Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  When Kenneth R. Andrews published his groundbreaking study of the Nook Farm literary community in 1950, Mark Twain’s eight-thousand-square-foot Hartford mansion of nineteen rooms and seven bathrooms (with flushing toilets) had already been sold several times and finally reduced to the quarters of the Mark Twain branch of the town library on the ground floor and residential apartments on the upper floors. In the words of Wilson H. Faude, curator of the Mark Twain Memorial Committee, which oversaw the house’s full restoration on the centenary of its initial construction in 1874: “Where Thomas Nast, Edwin Booth, William Dean Howells, Generals Sheridan and Sherman, and Sir Henry Morton Stanley had dined, strangers checked out books.” Before it was a library, the grand house at 351 Farmington Avenue had even served as a boys’ school. The then shabby building may suggest what could have happened to Mark Twain’s genius after he moved into upper-middle-class Hartford and lived there for almost twenty years. At it turned out, of course, he didn’t fade away with the house over the next hundred years, but neither did Mark Twain the humorist sell Samuel Langhorne Clemens down the river of American literature, contrary to Van Wyck Brooks’s argument in 1920. Mark Twain coexisted with Sam Clemens in Hartford, but wrote mostly during the summer months in a hilltop study at his sister-in-law’s Quarry Farm estate outside Elmira.2

  His neighbors and social intimates at Nook Farm, where the unlocked doors permitted unannounced visits from one house to another, included John Hooker, a direct descendant of the founder of Hartford, and his brother-in-law Francis Gillette, a renowned abolitionist and temperance advocate. Together they had purchased the Nook Farm tract of one hundred acres about three miles west of downtown Hartford, then one of the most prosperous towns in America. Hartford was the home of the country’s first insurance companies and the Colt Fire Arms Manufactory, among other thriving businesses, including the American Publishing Company. Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband, Calvin, a retired theology professor, had resided in the Nook Farm community since 1862, and by this time she was weathering the tarnishing of her reputation that began with her 1869 Atlantic Monthly essay about Byron’s incestuous affair with his half-sister.3 Also living in the community were her sister Isabella Hooker and Isabella’s eldest daughter, Mary Hooker Burton. Isabella’s reputation would also suffer (at least in the eyes of Twain and other Nook Farmers) for her support of fellow feminist Victoria Woodhull’s 1872 denunciation of Henry Ward Beecher as an adulterer. Twichell, as we know, lived nearby, and so did Charles Dudley Warner and his wife, Susan. Warner, who ran the Courant with Joseph R. Hawley, a recent governor of the state, was known generally for graceful travel letters that he would first publish in the Courant before gathering them into books. Just before Twain moved into the neighborhood, Warner was enjoying the success of a collection of nature sketches published as a book, My Summer in a Garden, in 1871. In his younger days as a bachelor, he had been a railroad surveyor out west, and those experiences would soon be put to use in his collaboration with Twain, The Gilded Age. In sum, Twain’s neighbors were literary and clerical professionals as well as stolid Republicans who were growing a little uncomfortable with the radicals in the party, now that the war was over and slavery seemingly abolished.

  One of those Republicans was William Dean Howells of the Atlantic. He didn’t live in Nook Farm, but once he and Twain became close friends (and literary allies, Howells always writing glowing reviews of Twain’s books, Twain writing for the Atlantic) in the 1870s, Twain tried to get him to move there from his home just outside Boston in Cambridge. They first met in Boston in late 1869 after Howells had reviewed The Innocents Abroad. The review was unsigned, but everyone knew who was writing the reports for the magazine’s review section. Twain had gone to its editorial offices at 124 Tremont Street to thank James T. Fields, who in 1869 was still the chief editor of the Atlantic; Fields introduced him to Howells. Howells, later known as the “Dean of American Literature” (who memorably would call Twain the “Lincoln of our literature”), became the John Updike of his era, a realist whose novels captured the details of everyday life in dramas about current pressing social and psychological issues. He was also nearly as prolific as Updike, publishing more than sixty novels, travel books, and collections of essays. As his reward for writing one of the campaign biographies of Lincoln, he served as U.S. consul in Venice during the war. (Significantly, both Howells and Twain managed to sidestep the fratricide of their times.) His earliest books were travel essays—Venetian Life (1866) and Italian Journeys (1867). Both he and his new friend would labor on almost the same schedule with similar distractions before their ultimate achievements—The Rise of Silas Lapham and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.4

