Mark Twain

Hannibal to the Quaker City

Samuel Clemens was born on 30 November 1835 in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children, and moved to Hannibal on the Mississippi when he was four. He had been a printer, a Mississippi riverboat pilot and a newspaperman before he was an author of books. In 1867 he arrived in New York and signed up for something new: a steamship tour of Europe and the Holy Land aboard the Quaker City, with the letters he sent back paid for by a newspaper.

The letters became The Innocents Abroad, published in 1869 by the American Publishing Company of Hartford, sold door to door by subscription rather than in bookshops, and stuffed with two hundred and thirty-four illustrations. It was a bestseller and it fixed his voice for the rest of his life: the American abroad who refuses to be awed, who describes what is actually in front of him, and who is funniest when the guidebook is most solemn.

Paris, 1867: the guide they called Ferguson

The Paris chapters are the comic heart of the book. The party hired a guide whose card gave his name as A. Billfinger — a name they refused, on the grounds that it was unpronounceable and unromantic — and renamed him Ferguson on the spot. Every guide afterwards, in every city of the tour, is also called Ferguson, and the joke becomes the book's method: the traveller declines to take Europe on Europe's terms.

They arrived in the year of the great Paris Exposition — the world's fair of 1867 — and saw, in the street, the French emperor Napoleon III riding with the Ottoman sultan Abdul Aziz while the crowd swung their hats and shouted. Twain was shaved by a Paris barber and turned three minutes of it into a small massacre — the man 'lathered my face for ten terrible minutes and finished by plastering a mass of suds into my mouth', and then 'the first rake of his razor loosened the very hide from my face and lifted me out of the chair'. And he went to the Jardin Mabille, the open-air dance garden where the high-kicking can-can was danced, and produced the line that generations of readers have quoted back at him.

I placed my hands before my face for very shame. But I looked through my fingers.

The visitor who kept coming back

Twain's Paris was never a home in the way it was for the Americans who followed him there in the 1920s; it was a place he passed through repeatedly, over forty years. He and his family travelled Europe in 1878 and 1879 — Heidelberg, the Alps, Italy, Munich — during the seventeen years the Clemenses were otherwise settled in their Hartford house, where Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi were written.

The later European years were forced on him. Twain had poured money into a doomed automatic typesetting machine and into a publishing firm that failed; in 1891, trying to economize and pay what he owed, he moved the family to Europe, and between 1891 and 1895 they lived in Germany, France and Italy. In 1894 he filed for bankruptcy. He was almost sixty, the most famous writer in America, and broke.

Paris, 1894–95: Joan of Arc and the world tour

Following the Equator, the travel book he wrote out of what came next, opens with a plain statement of where he was living: 'The starting point of this lecturing-trip around the world was Paris, where we had been living a year or two. We sailed for America, and there made certain preparations.' The lecture tour of 1895 and 1896 took him around the globe in front of paying audiences, and the point of it was to clear his debts, which it did.

The book he was finishing in those years was the one he cared most about. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc — the life of the fifteenth-century French peasant girl who led an army and was burned as a heretic, told in the voice of an invented page who had served her — was begun at the Villa Viviani outside Florence, serialized anonymously in Harper's Magazine through 1895, and published under his own name by Harper & Brothers in 1896. He kept the anonymity deliberately: the name Mark Twain promised jokes, and this book was not one.

Readers have never agreed with him about it, which he knew. On his seventy-third birthday, about eighteen months before he died, he wrote: 'I like the Joan of Arc best of all my books; & it is the best; I know it perfectly well.' He added that it had given him 'seven times the pleasure afforded me by any of the others: 12 years of preparation and two years of writing'. Those two years of writing belong to the European exile whose final base, by his own account, was Paris — the city he had first written about, thirty years earlier, as a tourist renaming his guide.

After

The world tour paid the creditors, and the loss that followed was not financial: his daughter Susy died of meningitis on 18 August 1896. The last years brought honours and a darker body of work, and the line about him that everyone now quotes came from another writer entirely — Ernest Hemingway, in Green Hills of Africa in 1935, telling an Austrian in a safari camp that all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.

Clemens died on 21 April 1910, aged seventy-four, and was buried in his wife's family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York. Halley's Comet, which had been in the sky the year he was born, was visible again.