The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by Kevin Mac
Donnell.
~~~~~

BOOK REVIEW


_Chasing the Last Laugh. Mark Twain's Raucous and Redemptive
Round-the-World Comedy Tour_. Richard Zacks. Doubleday, 2016. Pp. 451.
Hardcover $30.00. ISBN 978-0-3855-3644-8 (hardcover). ISBN
978-0-3855-3645-5 (ebook)


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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by
Kevin Mac Donnell



Copyright (c) 2016 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.



The story of Mark Twain's round-the-world tour is familiar to Twainians:
After driving his once successful publishing company into the ground,
investing in a compositor that did indeed work but failed to reach the
market ahead of the competition, and enduring the financial recession of
1893, Mark Twain hit bottom, regrouped, and soon embarked on a world tour
that enabled him to honor his debts in full. Twain credited his capitalist
friend Henry H. Rogers, saying later that Rogers "saved me from financial
ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face
of the earth for four years and persecute the nations thereof with
lectures, promising that at the end of four years I would pay dollar for
dollar" (p. 404).


It was a lively tour that began in Elmira in 1895 with his last lecture
trip across America while nursing a carbuncle. Departing America at
Vancouver, Canada, he was soon sitting quarantined off the coast of Hawaii
on a cockroach-infested ship. Next, it was on to Australia, New Zealand,
India, and South Africa before ending up in England, where he stayed for a
time after the death of his daughter, Susy. That was followed by stays in
Switzerland, Austria, and Sweden before returning to England at the end of
1899. He did not return home to America until 1900. Henry Rogers's
efficient and imperious secretary, Katherine Harrison, had written Twain in
January 1898 that his debts had been paid in full with $13,000 to spare,
but truth be told, he paid off nearly $40,000 more of his debt by July
1898, although he may never have paid a $1,471.55 balance that he owed
General Grant's widow or a balance on the ledgers of the Mount Morris Bank.
In March of 1898, thinking he was debt-free, he was already chasing a new
get-rich-quick scheme, so he may not have learned the lesson. True
financial stability did not return until late in 1903 after he sold the
Hartford home and signed a lucrative contract with Harper Brothers, only to
lose his wife Olivia the next summer.


Along the way Twain endured audiences that included boisterous drunks and
barking dogs, which certainly justifies the "raucous" in the title of this
book, and Twain's fascination with African voices and his triumphant return
to New York were certainly moments that qualify as "redemptive."
Observations like these combined with Zacks's engaging writing style make
this volume as enjoyable and readable as any previously published account
of Mark Twain's world lecture tour, with the sole exception of Twain's own
account, _Following the Equator_ (1897), which was published in England as
_More Tramps Abroad_ with much additional text that had been excluded from
the American edition. But the English edition still leaves out much of the
detail that Zacks supplies here. Previous books have captured the details
of the initial American leg of Twain's tour, like Gribben and Karanovich's
_Overland With Mark Twain_ (1992), or have narrated his time in Australia
and New Zealand, like Shillingsburg's  _At Home Abroad_ (1988), or have
celebrated his time in India, like Vaswani's _Mark Twain in India_ (1943),
Mutalik's _Mark Twain in India_ (1978), or Strathcarron's _The Indian
Equator_ (2013). Other accounts, like Cooper's _Around the World With Mark
Twain_ (2000) and Rodney's _Mark Twain Overseas_ (1993) cover the tour or
retrace Twain's itinerary in a more general way, while some, like Watson's
_Wayward Tourist_ (2006) or the Darjeeling Windamere Hotel's _Americans at
Darjeeling_ (2015) consist of mere extracts from Twain's own writings.
Zacks relies upon most but not all of these previously published accounts,
but also mines the rich archives of the Mark Twain Papers for Twain's
correspondence and notebook entries about the tour, and makes effective use
of other sources like Scharnhorst's _The Complete Interviews_ (2006) and
Coleman Parson's useful articles about the tour that appeared in several
different journals, to cite just two examples.


