THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 3

MARK AND JOE IN THE ALPS

By Steve Courtney

On September 9, 1878, in Geneva, Switzerland, Mark Twain mailed a letter to his friend the Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell of Asylum Hill Congregational Church.

Dear Old Joe ---

It is actually all over! I was so low-spirited at the station yesterday -- & this morning when I woke, I couldn’t seem to accept the dismal truth that you were really gone, & the pleasant tramping & talking at an end. Ah, my boy, it has been such a rich holiday to me; & I feel under such deep & honest obligations to you for coming. I am putting out of my mind all memory of the times when I misbehaved toward you & hurt you; I am resolved to consider it forgiven, & to store up & remember only the charming hours of the journeys, & the times when I was not unworthy to be with you & share a companionship which to me stands first after Livy’s.

The letter mystifies scholars – as it mystified Twichell – in its combination of real affection and abject apology. Mark was in better form when, two years later, his travel book “A Tramp Abroad” was published:

Just imagine it for a moment: I was collecting material in Europe for fourteen months for a book, and now that the thing is printed I find that you, who were with me, only a month and a half of the fourteen, are in actual presence (not imaginary) in 441 of the 531 pages the book contains! Hang it, if you had stayed at home it would have taken me fourteen years to get the material.

Mark Twain closed up his house in Hartford in April 1878 and left for Europe with his wife, Livy, their daughters, Susy, 6, and Clara, 4; a nursemaid, Rosina Hay; and Livy’s friend Clara Spaulding. He was ostensibly taking a break to work on some of the literary projects that had been gathering dust since December, when he had suffered a lecture-platform trauma. Speaking before an audience that included the most famous literary Americans of the day—Whittier, Emerson, Holmes and Longfellow—he believed he had offended them with a tasteless story. He wrote them abject apologies – he was always looking for some kind of absolution.

These unfinished manuscripts included the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mark Twain was never very good at finishing things. In fact, he would let Huck Finn float for a while; literally, because he had left Huck and Jim adrift in the river after a steamboat smashed their raft. Mark had secretly contracted with the son of his regular Hartford publisher, who had broken off to form a company of his own, to use the European trip to write another travel book. After all, his best-seller was “The Innocents Abroad.” When he asked his neighbor and walking companion Joe Twichell to come and visit him in Europe, Twichell was interested.

Joe was just about to turn 40. A former Civil War chaplain, he had been the pastor of Hartford’s socially premier church for a dozen years. He and his wife Harmony had three daughters and two sons. An important part of the friendship he had with Mark Twain was constituted in the walks they took in the Hartford area, particularly to Bartlett’s Tower on Talcott Mountain (a hundred yards from where Heublein Tower stands now). During the cold, drear November of 1874, they had tried to walk to Boston, but made it only as far as North Ashford, where Mark’s feet gave out. In 1877 they traveled to Bermuda, where they walked and talked around the sun-baked island on what Mark said was his first trip entirely for pleasure.

The European trip, however, was the first trip he took for the express purpose of writing a book. “Mr and Mrs Mark Twain leave for Europe,” Twichell wrote in his journal for March 27, 1878. On May 27, he wrote: “Forty years old to-day!! I write it, but I can’t believe it. One of the soberest days of my life, what God has been toward me, and what I have not been toward Him has been my ruling thought.”

On June 8, he wrote:

Our sixth child and third son was born early this morning!! Attending physician, our friend Dr. Davis, no nurse at hand. The Doctor and I did everything. Dear H., God bless her, went through it all like her own brave self. The boy is a fine lusty fellow. We thank the Lord for him, and hope that we gave him to the Lord before he drew breath.
The divine mercies to me and mine never seemed so precious and maniold. May this child be a servant of God, a disciple of Christ, a temple of the Holy Ghost, and an heir of life eternal!! Such is our prayer.”

Then, a change of subject:
By the p.m. mail comes a letter from M.T. at Heidelberg, Germany, enclosing $300 and inviting me to join him about Aug. 1st for a two months visit, all at his expense!! Really our bounties are extraordinary. This is a most handsome offer, and I must of course, accept it. I had not expected it till next year.

