The Portable Mark Twain Read Free Page B

“labrick” and many other unflattering things.
    Twain, on the other hand, had indeed traveled more than most people, enough to know that, the effects of British colonialism notwithstanding, the English language and the Anglo-Saxon point of view were not the only games being played in the world. In fact, by the end, Clemens had circumnavigated the globe and gone nearly everywhere except the place he set out for in 1857, the Amazon. But he got diverted into river-boating and did not look back. Twain later transferred the childhood ambition to get to South America to Huckleberry Finn, but Huck never made it either.
    Twain (and Clemens, too, for that matter) had also traveled up and down the social ladder in remarkable ways. In his San Francisco days, it was oysters and champagne one day, unemployment and despair the next. In the mid-1880s he owned his own publishing house that had just published the monumentally successful memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, and he had high hopes for his investments; ten years later he was trying to find his way out of debt. These swings in personal fortune probably made him that much more alert to thwarted ambition and to matters of class distinction and the spurious lines that divide human creatures from one another. Clemens knew firsthand the profligacy of ambition and the meagerness of destiny, but in this, as in most matters, he was on both sides of the question. He could have Pudd’nhead Wilson sardonically remark, “There isn’t a Parallel of Latitude but thinks it would have been the Equator if it had had its rights.” Yet in “Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven” (1909) he could picture true “heavenly justice”; the hereafter was a place where one was judged and rewarded according to an inward greatness that, on earth, often never had the opportunity to develop.
    As a rule, Twain recognized the markers of supposed merit for what they are, patent absurdities. In his day they might be pretentious titles, epaulets, or bad French; in our own they might be stretch limos, buns of steel, or bad French. He typically satirized such inequity and pretense with an eager glee. In The Innocents Abroad (1869), for example, Twain meets the Czar of Russia and marvels at the terrible yet whimsical authority he wields: “If I could have, I would have stolen his coat. When I meet a man like that, I want something to remember him by.” However, the author himself was not exempt from like affectation. Clemens had a love/hate relation with the English and more than once satirized their aristocratic ways. Nevertheless, he sometimes strutted around in the scarlet robes he had worn when he received an honorary degree from Oxford—there was no other red that could compare with it, he thought, “outside the arteries of an archangel.” He once bragged, “An Oxford decoration is a loftier distinction than is conferrable by any other university on either side of the ocean.” And, in the persona of Mark Twain, Clemens could become the ultimate name-dropper. He recounts in Following the Equator (1897) a visit by a Mohammedan “god.” A direct descendant of the Prophet and worshipped accordingly, this walking deity wants to discuss the “philosophy of Huck Finn.” Twain’s reaction is predictable: “It would be false modesty to pretend that I was not inordinately pleased. I was. I was much more pleased than I should have been with a compliment from a man.”
    These sorts of encounters between social unequals can make for great comedy, and Twain applied the attendant mechanisms of social adjustment (envy and flattery, obsequiousness and exasperation, indifference and condescension) in a variety of ways and to diverse effects. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) begins with a letter addressed to Artemus Ward. Twain, in this instance cast in the role of a dandified gentleman, expresses