August 18, 2025 • 14 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).
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Chapter seventeen 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 seventeen. A little after this,
(00:25):
Clemens went abroad with his family and lived several years
in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer intervals,
and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken.
He would write me when something I had written pleased him,
or when something signal occurred to him, or some political
(00:47):
or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished
to free his mind in pious profanity. During this sojourn
he came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he
had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin,
also he had the honor of dining with the German
(01:08):
Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a
high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
enjoy such a distinction. He knew how to take it
as a delegated recognition from the German people, but as
coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign, who had as yet
only his sovereignty to value himself upon. He was not
(01:31):
very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of
the event, as between the imperiality and himself on whom
it was supposed to confer such glory, crowning his life
with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in the
same mood in his account of an English dinner party
many years before, where there was a little Scotch lord present,
(01:56):
to whom the English tacitly referred Clement's talk, and laughed
when the Lord laughed, and were grave when he failed
to smile. Of all the men I have known, he
was the farthest from a snob. Though he valued recognition
and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair. When it
came in his way, he would not go out of
(02:19):
his way for it. But like most able and brilliant men,
he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness,
their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they
would say, and their pretty temporrious defiances. He had, of course,
(02:41):
the keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly
undignified in people, but he was not really interested in
what we call society affairs. They scarcely existed for him,
though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful fools who,
through some chance of birth or wealth, hold themselves different
(03:04):
from other men. Commonly, he did not keep things to himself,
especially dislikes and condemnations. Upon most current events. He had
strong opinions, and he uttered them strongly. After a while
he was silent in them, but if you tried him,
(03:24):
you found him in them. Still he was tremendously worked
up by a certain famous trial, as most of us
were who lived in the time of it. He believed
the accused guilty. But when we met some months after
it was over, and I tempted him to speak his
mind upon it, he would only say the man had
(03:45):
suffered enough, as if the man had expiated his wrong,
and he was not going to do anything to renew
his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His
continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but
he felt it his duty to forbear it. He was
(04:08):
apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his
resentments or he had so spent himself in uttering them
that he had literally nothing more to say. You could
offer clements, offenses that would anger other men, and he
did not mind. He would account for them from human nature.
(04:30):
But if he thought you had in any way played
him false, you were anathema and maranatha forever, Yet not forever,
perhaps for by and bye, after years, he would be silent.
There were two men, half a generation apart in their succession,
(04:50):
whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly even after
they were out of the world. He went farther than Heina,
who said that he forgave his enemies, but not till
they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies.
(05:11):
Their deaths seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base
evasion or a cowardly attempt to escape. He pursued them
to the grave. He would like to dig them up
and take vengeance upon their clay, so he said, But
no doubt he would not have hurt them if he
had them living before him. He was generous without stent,
(05:35):
he trusted without measure. But where his generosity was abused,
or his trust betrayed. He was a fire of vengeance,
a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool
patience from others could quench. It had to burn itself out.
He was eagerly and lavishly hospitable. But if a man
(06:00):
seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way
to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In
his frenzies of resentment or suspicion, he would not, and
doubtless could not listen to reason. But if between the
paroxysms he were confronted with the facts, he would own them,
(06:22):
no matter how much they told against him. At one
period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling
himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the
editor's head. Later he wrote me, with a humorous joy
(06:43):
in his mistake, that Warner had advised him to have
the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so,
And how many mentions of him did I reckon? He
had found in three months just two, and they were
rather in different than unfriendly. So the paper was acquitted,
(07:03):
and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never knew
how near he was to losing it with incredible preliminaries
of obloquy and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. His
memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and
he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a
(07:25):
band of music as could be bought or bribed for
the occasion. All that you had to do was to
signify that you wanted his help. When my father was
counsul at Toronto during Arthur's administration, he fancied that his
place was in danger, and he appealed to me. In turn,
(07:47):
I appealed to Clemens bethinking myself of his friendship with
Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
write to Grant in my father's behalf. But no, he
answered me, I must come to Hartford and we would
go on to New York together and see Grant personally.
(08:08):
This was before, and long before Clemens became Grant's publisher
and splendid benefactor. But the men liked each other. As such,
men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment and
we went to find Grant in his business office, that
place where his business innocence was afterwards so betrayed. He
(08:31):
was very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly
the more at home with him, because his voice was
the soft, rounded Ohio River accent to which my ears
were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes.
When I stated my business, he merely said, oh, no,
(08:52):
that must not be. He would write to mister Arthur,
and he did so that day, And my father lived
to lay down his office when he tired of it,
with no urgence from above. It is not irrelevant to
Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding himself
in company with two literary men, one of whom at
(09:13):
least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man,
he was reputed. He talked constantly, and so far as
he might, he talked literature. At least he talked of
John Phoenix, that delightfullest of the early Pacific Slope humorists,
whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby,
(09:36):
when they were fellow cadets at West Point. It was
mighty pretty, as peeps would say, to see the delicate
deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect
with which he listened while Grant talked. His luncheon was
brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
(09:57):
asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee,
which were served us in a little room out of
the office with about the same circumstance as at a
railroad refreshment counter. The baked beans and coffee were of
about the railroad refreshment quality, but eating them with Grant
(10:18):
was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with
Julius Caesar or Alexander or some other great Plutarchian captain.
