S. L. Clemens (Mark Twain) at Hartford and Elmira
The story of Mark Twain’s life has been told so often that it has lost its novelty to many readers, though its romance has the quality of permanence. But people to-day are more interested in the author than they are in the printer, the pilot, the miner, or the reporter, of twenty or thirty years ago. The editor of one of the most popular American magazines once alluded to him as “the most widely read person who writes in the English language.” More than half a million copies of his books have been sold in this country. England and the English colonies all over the world have taken at least half as many in addition. His sketches and shorter articles have been published in every language which is printed, and the larger books have been translated into German, French, Italian, Norwegian, Danish, etc. He is one of the few living men with a truly world-wide reputation. Unless the excellent gentlemen who have been engaged in revising the Scriptures should claim the authorship of their work, there is no other living writer whose books are now so widely read as Mark Twain’s; and it may not be out of the way to add that in more than one pious household the “Innocents Abroad” is laid beside the family Bible, and referred to as a hand-book of Holy Land description and narrative.
Off the platform and out of his books, Mark Twain is Samuel L. Clemens—a man who was born November 30, 1835. He is of a very noticeable personal appearance, with his slender figure, his finely shaped head, his thick, curling, very gray hair, his heavy arched eyebrows, over dark gray eyes, and his sharply, but delicately, cut features. Nobody is going to mistake him for any one else, and his attempts to conceal his identity at various times have been comical failures. In 1871 Mr. Clemens made his home in Hartford, and in some parts of the world Hartford to-day is best known because it is his home. He built a large and unique house in Nook Farm, on Farmington Avenue, about a mile and a quarter from the old centre of the city. It was the fancy of its designer to show what could be done with bricks in building, and what effect of variety could be got by changing their color, or the color of the mortar, or the angle at which they were set. The result has been that a good many of the later houses built in Hartford reflect in one way or another the influence of this one. In their travels in Europe, Mr. and Mrs. Clemens have found various rich antique pieces of household furniture, including a great wooden mantel and chimney-piece, now in their library, taken from an English baronial hall, and carved Venetian tables, bedsteads, and other pieces. These add their peculiar charm to the interior of the house. The situation of the building makes it very bright and cheerful. On the top floor is Mr. Clemens’s own working-room. In one corner is his writing-table, covered usually with books, manuscripts, letters, and other literary litter; and in the middle of the room stands the billiard-table, upon which a large part of the work of the place is expended. By strict attention to this business, Mr. Clemens has become an expert in the game; and it is part of his life in Hartford to get a number of friends together every Friday for an evening of billiards. He even plans his necessary trips away from home so as to get back in time to observe this established custom.
Mr. Clemens divides his year into two parts, which are not exactly for work and play respectively, but which differ very much in the nature of their occupations. From the first of June to the middle of September, the whole family, consisting of Mr. and Mrs. Clemens and their three little girls, are at Elmira, N. Y. They live there with Mr. T. W. Crane, whose wife is a sister of Mrs. Clemens. A summer-house has been built for Mr. Clemens within the Crane grounds, on a high peak, which stands six hundred feet above the valley that lies spread out before it. The house is built almost entirely of glass, and is modeled exactly on the plan of a Mississippi steamboat’s pilot-house. Here, shut off from all outside communication, Mr. Clemens does the hard work of the year, or rather the confining and engrossing work of writing, which demands continuous application, day after day. The lofty work-room is some distance from the house. He goes to it every morning about half-past eight and stays there until called to dinner by the blowing of a horn about five o’clock. He takes no lunch or noon meal of any sort, and works without eating, while the rules are imperative not to disturb him during this working period. His only recreation is his cigar. He is an inveterate smoker, and smokes constantly while at his work, and, indeed, all the time, from half-past eight in the morning to half-past ten at night, stopping only when at his meals. A cigar lasts him about forty minutes, now that he has reduced to an exact science the art of reducing the weed to ashes. So he smokes from fifteen to twenty cigars every day. Some time ago he was persuaded to stop the practice, and actually went a year and more without tobacco; but he found himself unable to carry along important work which he undertook, and it was not until he resumed smoking that he could do it. Since then his faith in his cigar has not wavered. Like other American smokers, Mr. Clemens is unceasing in his search for the really satisfactory cigar at a really satisfactory price, and, first and last, has gathered a good deal of experience in the pursuit. It is related that, having entertained a party of gentlemen one winter evening in Hartford, he gave to each, just before they left the house, one of a new sort of cigar that he was trying to believe was the object of his search. He made each guest light it before starting. The next morning he found all that he had given away lying on the snow beside the pathway across his lawn. Each smoker had been polite enough to smoke until he got out of the house, but every one, on gaining his liberty, had yielded to the instinct of self-preservation and tossed the cigar away, forgetting that it would be found there by daylight. The testimony of the next morning was overwhelming, and the verdict against the new brand was accepted.
