Twain Scholars Exult at New Perspective on ‘Innocents Abroad’

It was a windy summer evening aboard the side-wheel steamer Quaker City, and passenger William Denny’s mental state was as stormy as the seas.

A “worldling & swearer”--one who had just been dancing, no less--had asked him to pray.

“My feelings were singular at such a singular circumstance, to the best of my ability I performed my duty,” Denny, an ex-Confederate colonel, would later record in his journal.

The “worldling” was Mark Twain, an up-and-coming writer about to make Denny and his hapless shipmates famous the hard way--as subjects of the satiric bestseller “The Innocents Abroad.”

For years, the trip as told by the sardonic Twain has been an American classic.

Now, thanks to the recent donation of Denny’s diaries and photograph album, Twain scholars at UC Berkeley are getting an intriguing new perspective on the historic voyage.

“All of a sudden you can literally see what these folks are like,” says Robert Hirst, director of the Mark Twain Project.

Funding permitting, Hirst and his fellow editors hope to produce a new edition of “Innocents” that would include the photographs and diary entries to convey “an extremely vivid sense of what the reality was that he was building on.”

Denny’s accounts, donated by his descendants to Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, provide a restrained, often amusing, counterpoint to Twain’s more flamboyant memoirs.

For instance, when the travelers try to sail the Sea of Galilee, they hail a boatman, balk at his price and then watch in chagrin as he takes umbrage and sails away.

This is how Denny sums up the affair:

The boatman “asked such an exorbitant price that we would not give it, and he seemed independant [sic] because he thought we were in his power and he reluctantly left, and we reluctantly saw him leave. So thus we were disappointed and so was he. He lost the money he could have made and we saved it.”

Twain’s version goes on for pages, describing how the excited travelers vow to pay “anything whatever!” to sail the sacred sea but then promptly proceed to haggle.

“Eight crestfallen creatures stood upon the shore, and O, to think of it! this--this--after all that overmastering ecstasy! Oh, shameful, shameful ending, after such unseemly boasting!” Twain records gleefully.

On a trip to the River Jordan, Twain fumes over the early wake-up call that got them to the river in the pitch dark of 4 a.m. “Some of us were in a savage frame of mind,” he writes.

Denny agrees the start time was too early, but writes a much milder report, saying “a good breakfast is almost certain to make one pleased.” He notes that “one of our company could not be calmed down from his anger,” but piously improves on the occasion with the observation that “anger is not good, temper wasteth good humor, and destroys good temper.”

Hirst, who first learned of the diaries as a doctoral student in 1973, was thrilled when he learned last year they were coming to Berkeley, where he and his colleagues are in the middle of volume six of their long-standing project to publish the letters of Mark Twain.

Money is always a problem for the project, which each year scrambles to come up with about $150,000 in contributions--it is currently about $25,000 short of that goal for 1998-99 funding--to get a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The resulting budget pays for four editors, two part-time editors and three students.

If the money holds out and the new edition of “Innocents” is published, it will include an introduction explaining the importance of Denny’s journals from the 1867 trip--and how Twain ended up taking passage with such a shipload of sobersides.

Originally, the trip, bound for the Holy Land with stops along the way, was intended to be a gathering of intellectuals including the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, brother of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” author Harriet Beecher Stowe.

But tickets proved hard to sell, Beecher bowed out and organizers were forced to lower their sights.

“What they get is a very definite cross section of middle-class America,” Hirst said. “Twain . . . finds a large portion of these passengers rather too much, and that’s because really they weren’t drawn from the social group that he at first expected.”

The disgruntled Twain dubbed most of his shipmates “pilgrims,” not to be confused with the “sinners,” a coterie of young men who joined him for late-night card-playing, cigar-smoking shenanigans.

While the pilgrims’ mission was a spiritual one, it was a business trip for Twain, who reported on the five-month cruise by way of newspaper dispatches that he later turned into “Innocents Abroad.”

“Innocents”--the book that made Twain famous--uses sly humor to expose the bumbling tourists.

In Paris, for example, the travelers are bemused when their attempts at French are met with stares. “We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language!” writes the mocking Twain.

Not surprisingly, his wicked pen made Twain about as popular as scurvy on the Quaker City.

Passengers were particularly furious after getting their hands on one article describing some of the ladies’ inept attempts to entertain Russian royals. Twain was “told to stay pretty close to his cabin and not come out until things calm down a bit,” Hirst said.

Still, Twain had some friends among the “pilgrims,” including Denny.

“Samuel D. Clemens [Twain’s real name] of San Francisco, California, [is] a wicked fellow that will take the name of the Lord in vain, that is no respector [sic] of persons,” reads one diary entry. “Yet he is liberal, kind and obliging, and if he were only Christian, would make his mark.”

In his final article, Twain let fly, describing the trip as a “funeral excursion without a corpse.”

But at other times, he took a milder tack, declaring, “They are better men than I am . . . and besides if they did not wish to be stirred up occasionally in print, why in the mischief did they travel with me?”

Once the book came out, Hirst said, the passengers were “famous in a way they didn’t particularly want to be, but they couldn’t really do anything about it.”

Until now.

“Denny is getting his say in, finally,” Hirst said.