A Tramp Abroad

I bought this book by mistake in one of those charity shops that make any idle and rainy Saturday in Oxford a treasure hunt. <br />What I thought I had found was actually "Innocents Abroad" by the same Mark Twain, but somehow the word "tramp" was left out of my raptorous glance. <br /><br />Well, "A Tramp Abroad" revolves around pretty much the same topic of "Innocents Abroad" which is Mr Twain touring Europe proud of being an American but at the same time eager to get all that the Old Continent has to offer to his transatlantic eyes.<br /><br />A very good reason to grab this book is its humour. <br />One cannot wonder that Mark Twain was so funny a writer. Or perhaps it's just me having read "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" when I was a kid and getting bored to death with all that exhausting fence painting business and that haughty Becky Thatcher.<br /><br />And yet "A Tramp Abroad" is funny, witty and it's clear how Twain got amused in writing some of its pages. It's a kind of humour that one may find in a celebrated British author of the same period (1880s) such as Jerome Klapka Jerome, but Twain adds up his American touch: the exaggeration of likelihood.<br /><br />Where Jerome (an eager traveller too) loved paradoxes and observations about the cultural oddities he found while navigating the Thames or cycling in Germany, Twain liked to put himself at the centre of the scene. But he did so in a very amusing way by pretending to be the bravest person around fooling us and himself in the process.<br />The travels of "A Tramp Abroad" are not particularly exotic involving Germany, Switzerland and a bit of Italy and Twain is not masterful in telling us how and why he got from, say, Heidelberg to Lucerne. Where he excels is in collecting the local stories, news and legends and reporting them on his account along with amazing fictional dialogues and expeditions deign of a maharaja. <br /><br />Here you can find many gems like a passionate praise of tasty American food along with a lot of sarcasm referred to European menus thay may disappoint a German or a French gourmet, but it's actually only another example of Twain's comic exaggeration. <br />Twain is not afraid of despising the sense of perspective and proportions of the Old Masters in painting, in calling St Mark's church in Venice "ugly" and the edelweiss flower "cigar-coloured". There is no arrogance or sense of superiority in doing this, although someone may think and may have thought the opposite. <br />It seems unbelievable that Henry James lived in the same years and saw a good deal of the same British-American jet-set tourism portraying it in the most solemn and antiquated terms. <br /><br />And then there are appendixes, introduced by a quote by Herodotus. <br />Mind you, do not miss these appendixes! And if your edition of "A Tramp Abroad" doesn't include them, raise an official protest with the bookseller who sold it to you! <br /><br />Appendix D, titled "The Awful German Language", is one of the funniest things I've ever read. Eighteen pages of pure intellectual pleasure dedicated to the struggle Twain had with studying German with all the grammar exceptions, peculiarities and oddities of that language he could recall crowned by eight suggestions to make German better. I have never studied German, but I laughed till tears came to my eyes in reading this stuff. And appendix F "German Journals" is irresistible too. Not to mention appendix C "The College Prison". Etc, etc.<br /><br />On the whole, this book is huge and heavy and for that reason not quite comfortable to read if you're not surrounded by pillows half-lying on a double bed, but "A Tramp Abroad" is worth a try when you want to cheer up yourselves. Not a book to travel with, but a book to travel for. <br />