At Elmira, Mr. Clemens works hard. He puts together there whatever may have been in his thoughts and recorded in his note-books during the rest of the year. It is his time of completing work begun, and of putting into definite shape what have been suggestions and possibilities. It is not his literary habit, however, to carry one line of work through from beginning to end before taking up the next. Instead of that, he has always a number of schemes and projects going along at the same time, and he follows first one and then another, according as his mood inclines him. Nor do his productions come before the public always as soon as they are completed. He has been known to keep a book on hand for five years, after it was finished. But while the life at Elmira is in the main seclusive and systematically industrious, that at Hartford, to which he returns in September, is full of variety and entertainment. His time is then less restricted, and he gives himself freely to the enjoyment of social life. He entertains many friends, and his hospitable house, seldom without a guest, is one of the literary centers of the city. Mr. Howells is a frequent visitor, as Bayard Taylor used to be. Cable, Aldrich, Henry Irving, Stanley, and many others of wide reputation, have been entertained there. The next house to Mr. Clemens’s on the south is Charles Dudley Warner’s home, and the next on the east is Mrs. Stowe’s, so that the most famous three writers in Hartford live within a stone’s throw of each other.
At Hartford Mr. Clemens’s hours of occupation are less systematized, but he is no idler there. At some times he shuts himself in his working-room and declines to be interrupted on any account, though there are not wanting some among his expert billiard-playing friends to insist that this seclusion is merely to practice uninterruptedly while they are otherwise engaged. Certainly he is a skillful player. He keeps a pair of horses, and rides more or less in his carriage, but does not drive, or ride on horseback. He is, however, an adept upon the bicycle. He has made its conquest a study, and has taken, and also experienced, great pains with the work. On his bicycle he travels a great deal, and he is also an indefatigable pedestrian, taking long walks across country, frequently in the company of his friend the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, at whose church (Congregational) he is a pew-holder and regular attendant. For years past he has been an industrious and extensive reader and student in the broad field of general culture. He has a large library and a real familiarity with it, extending beyond our own language into the literatures of Germany and France. He seems to have been fully conscious of the obligations which the successful opening of his literary career laid upon him, and to have lived up to its opportunities by a conscientious and continuous course of reading and study which supplements the large knowledge of human nature that the vicissitudes of his early life brought with them. His resources are not of the exhaustible sort. He is a member of (among other social organizations) the Monday Evening Club of Hartford, that was founded nearly twenty years ago by the Rev. Dr. Bushnell, Dr. Henry, and Dr. J. Hammond Trumbull, and others, with a membership limited to twenty. The club meets on alternate Monday evenings from October to May in the houses of the members. One person reads a paper and the others then discuss it; and Mr. Clemens’s talks there, as well as his daily conversation among friends, amply demonstrate the spontaneity and naturalness of his irrepressible humor.
His inventions are not to be overlooked in any attempt to outline his life and its activities. “Mark Twain’s Scrap-Book” must be pretty well known by this time, for something like 100,000 copies of it have been sold yearly for ten years or more. As he wanted a scrap-book, and could not find what he wanted, he made one himself, which naturally proved to be just what other people wanted. Similarly, he invented a note-book. It is his habit to record at the moment they occur to him such scenes and ideas as he wishes to preserve. All note-books that he could buy had the vicious habit of opening at the wrong place and distracting attention in that way. So, by a simple contrivance, he arranged one that always opens at the right place; that is, of course, at the page last written upon. Other simple inventions by Mark Twain include a vest which enables the wearer to dispense with suspenders; a shirt, with collars and cuffs attached, which requires neither buttons nor studs; a perpetual-calendar watch-charm, which gives the day of the week and of the month; and a game whereby people may play historical dates and events upon a board, somewhat after the manner of cribbage, being a game whose office is twofold—to furnish the dates and events, and to impress them permanently upon the memory.
In 1885 Mark Twain and George W. Cable made a general tour of the country, each giving readings from his own works: and they had crowded houses and most cordial receptions. It was not a new sort of occupation for Mark Twain. Back in the early days, before his first book appeared, he delivered lectures in the Pacific States. His powers of elocution are remarkable, and he has long been considered by his friends one of the most satisfactory and enjoyable readers of their acquaintance. His parlor-reading of Shakspeare and Browning is described as a masterly performance. He has hitherto refused to undertake any general course of public reading, though very strong inducements have been offered to him to go to the distant English colonies, even as far as Australia.
Charles Hopkins Clark.
[After the failure of the firm of Charles L. Webster & Co., of which he was a member, Mr. Clemens accomplished the Herculean task of discharging debts not legally his, by a lecture tour in this country and in Australia. On his return home, he was met in England by the sad news of the sudden death of his eldest daughter. After four more years in Europe, for the most part in Vienna, he came back to this country. The Hartford home was left unoccupied, partly on account of sad associations, and the family spent the winter in New York. They then leased a house at Riverdale on the Hudson, from where they will move to the new home at Tarrytown which Mr. Clemens has recently bought.—Editors.]
GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS