THE REV. JOSEPH HOPKINS TWICHELL: A CELEBRATION                              STORY 1

TO THE TOWER

By Steve Courtney

The journals were packed in a neatly labeled cardboard box. When I drew them out—there were 13, each of them blue, each the size of a paperback, each tied up with string secured with a delicate bowtie knot—it was like being in a stranger’s attic, picking through the kind of private things people write down and pass on to their children, things perhaps unexamined for several generations.

It was as quiet as an attic, but the reading room was below ground level; a few scholars sat at tables broad enough to hold a whole spread of manuscripts and books. One wall of the room was glass, looking onto a sunken courtyard with a pyramid, with a huge marble Life Saver set on edge. What the writer of these journals, the captain of the Yale crew, Class of 1859, would have said about Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, I can’t imagine. His rotund, delicate Victorian penmanship displays the aesthetics of a different era.

The journals had been filled daily and carefully over more than 40 years by the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, who was pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church in Hartford from 1865 to 1912. Twichell has a permanent corner in literary history as Mark Twain’s best friend. They met when Twain was on a visit to the city in 1868. Twichell married Samuel Clemens to Olivia Langdon in Elmira, N.Y., in 1870; he performed their daughter Clara’s wedding ceremony in 1909. He presided over the funerals of three of the Clemens children, then over Olivia Clemens’ funeral, and finally over Twain’s own.

I was looking through the journals for references to the walk the two men took as a regular Saturday outing during the 25 years Twain lived in the city. They walked from Farmington Avenue, where the Mark Twain House is a museum today (Twichell lived just up Woodland Street at No. 125), to the top of Talcott Mountain in Simsbury, where Heublein Tower now stands, a distance of about 8 miles.

Heublein Tower is a 1913 newcomer, but in the 1870s there was a tower there, too: a wooden one kept as a tourist attraction by one Matthew H. Bartlett. Twain and Twichell would rest there, perhaps have a drink and a meal at the saloon Bartlett kept, and walk home again. If time was short, they would walk the couple of miles to Bloomfield and catch one of the frequent trains to the city.

And they would talk. “Mark Twain says he and Mr. Twichell always return to Hartford after one of these jaunts with the jaw ache, but never footsore,” reads an 1874 newspaper account.

Why not get a few people together and retrace the walk? When I told Lisa Johnson, the curator of Heublein Tower—which is still a popular goal of shorter autumn sightseeing walks—about this idea, she liked it. “Sometimes we think Mark Twain just stayed in the Mark Twain House all the time,” she said. And so it was that on an October morning John Boyer, Jim Kidd and I set out from the humorist’s fantastic brick house on Farmington Avenue on our way to Talcott Mountain and the Tower.

I have always practiced doubtful things on Twichell from the beginning. -- Mark Twain, “Autobiography”
Why did Mark Twain, the blasphemer, the author of “Letters from the Earth” and other dark books in which he took God to task for his cruelty, have a minister for his best friend?

“ It seems a strange association, perhaps, the fellowship of that violent dissenter with that fervent soul dedicated to church and creed,” wrote Twain’s first biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, in 1912; “but the root of their friendship lay in that frankness with which each man delivered his dogmas and respected those of his companion.”

In the winter of 1868-69, Twain was in Hartford to work on the manuscript of “The Innocents Abroad” with his publisher. According to Paine, the young, relatively unknown humorist was attending a reception where conversation turned to the fashionable new church, where many of the Hartford’s financial movers and shakers preened and worshipped.

“ The Church of the Holy Speculators,” Twain loudly dubbed it. His hostess whispered that the church’s minister was standing behind him, and tried to patch things up by introducing them.

Twain was invited to Twichell’s after the party, politely rose to leave at 9:30, and stayed until 11.

“ He enjoyed not only Clemens’ humor but also his bawdiness and profanity,” writes Justin Kaplan, Twain’s best modern biographer, “and in return [Twichell] preached to him a kind of muscular and nondoctrinal Christianity.” Twichell had learned this approach as chaplain to a New York regiment during the Civil War and in the fires of reform in the Congregational Church, a movement led by Hartford’s Horace Bushnell.