  Another Boston literary friend who would visit the Twain mansion in Hartford, with his wife, Lilian, was Thomas Bailey Aldrich. As DeLancey Ferguson observes, Mark Twain was never fully accepted by the New England literati. Even Howells had his doubts, perhaps ultimately seeing Twain as great mainly as a humorist whose material never mocked “any good or really fine thing,” unlike the humorists who preceded him who were “on the side of slavery, of drunkenness, and of irreligion.” But it was chiefly he and Aldrich, both Bostonians by adoption, who accepted Sam as their friend and literary compatriot. Yet Twain’s relationship with Aldrich, who had recently published the prototypical A Story of a Bad Boy, almost got off on the wrong foot. When Aldrich brought Twain home for dinner unannounced one night in the winter of 1872, his wife had no idea who her guest was and also suspected, from his manner and slow speech, that he was intoxicated. As a result, she kept putting off the expected dinner until Sam got the message that he wasn’t wanted as Mrs. Aldrich’s guest and departed. When she discovered from her husband that she had mistaken his drawl and southwestern vernacular for the slurred speech of a drunk, she was naturally embarrassed. Twain never forgot the slight, even though the Aldriches became regular social acquaintances. He may indeed have been slightly intoxicated that evening, for while the imperfect speech was explained, nothing (in Lilian Aldrich’s own account of this incident) was offered to explain away Twain’s “marked inability to stand perpendicular.”5

  A third literary ally who made at least two visits to Mark Twain in Hartford and regularly drank to excess was his old literary companion and adviser from San Francisco, Bret Harte. In 1871 Harte had come east in a far more triumphant fashion than Mark Twain had in 1867 (or 1868), and he landed a lavish contract with the Atlantic to provide ten stories, for ten thousand dollars, on a par with those he had already published in The Luck of Roaring Camp, and Other Sketches (1870). There is at least a remote possibility that this deal was at the root of their notoriously troubled relationship. Twain seems not to have made totally public his dislike for Harte until he was on his international lecture campaign in 1895 (the tour that would result in Following the Equator). Harte, as Twain gratefully admitted to Aldrich in 1871, had read the Innocents Abroad manuscript for him, and had (then and earlier) “trimmed & trained & schooled me patiently until he changed me from an awkward utterer of coarse grotesqueness to a writer of paragraphs & chapters that have found a certain favor in the eyes of even some of the very decentest people in the land.”

  Yet Harte’s character, especially his lack of integrity, came to annoy Twain mightily. “In the early days,” he recorded in his autobiography, “I liked Bret Harte, and so also did the others, but by and by I got over it; so did the others.” Among other things, Harte had been “an incorrigible borrower of money.” In June 1872 Harte visited Twain in Hartford and borrowed $250, which was never repaid. One Christmas season in 1876 Harte was guest at the newly completed “Steamboat Gothic” mansion. He was working on a story but in the process managed to consume at least two bottles of whiskey, staying up all night. During the same visit the two began cowriting a play to be called Ah Sin, based on Harte’s then famous poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” (better known as “The Heathen Chinee”). The “last feather” came when, toward the end of his visit of se
veral weeks, he included Mrs. Clemens in his “smart and bright criticisms leveled at everything” in the house.6 Their play’s failure to become a hit, along with Harte’s failure, at least in Twain’s view, to do his share of the work in seeing to the play’s successful production, would end their once promising friendship at a time when Harte’s descent was already well under way.

