Travelers' Return

TRAVELING WITH THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (324 pp.)--Mark Twain--Edited by Daniel Morley McKeithan--University of Oklahoma ($5).

THE ART OF TRAVEL (567 pp.)--Henry James--Edited by Morton Dauwen Za-bel--Doubleday ($5.50).

All tourists are snobs of sorts, chiefly two: newness snobs and oldness snobs. Two well-traveled igth century U.S. writing men, Mark Twain and Henry James, stand like archsentinels at these two poles. Twain, the apostle of modernity, prized Italian railroads "more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art treasures." Antiquarian Henry James found the restoration of Venice's St. Mark's "crude" and "monstrous," even though the basilica might otherwise have crumbled about the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.*This conflict adds a fillip to two thoroughly engaging travel books that should please the chairborne as well as the airborne tourist.

Traveling with the Innocents Abroad is actually a highly unscrubbed first draft of Twain's The Innocents Abroad, the most popular travel book ever written by an American. As special correspondent for San Francisco's Daily Alta California, the 31-year-old Twain was dispatched on "The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion" of 1867. The excursionists were a sobersided group of about 75, "chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors," bound first for Europe and then the Holy Land. Twain's task was to write dispatches on the pilgrims' progress. This is the first time "those wretched slangy letters," as he called them, have been put into book form.

Mockery & Ecstasy. Young Twain permitted himself a coarse though spirited mixture of cornball humor, village atheist mockery, and a mulishly provincial contempt for most people and things foreign. The Portuguese were "lazy louts," the Neapolitans were "a bad lot," the Greeks were "a community of thieves," Jews were "greasy," Italians groped "in the midnight of priestly superstition," and Arabs "carried passengers in their hair." Beneath the invective lurked a cultural inferiority complex and a desperate anxiety not to be taken in. Twain regarded religious relics and purported miracles as "frauds" and "swindles": "I find a piece of the true cross in every old church I go into, and some of the nails that held it together." The Sea of Galilee was "this puddle," and no match for Lake Tahoe. Of the Hellespont, Twain wrote: "I don't think much of Leander, now, who swam the Hellespont to see his squaw ... I could swim that creek with all my property on my back."

Despite his debunking Missouri skepticism, Twain let himself be thrilled, too. He went as gaga as a vacationing schoolmarm before the beauties of Versailles ("an exquisite dream"), the cathedral in Milan ("The princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived") and the Acropolis by moonlight ("All the beauty in all the world combined could not rival it"). As if half-ashamed of such ecstatic outbursts, he lapsed into heavy-handed gags about "Mike" Angelo and the tomb of Lazarus ("I had rather live in it than in any house in the town"). Even in such jests Twain foreshadowed an emergent American who, while he had not yet come of age, was prepared to take over the age and judge all cultures by his own.

Mind's Eye. If Twain the patriot was a cultural absolutist, Henry James the expatriate was a cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite--that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled.

The mind's eye of James condoned what the camera eye of Twain condemned. Where Twain saw mere dirt, James saw the patina of centuries-old civilizations. Where Twain saw superstition and ignorance, James saw piety and a sense of the past. Standing within the basilica of St. Mark's, James spoke of its mosaic pavement as "dark, rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite, polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers." Standing in the same spot, Twain observed: "Everything was worn out--every block of stone was smooth and almost shapeless with the polishing hands and shoulders of loungers who devoutly idled here in bygone centuries."

Love-Affair. If Twain suffered from a certain crudity of sensibility, James's defect was overrefinement. His pinnacles of taste sometimes seem like parodies of it. In one such solemn-silly moment, James gravely agreed with a British friend that a certain garden at Cambridge University was "the most beautiful small garden in Europe." James loved the undistinguished quick rather less than the illustrious dead; nowhere in his travel accounts was there a jot of sympathetic indignation about the plight of Europe's poor and humble; Twain's letters are aflame with it.

But few have written more feelingly than James of how one falls in love with a place. Writing again of Venice, his favorite city, James rose above the snobbery of things old or new to capture the wonder of all moving travel experiences: "[Venice] varies like a nervous woman, whom you know only when you know all the aspects of her beauty. She has high spirits or low, she is pale or red, grey or pink, cold or warm, fresh or wan, according to the weather or the hour . . . The place seems to personify itself, to become human and sentient and conscious of your affection. You desire to embrace it, to caress it, to possess it; and finally a soft sense of possession grows up and your visit becomes a perpetual love-affair."

*As the entire Campanile did in 1902, to be rebuilt between 1905 and 1911.

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