Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land by Franklin Walter (review)

Reviews Walter, Franklin. Irreverent Pilgrims: Melville, Browne, and Mark Twain in the Holy Land. Seattle: Univ. ofWashington Press. 1974. 234 pp. Cloth $9.95. That's a lot of money for a small book, but read correctly, it just might be worth it. For the old master has done it again. He first gave us Frank Norris in 1932, then some years later San Francisco's Literary Frontier which has spawned all manner and all kinds of offspring, large and small. His collaborative edition of Mark Twain's Travels with Mr. Brown has been a continuing delight. Now in Irreverent Pilgrims, he has driven another wedge, which will delight and, I hope, continue to inspire—providing other studies of other, often less innocent pilgrims to lands which are no less holy, only more economically important, known best to us now through the sometimes deviously effective travelings of our official representatives or talkings of those in what we now designate as the media. For this is a land thought of as filled with milk and honey, but with dynamite and land mines also, which we need to know more about, from travelers as much as from diplomats. We literary people can probably most successfully estimate the texture of thought, even as we caricature it, in these lands of the Near East, holy, revered, protected and attacked by people of varying kinds, a powder keg, it has been called, which has exploded and perhaps will explode again. Walker is correct in treating it lightly, if only to remind us that we must not. And we literary people know that the observations of a bright literary mind is more likely, even through indirection, to provide truths more objective than those of prognosticating historians or statesmen who have professional or political reputations to uphold. There is an axiom among Americans long resident in the Near East that stay two weeks or even three and you will inevitably write a book about it; but to stay longer is to become involved in confusion mounted on confusion, contradictions confounding contradictions . As an old Near East buff myself, who followed, more than half a century later, on bicycle—long coasts down hills, long walks up—almost exactly the same route that John Ross Browne did, but without guide, gun, or apprehension of attack, this book kept me enthralled. Quite properly Walker spends more space on the adventures of Browne, as an introduction to those of Melville and Mark Twain, which are better known but which read in the context, and with the introduction he supplies, take on significant meaning. Just in time, and at the right time, he reminds us of some of the strengths and bewildering weaknesses, not only among people in the area of which he writes, but also of those same qualities among quizzically observant people who visit them. His book reveals as much of attitudes, confidently waspish, not only of people who adventured through these holy lands, not quite up to "civilized" standards, but also of people who have read them with delight heightened by smiles of superiority—after all, East is East. Walker's book can thus be an important reminder of our ancestors' attitudes, the curious, sometimes perilous adventures of Browne, the search for reverence in Melville, and the sometimes slapstick jocularity of Mark Twain. Whether he meant to or not, and I suspect that he did mean to, Walker reminds us of quite understandable attitudes toward people who seem somehow different—inscrutable is the word sometimes used—from ourselves. At any rate, the old master has, as I have suggested, written what may just become another seminal book, just in time and in the nick of time, when we must make up our minds about the people, and their humanness, who live and perhaps even seem to 112Reviews think differently from the way we do, but who, in a large sense, have been caretakers of a territory from which much of our strength, or weakness, has derived. Read with hindsight and intelligent foresight, it tells us much of ourselves and of our neighbors on the eastern Mediterranean to whom, after several centuries of bemused literary irreverence, we now of necessity...