BOOK REVIEW

    Ziff, Larzer.  _Return Passages: Great American Travel Writing,
    1780-1910_. Yale University Press.  Pp. 320.  $29.95.
    ISBN 0-300-08236-3.

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          Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
          Mary Leah Christmas

    Copyright (c) 2001 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be
    published or redistributed in any medium without permission.


Larzer Ziff has given the traveling and Twainian worlds a troubling,
thought-provoking book.  No starry-eyed romanticism here, Ziff is all facts
and analysis, bathed in a sea-spray of sociology.  One reviewer pronounced
this book to be good bedside reading, and that it is--if one's intention is
to lie awake in the dark.

Ziff has selected five individuals to represent the "history of
distinguished American travel writing from the end of the Revolution to the
outbreak of the First World War":  John Ledyard, John Lloyd Stephens, Bayard
Taylor, Mark Twain, and Henry James.  In turning their telescopes toward the
horizon, they were in fact gazing through microscopes at their American
culture, to borrow a device from one of Mark Twain's notebooks.

One cannot help but think of Mark Twain at every step of the way--in others'
steps as well as his own.  For anyone steeped in Mark Twain's travel
writings and his life-long musings on humanity, Ziff's book is almost too
much to bear.  There is just too much material--too many parallels, too many
philosophical points to be agreed upon or argued--to be absorbed in a single
reading or even a few.  The great secret of this book?  For the cognoscenti
it is _all_ about Mark Twain, not just the section assigned his name.

_Return Passages_ is freighted with issues of race, imperialism, and
culture.  These familiar topics in Twain circles are relevant in examining
other travel writers as well.  Bayard Taylor's work "brings to the fore the
entwined issues of racism and imperialism that are never far from the
surface of other travel writings."  The other individuals featured in the
book are found to be similarly at fault, to varying degrees, except one:
"In his democratic idealism Ledyard alone appears exempt."  Ziff further
observes that, "[Ledyard] saw that if anyone appeared insane it was not the
island cannibals or the grease-encrusted Aleuts or the stony-hearted Tartars
but the one who visited them.  He saw that the true alien is the traveler."

These alien guests faced enticements whether inside or outside the art
galleries, from Titian's "Venus" to village maidens, from the "burning
shame" of John Lloyd Stephens to the "ultimate subjection of women to male
desire...found in the institution of slavery."  Then we are given this to
ponder about the widowed Bayard Taylor.  "That the subsurface eroticism is
gendered male while his physical descriptions of men and boys are generally
more detailed than those of women suggest also that Taylor may have been
experiencing a release from more than the institutionalized confinement of
heterosexuality in his homeland."  Let us draw the curtain of
institutionalized charity over this scene.

Ziff packs a lot of information into the pages, and the sites and
accompanying commentary go zipping along as if past the windows of a tour
bus.  However, at that pace one cannot stop and savor any particular point,
and any revelations (or possible errors) in the narration may not fully
register until later, once one is between the sheets in one's hotel room.
Let us consider a few examples of why our traveler may now be feeling wide
awake after an exhausting day.

The author has some pet words and phrases which he uses--not to excess, but
often enough to attract notice.  The word "shaggy" is used more than once,
but only and always in conjunction with Mark Twain's work.  The term may be
apt, if not endearing, but still contains a whiff of contempt.

The author follows Mark Twain through his years of artistic "adolescence"
(another term used several times, and again only about this writer) to his
eventual maturity.  Ziff pegs Twain's arrival with the cultural sensitivity
shown in _Following the Equator_, but to his dismay, Twain does not stop and
soon leaves the station.  "For all his nominalistic skepticism this great
practitioner of horse sense did for an exalted moment before his final
plunge into colorless nihilism achieve transcendence."

In the Introduction, Ziff ranks Twain's "accomplished travel literature"
alongside that of James; but such approval seems tenuous when one reads
"drawl on," "massive, shaggy volumes," "shaggy conglomerate," "garrulous
rambling," "rambling giant of a book," etc.  However, in the process of
setting-up Twain as a "thinly cultured" rube, in order to chart his
intellectual growth, Ziff creates some situations which backfire.

We know that Mark Twain observed that some folks couldn't tell when he was
being humorous or serious.  Ziff falls into this pit a time or few.  For
instance, the author believes Mark Twain's claim of laziness.  Lazy doesn't
earn one honorary degrees from Yale, the University of Missouri, and Oxford.
As for Mark Twain's laments regarding the nude "Venus" in the Uffizi, they
are interpreted as

            not a claim that the writer should be as free to portray the
            sexual as is the painter the nude, but rather a wish that
            the painter too be reined in.  The proper father of three
            daughters [though he had only two at the time--M.L.C.]
            wholeheartedly subscribed to the proposition that in
            the enlightened second half of the nineteenth century
            the only standard for exhibited art or published
            literature (as opposed to smoking-car exchanges) should
            be its fitness for the eyes of the American girl.