Hilarious first chapter (of Vol. 2), walking in the Swiss alps with his agent and courier. He sands his Agent Harris on ahead to scout out and report back, which he does after a few days, “all felt the heat in the climb up this very steep bolwoggoly, then we set out again…until from the Finsteraarhorn poured down a deluge of haboolong and hail” (11-13). Several pages feature such incomprehensible words. Clemens compliments his report, but asks about the words, turns out from Fiji, Zulu and Choctaw (bolwoggoly et al.) Clemens asks, “Why all this Choctaw rubbish?” Harris answers, “Because I didn’t know any French but two or three words, nor any Latin or greek at all.” Twain, “Why use foreign words anyhow?” Agent, “To adorn my page. They all do it.”(20)<br /><br />Twain encountered the purported suicidal leaping-palace of Pontius Pilate, and the real St Nicholas, who’s buried in the church in Sachseln. “He has ranked for ages as the peculiar friend of children…He had ten of them, and when fifty years old he left them to become a hermit.” “St Nicholas will probably have to go on climbing down sooty chimneys Christmas Eve, forever, and conferring kindness on other people’s children, to make up for deserting his own”(24). During his hermit life, he partook of communion bread and wine once a month, but for the rest, he fasted. So Santa Claus was skinny. Guess Prof. Clement Moore’s account in 1823, the “right jolly old elf” displaced the thin saint.<br /><br />Great stories of carriage rides slowly until reaching town, then faster “with the dust flying and the horn tooting”(30). Shocking to think stages drove faster through towns, to show off. <br /><br />New to me, Twain’s words “Nooning,” which means lunch, and “alpenstock,” though that’s a climbing stick with an iron point. In the giant mountains, Twain finds rare cabins or hostels, near one shack— for builders of a stone house— he buys a beer “but I knew by the price it was dissolved jewelry”(74).<br /><br />On one of the narrow paths by the side of a torrent when he heard a cowbell he hunted for “a place that would accomodate a cow and a Christian side by side.” That torrent was so fast he had his Agent race it, and “I made a trifle by betting on the log”(58).<br /><br />When he gets to Florence, he assails Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” as the "foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses,” which appallingly signals how very far from us was this writer who seemed so close in his humor. Even more astonishing his wondering that “Art is allowed as much indecent license today as in earlier times, but the privileges of literature in this respect have been sharply curtailed in the last eighty or ninety years [since Fielding and Smollett]”(267). Modernism— James Joyce and D.H.Lawrence-- would reclaim literary license.<br /><br />Around 1880 when this was written, Europe had not yet learned to make coffee (Germans using chicory), nor heat their “vast and chilly tombs [homes]”; I experienced a virtually unheated room in Perugia where I had to take a hot bath to warm myself. No breakfasts, and the rest of the food he critiques, excepting fish and grapes. “Sometimes there is a tolerably good peach, by mistake…Roast chicken, as tasteless as paper…One vegetable, brought on in state usually insipid lentils, or indifferent asparagus…A monotonous variety of unstriking dishes”(261ff).<br /><br />Now began Volume I, Twain takes up birdtalk: "A raven can laugh, just like a man" -- A Tramp Abroad (Vol I, p.23). Only one man understood birds, Jim Baker, a miner. "A jay is the best talker." One jay filled a hole in the roof, dozens of acorns, but it didn't fill. When he called over other jays, they saw all his acorns had fallen to the floor of the abandoned cabin, and they mocked him. A jay's mockery is a terrible thing. "Come here," he said, "hang'd if this fool hasn't been trying to fill up a house with acorns." Thousands of jays came, and each "fell over backward with laughter, and the next jay took his place and done the same"(p.31, Uniform edition, Vol I). Jays seldom use bad grammar. A jay's interests andfeelings cover the whole ground. "A jay hasn't got any more principle than a Congressman"(25).<br /><br />He visits Heidelberg and its university, the students more relaxed than they were in nine years of gymnasium (grammar and HS). But dueling plays a big part, the five "corps" distinguished by the color of their caps. They duel with swords, with body protections, but their head vulnerable. They duel in a large open room with tables where they eat. "I had seen the heads and and faces of ten youths gashed in every direction by the keen two-edged blades, yet had not seen a victim wine"(50). "Newly bandaged students are a common spectacle in the public gardens of Heidelberg"(55). "It was of record that Prince Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer term"-- twenty nine of them after he earned the right to retire from fighting (after 3 duels, none tied, of acceptable length).<br />Twain becomes second in a duel with tiny silver pistols; he stands behind a huge man 35 paces from the other pistol-wielder. Two shots ring out--German law allows only one bullet--and the huge man collapses on Twain. No need for the two coroners, nor the hearses, but yes, the surgeons: no injuries to the principles, though Twain is injured by the weight falling on him: Surgeons diagnose, "I would survive my injuries"(75).<br /><br />Visiting a production of Lear, he notes German order, no late patrons seating themselves, no applause to interrupt, though he thinks this makes acting lonelier. American applause can urge actors onward. He finds German love of opera unfathomable, because they applaud formerly great tenors who can no longer sing. "Why do we think Germans stolid? They are very children of impulse. They cry and shout and dance and sing." Their language is filled with diminutive endearments.<br /><br />On that language, Twain appends his "Awful German Language" essay, where three months with tutors, a couple of whom die, results in his one perfect phrase, "Zwei bieren," two beers. He's amused that in German a woman is female, but a Weib, a wife is not. Neuter. He complains about compounding of words forming words not in the dictionary, some very long. An English woman is "die Enlangerinn" or "she-Englishwoman."

