THE CLEMENSES ARRIVED IN BALLARAT, about seventy-five miles southeast of Stawell, on Saturday, October 19, 1895. The next day they received letters from home, the first since mid-August. Their letter carrier was Carlyle Greenwood Smythe, the son and partner of their agent, Robert S. Smythe, who had sailed to Melbourne the day of Clemens’s last performance in Adelaide. Smythe senior had intended to arrange a farewell matinee in Melbourne and then rejoin the Clemenses in one of the Victorian country towns. Now the Clemenses learned from his son that the old man was languishing in ship’s quarantine. When his ship, the Cuzco, arrived at Melbourne two days before, medical inspectors found a crewman infected with smallpox. Instead of disembarking at Melbourne to remain in quarantine, he elected to sail on to Sydney, in the hope that the inspectors there would give a different diagnosis. Instead they found three more cases. “Until last week,” wrote one newspaper, “there were two places on this globe which Mr. Smythe had not visited — quarantine and the North Pole — both considered unsuitable for lectures. Now there is only one.” He could at least congratulate himself, as another newspaper pointed out, “that his lecturer did not travel by the Cuzco too.”
His son replaced him as the Clemenses’ shepherd. Carlyle Greenwood Smythe, “the more travelled,” as he styled himself, in contrast to his father’s sobriquet “the much travelled,” was born thirty years before in the Himalayan foothills, when his mother, a popular Melbourne soprano, was touring with a musical company that his father was managing. Before joining his father in lecture management, he worked briefly as a journalist in Australia and Europe. Now he was to guide the Clemenses through the remainder of their Australian tour and through New Zealand, India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and South Africa.
Ballarat was the site of Australia’s first great gold strike, its alluvial goldfields proving to be among the richest in the world. It was also the site of what Clemens called “the finest thing in Australasian history,” the Eureka Stockade Rebellion. The good guys in this story, from the Australian point of view, were the prospectors, or “diggers,” as they were called, who had neither the vote nor representation in the appointed legislative council. The baddies were the Victorian government, which imposed exorbitant licensing fees for the privilege of prospecting for gold that might never be found and, to make matters worse, employed brutal methods to discover tax evaders.
The diggers’ grievances came to a head in 1854, three years after the discovery of gold. A digger was murdered in front of a hotel, and the hotel’s owner, whom the diggers blamed for the murder, was acquitted by a government board of inquiry. In the rioting that followed, diggers burned down the alleged killer’s hotel, and when the government punished the ringleaders, the diggers formed a league that pressed for prompt reform. Unable to obtain immediate satisfaction, many of the diggers burned their licenses, formed military companies, and built a timber stockade, which was named for the Eureka claim on which it stood. After government soldiers surrounded the garrison and demanded that the diggers put down their arms and leave the stockade, the rebels opened fire on the troops. The ensuing battle lasted fifteen or twenty minutes, during which the garrison was dispersed and about thirty people killed, most of them diggers. Stunned by the bloodshed, the public supported the reforms that speedily followed.
Although this celebrated rebellion had little effect in the long run — Australia would have become a liberal democracy in any case — for Australians it symbolizes resistance to government tyranny. An icon of this resistance is a flag sewn with the five stars of the Southern Cross, put together by the diggers’ wives, from such odds and ends as their petticoats, and flown by the diggers as a symbol of solidarity. The soldiers who captured the flag allowed people to take souvenir snippets, but what’s left of it can be seen hanging at the Ballarat Art Gallery, an opulent, well-maintained building from 1890.
Three survivors of the gold-boom era, members of pioneer societies, met Clemens at his hotel Sunday afternoon, October 20, to invite him to an afternoon social hour in his honor. He was unable to accept their hospitality, he said, because of a full schedule — he was to perform on each of the following two evenings — and because he was again unwell, suffering from a new boil. His visitors found him “stretched out at full length on a comfortable couch, his head propped up with a pillow,” smoking alternately a pipe and a cigar. His indisposition did not prevent him from entertaining his visitors with about an hour of drollery, in which he meandered from one topic to another, told funny stories, and recounted his experiences in Australia. He complimented Australians as “a warmhearted, genial, sympathetic, and appreciative people.” Most of what he’d seen of Australia, he said, was from a railroad car. He’d done little besides lecture, except study wallpapers. “Every kind of wall-paper you possess in Australia has come under my purview, and if I fail as a lecturer, I shall write a book on Australian wall-papers, for I don’t intend to be swindled out of everything by a carbuncle.”
