THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 2

THE ODD COUPLE

By Steve Courtney

Hartford in 1867 was on its way to becoming the richest city in America. The Colt plant turned out firearms to win the West, the Jewell factory made miles of leather belting that drove machines everywhere in the country, Aetna and Phoenix made good on their claims when fires ravaged America’s wooden cities.

Hartford was also famed for its book industry, and that’s what brought a 32-year-old California writer with wild red hair to the city that year to talk to his publisher. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, already known as Mark Twain, was about to bring his first full-length book into the world, the story of the travels of the first package tour of Americans to Europe and Palestine. The publisher, Elisha Bliss, thought he should meet the best people of Hartford, and he was brought along to a social evening. The hostess had a picture of her church on the wall—Asylum Hill Congregational Church, where many of the city’s elite attended. “Ah!” said Mark. “I know it. The Church of the Holy Speculators.” “Shhh!” said his hostess. “The minister is right behind you.”

This could have been an awkward moment, but instead it was the beginning of a friendship that lasted for more than 40 years.

The Rev. Joseph Hopkins Twichell was a handsome man with a handlebar mustache, better kept than Mark’s. He had rowed port waist on the Yale crew. During three years in the Union army, he had dealt with far worse than Mark Twain’s sharp wit. He was intrigued by this newcomer. The Westerner’s future fame as a writer, Twichell said, was “impossible to anticipate at the time I first saw his shaggy head in 1867.”

Twichell himself was a Yankee through and through. He was born and raised in Plantsville when it was the tiny hamlet of Southington Corners, a place where all but a few were practicing Congregationalists. The wind blowing at night or a fall into an icy pond seemed to the boy to be full of meaning, purpose and God’s presence. His father, a tanner, was able to send him to Yale, where he got a taste of upper class life and friends. While he was at seminary in New York he was caught up in the beginnings of the Civil War, and enlisted as a chaplain in a regiment made up mostly of Irish Catholics. These men gave him an education in tolerance and diversity; Fredericksburg, Gettysburg and the Wilderness taught about terror and despair. After the war, his friend and mentor Horace Bushnell got him a job in the elegant new Asylum Hill church being built in the western Hartford suburbs.

That evening he met Mark Twain, the two got so immersed in talk that they returned to Twichell’s home to continue the conversation. Twichell introduced his new acquaintance to his wife, Harmony. Mark got up to leave at 9 o‘clock, but the two kept talking at the door until 11. They talked in other long evenings by the fireside; they talked on innumerable walks from Hartford to the wooden tower on Talcott Mountain, eight miles away. Twichell described these as “feasts of talk.” They talked on a hike to Boston that flopped in North Ashford, Connecticut. They talked in Heidelberg in Germany, in the shadow of the Matterhorn, on the dusty roads of Bermuda.

Twichell took ideas for sermons from these travels and conversations, and Clemens took ideas for his books—“Life on the Mississippi,” “A Tramp Abroad” owe their existence to Twichell’s influence. The Twichell family life also appealed to Mark -- Livy Clemens and Harmony Twichell became fast friends also. When Mark needed to get away from the social whirl of his mansion on Farmington Avenue to write “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,“ he took refuge at the parsonage on Woodland Street—even though carpenters were noisily at work there, and the Twichells’ nine children could not have always stayed quiet for “Uncle Mark.”

Mark Twain once said of Joe Twichell, “I keep a clergyman to remonstrate against my drinking. It gives zest and increase of appetite.” But this was the public Mark, not the private Sam Clemens. Their friendshoip was more complicated than that. The two men could not have been more different. Twain was impatient with religious hypocrisy, and fumed against missionaries, considering them less civilized than the people they tried to convert. In later life, he suffered tragedy with the deaths of two adult daughters; the death of his wife Livy added to the burdens of a soul racked with agony and guilt. “With all his splendid prosperities he lived to be a lonely, weary-hearted man,“ Twichell wrote. Mark came to believe in a God who was a sadist, toying cruelly with the human race in a bleak, machinelike universe. Humanity was not much better: “Oh, this infernal human race!” he wrote Twichell. “I wish I had it all in the Ark again—with an auger!”

Twichell stayed optimistic about God and humanity, and impatient with this growing strain in his friend. “Mark, the way you throw your rotten eggs at the human race doth greatly arride me,” he wrote Clemens . The simple faith of his childhood stayed strongly with Twichell in during the 47 years he served at Asylum Hill. During that time, Hartford’s factories flourished and the city’s population tripled. Twichell’s generosity embraced the newcomers from Italy and Poland. It also embraced new ideas: Darwin‘s theory of evolution and the beginnigns of psychology.

When Livy Clemens died in Italy in 1904, Joe Twichell wrote Mark Twain:

I can’t wonder – and I don’t – that with the light of your life gone out you sit dazed 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 at your side just now.

“I would like mightily to be at your side right now.” What a great way to think about a best friend, even one with whom you disagree entirely with on so many things, but whom you love nonetheless.

Every morning before breakfast, the Twichell family would read from the 103rd Psalm, with the famous lines: “As for a man, his ways are as grass. As a flower of the field he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more.” So I thank you for your patience in listening and remembering these two men and their unusual friendship, the friendship of a man of faith and a man of deep skepticism, here in Connecticut, in the place that knew them for a while.

       Speech at First Congregational Church, Bristol, Jan 13, 2002. © 2003 Steve Courtney.
     

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