When I think of Mark Twain I think of my sophomore year English class in High School. We read Huckleberry Finn. In eighth grade I remember reading Tom Sawyer. In both cases I remember the teacher engaging us in lengthy discussions of youth, naiveté, racism, American culture during the 1800’s, and Samuel Clemens own tramp-like background. Ever since those “teachable moments” in literature I wanted to meet this Mr. Twain. He seemed like my kind of person: witty, tongue-in-cheek, mischievous, idealist, and subtle.

tI’m glad I waited till I was twenty-four to read A Tramp Abroad. Mark Twain narrates as a sophisticated tramp; well educated, yet not worldly and experienced. Our narrator describes his journey across Germany and other countries of Europe. In true Twain fashion, he uses the narrator to describe “absurdities” in culture and language. The appendixes produce some of the best material in regards to the German language and customs.

tAlthough the book seemed to plod along in some parts and cause me to doze during the mid-day hours, it did offer the best look some interesting themes. Many have made the comment that the narrator embodies the essence of the “ugly American”- a tourist with no appreciation, education, etc, toward the customs and culture of other, older, nations. Though I agree with the assessment, I think it only goes halfway. I think Twain captured something that still persists among those that desire adventure from the comfort of their desk or living room. Twain’s narrator knows a lot about mountain climbing, but when it comes to make the ascent of the Matterhorn himself he falters and rests easy at the bottom. It seems Twain is satirizing our need as tourists, or as people in general, to experience adventure in a “diet” format. After all, one wants danger, but not the kind that could actually result in negative consequences.

Mark Twain's travels through Europe and his sharp commentary on society and culture and relevant AND funny over a century later. My fave book. I lurrved it.

In this case, tramp is used not as a description of a person, but as the name of an action, the process of walking. It's ironic, of course, since Twain uses every chance he gets to tell us that his walking tour usually consisted of taking carriages, trains, boats, horses, or other means of conveyance. May I interject a personal note here? In high school, Mr. Hoyer told me in speech class that he couldn't figure out if I was being serious or trying to be funny when I gave my very ill-informed but hilarious speech about trying to install a TV antenna on the roof. Clearly, he was no fan of Mark Twain, whose footsteps, it turns out, I was following without even knowing it. A Tramp Abroad tells of Twain's travels in Germany and Switzerland, and spends several chapters on the funniest and most over-the-top tale of mountain climbing. There is also a tour de force chapter describing his attempts to get along in his bedroom in the dark, and an astonishing chapter on the sword fights held by German university students on a regular basis. Travel books were a dime a dozen in the 19th Century, but hilarity on the subject required the special outlook of Twain. His art criticism, while blatantly philistine, is actually really funny, too.

I confess I bought this book because while perusing it in the bookstore I noticed that Dave Eggers had written the introduction, and because of visited several of the places that Twain writes about from his travels in 1878-1879. I was surprised at how good it was; I was very entertained throughout. You get what you would expect in Twain: wry comments and at times outlandish humor, but also his true reverence for nature and for beauty, and his love of travel, yet at the same time, his love for his home America. By far a better 'travelogue' than Dostoevsky's tepid "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions"; Twain is a true traveler, lover of life, and consummate humorist. He pokes fun at the places he visits and at American tourists and himself too. I can't imagine a better travel companion, and that's what this book feels like, a trip, and with a great travel companion.

Quotes, I start with the 'standard' Twain types of quips for:
- A French duel: "Sixty-five yards with these instruments? Squirt-guns would be deadlier at fifty."
- German opera: "...I lived over again all that I had suffered the time the orphan asylum burned down."
- German wine: "The Germans are exceedingly fond of Rhine wines; they are put up in tall, slender bottles, and are considered a pleasant beverage. One tells them from vinegar by the label."
- On cuckoo clocks: "Some sounds are hatefuller than others, but no sound is quite so insane, and silly, and aggravating as the 'hoo'hoo' of a cuckoo clock, I think."
- On St. Mark's in Venice: "Propped on its long row of low thick-legged columns, its back knobbed with domes, it seemed like a vast warty bug taking a meditative walk."
- Recipe for New England Pie concludes with: "...then solder on the lid and set in a safe place till it petrifies. Serve cold at breakfast and invite your enemy."
- Lastly, the recipe for German coffee which Twain found weak ends with: "Mix the beverage in a cold cup, partake with moderation, and keep a wet rag around your head to guard against over-excitement."