Twain later put Twichell, under the name Harris, into his travel book “A Tramp Abroad,” and the novelist Russell Banks recently drew parallels in the New York Times Book Review between the two men’s friendship and Huckleberry Finn’s friendship with the slave Jim. Banks, who is married to Twichell’s great-granddaughter, wrote that they were all “American males clearly blessed with the gift of friendship, of giving it and receiving it and holding onto it.”

Twain took refuge from his busy Hartford social life at Twichell’s house on Woodland Street in the 1880s, even when the house was full of children (Twichell and his wife Harmony had nine) and carpenters. “It’s like a boiler factory for racket,” he wrote while at work on “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court,” “and in nailing a wooden ceiling on to the room under me the hammering tickles my feet amazingly sometimes and jars my table a good deal, but I never am conscious of the racket at all, and I move my feet into positions of relief without knowing when I do it.”

There are cognitive psychologists who believe that the parts of the brain that control the creation of language are the parts that our ape ancestors used to grab bananas with their hands and feet. If Twain’s colossal powers of storytelling—“The perfect art of a certain kind of story telling will die with him,” Twichell wrote in his journal after a dinner party—could be improved by such foot-tickling, then what would an 8-mile walk do?

With M.T. to Bloomfield by rail, thence afoot to the Tower, and back afoot home to this house to dine at 6 ½ oclock. Splendid exercise and lots of pleasant talk. -- Twichell’s Journal, Oct. 26, 1874.

If people find it hard to picture Mark Twain outside his house, it is certain that John Boyer spends too much time there. Or so he said, phoning his wife to see if he could take off an October Saturday when he was supposed to help paint the kitchen.

“ It’s OK,” he told her. “I can take a weekday off and paint then. This is work. I always say I have to get out more.”

Boyer is the director of the Mark Twain House, and has put his institution firmly into the community—keeping the place humming with activity, be it Roy Blount Jr. on Southern humor or a recent symposium for teachers on the racial issues raised by “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Almost every time I call him, he’s in a meeting.

When I invited him to join the walk, he said he had always wanted to do it. Whether his wife grudged him the lost Saturday of painting is not clear, but she did suggest that we invite Jim Kidd.

There would be some real symmetry in that. Kidd is the present-day pastor of the Asylum Hill Congregational Church, and another exponent of a muscular and non-doctrinal Christianity. Since 1979 his church has been a force for aid to the city’s poor—as it was in Twichell’s day—and has increased in attendance fourfold. It’s Boyer’s church, too. Though Boyer and I wondered: We’re in our 40s; Kidd, we figured, was in his 50s. Would it be too much for him? Could he keep up?

“ I’ve always wanted to do it,” Kidd said on the telephone a couple of days later. He has been interested in the friendship of writer and minister and once preached a sermon called “Twixt Twain and Twitchell.” He warned me that he had to get back in time to officiate at the church’s Saturday evening service. I suggested an alternate day. “No, just assume I’ll be there,” he said.

Nobody seemed to have any idea how long it would take to walk from the Mark Twain House to Heublein Tower in Talcott Mountain State Park. It’s just not a route people walk anymore. The park personnel had bets going, Johnson, the Heublein curator, told us as the date approached: The shortest time estimate was five hours.
But first we had to figure out what route to take. Did they walk up what’s now Route 44, and then along the ridge of Talcott Mountain? Or was there a route through the woods, long lost?

A clue came from a reference to the walks in Paine’s 1912 biography: “Sometimes they took the train as far as Bloomfield, a little station on the way, and walked the rest of the distance, or they took the train from Bloomfield home.” That put the route to Bartlett’s tower roughly the same as the route one would take to Heublein Tower today: out of town along Albany Avenue, to Bloomfield Avenue, and then along Route 185 up the mountain to the park entrance. From there, Johnson said, the footpath to the summit and the tower follows the carriage road Bartlett put in for excursionists.

For Mr. Bartlett, who has robbed the historical command Away with him to the Tower! of all its terrors. -- Mark Twain, inscribed in a book presented to Matthew H. Bartlett

Bartlett erected his tower in 1867 because of the healthful air—he had lung problems—and the magnificent view available from the Talcott Mountain ridge. “The Farmington River Valley lies before one in all its extent,” a Philadelphia traveler wrote in the 1870s, “the white churches and farm-houses in pleasing contrast with the darker colors of the trees and meadows—the fields, some covered with their treasures of waving grain, others from which the summer’s harvest has already been reaped and housed, now displaying all the various shades of green and yellow, with here or there one just tinged with brown.” To the east was Hartford, “its towers and graceful spires rising among the beautiful elms and maples which shade its streets.”

Omnibus parties from Hartford would drive to the tower, or whole towns of walkers, or the girls from Miss Sarah Porter’s school in Farmington. Buffalo Bill Cody visited, and Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Clemens and Twichell were among “my most faithful and frequent visitors,” Bartlett wrote many years later. It was an age when people could walk long distances without having to call it “hiking.”

“ The middle-aged and the elderly walked constantly, for pleasure and health, and the boys tackled marathon distances,” wrote Kenneth Andrews in “Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle.” Twain and Twichell started on a walk to Boston in November 1874, but Twain’s feet gave out and they ended up taking the train. (Twichell, however, walked nine miles from Boston the next morning to preach a sermon in Newton Highlands.) Twain was a celebrity by then, and his walk was well-covered in the press.

“ It has long been the custom of these two gentlemen to take walks of about ten miles in the vicinity of Hartford for the purpose of enjoying a social chat and exchanging views on nothing in particular and everything in general,” says one of the Boston newspaper accounts, carefully clipped by Twichell and inserted in his journal.

One Twain-Twichell walk had serious repercussions for literary history. In 1874, a few weeks before the Boston attempt, Twain had a severe case of writer’s block. His friend and editor, William Dean Howells, had been asking him for a story for the January issue of the Atlantic. “I find that I can’t,” Twain wrote him on an October morning. “We are in such a state of weary and restless confusion that my head won’t ‘go.’ So I give it up.”

Two hours later, he wrote another letter: “I take back the remark that I can’t write for the Jan. number. For Twichell & I have had a long walk in the woods & I got to telling him about old Mississippi days of steamboating glory & grandeur ... He said ‘What a virgin subject to hurl into a magazine!’ I hadn’t thought of that before.”
The articles ultimately became Twain’s “Life on the Mississippi.” Twichell writes of this same day in his journal: “Had a long walk with M.T. in the P.M.”

Went on another walk to the Tower with M.T. Lots of pleasant talk. Never thought even to allude to the great Democratic victory. -- Twichell’s Journals, Nov. 4, 1874.

It threatened rain on the October morning that we started out. It had been agreed that we would not try to make the walk round-trip. But there are no longer trains to hop in Bloomfield, so we left my car at Heublein Tower and drove to the Mark Twain House in Boyer’s. As we got out, Jim Kidd, whose face always seems to me to be defined by piercing, shrewd eyes, permanent laugh lines and an absolutely defeating smile, joined us, looking a little like a power boat captain in his blue-striped shirt, white ducks and maroon cap, a bag slung over his shoulder.

Boyer’s face is boyish and round, set off by a near-Victorian brown moustache, though nothing as flamboyant as Twain’s (which along with his hair was red in the early days in Hartford, despite our present-day image of his mane as perpetually white.) Boyer’s clothes were sporty, knit shirt, khaki shorts, fanny pack. I was more forest-rangerish, jeans, grey shirt, work boots, red backpack. None of us wore the ties and jackets, puttees, dresses and ballooning bloomers that were de rigueur among Victorian walkers who had never heard of Eastern Mountain Sports.

We walked up Woodland Street and crossed Asylum. We stopped at a bridge over the railroad tracks: This was the right-of-way to Bloomfield, and might take passengers there again if the Griffin light-rail line is ever built to Bradley airport. As Woodland approached Albany, we saw the signs of decay: empty buildings, trash-strewn lots: “What a loss, what an opportunity lost,” Boyer said wistfully.

So what did they talk about? Leah Strong, a professor at Wesleyan College in Georgia, wrote the only biography of Twichell in the 1960s; she opined that their conversations on these walks were “of a light nature, not involving serious thought or decisions.” Paine disagrees: “They discussed philosophies and religions and creeds, and all the range of human possibility and shortcoming, and all the phases of literature and history and politics.”

The unknown 1874 Boston newspaper writer whose work Twichell pasted into his journal may have been the only one to get close to this. He asked Twain. Twain told him “that Mr. Twichell sometimes gains ideas from his companion which he embodies in his sermons and Mark Twain obtains information from his pastor which he works up into comical and humorous stories, and makes note of every joke which unconsciously falls from the clerical lips.”

All we know from the journal is that on Nov. 4, 1874, they did not discuss the main news of the day: The crushing defeat of the Republican party in Congressional elections, the first sign that the populace was getting fed up with corruption of the Grant administration. Twichell, Twain and most of their Hartford friends and associates were Republicans, revering the memory of Lincoln and hating the memory of slavery, so it was a grim day for them. Their neighbor Charles Dudley Warner, editor of The Courant (who first showed Twichell the walk to the Tower) editorialized that the defeat was a judgment on their party and they had better reform it.

They didn’t, and the country was on a slide that three years later led to reaction: in order to get into office, a Republican president had to make compromises with the Democrats that essentially returned black people in America to a form of slavery for the next 90 years.

Fast-forward to our walk of October 1995: It was two days before the Million-Man-March, and Kidd dubbed us “the Three-Man March.” Boyer asked me what I thought about it; some things he had read in The Courant had disturbed him, seemed too uncritically approving. I told him I thought the march was a valid expression of a group of people who had been historically disenfranchised and had been facing a vicious reaction in recent years. Kidd agreed, but for Boyer, as for many, black and white, the fascistic trappings of the march’s organizer, Louis Farrakhan and the dis-invitation of women stuck in the throat. (We had invited curator Johnson on our march, but she said shed meet us near the Tower for the last leg.)

We stopped at Scott’s bakery on Albany Avenue for a West Indian goat-meat pie; Boyer bought a couple of sweet buns and dangled them from his fanny pack.

The atmosphere is very hazy, and it makes the autumn tints even more soft and beautiful than usual. Mr. Twichell came for Mr. Clemens to go walking with him; they returned at dinner-time, heavily laden with autumn leaves. -- Olivia Langdon Clemens, early 1870s

We passed Thomas, the boarded-up Cadillac and Jaguar dealership, moved for reasons of theft problems, Kidd said, to the North Meadows. The owner, one of his parishioners, had once let him take the wheel of a $30,000 vehicle. Kidd told us of another parishioner at the other end of the spectrum, a man with a prison record, now a tireless worker for the church. He sported a tattoo on his chest of a headsman with a bloody axe. “Great for prison showers,” said Boyer.

Then we crossed the North Branch of the Park River and the urban landscape changed, as it can so quickly in Hartford, into the well-kept lawns and stately trees of Scarborough Street and environs. “I could just see Donna Reed or Katharine Hepburn stepping out of one of those houses,” says Kidd, pointing to a particularly white-clapboarded one veiled with red and yellow leaves. “Isn’t that the perfect New England autumn scene?”

As we headed out Bloomfield Avenue—the skies ambivalent about what they were planning for us—sidewalks dwindled as Tudor houses gave out. We were now walking along the shoulder of a road that, in Twain’s day, was a well-traveled country road. But it was not populated by these overpowered metal monsters that rushed toward us as we walked among the detritus of hub cap and road kill.

On Route 185, Simsbury Avenue, we began to see old farmhouses marked with dates from the 1700s and early 1800s. Blocking off the asphalt and internal combustion to our right, we might, for the first time, be seeing something like the scene Twain and Twichell saw along the route.

And in the fall ... when Twichell and I resumed the Saturday ten-mile walk to Talcott Tower and back, every Saturday, as had been our custom for years, we used to carry that letter along. -- Mark Twain, Autobiography

When we were planning the walk, Boyer had said, almost first of all, “We have to bring along ‘1601,’ “ and so we did.

“ 1601: Conversation as it Was by the Social Fireside, in the Time of the Tudors,” is a short work by Mark Twain that will probably never sit on the shelves next to “Tom Sawyer” in children’s libraries. It is, to put it bluntly, a dirty book. Twain wrote it in 1876 as a letter to Twichell. He had been reading old English books while researching “The Prince and the Pauper” and was pleasantly surprised by the natural and obscene speech found in them; Twain was always interested in how other ages undercut the Victorian stuffiness of his own. He thought he’d try writing his own piece of Elizabethan bawdry.