Does he really think that the writer of _1601_, the Stomach Club speech, and
_Letters from the Earth_ was in fact an inveterate prude who never let his
wild, white--dare I say "shaggy"--hair down?  He must, for surprise,
surprise, there is no mention of any of Twain's seamier titles having even
existed.  Some further digging by Ziff would also have yielded the
chronology of the matter, and once again he could have avoided drawing such
an erroneous conclusion.  When our not-so-Innocent was fretting about the
positioning of the model's hand, he may in fact have been bemoaning the
uptightness of a magazine editor who had recently failed to see the
brilliance of his earthy Elizabethan manuscript.

Ziff may be an accomplished scholar and author, but he has not spent the
years with Mark Twain that some have.  That is why he can innocently report
that Mark Twain "as early as 1879" (which happens to be the year of the
infamous Stomach Club speech) referred to Henry James as a "master," and
Ziff not only takes that as a compliment, but alludes to the honor in the
Introduction as well.  Meanwhile, Twain's intimates politely hide their
knowing smiles behind their dinner napkins.

The individual writers in _Return Passages_ were undoubtedly chosen to
represent different stages in the overall maturing of American culture,
culminating with the cosmopolite Henry James.  Interestingly, some of the
things about James which Ziff praises were things for which he had earlier
criticized Twain.

But let us return to our traveler abroad, who is now tossing and turning in
the darkened hotel room.

Ziff tells us that Bayard Taylor's _Northern Travel_ and _Travels in Greece
and Russia_, both dated 1859, were "the last book-length narratives of
travel he was to publish."  We are also informed that Taylor's travel
writings "climaxed" (ahem) with the collected _Bayard Taylor's Travels_ in
1974.  Omitted from the Bayard Taylor section heading, and missing
throughout the text, is any mention of _Egypt and Iceland in 1874_; and yet
he cites the very book, with a sanitized title (sans date), in the fine
print of the first endnote for the Mark Twain chapter.  _Egypt and Iceland
in 1874_ is in this reviewer's personal library, part of her research for
the upcoming State of Mark Twain Studies conference.  After writing a series
of letters from Egypt in March and April of that year, Bayard Taylor was in
Iceland from July to August to document the millennial celebration of
Iceland's colonization for Greeley's _New York Tribune_.  So much for
Taylor's stand-alone volumes ceasing in the 1850s.

Then there is this further error of omission.  By not giving an identity to
Mark Twain's nameless wife--who is mentioned only once, in passing--he
sidesteps having to address the Clemens family's travels for the sake of
Olivia's health.  Instead, the last ten years of Twain's life and travels
are summarized in a single paragraph with an unemotional listing of
geographical points visited.  The reason he went to any of those places, and
what happened there, goes unexplored.  Ziff's concluding statement, "His
days of travel writing had ended but the psychological link between his
mind's rambling along the route of associations and his need to journey from
place to place continued to his death," does not suffice.

More on the subject of health.  On an earlier page, Ziff incorrectly implies
Susy Clemens died in Elmira of spinal meningitis.

A final nit:  One does not normally associate Mark Twain's friend, the
Reverend Joseph H. Twichell, with the term "fellow yarn spinner."

Larzer Ziff is Caroline Donovan Research Professor of English at Johns
Hopkins University.  He has done a significant amount of research, and an
admirable job of squeezing over a century's worth of information into a
relatively small space; but based on the aforementioned, we know that parts
of the story had to be sacrificed.  That is not to say the book is not a
compelling and erudite one, whether the reader agrees with Ziff's every
point or not.

This reviewer has, but an arm's length away, at least a dozen
foreign-language dictionaries.  Such Magellans as we, never know when we may
find ourselves stranded in Byzantium or Thule or some far-flung Grand Duchy,
deposited abroad by an errant hot-air balloon.

For all of the romanticism of travel, however, reality can prove far
different.  Explorers and other high-profile travelers may seem
larger-than-life and invincible, but they are as vulnerable as any of us.
Captain Cook was killed in the Sandwich Islands; Ledyard met his fate in
Cairo battling a "bilious complaint"; Stephens, in Panama, was felled by
hepatitis brought on by malaria and taken back to New York; Bayard Taylor,
in Germany, died of a chronic, undiagnosed ailment; and Henry James, in ill
health, passed away in England.  Mark Twain, as we know, returned from
Bermuda with but a week to spare.

We have been given much to ponder before we next consider climbing into the
Professor's airship.  "[F]or the 'real and genuine traveler' travel is a
test rather than a pleasure.  Only the journey that involves fatigue and
suffering leads to wisdom...."  And with wisdom comes sorrow.  Mark Twain
may have led a life of international travel and worldwide acclaim, but he
wrote that if he had it to do all over again, he would have become a river
pilot and stayed one.  _Nota bene_.

* * * * * *

ABOUT THE REVIEWER:  Mary Leah Christmas is an award-winning freelance
writer/editor with a background in book publishing.  She first became
interested in Mark Twain when, as a teenager, her parents inadvertantly bid
on the wrong box-lot of books at an auction and became the owners of an 1876
edition of _Innocents Abroad_.  This is her sixth review for the Mark Twain
Forum.