On the ship to Europe in July, Twichell read Bret Harte, “Lorna Doone” and the biblical Apocrypha. In London, he visited his Hartford friend, Gen Joseph Hawley; he sightsaw and traveled from London to Paris, finally taking the overnight train to Strasbourg, reaching Baden Baden, the famous and fashionable spa where the Clemens party was staying, at 4:30 pm on Thursday, Aug 1. “M.T. & family gave me a most joyous welcome,” he wrote.

By now, Mark had become frustrated with his book. He needed a character to act as a foil, and considered creating a character called “The Grumbler” to serve as a vehicle for his attacks on the opera, the theater, European art, German food and the German language. But Mark Twain was grumbler enough to supply that role on his trip.

Joe’s arrival changed things. “The arrival of Twichell is reflected in the notebook by the influx of personal and anecdotal material,” write the editors of Mark Twain’s journals, “the result of conversations and reminiscences shared by the two men during their hours of tramping.” The first tramp on their own was through the Black Forest. The two men took a carriage six miles out of town to a castle. “Went to Favorita Schloss with Joe & walked back through the woods,” he said, and there they talked about bad travel books, a girl at the castle who, Mark wrote, “was so pretty & alas spoke in French – I could only understand it, couldn’t speak in reply.” as Mark wrote. He lists other subjects in his journal, and we can only guess about the details: “The monkey. Big mouth fish. Bee that impregnates that tubular plant. I guess God will laugh when he sees this horse. God made man in his own image. Christ, a man, was the son of God -- & possessed humor of course.” Twichell wrote, “A wonderful walk.”

A few days later, the two traveled to Allerheilegen, the ruins of a 12th-century monastery in the forest, by rail, carriage, and finally on foot. “After a supper of trout, down the Seven Falls ravine,” Twichell wrote. “Those woods stretch unbroken over a vast region; and everywhere they are such dense woods, and so still, and so piney and fragrant,” Mark elaborated in “A Tramp Abroad.” It is descriptive writing worthy of the still-gestating Huck Finn. “The stems of the trees are trim and straight, and in many places all the ground is hidden for miles under a thick cushion of moss of a vivid green color, with not a decayed or ragged spot in its surface, and not a fallen leaf or twig to mar its immaculate tidiness.” The pair walked 10 miles the next day, and Mark began to make jokes about the pedometer Twichell had brought with him. “By measurement, 10m – by Joe’s pedometer, 164,” he wrote in his journal. It was a joke he would extend in “A Tramp Abroad.”

The day of walking ended at the Oppenau railway station, where the men took a train, bypassing Livy and the rest in Baden Baden, and continuing to Heidelberg , the great university town in the Neckar Valley where the Clemenses had stayed earlier on their travels. They saw the illumination of the castle, but Twichell was more excited by the mail he got. “Letter from H----!!!!” he wrote, with four exclamation points. They took another train up the Neckar to Heilbronn, where Twichell sketched the elaborate town clock in his journal.

“Left Heilbronn by small boat and floated down the Neckar,” Twichell wrote, “7 or 8 miles to Jagsfeldt where we stopped for lunch and took another boat to Hirshorn where we arrived at 10 o’clock and spent the night.” In “A Tramp Abroad” this trip is hilariously extended and becomes a trip on a log raft – shades of Huckleberry Finn again! Instead of Mississippi flatboatmen, murderers and superstition there are medieval legends of haunted caves and water nymphs. As though to tantalize the small army of Mark Twain scholars who were to people his literary future, Mark ends the raft trip as he had ended it for Huck – with a glorious smashup, this time against a bridge abutment in Heidelberg.

Twichell had a different take on this trip. The two men did not really float as leisurely as Huck and Jim (or Mark-Huck and Joe-Jim, as the novelist Russell Banks has called them in writing about this episode). They had to row. Twichell had spent his college days as portwaist on the Yale crew, taking part in Yale’s first win against Harvard in 1858. Twenty years later, Twichell wrote, “blistered my hands rowing but it made me feel young.”

The 40-year-old Joe and 42-year-old Mark returned to Baden Baden. “Very hot. Took bath,” wrote Twichell in his much more succinct journal on Aug. 10. By now the rest of the group had gone on to Luzern, in Switzerland, and the Alpine part of the journey was to begin. This began with excursions, with the family and without them, around Lake Luzern and into the surrounding area. Joe observed a workman on a steamer and jotted down an idea for a sermon. “Things of human interest surpass all others. The carpenter putting in a new board on the steamer in Lake Lucerne attracted more interest than the scenery.” He received more letters from Harmony, at home with their brood of six, and traveled to a nearby town “to see my old sweetheart Lucy N. Had a most charming visit with her and returned to L. in the evening.” The two men walked to the top of the Rigi Kulm, the mountain dominating the lake, while Livy and the two girls traveled to the summit by rail.

