En Route: Tramping Beyond Innocence, Sagebrush, and Steamboats

Drumbeaters for Mark Twain can always loosen up an audience with some of his rim-shots. Here we could stick to just his witticisms about travel, such as “I have traveled more than anyone else, and I have noticed that even the angels speak English with an accent.”¹ Such an opening might qualify for a keynote, the label proposed to me, which I have therefore pondered. It could allow the current academic maneuver of going to the Oxford English Dictionary and then playing with the meanings of a word as they evolved. But I certainly don’t aspire to strike any keynote that would teach the Twainian world to sing in perfect harmony. That goal dissatisfies me as essentially anti-Twainian, as negating the personality that we treasure and enjoy.

Anyway, now we primarily associate “keynote” with those a capella solo arias on the opening night of a political convention, those calls to a grand campaign for perhaps the unattainable, and even the undesirable. More provincial than that and nevertheless bolder than Tom Sawyer, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main, I will challenge Twainians to attract more readers for A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator.

Evidently, the reading of a book, complete in itself without links, is getting as rare as raising gooseberries, or at least as quaint as embroidering couch-pillows that revere Home, Sweet Home. Recently, the report on a campus forum about the clouded future of reading used for its sly title this question: “The End of Civilization as We Know It?” In straightforward truth, some rich minds have lately remade the case for bookishness. However, only confirmed readers are likely to see these persuasive pleadings or warnings or are likely to read attentively about reading.

So, just how do I propose to attract a crowd, to lure the eyes and ears already committed to the “smart phones” and the iPod and now the iPad? According to veteran teachers in the secondary schools, the reading of ordinary books is a fading habit and even a fading skill. The focused reader is joining the too many other species disappearing from our hyperactive planet, succumbing to those highly talented people who are highly paid to capture our attention for its market value.

Just how do I propose to attract more readers for A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator? Well, first, not by bloviating about The Seven Joys of Reading (an actual title that never sold like The Joy of Cooking anyway). Nor will I pass out bookmarks that quote Emily Dickinson’s “There is no frigate like a book”—even though travel has been the favorite metaphor for the benefits of reading.² Visit again Keats’s sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Again I remind myself that non-readers are not likely even to see poems on the reader as adventurous sailor, as explorer, as intellectual astronaut.

Nor do I propose that we lure truant readers to the reference shelves or even to googling on their Olympic-level cell phones for background materials on, say, the gap between what A Tramp Abroad relates and what actually happened day to day or on the reality gap between Joseph Twichell and the fuzzy Mr. Harris or on the context of travel writing in Twain’s times. The Bayard Taylor bandwagon sags beyond repair, mouldering away next to Marietta Holley’s; and invoking Samantha Allen won’t ignite cultural memory either.³ Too often, teachers steer students away from the text—to the newest criticism or just to Wikipedia.

Nor do I propose to build my case on the contemporary reviews. I give up their help despite my respect for those reviewers, who are in fact useful for ideas for what to feature about A Tramp Abroad and Following the Equator. Newspaper and magazine reviews, when sympathetic, usually focused on encouraging a go at the book itself.

Right now, focusing on political angles would get the liveliest response. Actually, this focus intrigues me too, even for A Tramp Abroad. I’m so committed as to argue that since ultimately everything is...