Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum
Hannibal, Missouri

By Cindy Lovell

The best time to visit Hannibal, Missouri, is right after you’ve read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), especially if you chase it with the sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The other best time to visit is when you haven’t read these books in many years. You see, Hannibal stands ready to awaken memories, stir dormant imaginations, and welcome you to its literary folds. The question is, are you ready?

I first read Tom Sawyer in the fourth grade. I would spend the next 30 years trying to get to Hannibal as I reread Tom Sawyer and learned more about its author, Samuel Clemens, pen name Mark Twain.

Although critics claim Huck Finn as the better book, Tom Sawyer provides the gateway where Clemens initially resurrects the people and haunts of his youth. No other town has served the purpose of literature as well as Hannibal. No other author fictionalized his own childhood in such a way as to constantly be inviting all who read the book to come home, come home to Hannibal … or “St. Petersburg.” The line between fact and fiction is lovingly blurred.

My first pilgrimage was in the summer of 1996. Exiting Highway 61 past a handful of motels and diners, I steered downhill until the Mississippi River sprawled before me, a river of rafts and perils and adventures. I ditched the car and climbed across the levee to feel the power of place. Jackson’s Island loomed large. The Mississippi River may border or pass through ten states, but Mark Twain staked Hannibal’s claim on it when he wrote Tom and Huck.

Two kinds of tourists visit Hannibal: those who have read the books and yearn to feel the connection, and those who enjoy nitpicking impossible points and whining about commercialism. Yes, that’s Sam’s face on the Pepsi machines. To those lacking imagination, I say: lighten up.

At the corner of Hill and Main, Sam’s two-story boyhood home surveys the town, his bedroom windows facing the river and Cardiff Hill, scenes that presented irresistible temptation. Missing is the one-story ell upon which Sam (and Tom) landed when climbing out the window. Imagination supplies the invisible summer kitchen where the boys landed. Across the street stands Laura Hawkins’s girlhood home. Laura was the model for Becky Thatcher. Other period buildings complete the scene, such as Sam’s father’s Justice of the Peace Office and Grant’s Drug Store, where the family lived during harder times.

If you squint, power lines and cars disappear, revealing imaginary barefoot boys scampering toward adventure, eluding an unseen Aunt Polly.

Poke your head inside the replica of Tom Blankenship’s home, making sure to duck if you’re on the tall side. Blankenship was Huck’s real-life counterpart, and his house is catty-corner to the Clemens home, providing excellent proximity when the boys meowed to each other as a signal at night. Museum benefactors built this tiny abode on the site of the original home that housed the vast Blankenship clan. The house was rebuilt using period lumber and conjures enough cramped authenticity to remind modern visitors why Huck preferred sleeping in hogshead barrels. They were roomier.

A few blocks north, a memorial lighthouse, absent during Sam’s childhood, invites visitors to climb 244 steps up Cardiff Hill. The vistas of the river are worth it. Take out your copy of Tom Sawyer and reread the passages describing this “Delectable Land, dreamy, reposeful, and inviting.” Sam got it just right.

As twilight descends, meander farther away from the river toward the Old Baptist Cemetery, where Tom and Huck found “round-topped, worm-eaten boards staggered over the graves, leaning for support and finding none.” In summer, one million lightning bugs await to enchant the devoted reader. You are forgiven if you yield to temptation and go barefoot in the grass.

In the distance a train slouches through town, each whistle unique, composed by the engineer. On Lovers Leap, out-of-towners listen expectantly.

Two miles south, the Mark Twain Cave reaffirms Clemens’s meticulous memory. In Huckleberry Finn, he provided these directions:    

We went to a clump of bushes, and Tom made everybody swear to keep the secret, and then showed them a hole in the hill, right in the thickest part of the bushes. Then we lit the candles, and crawled in on our hands and knees. We went about two hundred yards, and then the cave opened up. Tom poked about amongst the passages, and pretty soon ducked under a wall where you wouldn’t a noticed that there was a hole. We went along a narrow place and got into a kind of room, all damp and sweaty and cold, and there we stopped. 

            I have followed those directions to that room. It is uncanny that young Sam knew that cave so well as to remember these directions decades later when he wrote Huckleberry Finn. The oldest cave signature is in this room, dated 1819. Young Clemens himself autographed a cave wall as did his friends. I imagine Sam pulling the pencil out from behind his ear, or maybe his pocket. The cave is sacred ground. Utterly sacred.

Hannibal itself is holy to all who fall under the spell of Sam Clemens’s pen. When Jorge Luis Borges, the blind Argentine writer visited, his only wish was to touch the Mississippi River in Sam’s hometown. He wept.

I have witnessed schoolteachers, students, and others respond similarly. Between my first visit in 1996 and moving there in 2007, I lost count of the dozens of people I brought to explore Sam’s boyhood home. They marveled at the cracks in the plank floors where Tom poured the dreaded Pain-killer. They peered at Becky Thatcher’s house from the parlor window and asked if Laura Hawkins stayed in Hannibal or moved away as Sam did. (She stayed.) They lingered in the kitchen imagining Sandy, a young enslaved boy whose services were rented by the Clemenses, sleeping on a rug.

Their questions attempted to discern fact from fiction. All were worthy visitors. They brought no snipe, no snark, no snide remarks dismissing the commercialization of Hannibal’s most famous resident. They brought respect, curiosity, and imagination. And Hannibal rewards such folks.

Cindy Lovell is a writer and educator. She teaches a course on Tom Sawyer for Quincy University, which is on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River. She is the former executive director of both the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum (Hannibal, MO) and the Mark Twain House & Museum (Hartford, CT). Cindy wrote the narrative for Mark Twain: Words & Music, a double-album benefit project for the Boyhood Home, featuring Jimmy Buffett as Huck Finn, Clint Eastwood as Mark Twain, and Garrison Keillor as narrator. Grammy Award-winner Carl Jackson produced the project, and performers included Brad Paisley, Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris, and other fans of Mark Twain.

