By Micah Mattix

In the summer of 1893, Mark Twain was 57 and at the pinnacle of his career—or so it seemed. Behind him were the successes of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1885). Pudd’nhead Wilson was being serialized in The Century, one of America’s most prestigious literary magazines at the time, and would be published as a book the next year.Twain was making up to $1,000(roughly $30,000 in today’s dollars)for a single essay or story and was married to a coal heiress. To top it all off, he owned his own publishing company.

[2] He was also broke and deeply in debt. His publishing house, named after and briefly run by his niece’s husband,Charles L. Webster, started with a bang in 1885, publishing his own Huck Finn and Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which turned out to be a surprise record-breaking hit. But a series of poorly-selling titles and a badly planned, 11-volume set of American classics (which, while popular, put the company as much as$22 in the red for every sale) sent revenue and profits sharply downward.Eight years after it had started, Charles L. Webster & Co. was over $6 million in the hole. Twain had also invested heavily in James W. Paige’s promising but ultimately flawed typesetter, the Paige Compositor. The American author had gone from a pauper to a prince and back to a pauper—at least on paper.How he’d become a prince again is the story of Richard Zacks’s expertly paced Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour.

1839年夏天，57岁的马克·吐温正处在创作生涯的巅峰——或者看上去如此。他已经创作了《汤姆·索亚历险记》（1876）和《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》（1885）两部小说。同时，《傻瓜威尔逊》正在当时美国最负盛名的文学杂志之一——《世纪》上连载，将在翌年结集出版。马克·吐温仅靠一篇文章或一个故事就能赚取1000美元（约合现在的30000美元），还迎娶了一个煤矿主的女儿。最重要的是，他拥有自己的出版公司。

[2]但同时他手头拮据，负债累累。他的出版公司以自己侄女的丈夫查尔斯·L.韦伯斯特的名字命名，并暂时由其管理。1885年该出版公司成立后出版了马克·吐温本人的《哈克贝利·费恩历险记》和尤利西斯·S.格兰特的回忆录，一鸣惊人。这些出版物出乎意料地打破了纪录，引起了很大的轰动。但仍有一些滞销的书籍，加上一套策划不周的11卷本的美国经典丛书（虽然深受欢迎，可每售出一套，出版公司亏损22美元）使得销售收入和利润大幅下滑。创建8年后，查尔斯·L.韦伯斯特出版公司亏损超过600万美元。马克·吐温还将巨资投在杰姆斯·W.佩奇前景广阔的佩奇排字机上，但最终产品还是有缺陷。这位美国作家从乞丐到王子，再到乞丐——至少理论上如此。至于他又是如何变回王子的，这正是理查德·扎克斯在《追逐最后的笑声：马克吐温喧闹而救赎的环球喜剧之旅》一书中娓娓道来的故事。

[3] As Zacks’s subtitle tells us, Twain would go on an unprecedented world speaking tour beginning in the summer of 1895. The tour would take him across the American Midwest to Vancouver and then on to Australia, New Zealand, India, and South Africa. He would perform over 100 times in front of aristocrats, British generals, New Zealand ranchers, and Indian maharajas in over a year.

[4] Zacks notes that Twain hated go-ing on “the platform,” as he called it,to recount humorous episodes from his books. But he decided that it was the only way for him to get back on his feet again.

[3]正如扎克斯的副标题所言，在1895年的夏天,马克·吐温开始进行一次前所未有的世界巡回演讲。此次巡讲带他穿越美国中西部地区到达温哥华，随后抵达澳大利亚、新西兰、印度和南非。一年多的时间里，他在贵族、英国将军、新西兰牧场主和印度王公面前演讲100余场。

[5] He took his wife and his middle daughter, Clara, leaving his two other daughters, Susy and Jean, with friends and family. The tour got off to a bumpy start in Cleveland. Twain, suffering from a carbuncle on his leg, was unable to practice as much as he would have liked before the first paying audience.But he quickly found his stage legs and regularly performed in sold out houses to mostly rave reviews.

[6] While Twain wondered how American humor would play with audiences in Australia—the first stop outside the United States and Canada on the tour—he was surprised to find Australians more like Americans than even the English: “No shyness; get acquainted in five minutes,” he wrote.His first performance brought down the house. He performed before audiences of 2,000 in Sydney, four times larger than most of his American shows.Zacks writes that “What had started for him as a desperate lunge for money was starting to seem magically transformed into a victory lap for the ‘humorist of the century.’”

[7] I suspect that one of the temptations in a book on Mark Twain is to allow Twain to do all the writing. With zingers like “There is but one love which a Frenchman places above his love for his country, & that is his love for another man’s wife,” it must be hard to resist. But Zacks does an admirable job of giving us a taste of Twain’s performances and quoting his best commentary without, for the most part,overwhelming the narrative with block quotes.

[4]扎克斯写道，马克·吐温憎恨登上他说的“那个台子”讲述自己书中的幽默章节。然而，马克·吐温认为，外出演讲是他重新站起来的唯一办法。

[5]他带着妻子和二女儿克拉拉，把另外两个女儿苏茜和琼留给朋友和家人。此次旅程从克利夫兰出发，开始就不顺利。马克·吐温腿上出了个疖子，根本无法在首场付费听众面前尽情发挥。但他很快就找回了上演讲台的感觉，经常在座无虚席的大厅里演讲，收到的好评如潮。

[6]正当马克·吐温思量着怎样用美国幽默取悦澳大利亚的听众时——毕竟澳洲是美国和加拿大之外第一站——他吃惊地发现，澳大利亚人甚至比英国人更像美国人：“一点都不害羞；五分钟就混熟了，”他写道。他的首场演讲博得满堂喝彩。在悉尼演讲时，他有2000名听众，比在美国的多数场次多四倍。扎克斯写道，“他的初衷是拼命赚钱，结果神奇地变成了一场‘世纪幽默家’的胜利之旅。”

[7]我想，在写关于马克·吐温的书时，会不禁一直引用马克·吐温的原话。像这样的巧言妙语，如“法国人只会把一种爱置于爱国之上，那就是对别人老婆的爱”，就很难不写进书里。而扎克斯的写作令人钦佩，让我们领略到了马克·吐温的演讲风采，同时引用了马克·吐温的最佳评论，这些引文并未遮蔽作者的叙述。

[8] Zacks notes, for example, that for all the success that Australia brought him, Twain was ambivalent about the country itself. The native Australian, he wrote in his notebook, “is as sensitive”about his country “as men are of their sacred things—can’t bear to have critical things said about her. Thinks he is going to build a mighty nation here, &someday be an independent one—a republic—cut up his 60[,000] & 100,000-acre sheep runs into farms, maybe—irrigate the deserts, &—Federation is sound; but better not hurry to cut loose from England.”

[9] But Twain fell in love with India.He was astonished by the colors and the chaos, as well as the strangeness of the locals and their customs. While he disliked and tended to denounce oppression wherever he saw it (his wife mostly kept him from making gauche comments to Australian reporters), he thought imperialism worked in India,and even praised Britain’s harsh response to the Mutiny of 1857: “The military history of England is old and great, but I think it must be granted that the crushing of the Mutiny is the greatest chapter in it.”

[8]譬如，扎克斯写到，尽管澳大利亚给马克·吐温带来了巨大成功，但他对这个国家本身并不宽容。他在笔记中写到，土生土长的澳大利亚人对自己国家“很敏感”，“如同人们对待圣物一样——不能容忍别人批评自己的国家。澳大利亚人认为他们将在这里建立一个强大的国家，有朝一日，会实现独立——建立一个共和国——开垦6万英亩，乃至10万英亩的大牧场，将其变成农田，或许——灌溉沙漠，而且——联邦制挺好；但最好不要急于同英国断绝关系。”

[9]但是马克·吐温爱上了印度。他对印度的异域风光、混乱局势，以及奇特的当地人和习俗感到吃惊。尽管他不喜欢，还倾向于谴责所到之处看到的压迫（多数情况下他的妻子都阻止他向澳大利亚记者发表锋芒毕露的言论），但他认为帝国主义在印度行得通，甚至赞扬英国对1857年印度叛乱的残酷镇压：“英国的军事史古老而伟大，但我认为必须承认，粉碎印度叛乱是其中最伟大的篇章。”

[10] After India, the three Clemenses travelled to South Africa, where Twain allowed himself to become involved in a dispute between the Dutch Boers and the English, before they headed to England at the end of July in 1896, where Twain began work on his travel book.

[11] As successful as the speaking tour was, Twain wouldn’t have come close to paying his debts had it not been for the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers,a 53-year-old executive at Standard Oil and one of America’s wealthiest men.Chasing the Last Laugh is as much about Rogers’s financial housecleaning and stewardship of Twain’s business affairs and the friendship between the two as it is about Twain’s “raucous” tour.Rogers’s son-in-law bought Webster’s leaky Library of American Literature,and the Standard Oil man, to whom Twain had given the right of attorney,transferred the rights of all of Twain’s work to his wife to protect it from his creditors. Equally important, Rogers negotiated a collected works to be coissued by two competing publishing houses after Twain’s tour. This would be his major source of income for years to come.

[10]离开印度后，马克·吐温一家三人前往南非，在那里他卷入了荷兰布尔人与英国人之间的纠纷。1896年7月底他前往英国，开始撰写旅行游记。

[11]尽管马克·吐温的巡回演讲十分成功，但若不是亨利·赫特斯尔顿·罗杰斯的帮助，他还是无法还清债务。当年53岁的罗杰斯是标准石油公司的高管，也是当时美国最富有的人之一。《追逐最后的笑声》记述马克·吐温“喧闹”之旅的同时，又记述了罗杰斯帮他清偿债务、打理生意以及他们的友谊。罗杰斯的女婿购买了经济上亏损的韦伯斯特美国文学图书馆，而马克·吐温授权给罗杰斯，让他把自己所有的作品权都转给了他的妻子，以免落入债权人之手。同样重要的是，在马克·吐温的巡回演讲结束之后，罗杰斯将马克·吐温全集交由两家相互竞争的出版社共同出版发行。这笔钱将是他未来的主要收入来源。

[12]扎克斯也让人们重新认识了马克·吐温本人。《追逐最后的笑声》让人们更清楚地看到，在管理金钱方面，马克·吐温是多么轻率和鲁莽。仅仅在偿清债务10天之后，他就给罗杰斯写了一封过分热情的信，叙说了一位奥地利发明家设计的新型电动“印花机”，据说这个机器会给地毯业和纺织业带来革命性的变化。虽然马克·吐温提议的投资落空了，但他最终还是买了一家公司的股票，这家公司出售一种德国的奶粉提取物——普来斯蒙，马克·吐温声称其治愈了他多年的消化不良症。如果在英国、美国，产品的销售情况也不会好。

[12] Zacks also casts new light on Twain himself. What becomes clearer in Chasing the Last Laugh is just how rash and gullible the man was when it came to managing money. A mere 10 days after he finally paid off his debts in full, Twain wrote Rogers a gushing letter about a new “Designing Machine”built by an Austrian inventor that would supposedly revolutionize the carpet and textile industries. While Twain’s proposed investment fell through, he would eventually buy stock in a company that sold Plasmon, a German milk powder extract that Twain claimed had cured him of lifelong indigestion. It would have little success in either England or America.

[13] His wife’s insistence that he pay all his investors back in full—against Rogers’s advice—endeared him to the American public, making him even more popular after his financial failures than before. In short, it wasn’t just the speaking tour that remade Twain, it was H. H. Rogers and Olivia Langdon Clemens. Without them, he probably would have ended his life bitter, unloved by the public, and if not poor at least unwealthy—that is, as only Samuel L.Clemens and not Mark Twain. ■

[13]马克·吐温的妻子并未听从罗杰斯的劝告，执意要他偿清全部的债务，这种执着给他赢得了美国公众的喜爱，甚至让他在生意失败后更受欢迎。总之，不仅是这次巡回演讲重塑了马克·吐温，更是罗杰斯和妻子奥利维亚·兰登·克莱门斯的功劳。如果没有他们，他可能会了此一生、苦不堪言，不被公众所爱，虽说不上贫穷，至少也不富有，只能作为无名的塞缪尔·L.克莱门斯而不是众人熟知的马克·吐温而终此一生。 □