One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens often supremely satisfactory
life was his relation to Grant. It was his proud
(10:38):
joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign
a contract for his book on certainly very good terms,
and said to him that he would himself publish the
book and give him a percentage three times as large
he said. Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably
(10:59):
withdraw from the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore
his scruples and it was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure,
to pay the author a far larger check for his
work than had ever been paid to an author before.
He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
(11:21):
moments in which their business brought him into the presence
of the slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was
so befriending. And he told me in words which surely
lost none of their simple pathos through his report how
Grant described his suffering. The prosperity of this venture was
(11:45):
the beginning of Clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses
of enterprise, which were forms of dissipation. The young sculptor,
who had come back to him from Paris, modeled a
small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers
to his great loss, and the success of Grant's book
(12:06):
tempted him to launch on publishing sees where his bark
presently foundered. The first and greatest of his disasters was
the life of Pope Leo the thirteenth, which he came
to tell me of when he had imagined it in
a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in
which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to
(12:29):
forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded
only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would
be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed.
It would be circulated literally in every country of the globe,
and Clemens book agents would carry the prospectuses and then
(12:51):
the bound copies of the work to the ends of
the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic by it,
but every Catholic ust as he was a good Catholic,
as he hoped to be saved. It was a magnificent scheme,
and it captivated me as it had captivated Clemens. It
dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal
(13:15):
defect in it. We did not consider how often Catholics
could not read, how often, when they could, they might
not wish to read. The event proved that, whether they
could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish
to read the Life of the Pope. Though it was
(13:36):
written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to
the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The failure
was incredible to Clemens his sanguine soul was utterly confounded,
and soon a silence fell upon it, where it had
been so exuberantly jubilant. Chapter seventeen, read by Dennisaers in Modesto, California,
(14:04):
for LibriVox Winter two thousand and six
Chapter seventeen 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 seventeen. A little after this,
(00:25):
Clemens went abroad with his family and lived several years
in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer intervals,
and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably broken.
He would write me when something I had written pleased him,
or when something signal occurred to him, or some political
(00:47):
or social outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished
to free his mind in pious profanity. During this sojourn
he came near dying of pneumonia in Berlin, and he
had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin,
also he had the honor of dining with the German
(01:08):
Emperor at the table of a cousin married to a
high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
enjoy such a distinction. He knew how to take it
as a delegated recognition from the German people, but as
coming from a rather cockahoop sovereign, who had as yet
only his sovereignty to value himself upon. He was not
(01:31):
very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of
the event, as between the imperiality and himself on whom
it was supposed to confer such glory, crowning his life
with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in the
same mood in his account of an English dinner party
many years before, where there was a little Scotch lord present,
(01:56):
to whom the English tacitly referred Clement's talk, and laughed
when the Lord laughed, and were grave when he failed
to smile. Of all the men I have known, he
was the farthest from a snob. Though he valued recognition
and liked the flattery of the fashionable fair. When it
came in his way, he would not go out of
(02:19):
his way for it. But like most able and brilliant men,
he loved the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness,
their sensitive perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they
would say, and their pretty temporrious defiances. He had, of course,
(02:41):
the keenest sense of what was truly dignified and truly
undignified in people, but he was not really interested in
what we call society affairs. They scarcely existed for him,
though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful fools who,
through some chance of birth or wealth, hold themselves different
(03:04):
from other men. Commonly, he did not keep things to himself,
especially dislikes and condemnations. Upon most current events. He had
strong opinions, and he uttered them strongly. After a while
he was silent in them, but if you tried him,
(03:24):
you found him in them. Still he was tremendously worked
up by a certain famous trial, as most of us
were who lived in the time of it. He believed
the accused guilty. But when we met some months after
it was over, and I tempted him to speak his
mind upon it, he would only say the man had
(03:45):
suffered enough, as if the man had expiated his wrong,
and he was not going to do anything to renew
his penalty. I found that very curious, very delicate. His
continued blame could not come to the sufferer's knowledge, but
he felt it his duty to forbear it. He was
(04:08):
apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his
resentments or he had so spent himself in uttering them
that he had literally nothing more to say. You could
offer clements, offenses that would anger other men, and he
did not mind. He would account for them from human nature.
(04:30):
But if he thought you had in any way played
him false, you were anathema and maranatha forever, Yet not forever,
perhaps for by and bye, after years, he would be silent.
There were two men, half a generation apart in their succession,
(04:50):
whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly even after
they were out of the world. He went farther than Heina,
who said that he forgave his enemies, but not till
they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies.