This isn't an actual review, just a note as to why I didn't finish the book. Though Twain is one of my favorite authors on the strength of his fiction, I've never been as enamored with his nonfiction. I've also never been a fan of reading other people's travel narratives. (I'll turn 70 in August and have been reading independently at least since I was six; I've read exactly two of them in my life, and wasn't bowled over by either one.) The only reason I tried this one is that it was picked as a common read in a group that I help moderate, and I feel an obligation to join in with those (since the group only does one a year). But although I gave it an honest, good-faith effort, reading 71 pages of it, I just got to the point where it was a time-consuming chore, and the contrast between soldiering on with it vs. reading something I would actually enjoy became too sharp to ignore.<br /><br />A problem with Twain's nonfiction for me (and that's based mainly on <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/38750.The_Complete_Essays_of_Mark_Twain" title="The Complete Essays of Mark Twain by Mark Twain" rel="noopener">The Complete Essays of Mark Twain</a>, which I actually did read in its entirety as a teen) is that, whereas in his fiction he can employ a serious tone where it's appropriate, without the discipline of a fictional plot and the demands of verisimilitude, his temptation to play court jester tends to take over, and over-the-top humor gets dragged into serious discussions, making it hard to take him seriously. And while I enjoy humor as much as most people, much of Twain's humor takes the form of satirical ridicule --whether the targets really deserve ridicule or not. Here, the main objects of his ridicule (at least in the first 71 pages) are the French and the German people, in ways that come across to me as invidious and as cheap shots in a medium where the victims can't reply. This is not a book which attempts to be a serious account of his actual travel experiences, as I'd initially expected; and the one case in the first 10 chapters where he does provide this is a description of the grisly dueling practices of German students, which he recounts with a morbid fascination that I definitely didn't share. So, in my third session with this tome, I decided to bail, and the effect was like a weight lifted off of me!

Even after all those years still very amusing.

There are some magic chapters in this rambling tale of Twain's rambles in Europe. His restaurant meeting with a young lady who knows they have never met but strings him along as he digs a hole deeper and deeper for himself. His descriptions of the violent German duels was surpassed by his slapstick version of a French duel. His ordering around of his travelling companion. His fondness for retelling unrelated stories or embellishing an event with impossibly unsuitable adjectives, adverbs or nouns. Still a humorous book after 130 years.

Funny, but not hilarious. Mostly tongue-in-cheek hyperboles, Mark Twain recounts here his 15-month walking trip through Central Europe and the Alps in 1878-1879. I have only one kind of test for humorous, or supposedly humorous, books: the sound test. Five stars if it made me laugh out loud; four stars if it made me chuckle; three stars if it made me smile; two stars if it just made light up inside; a star if I found it funny without any change in me, or if it wasn't funny at all.<br /><br />In his Introduction Dave Eggers wrote that he "was crying because (he) was laughing" while reading this book. I find this hard to believe. But then again, maybe Mr. Eggers has a lower threshhold for humor. Or hasn't read Jorge Amado. I myself don't remember laughing, or crying, while reading his "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" which I read mainly because of its title which hinted of fun. It turned out to be a mild disappointment.<br /><br />You see, of course, how many stars I gave this book

