Twain Shall Meet

I’m ashamed to admit this, but I never got the whole Mark Twain thing. I’m not even sure which of his books I’ve opened. I assume I read something of his in school. Probably Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn…that was the one that was banned, right? I know that he’s considered one of the greats, but there have been plenty of great American novelists. And Hal Holbrooke didn’t get all kinds of awards for impersonating them in a one-person show off and on for most of his career. So what’s the dealio with Twain?

This is what I was thinking as I purchased my 15 buck ticket to tour The Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. But as the nice young docent led our small group through Twain’s immense, funky old Gothic home, telling tales of the writer, I found myself developing a wee bit of a crush on the man. Twain, I discovered, was naughty. He was a bad boy. Not only that, but he was whip-smart and damned funny and regarded his African-American servant as not merely his equal, but often his better – a distinctly non-mainstream view back in the 19th century.

Twain drank and smoked and swore and when the woman he would eventually marry first scorned him, he most conveniently took a tumble off his horse and had to lay up healing in her house for weeks afterward. He loved parties, and he and his wife, Olivia, threw lavish dinners that would last into the wee hours of the morning. (His buddies included Nikola Tesla and neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass and Thomas Edison.) Yet every evening, he would find time to spin an elaborate bedtime story for his three little girls using objects displayed on the library’s mantle as inspiration. He was a staunch abolitionist, strongly supported emancipation and women’s rights, and said all sorts of rascally, charming things like, “Be good and you will be lonely.” And, oh yes, he loved animals.

So as I trod the same floors Twain once did, sniffing the air, hoping to catch a phantom whiff of cigar (it is said that when and he and his friends locked themselves away in the billard room, the smoke sometimes became so heavy it was impossible to see through), gazing upon the spots where he crafted his greatest books, I began to get it. Twain, beyond his prodigious talent, was one hell of a fascinating man. After the tour wrapped up, I stopped by the gift shop and picked up a copy of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Mark Twain House and Museum had introduced me to the man – now it was up to me to get acquainted with his books.