(05:11):
Their deaths seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base
evasion or a cowardly attempt to escape. He pursued them
to the grave. He would like to dig them up
and take vengeance upon their clay, so he said, But
no doubt he would not have hurt them if he
had them living before him. He was generous without stent,
(05:35):
he trusted without measure. But where his generosity was abused,
or his trust betrayed. He was a fire of vengeance,
a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool
patience from others could quench. It had to burn itself out.
He was eagerly and lavishly hospitable. But if a man
(06:00):
seemed willing to batten on him, or in any way
to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In
his frenzies of resentment or suspicion, he would not, and
doubtless could not listen to reason. But if between the
paroxysms he were confronted with the facts, he would own them,
(06:22):
no matter how much they told against him. At one
period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling
himself up with wrath to be duly discharged on the
editor's head. Later he wrote me, with a humorous joy
(06:43):
in his mistake, that Warner had advised him to have
the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so,
And how many mentions of him did I reckon? He
had found in three months just two, and they were
rather in different than unfriendly. So the paper was acquitted,
(07:03):
and the editor's life was spared. The wretch never knew
how near he was to losing it with incredible preliminaries
of obloquy and a subsequent devotion to lasting infamy. His
memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and
he liked to return your friendliness with as loud a
(07:25):
band of music as could be bought or bribed for
the occasion. All that you had to do was to
signify that you wanted his help. When my father was
counsul at Toronto during Arthur's administration, he fancied that his
place was in danger, and he appealed to me. In turn,
(07:47):
I appealed to Clemens bethinking myself of his friendship with
Grant and Grant's friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
write to Grant in my father's behalf. But no, he
answered me, I must come to Hartford and we would
go on to New York together and see Grant personally.
(08:08):
This was before, and long before Clemens became Grant's publisher
and splendid benefactor. But the men liked each other. As such,
men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment and
we went to find Grant in his business office, that
place where his business innocence was afterwards so betrayed. He
(08:31):
was very simple and very cordial, and I was instantly
the more at home with him, because his voice was
the soft, rounded Ohio River accent to which my ears
were earliest used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes.
When I stated my business, he merely said, oh, no,
(08:52):
that must not be. He would write to mister Arthur,
and he did so that day, And my father lived
to lay down his office when he tired of it,
with no urgence from above. It is not irrelevant to
Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding himself
in company with two literary men, one of whom at
(09:13):
least he could make sure of, and unlike that silent man,
he was reputed. He talked constantly, and so far as
he might, he talked literature. At least he talked of
John Phoenix, that delightfullest of the early Pacific Slope humorists,
whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby,
(09:36):
when they were fellow cadets at West Point. It was
mighty pretty, as peeps would say, to see the delicate
deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and the manly respect
with which he listened while Grant talked. His luncheon was
brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
(09:57):
asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee,
which were served us in a little room out of
the office with about the same circumstance as at a
railroad refreshment counter. The baked beans and coffee were of
about the railroad refreshment quality, but eating them with Grant
(10:18):
was like sitting down to baked beans and coffee with
Julius Caesar or Alexander or some other great Plutarchian captain.
One of the highest satisfactions of Clemens often supremely satisfactory
life was his relation to Grant. It was his proud
(10:38):
joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign
a contract for his book on certainly very good terms,
and said to him that he would himself publish the
book and give him a percentage three times as large
he said. Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably
(10:59):
withdraw from the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore
his scruples and it was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure,
to pay the author a far larger check for his
work than had ever been paid to an author before.
He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
(11:21):
moments in which their business brought him into the presence
of the slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was
so befriending. And he told me in words which surely
lost none of their simple pathos through his report how
Grant described his suffering. The prosperity of this venture was
(11:45):
the beginning of Clemens's adversity, for it led to excesses
of enterprise, which were forms of dissipation. The young sculptor,
who had come back to him from Paris, modeled a
small bust of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers
to his great loss, and the success of Grant's book
(12:06):
tempted him to launch on publishing sees where his bark
presently foundered. The first and greatest of his disasters was
the life of Pope Leo the thirteenth, which he came
to tell me of when he had imagined it in
a sort of delirious exultation. He had no words in
which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to
(12:29):
forecast its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded
only by the number of Catholics in Christendom. It would
be translated into every language which was anywhere written or printed.
It would be circulated literally in every country of the globe,
and Clemens book agents would carry the prospectuses and then
(12:51):
the bound copies of the work to the ends of
the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic by it,
but every Catholic ust as he was a good Catholic,
as he hoped to be saved. It was a magnificent scheme,
and it captivated me as it had captivated Clemens. It
dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal
(13:15):
defect in it. We did not consider how often Catholics
could not read, how often, when they could, they might
not wish to read. The event proved that, whether they
could read or not, the immeasurable majority did not wish
to read the Life of the Pope. Though it was
(13:36):
written by a dignitary of the Church and issued to
the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The failure
was incredible to Clemens his sanguine soul was utterly confounded,
and soon a silence fell upon it, where it had
been so exuberantly jubilant. Chapter seventeen, read by Dennisaers in Modesto, California,
(14:04):
for LibriVox Winter two thousand and six
Popular Podcasts
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.