20 - My Mark Twain by William Dean Howells

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).

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Chapter twenty 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 twenty. For a time

(00:25):
it was a question whether he should not go back
with his family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps
the father's and mother's hearts drew them there all the
more strongly because of the grief written ineffaceably over it.
But for the younger ones it was no longer the

(00:47):
measure of the world. It was easier for all to
stay on indefinitely in New York, which is a sojourn
without circumstance, and equally the home of exile and of indecision.
The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious house at Riverdale on

(01:10):
the Hudson, and there I began to see them again
on something like the sweet old terms. They lived far
more unpretentiously than they used, and I think with a
notion of economy which they had never very successfully practiced.

(01:31):
I recall that at the end of a certain year
in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash
for everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment,
and asking me to guess how many bills they had
at New Year's He hastened to say that a horse

(01:54):
car would not have held them. At Riverdale, they kept
no carriage. And there was a snowy night when I
drove up to their handsome old mansion in the station carryall,
which was crusted with mud as from going down to
the deluge after transporting Noah and his family from the

(02:17):
Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally.
But the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that
could never suffer poverty of mind or soul, was there,
and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our middle youth.

(02:44):
It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
superstition nobody and he least of all, expected to destroy.
It would not be easy to say whether in his
talk of it, his disgust for the illiterate twaddle of

(03:08):
missus Eddy's book or his admiration of her genius for
organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious machine,
the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church,
and destined to be more formidable in its control of

(03:28):
the minds of men. He looked for it spread over
the whole of Christendom, and throughout the winter he spent
at Riversdale, he was ready to meet all listeners more
than halfway with his convictions of its powerful grasp of
the average human desire to get something for nothing. The

(03:52):
vacuous vulgarity of its texts was a perpetual joy to him,
which he powed with serious respect to the sagacity which
built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human credulity
and folly. An interesting phase of his psychology in this

(04:15):
business was not only his admiration for the masterly policy
of the Christian science hierarchy, but his willingness to allow
the miracles of its healers to be tried on his
friends and family if they wished it. He had a
tender heart for the whole generation of empirics, as well

(04:39):
as the newer sorts of scienticians, but he seemed to
base his faith in them largely upon the failure of
the regulars, rather than upon their own successes, which also
he believed in. He was recurrently but not insistently desirous

(05:01):
that you should try their strange magics when you were
going to try the familiar medicines. End of Chapter twenty,
read by Dennis Ayers in Modesto, California, for LibriVox Winter
two thousand and seven.