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East Hill
Elmira, New York

By Matt Seybold

Now it’s just a small, oddly-shaped clearing in a dense wood. At the top of the large pile of limestones we generously call a “staircase,” a space opens up in the trees. It feels like a good place for a pagan ritual. And every four years, on the final night of the International Conference on The State of Mark Twain Studies, that’s kind of what happens. A gaggle of scholars, creative writers, actors, filmmakers, and other Twainiacs gather in the moonlit clearing to smoke the cheapest possible cigars, their inexpensiveness a point of pride, as it had been for Sam Clemens himself. Winners of Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Emmys, Oscars, Tonys, and every imaginable academic fellowship scrape dry flakes of tobacco off their tongues and pretend to know the words to “Oft in the Stilly Night.”

From 1874 to 1953, in this space stood an octagonal study, designed to resemble a steamboat pilothouse, in which Mark Twain drafted the majority of the works for which he is now remembered. After too many midcentury literary tourists made pilgrimage, trapsing across the property where Twain’s in-laws still resided, the study was relocated to the campus of Elmira College, where his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was an alumna and his niece, Ida Langdon, was a professor. Elmira College would eventually become custodian of Quarry Farm as well, and the home of the Center for Mark Twain Studies, where I work.

While I once cringed at the solemnity with which my fellow scholars sung “Will The Circle Be Unbroken?” after four days of academic panels and roundtables, I’ll admit in the intervening years I have occasionally secluded myself in that clearing for a few idle minutes of, I don’t know, reverence.

When Twain was here, most every Summer from 1869 to 1890, and periodically thereafter, there were no woods. The study was, as he put it, “perched in complete isolation on the top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley and city and retreating ranges of distant blue hills.” One can still approximate this view from the veranda of the main house at Quarry Farm, a hundred yards southeast and downhill from where the study stood. On a clear day, the blue hills are visible well across the Pennsylvania border, seven miles south.

It was this view, across the Chemung River Valley, this panorama of church steeples, lumber barges, railways bridges, and smokestacks, of commercial development buttressed by wilderness on all sides, which inspired Twain’s imaginative return to antebellum Missouri. First the early chapters of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and then the greater parts of Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) were drafted here, along with dozens of other novels, memoirs, plays, essays, stories, speeches, and at least one pornographic farce solely for private circulation. Twain estimated that he wrote ten chapters in the study at Quarry Farm for every one he wrote elsewhere.

Visitors joke, often enough for it to become something of a cliché amongst our staff, that Twain’s productivity must have been fueled by boredom. His other regular haunts during the Gilded Age – Hartford, New York City, London, Vienna, Berlin – are so cosmopolitan and Elmira so provincial by comparison. It must have been easy for him to avoid distraction up there on East Hill. I have myself sometimes described him as looking down on Elmira like the Grinch over Whoville. But there is no evidence that Sam Clemens disdained or eluded the social scene of Elmira. To the contrary, some of his most cherished friendships were developed here, with Thomas K. Beecher, Charley Langdon, John T. Lewis, and John B. Stanchfield. And he did not vegetate at Quarry Farm, waiting for them to come to him, either.

One of Twain’s most healthful habits was his near-daily constitutionals. He was a “pedestrianist,” as he put it. Often accompanied by friends, often chain-smoking, he would walk shocking distances over tough terrain. During the seasons he spent here, downtown Elmira was connected to Quarry farm only by what one visiting reporter described as “a winding road, which is steep, very steep, and at times is really a dangerous driveway.” Twain was well aware of the danger, having witnessed the occasion in 1877 when a runaway carriage containing his sister-in-law and niece nearly careened into a deep ravine, saved only by the heroic efforts of Lewis.

The “dangerous driveway” no longer exists. It has been replaced by a pair of paved two-lane surface roads, still very steep, and treacherous when icy. This commute should be considered as essential to Twain’s writing process as the porch where he read each day’s work aloud to the assembled family and maybe even as the study itself.

Throughout his forties and fifties, Twain tripped his way down (and back up again) to visit the barber shop of Henry Washington, the self-emancipated man whose mother is the narrator of Twain’s “A True Story, Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It”; to play pool with Beecher in the makeshift billiard parlor the radical theologian had created in the southwest corner of the Park Church; to gossip with other men of his guild at the newspaper offices of the Elmira Advertiser, Gazette, and Telegram;and to wet his whistle at Klapproth’s Tavern.

Far from being a recluse during the three or four months he spent in Elmira every year, Twain was someone you were likely to bump into during a summer stroll, a fixture of the downtown scene. When Twain died, legions of well-wishers gathered for a public viewing in New York City of the celebrity who Robertus Love, in his obituary, deemed “the most famous man on earth.” But Twain’s eulogy, written by the first woman ordained in this state, Beecher’s protégé, Annis Ford Eastman, was read at the Park Church in Elmira, and he was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, next to his wife, son, and the two daughters who preceded him.

Frank Gannett, the newspaper magnate who was then the publisher of the Elmira Star-Gazette, noted in his obituary that though Twain’s celebrity and works belonged to the whole world, his “personal attributes, idiosyncrasies and peculiarities of disposition, temperament and moral attitude” felt like they were peculiar to Elmira. Nearly every Elmiran could recount secondhand stories, if not personal memories, of the famous author’s local exploits, and could testify to his “labors in the path of universal education,” his “insistence on an exchange of absolutely honest and honorable relations in every business and social enterprise,” and his “domestic life full of examples of faithfulness and devotion.”

