THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 5

JOE TWICHELL’S DISREPUTABLE FRIENDS

By Steve Courtney

Scholars have not often tried to explain the extraordinary fact of the friendship between Mark Twain, a Westerner, brilliant writer, rebel, cynic and scourge of an age, and the Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell, a Congregationalist minister sprung from the rural heart of Connecticut and planted in the pulpit of Hartford’s fanciest church. What attracted Mark to this seemingly conventional man? Mark himself brushed aside the question with a joke, often as not: “I keep a clergyman to remonstrate against my drinking,” he wrote. “It gives zest and increase of appetite.” But this was the public Mark Twain talking, not the private Mr. Clemens. Mark Twain was often on the lookout for preachers – in the San Francisco of his young manhood, on the Quaker City expedition to Europe and the Middle East. “He liked their conversation and their company,” writes Justin Kaplan, the greatest Mark Twain biographer; “he had in common with them an interest in oratory.” He also had an interest in eternal things, the great questions such as life, death, God, and the justifications for human suffering. These were the matter of ministerial discourse. Because Mark was serious about these questions, he hated cant, hypocrisy, and the worst side of Victorian self-righteousness and piety. Even the bitterness of his later life, when he railed at God for being the sadistic puppeteer of a deterministic universe, demonstrates the tremendous weight he put on these issues. He argued with his old friend Joe: “What a hell of a heaven it will be when they get all these hypocrites assembled there!” he wrote to Twichell when both men were in their 60s and had been friends for more than 30 years. “Mark, the way you throw your rotten eggs at the human race doth greatly arride me,” Twichell wrote back.

Now, note what is happening here. I recently had the good luck to see Ken Burns present some scenes from his four-part documentary on Mark Twain that will air on PBS in January. As you know, Burns uses the words of participants extensively in his historical films. “We had great stuff from Livy, from Howells, from lots of others,” Burns told the audience after the screening. “But in the end, most of words are Mark Twain’s He kept elbowing his way onto center stage.” So in writing a biography of Twichell, and presenting some of what I’m found here, it is sometimes hard to keep Mark from pushing his way to the front. What I hope will find is that Joe Twichell was a remarkable man for his time. After all, he is the one who turned Mark Twain on to the “Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” when the Edward Fitzgerald translation appeared in the Courant in the 1870s. “I never yet came across anything that uttered certain thoughts of mine so adequately,” he wrote. This is the poem that includes the verse:

Come fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
The winter garment of repentance fling.

Joseph Twichell was born in the heady religious atmosphere of Plantsville, Connecticut, a section of Southington, in 1838. He later looked back at his youth there as a kind of Golden Age for Connecticut. “I do not know that I remember anything about my father, for instance, that antedates my memory of seeing him on his knees,” he wrote. “…There are few things in my childhood that I remember more distinctly than hearing, as I played about the yard, a neighbor of ours, an aged man, worn out with the labors of his farm, superannuated, waiting to depart, praying in his house. Now and then I can catch the reverend tone of his voice, as it floated through the open window and across the garden those still summer forenoons.”

But unbelief fascinated Twichell, even as a boy. In Southington was one of only three Unitarian churches in the state. “I can hardly describe the emotion with which I used to view their meeting house,” he said. “How profane and heaven-defying and altogether shocking an edifice morally it seemed to be!”

Twichell’s father Edward was a deacon of the First Congregational Church of Southington and the owner of a local tannery, and after Twichell attended a local private academy he entered Yale in the fall of 1855. Yale at the time was a much smaller place, and students followed a rigid course of study in the classics. It wasn’t until junior year that he had a choice of classes – Ancient Languages (meaning Hebrew, Aramaic and Sanskrit), Modern Languages or Mineralogy. He chose Ancient Languages, his bent for the ministry already showing. It was a time at Yale that one student of the time, later a professor, called “strangely stagnant,” under President Theodore Dwight Woolsey, whose classroom, another student wrote, had a “chilly atmosphere of repression.” But Woolsey along with many students, including Twichell, was a strong abolitionist, appearing with Henry Ward Beecher as that world-famous minister solicited funds to send arms to anti-slavery settlers in Kansas.

