My Mark Twain

LITERARY FRIENDS AND
ACQUAINTANCES--My Mark
Twain
by William Dean Howells
MY MARK TWAIN

I.
It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was
then the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had
the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does not
matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author. He
now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance,
which I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self
prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the

letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the first
reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling on this
point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost will not
suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.
At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which
seemed always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was
wearing a sealskin coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice,
or the love of strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I
do not know what droll comment was in Fields's mind with respect to
this garment, but probably he felt that here was an original who was not
to be brought to any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid
qualities. With his crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his
flaming mustache, Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that
sealskin coat, which afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the
cold chills through me when I once accompanied it down Broadway,
and shared the immense publicity it won him. He had always a relish
for personal effect, which expressed itself in the white suit of complete
serge which he wore in his last years, and in the Oxford gown which he
put on for every possible occasion, and said he would like to wear all
the time. That was not vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume
which the severity of our modern tailoring forbids men, though it
flatters women to every excess in it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the
offence, the pang which it gave the sensibilities of others. Then there
were times he played these pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of
the witness. Once I remember seeing him come into his drawing-room
at Hartford in a pair of white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do
a crippled colored uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say
all, for I remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low,
despairing cry of, "Oh, Youth!" That was her name for him among their
friends, and it fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it
was a shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of
his earlier companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the
heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad
boy, but always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every,

time for just the boy he was.

II.
There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a
year or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a
lunch in Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically
destined Ralph