Bendigo, another great gold-mining center, about seventy-five miles northeast of Ballarat, was Clemens’s next venue. According to a generally accepted story, the city owes its name to a local shepherd. The fellow admired a contemporary English prizefighter, William “Bendigo” Thompson, and thus, like his hero, became known as Bendigo. The shepherd’s nickname was applied not only to his hut but also to the nearby creek where gold was found in 1851. Perhaps the authorities considered “Bendigo” an insufficiently stately name for the city that was growing up around the creek. Eighteen months after gold was found, the Chief Commissioner of the Goldfields suggested the name of Sandhurst, where he had been a cadet. The name lasted only thirty-eight years, until 1891, four years before the Clemenses’ arrival, when Sandhurst became Bendigo again. It was not nostalgia that motivated the reversion, but the desire to identify the city, in the minds of British investors, with the Bendigo gold region.
The Clemenses stayed at the Shamrock Hotel, where, according to legend, the gold dust tracked in by miners’ boots was regularly collected from the floor washings. The tracked-in gold dust must have been fairly meager by the time of the Clemenses’ visit, because by then the gold boom was over, although gold mining continued. By that time, quartz mining was more important. Clemens complained to his journal that this hotel, like the others he had visited in the Victorian country towns, provided no wastebaskets in the rooms, that one of a pair of gas jets was plugged up, and that one of the beds was impossibly uncomfortable. He groused that hotel practices were determined by dolts: in Victorian country hotels you needed a ladder to reach your clothes, whereas in American hotels you had to bend down to see yourself in a mirror.
It was at this hotel, Clemens tells us in Following the Equator, that a middle-aged man called on him. “He was an Irishman; an educated gentleman; grave, and kindly, and courteous; a bachelor, and about forty-five or possibly fifty years old, apparently.”
The Irish gentleman, who displayed an “amazing familiarity” with the work of Mark Twain, proved to have been president of the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle, Ireland. He used to send Clemens reports of the club’s monthly meetings, with summaries of discussions, along with quotations from the most brilliant of the speeches, particularly those made by five of the members, each of whom spoke in a distinctive fashion. “I could always tell which of them was talking without looking for his name,” Clemens tells us. These reports were long, averaging 15,000 words each, but they were “absorbingly entertaining.” Unfortunately, they were accompanied by requests that Clemens answer various questions about his work. In addition, the club asked for his reactions to the quarterly reports by the treasurer, auditor, and president. “By and by I came to dread those things; and this dread grew and grew and grew; grew until I got to anticipating them with a cold horror.” Nonetheless, he would answer the club’s questions. “I got along fairly well the first year; but for the succeeding four years the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle was my curse, my nightmare, the grief and misery of my life.” Finally, Clemens tells us, he rose up in revolt and burned the club’s letters as soon as they arrived. Eventually they stopped.
Clemens now learned that neither the Mark Twain Club of Corrigan Castle nor Corrigan Castle itself had ever existed. The club’s “president” was a rich man who had become bored with life but found, in the invention and elaboration of the club, more than an amusing way to pass the time. “The work gave him pleasure and kept him alive and willing to be alive. It was a bitter blow to him when the Club died.”
The story as Clemens tells it, like his performances, combines humor with poignancy. Still, when I first read it I felt that “if he expects us to believe that he must take us for gulls.” So it was with considerable surprise that I later read Clemens’s journal entry from Bendigo, which noted his meeting the man from the Mark Twain Club of Ireland. There must have been, then, at least a kernel of truth to the story.
In Following the Equator, Clemens combined the story of his Irish admirer, “Mr. Blank,” and that of Reginald Cholmondeley, who had written to Mrs. Clemens from Melbourne in 1881, offering condolences for her husband’s death. In Clemens’s narrative, it was “Blank” who not only founded the club but also wrote the letter of condolence. “Blank,” wrote Clemens, confessed that he sent the letter “without stopping to think,” had regretted it ever since, and begged Clemens’s forgiveness. “So the mystery was cleared up,” wrote Clemens in concluding the tale, “after so many, many years.”
Today’s Shamrock Hotel, restored to its original magnificence, stands on the site of the hotel Clemens knew, but it was built two years later, in 1897. Perhaps the defects he complained about stemmed from the management’s unwillingness to invest in a structure about to be rebuilt. But the sumptuous Italian Renaissance post office across the street, complete with clock tower, dates from Clemens’s time. You can still buy postage stamps there at its long oak counter, which seems to rest on the heads of seated lions.