“ Oh the Alps, the Alps, the Alps!” wrote Joe. He and Mark had enjoyed their walks of 8 to 10 miles, but on Aug. 17 Mark was laid up with rheumatism and Joe went off on his own. The former athlete and soldier is suddenly, if you read his journals of this tramp abroad without Mark Twain, able to cover prodigious distances. “On foot (25 ½ miles) to Andermatt through the St. Gotthard Pass.” “From Andermatt via Furka Pass to Rhone Glacier, thence by Grimsel Pass to Handeck Fall – about 32 miles.” “Left Handeck Falls at 5:50 a.m. walked via Meiringen & Bruning Pass to Alpnach Astad (35m) arriving there at 5:45.” He was making a great loop back to Luzern. Three days, ending with nearly 12 hours of walking along steep Alpine trails and over passes at altitudes between 7,000 and 8,000 feet. The sociable minister now joins up for walking with two Englishmen, a Dutchman, another Englishman “who proved a great find.” Mark, by contrast doesn’t like to mingle with others on the footpath, and will go to any length or pretext to avoid catching up with them.

After Joe’s return, the group moved on to Interlaken, and Mark, his rheumatism cleared up, joined the minister for a jaunt over the Gemmi Pass, taking a carriage to the village of Kandersteg and thence over Alpine trails 10 or 12 miles to Leukbad. “Lost my hat over a precipice,” wrote Joe in his journal. “A great day.” “Chased a chunk downstream,” wrote Mark in his. Joe wrote to Harmony: “Mark was running down-stream after it [a chunk of driftwood] as hard as he could go, throwing up his hands and shouting in the wildest ecstasy, and when a piece went over a fall and emerged in the foam below he would jump up and down and yell. He said afterward that he hadn’t been so excited in three months.” The next day, the two men went looking at the bottom of the precipice for Joe’s hat, only to find a pair of broken opera glasses, a fact both men noted in their diaries.

A carriage at Leukbad, a train to Visp, and then on foot through heavy rain up the Vispa, the stream that flows from the Matterhorn region. They arrived wet at the inn in St. Niklaus, and handed over their clothes to the chambermaid. “[We] stripped and went to bed for 2 ½ hours while our traps were thoroughly dried, and our boots greased in addition,” wrote Mark. “Supreme comfort, and then the warm dry clothes were most comfortable,” wrote Joe.

The next day, Aug. 27, as Joe wrote:

Left St. Nicklaus at ¼ to 9 in good weather …Within a couple of miles of Z[ermatt] a little girl approached us with two other children just where the road ran along a wall of 15 ft. height on top of a very steep bank, stumbled and fell and almost went off. She would certainly have rolled into the torrent had she fallen, and so far as we could judge could not have escaped death.

Mark took this incident and ran with it.

Aug 27

At a bridge say 9 miles fr[om] St. Nicholas, we crossed over to the left bank of the stream. A little distance further, came to a long piece of fence. Three children were approaching; a little girl started to run toward us & fell. She slipped actually under the bottom rail & her sprawling feet for a moment overhung a precipice 40 feet high. She scrambled out while my heart stopped beating. She laughed & ran by. We examined the place & there were her tracks where her foot had torn the dirt right to the verge. Below were great rocks. We came so near witnessing her death.
She would have fallen straight down a built wall 15 ft, then rolled 30 down a steep bank into the howling torrent & been pounded to a jelly in 2 minutes.

He didn’t stop there.

…Joe has no spirit of self-denial. He continually expresses gratitude that the child was not killed – never caring a cent for my feelings & my loss of such a literary plum hanging ready to fall into my mouth. His selfishness puts his own gratification in being spared suffering clear before all concern for me. Apparently he does not reflect upon the valuable details which would have fallen like a windfall to me: fishing the child out—witnessing the surprise of the parents & the stir the thing would have made among the peasants; then a Swiss funeral – then the denkmal [a roadside monument] to be paid for by us & with our names mentioned in it. And we would have gone into Baedecker & been immortal.
He developed a more elaborate version of this incident and commentary in Chapter 36 of “A Tramp Abroad.”

