August 18, 2025 • 13 mins
William Dean Howells (1837-1920) forged a deep friendship with Mark Twain beginning in 1869, when Twain entered The Atlantic Monthlys Boston office to express his gratitude for Howells positive review of *Innocents Abroad*. As Howells later assumed the role of editor, The Atlantic Monthly became a pivotal platform for many of Twains works, including his acclaimed non-fiction piece, *Life on the Mississippi*. In *My Mark Twain*, Howells shares a captivating literary memoir filled with remarkable anecdotes, including their encounters with former President Ulysses Grant, who was then crafting his own classic autobiography—a project Twain would support through a groundbreaking publishing deal. Howells also beautifully captures the warmth of Twains family life during his numerous visits to the Twain residences in Hartford and Stormfield. (Summary by Dennis Sayers).
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Chapter fifteen of My Mark Twain. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox dot org. My Mark
Twain by William Dean Howells, Chapter fifteen. When Messrs Houghton
(00:25):
and Mifflin became owners of the Atlantic Monthly, mister Houghton
fancied having some breakfasts and dinners which should bring the
publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the
subtle fiend of advertising, who has now grown so on
(00:46):
blushing bold, lurked under the covers at these banquets, And
the junior partner and the young editor had their joint
and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste
and the principle of them. But they were really very
simple hearted and honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as
(01:08):
they ought, and gave great pleasure and no pain. I
forget some of the emergent occasions, but I am sure
of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whitdheer, and
a birthday luncheon to missus Stowe, and I think a
birthday dinner to Longfellow. But the passing years have left
(01:32):
me in the dark as to the pretext of that
supper at which Clemens made his awful speech and came
so near being the death of us all. At the
breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady
contributor's company, but that night there were only men, and
(01:53):
because of our strength we survived. I suppose the year
was about eighteen seventy nine, But here the almanac is unimportant,
and I can only say that it was after Clemens
had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where
he found himself, to his own great explicit satisfaction, he
(02:15):
had jubilantly accepted our invitation and had promised a speech, which,
it appeared afterward, he had prepared with unusual care and confidence.
It was his custom always to think out his speeches,
mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
(02:36):
system of mnemonics, which he had invented. On the dinner table,
a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt cellar, and butter
plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard table,
a ball, a queue, and a piece of chalk served
the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on
(02:58):
the brain, he had full command of the phrases which
his ex cogitation had attached to them, and which embodied
the ideas in perfect form. He believed he had been
particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening,
and he had worked it out in joyous self reliance.
(03:20):
It was the notion of three tramps, three dead beats,
visiting a California mining camp and imposing themselves upon the
innocent miners, as respectively, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The humor of the conception must
(03:42):
prosper or must fail, according to the mood of the hearer.
But Clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and
he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph. But there were
two things that he had not taken into account. One
was the species of religious veneration in which these men
(04:04):
were held by those nearest them, a thing that I
should not be able to realize to people remote from
them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
dignity of the thing called presence, for want of some
clearer word, so that no one could well approach them
in a personally light or trifling spirit. I do not
(04:28):
suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more piously
loved them than Clemens himself. But the intoxication of his
fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard and
emboldened him to the other thing which he had not
taken into account, namely the immense hazard of working his
(04:51):
fancy out before their faces and expecting them to enter
into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow
nor Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried.
But even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly
honored them would have overcome their horror with difficulty, and
(05:15):
perhaps would not have overcome it at all. The publisher,
with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling
the abhorred function of calling people to their feet and
making them speak. When I came to Clemens, I introduced
(05:38):
him with the cordial admiring I had for him, as
one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here I
said in some was a humorist who never left you
hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke. And then
the amazing mistake, the bewildering, blunder, the cruel catastrophe, was
(06:03):
upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including
the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay.
There fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch,
(06:25):
which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only
by the hysterical and blood curdling laughter of a single
guest whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.
Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down
at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction,
(06:49):
and so I do not know how Clemens looked, except
when I stole a glance at him and saw him
standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at
the grete three, whom his jest had made its theme,
(07:11):
I was aware of longfellow sitting upright and regarding the
humorist with an air of pensive puzzle. Of Holmes busily
writing on his menu with a well feigned effect of preoccupation,
and of Emerson holding his elbows and listening with a
(07:33):
sort of Jovian oblivion, of this netherworld, in that lapse
of memory which saved him in those later years from
so much bother Clemens must have dragged his joke to
the climax and left it there. But I cannot say
this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward,
(07:54):
at the table where the immense, the holy, innocent, the
truly unamadgined affront was offered, I have no longer the
least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of
the hotel where Clemens was not to sleep but to
toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner's saying in the gloom, well, Mark,
(08:20):
you're a funny fellow. It was as well as anything
else he could have said, but Clemens seemed unable to
accept the tribute. I stayed the night with him, and
the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about
and he made some purchases of bric a bract for
his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away
(08:43):
from bric a brac as ever the soul of man was.
