The following book review was written for the Mark Twain Forum by
Harold Hellwig.

~~~~~

_Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader_. Edited by Alan Gribben and
Jeffrey Alan Melton. The University of Alabama Press, 2009. Pp. 231.
Softcover. $29.95. ISBN 978-0-8173-5521-0.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Harold Hellwig
Idaho State University

Copyright (c) 2009 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published
or redistributed in any medium without permission.

Mark Twain's major travel works, _Innocents Abroad_, _Roughing It_, _A
Tramp Abroad_, _Life on the Mississippi_, and _Following the Equator_,
have recently received more attention, and deservedly so. As Alan
Gribben noted in 1999 in his review of criticism (_American Literary
Scholarship_, "Mark Twain"), the travel works needed that attention and
scholars are meeting that need in the last ten years.

Several recent editions of the travel writings have appeared, notably
the Library of America and the Oxford University series. These allow
readers the access required to appreciate Twain's five travel works.
_Following the Equator_ had been out of print for literally decades
until Dover Publications offered a useful facsimile reprint. One can
even read _Following the Equator_ as a Kindle book from Amazon.com or
as a Webster's French Thesaurus edition. Even _A Tramp Abroad_ can be
found in a relatively new edition (Penguin) designed for a non-scholar,
which should replace Charles Neider's rather odd attempt to improve the
text. These are designed for general readers.

Gribben and Melton provide an introduction that reviews some
generalizations about travel conventions and Twain's modifications of
the travel genre, a short description of editorial principles, a list
of illustrations, a brief head note to each of the five texts, the
excerpts from each of the major travel works, a list of selected
secondary criticism, and an index. These excerpts include the
discussion of crows in India, the description of Baton Rouge and New
Orleans, the massive ascent of the Riffelberg peak, the forest fire at
Lake Tahoe, and the stealthy tour of the Parthenon by night.

Trying to find excerpts from these travel works to compile a useful
reader is a daunting task. Gribben and Melton's effort leaves much good
material behind in this editing process. They do admit that they sought
to focus on traditional travel rather than on the tall tales often
anthologized, omitting "Jim Baker's Blue Jay Yarn," from _A Tramp
Abroad_, for example. They suggest that this "present volume more
authentically introduces this neglected Mark Twain, a man en route, out
of his comfortable element, on the road, on the seas, on trains,
matching his travel skills against the inconveniences and hazards of
living away from home and earning the thrills and diversions that the
unfamiliar can bring" (p. xix). Gribben and Melton admit that
"winnowing Mark Twain's travel works down to the contents of a single
volume proved tremendously frustrating because we were obliged to
eliminate so many superb passages" (p. xxi).

In that winnowing process, they have had some success. The brief sketch
of the Sphynx woman in _Roughing It_ seems parallel to the description
of the Sphynx in Egypt from _Innocents Abroad_. Both are good
selections. However, at some point it would have been useful to present
a rationale for what was chosen, because some excerpts lack context or
connectivity to travel themes. It is not entirely clear why the sage
brush in _Roughing It_ receives a page or two of space, unless the
Syrian camel incident, which is embedded, is highlighted somehow as a
reference to truth and reality from Twain's journey to the Holy Land,
the anticipation of finding authentic moments of religious revelation
half-creating the perceived truth of the journey. The Syrian camel
attempts to eat Twain's innocuous piece of journalism, choking on the
truth. Perhaps the sage brush represents reality, a demythologized part
of the American West, and the Syrian camel personifies the exotic myth
of Arabic culture. Gribben and Melton discuss the general traditions of
travel writing or tourism, summarized more comprehensively in Melton's
work on travel writings in 2001 (_Mark Twain, Travel Books, and
Tourism: The Tide of a Great Popular Movement_, University of Alabama
Press). The conventions of the Grand Tour are sketched out in this
current travel anthology's introduction: travel modes, hazards and
inconveniences of travel, and the attitudes of the American traveler.
Gribben and Melton do present some of the perspectives that Twain
brings to these travel conventions, principally the necessity of the
American to resist the culture of Europe and to exaggerate the American
way of life. It would have been useful to find a way to make that more
clear in their introduction, perhaps, and discuss how each of the
excerpts reflects these concerns with some kind of brief footnote or
added introduction to each of the excerpts.

The head notes are oddly brief, presenting some of the history of each
text and summarizing some of Twain's attitudes, for example, remarking
that Twain reflected an "air of insolent nationalism" in _Innocents
Abroad_ (p. 2). These head notes could provide a bit more detail on
current criticism or cite more sources for further reading. For
example, the head note on _A Tramp Abroad_ seems very astute and
condensed, suggesting new directions for further scholarship on that
text, alluding to the intense effort to parody himself and travel works
in general (an experimental attempt to break free from the genre of
travel writing that Twain had himself helped to create), and this head
note could offer several suggestions for further reading. _Following
the Equator_ seems less usefully summarized. Common assumptions about
that text are that Twain wrote this book under the strain of having
lost his daughter Susy to meningitis and that the text reveals his
alarm at the racial and colonial attitudes of other countries, such as
India and South Africa. The editors simply plead for more attention
from readers and critics, writing that _Following the Equator_
"deserves to be better known than it is" (p. 203). For a general
reader, this level of commentary might suffice.

