But it had been a long, dreary process of composition, revision, and editing that seemed endless to its author.

Whatever the amount of labor involved, Mark Twain was discovering the harmonious tone for his most characteristic voice. As far back as 1871, he explained to his wife his formula for delivering a comic lecture:

Any lecture of mine ought to be a running narrative-plank, with square holes in it, six inches apart, all the length of it, & then in my mental shop I ought to have plugs (half marked “serious” and the other marked “humorous”) to select from & jam into these holes according to the temper of the audience.

In the mid-1870s Twain elaborated on his notion of a narrative plank punctuated with comic material when he offered advice to his Western newspaper friend, William Wright. Wright (who wrote under the pseudonym “Dan DeQuille”) intended to publish a history of the Comstock silver bonanza and a separate collection of humorous sketches. According to Twain, however, Wright’s method of composition was not only flawed, it was incorrect:

Dan, there is more than one way of writing a book; & your way is not the right one. You see, the winning card is to nail a man’s interest with Chapter I, & not let up on him till you get him to the word “finis.” That can’t be done with detached sketches; but I’ll show you how to make a man read every one of those sketches, under the stupid impression that they are mere accidental incidents that have dropped in on you unawares in the course of your narrative.

For Twain, the humorous sketch was interspersed with that factual, autobiographical, historical “narrative plank,” so that the two parts worked in felicitous combination. But Twain had more insight for Wright, and when Wright went to the Clemenses’ Hartford house to take lessons in book writing, Twain suggested that he “Bring along lots of dry statistics—it’s the very best sauce a humorous book can have. Ingeniously used, they just make a reader smack his chops in gratitude. We must have all the Bonanza statistics you can rake & scrape.” Twain’s narrative formulas were ones that he followed himself, and the result, as Bernard DeVoto said, was that Twain

took the humorous anecdote, combined it with autobiographical reminiscence, and so achieved the narrative form best adapted to his mind. . . . The mode of creation that expressed him was a loosely flowing narrative, actually or fictitiously autobiographical—a current interrupted for the presentation of episodes, for, merely, the telling of stories.

It was a deliberate, crafted formula that brilliantly imitated informality, free association, and casual indifference to coherence and connection; a formula found throughout A Tramp Abroad. And even rural newspapers, the voice of Twain’s middle-class audience, noticed his unique formula. The Scranton Free Press said of A Tramp Abroad, “People do not like to read a volume of travels because it is dry and prosy, but when all this knowledge is combined with sparkling wit the reading becomes a pleasure instead of a task”; the Tolland County Leader echoed the fact that factual material “which if given by other writers would be dry and uninteresting is here fairly ‘sugar-coated,’ as none but Clemens knows how to do.”

The quarter of the book that he estimated he had written by July 1878 was in the “disconnected form”: the collection of square plugs—anecdotes, tall tales, descriptions of scenic or historic sites, and critiques of European customs and society. Combined with the equivalent of his “narrative plank”—a burlesque walking tour and a caricature of the study of art and German—Mark Twain had the formula that permitted him to expand, contract, insert comedy, alternate serious and comic material (as in the German and French duels), and basically wander off his topic when something else interested him. Twain revealed one possible method of incorporating the “plug” into the “plank” in a January 1879 letter to Howells: “I have chartered it [the raft], & I shall pick up useful passengers here & there to tell me the legends of the ruined castles, & other things—perhaps the Captain who brought the news of the Pitcairn revolution.”

For the present, however, he accumulated enough “disconnected” material to make an additional book’s worth, published in 1882 as The Stolen White Elephant. That collection included the title story along with “The Legend of Sagenfeld,” “Concerning the American Language,” “Paris Notes,” and “Mental Telegraphy,” all identified as left out of A Tramp Abroad. “The Professor’s Yarn” and “The Great Revolution in Pitcairn” were in reserve for inclusion very early in the process of composition. Several other passages left out of A Tramp Abroad made their way into his next travel book, Life on the Mississippi (1883), and one was reworked for A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). Some of the material originally written for A Tramp Abroad is still unpublished.

What he did decide to include as “plugs” in his narrative plank vary widely in their quality. As Richard Bridgman has pointed out, “The result was a typically uneven performance, with some first-rate anecdotes, such as ‘Jim Baker’s Bluejay Yarn,’ but also long mechanical stretches and a good deal of filler.” But that was a significant aspect of Mark Twain’s pose as a writer—casual, spontaneous, low- (or at best, middle-) browed, unorthodox, indifferent to the rules of genteel society. A Tramp Abroad is, in a sense, a mirror in which we view not only what Mark Twain sees; we are also allowed to view Mark Twain “absorbing” the scenery in Europe, which provides much of the humor, as the perceiver and the workings of his perceptions are at least as interesting as the Black Forest or Heidelberg or the Alps.

III

A Tramp Abroad is a much more sedate book than its obvious predecessor, The Innocents Abroad (1869). Its author was a decade older, married and the father of two children; established in a handsome mansion in Hartford; and lacking, as he told Howells, the “calm judicial good humor” necessary to produce the satire with which the earlier book brims over. Its narrator is, indeed, less innocent, more world-weary, and possibly more foolish. The burlesque walking tour of Europe becomes strained and obvious; descriptive material occasionally grows tedious; and jokes sometimes extend longer than their optimum lifespan. The “tramp” through Germany (chapters 1-24), Switzerland (chapters 25-42), and France and Italy (chapters 42-49) concludes with a half dozen appendices of varying interest, suggesting Mark Twain’s weariness with his book and its contract.

The mind composing the record of that tramp is, however, a wonder to behold. As Bridgman notes astutely, in his rush for movement Twain was committed to

trying out other possibilities, quite unsystematically and without coming to any logical closure, for this was where the associative path led him. However bizarre and disconcerting such moments might be, he allowed them entrance to his page, for they represented a faithful record of the movement of his mind through unregulated complexities. . . . For our purposes they accurately display associative connections as well as underlying concerns in Twain’s mind.

But Twain was also committed to form, and in chapter 23, he explicitly described the structure of A Tramp Abroad—not a book about walking, but one about talking:

Now the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking, or in the scenery, but in the talking. .