Mark Twain, the World, and Me: "Following the Equator," Then and Now

By Susan K. Harris

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
 
A scholar accompanies Twain on his journey around the world
 
In Mark Twain, the World, and Me: “Following the Equator,” Then and Now, Susan K. Harris follows Twain’s last lecture tour as he wound his way through the British Empire in 1895–1896. Deftly blending history, biography, literary criticism, reportage, and travel memoir, Harris gives readers a unique take on one of America’s most widely studied writers.
 
Structured as a series of interlocking essays written in the first person, this engaging volume draws on Twain’s insights into the histories and cultures of Australia, India, and South Africa and weaves them into timely reflections on the legacies of those countries today. Harris offers meditations on what Twain’s travels mean for her as a scholar, a white woman, a Jewish American, a wife, and a mother. By treating topics as varied as colonial rule, the clash between indigenous and settler communities, racial and sexual “inbetweenness,” and species decimation, Harris reveals how the world we know grew out of the colonial world Twain encountered. Her essays explore issues of identity that still trouble us today: respecting race and gender, preserving nature, honoring indigenous peoples, and respecting religious differences.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Alabama Press
• Release date: Mar 10, 2020
• ISBN: 9780817392833

Book preview

you!

Me, World, Twain

An Introduction

I wasn’t wild about visiting Australia. It had never been on my personal bucket list, not the way the Galápagos Islands are, or the grasslands of Central Asia. I didn’t think I could stand the long flight, for starters. I’m mildly claustrophobic and a bad sitter, and the prospect of all those hours in a plane made me queasy. I also was never grabbed by the idea of Australia, which seemed too much like the United States to be worth the effort. But I was following Mark Twain on his 1895–1896 lecture tour around the world, and he spent two months Down Under, so I tamped down my anxieties and flew. Australia was the first stop on a research project that I spread out over fifteen months: a month in Australasia, another in India, a third in South Africa. I started with a list of Twain related sites to visit and archives to explore—a routine academic research itinerary. I managed to visit about half of the sites, but I barely set foot in the archives. The project morphed almost as soon as my plane touched down in Sydney.

It started as a cartographical realignment, a radical shift in my sense of place. I knew, intellectually, that Australia was somewhere below Southeast Asia, but in my head North America is the center of the world map, and Australia is in the lower left-hand corner. My trip had begun from the Kansas City airport, the hub closest to Lawrence, Kansas, where I lived and taught at the University of Kansas. From there I flew to Houston, Texas, and then straight to Australia—a nineteen-hour flight. Not only was I phenomenally jet-lagged, but for my first couple of days in Sydney my brain assumed that I was in the United States looking over at myself perched on that lower-left corner. I didn’t start to feel like I was in Australia until—go on, laugh—I was sitting in the Sydney Opera House watching a production of South Pacific. (I know, I know—it’s ridiculous to go to Australia to see South Pacific, especially since it was a production I’d seen before and hadn’t particularly liked, but that’s what was playing, and I wanted to see the Sydney Opera House.) I’m happy to report that the cast was far better than the one at Lincoln Center, but the significant moment came with the staging. A huge, World War II map of the South Pacific functioned as the backdrop for most of the scenes. It had seemed academic when I saw it in New York, but this time I thought, "Wow! I’m in the South Pacific," and suddenly my geographical orientation reconfigured itself, like when you twist a kaleidoscope and all the colored pieces tumble around and end up in a different pattern.

My research agenda saw a similar shift. Suddenly library research looked tiresome. I didn’t want to spend my three weeks in musty archives. I was in Australia; I wanted learn about the country, not about a few individuals’ conversations with an American visitor over a hundred years ago. I didn’t have to drop Twain to change my focus; instead I reoriented the project, just as my Opera House moment had reoriented my sense of place. Instead of reading Australians’ comments about Mark Twain, I would begin with Twain’s comments about Australians and take my thematic cues from there. Twain traipsed through Fiji, Australia, New Zealand, India, Mauritius, and South Africa observing and commenting, and I could learn about contemporary Australia (and later, about New Zealand, India, and South Africa) by testing those comments in light of today. For instance, he insisted that in all his trips through the Australian countryside, he never saw a kangaroo, and that he had to visit a zoo to see native Australian fauna. That’s one comment I followed up; a journey into wildlife preservation that took me from Sydney zoos to South African wildlife refuges and back to the little penguin colony outside Melbourne. Suddenly, the kinds of research I was doing shifted from the purely academic, from fleshing out already well-developed stories about Mark Twain, to a much wider, more comprehensive set of questions about the myriad ways that human beings around the world are grappling with pressing problems like wildlife conservation, pollution, religious difference, and racial and gender categorization.

