Innocence and War Read online

  Title Page

  Innocence and War

  Mark Twain’s Holy Land Revisited

  Ian Strathcarron

  Signal Books

  Oxford

  Publisher Information

  First published in 2012 by Signal Books Limited

  36 Minster Road

  Oxford OX4 1LY

  www.signalbooks.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  © F&J Productions Ltd, 2012

  The right of Ian Strathcarron to be identified as the author of this work has been as- serted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. The whole of this work, including all text and illustrations, is protected by copyright. No parts of this work may be loaded, stored, manipulated, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information, storage and retrieval system without prior written permission from the publisher, on behalf of the copy- right owner.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Design & Production: Windrush Publishing Services

  Cover Design: Baseline Arts, Oxford Cover Images: Wikipedia Commons

  Dedication

  To Karen Armstong and Larry David

  for services to sanity on board s / y Vasco da Gama

  Preface

  Preface to THE INNOCENTS ABROAD, OR THE NEW PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS.

  This book is a record of a pleasure trip. If it were a record of a solemn scientific expedition, it would have about it that gravity, that profundity, and that impressive incomprehensibility which are so proper to works of that kind, and withal so attractive. Yet notwithstanding it is only a record of a pic-nic, it has a purpose, which is to suggest to the reader how he would be likely to see Europe and the East if he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him. I make small pretense of showing anyone how he ought to look at objects of interest beyond the sea - other books do that, and therefore, even if I were competent to do it, there is no need.

  I offer no apologies for any departures from the usual style of travel- writing that may be charged against me - for I think I have seen with impartial eyes, and I am sure I have written at least honestly, whether wisely or not.

  Mark Twain. San Francisco.

  Preface to INNOCENCE AND WAR: MARK TWAIN’S HOLY LAND REVISITED

  Mark Twain and I first met in Compendium Books in Athens, Greece. I was researching my book about Lord Byron’s Grand Tour, Joy Unconfined!; Mark Twain was hiding towards the end of an anthology called Travelers’ Greece. The editors had chosen Chapter 32 from The Innocents Abroad, recalling the full moon quarantine-breaking visit to the Parthenon. The chapter sparkled with clarity and fresh eyes and the next day I ordered The Innocents Abroad. Three days later the die was cast for me to sail down to Syria and re-join him there the following spring.

  I wish I could also say that this book is a record of a pleasure trip but it is not; rather I hope it shares with its inspiration an open interpretation of events as they were seen and shares with the reader an idea of what it is like to be drawn into that most unholy land, the Holy Land.

  Ian Strathcarron.

  www.strathcarrons-ahoy.com

  Prologue

  Mark Twain Before the Holy Land

  Mark Twain was born on 3 February 1863; he was twenty-seven years and two months old at the time. Up until then he had been masquerading under the nom de vie of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, but on that February day in 1863 for the first time he ended a newspaper piece with the name “Mark Twain”. That same piece started with the words: “I feel very much as if I had just awakened from a long sleep.”

  His twenty-seven-year long sleep as a poor white Presbyterian Missouri home boy, apprentice typesetter, Mississippi River boat pilot, Civil War fugitive and failed Nevada and California silver mine prospector only ended when he stumbled into journalism through a happenstance of desperation and nepotism, a happenstance which also confirmed his faith in Providence. But once Providence had decided to let loose Mark Twain’s way with words on the world he launched himself, as if making up for the lost years, into a frenzy of written creativity and lecturing performance. He was the first American writer to give all of his post-War country a voice of its own, in a tone pitched perfectly between old world cynicism and new world optimism, and in a style that satisfied the linguistic probity and conventions of the East Coast and the limitless opportunities for spontaneous self-expression in both the mild or Wild West. Ernest Hemingway later declared that “all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn”.

  It was not always thus. Born two months prematurely and in the most fragile health in the tiny hamlet of Florida in the middle of Nowhere, Missouri, he followed his earnest and unlucky father around various failed business ventures until they settled in Hannibal, Missouri, when the still often bed-bound Sam was only four years old. He grew up in material poverty in a land of plenty, yet not uncomfortably in a society where bartering, self- sufficiency and good neighborliness were their own currencies, and extended families their own welfare.

  Maintaining respectable membership of the Presbyterian1 congregation was as important as maintaining a respectable number of slaves. As he was later to recall in his autobiography: “When I was a boy everybody was poor but didn’t know it; and everybody was comfortable and did know it. There were grades of society - people of good family, people of unclassified family, and people of no family. Everybody knew everybody and was affable to every- body and nobody put on any visible airs; yet the class lines were quite clearly drawn.”