The illustrations, considering the hundreds available, are few. The
illustrations provided for _A Tramp Abroad_, four out of all nine
provided for all of the works, are not necessarily representative of
the illustrations used by all five travel texts. _A Tramp Abroad_, by
itself, seems an anomaly in terms of narrative structure and authorial
persona, and the illustrations are similarly flawed in terms of
reflecting the text. Three of these four are illustrations doctored by
Twain in some way, presumably part of the attempt to parody travel
writing illustrations. It would have been useful to add "An Author's
Memories" from _A Tramp Abroad_, for instance, to show the importance
of memory in Twain's travel schemes, as a kind of parallel illustration
to "A Miner's Dream" from _Roughing It_, and "The Pilgrim's Vision"
from _Innocents Abroad_ which are in this edition. That said, it's easy
to argue that Gribben and Melton should have included more
illustrations; perhaps the publisher had limitations on how many
illustrations to include. "The Full-Dressed Tourist," from _Innocents
Abroad_, is an ideal choice as a frontispiece, and other illustrations
similar to that one would have been useful to capture the sense of
demythologized travel that the editors discuss.

Given that the anticipated readership is decidedly general, the list of
Selected Readings that appears at the end of the book is a fair
overview of the criticism available for further study. Scholarly
readers might object because the list is fairly short, roughly fifty
articles and books relating to Twain's travel works, though it does
represent a starting point for further reading. It would have been
useful to provide a citation to Harold Smith in this bibliography, as
that name appears in the introduction as a resource of useful
information about the publishing trade in travel literature of the
nineteenth century, but no endnote exists for that cited information
nor does it appear in the bibliography. I trust that this is a
reference to Harold F. Smith's _American Travellers Abroad: A
Bibliography of Accounts Published before 1900_ (Scarecrow Press,
1999).

An index is surely a devil's task. The index provided is curious in a
number of ways. Sometimes the index system makes little sense. The word
"Buffalo" appears, with an appropriate page number, though the text has
no useful reference to buffaloes, other than the one word reference. If
the excerpt had been the famous Bemis buffalo climbing a tree in
_Roughing It_, which does not appear in this collection, then the
indexed item would have had real merit. The same thing occurs with the
indexed word "Boots," though the index could have clarified why this
seems a useful word to index [perhaps "Boots, wearing them in mud"].
Other indexed items do have context, such as the "ice water" item in
the index that refers to a paragraph from _A Tramp Abroad_, where Twain
discusses European and American attitudes toward drinking cold water.
Sometimes the index is just wrong. "Dan," as an index reference to page
14, apparently misses an obvious and more useful reference on page 11.
The indexer might be playing a hoax on occasion as well; the reference
"Intoxicated man in a hotel" (page 144) is clearly a duplicate of the
index item, "Drunk man in a hotel" (also referenced to page 144). One
last example: Ferguson is indexed as a guide, without any mention
elsewhere that this is a fictitious name applied by the tourists and
Twain to all tour guides; the index also indicates that Ferguson ought
to be a reference to be found on page 6, though it clearly is not there
at all. The typical reader might assume that Ferguson was one
individual tour guide in _Innocents Abroad_. Names presented in the
introduction, Margaret Fuller, Henry James, Washington Irving, Julia
Ward Howe, and William Dean Howells (Howells does have his name in the
index elsewhere) probably deserve as much space in the index as "Boots"
or "Buffalo."

Much of the index is useful. It is just not that reliable. Historical
references, as endnotes or footnotes, might help explain some of the
references that could otherwise escape the reader. A reference to Kent
Rasmussen's _Critical Companion to Mark Twain: A Literary Reference to
His Life and Work_ (Facts on File, 2007), other than being listed in
the Selected Readings, would be helpful for some readers. Certainly, a
statement about reasonable scholarly editions of the travel works seems
in order. _Roughing It_, for example, deserves some mention in terms of
the teamwork provided by the staff at the Mark Twain Project, resulting
in that award-winning edition by Harriet Elinor Smith, Edgar Marquess
Branch, Lin Salamo, and Robert Pack Browning, replete with historical
notes and explanations.

Given the need to be selective, perhaps readers will be enticed to read
the full adventures of the Pilgrims on the road to Damascus, not just
the brief page or two provided; to admire the frontier spirit and pluck
represented by the American coyote, not present at all; and to
understand Twain's growing disenchantment with colonial efforts to
subdue natives in South Africa and India, particularly with absent
passages on the diamond mines and the problematic fascination with the
Thugee. There are passages from _Life on the Mississippi_ that beg to
be read and to be analyzed, passages that are not in this edition,
passages that reflect Twain's days on the river as a cub pilot, and,
which, if given a context, help explain why travel is such an important
component of Twain's thinking.

There are surprises here. The brief sketch of an inebriated man trying
to pour more wine from a corked bottle is an unappreciated classic from
_A Tramp Abroad_.  The parody of a scenic description of the Sphinx in
_Innocents Abroad_ is a reminder of American hubris and a fitting coda
to the ignorant American tourist. The excerpt from _Life on the
Mississippi_ that reflects Twain's self-deprecating conversation with a
Hannibal inhabitant who remembers Twain as a "damned fool" is a deft
commentary on nostalgia. There are some good choices made here also,
such as the insightful reflection on memory and Bombay in _Following
the Equator_, and the description of the volcano Kilauea in _Roughing
It_. The excerpt on art appreciation in _Innocents Abroad_ is essential
to understanding what Twain means in the preface to that book in terms
of seeing things properly as a tourist.

Gribben and Melton are to be commended for providing a set of readings
that begin to point the way toward further work and reading.
_____

About the Reviewer: Harold Hellwig is the author of _Mark Twain's
Travel Literature: The Odyssey of a Mind_ (McFarland, 2008).