At the end of the day they arrived in Zermatt. “The guide-book said it was 12 M from St. Nicholas to Zermat,” Mark wrote in his journal, “but we found by the Pedometer it was 72.”

The next day they took a 3-hour walk up a gentle rise to the Riffelberg Hotel. As they walked, Mark seems to have woven a fantasy of a far more difficult hike. “You will see,” he wrote to Joe when the book came out, “how the imaginary perilous trip up the Riffelberg is preposterously expanded.” In “A Tramp Abroad,” Chapter 37 through 39, he presents an account of a lengthy expedition. In this version of that morning, Twain the narrator exclaims to his companion: “My mind is made up.”

Something in my tone struck him; and when he glanced at my eye and read what was written there, his face paled perceptibly. He hesitated a moment, then said, --
“ Speak.”
“ I WILL ASCEND THE RIFFELBERG.”
If I had shot my poor friend he could not have fallen from his chair so suddenly. If I had been his father he could not have pleaded harder to get me to give up my purpose. But I turned a deaf ear to all he said. When he perceived at last that nothing could alter my determination, he ceased to urge, and for a while the deep silence was broken only by his sobs.

The expedition consists of “198 persons, including the mules; or 205, including the cows. There are guides, surgeons, barkeepers, confectionary chefs and chaplains; Mark is horrified that a barkeeper has fallen off a cliff, then is relieved to learn it was only a chaplain. (Twichell was a preacher of temperance. It is in these “Tramp Abroad” journals that Mark uses the famous line: “I keep a clergyman to remonstrate against my drinking—it gives zest and increase of appetite.”)
In the book, the ascent takes seven days , the party builds a chalet along the way, they are treated for exhaustion “from the friction of sitting down so much” by Twain with arnica and paregoric. Once the summit is achieved, the party travels to the middle of a glacier, wating for it to carry them down to the base again. Mark writes, “I chose a good position to view the scenery as we passed along.”

To return to the real Aug. 27, 1878 (though Mark might question its reality compared to his creation): “Toward night,” Twichell tells us in his clipped way, “Matterhorn cloudless.”
And here is Mark:

Matterhorn’s tall sharp peak very well represents a volcano, with his vast wreaths of white cloud circling around his summit & floating away from it in rolling & tumbling volumes twenty-mile wreaths floating slanting toward the sun. When one of his sides is clean another is sure to be densely clothed from base to summit in thick smoke-like cloud which feathers off & blows around his sharp edge like the smoke around the corners of a burning building. On the Gornergrat (1870 feet) above our hotel we saw the whole world of circling mountains free from cloud. Often the Matterhorn was free for nearly a minute at a time. Just at sunset on our way down he was utterly free & against a pure blue sky.

The Matterhorn was wreathed in cloud when they left a few days later and traveled to Lausanne. “Found Livy and party all well,” wrote Twichell. They were to explore the Mont Blanc region before parting at the Geneva railroad station on Sept. 8. Mark was to spend nearly another year in Europe with his family, struggling through “A Tramp Abroad,” which became more and more burdensome. He began to dislike foreign scenes intensely. “I do wish you were in Rome to do my sight-seeing for me,” he wrote Joe. “Rome interests me as much as East Hartford could, and no more.”

Instead of “The Grumbler,” he chose for his literary companion a man called Harris, his “agent,” a figure most critics have found flat, but for the rest of his days Twichell was referred to as the original of Harris.

“ Thus endeth a most delightful and ever memorable vacation during which I experienced both human and divine kindness far beyond my deserts,” wrote Twichell in his journal. He had jotted down a thought for a sermon: “As men trying to read the details of a distant mountains and differing in their judgment as to what is what, distances, &c, so are men theologizing through the medium of their own philosophy.”

Mark also thought of mountains and distance. “Mont Blanc is like the great qualities of a friend – they sink low when close by & and the defects tower above – but down the vally of time & distance, they sink and old Mont Blanc soars into heaven with the glory of the sun on his crown.”

       Speech at the Mark Twain House, Hartford, October 10, 2002. © 2003 Steve Courtney.
     

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