The new framing excited me because it called on far more of my interests than a historically defined authorial study would allow. It also brought me into the project, as a character in my own right. The personal is pretty much verboten in academic writing, so this was a whole new playing field for me. It meant figuring out my relationship to the material in a way I’d never ventured before, including digging into personal memory to understand why I come at things the way I do. I’ve always lived a kind of dual life. My first eighteen years were divided between home and abroad, between growing up as a middle-class Jewish kid in Baltimore, Maryland, and family sojourns, from two to fourteen months each, in the countries where my peripatetic father worked: Puerto Rico, Colombia, Nepal, Switzerland. The conflicts arose after we came home. I’d missed my Baltimore kid-life intensely, but each time I returned it was a little harder to reintegrate into my friends’ cozy existence. I’d seen a bigger world than the other girls’ narrow round of school, B’nai B’rith Girls, hairstyles, TV, and movies. Most of my friends couldn’t take a bus downtown without a parent along; I flew alone to India the summer I turned thirteen. My friends didn’t want to hear about my travels, so I pretended they hadn’t happened. As long as our chatter focused on hairstyles and math homework, no problem.

The uneasiness came with social issues, particularly civil rights. Late 1950s Baltimore was being desegregated, against its will. My grade school had been integrated during the year I spent in Bogotá, Colombia, and local white mothers warned us that the junior high school was full of Negroes with knives. No one in my family bought into the white paranoia, but it gives you an idea of the environment my brothers and I had to negotiate. I was a preadolescent, already too fat and from too weird a family to blend in easily. To complicate matters, my travels had taught me some very alien (to Baltimore) ideas about the value of racial and cultural diversity. I cringed when my B’nai B’rith chapter chanted two, four, six, eight / we don’t want to integrate as our bus drove through a black neighborhood. In retrospect I realize the incident accelerated my moral development, because the shame I felt at that moment propelled me out of that crowd. As I got older I drifted farther and farther away from Baltimore’s insular Jewish community, drawn to companions who could share at least some of my values, if not my experiences. That didn’t mean I forsook Judaism, only that I searched for Jews who, like me, were eager to explore and embrace the world. It also didn’t erase my sense of marginality—by high school I was the Jew among Christians, the white among Negroes, and still, the traveler among entrenched locals. The quality of my friends rose, but my position remained tangential to the mainstream. College didn’t help matters; four years at Antioch, an institution long dedicated to producing graduates imbued with social justice ideals, plus a year at Oxford’s working-class Ruskin College, brought me to a point where I had very little in common with Baltimore. My 1968 marriage to an African American finalized the separation.

So there I was in Sydney in 2013, chasing a writer who in many ways epitomized the white, Christian, American mainstream of the late nineteenth century, and who, even when he rejected that community’s values, still depended on them for his living. Economic power demands subservience (I’d learned that lesson early, in fights with my father), and Mark Twain often played to his audience’s worldview. At the same time, he also often spoke out against the racism, bigotry, and political expediency that ruled the United States throughout the late nineteenth century, and he railed against European states that were raping and pillaging their way to domination in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I’d always sensed that Twain and I shared an edgy, marginal relationship to our contemporaries—especially when we perceived our compatriots refusing others the rights and opportunities they enjoyed themselves. With this, I admired Twain because he wasn’t afraid to change his mind. Over his lifetime he struggled with his culturally inherited racism, sexism, and sense of white Western superiority, and by the 1890s—the decade on which I’m focusing here—he had rethought many, though certainly not all, of his earlier assumptions. Part of my pleasure in studying his works came from watching him evolve. In many ways that’s what brought me to this project; in 2011 I had published a book (God’s Arbiters: Americans and the Philippines) focused on his resistance to the US annexation of the Philippines in 1899, and I wanted to figure out how he got there. My hunch was that the trip around the world had taught him the perils of colonialism, so I was going to try to find out more about his experiences in the British colonies he visited. That turned out to be a lot harder than it originally appeared because Following the Equator, the book he wrote about the lecture tour, gyrates between celebrating and criticizing the British colonial presence. Even though I think I understand Twain’s fluctuations, the inconsistencies of this book continue to baffle