My Mark Twain

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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--My Mark Twain

by William Dean Howells




MY MARK TWAIN




I.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had
the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self
prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling
on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.

At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know
what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to this garment, but
probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to
any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his
crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,
Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which
afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through
me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense
publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which
expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his
last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible
occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not
vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our
modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in
it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave
the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these
pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I
remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of
white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored
uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I
remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of,
"Oh, Youth!" That was her name for him among their friends, and it
fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a
shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a
boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but
always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for
just the boy he was.




II.

There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
'Vagabond Adventures', a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me
of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good
stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of
an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who
took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full
of good fellowship, Bret Harte's fleeting dramatization of Clemens's
mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. "Why,
fellows," he spluttered, "this is the dream of Mark's life," and I
remember the glance from under Clemens's feathery eyebrows which betrayed
his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in
recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the
feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a
pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them
with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary
lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
to Clemens.

Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be
his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner's, but Clemens had
come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial
neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses
where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian
names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin
coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to
humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most
original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner's
humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
in completed sale. Of the 'Innocents Abroad' he said, "It sells right
along just like the Bible," and 'Roughing It' was swiftly following,
without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured
Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
"Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
circulation," he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as
we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
opulence.




III.

The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
Warner's European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after
we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come
away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York
together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing
a syllable till we had occasion to say, "Well, we're there." Then, with
our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
again. Or at times he would reason high--

"Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,"

walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.

He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife's belief, for
it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her
goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her
household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of
her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion
for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her
ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but
she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which
Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had
been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the
beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found
capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her
father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation
of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. "He
asked me," Clemens would say, "if I couldn't give him the names of people
who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard
from him. 'Well, Mr. Clemens,' he said, 'nobody seems to have a very
good word for you.' I hadn't referred him to people that I thought were
going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was
disappointed. 'So I guess I shall have to back you myself.'"

Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and
in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
children. There had been a boy, and "Yes, I killed him," Clemens once
said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
this was through its father's imprudence. I never heard him speak of his
son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the
minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in
everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set
him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he
used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin
and talking and talking.

It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to
tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs.
Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who
snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement
in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive
sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she
more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew
itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run
over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.

His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could
have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death,
that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in
lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from
him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she
was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, "I wish I was with Livy." I do
not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful
woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her
forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses,
and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of
humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man
who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with
Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
them was his equal in humanity.




IV.

Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect's connivance, a
luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk
together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the
gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it
well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and,
without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument
against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales
and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly
remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
Stormfield's Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
knew already from his many stories about him.

We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was
a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.

I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention
my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative
reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always
reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it
had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of
the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of
travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I
remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had
certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he
seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith
was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime
favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been
reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her,
"You seem to think that woman could write," and he forbore withering me
with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he
more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any
preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the
theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very
distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away
at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
over Clemens wrote, "That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
to me." I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay's it was
that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
vengefulness of William Morris's 'Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,' and how
he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker's
joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:

"I am threescore years and ten,
And my hair is 'nigh turned gray,
But I am glad to think of the moment when
I took his life away."

Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for
himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.

Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was
what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I
have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote
as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made
it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when
he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
better found than in Twain's 'Autobiography,' it was not a "style" it was
unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
tore it all apart, and "chucked" the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On
minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.




V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable "mush of
concession," as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
stronger language than 'The Atlantic' had stomach for, and once when I
sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
wrote back: "Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
to her I skipped that." It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in
that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to
their friends.