He went home by an early train, and he lost
no time in writing back to the three divine personalities
which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all
wrote back to him, making it as light for him
(09:03):
as they could. I've heard that Emerson was a good deal. Mystified,
and in his sublime forgetfulness, asked who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort
of annoyance. But I am not sure that this is accurate.
What I am sure of is that longfellow a few
(09:24):
days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of
Clemens and said, ah, he is a wag, and nothing more.
Holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother
humorous might well feel that he had not lost an
instant in replying to Clemens's letter and assuring him that
(09:47):
there had not been the least offense, and entreating him
never to think of the matter again. He said that
he was a fool, but he was God's fool. Holmes
quoted from the letter with a true sense of the
pathos and the humor of this self abasement. To me,
(10:09):
Clemens wrote a week later, it doesn't get any better.
It burns like fire. But now I understand that it
was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder
which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived
of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization,
(10:32):
as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous
travesty was a break he saw too late, for which
there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not
so long afterward when some mention was made of the
(10:56):
incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness,
but I don't admit it was a mistake, and it
was not so in the minds of all witnesses at
second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner, there came
a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the
(11:17):
newspaper report of it, praising clemens burlesque as the richest
piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense
of incongruity, in its perpetration, in the presence of its victims.
I think it must always have ground in Clement's soul,
that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if
(11:39):
he had some more favoring occasion, he could retrieve his
loss in it by giving the thing the right setting.
Not more than two or three years ago he came
to try me as to trying it again at a
meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own
my fears while I ledged Child's note on the other hand.
(12:02):
But in the end he did not try it with
the newspapermen. I do not know whether it was ever
printed or not, But since the thing happened, I have
often wondered how much offense there really was in it.
I am not sure, but the horror of the spectators
read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling
(12:25):
than they felt. But it must have been difficult for
them to bear it with equanimity, to be sure they
were not themselves not The joke was of course beside them. Nevertheless,
their personality was trifled with, and I could only end
(12:45):
by reflecting that if I had been in their place,
I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have
liked himself, for he had the heart for that sort
of wild play, and he so loved a joke that
even if it took the form of a liberty and
was yet a good joke, he would have loved it.
(13:09):
But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke. End
of Chapter fifteen, read by Denis Ayers in Modesto, California,
for LibriVox Winter two thousand and six.
Chapter fifteen of My Mark Twain. This is a LibriVox recording.
All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more
information or to volunteer, visit LibriVox dot org. My Mark
Twain by William Dean Howells, Chapter fifteen. When Messrs Houghton
(00:25):
and Mifflin became owners of the Atlantic Monthly, mister Houghton
fancied having some breakfasts and dinners which should bring the
publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the
subtle fiend of advertising, who has now grown so on
(00:46):
blushing bold, lurked under the covers at these banquets, And
the junior partner and the young editor had their joint
and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste
and the principle of them. But they were really very
simple hearted and honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as
(01:08):
they ought, and gave great pleasure and no pain. I
forget some of the emergent occasions, but I am sure
of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by Whitdheer, and
a birthday luncheon to missus Stowe, and I think a
birthday dinner to Longfellow. But the passing years have left
(01:32):
me in the dark as to the pretext of that
supper at which Clemens made his awful speech and came
so near being the death of us all. At the
breakfasts and luncheons we had the pleasure of our lady
contributor's company, but that night there were only men, and
(01:53):
because of our strength we survived. I suppose the year
was about eighteen seventy nine, But here the almanac is unimportant,
and I can only say that it was after Clemens
had become a very valued contributor of the magazine, where
he found himself, to his own great explicit satisfaction, he
(02:15):
had jubilantly accepted our invitation and had promised a speech, which,
it appeared afterward, he had prepared with unusual care and confidence.
It was his custom always to think out his speeches,
mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
(02:36):
system of mnemonics, which he had invented. On the dinner table,
a certain succession of knife, spoon, salt cellar, and butter
plate symbolized a train of ideas, and on the billiard table,
a ball, a queue, and a piece of chalk served
the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on
(02:58):
the brain, he had full command of the phrases which
his ex cogitation had attached to them, and which embodied
the ideas in perfect form. He believed he had been
particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech of that evening,
and he had worked it out in joyous self reliance.
(03:20):
It was the notion of three tramps, three dead beats,
visiting a California mining camp and imposing themselves upon the
innocent miners, as respectively, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The humor of the conception must
(03:42):
prosper or must fail, according to the mood of the hearer.
