OLD, SICK, BROKE, AND DEPRESSED, Samuel Langhorne Clemens boarded a night train from Elmira to Cleveland on Sunday, July 14, 1895. He was five months short of his sixtieth birthday, an advanced age in those days. He had been bedridden for weeks, suffering from an immense carbuncle on his leg. The publishing firm of which he was principal partner had collapsed the year before, leaving huge unpaid debts and casting him into bankruptcy. Because he had failed as a businessman, he felt he had failed as a father and husband as well.
To his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, business failure meant disgrace. She urged him to pay the firm’s debts in full, although he was not obliged to do so. He received the same counsel from a surprising source, his friend and admirer Henry Huttleston Rogers, a piratical, monstrously rich director of the Standard Oil trust. If, as many supposed, trusts were satanic, Rogers sported two horns and a tail. As a businessman he was ruthless, rapacious, and unscrupulous. But he was a loyal, generous, and sensitive friend. He took the Clemenses’ financial affairs in hand, negotiated with creditors and publishers, and saved the Clemenses from ruin without injuring their pride. Clemens, who revered and loved him, listened when Rogers told him that an author could afford to be poor in money but not in character.
So Clemens was returning to the lecture circuit. When he had left it ten years before, he’d thought that he would never again suffer the noisy, dusty, bone-shaking trains, missed connections, and boring small towns associated with an interminable succession of one-night stands. But a lecture tour was still his quickest means for raising money. Not only was he the international celebrity Mark Twain, constantly interviewed and photographed, whose mop of bushy hair, tufted eyebrows, and swooping mustache made him instantly recognizable, he was also a superb platform entertainer.
Cleveland was to be the first stop in a year-long tour that took him, his wife, and their second daughter, Clara, to the Pacific Northwest, Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ceylon, Mauritius, and South Africa. One hundred years later to the day, I set out from Elmira to follow them.
As a recently retired academic, I'd been craving a long journey. Like Huck Finn, “all I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular.” Paul Theroux set the direction of this change. In the introduction to a selection from his travel writings, he listed Following the Equator, Mark Twain’s account of his world lecture tour, as one of the few travel books he likes.
Almost as soon as I began to read it, I found a personal connection to the book. My wife’s grandmother once met Mark Twain, probably in 1901, when she was eighteen years old. A photograph from that period shows her looking at you over her shoulder, half smiling, half flirting, standing slim and erect in a long white gown. Years later she would tell her grandchildren what she had said to the great man when she was introduced: “Mr. Clemens, Fm not a bit embarrassed. Are you?” This so delighted him, she would say, that he kept her with him for several minutes to chat. She never explained why the old man was pleased.
In the second chapter of Following the Equator, Clemens told about having been introduced, years before, to a taciturn President Grant. The president took his hand, dropped it, and then stood silent.
“There was an awkward pause, a dreary pause, a horrible pause. Then I thought of something, and looked up into that unyielding face, and said timidly:
“ ‘Mr. President, I — I am embarrassed. Are you?’
“His face broke — just a little — a wee glimmer, the momentary flicker of a summer-lightning smile … and I was out and gone as soon as it was.”
Ten years later he was again introduced to Grant. Before Clemens could think of an appropriate remark, the general said, “Mr. Clemens, I am not embarrassed. Are you?”
Although this anecdote solved a family mystery, it meant more to me than that. Suddenly the historical figure, Samuel Clemens, became human, a man pleased by the subtle flattery of a pretty young woman. Suddenly the last turn of the century seemed not impossibly distant. Could I come closer to him and his times by following the Clemenses, one hundred years later, along the route of Mark Twain’s lecture tour? I wanted to try. I hoped to leave Elmira on July 14 and complete the journey in Cape Town on July 15 of the next year, as he did, traveling by surface transportation wherever possible.
This vision did not enchant Alice, my wife. She was not eager to rattle around the world for a year, changing accommodations every third day, boarding trains at five in the morning, and wearing the same two blouses and skirts month after month. On the other hand, neither of us wanted a long separation. We finally agreed that I would travel alone along the Clemenses’ North American route during the summer of 1995 and that she would join me on the West Coast in late August and accompany me for the rest of the journey. But with one condition: we would return twice to our home in Jerusalem, for about a month each time, during the year-long project. Before she could change her mind, I flew to New York and from there found my way to Elmira.