  Although poor they were “people of good family”. His father could, and did, boast that one of his Clemens ancestors was part of the court that tried and found guilty King Charles I of England. His mother’s family, the Lamptons, was of even more ancient origin having shared a nine hundred years lineage - albeit somewhat tentatively by the nineteenth century - with the Earldom of Durham. For the young Sam his Clemens father was austere, stiff, cold, pious and proud - and, in retrospect, born under an unlucky star. The Lampton side was the opposite: big-hearted, wholehearted, frail in body but full in soul. His father died aged forty-four, when Sam was eleven, from shame and pneumonia after being swindled on a business deal and forcing the family to fall from poor to dirt poor. The only time Sam saw a family kiss was when his father drew his sister down to him, kissed her and said, as his last words, “let me die”. Sam’s mother survived, indeed flourished, and lived with her large heart and kind spirit for a further fifty years.

  His father did leave an inheritance, 100,000 acres in Jamestown, Tennessee, but even that proved unlucky. He was convinced that it contained coal, copper, iron, timber, and oil and that one day the railroad would go straight through it. His father said “whatever befalls me, my heirs are secure; I shall not live to see these cares turn to silver and gold but my children will.” But, as they say, “where there’s a will there’s a relative” (funnily enough not one of Mark Twain’s aphorisms) and from the moment of his father’s death the inheritance was squandered away bit by bit by family squabbles, short term expediency, sibling politics and general inertia. Twain’s observation on it all was: “We were always going to be rich next year - no need to work. It is good to begin life rich; it is good to begin life poor - these are wholesome; but to begin it poor and prospectively rich! The man who has not experienced it cannot imagi
ne the curse of it.”

  Death was always a family member: it nearly claimed Samuel even before he was born and would hover close by his bed for his first seven years. Four of his six siblings died; his sister Margaret died when he was three and she was nine and his brother Benjamin died aged nine, three years later. Both died slowly and in distress from the yellow fever, carried - it was determined later - by non-native mosquitoes imported with the slaves from West Africa, and both died with the child Samuel in what we would now consider to be ghoulishly close attendance. Life’s hold over death for these early European settlers was tenuous at best: if it had not been yellow fever that claimed his siblings it could have been the measles or the mumps, or cholera or malaria, and if one of these didn’t succeed the recommended “cures” - either granny’s potions or what Mark Twain later recalled as the “Indian doctor, grave and savage, remnant of his tribe, deeply read in the mysteries of nature and the secret properties of herbs” - might well have done so.

  And the teenage Sam was death’s prime witness outside the home too: he lent a tramp in Hannibal jail some matches and looked on in horror as the man accidentally burned himself to death; he saw an old-fashioned Wild West shoot-out one noon in Main Street; he watched as a slave took half an hour to die after being struck on the head with a piece of slag; he stood beside a dying young Californian emigrant as blood poured from his heart after a Bowie knife fight; from the bushes he saw a widow count to ten before blasting a drunken intruder with her shotgun; and most tragically of all, after securing his younger brother Henry a job on the paddle steamer Pennsylvania, he saw Henry perish from a doctor’s mistaken overdose of morphine after his brother was badly hurt when the Pennsylvania’s boiler exploded.

  Missouri was a slave state, Hannibal a slave town and the Clemens house a slave house. Twain later remembered that his mother was sixty when slavery was abolished, and that in spite of being the kindest soul, with the biggest heart in all the world, she never saw anything wrong with it. For her and her generation “The Ennoblement of the Heathen” was not so much an excuse for slavery but part of the crusade for it, a God2-given chance to show the savages the higher ground. After all, if Abraham had slaves - and he did - and we have adopted his faith - and we have - surely we too should have slaves? From his childhood he remembered slavery to be of the mild domestic type, and that he never saw a slave mistreated, “and to have done so would have been most unpopular”. If a slave got uppity he would be threatened with “selling down the river”, which meant being sold to a “nigger trader” who would in turn sell him into one of the brutal southern plantations. The Clemens family hired their slaves - one at a time - from a nearby farmer: a 15-year-old girl cost $12 a year, a strong middle-aged woman $40 a year, and the able bodied men $75-100 a year each.

  Mark Twain also remembered, as the abolitionist voice grew louder, hearing the Bible Defense of Slavery preached with passion and conviction. From Genesis he heard that: “It was from the lips of this man [Noah] that the everlasting God chose to announce the curse or malediction of servi-tude and slavery upon Ham and his race, as it is written.” If anyone wavered at the certainty of that there was always Leviticus: “Both thy bondmen, and thy bondmaids, which thou shalt have, shall be of the heathen that are round about you; of them shall ye buy bondmen and bondmaids. Moreover of the children of the strangers that do sojourn among you, of them shall ye buy, and of their families that are with you, which they begat in your land; and they shall be your possession. And ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever.”