Clemens complained about the post office clock, which woke him at six in the morning. “All Australia,” he was to write in Following the Equator, “is simply bedamned with bells. On every quarter-hour, night and day, they jingle a tiresome chime of half a dozen notes — all the clocks in town at once, all the clocks in Australasia at once, and all the very same notes.” According to legend, Nellie Melba successfully ordered the clock stopped to enable her to sleep, when she stayed at the Shamrock six years later.
Clemens had good reason to be annoyed by the post office clock in Bendigo. His performances and the club suppers or other entertainments that often followed them kept him up late, so it is understandable that he preferred not to rise early.
He performed twice at Bendigo’s Royal Princess Theatre, opulent with crimson brocade and gilt. “The prices of admission were not so popular as ‘Mark Twain,’ and the result was but a moderate attendance,” according to a local paper reviewing the first performance. Prices were lowered for the next night’s show, which was fully attended.
Alice and I ask about the theater at the town library, where we learn that it became a cinema before it was demolished in 1963. A volunteer at the city’s tourist information bureau even remembers going to the movies at the Royal Princess Theatre. We ask her how to reach Lone Tree Hill, which the Clemenses visited in the company of John Gregory Edwards, editor of Bendigo’s Independent, and Mrs. Edwards. Either Clemens misremembered the name when he was writing Following the Equator, or the name has changed, because the volunteer tells us we’re looking for One Tree Hill. Whatever its name, we drive out to it in the late afternoon.
From the top of the hill you see a carpet of trees. In one direction they stretch to the foothills of the Continental Divide. In the other, they lead to the town. It is indeed a fine view, but Clemens’s comment to his hosts that it was “one of the finest panoramas he had ever seen, and it was typically American in its distance” seems to have been overly generous.
When the Clemenses were about to leave the Edwardses, Mr. Edwards asked Clemens for a memento. Years later the Edwardses’ daughter reported that in response to the request, Clemens looked at his hosts for a moment and then took from his pocket a bit of paper, wrote something on it, and handed it to her father. It read, “Let us endeavor to so live, that when we die, even the undertaker will be sorry.” It was dated and signed “Mark Twain.” The maxim was one of many in The Tragedy ofPudd’nhead Wilson, which had been published the year before.
The next day, the Clemenses took a train to Maryborough, about forty miles southwest of Bendigo, where a delegation of leading citizens met them at the station. The five-year-old brick and limestone station, comically grand in view of the small town for which it was built, was the pride of Maryborough. It is said that the Minister for Railways selected the architectural plans from those submitted for the Spencer Street Station in Melbourne, which was built at about the same time but is not nearly so beautiful.
“Any town that has a good many votes and wants a fine station, gets it,” Clemens was to write in Following the Equator, using the Maryborough station as an example. “You can put the whole population of Maryborough into it, and give them a sofa apiece, and have room for more. You haven’t fifteen stations in America that are as big, and you probably haven’t five that are half as fine.” At the Town Hall reception for him, when asked what he thought of the railroad station, he said he had noticed its spaciousness, beauty, and sump-tuousness. “It might be a little behind the average American city,” he said, but that was as much as he was prepared to say: he didn’t want to be accused of criticizing his own country.
The mayor complained that the station’s tower lacked a clock, owing to a change of government, and he asked Clemens to publicize the station so that funds could be attracted to install a clock on the tower. Clemens, according to a newspaper account, hoped it would be chimeless. Both the mayor and Clemens got their wish: a silent clock was installed in 1914, but by then both men were dead.
The day Alice and I arrive at the station, the clock is slow, not yet reset following a power outage earlier in the day After passenger train service was discontinued last year, the building became a tourist center, with shops selling antiques, books, furniture, and arts and crafts. It offers a restaurant called Twain’s. Across the street, a half-dozen boys play on the high school lawn, oblivious of the seed-pods raining upon them from the elm trees above. The yellow-green pods, thin as onion skin, float through the station’s open doors and onto its wooden floor.
The magnificent Town Hall, in which Clemens performed on the evening of his arrival in Maryborough, was built in 1887, Queen Victoria’s jubilee year. The building still stands. One of the town’s commissioners, a pleasant middle-aged man dressed in a suit and tie, offers to show us the theater, which is on the ground floor opposite the main entrance. The auditorium, with its raked stage in place, is unchanged except for the false ceiling and its absence of chandeliers. The commissioner tells us that the authorities plan to remove the false ceiling, renovate the vaulted and painted original, detach the skylight cover, and bring back the original chandeliers, which someone had the foresight to save. He does not mention the next show, which we’ve seen advertised by a poster in town: an all-male review, presented by the Top Notch Strippers.