At the back of the postcard shown here, which bears an image of his residence in Redding, Connecticut (no date, but circa 1908–1909), Mark Twain writes to an unknown recipient: “Please send me, right away, second volume of Innocents Abroad – (red cloth). I want it for Payne [sic], who is sailing soon. I’ve got the first volume.”
Albert Bigelow Paine (1861-1937), a respected member of the Pulitzer Prize Committee, was himself a prolific writer of novels, stories, children’s books, travel volumes and, perhaps most famously, a definitive three-volume biography on Twain (1906). As Twain’s literary executor, he was singularly responsible for controlling both the publication of Twain’s posthumous works and protecting his public image and reputation. As an interesting side note, the title of his novel The Great White Way (1901) came into general use as the name for Broadway and New York’s theatrical district.
Twain was already a famous author and American icon when he undertook a journey from the United States to Europe and the Middle East and published his accounts of his travels as the semi-autobiographical and partly fictional The Innocents Abroad (1869), which was the best-selling of his works during his lifetime and, even to date, remains one of the best-selling travel books of all time. He was among the first notables in the nineteenth century to travel to Eretz Yisrael and provide a description of the Holy Land and its people, and his descriptions provide a bleak picture of a desolate and miserable land only eighty years before the rebirth of the state of Israel:
We traversed some miles of desolate country, a silent, mournful expanse; a desolation is here that not even imagination can grace with the pomp of life and action. We never saw a human being on the whole route. The further we went, the more repulsive and dreary the landscape became. No landscape exists that is more tiresome to the eye than that which bounds the approaches to Jerusalem…. At last, away in the middle of the day, ancient bite of wall and crumbling arches began to line the way – Jerusalem! Perched on its eternal hills, white and domed and solid, massed together and hooped with high gray walls, the venerable city gleamed in the sun. We dismounted and looked across the wide intervening valley for an hour or more; and noted those prominent features of the city that pictures make familiar to all men from their school days till their death….
The appearance of the city is peculiar. It is as knobby with countless little domes as a prison door is with bolt- heads. The streets are roughly and badly paved with stone, and are tolerably crooked…. The population of Jerusalem is composed of Moslems, Jews, Greeks, Latins, Armenians, Syrians, Copts, Abyssinians, Greek Catholics, and a handful of Protestants. It seems to me that all the races and colors and tongues of the earth must be represented among the fourteen thousand souls that dwell in Jerusalem. Rags, wretchedness, poverty and dirt, those signs and symbols that indicate the presence of Moslem rule more surely than the crescent-flag itself, abound. Lepers, cripples, the blind, and the idiotic, assail you on every hand. To see the numbers of maimed, malformed and diseased humanity that throng the holy places and obstruct the gates, one might suppose that the ancient days had come again, and that the angel of the Lord was expected to descend at any moment to stir the waters of Bethesda. Jerusalem is mournful, and dreary, and lifeless. I would not desire to live here. It is a hopeless, dreary, heartbroken land…. Palestine sits in sackcloth and ashes.
