Innocence and War

Ian Strathcarron

Description

In 1867 the Daily Alta California commissioned Mark Twain to cover the story of the world's first luxury cruise, a six-month round tour to the Holy Land from New York on board the Quaker City, an ex-Civil War Mississippi side-wheel paddle steamer. The captain, crew and passengers were highly respectable Presbyterian Christians on a mission; the Islamic Holy Land was under loosening Ottoman control. The interchangeable infidels and zealots saw Mark Twain as a distracting influence and he saw them as a wonderful source of material for comments on the folly of the human condition. The resultant 'The Innocents Abroad' was his bestselling book in his lifetime and is still regarded as a classic of travel writing and a masterpiece of satire on political and religious excess.Ian Strathcarron follows Mark Twain and his caravanserai as it sways across the Holy Land and the two writers' contrasting adventures and observations are told in Innocence and War.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Israel
• Travel writing
• History of the Middle East

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 26 octobre 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908493002
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

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 Presbyterian 1 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 imagine 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 fro