It was at Yale that Twichell made friends with whom he bonded strongly and started to take on the role of what one writer has called an “elite Everyman.” He helped found a Freshman society called Gamma Nu, indulged in a piece of junior-year foolishness called the Society of the Wooden Spoon, joined an eating club and rowed in the crew that had only shortly before competed with Harvard in the first intercollegiate athletic event in the United States. He sent his laundry by trunk back to Southington weekly; in his letters home he would includes diagrams of exactly the kind of fashionable shirts he would like his stepmother to make for him. To the end of his life he kept his Class of 1859 classbook, inserting clippings, photographs and letters from the men who graduated with him. His closest friend was Edward Carrington, a young man from Colebrook, and that friendship was fateful.

In the beginning of the spring term of his junior year Twichell, Carrington and a group of friends got into a tussle with some firemen whose engine house abutted the campus. It was a classic town-gown contretemps that got out of hand. The firemen – mechanics and tradesmen barely older than the college boys - had been taunting the students as they walked from evening prayers in the college chapel to dinner. Twichell later wrote his father that he and his friends had turned the other cheek when the firemen delivered “many indignities which we would not have brooked from equals.” In fact, the students had done their best to upset the firemen in return by singing loudly, “We Don’t Care a Damn while We’re at Yale” and other college favorites. One night, one of the firemen threw a bucket of water on the students; “The firemen told us to shut up and we said ‘dry up,’ a student remembered later. The next night the encounter blew up into a full scale brawl. Some of the students had armed themselves. One of those carrying a pistol was Joe Twichell.

Twichell was, all the witnesses say, trying a conciliatory role, talking to the most bellicose of the fireman – a 19-year-old butcher’s son named William Miles Jr. – when Miles struck him with a brass speaking horn and he doubled over. Miles, who had a hose wrench in the other hand that could do more damage, lifted it to strike again. Shots were fired, and one bullet entered the small of Miles’ back. The young firemen died in agony the next night, and a coroner’s jury was convened, but none of the students would testify as to who fired the shot, so no one was ever charged. Twichell wouldn’t even reveal the name of the student more than 50 years later, in a 1914 interview with the Hartford Times. But the scuttlebutt at Yale then, and the assumption among Twichell descendants today, was that Carrington fired the shot to save Twichell’s life. Carrington, Twichell and another student were briefly suspended from college when they later admitted to having carried pistols to the affray, but all graduated. Carrington went on to graduate from Columbia Law School but was killed in the Civil War. Twichell named his first son Edward Carrington Twichell.

Carrington’s and Twichell’s correspondence make it clear that Carrington was a brilliant student and leader of men with a definite wild side to him. He had been disciplined for firing a pistol in the college grounds earlier that year, and his classmates’ notes to him in his classbook make it clear that he was a lover of wine, women, song and occasional nocturnal rock-throwing at disliked faculty members’ rooms in the late evenings. His letters from the Civil War show similar interest in shooting, boxing and “quails” – the term he and Twichell used for young women.

If Carrington he was the first of Twichell’s disreputable, yet admirable friends, Gen. Daniel E. Sickles may have been the second. After Yale, the call of the ministry if anything strengthened by his junior year trials at Yale, Twichell entered Union Theological Seminary in lower Manhattan, sharing quarters with Carrington on Waverly Place. When the Civil War broke out, Twichell, two years into theological study, sought out a regiment that would take him – as yet unordained – as a chaplain.

Sickles was a Tammany Hall political leader and former congressman was living in New York in disgrace following an incident in which he, too, had killed a man. In this case it was a crime of passion: while serving in the Congress, he learned that his young wife, Teresa Sickles, was having an affair with Capt. Philip Barton Key, a family friend who happened to be the son of Francis Scott Key. Sickles sought out Key and shot him dead on a Washington Street. In the subsequent trial, Sickles was acquitted – the first defendant in the country to be acquitted on the grounds of temporary insanity. But back in New York, he quickly became of use to the federal government; a staunch pro-Southern Democrat, who had once proposed New York City secede, he was named a general and raised a brigade for the Northern cause.