But Clemens felt sure of compelling this to sympathy, and
he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph. But there were
two things that he had not taken into account. One
was the species of religious veneration in which these men
(04:04):
were held by those nearest them, a thing that I
should not be able to realize to people remote from
them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
dignity of the thing called presence, for want of some
clearer word, so that no one could well approach them
in a personally light or trifling spirit. I do not
(04:28):
suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more piously
loved them than Clemens himself. But the intoxication of his
fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard and
emboldened him to the other thing which he had not
taken into account, namely the immense hazard of working his
(04:51):
fancy out before their faces and expecting them to enter
into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow
nor Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried.
But even this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly
honored them would have overcome their horror with difficulty, and
(05:15):
perhaps would not have overcome it at all. The publisher,
with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling
the abhorred function of calling people to their feet and
making them speak. When I came to Clemens, I introduced
(05:38):
him with the cordial admiring I had for him, as
one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here I
said in some was a humorist who never left you
hanging your head for having enjoyed his joke. And then
the amazing mistake, the bewildering, blunder, the cruel catastrophe, was
(06:03):
upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including
the burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay.
There fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch,
(06:25):
which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only
by the hysterical and blood curdling laughter of a single
guest whose name shall not be handed down to infamy.
Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down
at his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction,
(06:49):
and so I do not know how Clemens looked, except
when I stole a glance at him and saw him
standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at
the grete three, whom his jest had made its theme,
(07:11):
I was aware of longfellow sitting upright and regarding the
humorist with an air of pensive puzzle. Of Holmes busily
writing on his menu with a well feigned effect of preoccupation,
and of Emerson holding his elbows and listening with a
(07:33):
sort of Jovian oblivion, of this netherworld, in that lapse
of memory which saved him in those later years from
so much bother Clemens must have dragged his joke to
the climax and left it there. But I cannot say
this from any sense of the fact. Of what happened afterward,
(07:54):
at the table where the immense, the holy, innocent, the
truly unamadgined affront was offered, I have no longer the
least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of
the hotel where Clemens was not to sleep but to
toss in despair, and Charles Dudley Warner's saying in the gloom, well, Mark,
(08:20):
you're a funny fellow. It was as well as anything
else he could have said, but Clemens seemed unable to
accept the tribute. I stayed the night with him, and
the next morning, after a haggard breakfast, we drove about
and he made some purchases of bric a bract for
his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away
(08:43):
from bric a brac as ever the soul of man was.
He went home by an early train, and he lost
no time in writing back to the three divine personalities
which he had so involuntarily seemed to flout. They all
wrote back to him, making it as light for him
(09:03):
as they could. I've heard that Emerson was a good deal. Mystified,
and in his sublime forgetfulness, asked who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort
of annoyance. But I am not sure that this is accurate.
What I am sure of is that longfellow a few
(09:24):
days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of
Clemens and said, ah, he is a wag, and nothing more.
Holmes told me, with deep emotion, such as a brother
humorous might well feel that he had not lost an
instant in replying to Clemens's letter and assuring him that
(09:47):
there had not been the least offense, and entreating him
never to think of the matter again. He said that
he was a fool, but he was God's fool. Holmes
quoted from the letter with a true sense of the
pathos and the humor of this self abasement. To me,
(10:09):
Clemens wrote a week later, it doesn't get any better.
It burns like fire. But now I understand that it
was not shame that burnt, but rage for a blunder
which he had so incredibly committed. That to have conceived
of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our civilization,
(10:32):
as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous
travesty was a break he saw too late, for which
there was no repair. Yet the time came, and not
so long afterward when some mention was made of the
(10:56):
incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness,
but I don't admit it was a mistake, and it
was not so in the minds of all witnesses at
second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner, there came
a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the
(11:17):
newspaper report of it, praising clemens burlesque as the richest
piece of humor in the world, and betraying no sense
of incongruity, in its perpetration, in the presence of its victims.
I think it must always have ground in Clement's soul,
that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if
(11:39):
he had some more favoring occasion, he could retrieve his
loss in it by giving the thing the right setting.
Not more than two or three years ago he came
to try me as to trying it again at a
meeting of newspaper men in Washington. I had to own
my fears while I ledged Child's note on the other hand.
(12:02):
But in the end he did not try it with
the newspapermen. I do not know whether it was ever
printed or not, But since the thing happened, I have
often wondered how much offense there really was in it.
I am not sure, but the horror of the spectators
read more indignation into the subjects of the hapless drolling
(12:25):
than they felt. But it must have been difficult for
them to bear it with equanimity, to be sure they
were not themselves not The joke was of course beside them. Nevertheless,
their personality was trifled with, and I could only end
(12:45):
by reflecting that if I had been in their place,
I should not have liked it myself. Clemens would have
liked himself, for he had the heart for that sort
of wild play, and he so loved a joke that
even if it took the form of a liberty and
was yet a good joke, he would have loved it.
(13:09):
But perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke. End
of Chapter fifteen, read by Denis Ayers in Modesto, California,
for LibriVox Winter two thousand and six.
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