That steep, winding, hazardous road between Quarry Farm and downtown Elmira connected the pastoral idyll — which was undoubtedly good for Twain’s productivity — to a diverse cast of quirky characters and social dynamics, which were also, I contend, generative for his art. Part of what I have elsewhere called the “Quarry Farm Style” is its dialectic of romance and realism. The novels written under these conditions move from King Arthur’s Court to scathing critiques of feudal and industrial society, from vivid naturalist descriptions of the Mississippi River to violent scenes of crisis and collapse along the banks, from prevailing American myths to reportage which debunks them, from the lifestyles of deluded princes to those of grasping paupers (equally deluded).

By the time he first came to Elmira, 33-year-old Mark Twain well knew what it was like to climb. How hard. How irrational. How unlikely. And I expect every time he contemplated those two miles back up East Hill, he was reminded again. The bootstrappers, the strivers, the grinders, the scrapers, the self-title entrepreneurs: all the lunks in the streets blindly hustling some mirage of success in a society structured to ensure their defeat; aren’t they ridiculous?

Well, so am I.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as Resident Scholar at the Center for Mark Twain Studies. He is executive producer and host of The American Vandal Podcast and founding editor of MarkTwainStudies.org. He is co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018) and (with Gordon Hutner) of a 2019 special issue of American Literary History on “Economics & Literary Studies in The New Gilded Age.” His work has appeared in dozens of publications.

Photo of Samuel Clemens looking out from the study window, Quarry Farm, East Hill, Elmira, New York, 1903. By T.E. Marr, courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive at Elmira College.

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Mark Twain House & Museum
Hartford, Connecticut

By Jacques Lamarre

In 2008, with no ceremony, I was handed a simple brass key to Mark Twain’s Hartford home. Having just been hired as the director of Marketing and Special Programs, I was given a few rules: do not touch anything, do not sit on the furniture, and, for God’s sake, don’t enter the house after the alarm has been set. The key went onto my keychain alongside those for my house, my Jeep Liberty, and my shed, and I began my efforts to lure visitors into the Clemens family’s house and its adjacent museum.

Up until that time, I only had been to the Twain House on an otherwise unmemorable date. I don’t know who chose the house tour for a date activity, but it likely had to do with my being a resident of the West End of Hartford, and, at the time, without a car. I cannot remember my date’s name, but the house made an immediate impression. That was the Clemenses’ intention.

One can track the trajectory of Twain’s life, work and gathering sophistication by visiting his homes. I have visited Samuel Clemens’ childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri as well as his birthplace, a humble two-room shack in Florida, Missouri. Both homes lay bare his Lower Midwest roots and illustrate the elements that would feature heavily in several of his most popular works. He left Missouri a Clemens and found his pen name of Mark Twain when he went out west.

His time in the rough-and-tumble, Wild West atmosphere of Nevada would find him living in a variety of frontier structures. In California, his accommodations ranged from mining camps to boarding houses. Alta California, a San Francisco newspaper, engaged his services as a traveling correspondent to cover the first transatlantic pleasure cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. This trip on the steamship the Quaker City would not only expose him to a rich world of antiquities and awe-inspiring sights — all chronicled with a wry cynicism in his first major work, The Innocents Abroad (1869) — it would also introduce him to his future brother-in-law, Charley Langdon.

Twain experienced love at first sight after seeing an ivory miniature picture of Charley’s sister Olivia “Livy” Langdon. After meeting in New York City in 1869, an ardent courtship ensued, much of it conducted in the Langdon family home in Elmira, New York. The Langdons’ wealth and social prominence, along with Twain’s burgeoning success as an author and lecturer, allowed him to graduate into a new circle of society and a heightened level of ambition. After their marriage, Livy and Sam two moved into a gorgeous, fully-furnished home on a highly-desirable street in Buffalo — a gift from Sam’s father-in-law. Their time in Buffalo was brief, only one year. Twain set his sights on a move to Hartford. It wasn’t his first visit to a city that would loom large in his life.

In 1868, Twain visited Hartford — at the time the wealthiest city per capita in the United States — to meet with the publisher of the forthcoming The Innocents Abroad. Always one to economize efforts, Twain used the visit to file one of his ongoing travelogues to the Alta California. “Of all the beautiful towns it has been my fortune to see this is the chief…. Everywhere the eye turns it is blessed with a vision of refreshing green. You do not know what beauty is if you have not been here.”

Sam, Livy, and their first child Langdon moved to Hartford in 1871 to be close to the American Publishing Company. They rented a home in Hartford’s West End, then known as Nook Farm. Named after a bend in the Hog River, Nook Farm was and would be home to many of Hartford’s cultural and political elite, including author Harriet Beecher Stowe, suffragist Isabella Beecher Hooker, journalist, Charles Dudley Warner, actor and playwright William Gillette, Senator Joseph Hawley, and, eventually, Katharine Hepburn.

It was during this time that four significant events occurred. The first, the tragic death of their young son in 1872, a devastating blow for the family. This was followed by the joyful births of their daughters Susy in 1872 and Clara in 1874. The fourth, Sam and Livy purchased a plot of land on Farmington Avenue to begin construction of the first home that they could properly call their own.

Positioned overlooking the Park River (the new and much nicer name for the Hog River), the property sat on the edge of Hartford adjacent to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s final home. Sam and Livy engaged architect Edward Tuckerman Potter to design a house that would be both a family home and a jaw-dropping showstopper that reflected the Clemenses’ growing social importance. The construction of the massive Victorian Gothic home with its ornate brick and woodwork would cause tongues to wag around the conservative town. The Hartford Times wrote, “The novelty displayed in the architecture of the building, the oddity of its internal arrangement and the fame of its owner will all conspire to make it a house of note for a long time to come.” They weren’t wrong.

The seventeen years that the Clemenses lived in their beloved home were to be their happiest and were Sam’s most prolific and productive. Ironically, it was during his time that he wrote three of the works that would lean most heavily on his Midwest roots: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Of his Hartford home, Twain wrote in 1897, “To us our house was not unsentient matter—it had a heart & a soul & eyes to see us with, & approvals & solicitudes & deep sympathies; it was of us, & we were in its confidence, & lived in its grace & in the peace of its benediction. We never came home from an absence that its face did not light up & speak out its eloquent welcome—& we could not enter it unmoved.”