“The intimate friendship of Gen. Sickles I did not regard as a promise of extraordinary piety,” Twichell wrote his father. But he signed on as chaplain of the 2nd Excelsior Brigade, later the 71st New York, a rough bunch of Irish immigrants from Manhattan. Twichell ultimately found another friend in an unexpected quarter for a New England Puritan – the Roman Catholic chaplain Father Joseph O’Hagan – and followed Sickles through the early campaigns of the war. When Sickles and his friend Gen. Joseph Hooker were running things in early 1863, Charles Francis Adams Jr. called the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac a “bar-room and brothel.” (Twichell saw both men as heroes, and named another son after Hooker.)

By the time of the battlefield of Gettysburg in July 1863, Sickles commanded the Third Corps. At a crucial moment, in an exercise of a kind of passive aggression against his commander and rival, Gen. Meade, Sickles moved his entire Corps forward to an exposed position without orders. The Confederates immediately attacked, and the key action of the battle took place. For decades afterward, ex-generals and historians debated whether Sickles won the battle or nearly lost it for the Union.

Twichell, however, had no doubts. Accompanying his old commander to reunions right up to the 50th in 1913, he expounded on how Sickles’ “unshakable nerve and trumpet voice had ever inspired his storm-swept lines with the soul of his own invincible courage.” Twichell described the start of the battle: “Of a sudden, from the left, a point not apprehended as concealing the enemy, a battery opened upon us, the most terrific fire I ever witnessed. The first shell struck not more than two rods behind where I with several other non-combatants were standing, expecting to see it begin from the front. We all retired rather precipitately to the partial shelter of a brick barn hard by and there remained until our artillery silenced the guns that had opened.” The shelling was heavy, but Twichell made it to the vast hospital that was forming in the rear as the wounded were brought there. Then, Sickles himself was brought to the rear – his right leg torn to shreds by a shell. Twichell administered the chloroform for the operation. (Sickles, who went on to a post-war diplomatic career and, in Shelby Foote’s words, “a well-publicized liaison with the deposed nymphomaniac Queen of Spain,” donated the shattered bones of his leg to the Army Medical Museum and visited them yearly.)

Twichell remained at Gettysburg after the army left; years after the war, he still corresponded with some of the Confederate patients to whom he administered. His military career was to include Grant’s grim Wilderness Campaign, one of the brutal actions that essentially bludgeoned and end to the war. He then returned to seminary – Andover, this time – and completed his studies. But it was while he was on leave from the army that the most important acquaintances of his life were made: One, with the Rev. Horace Bushnell, and the other, with a college friend‘s cousin, Harmony Cushman of Orange, N.J.

Harmony became his wife on Nov. 1, 1865. Bushnell’s recommendation helped him attain the pastorate of Asylum Hill Congregational Church, which had just been founded by a group of Congregationalists, including Calvin Stowe, who wanted to see a church established for Hartford’s burgeoning western suburbs. And it was because of his pastorate there that he met, just two years later, a wild-haired writer from the West who had come to town to see about the publication of his new book, a humorous account of his travels with a group of pilgrims – the “innocents abroad” – to Europe and the Holy Land.

Now, at last, let’s let Mark Twain come on stage. The story of their meeting is a terrific Hartford fable, whether true or not: Mark, at a cocktail hour at the home of his publisher Elisha Bliss, expounds loudly on the church across the street, which he has heard served the wealthy movers and shakers of this city of his recent acquaintance, the leaders of “all those Phoenix and Charter Oak insurance companies, whose gorgeous chromo-lithographic show-cards it has been my delight to study in faraway cities, are located here.” Asylum Hill church, he says in his stentorian drawl, should be called “The Church of the Holy Speculators.” “Sh,” says Mrs. Bliss. “The pastor is right behind you.” But Twichell, who had met all kinds of men in the Army of the Potomac who had said far worse things to him, was unfazed, and that night Mark was invited to the Twichell home at 6 Atwood Street and met Harmony. He rose to leave at 9, and stayed until 11. The next day the speculators’ minister took him to see the poor of Hartford at the City Mission, a sight Mark wrote was as sad as anything he had seen in Syria. It was on this autumn 1868 visit that Mark Twain saw the glories of a New England autumn for the first time – very likely from the top of Talcott Mountain in the first of his and Twichells’ many walks there.

