86
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
voyagers scanted whist and dancing and lOVe-making in favor of prayers
and the singing of hymns, and to wander the streets of Europe in search
of good cigars, a decent shave and an authentic pool table-yet one not
too mature to steal bunches of grap'es on his way down from the Acro–
polis, and to torment his guides with childish horseplay. The "Mark
Twain" of 1867 was, in short, the kind of boy-man we think of referring
to a "Westerner," one in whom the power of adulthood and the irre–
sponsibility of childhood ideally combine. Twain, however, did not
consider himself quite such a "Westerner" as he was later
to
describe in
R'oughing It,
"stalwart, muscular, dauntless, young braves ... erect,
bright-eyed, quick-moving, strong-handed young giants . . ."; for these
exist only as legend, i.e., as someone else. Most Westerners whom Twain
knew, were, in fact, rejects of the American South, "white trash" to
their social superiors-whose chivalric values they did not, however,
deny, seeking instead to transport those values into the "territory ahead,"
to give them a second chance in a virgin world. The code of the cowboy
is as much derived from the Southerner's reading of Sir Walter Scott
(is as embarrassingly and illiterately European, that is to say) as the values
of the Klu Klux Klan; which is why Twain's "heroes" turn so easily
into gunmen shooting up a sle'eping town or Vigilantes imposing their
version of justice upon their own opposite numbers.
The character called "Mark Twain" in
The Innocents Abroad
is a
comic version of these heroic types, a
shlemiel--or
clown-Westerner, a
wandering jester who has learn'ed among the "young braves" (to whom,
of course, he had always been a butt) to hate cant, despise sentimentality,
distrust sophistication; and who has picked up from them a new vocab–
ulary-a native American diction-in which that hatred, despite and
distrust can become a kind of humor acceptable to the New England
Brahmins themselves: a way of discharging in laughter the nagging
doubts about high art and European civilization that troubled their
social inferiors if not them. Moreover, "Mark Twain" had lived
in
a
landscape so terrifyingly beautiful in its aloofness from from man's small
necessities, so awesomely magnificent in its anti-human scale, that beside
it the scenery of the Old World was bound
to
seem pallid, domesticated,
dwarfed.
"Como? Pshaw! See Lake Tahoe," one of his chapter headings
reads; and in a footnote to another, this time concerned with the Sea of
Galilee, Twain notes: "I measure all lakes by Tahoe, partly because
I am far more familiar with it than with any other, and partly becam"e
I have such a high admiration for it. ..." Yet each time he begins by
evoking the peaceful splendor of that Western lake, he ends in rage--rage
at the rest of the world, which he considers somehow betrays its mythical