On beauty, with beautiful writing, and with humor at the end:
"She was an enchanting study. Her gown was of a soft white silky stuff that clung to her round young figure like a fish's skin, and it was rippled over with the gracefullest little fringy films of lace; she had deep, tender eyes, with long, curved lashes; and she had peachy cheeks, and a dimpled chin, and such a dear little dewy rosebud of a mouth; she was so dove-like, so pure, and so gracious, so sweet and bewitching. For long hours I did mightily wish she would speak. And at last she did; the red lips parted, and out leaped her thought, - and with such a guileless and pretty enthusiasm, too: 'Auntie, I just know I've got five hundred fleas on me!'"

On beauty as compared to ugliness:
"One does not find out what a hold the chalet has taken upon him, until he presently comes upon a new house, - a house which is aping the town fashions of Germany and France, a prim, hideous, straight up-and-down thing, plastered all over on the outside to look like stone, and altogether so stiff, and formal, and ugly and forbidding, and so out of tune with the gracious landscape, and so deaf and dumb to the poetry of its surroundings, that it suggests an undertaker at a picnic, a corpse at a wedding, a puritan in Paradise."

More:
"But every now and then, through the stern gateways around us we caught a view of some neighboring majestic dome, sheathed with glittering ice, and displaying its white purity at an elevation compared to which ours was groveling and plebeian, and this spectacle always chained one's interest and admiration at once, and made him forget there was anything ugly in the world."

And this one....wow:
"...we looked up toward a neighboring mountaintop, and saw exquisite primatic colors playing about some white clouds which were so delicate as to almost resemble gossamer webs. The faint pinks and greens were peculiarly beautiful; none of the colors were deep, they were the lightest shades. They were bewitchingly commingled. We sat down to study and enjoy this singular spectacle. The tints remained during several minutes - flitting, changing, melting into each other; paling almost away, for a moment, then re-flushing, - a shifting, restless, unstable succession of soft opaline gleams, shimmering over that airy film of white cloud, and turning it into a fabric dainty enough to clothe an angel with."

On college:
"So this German attends only the lectures which belong to the chosen branch, and drinks his beer and tows his dog around and has a general good time the rest of the day. He has been in rigid bondage so long that the large liberty of university life is just what he needs and likes and thoroughly appreciates; and it cannot last forever, he makes the most of it while it does last, and so lays up a good rest against the day that must see him put on the chains once more and enter the slavery of official or professional life."

On reading:
"I have a prejudice against people who print things in a foreign language and add no translation. When I am the reader, and the author considers me able to do the translating myself, he pays me quite a nice compliment,- but if he would do the translating for me I would try to get along without the compliment."

On religion:
"In this sordid place, and clothed, bedded and fed like a pauper, this strange princess lived and worshipped during two years, and in it she died. Two or three hundred years ago, this would have made the poor den holy ground; and the church would have set up a miracle-factory there and made plenty of money out of it."

"I think 't if a feller he'ps another feller when he's in trouble, and don't cuss, and don't do no mean things, nur noth'n' he ain't no business to do, and don't spell the Savior's name with a little g, he ain't runnin' no resks, - he's about as saift as if he b'longed to a church."

On perspective, the smallness of man against the majesty of nature:
"...the exactest simile I can devise is to compare them to ant-deposits of granulated dirt over-shadowed by the huge bulk of a cathedral. The steam-boats skimming along under the stupendous precipices were diminished by distance to the daintiest little toys, the sail-boats and row-boats to shallops proper for fairies that keep house in the cups of lilies and ride to court on the backs of bumble-bees."

"...one seemed to meet the immutable, the indestructible, the eternal, face to face, and to feel the trivial and fleeting nature of his own existence the more sharply by the contrast. One had the sense of being under the brooding contemplation of a spirit, not an inert mass of rocks and ice, - a spirt which had looked down, through the slow drift of the ages, upon a million vanished races of men, and judged them; and would judge a million more, - and still be there, watching, unchanged and unchangeable, after all life should be gone and the earth have become a vacant desolation."

"The Alps and glaciers together are able to take every bit of conceit out of a man and reduce his self-importance to zero if he will only remain within the influence of their sublime presence long enough to give it a fair and reasonable chance to do its work."

Lastly, there is humor in a lot of ways throughout the book that are hard to capture, and there are also some truly hilarious moments. My favorite was after he got up the nerve to talk to a young lady and was interrogated by his travel companion afterwards; it's hard to quote in it's entirety. I also loved Chapter 37, the "ascent of the Riffelberg".

Its been a long time since I have read anything by Mark Twain. No reason to rush into reading any others too quickly. I finished the book only because it was one of our reading group books. Good news is that it was available free on kindle! The book was about Mark Twain's European travels. Maybe if I had been to these places or knew more about the cities he was visiting I could have related? Some of his adventures were certainly humorous, but many seemed so far fetched that it was just goofy!

___________________
This book has its ups and downs, and they are not all in the Alps.

In 1869, Mark Twain published The Innocents Abroad, a humorous travelogue about his real-life adventures on one of the earliest organized tours of the lands around the Mediterranean. It was a significant success for Mark Twain and became his first major hit and one of the best-selling travel books of all time. Twelve years later, Twain decided to climb that mountain again—this time concentrating on a “walking tour” through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland––A Tramp Abroad, Walking Tour, Innocent vs Tramp. Oh, now I get it. HA!

Here are some samples.

One of the first stories reported in A Tramp Abroad is about dueling clubs at Heidelberg University. If you have ever watched old movies or TV stories with a German villain, you probably noticed that many of these Germanic cads had a scar on their face. There were dueling clubs at the university that fought each other with swords. Real swords. The tips were blunted--so no sticking just nicking--but the edges were razor sharp. Getting a facial scar in a duel was a badge of honor. [I suspect this fad began as a Tik Tok challenge, but I might be wrong.]

My favorite sketch in the book is called The Awful German Language; however, it may not appeal to everyone. When I first went to college, I was determined to become a chemist, and one requirement for a degree in chemistry was taking 2 years of German. I was convinced though that this German requirement was the school’s way of discouraging hippies from studying chemistry.

Here are some of Twain’s remarks about the difficulties of learning gender/article/pronoun relationships in Teutonic philology.

“. . .In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip is feminine. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl. To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats (even tomcats) are female— A person’s mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and NOT according to the sex of the individual who wears it — for in Germany all the women wear either male heads or sexless ones; a person’s nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, and legs are male … .”

“This explains why, whenever a person says SIE to me, I generally try to kill him, if a stranger.”

Some of the chapters contain more filler than a fast-food hamburger. For instance, when Twain ran out of things to write about, he decided to recite a couple of Germanic folk tales to the readers. He found them in a book he found in a local bookstore. Are they funny? No! Are they interesting? No! They do, however, take up some of the time that you would otherwise waste swearing and shaking your fist at the nightly news on the TV.

Here’s something I learned from Tramp Abroad. You know those coin fed telescopes that sprout up everywhere there is an interesting view today. Well, these tourist telescopes have been around since Twain’s time. They weren’t coin operated then. An entrepreneur would set up a powerful telescope and then charge the tourist for a peek at the peak. In Tramp Abroad, one such view vendor had set up his telescope at the base of a mountain where tourists could watch the mountain climbers making their way up toward the summit. Twain thought that peering through a telescope might be an attractive way to climb a mountain, but:

“… if the tourist elects to attempt [this telescopic Alpinism], let him be warily careful of two things: chose a calm, clear day; and do not pay the telescope man in advance. There are dark stories of his getting advance payers on the summit and then leaving them there to rot.”

Another one of my favorite sketches is on French duels. According to Twain:

“French duel is ridiculed by certain smart people; it is in reality one of the most dangerous institutions of our day. Since it is always fought in the open air, the combatants are nearly sure to catch cold.”