IF CLEMENS READ THE PAPERS when he arrived in Adelaide, he might have noted an editorial greeting Mark Twain. The editorial, which referred to the writer’s drawl as a Yankee accent, remarked that “an increase of public curiosity as to the personal appearance and private life of public favorites is admittedly one of the marked characteristics of this age.”
Adelaide’s papers, assisted by promotional pieces from Smythe, had been writing about Clemens since his arrival in Australia. Adelaide’s satirical weekly Quiz and Lantern threatened reprisals if Mark Twain was not funny enough. South Australians “will hand him over to the tender mercies of Max O’Rell, who is very anxious to fight a duel.”
Even merchants promoted Mark Twain. Shopkeepers displayed photographs of Clemens, distributed by Smythe, in their windows. Charlick Brothers published an advertisement suggesting that the lecturer would exclaim “Innocents at Home,” while sipping a cup of their pure blend teas.
The crowd that gathered at the Adelaide train station to greet Clemens was disappointed when the train arrived without him. After leaving the train at Aldgate, he and his party drove to town in an open carnage, with the American consul, C. A. Murphy. A few days later Clemens remarked that if the rest of South Australia or even a small part of it were as beautiful as the drive from Aldgate to Adelaide, it was a fortunate country. Everything he saw on the drive was unfamiliar, he said, except the grass, which he had seen before. “The trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers were all new, and so they would have remained” had he not been riding with his fellow American, Mr. Murphy, “who, though knowing nothing whatever about them, described every one accurately.” As a stranger in a strange land, Clemens asserted, what he longed for was information about that country. It did not matter whether the information was correct. The ride down from Aldgate ended at the South Australian Club Hotel, where the consul’s two young daughters presented flowers to Mrs. Clemens and Clara.
Shortly thereafter, Clemens met reporters, to whom he confided that he had smuggled his carbuncle past the customs officers. One journalist, impressed by Clemens’s drawl, called it “a constant protest against the hurry and worry of the nineteenth century.” Clemens thought that Australians were more American than English: “There is a frankness, a bluntness, and an absence of self-consciousness about them.” He defended American newspapers from the accusation that they are corrupt, a charge that he compared to the belief that all Americans carry revolvers and are quick to shoot one another, especially in the South. Communities in the South, he said, are as “religious and peaceable” as those in the North. That may be so, but in Clemens’s day the nation’s highest murder rate was found in the South, a distinction that the region continues to maintain.
When asked about racial feeling in America, Clemens replied that “much of the talk is exaggerated by windy agitators and stump orators, and does not represent the real feeling. Away back there was talk of deporting the negroes to Africa, and of disfranchising a large number, but you do not hear much of it now.” As for the Chinese, they are “poor, hardworking, industrious … always busy and always sober.” Even so, he said, the Chinese are friendless and not wanted in America. “But America is a place for all people, it seems.”
One of the reporters talked to Clara, whom he described as “a lively, self-possessed, frank, chatty young lady.” She asked him if South Australians did much riding. “I do so love a good horse,” she said. The reporter reckoned that South Australians “also loved a good horse and knew its points and paces to perfection,” but the bicycle might make horses extinct. Clara said that she preferred horses to bicycles.
That night, with His Excellency the lieutenant governor in attendance and about forty standees in a semicircle at the rear of the stage, Clemens gave the first of four performances at the Theatre Royal. When he appeared, wrote one reviewer, “a great roar of applause, recognition, and welcome” burst forth and continued for several minutes, slackening only after he had bowed many times. Such a greeting, Clemens said, made a stranger doubt if he was a stranger at all.
“The doctor says I am on the verge of being a sick man,” he said, alluding to his carbuncle. “Well, that may be true enough while I am lying abed all day trying to persuade his cantankerous, rebellious medicines to agree with each other; but when I come out at night and get a welcome like this I feel as young and healthy as anybody, and as to being on the verge of being a sick man I don’t take any stock in that. I have been on the verge of being an angel all my life, but it’s never happened yet.” He took the pretty bouquet of flowers from the table next to him and said he “presumed they were intended for him, but whether they were or not made no difference, for he accepted them very kindly just the same.”
Just as Clemens walked onto the Theatre Royal’s canted stage, the Mayor of Adelaide was switching on an electric light at a major downtown intersection. The mayor was implementing the City Council’s resolution to experiment with “electric-lighting in the Streets of Adelaide.” The current was supplied by the same company that at the moment was illuminating the Theatre Royal and the South Australian Club Hotel, where Clemens retired after a late-night supper hosted by the town’s literary lights. According to one report, a number of tedious postprandial speeches “bored poor Mark Twain almost to death.”
The Theatre Royal and the South Australian Club Hotel survived for most of the twentieth century. The destruction of the theater, whose 1914 reconstruction probably retained only the original walls, did not create as much controversy as the razing of the hotel. The “South,” as it was affectionately called, was for almost one hundred years a venue for elegant lunches, teas, dinners, and receptions. When that genteel reminder of the colonial past fell, the public clamored to buy its bricks as souvenirs.
Alice and I step into the Intercontinental Hotel, which stands on the site of the old South Australian Club Hotel. The bell captain, a short young man with blue eyes, tells us that the old hotel hosted Pavlova, Nureyev, and the Beatles. When we inform him that Mark Twain stayed there too, he seems pleased. He points out a bronze plaque that bears a relief of the gracious colonial building, complete with three-story veranda. Its successor, about twenty stories high, is inoffensive enough, but scarcely distinguished. Still, if it stands for one hundred years, the memories it begets and the nostalgia it creates will transform it into beauty.
Not far from the Intercontinental and the ghosts of the South Australian Club Hotel stands the Playhouse of the Adelaide Festival Centre. From its balcony you can see St. Peter’s Cathedral, built in 1869, dramatically spotlit against the night sky. We are sitting inside the playhouse, watching Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, set in the drawing room of an eighteenth-century country house. The action occurs first in the early nineteenth century, then in the late twentieth century, and finally in both centuries simultaneously, as the characters from each era walk about and speak, in parallel worlds, oblivious of each other.