Zacks has a knack for telling a good story, and this is on display early on
when he introduces Henry H. Rogers into the plot (pp. 10-12), and again
when he describes the less than luxurious cockroach-infested life aboard
ship (p. 110), or provides a vivid account of Twain's arrival in Calcutta
(p. 242), or reveals Olivia Clemens's very real role as editor (p. 339). He
can also turn a phrase, as when Mark Twain's "inner riverboat gambler" was
in daily struggle with his "inner Joan of Arc" (p. 349). No account of what
Zacks calls a "comedy tour" could leave out Twain's humor, and Zacks never
lets a humorous moment slip away unnoticed, and conveys humor in his own
writing as well. He cleverly invokes _The Wizard of Oz_ (pp. 122-23),
describes how Twain mistook a goat for a flea (p. 175), shows how Twain
managed to sneak a blatant phallus joke into _Following the Equator_ (p.
251), explains how Twain covered up for a drunken servant named Satan (p.
265)--whom he later had to fire when he got drunk again--and even includes
a passage that did not make it into _Following the Equator_, in which Twain
recalls (and reveals for the first time!) that the holy water from the
River Jordan collected by the pious pilgrims of _The Innocents Abroad_ had
actually been surreptitiously dumped and replaced with regular drinking
water by irritated crewman of the _Quaker City_ (p. 341).


Zacks's bibliography reflects a variety of sources far beyond the scope of
Twain scholarship that provide the broader context for all of the drama,
humor, and pathos, that unfolds as the tour progresses, something not often
present in previous published accounts. He begins his account with a good
summary of Twain's life and the disastrous finances that made this lecture
tour a necessity and ends his account with a finely detailed description of
Twain's debts, their precise amounts, and when each creditor was finally
paid. Along the way he continually expands the context as needed in order
for the events taking place to be understood. His background on the
Himalayan Railroad is excellent and his history of South African politics,
Cecil Rhodes, the Boer War, and the prisoners Twain visited at Pretoria is
a clearly written account of a sometimes confusing situation to those not
familiar with African history. The thirty-two illustrations included in the
book reflect this broader context as well. They are a balanced comingling
of familiar images of Twain and some less familiar images of Twain, along
with images of the other major players in this round-the-world drama and a
variety of street scenes that help bring the story to life.


No account of this length and detail could completely escape any errors,
and a few have crept in. Twain did not build his Hartford home in 1882 (p.
25); he had moved into the home in 1874 as construction was wrapping up.
Zacks implies Twain never had his voice recorded (p. 81) and speculates
why, but Twain's voice was recorded on several different occasions. His
summary of the personalities of Susy, Jean, and Clara (pp. 96-97) is
over-simplified at best and misleading at worst, and he repeats the
doubtful claim that Jean tried to kill Kate Leary (p. 400), but these
errors are minor. Zacks deserves the reader's gratitude for correcting some
errors. He takes the time to explain some Indian titles and corrects
Twain's erroneous description of gun salutes for royalty and other "grand
folk." More important, he corrects the sometimes repeated error that Twain
and Livy were guided around a Jain temple in Byculla by Mahatma Gandhi. The
guide was actually Virchand Gandhi. No doubt Virchand was a swell fellow
and a very good guide, but he was no Mahatma, as several Twain biographers
have supposed. But most surprising of all, Zacks reveals that Mark Twain
never paid off his debts in full, and backs that claim with an unpaid
balance from Mount Morris bank for $14,370 in 1901 that does not seem to
have ever been resolved. But even if Twain never paid off all of his debts,
the tour accomplished his immediate goal, and a good deal more.


In _The Innocents Abroad_ Mark Twain observed that "travel is fatal to
prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness" making it unfortunate that his
travel books are not more often read and studied; they have never received
the attention they deserve, and _Following the Equator_ is the most
deserving, even if Twain thought he had filled it with "lying cheerfulness"
as he composed it in the dark aftermath of losing his daughter, Susy.
Richard Zacks gives Mark Twain his due. It was indeed a raucous and
redemptive journey, and even though Twain would experience more acclaim and
appreciation in his last years--his 70th birthday dinner--his Oxford
degree--the move into his grand final home at Stormfield--Zacks is
justified when he concludes with a satisfying finale to his satisfying
tale: "Twain had chased the last laugh and had caught it. Ovations awaited
him during his final decade, but it would be pretty hard for anything to
top these weeks of adulation when the American author came back home."