  The Presbyterianism of the dour and dank moors of Scotland, with its certainties of wrath and sin, punishment and damnation, condemnation and salvation, had flourished in the uncertainties of the lives and deaths of the Midwest pioneers. By the time the Clemens family had arrived in Hannibal it was the predominant denomination, and the Clemenses needed no encouragement to be in the front row pews. Sam’s father was already Presbyterian by nature even before his calling; his mother less so, until after the death of Benjamin - when Sam was seven - she found explanations in homegrown mystical zealotry. Sam simply learned to loathe Sundays as a youth and any form of Puritanism, with its first cousins self-righteousness, hypocrisy, cant and humbug, as he matured. He came to be appalled by the Bible, with its “blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies.” From the vantage point of advanced years he would reflect that “Man is without any doubt the most intriguing fool there is. He hasn’t a single written law, in his Bible or out of it, which has any but just one purpose and intention - to limit or defeat a law of God.”

  But perhaps the spirit, like nature, abhors a vacuum and Sam Clemens suspected, and later Mark Twain confirmed, that Providence answered the soul’s questions from within. Although later he would light-heartedly say that “The proverb says that Providence protects children and idiots. This is really true. I know because I have tested it,” he would return again and again to thank Providence for life’s charms and would never blame Providence for its mishaps. He was an early practitioner of what the philosopher and Orientalist Alan Watts would later call the “Wisdom of Uncertainty”. In his autobiography he tells the story of how one day his daughter Susy stopped praying. Her mother asked her why so. Susy replied: “Well mamma, the Indians believed they knew, but now we know they were wrong. By and by it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there may be a God and a heaven - or something better.” Twain carried this last sentence everywhere, and said that “its untaught grace and simplicity are a child’s, but the wisdom and pathos of it are of all ages that have come and gone since the race of man has lived and longed and hoped and feared and doubted.”

  But we have jumped ahead of ourselves. When Sam’s father died in 1847, the family had to move in as live-in help to wealthy neighbors; they were close to the bottom rung of the material ladder. His sister Pamela, who was by then twenty, gave the neighbors piano lessons. His mother became their house- keeper. His elder brother, Orion, by now twenty-two, had finished his printer apprenticeship in St. Louis and was remitting what he could, but by Sam’s twelfth birthday it was clear that the family could no longer afford to keep him at school. He was to spend his twelfth and thirteenth years in whatever employ he could find: in a grocery store, until he was fired for stealing sugar, in a bookstore where he found “the customers bothered me so much I could not read with any comfort”. He tried the town pharmacy but this didn’t work out because “my prescriptions were unlucky, and we appeared to sell more stomach pumps than soda water.” He had his first connection with newspapers, a paper round, then took on odd jobs in a blacksmith’s workshop. But it was all still an education of sorts, and as he was later to remark: “I have never let schooling interfere with my education.”

  Then in June 1848, aged twelve, he followed in Orion’s footsteps and became a printer’s apprentice, in this case on the Hannibal Courier. When Orion returned to Hannibal three years later and bought the rival Journal, Sam switched print shops and continued his apprenticeship there, and soon found himself promoted to dogsbody. But Orion, like his father, was then and always would be a hopeless businessman, and when three years later the Journal folded the newly qualified Sam was jolted into action and at the age of seventeen left the dubious comforts of hometown Hannibal. His apprentice- ship had served him well; printing work was easy to find as the new country expanded and newspapers and journals were springing up in every new town and expanding in every older city.

  He soon found a job as a printer in St. Louis on the Evening News but once his travelling shoes were on they wanted to keep moving. He headed for New York in its most vibrant stage of growth, and worked for a pittance as a printer for the magazine publishers Grey & Green, and paid a pittance for rent in NewYork’s squalid Irish quarter. When the pittances had lost their allure he headed for Philadel
phia and found work as a printer and sometimes subeditor in Philadelphia on the Inquirer and the Public Ledger. On a visit to see Orion’s family in their new home in Keokuk, Iowa, he started helping out on Orion’s new newspaper venture there. He soon found himself back working as Orion’s dogsbody, but was by now confident enough to sub-edit as well as print, and for the first time, slip in the occasional piece of reportage himself.

  The frustration of working again for poor doomed Orion must have jolted Sam into taking stock, and jolted Providence into paying him another visit. By now just shy of twenty-one, he could reflect that he had spent the last eight years working in dirty, noisy, smelly print rooms for minimal wages, and after all that sweat and endeavor he had ended up back in Orion’s dirty, noisy, smelly print room for no wages at all. All he could see ahead was more of the same. Providence agreed and sent him two gifts from her lockers. First, Sam happened to borrow a book about the Amazon and found it contained a chapter on the coca plant, “a vegetable product with miraculous powers... so nourishing and strength-giving that the native... would tramp up-hill and down all day on a pinch... and require no other sustenance.” Sam’s mind was set: he would take a boat to Brazil, buy some of this coca and sell it in Iowa, and maybe beyond. Providence then provided the means: he stumbled across a piece of paper blowing in the wind. He later remembered that “it was a fifty dollar bill... the largest assemblage of money I had ever seen in one spot.” He headed for Cincinnati and then the Mississippi River paddle steamer to New Orleans, the first stop on the way to Brazil.