How in the name of God does a man find his way from here to Amherst,
and when must he start? Give me full particulars, and send a man
with me. If I had another engagement I would rot before I would
fill it. S. L. CLEMENS.
This was at the end of February, and he believed that he was standing on the platform for the last time. He loathed the drudgery of the work, and he considered there was no further need. He was no longer in debt, and his income he accounted ample. His new book, 'Roughing It',—[It was Bliss who had given the new book the title of Roughing It. Innocents at Home had been its provision title, certainly a misleading one, though it has been retained in England for the second volume; for what reason it would be difficult to explain.]—had had a large advance sale, and its earnings promised to rival those of the 'Innocents'. He resolved in the future to confine himself to the trade and profits of authorship.
The new book had advantages in its favor. Issued early in the year, it was offered at the best canvassing season; particularly so, as the author's lectures had prepared the public for its reception. Furthermore, it dealt with the most picturesque phases of American life, scenes and episodes vastly interesting at that time, and peculiarly adapted to Mark Twain's literary expression. In a different way 'Roughing It' is quite as remarkable as 'The Innocents Abroad.' If it has less charm, it has greater interest, and it is by no means without charm. There is something delicious, for instance, in this bit of pure enjoyment of the first day's overland travel:
It was now just dawn, and as we stretched our cramped legs full
length on the mail-sacks, and gazed out through the windows across
the wide wastes of greensward clad in cool, powdery mist to where
there was an expectant look in the Eastern horizon, our perfect
enjoyment took the form of a tranquil and contented ecstasy. The
stage whirled along at a spanking gait, the breeze flapping the
curtains and suspended coats in a most exhilarating way; the cradle
swayed and swung luxuriously, the pattering of the horses' hoofs,
the cracking of the driver's whip, and his “Hi-yi! g'lang!” were
music; the spinning ground and the waltzing trees appeared to give
us a mute hurrah as we went by, and then slack up and look after us
with interest and envy, or something; and as we lay and smoked the
pipe of peace, and compared all this luxury with the years of
tiresome city life that had gone before it, we felt that there was
only one complete and satisfying happiness in the world, and we had
found it.
Also, there is that lofty presentation of South Pass, and a picture of the alkali desert, so parching, so withering in its choking realism, that it makes the throat ache and the tongue dry to read it. Just a bit of the desert in passing:
The sun beats down with a dead, blistering, relentless malignity;
the perspiration is welling from every pore in man and beast, but
scarcely a sign of it finds its way to the surface—it is absorbed
before it gets there; there is not the faintest breath of air
stirring; there is not a merciful shred of cloud in all the
brilliant firmament; there is not a living creature visible in any
direction whither one searches the blank level that stretches its
monotonous miles on every hand; there is not a sound, not a sigh,
not a whisper, not a buzz, or a whir of wings, or distant pipe of
bird; not even a sob from the lost souls that doubtless people that
dead air.
As for the humor of the book, it has been chiefly famous for that. “Buck Fanshaw's Funeral” has become a classic, and the purchase of the “Mexican Plug.” But it is to no purpose to review the book here in detail. We have already reviewed the life and environment out of which it grew.
Without doubt the story would have contained more of the poetic and contemplative, in which he was always at his best, if the subject itself, as in the Innocents, had lent itself oftener to this form of writing. It was the lack of that halo perhaps which caused the new book never quite to rank with its great forerunner in public favor. There could hardly be any other reason. It presented a fresher theme; it abounded in humor; technically, it was better written; seemingly it had all the elements of popularity and of permanence. It did, in fact, possess these qualities, but its sales, except during the earlier months of its canvass, never quite equaled those of The Innocents Abroad.
'Roughing It' was accepted by the public for just what it was and is, a great picture of the Overland Pioneer days—a marvelous picture of frontier aspects at a time when the frontier itself, even with its hardships and its tragedies, was little more than a vast primal joke; when all frontiersmen were obliged to be laughing philosophers in order to survive the stress of its warfares.
A word here about this Western humor: It is a distinct product. It grew out of a distinct condition—the battle with the frontier. The fight was so desperate, to take it seriously was to surrender. Women laughed that they might not weep; men, when they could no longer swear. “Western humor” was the result. It is the freshest, wildest humor in the world, but there is tragedy behind it.
'Roughing It' presented the picture of those early conditions with the startling vividness and truth of a great novel, which, in effect, it was. It was not accurate history, even of the author's own adventures. It was true in its aspects, rather than in its details. The greater artist disregards the truth of detail to render more strikingly a phase or a condition, to produce an atmosphere, to reconstruct a vanished time. This was what Mark Twain did in 'Roughing It'. He told the story of overland travel and the frontier, for his own and future generations, in what is essentially a picaresque novel, a work of unperishing fiction, founded on fact.
The sales of 'Roughing It' during the first three months aggregated nearly forty thousand copies, and the author was lavishly elate accordingly. To Orion (who had already closed his career with Bliss, by exercise of those hereditary eccentricities through which he so often came to grief) he gave $1,000 out of the first royalty check, in acknowledgment of the memorandum book and other data which Orion had supplied. Clemens believed the new book would sell one hundred thousand copies within the year; but the sale diminished presently, and at the end of the first year it was considerably behind the Innocents for the same period. As already stated, it required ten years for Roughing It to reach the one-hundred-thousand mark, which the Innocents reached in three.
All books are sourced from Project Gutenberg