Over my years at the Twain House, that simple brass key would grow in weight and import in my pocket. Every day when I left, I would swing by the bust of Twain in the lobby and say (quietly, so no one would question my sanity), “I hope I did right by you today.” In 2016, I left the Mark Twain House for another job. I still live in the Hartford area and can visit, but I feel acutely the loss of that key and my access to the bewilderingly beautiful and eccentric home that I too could not enter unmoved.

Jacques Lamarre is a playwright and a marketing specialist who consults for The Mark Twain House & Museum.

Photo by Frank Grace Photography, courtesy of the Mark Twain House & Museum.

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Dollis Hill House
London, England

By Thomas Ruys Smith

It’s the first real day of spring and I’m in Dollis Hill — an unremarkable suburb of North London that sits just inside the North Circular, the multi-lane road system that encircles the centre of the capital and is synonymous with traffic congestion and an entrenched atmosphere of urban decay. Still, in Gladstone Park, the sun is out and so are the local residents: in the ruins of what was once Dollis Hill House, a children’s birthday party is winding down just as a group of women begin an impromptu karaoke session; our miniature schnauzer Winifred is making the acquaintance of a fluffy white pomeranian apparently named Snowflake. This might seem an unlikely location for a ghost-hunt, but that’s why we’re here.

If you wanted to seek for the restless spirit of Mark Twain, there would be worse places to begin, at least according to the man himself. Interviewed in 1907 as he embarked on what he knew would be his final trip across the Atlantic, Twain was clear that he intended to spend his afterlife in the modern Babylon that had often served him as a second home: “I may never go to London again until I come back to this sphere after I am dead,” he told a reporter, “and then I would like to live in London.”

As an academic based in the UK, I’ve spent much of my career exploring Mark Twain’s relationship with the Mississippi River, tracing the way that the river wound its way through his life and work. In surprising ways, that muddy water often washed up at my own front door across the Atlantic: British writers had a surprising influence on the creation of the Mississippi as a powerful global emblem of America. Now, though, I’m reversing that transatlantic equation. It seemed time to pursue the traces of Mark Twain in my own backyard — in London, the city in which he spent roughly three crucial years on numerous trips, from his inaugural visit in 1872 to his final victory lap in 1907. A number of Twain’s London residences still exist, most famously the Langham Hotel which hosted his early visits and the house he rented at 23 Tedworth Square in affluent Chelsea, which bears a blue plaque erected by English Heritage to announce to passers-by that Mark Twain, American writer, had once lived there in 1896-7.

For me, though, there is something especially evocative about Dollis Hill House, occupied by Twain with his wife Olivia and daughter Jean in the summer of 1900. Compared to the glamour of his first trips to London as a literary lion ensconced in the Langham, or the awful gloom of his secluded residence in Tedworth Square after the death of his daughter Susy, there is an appealing softness to Twain’s time in Dollis Hill: after years of personal turmoil, including bankruptcy, the months he spent in the house were a relatively sunny sojourn. By 1900, his fortunes had been largely restored, enough for his family to return to America after a period of financial exile in Europe, and Dollis Hill House was a final hiatus before the end of this odyssey.

Twain’s description of this time exudes a warmth and peace that was rare in his later years: “Dollis Hill House comes nearer to being a paradise than any other home I have ever occupied. … It is within a biscuit-toss of solid London; yet it stands solitary on its airy hill, in the centre of six acres of lawn, and garden, and shrubbery, and heavy-foliaged ancient trees.” His only complaint was the lack of a telephone. Today, of course, London has swallowed up Dollis Hill and what had been “country, pure and simple” to Twain is now surrounded by urban sprawl. Even on a warm spring day, “paradise” seems a stretch. However, as Twain himself noted, the land around the house had just been “bought for a park, to be for all time a memorial to Mr. Gladstone” — a frequent visitor to the house during his time as Prime Minister — which meant that, to some extent, the landscape that Twain loved really would “remain as it is.” Unlike hotels or his other residences that still function as private homes, this Twain-imprinted place remains immediately and freely accessible to all.

There’s also something about Dollis Hill House’s ruin that adds a poignancy, and a piquancy, to its association with Twain. A series of fires in the late 1990s left it a derelict shell. Though money was earmarked for its restoration, it became a casualty of austerity when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson canceled the funding during his time as London Mayor. A final fire in 2011 precipitated its demolition. Now, it remains an absent presence in Gladstone Park: a short course of bricks marks out the building’s floorplan and a fragment of one wall remains. People make their own use of this liminal space — like today’s birthday party.

An absent presence is also how I’ve come to think about Mark Twain as I search for him in London. Today, I can’t swear that the park-goers in Dollis Hill are thinking much about its famous former resident, but across the closing decades of the nineteenth century London was infatuated with the writer who seemed to embody their dreams, and sometimes nightmares, about America. In 1907, local newspaper The Hendon and Finchley Times proudly claimed him, “Our friend Mark Twain, who is associated with this district owing to his residence at Dollis Hill House.” Another paper judged that Twain’s connection to Gladstone Park would “add a certain … literary flavour in the public mind to its natural attractions.” These are vivid and hyperlocal examples of what Twain’s some-time associate Ralph Ashcroft declared in 1907: the English — and Londoners in particular — were “part-owners with the American nation of Mark Twain.”

