Leslie A. Fiedler
AN AMERICAN ABROAD
It is now n'early a hundred years since Mark Twain embarked
on "the first organized pleasure party ever assembled for a transatlantic
voyage," and began making the notes which were to become that occa–
sionally mad, often tedious, but somehow 'eminently satisfactory travel
book,
The Innocents Abroad or the N ew Pilgrim's Progress: Being Some
Account
'Of
the Steamship QUAKER CITY'S Pleasure Excursio.n to
Europe and the Holy Land,
A century later, we find it p'erfectly natural
that Twain should have been present as a kind of laureate
ex-,officio
to
the initiation of mass tourism in the United States-his way, to the tune
of $1250, paid by a California newspaper; for we know now that with
the publication of his
New Pilgrim's Progress,
he was launching a
literary career marked by an almost obsessive concern with Europe and
the quest for American identity.
No one, however, had any sense of this on June 8, 1867, when the
"Quaker City" sailed, since--though Twain had already done some news–
paper pieces about a voyage to Hawaii-his sole published volume,
The
Celebrated Jumping Frog and Other Sketches,
suggested an exclusive
concern with quite other, much more parochial material, Yet, over and
over, he was to return to the themes of
The Innocents Abroad:
not only
in other self-declared travel books like
A Tramp Abroad
or
Following the
Equator,
but in such fictions as
The Prince and the Pauper, A Connec–
ticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Personal Recollections of Joan of
Arc, Tom Sawyer Abroad, The Mysterious Stranger,
Even in his greatest
work,
Huckleberry Finn,
the encounter with Europe is represented,
despite the 'exclusively American scene, in the ill-fated meeting between
Jim and Huck, on the one hand, and the Duke and the Dauphin, on the
other, To be sure, those two self-styled Europeans are arrant frauds; but
precisely in so far as th'ey are fraudulent, they embody what Twain took
to be the essential nature of Old World aristocracy, "What was the use
to
tell him these warn't real Kings and Dukes?" Huck asks himself at
one point just before falling asleep, and answers himself, "It wouldn't
