment of the natives, he concluded: "How glad I am that all these native races are dead and gone, or nearly so. The work was mercifully swift and horrible in some portions of Australia" (256). The methods used by the white invaders revolted Mark Twain whether they involved force or guile, but he conceded, however ironically, their inevitability. Speaking elsewhere of the Australian wild dog, the dingo, he observed: "He had been sentenced to extermination, and the sentence will be carried out. This is all right, and not objectionable. The world was made for man—the white man" (186). Perhaps in an ideal situation things would be otherwise, but as they were not and evidently would never be so, Twain tried to develop an ironic fatalism that could accept things as they were.

Moreover, at least in India, Mark Twain found much to say for English rule as opposed to the absolute and capricious tyranny of various Indian rajahs and princes. The English had eradicated the Thugs (446). They now governed "with apparent ease . . . through tact, training, and distinguished administrative ability, reinforced by just and liberal laws" (518). Further, for all the abuses of conquest that Twain had documented and lamented, his conclusive feeling was that "all the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe. I am not sorry, but glad." He was not being ironic. He believed, he wrote, that India demonstrated that after much bloodshed the result would be "peace and order and the reign of law" (625, 626).

Although these hopeful sentiments may have represented Mark Twain's best judgment as he came to the end of his last

extensive journey, in fact he would shortly be obliged to repudiate them, and did, with unparalleled indignation, in a series of critiques of imperialistic policy. In 1901 in "To the Person Sitting in Darkness" and "To My Missionary Critics," he addressed hypocritical Christian conversion efforts, especially in China. In 1902 with "In Defense of General Funston," he attacked the American general named and the means by which he put down the Filipino insurrectionaries and captured their leader, Emilio Aguinaldo. And in "King Leopold's Soliloquy" Twain indicted the malign Belgian presence in the Congo. In short, everywhere he looked, that hope for enlightened colonial government expressed in the Equator was betrayed by the cruelest oppression and exploitation. In any case, he had hardly been blind to white viciousness before. "There are many humorous things in the world," he said in the Equator, "among them the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages" (213).

Yet such nihilism was unendurable for him. Mark Twain was many things, not all of them attractive, but he was invariably aroused by suffering and frequently puzzled and distressed by the anomalies of existence. He worked diligently for years to formulate an explanation for the deplorable condition of the world, but he derived neither comfort nor enlightenment from his efforts. As with most of us, escape was at least temporarily preferable. On the way from Ceylon to Mauritius, he said he would prefer never to go ashore again. At sea "there is no weariness, no fatigue, no worry, no responsibility, no work, no depression of spirits. There is nothing like this serenity, this comfort, this peace, this deep contentment, to be found anywhere on land. If I had my way I would sail on forever and never go to live on the solid ground again" (617). Such sentiments he had once invested in raft life: separation from trouble, going nowhere perpetually, ever drifting.

Few alternatives occurred to him. Once in India he watched an artist who made pictures by sprinkling colored dust on water. Seeing a creation so ephemeral that a breath could destroy it, Twain reflected that finally all men's monuments and temples were no more than this—"water pictures." The dust image struck him as "a sermon, an allegory, a symbol of Instability" (505). But despite the validity of this perception and the truly heroic efforts he made to adjust to this capitalized instability, he himself was never afforded the gift of balance, of following an equator of equanimity. He could only counter the perceived injustices of this world with the humanity of his indignation, and of his laughter.