Mark Twain and Human Nature

Chapter Two. 1870–1879

C h a p t e r Tw o 1 8 7 0 – 1 8 7 9 I Given his own circumstances at the time he was writing it, Roughing It (1872) is an oddly ironic title for Twain’s next important book. Throughout , the author recalls his travels in the West, often far from creature comforts , improving company, and domestic security. Yet at the time he contracted with Elisha Bliss to write this book, Clemens was one-third owner of the Buffalo Express, recently married to Olivia Langdon, and living in a furnished house his father-in-law had given the couple as a wedding present. Samuel Clemens had apparently “settled down,” but he wrote in Roughing It that camping out in desert solitudes “seemed the very summit and culmination of earthly luxury”: “It is the kind of life that has a potent charm for all men, whether city or country-bred. We are descended from desert-lounging Arabs, and countless ages of growth toward perfect civilization have failed to root out of us the nomadic instinct” (RI, 218). This passage is basically a restatement of a claim he made in The Innocents Abroad, but with interesting differences: “The nomadic instinct is a human instinct; it was born with Adam and transmitted through the patriarchs, and after thirty centuries of steady effort, civilization has not educated it entirely out of us yet” (IA, 446). 5 9 The genealogy of wanderlust in Roughing It has its origins in Semitic tribes and has persisted “countless ages”; in The Innocents Abroad the same impulse has been inherited from Adam, and civilizing influences are a mere three thousand years old. In either instance, the remark probably says more about Sam Clemens than it does about the human condition. His travels in the Middle East and the Holy Land had acquainted him with nomadic peoples, of course, but far more frequent were his encounters with families, sects, or tribes that had occupied the same few acres of ground for two thousand years. Itinerancy is not necessarily a universal instinct, but it may have been a fundamental part of Samuel Clemens’s makeup. He wrote to a friend in December 1867, for example, “I wish I were in the [Sandwich] Islands now—or in California. . . . I am in a fidget to move. It isn’t a novel sensation, though—I never was any other way” (L2, 138). He sometimes claimed that his conscience began to pinch him when he stayed in any one place too long. Domestic bliss would not curb that impulse in him, though he assured his bride-to-be otherwise. It might almost be expected that Clemens’s courtship of Olivia Langdon would be conducted on the run and largely through correspondence; he was lecturing in several states and writing her continually from one town or another. In one letter he confessed to the “strong conviction that, married to you, I would never desire to roam again while I lived.” But he quickly added a disclaimer: “If I roamed more, it must be in pursuit of my regular calling & to further my advancement in my legitimate profession,” and insisted, “Wandering is not my habit, nor my proclivity” (L3, 74–75). It is perhaps worth noting that, in the early 1870s, Clemens made two ill-fated and somewhat ludicrous attempts to advance his literary reputation as a travel writer without subjecting himself to that most necessary requirement of the genre—travel.1 At any rate, despite his efforts and convictions, he managed to travel a great deal after his marriage. In the 1870s alone, when one lumps together the time spent in separate excursions abroad, we find Clemens lived nearly three full years out of the country—pitching his several tents in Germany, France, Bermuda, Switzerland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium, and, most often, England. It became almost routine for the family to spend the summer months in Elmira, New York, and he frequently embarked on lecture tours in the United States. As often as not, there were practical pro6 0 M a r k Tw a i n a n d H u m a n N a t u r e 1. He decided to do his traveling by proxy, first proposing to write up the aroundthe -world jaunt of his future brother-in-law and a college professor named Ford as if it were his own experience; and second by sending an agent to report on the diamond mines in South...