By 1874 Mark had been married to Olivia Langdon (in Elmira, but the service was performed by Twichell as well as the Langdon family minister), had moved to Hartford and had built his house here. Twichell’s journal for that year gives the daily rounds of a minister’s life as well as greater events. In October, he returns from a trip to Peru with Yung Wing, a Yale-educated friend who had established an educational mission for Chinese boys in Hartford; the trip, at the request of the Chinese government, was to study the condition of the so-called “coolies” in that country. Charles Dudley Warner, the novelist and travel writer, leaves for Egypt for a year. A son – one of the eventual nine children Joe and Harmony were to have – is born. Twichell has tea with Dr. Bushnell. He delivers what he calls his “yarn about Peru” to a minister’s meeting and to the Sunday School and to the inmates of the Retreat for the Insane; Mark Twain accompanies him to this. He tells a funny story about how Mark Twain visited Harriet Beecher Stowe and forgot to wear his tie, then had his butler take the tie to Mrs. Stowe to complete the visit – a tale often told by Mark Twain House guides today. He tells of his servant Lizzie, who has to make an emergency trip to Holyoke to prevent her sister Kate from entering a convent. And he walks to Boston with Mark Twain – a trip that, interrupted by Mark’s shin splints, becomes a running joke in all the local papers, which Twichell carefully glues into his journal.

In 1877 they traveled to Bermuda together. But first, they took a walk in New York on a hot day in May, and they already indulged in the petty wrangles of an old married couple. They had to cross lower Manhattan from the East River dock where the steamer had brought them from New Haven to the Bermuda boat’s dock on the Hudson – then called North River. Twain, always excruciatingly self-conscious, did not like it when Twichell asked a policeman for directions.

“Can you tell me where Pier 12 is?” Twichell asked the policeman. Clemens later grumbled into his notebook, “We didn’t need to know where it was, yet.”

“Pier 12 East River?” asked the policeman.
“No, Pier 12 North River.”

The policeman paused. “This is East River,” he said. He didn’t move away, but waited, Clemens thought, to see the effect.
“Oh,” said Twichell.

Mark wrote that it was “so much as to suggest, he hadn’t thought of that -- & yet with a manner that would lead one to suspect that he was ignorant that there was an East river & therefore couldn’t have thought of it.”

“Pier 12 North River is on the other side of town,” the policeman said. You can go there by car, but --”

“We only wanted to know, you know,” Twichell said. “We don’t want to go there. We --”

“You don’t want to go there?” asked the policeman.
“No,” said Twichell, “not now. -- not just now. But if we knew the way --”
“Do you know Trinity Church?”
“Oh yes,” Twichell answered uncertainly.
“Well, you strike down the first street before you come to Trinity and that will take you there.”

When they were out of the policeman’s hearing, Mark said: “Now we didn’t have to ask him those questions. We have caused that man to suspect us. Where we are really bound for is William Street near Fulton. Come along, now and let’s not ask any more questions until we want to find out something.”

They walked what Clemens called “a blazing hot hundred yards.”
“Didn’t you say William near Fulton?” Twichell asked.
“Yes,” Clemens said, “and if you hadn’t stopped to fool with that policeman we would be there by now instead of plowing along in this fiery weather.”

“Well, I only wanted to ask --”
“Yes, you’re always wanting to ask. That’s the trouble.”

This air of openness and innocence that Twichell adopted seems to have remained slightly irritating to Mark throughout his life. In the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale there is a letter from Twichell to Twain relaying an invitation to both men to travel to Michigan, all expenses paid, to hear a lecture on the wars of the American colonial period, a subject that fascinated Twichell but Twain not quite so much. Twain has scrawled a note to his secretary on the note: “Miss Lyon – Tell him no. I wouldn’t travel that far for the Resurrection.”

