90
LESLIE A. FIEDLER
Abroad,
most spectacularly eXemplified in the chapters on Venice, where
the wary Westerner, the man resolved at all costs not
to
be had, begins
by asserting point-blank, "This famed gondola and this gorgeous gon–
dolier!-the one an inky, rusty old canoe with a sable hearse-body clapped
on to the middle of it, and the other a mangy, bare-footed guttersnipe
with a portion of his raiment on exhibition which should have been sacred
from public scrutiny." But a f'ew pages later, he has apparently changed
his mind, observing in conventional panegyric tones, "The Venetian
gondola is as free and graceful, in its gliding movement, as a serpent....
The gondolier
is
a picturesque rascal for all he wears no satin harness,
no plumed bonnet, no silken tights."
This doubleness of vision, however, this alternation between day–
time debunking and nighttime subscription to a dream ("In the glare of
day, there is little poetry about Venice, but under the charitable moon
her stained palaces are white again. . . .") does not arise out of the
dialogu'e between Clemens the artist and "Twain" the cornic innocent;
it has lain deep in the heart of every run-of-the-mill tourist ever since
that memorable year of 1867, when, for the first time on record at least,
"everybody was going to Europe...." Occasionally, of course, Twain
moves from echoing the Americans abroad
to
mocking them, but never
for their vulgarity, their grossness of perception, their smug contempt
for culture. What stirs his satirical impulse is rather their pretentious–
ness, their pitiful attempts at culture climbing: their signing hotel regis–
ters in French, or claiming loudly never to have eaten a meal without
the proper wine---or, especially, their mouthing of high-flown phrases out
of guidebooks in the presence of works of art they do not really under–
stand.
When he is recounting the playful desecration of revered cultural
sites, his tone is bafflingly equivocal-as in the episode in the crater of
Mount Vesuvius which so infuriated Stuart Sherman. "Some of the boys
thrust long slips of paper down into holes and set them on fire, and so
achieved the glory of lighting their cigars
by
the flames of Vesuvius, and
others cooked their eggs over fissures in the rocks and were happy."
Surely, there is a note of friendly mockery here, but none of that cold
fury with which Twain reports, say, the credulity of Europeans in the
face of holy "relics" and "miracles," or the gushing response of some
of his fellow Americans to such utterly ruined pictures as Da Vinci's
"Last Supper" ("Maybe the originals were handsome when they were
new, but they are not now").
Only at the climax of the book, when the author-protagonist stands
face to face with the oldest monument he has encountered, with, that is
to say, an ultimate incarnation of the persistence of the past, toward