  The house in which Harte made his deadliest mistake with Twain no doubt helped to precipitate the impolite remarks, for it was a monument to Twain’s towering success, far greater by then than that of his mentor in the West. It cost around sixty thousand dollars to build then—not counting the several acres on which it stood. Today the Twain house no longer overlooks a branch of the Park River, long since piped underground because of persistent flooding, but instead a parking lot for the Mark Twain Visitors Center, completed in 2003. In general, the Victorian structures remaining (except for Stowe’s Victorian cottage, her carriage house, and Twain’s) have been either demolished or retrofitted as apartments in economically depressed Hartford. The Hooker house, which the Clemenses rented in Nook Farm, is now an apartment complex partially concealed from the street by another apartment building.

  Twain was adjusting to the fact of his rising wealth, but the question nevertheless remains why he and Livy built such an expensive and indeed curious house. He could afford to do so at this point only with his wife’s inheritance, but earlier, during the courtship, he had emphasized to his mother and sister Pamela that he did not want to depend on Livy’s money for their support.7 (Ultimately, he did and lost much of it in bad investments.) Perhaps his description of Hartford during his very first visit explains why he built his castle there. In a letter to the Alta of January 25, 1868, written just after he signed a contract with Elisha Bliss for The Innocents Abroad, he sang the city’s praises, calling it “the best built and the handsomest town” he had ever seen. “The dwelling houses,” he continued, “are the amplest in size, and the shapeliest, and have the most capacious ornamental grounds about them. . . . This is the centre of Connecticut wealth.” He noted that the city’s population was forty thousand, “and the most of them ride in sleighs. That is a sign of prosperity, and a knowledge of how to live—isn’t it?”8 Having married a wealthy woman and becoming rich himself, he sought to make a positive, though still particular, impression on the Nook Farm community. Instead, he created a curiosity that ironically reflected the fact that this writer capable of “word paintings” was still basically a humorist whose job it was to startle people out of their own sense of what to expect. This unintended image of the Writer vying with the Humorist would be a problem for the rest of his career.

  As Justin Kaplan astutely wrote of the house, this “stately mansion was a classic American success story, a reminder that it was possible to be born in a two-room clapboard house in Florida, Missouri, . . . and to become world-famous, . . . and live a life of domestic bliss in a house that was the marvel of Hartford.” And marvel it was—though marveled at mainly (according to the local newspaper) as “one of the oddest looking buildings in the State.” The exterior featured three turrets, none of which was the same size as the other, five balconies, a porch that wound around the house to the left of the main entrance, brickwork both painted and, in places, set in vertical rows. The designer was Edward Tuckerman Potter, of New York, a writer and musician in addition to an architect, mainly known for designing churches and college buildings. He had designed Charles Dudley Warner’s house, and Twain’s would be one of his last before he retired as an architect and turned to other career challenges.9

  The interior was signature Victorian in its deliberate exclusion of sunlight. The first of three floors featured an entrance hall, a guest room, a drawing room, a dining room, a library, a conservatory, and a kitchen wing with a pantry and servants’ hall and entry. In the last, Patrick McAleer, the coachman who had been with the family since Buffalo, and housekeeper Katy Leary, whom Livy hired in 1880 from Elmira, where Leary’s sister worked for the Charles Langdon family, labored along with several other servants, preparing meals with vegetables and meats fresh from the local markets. An ornate carved wooden staircase in the entry hall led to five bedrooms and a servants’ wing on the second floor. One of the bedrooms was intended for Sam’s study, but was turned into a schoolroom for the children. There was an additional guest room where Livy’s mother stayed when visiting from Elmira, a bedroom for Clara and ultimately Jean (born respectively in 1874 and 1880), one for Susy, and one for Sam and Livy, which was eventually dominated by a large, intricately carved wooden bedstead that the Clemenses would buy in Venice in 1878. The third floor offered yet another guest room, an additional servants’ room, and a large billiard room that doubled as Sam’s study. It opened onto a deck that he sometimes occupied when he wanted his butler, George Griffin (a former slave who came one day “to wash some windows, & remained half a generation”), to say he had “stepped out” without telling an actual lie to unwanted guests—an example, perhaps, of the moral hairsplitting required in that Social Darwinist era of upper-class America. The McAleer family, with seven children, lived on the second floor of the adjoining carriage house, or stable. During 1883, when all seven of the McAleer children one after another came down with scarlet fever within a period of six months, “there was,” Twain told Mrs. Fairbanks, “no communication between the house and the stable except by speaking tubes.”10