Der Beginn las sich vielversprechend. Humorvoll, pointiert und schon allein wegen seines historischen Rahmens interessant. Aber Mr. Twain schien eine gewisse Schwäche für Längen und ausführliche Darstellungen von Banalem zu pflegen. So gelang es ihm beispielsweise bei seiner Beobachtung der Studenten-Riten nicht, das für ihn Exotische zu bündeln und kurzweilig vorzutragen. Nein, es schien gar kein Ende zu nehmen und so verlor er mich spätestens gen Hälfte des Buches.<br /><br />Und während er sich, nachdem er immerhin ein ganzes Kapitel ausschließlich der Komplexität der deutschen Sprache widmete, heute über deren Amerikanisierung und zunehmenden Einseitigkeit freuen würde, kann ich ihm darin auch nicht beipflichten. Zunächst amüsierten mich noch sein Unverständnis über den männlichen Kürbis und das geschlechtslose Fräulein. Seine Vorschläge indes zur Vereinfachung der deutschen Sprache brauchten ihren Witz alsbald auf und ich hätte ihn am liebsten nahe gelegt, das nächste Mal im englischsprachigen Raum zu reisen, wenn er sich an der Einzigartigkeit einer Sprache nicht erfreuen kann und gerade darin die Besonderheit und Herausforderung im Bereisen anderer Kulturen entdeckt. - Falls ich seine Absicht missverstanden habe, möge er mir verzeihen.

First, I'm glad I've already read <a href="https://goodreads.com/book/show/2443.The_Innocents_Abroad_or__The_New_Pilgrims__Progress__Modern_Library_Classics_" title="The Innocents Abroad or, The New Pilgrims' Progress (Modern Library Classics) by Mark Twain" rel="noopener">The Innocents Abroad</a>, or else at some point I'd have little to no idea what Twain is talking about when he refers to incidents on that trip, which happens occasionally. This seems a slightly more 'serious' book than that, too, which shows me some of the changes (not to mention growth) in Twain himself, which adds interest.<br /><br />Beyond that, there's no easy way to categorize this book: humorous travelogue, social critique of both Europe and the U.S. (in which neither has everything its own way), journey of self-discovery, collection of folk tales, art critique. Twain ventures into all of these areas, and not in exactly an orderly fashion, either. Like a good journey, sometimes one doesn't really know what's coming around the next corner until it arrives.<br /><br />One rather specialized section near the end will mostly appeal to those like myself who have, starting with English, attempted to master German. In it, Twain offers to reform the latter. I don't know how funny a native speaker would find some of his suggestions, but to me it was in many ways the funniest part of the book.<br /><br />If you like Twain, this is a must-read. It's a good book to tackle when you have somewhat limited time, since it's divided into longish, but not unconquerable sections, between which you can let the book lie and, once you've come back to it, not have much of a task, if any, to return to the narrative. Those unfamiliar with Twain's longer stuff really may want to start with <i>The Innocents Abroad</i> and then try this, since, although this book can stand on its own, one gets more from it having read the former. That's just a suggestion, though.<br />

Fascinating, fraught and hilarious. I'm pretty much besotted by that part of the world anyway and I enjoyed travelling back in time. This is the book which contains the famous essay "The Awful German Language" - read it for that alone - and it relates an episode which will put you off forever from attempting to scale the Matterhorn.

This is by far my favorite of Twain's works. When you go to Europe you need this book. "Paris and Venice are the two greatest lies ever told." Brilliant. Cause they are. When you read this you must realize that Twain is a sarcastic American debunking all the European myth and glory. Most of what you know about Europe has been sold as a marketing campaign. Twain realizes that reality lays not in a travel brochure but in the real travel and observation of that place. Excellent.