You can’t tour the home alone, and you can’t touch anything. but for a small fee ($28), you can go on a guided tour of the house where Mark Twain lived for much of his life in Hartford, Connecticut. For an additional three dollars, you can take the living history tour. We were happy with our enthusiastic and knowledgeable guide.
We arrived around 12:30 and paid for the 2 o’clock tour. In the meantime, we browsed the main building museums and went to the café for a snack (we were starving). There was one vegetarian option: a poorly-dressed limp kale Caesar salad. I balanced out the disappointment with a Huckleberry float, made with (of course) vanilla ice cream and a bottle of huckleberry soda, bearing a hands-on-hips Huck Finn on the label. We sat at the outdoor tables and admired the impressive gardens. We noted a group coming through with a tour guide dressed in a tux, yelling loudly in a southern accent while they followed his lead a little sheepish-looking.
Our small group stepped up onto a massive wrap-around porch. The guide explained how Twain would sit there at the end of his writing day and read aloud to the neighborhood kids. That ritual of reading what he’d written in a day to his family or his neighbors was a core habit.
His house sat on the banks of a small, smelly river called the Park River. Due to frequent flooding, the decision to bury the river underground began in the 1940s. Today, when you visit the Twain House, you must stand on his porch or look out the window in his upstairs writing room and imagine a river there. Our guide conjectured that perhaps Twain settled in Hartford because it was the home of his primary publishing house, The American Publishing Company.
Twain married Olivia Langdon, whose inheritance provided them the money to build the impressive three-story building and additional carriage house on this plot of land. It was also the home of other literary friends, including Harriet Beecher Stowe, fellow abolitionist and friend.
Twain wrote on the floor of his huge, carefully decorated house in his billiards room. Though I have no pictures of the ornate interior (since inside the house is a no photography area), you’ll have to trust me that every room had plenty of eye candy: carpets, wallpaper, chandeliers, statues, ornate wood-carved furniture and beams. He wrote in this room, though he chose to write not at his writing desk (facing the billiards table), but instead tucked into a corner of the room, facing the wall, to shut out distractions. According to our guide, he wrote must of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in that corner. He also described how at one point he got stuck and put the book away in a paper cubby for six years. A good reminder to all of us that no one is spared from the challenges of writing a novel.
He had two kids (one son that died at 18 months) and a sickly wife, but still enjoyed the luxury of shutting himself in his study to write all day, thanks I’m sure to the staff of seven servants that attended the family. The family knew not to come near his study but had a horn they could blow to alert him if they absolutely needed him for something.
These kinds of stories can be discouraging for those of us trying to do our creative work without privileges and supports. That’s a problem with focusing on our own limitations. That’s what we see. Looked at from another angle? The poor guy did not have word processing, though he would have loved to. His side hustle was inventions, and he was close friends with Nikola Tesla, and even worked in his laboratory. When we look for possibilities, we see a dedication to craft so strong that he was willing put himself in a corner so he could focus. He worked all day and then read his work out loud to test its worth on his readers. Though he got stuck, he persisted. Twain believed in the power of revision, and embraced the work of rewriting. He understood that the real payoff comes in the refinement. He was a bit of a ‘style cop’ who campaigned for the precise and perfect word, and did not care for adjectives. He famously aimed for what we call realism. I’ve often blamed Hemingway for the cold, clean American style that still dominates today, but Twain paved the way. Both had been journalists, trained in precision, accuracy, and “truth.”
Twain wrote in a time when early death by illness was much more probable, and the cultural awareness of death showed up everywhere. In one of the rooms, the wallpaper was this gold-accented pattern of lively buzzing bees. But a closer look reveals how the ceiling the pattern changes to spider webs, with dead bees trapped in them. Another painting of children playing that looked at from another angle is a skull. This artistic expression of the awareness of death was common at the time, our guide explained.
The aspect of Twain’s ritual that struck me as most remarkable was the habit of reading his work aloud to gauge reader reaction at the end of every workday, particularly the strong sense of confidence in his own voice that required. He trusted those responses more than he trusted critics. I had a colleague say to me recently when complimenting my recently published poem that she admired my “ability to share openly with other people.” I suppose that to do this work, we must be willing to do just that.
If you haven’t already joined a group of others who do the creative work you do to share and give feedback, or you haven’t found a few close friends to regularly give feedback, maybe it’s time to consider doing just that. Just after this Twain house tour, I attended a three-day yoga retreat at Kripalu in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. In a divination workshop, I was asked to pose a question and draw a card from the deck. I asked: What do I need to know to move forward with my writing this summer and beyond? The card I drew from this deck of divining trees and shrubs was heather, which represented community and connection. That’s my big takeaway from visiting Twain’s house. When it comes to revision, embrace your inner realist, and apply yourself relentlessly to the task, and lean on your community for support and feedback.
I also work as a writing coach and love helping writers gain confidence, set goals, and develop their work. For more information on coaching, email me at eatyourwords.lizshine@gmail.com.