



Produced by David Widger





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 
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