On the subject of his house, I’ve read two accounts of Kurt Vonnegut’s visit there. He was given some award bestowed by the Twain House (it was before the Mark Twain Award for Humor so I’m not sure of the exact title) and was given a banquet/delivered a speech at the Twain house. By Vonnegut’s account he was offered a chance to break (not play a full game, just break) the balls on Twain’s billiard table, and he picked up the cuestick and started to but couldn’t go through with it- he felt he was unworthy. The Twain House account is that he asked to play a game on Twain’s billiard table and they refused him and he was insulted. No idea which is correct.
Twain also had a house in NYC at 5th Avenue and E. 9th street (second from left corner in this pic) and next to the Brevoort Hotel. It was razed along with the rest of the block to build the Brevoort apartments. Other homes still standing that he lived in are his childhood homein Hannibal and his (perennially bad luck having) brother Orion’s house in Nevada. (One of the first published works that showed Twain’s wrathful side was a letter to the editor signed ‘Mark’ when Orion’s only child died in 1864 and the town’s only mortician overcharged-tale.)
I don’t agree with Orwell (and not for the first time). Twain may have given a false impression about his age when writing about his experiences in the Confederacy – but, dammit, he not only didn’t cover it up, he wrote about it(!!) And it’s still in print.
Orwell sees his switching sides as due to Twain’s feeling that the North would win, and wanted to be on the winning side, and he worshipped power. But Twain was also a staunch opponent of slavery. I don’t know exactly when that was made manifest, but it’s as plausible an explanation as love of Power. (Actually, I strongly suspect that Twain had no deep feeling one way or the other – he simply didn’t want any part of the war, and left for the Territories. That might even make him a coward – and Twain himself said that he “skedaddled”. Again, in print. ) In any event, if Twain worshipped Power, you’d think he would’ve joined the Union side. Orwell’s interpretation that Twain admired Slade is definitely his own.
as for Twain not taking a stand that could hurt him – damn, didn’t he read Huckleberry Finn? The book is a condemnation of not only slavery, but racism as well. People think of it as a good ol’ reminiscence of a young boy’s life in the South before the War, but I suspect they haven’t read the book. There’s a reason the book keeps getting banned, even today. The book was banned in his time, too – the Concord Public Library wouldn’t have it, and Louisa May Alcott condemned it (not for the defense of blacks, though) Twain kept up the anti-racism in Pudd’n’head Wilson and many short stories.
I don’t see why Orwell condemns Twain for doing things besides writing. And Connecticut Yankee written as a deliberate flattery? DAMN, he hasn’t read it! It’s poking as much fun at Hank Morgan as it is at Camelot. But Orwell evidently can’t see past the criticisms of his own Britain.
After-dinner speaker? Well, he did. But he condemned the hell out of Leopold of Belgium, and the Pilgrims of Plymouth Plantation. And lots of other folks in his declining years. He was about as “safe” in his old age as George Carlin.
I always figured he took the side that most of his friends and relatives and riverboat acquaintances took, and then changed his mind due to a moment of clarity born of the realization that “Damn… people are really getting killed!” and “What’s this war about exactly anyway?”, and Orion being a Presidential appointee in Nevada gave reason for him to be a Unionist as well. Had he been from Alabama (like his cousinJeremiah- a very good novelist in his own right but to my knowledge he and Twain weren’t even aware of each other’s existence let alone close) it might have been interesting since getting away from the fighting would not have been as easy an option.
I was watching a rerun of Henry Louis Gates’ Looking for Lincolndocumentary and in one scene he asked then president Dubya what his favorite aspect of Lincoln was. Bush replied “His absolute moral clarity”, which is enough to let you know that Bush may have slept in Lincoln’s bed and held his personal effects in the White House but he’s never read a biography of him that wasn’t on the back of a cereal box. What made Lincoln a great president and imo the greatest American of his era is that he did not see the world in moral absolutes, and he did flip-flop on issues: his views on black people (both free and slave), the purpose of the war and how it should be fought, of other political issues as well- they all changed several times whenever he found new and better information that implied his previous views were wrong; compare this to Jefferson Davis who was so ‘clear’ in his vision that he could entrust the well being of his family to an illiterate black man and his plantations to another black man yet could simultaneously believe they were not trustworthy or intelligent and who was still giving orders to keep fighting the Yankees even while he was sleeping in a tent and running for his life and 99% of the lands still in the Confederacy would have been challenged to fend off a well armed Boy Scout platoon.
Sorry for the ramble, but the point is that I have never understood the notion that steadfastness in convictions is a virtue. Not to Godwinize but Hitler was steadfast in his convictions, few see him as admirable for it. Twain could incorporate new information, just as Huck does in the great scene where he’s writing the letter to Miss Watson about Jim, then ultimately decides to go to hell instead.
The dislike of some intellectuals for the book came from the fact it was narrated by a barely literate poor white kid. Oliver Twist was from a workhouse also but his real parents were “quality” don’t ya know, and Oliver didn’t smoke and cuss and cavort with riff-raff except for Fagin’s gang and he got away from them as soon as he could. Twain would probably have made Fagin a likeable character.
He didn’t like missionaries much either, or [the grandparents and great-grandparents of what we’d now call but weren’t then called] Young Earth Creationists. After his famous disastrously received after-dinner speechlampooning Longfellow, Emerson and Holmes he didn’t particularly like genteel literary society much either.