In turn, Twain himself was infatuated with an urban space that was like no other on the face of the planet. “Everything in this monster city interests me,” Twain announced during his first time in London. And it always did. I would argue that outside of America, there is no other location that meant as much to him, or that had as much influence on his sense of self. Just as this ruined corner of London will always be a little paradise for Twain’s ghost, so London should always be a part of our understanding of this iconically American writer. And for me, there is something particularly significant about having this enigmatic shell on my doorstep, a short drive away from my own home along the grey river of the North Circular. Tracing the outlines of the rooms of Dollis Hill House as my daughters eat an ice cream purchased from the old stable block and modern life buzzes throughout this liminal shell, I can conjure up Twain as a near-neighbour, a fellow suburbanite, a Londoner, available for afternoon calls. In Gladstone Park, the sun is shining, and Mark Twain is lounging in a deckchair beneath the trees, forever.

Thomas Ruys Smith is an academic and writer who specializes in the study of nineteenth-century America. He is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom and co-editor of the journals Comparative American Studies and New Area Studies.

“Gladstone Park, at Dollis Hill, to Be Opened on May 25.” The Illustrated London News, 1901.

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23 Tedworth Square

London, England

By Susan K. Harris

When Mark Twain reached England at the end of his 1895–96 lecture tour around the British Empire, he first sojourned in Guildford, 25 miles southwest of London, where he began work on what would become Following the Equator (British title, More Tramps Abroad), his record of that trip. However, shortly after he and his travel companions — his wife Olivia, and their middle daughter Clara — moved in, his oldest daughter, Susy, died in the family home in Hartford, CT, and, according to Twain legend, the family fell into a period of deep mourning from which Olivia, at least, never fully recovered. In October, after their youngest, Jean, joined them, they moved to 23 Tedworth Square, London, a five-story townhouse where they would dwell for the next nine months. There, the story goes, the family lived in almost complete seclusion: Olivia grieving, the two girls faithfully attending her, and Twain alternately railing against God and knuckling down to writing. As he bitterly told his old friend Joseph Twichell, “I am working, but it is for the sake of the work — the ‘surcease of sorrow’ that is found there. I work all the days, and trouble vanishes away when I use that magic.”

Tedworth Square is in Chelsea, a leafy section of London. In Twain’s day it was a modest neighborhood; today it shows all the signs of upscale gentrification, with apartment sales starting at over a million pounds. I made London my final stop when I followed Twain’s route around the world in 2013-14. Like Twain, I was relieved to have my journey finished. Although I had visited Australasia, India, and South Africa in separate trips, interspersed with teaching and other domestic duties, the collective undertaking had proven far more exhausting than I had anticipated — in part because I was always conscious of being an outsider, especially in cities where the sight of a lone woman triggered outspoken commentary from male spectators. In contrast London seemed welcoming and strangely safe. It was, I realized, a transitional space for me: familiar — I had visited often and lived there one summer — though still distant from domestic stress; a place to tie up loose research ends at the British Library, stroll through parks, and collect myself before I hit home and the myriad responsibilities awaiting me.

I suspect Twain and Livy felt the same way, despite — or perhaps because of — their bereavement. At least the family had been spared the shock of hearing about Susy’s death while surrounded by strangers and unknown tongues, and London was old stomping grounds for them, too. Chelsea also afforded some distractions, even for a grief-stricken writer living in (relative) seclusion. Tedworth Square enters obliquely into Following the Equator, in the India portion of the book. There Twain compares the flawless beauty of black and brown skins to “the white ones which are streaming past this London window now.” Not only are his neighbors’ skin colors “fish-belly,” “sallow,” and “mustard yellow,” one passer-by sports a “boiled-cauliflower nose in a flabby face veined with purple crinklings.” Not a generous assessment, but an early marker of the angry misanthropy that Twain developed in the wake of Susy’s death, I suspect. 

Today’s London complexions are generally better — for all our urban pollutants, at least we don’t struggle with coal dust — but my journal reminds me that while I was sitting across from #23 a man stumbled by who did look like the people Twain described. Disheveled and unshaven, he was drinking beer at 11 am and smelled like a horse. Even upscale Chelsea isn’t entirely shut off from London’s outcasts.

Nor was the Clemens family entirely shut off from London’s social life. The story that the mourning family isolated themselves is, like many Twain stories, largely a myth, probably originating in Twain’s attempts to fend off interviewers by claiming sequestration. In fact all four had contacts with the world beyond the house. Although Livy rarely went out, she did see close friends at home, and Barbara Snedecor’s edition of Livy’s letters shows that she quickly resumed responsibility for family correspondence, including paying bills and (because Twain had shifted ownership of his copyrights to her prior to declaring bankruptcy) dealing with Twain’s contract negotiations. Clara and Jean certainly supported their mother, but not 24/7; David Frears’ Mark Twain, Day by Day, notes that they acquired bicycles and learned to ride them in the Square, and Clara’s memoir My Father, Mark Twain recounts long Sunday walks around the city with their father. With friends, both girls also attended concerts and theater performances.

Twain always gregarious, visited friends, including Poultney Bigelow, John Hay, Bram Stoker, and Rudyard Kipling, and he willingly attended the theater and social/public events, including a Zangwill reading, at least one meeting of the Savage Club, a Parliamentary session, and the Queen’s Jubilee. Letters also show him keenly following the McKinley/Bryan presidential race in the U.S. Moreover, though resisting most demands for lectures and interviews, he allowed his friend Adele Chapin to persuade him to “tell stories” to patients at the London Hospital, an event that delighted the patients and forced Twain out of his self-absorption.

We associate sprawling cities with loneliness and alienation. But their small neighborhoods and parks can also provide shelter, quiet places to harbor while learning how to shift from one stage of life to another. London proved transitional for the Clemens family, furnishing them the physical and social spaces they needed to navigate their lives without Susy. For them as for me, the city served as interstitial space, between the upheavals of travel and the resumption of familiar routines. They could mourn together inside the five-story house, but they could also venture beyond it: a bike ride around the square, tea with a friend, an afternoon concert, dinner at a social club. Day by day, month by month, 23 Tedworth Square harbored Livy, Clara, Jean, and Samuel Clemens while they worked through their initial shock and relearned the social skills they would need for the remainder of their lives.

Susan K. Harris’s studies of Twain’s life and works incorporate many perspectives, from his yearning to escape human time and space, through his courtship days, to his later anti-imperialism. Her most recent book, Mark Twain, the World, and Me: Following the Equator, Then and Now (2020), follows Twain on his journeys through Australia, India, and South Africa, exploring the cultural phenomena that he noticed (and those he ignored) and discussing her own relationship to one of America’s most powerful writers. 

Photo by Becky Dale.

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After some locals opened with a set perhaps too soft for the likes of that night’s crowd, two strange men took to the tiny stage, a platform rising maybe only a foot from the floor and only slightly larger than most people’s dinner tables. It was almost completely devoid of equipment when the men, who called themselves The Hooten Hallers, began to set up. While Andy began assembling a drum kit, John began to pace, wringing his hands, and grinning weirdly. The look on his bearded, sweaty face was wild, hurried, and almost nervous. He moved around the tiny stage like a panther in a sideshow cage.

Finally, Andy gave John a nod. Someone slipped a guitar into this strange beast’s hands, and everything about John changed. With the addition of his instrument he was complete. His entire being relaxed, and his eyes swept over the crowd with an unnerving look of total confidence.

A hard, dirty blues riff unwound itself into the air and a mean, pulsing rhythm beat forth from the kick drum. John swayed in his Carhartt overalls, his head cocked back and to the side, his eyes closed. When the lyrics came they were the mournful roadhouse lyrics of a man who has truly known blues in his life.

His voice isn’t so much gravelly—it’s more like broken glass. There are times that John’s voice finds a real Tom Waits quality in its deepness and grit, but sometimes it’s more like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins in its ascending-pitched growls of lyrics. But maybe it’s more accurate to say that John’s vocal cords are the conduits by which the ghosts of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf communicate. When The Hooten Hallers perform “Tonite, He’s on Death Row,” John appears to weep the lyrics and bleed the notes onto the neck of his guitar.

That night they played all the songs from their album Greetings from Welp City! Immediately obsessed, I bought the CD and wore it out waiting for another release.

Chillicothe Fireball came out in 2014, introducing Kellie Everett on bass and baritone saxophones. The Midwestern-blues sound had evolved into something else, emanating a sense of swampland magic as sorrowful and alluring as a French Quarter funeral. It’s mournfully aggressive, the kind of music you want blaring from your car when you step out to do the most badass thing you’re ever going to have to do.

The Hooten Hallers have channeled the songs of all the heartache and anger and triumph that anyone living on the fringes has come to know. I shiver when I hear “I Know Everything” or “I’m Used to the Truth,” with the beautiful instrumental work and simple-yet-profound lyrics like, “I’m stronger than dirt and I ain’t in no hurry. I’m used to the truth, I’m from Missouri.”

So the band is in no hurry, but something new is being painstakingly crafted somewhere as I write this. An acoustic EP is due out this summer, and rumor has it a full-length album will follow in 2017. From what I’ve seen around YouTube I get a sense that the band’s acoustic sound will bear the influence of some wonderful, dead country outlaws, but I don’t think the Hallers could completely depart from the blues even if they’d want to.

So whenever the new music comes, I’ll be waiting for it, and I hope it’s dirty…that’s the truth.

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River-Horse Pavilion
Columbia, Missouri

By Kit Salter

In March 1995, my wife Cathy and I went to wish Godspeed to Columbia, Missouri, resident William Lewis Trogdon as he was leaving for New York City to begin a 103-day nautical journey, which he would chronicle in the 1999 book, River-Horse: A Voyage Across America, under the pen name of William Least Heat-Moon.

Trogdon called his newly acquired boat Nikawa, which means “river-horse” in the Osage language. This 22-foot C-Dory with twin engines was nestled in a solid towing trailer. As the author prepared to ease both his boat and his hopes into motion, Cathy presented him with an ivory amulet of a sea otter. I handed him a Timex Expedition watch that had been my trusty travel companion. On that spring day, little did we know that the C-Dory being carefully pulled into traffic would later stand in a bold wooden pavilion just outside Columbia.

Today, as you drive north on Highway 63 just coming into Columbia from the direction of Jefferson City, the massive red metal roof of the Boone County History and Culture Center catches your eye. Then you see an open structure next to the parking lot. This is the River-Horse Pavilion, built in 2006 to celebrate Heat-Moon’s journey in Nikawa, the very boat we saw leave his home some years earlier.

Heat-Moon wrote on the final page of River-Horse that he had ridden Nikawa “5,288 watery miles from the Atlantic.” At the very end of that trip, to celebrate arrival at the Pacific, he reached for a pint of Atlantic water he had safeguarded for 103 days. He writes, “I raised the bottle  high, sunlight striking through the glass, salt waves rising to it as if thirsty, and I said, ‘We bring this gift from your sister sea — our voyage is done. Then I poured the stream into the Pacific and went back to the wheel of our river horse, and I turned her toward home.”

Some years after completing that adventure, Heat-Moon presented his already fabled C-Dory to the Boone County Historical Society.  The Society was proud to have such a fine bit of Missouriana from one of the state’s most productive and creative authors, but they had to ask, “How do we display it?”

The historical society wanted to make Nikawa available 24/7, yet protect it from the weather and potential pilfering. Local architect Nick Peckham (himself a marine engineer) worked with volunteers to design and build the wooden pavilion that stands adjacent to the Society’s main building.  This open structure provides easy viewing of the boat (behind plexiglass), a map of Nikawa’s route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and photographs of the craft and the author. Nikawa, in fact, was now home, resting and lending its stature to all of Boone County.

But the backstory of this literary landscape possesses two more elements. In 1978, Heat-Moon was teaching at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, when it had to let him go because of declining enrollments. At the same time, he and his wife decided to divorce.

Heat-Moon reacted to that pair of events by undertaking a 13,000-mile solo trip in his 1975 Ford Econoline van. That 90-day journey (which began on Earth Day in 1978) resulted in the 1982 book, Blue Highways: A Journey into America, which spent 42 weeks on the NYT Best Seller List and has never been out of print. In the early pages of Blue Highways, Heat-Moon declares, “A man who couldn’t make things go right, could at least go. He could quit trying to get out of the way of life.”

With Nikawa’s historic voyage across the continent, William Least Heat-Moon showed again that he “could at least go,” and this time he took contemporary travel exploration to a new level of innovation. To complete the circle, I have my Timex back — but the amulet remains with the author.

Kit Salter lived in 22 different places by the end of high school. He graduated from Oberlin College and took his Masters and PhD at Berkeley. He is professor emeritus of geography at the University of Missouri and taught for UCLA, the University of Oregon, and National Geographic. He has been married to writer and geographer Cathy Lynn Salter for 38 years.

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Parkview
St. Louis, Missouri

By Devin Thomas O’Shea

The epigraph of The Tunnel reads, “The descent to hell is the same from every place,” but William Gass chose to set his magnum opus in a leafy suburb of St. Louis, Missouri, called Parkview.

Parkview is one of the first White Flight subdivisions ever constructed. It was a planned neighborhood, a prototype that would use winding lanes and a single outlet to discourage “traffic.” In the basement of one of these darling mansions, based on William Gass’ real house, Gass imagined a history professor at an upscale *cough* Wash U *cough* Midwestern university. Professor Koehler sits to write the introduction to his career-defining work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. But he faces a block and pens The Tunnel instead — a messy, dark, lyrical portrayal of Koehler himself.

Instead of the neat, well-researched book dissecting the Nazis, Koehler describes the fascism in his own heart. In his basement, digging down in the soil of his soul, he also literally tunnels in the dirt floor of his Parkview cellar.

According to Gass, “[t]he reader is to feel, as he or she doubtless will, as if they are crawling through an unpleasant and narrow darkness.” We learn Koehler threw a brick on Kristallnacht. He kills his wife’s cat when it gets in the way of his digging. He runs out of space for all his soil, but luckily the history professor’s wife is an antiques shop owner. Their second floor is lined with Martha’s restored bureaus, and though Koehler fears Martha’s gaze — and wants to hide the tunnel (and The Tunnel) from her — he loads soil from his basement dig into her furniture, where she’ll surely find it one day. At the end, Martha finds Koehler’s filt­h and confronts him in the basement. She tips a drawer onto his manuscript, and the dirt goes everywhere: in his lap and all over his pages. Martha orders him to clean her cabinets, and Koehler wonders if she understood his pun about soiling her drawers.

Gass and Koehler both lived in secluded Parkview, a neighborhood built upon the philosophy that rich people shouldn’t have to share the sidewalks with poor people. In the 1900s, downtown St. Louis was busy and dirty. The rich built Parkview far away, just across the city limit, literally on the edge of the county. The Tunnel — written and set in the center of this planned community — is a deeply moral book about filth hiding below the surface of respectability. Like Gass, Koehler is an esteemed American intellectual with a wife, a house, and tenure. His research aims to find what was so unusually nasty about the villains of history, but long before he starts digging in the St. Louis mud, Koehler concludes that the Germans were just like you and me. Fascism is not aberrant. It has always been down in our subconscious basement; it lives in everyday hatreds.

Parkview’s wealth has been resilient in the face of St. Louis’s century-long economic decline, but just down the street, the city’s racial segregation has made poverty in the Black community worse every day. The so-called “Delmar Divide” represents one of the largest economic cliffs in the country. On the south side, White professors raise families in leafy, historic neighborhoods with old-timey gas lamps. Just up the street from Koehler’s basement, the redlining starts. Black suburbs like Mill Creek were destroyed to ghettoize Black St. Louisans in the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects. The city defunded Pruitt-Igoe soon after it was completed in 1956, then condemned and demolished it in the 1970s. Now, even the North County homes are falling down or being deconstructed because the bricks are worth more than the walls. Beauty is everywhere in North St. Louis — but people go hungry, police violence runs rampant, schools are pipelines to the prisons, and poverty abounds. And you don’t have to dig to find it.

Devin Thomas O’Shea’s writing is in Boulevard, Paterson Literary Review, Midwestern Gothic, The St. Louis Anthology, and elsewhere. Chapter one of his manuscript, Veiled Prophet, is published in Embark Literary Journal. He graduated Northwestern’s MFA program in 2018. Find him on Twitter.

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Central Elementary School
Ferguson, Missouri

By Taylor Fox

There’s a haunted feeling that comes with walking around an empty schoolyard. Barren playgrounds and darkened windows convey emptiness, dejection. It’s unnatural for playgrounds to go quiet. Yet, outside the historic Central Elementary School in Ferguson, Missouri, that eerie feeling is missing, replaced by a comforting glow provided by the towering trees, climbing vines, and community garden of fragrant herbs.

Did you know there was a time Ferguson was all a farm?

Central alumna Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetry is filled with imagery that conjures up the aura of her former school. She specifically reflects on the Ferguson of her youth in a poem honoring Jamyla Bolden, a 9-year-old black girl shot and killed in her Ferguson home in 2015 when a man shot into the house, targeting someone he believed stole from him.

The poem illustrates the commonalities between the author and Jamyla, who attended Koch Elementary School, just over three miles east of Central. In the poem, Nye wishes she could pass her own lived years on to the girl who was taken too soon.

Drive down Florissant Road today, and it is hard to imagine as farmland. The asphalt street is lined with barbecue restaurants and dozens of murals honoring the Black Lives Matter movement. Outside the Ferguson Police Department stands a row of signs and artwork remembering those killed by police violence in the United States.

Leaving Florissant Road and all of its restaurants, you immediately enter the quiet, calm neighborhood surrounding Central Elementary. Nye has described the area as a “leafy green historic suburb” and fondly remembers her old brick school. Built in 1880, the school flaunts a plaque acknowledging its listing on the National Register of Historic Places. The original bell tower — visible from both the playground and the community garden — still crowns the old building.

Considering Nye drafted her first poem when she was six years old, it’s easy to imagine the young artist gazing out the school’s wrought iron windows onto the large garden below and piecing together her earliest works.

Nye attended Central from kindergarten until sixth grade, and in 1966 her family moved to Palestine, her father’s country of origin. She has often spoken on her experiences as a Palestinian-American going to a then all-white school and in a 2014 essay wrote, “In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.”

Nye’s poetry often reflects the parallels between her two childhood homes. Her first published collection, Different Ways to Pray, is entirely on the topic of cultural similarities and differences, using her own Palestinian-American identity as a model.

As a first generation Cuban-American with an ethnically Jewish heritage, my own parallels to Nye are too striking to ignore. I can imagine the feeling of other she must have endured in Ferguson, accepted in neither the white nor black communities. After moving to Palestine, where she may have felt even more of an outsider, she began to study culture and identity, perhaps to find her own sense of belonging. I too have felt the drive to study my heritage in order to feel enough, to feel like you deserve to claim your roots.

Despite our commonalities, it is also not lost on me that, while I cannot trace my ancestry back to Israel, we are from opposite sides of that barbed wire fence, belonging to two cultures with more in common than they are willing to admit. We are from two cultures that historically villainize the other without the effort of understanding and respect.

We share this severing too with Ferguson itself, represented by the seeming innocence of the empty Central Elementary School across town from the home where Jamyla was killed and next to a street so often shown as a scene of violence against black people — violence portrayed to make a point, without respect for the motivation behind the movement or any attempt to amend the systemic issues that have led to this point.

Taylor Fox recently graduated from the University of Missouri with a Master of Arts in Geography. A former Peace Corps Volunteer, she has spent her career learning and writing about cultures and hopes to continue sharing this passion with others. Fox has also been published in Missouri Life Magazine and the Columbia Daily Tribune.

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Brick District Playhouse
Fulton, Missouri

By Alex Dzurick

The 1940 novel Kings Row once so offended residents of Fulton, Missouri, that you couldn’t find a copy on the shelves of the local library. You could, however, in the very same town, find a copy on my mother’s bookshelf. She was a history teacher who taught classes on Missouri history, so even as a child, I had heard the rumors: Kings Row was based on Henry Bellamann’s life growing up in Fulton, and his frank portrayal of the darker side of life in my hometown did not earn him admiration by its social elites.

With all my mother’s connections to the book, I’m not surprised her copy occupied such a prominent place in our home, next to heirlooms and family photographs. In middle school, I asked if I could read it to complete a book challenge. She said that I could as long as I was careful with her copy, and I remember stretching out on the living room sofa, devouring the novel over just a few days. It’s a shocking story, exploring topics like euthanasia and incest, so looking back I’m surprised that I was trusted enough as a young teenager to handle the material.

Take a drive down Fulton’s Court Street today, and you’ll still see the Victorian-style homes that those elites once lived in. It’s easy to imagine how young Mr. Bellamann must have felt seeing those homes and knowing it was their occupants who bullied him, ostensibly for his German heritage and friendships with kids from the poorer, industrial neighborhoods. In Kings Row, on the other hand, Bellamann’s alter ego Parris Mitchell is quite well liked by everyone. Still, he discovers the sinister side of those wealthy residents while apprenticing under the secretive Dr. Tower, who is likely based on a real local doctor.

A bit further down Court Street, you’ll find the Brick District Playhouse, which served as the town’s only movie theater from 1928 to 2006. My mother worked there part-time for decades, and I followed in her footsteps when I turned 16. The small cinema had just two screens, with one built into a former balcony, and the lobby doors opened directly onto the brick streets of downtown Fulton. The brick building’s marquee was changed by hand even in its last years, and it wasn’t unheard of for birds and bats to swoop down from the ceiling during a film. Today, the building has been converted into a live performance venue, hosting plays, concerts, and lectures.

The theater itself is part of Kings Row lore, thanks to a 1942 film adaptation starring Robert Cummings as Parris Mitchell and future president Ronald Reagan as Drake, one of Parris’s wealthy friends. The movie did little to appease Fulton’s residents, exposing their town’s secrets to an even wider audience. Tensions had eased by the later part of the century, however, and several cast members came to Fulton in June 1988 to celebrate their source material (Reagan did not attend, as he was busy politicking). My mom had the opportunity to meet them at the theater. Her copy of Kings Row has a red autograph inside the front cover — “To Beautiful Lola. Love, Bob Cummings.”

Later, I had the chance to watch the film, which brought characters like Parris, Drake, and Dr. Tower to life in new ways for me. The novel’s darkest themes were removed to satisfy film codes, but it remained a tale of small town hypocrisy. And the film’s visuals are eerily reminiscent of the older parts of Fulton, as evidenced by the historic photos and sketches that hung in our home. Despite the passage of some 50 years between the film’s release and my own youth, it became apparent to me how easily Fulton’s residents would have seen themselves in Bellamann’s work.

I now live just outside of Philadelphia, where Bellamann was a dean at a prestigious music school before writing Kings Row. When I return to Fulton these days, and I pass those grand old Court Street homes just a few blocks north of the movie theater, I can’t help but look at them through Bellamann’s eyes, seeing the town in its honesty, with all its grandeur and all its faults.

Alex Dzurick is an educator and writer originally from Fulton, Missouri. He has published in The New Territory, NSTA’s The Science Teacher, and NAAEE’s Urban Environmental Education. Currently living in the Philadelphia region, Alex spends most of his time (when he’s not teaching) writing quizbowl questions, building crossword puzzles, or reading random Wikipedia articles.

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