“ I thought I would practice on Twichell,” Twain remembered many years later. “I have always practiced doubtful things on Twichell from the beginning.”

The tryout site was on the walk to the Tower. “There was a grove of hickory trees by the roadside, six miles out, and close by it was the only place in that whole region where the fringed gentian grew. On our return from the Tower we used to gather the gentians, then lie down upon the grass upon the golden carpet of fallen hickory leaves and read it by the help of these poetical surroundings. We used to laugh ourselves lame and sore.”

“ 1601” defies synopsis; suffice it to say that Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh and sundry other Elizabethan characters are sitting around talking, and one of them breaks wind. Several pages of dialogue are required to determine the perpetrator; then the conversation shifts to the sexual customs of various lands and times; building to a final put-down line by the Virgin Queen herself that still can’t be printed in a family newspaper.

We had gotten a little bawdy ourselves, as we made our way up the old Simsbury Road. Like Twichell, Kidd showed a fine delight in the grossly obscene. Perhaps it was nervousness at the closeness of the traffic, perhaps it was the simian stimulation of our feet prodding our cerebral storytelling centers, perhaps it was just the bonhomie of three men released from their usual Saturday rounds. We were, in a way, lighting out for the territory. Anyway, we told jokes.

Rather than in a hickory grove, it was under a maple tree in a field at the Bloomfield 4-H farm where we rested to eat our lunch. I was about to suggest reading “1601” aloud, but Boyer alerted us to the sky, which was glowering.

Soon it was pouring. Boyer had a poncho, Kidd had a windbreaker and I had only a hat borrowed from Boyer. It was a hard uphill now. Boyer and I puffed along behind, hugging the guard rail, as Kidd strode farther and farther ahead. “I’m glad to see he’s able to keep up with us,” I said, as we watched his receding form. Muscular Christianity indeed.

We made time. We wanted to get dry, and were wet. The metal monsters that tickled our right elbows shone their lights in our eyes as their startled drivers spotted this trio of lunatics on the narrow shoulder.

Oh wake up, wake up! wake up! Dont sleep all day! Here we are at the Tower, man! I have talked myself deaf and dumb and blind . . . Just look at this magnificent autumn landscape! Look at it! look at it! Feast your eyes on it! -- The Rev. Mr. —, in Mark Twain’s “A Literary Nightmare,” 1876

Most of the hikers were scurrying through the rain for their cars as we entered Talcott Mountain State Park and walked up the last portion of the path that leads toward Heublein Tower. Suddenly, we were on the ridge. The rain stopped: against a gray backdrop, bathed with subdued light, what Victorian travelers called the Royal View was before us.

Where they saw steeples, fields and harvesters we saw forest and hills, light industry and asphalt; but a few steeples poked up, and a few tobacco barns, and we could ignore the pop, pop, pop of the state police shooting range below the cliff. The royalty of the view was still the same, the golds and russets receding into distant haze, the many shades of brown, the deep greens and shadows and light.

Lisa Johnson, who had helped set us on this trail months before, and Pat Heublein were there to meet us, and led us to a table set with cider, hot chocolate and doughnuts. Not, perhaps, what Twain or Twichell would have wanted to find, but it was welcome. (Kidd had said he would bring cigars. But he had decided against it; he might start smoking again.) We paid a visit to an iron bolt sticking from a foundation stone a few hundred yards south of Heublein Tower—the only remaining trace of Bartlett’s Tower.

The Tower volunteers were very attentive and interested, and pressed more doughnuts on us, and there was talk of museums and grants and church business, so it was not until we got into my Toyota that we could be boys again. The four of us—we had been joined by photographer Tony Bacewicz, who had dogged our steps in his car but joined us on foot for the last mile listened to “1601” read aloud in turn by Boyer, Kidd and Bascewicz. We laughed ourselves lame and sore.

       Originally printed in Northeast, the Sunday magazine of The Hartford Courant, Jan. 14, 1996.
        © 2003 Steve Courtney                           
     

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