I always imagined Mark Twain to be a southern gentleman in a white suit, relaxing on a porch with a view of the Mississippi River in a bucolic community.
While he did live by a river during his most productive years as a writer, it was not the mighty Mississippi but more of a stream, one which has since been replaced by a walking path. And instead of the rural south, Twain built his dream house in one of the most modern cities in the late 19th century, Hartford, Connecticut.
The brick multi-story mansion wasn't the biggest in the world, or even in Hartford, but it was one of the most modern when completed in 1874. Mr. Twain (or should I say Samuel Clemens, which was his birth name that he used throughout his life except as a byline?) was a man who fully embraced the most cutting edge technologies in his personal life while he wrote stories based loosely on his idyllic childhood in Hannibal, Missouri. Yes, this is where he wrote about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
How did he come to live in Connecticut?
Halley's Comet streaked through the sky on November 30, 1835, the day Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in the small town of Florida, Missouri, where he "increased the population by one per cent."
Four years later, his family moved to Hannibal, a small town on the Mississippi where he met people who would later be the basis of fictional characters who populated some of his popular novels. There was a local man named Injun Joe who got lost in some caverns near his house for days and was rumored to have survived by eating bats. There was a kind slave that Sam and other local boys called Uncle Daniel who regaled the boys with ghost stories told at night in his old shack. And of course, there were pre-adolescent boys, including himself, who would fish at a little island near their homes and dream up silly pranks to play on the townspeople. As Twain would later reflect, there was no more idyllic place to be a boy than Hannibal.
On a personal note, I felt the same about my home town of Westminster, California, for the era about 120 years later. It's Mark Twain's ability to convey that love of life that made his best works so special to all of us.
At age twelve, Samuel's formal education ended with the death of his father. He became a printer's apprentice, later joining his older brother Orion's newspaper where he got his first taste of writing. One headline on an apparently slow news day announced a tragic accident in which 500 people died, followed by the story which briefly said he had set up the headline but unfortunately the event had not yet occurred, so the story would be continued later.
At age seventeen, he heard the call of the big city, St. Louis, where he became a printer. For some reason, the Elton John song Honky Cat comes to mind. Watching the riverboats gliding down the Mississippi enticed Sam to leave his printer's career in 1858 to become a licensed river pilot. The next four years he cruised up and down the MIssissippi, meeting more great characters to fill his books. This is where he picked up the pen name Mark Twain, which meant 12 feet of water depth necessary for safe navigation of the river.
If you remember your history, it was in that time frame that the Civil War broke out, and the riverboat trade ground to a halt, so Sam, a southern boy who couldn't abide with defending slavery, headed to California to mine for gold and silver. He wasn't a very good miner, so he returned to writing, becoming a reporter. One of his stories about a Jumping Frog Jubilee in Calavaras County, California, became syndicated around the country, and Twain's renown as a humorist began.
Mark Twain became a famous travel writer, being sent on the newspaper's dime to Hawaii and then Europe and the Holy Lands, which he chronicled in a series of articles that later were compiled into his first book, Innocents Abroad.
By the time he was 33, Mark Twain was a well-known journalist with three books under his belt, and he faced the dilemma of wanting a wife too good to marry a man like him. He married Olivia Langdon, the daughter of a prominent New York family, to whom he remained happily wed for the rest of her life. Her father bought the young couple a mansion complete with butlers in New York, but after a year, they moved to Hartford where they commissioned the whimsical house next door to the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe ("Uncle Tom's Cabin").
It was a very modern house. The coal burning stove in the basement where servants prepared lavish dinner parties required for prominent members of society in Hartford, had pipes running to the bathrooms, so not only did they have indoor running water, which is something my grandparents didn't have in their home, but had running hot water. When I visited my grandparents house in the 1960s, taking a bath meant heating pots of water on the woodburning stove in the kitchen and pouring them into a wash tub on the porch. While my family didn't do this, the tradition on many farms in the 1800s was for the father to take the hottest bath, followed by the mother, and then through the kids until finally the baby was washed in water so cloudy with soap and grime that the old saying, "Don't throw the baby out with the bath water," was born.
Twain also had flushing toilets, although the historical society hasn't been able to ascertain exactly what type for the restoration. At my grandparent's house, they didn't add a flushing toilet until the 1960s. I remember hating that stinky outhouse, although I did kind of like the novelty of peeing in a pot at night when we didn't want to walk outdoors to relieve ourselves. Incidentally, that type of arrangement led to the saying about "being so poor we didn't have a pot to pee in."
Nobody had electricity in homes of 1874, but Samuel and Olivia had a house illuminated by natural gas, something made possible by being in thoroughly modern Hartford. Because there was no thermal paned glass, the windows were small to conserve heat in winter and cool in summer, and it was really the color of the walls that was used to create atmosphere. The parlor was a bright gold, making it relatively light, while the dining room walls were dark maroon to create a sort of candle lit atmosphere of a fine restaurant. The family room had a beautiful conservatory at one end, with a view to the creek and rolling countryside below.
The oldest daughter had her own room, and the two younger daughters shared a room. While two girls sharing a room with separate twin beds may not sound like cutting edge luxury today, consider that at the time it was a luxury to have a bed to share back in those days. It is also a nod to high childhood mortality rates of the era which did cost them a baby boy.
Sam had a billiard room perched at the top of the house, and that's also where he wrote his books. Friends who visited him while he worked said he had open books on the desk and discarded papers surrounding him on the floor. At night, his friends would come over to play pool and smoke cigars. Sam was said to have smoked 20 to 25 cigars per day. On two of the windows in the billiard room are opague marble panes carved by Tiffany depicting pool cues and balls on one and cocktail glasses on the other, giving me the image of Mark Twain as a Tommy Bahama of his era.
The seventeen years in this house were the happiest of his life. Of course, most of us can relate to the age of raising children being the happiest days. With no television or radios in the 1800s, Sam would entertain his daughters by telling them stories using a handful of objects on the fireplace mantle as props. He would make up a history for each item and, using them in the same order, spin a completely different yarn each evening for his children before they went to bed.
Being a thoroughly modern man with experience in the printing trade, Sam became enamored by a modern typesetting machine, the Paige Compositor, that could set type at six times as fast as any man. Unfortunately, it wasn't extremely reliable, and a slightly slower but more reliable competitor took most of the market while the Paige Compositor wound its way through the patent process. Only two prototypes were ever built, and Sam's gamble busted with the financial panic of that era. He went bankrupt.
Because the house was in his wife's name, as were his publishing rights for his books, he didn't lose them, but he couldn't stand the public humiliation and moved to Europe where he lived in what he called exile for nine years, eventually earning enough money giving speeches to pay off his creditors and return home. It had been cheaper for him to live in hotels in Europe than to maintain his household staff and social schedule in Hartford.
Unfortunately, one of his daughters had returned home alone and died of meningitus in the Mark Twain House, so he could never bring himself to return there. His beloved wife and one of his other daughters also died, and a bitterness became more apparent in his writings. He was a brilliant, well-read man, and he became more of a serious writer, attacking the problems of social ills directly rather than with the subtle prods of fictional situations like Huck's friendship with Slave Jim.
"I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: "Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together."--- Mark Twain
Mark Twain died on April 21, 1910, as Halley's Comet streaked across the sky.
No comments:
Post a Comment