I have always been interested to see, up close, where writers worked and lived. Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago, Chile, for instance, demonstrates his obsession with boats and the sea. All of the ceilings are low to the ground and the windows shaped like portholes. The house’s title “La Chascona,” comes from Neruda’s nickname for his third wife, so given because of her wild hair.

Then there is William Faulkner’s house in Oxford, Mississippi, with its beautiful old trees, its smokehouse and stables, and the modest study with walls covered on each side by Faulkner’s hand-scribbled notes.

A two-hour drive from Boston (by modern horseless carriage!), Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut, is where he spent his most productive years as a publisher and writer (before bankruptcy forced him and an all-female brood to move to Europe, ’cause “it was cheaper”). After two restorations, the place looks better than ever and throws its doors open to the public seven days a week.

And as it happens, this is quite the year for Mark Twain fanboys to make the trek. The year 2010 marks the 100th anniversary of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth (both occasions coincided with the celestial appearance of Haley’s comet), and the 125th anniversary of the book that Ernest Hemingway deemed America’s greatest: “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.”

We arrived at the Twain house on Monday morning and were greeted by an extremely genial/verging-on-sugary tour guide in the lobby, who ushered us into a small auditorium to see the first twenty minutes of Ken Burns’ film on Twain.

The documentary provides us with basic facts: Samuel Clemens was born in Florida, MO (where he said his birth “increased the population of the town by one percent”). Then his family moved to Hannibal, MS, where his boyhood was quite similar to that of Huck and Tom Sawyer. Clemens worked as a journalist, rode around on a steamboat, went prospecting in Nevada: an all-around interesting life, except for the sad truth that he outlived almost everyone in his family.

The house, incidentally right next door to good ole Harriett “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” Stowe’s place, is quite lavish. More than one would expect. It was equipped with indoor plumbing, burglar alarms, an “intercom” system, and–oh yeah–it was designed by TIFFANY. As in “Breakfast At–”.

You had chandeliers and little pink sitting stools. Vases filled with ostrich plumes. The dining room table was even set with ornate platters of fake oysters–something the family typically would have served at dinner parties with New England’s intellectual elite.

For sure, Twain made a lot of money from his writing, but a lot of the house’s grandeur was made possible by his wealthy and powerful in-laws, a point which our tour guide said often strained Clemens’ relationship with his humbler, frontier-based family.

What I found touching about the space was all the detail. Someone had obviously spent a lot of time in the painstaking recreation of the house’s interior and atmosphere.

Walking up the MC Escher-like staircase, we arrived at his youngest daughters’ rooms, covered with “Froggie Went A’ Courtin’” wallpaper–a wink, maybe, at Twain’s first book, a collection of short stories, published in 1867, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calavaras County.”
The master bedroom features Livy and Samuel Clemens’ Italian “angel bed,” which they would sleep atop backwards so that Samuel could admire the innately carved angel figurines on the headboard and “get his money’s worth.” This bed is also where, years later, their oldest daughter Suzy died at the age of 24.

We discovered from Twain’s study that he was just as easily distracted as any of us, having to position his writing table in the corner so that he could only see the wall while he was working.

Then again, the study’s centerpiece happened to be a billiards table. So one imagines that the pool shark took breaks from such intensive labor once in awhile.

The tour took an hour, often prolonged by one woman who claimed to be a descendant of Twain’s great-great-great grandfather and asked incessantly about each object in every room: “Is this original?”

As we were leaving, I asked the tour guide how he earned his Twain House badge. He said he had sold insurance for most of his life, in Hartford–”I didn’t even go to museums”–but was a huge Twain fan. Then he got laid off. “I was really lucky,” he said. “What if I had been from Philadelphia?”

All photos courtesy of Emerson alumnus Emmett Stone.

Tags:   Alexis · Connecticut · Hartford · Mark Twain · TravelNo Comments