  Mark Twain had arrived. Less than a decade after the Civil War and the end of the Southern cause he had essentially abandoned, he found himself in the lap of Yankee luxury. In fact, it was just ten years and two months between the time he and his fellow Marion Rangers had skedaddled and the time when he occupied the Beecher house in Nook Farm. The house he built there would be home to the family of Samuel Langhorne Clemens for most of the next (and best) two decades of his life, a stretch of singular happiness punctuated by two family trips abroad in the seventies and summers in Elmira at Quarry Farm, owned by Theodore and Susan Crane, Livy’s adopted sister. Here in Hartford the three children would grow up—receive home schooling—and even put on plays based on their father’s novel about a prince and a pauper, which resembles in certain aspects that now famous black and white twosome in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He was composing The Prince and the Pauper at the same time, but Huckleberry Finn would never be dramatized in his home because the family generally wanted Mark Twain to write as Samuel Clemens. In an unfinished biography of her father that Susy began writing in 1885 (at the age of thirteen), she even apologized for his perceived lowbrow literature (though later she came to better appreciate her father’s true genius). But then, in this house Mark Twain did live as Samuel Clemens, the American “phunny phellow” who could write with the best of the Victorian bores. That kind of writing came later in the life of the house, of course. For now, if only to pay the mounting bills this audacious house generated, he had to continue writing as Mark Twain.

  23 Sequel to a Success

  Roughing It became Mark Twain’s first major effort as a professional writer, planned as such at the very outset. His previous books, The Celebrated Jumping Frog and The Innocents, had evolved almost entirely out of his short magazine pieces and newspaper letters. It was a major step up as a professional writer. Even before he had withdrawn the Hawaii book of travel letters, he fell into the chance to travel on the Quaker City to Europe and the Near East, after originally not knowing how he was going to pursue Anson Burlingame’s idea of writing from Asia. If Elisha Bliss hadn’t approached him about collecting those Quaker City letters into a book, he might not ever have written The Innocents Abroad, especially after the financial failure of the Jumping Frog and his inability to get his Hawaii letters published in 1867 (about half of them would go into Roughing It). After the grand financial success of The Innocents Abroad, with its format of travel letters that allowed the embedding of slices of American humor, he naturally wanted to try to repeat the success and so ultimately chose his experiences as a silver and g
old prospector in Nevada and California. It was the right move, for Roughing It eventually sold almost as many copies as The Innocents Abroad.

  Henry Nash Smith notes that in this new book he showed for the first time “a marked advance toward the structural firmness of fiction” in a long narrative, and also that “the first half of Roughing It is a striking demonstration of Mark Twain’s ability to recognize the representative aspects of his own experience.” But after getting his narrator across the plains and through the “greenhorn” stages of life in the West, Twain “ran out of gas,” though he didn’t stop writing, as he would learn to do with future books. He remained at work on the book by relying on scrapbooks and thus falling into the same inconsistencies in the characterization of the narrator found in The Innocents Abroad, for which many notebooks and journalistic letters were also employed.1 To fill out the approximately 350 remaining pages of this second travel book, he imported material from his writings in the Enterprise, the California newspapers, even the Buffalo Express and the Galaxy. In fact, six of the letters he wrote for the Express’s “Around the World” series focused on his adventures in the West and may have been the earliest germ for Roughing It. Originally, he had planned, at Bliss’s urging, another trip for adventures to fill yet another travel book, but this time he couldn’t get away. He had just been married and his father-in-law was fatally ill. Other domestic distractions, as we have seen, made such travel abroad impossible for the foreseeable future.2