But in the year after the Bermuda trip Twichell traveled to Europe to join the Clemens family in Germany, and he and Mark set off for a six-week jaunt to the Neckar Valley and Switzerland. Mark later worked this trip into a book of travel and humor, “A Tramp Abroad,” and converted Twichell into a character named “Harris,” whom he called his “agent.” Mark also developed foot problems during their walks in the vicinity of Lucerne, and Twichell struck off by himself – while his walks with Mark Twain were six to 10 miles a day, his walks without him were 25 and 35 miles along Alpine trails. In his notebook of this trip, he jotted down meditations for use in sermons: “Things of human interest surpass all other. The carpenter putting in a new board on the steamer in Lake Lucerne attracted more interst than the scenery.” And “As men trying to read the details of a distant mountain and differing in their judgment as to what is what, distances etc., so are men theologizing through the medium of their own philosophy.”

In “A Tramp Abroad” Twain sings the glory of walking and talking: “ Now the true charm of pedestrianism does not lie in the walking , or in the scenery, but in the talking. The walking is good to time the movement of the tingue by, and to keep the blood stirred up and active; the scenery and the woodsy smells are good to bear in upon a man an unconscious and unobtrusive charm and solace to eye and soul and sense; but the supreme pleasure comes from the talk.” He gives us a glimpse into a Twain-Twichell Alpine conversation, one that rambles with the walkers from a question of grammar to the subject of the pain of dentistry vs. the paion of amputation to open-air dentistry with an audience that Twichell witnessed in camp during the war to doctors, to death, to skeletons, to a grisly practical joke played on a fellow printer in Twain’s youth.

Death, of course, was also an unwelcome visitor in the latter part of Mark Twain’s life, his first and perhaps most traumatic loss being that of his 24-year-old daughter Susy in 1896. Twain he was in Europe at the time, but Twichell had rushed back from an Adirondack vacation to be at Susy’s side. In a long reply to a letter of consolation, Twaiin wrote: “Some day you and I will walk again, Joe, and talk. I hope so. We could have such talks! We are all grateful to you, and Harmony – how grateful it is not given to us to say in words. We pay as we can, in love; and in this coin practicing no economy.”

After the death of Livy in 1904, Twichell wrote: “I can’t wonder – and I don’t – that with the light of your life gone out you sit dazed and in the dark seeing no meaning or reason in anything, the Universe appearing to you only a confusion of unintelligible phantasmagoria. ..I , indeed, believe that behind the riddle there is a Hidden and Awful Wisdom…of course I do, or I wouldn’t be a Christian minister. But I am not going to preach to you. I don’t feel in the least like it. I would, though, as I say, like mightily to be by your side just now.”

Twichell presided over all these funeral services, as he had over christenings and Mark’s wedding; the final service to the Clemens family – Mark Twain’s own funeral – turned into a double tragedy. Just before delivering the eulogy at the Old Brick Church in New York in April 1910, Twichell heard that Harmony had been taken to the hospital in Hartford. By the time he arrived, she was seriously ill with an intestinal condition; she died on the operating table that evening.

Twichell had to retire from Asylum Hill two years later, never quite making the 50 years that he, as a lover of anniversaries, would no doubt have wanted to achieve. (He did get to the fiftieth anniversary of Gettysburg with the aged Sickles – and Twichell’s son-in-law, the young composer Charles Ives.) After several years of illness in the house on Woodland Street, cared for by his daughter Susan, he died in 1918. But in his last healthy years he took some consolation in the birth of his grandson, Joseph Twichell Hall, to his youngest daughter Louise a few months after Harmony’s death. In 1997 Hall told me how his “Grosspappa” would get angry when waked by the toddler, and how after breakfast the family would gather to recite the 103rd Psalm in unison: “As for a man, his ways are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. /For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” I think that the place where Joe Twichell and Mark Twain flourished can be well served by knowing him more.

       Speech at the Mark Twain House, Hartford, Oct 11, 2001. © 2003 Steve Courtney.
     

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