March 2023 – Nadine M. Roth

Visiting Connecticut is so interesting for me. Everything is super historical, from the buildings with wavey pane-glass windows, to the brick walls surrounding properties, to the many tiny graveyards that hold the stories of our country’s beginnings.

On top of that, Connecticut is hilly and beautiful in all seasons.

I love visiting new places. I want to learn its history. I want to explore new and unusual flora and fauna, as well as hills, valleys, and waterways.

Recently, I had the good fortune to visit the Mark Twain house in Hartford, CT. Samuel Clements was his given name, Mark Twain was his nom-deplume, or pen name. A name he took that related to his steamboat days on the Mississippi River. I relished in the fact that Samuel was from the Midwest (Missouri) and that he’d worked in Iowa towns near me.

It was like a ‘home-town boy does good’ tour.

A photo of the Mark Twain house is in the background.

I was able to take some pictures in the museum, but no photography was allowed in his residence. I can tell you, however, he and his family lived in opulence. The rooms had wall-to-wall carpeting, which I didn’t know was a thing back then. A conservatory/ indoor greenhouse, along with park-like fountain in its center was located just off the dining room and was a place where his children played jungle.

The family had indoor bathrooms as well – three of them, at least! The sinks were marble, but the toilets were made of wood and looked like out-house bench type seats.

Fancy china and silverware, candelabras, statues, artwork, Steinway piano, billiards room on the third floor, and books, books, books everywhere. The tour covered only part of the house, but still we had a good idea of what life was like for the Clements family.

The only thing we were allowed to touch in the house was the banister. I put both of my hands on it as I walked up and down the steps, trying to collect as much writing mojo as I could from the very place Samuel Clements AKA Mark Twain’s hands had rested so long ago.

The house covered 11,000 square feet on a hill that once was the very best Hartford had to offer. Now this jewel is in the midst of an overcrowded downtown, susceptible to trespassers, vandals and other ne’er do wells.

In as much as I enjoyed the house, I loved the museum because it focused on Clements writing career.

As alluded to earlier in this post, Mark Twain was a pen name that Samuel adopted from his work on the steamboats of the Mississippi River. A rope, marked and intervals, was lowered into the water to check its depth. A mark twain was called out when the water was twelve feet, or two fathoms deep.

Like this writer, Mark Twain had a love and a hate for his chosen craft. Often times taking forever to finish a project. In 1876 Twain started The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but then stopped writing it some months later. In 1879, he went back to Huck Finn, but then stopped on chapter twenty-one and didn’t end up finishing it until 1883.

I too, can procrastinate, but I don’t leave a work sitting for that long. However, Twain did other writing in between. It’s not like he stopped writing all together.

Twain also laments about how he could have or should have done something different or better on already published works. I understand that sentiment. When I read some of my writings, I often want to get a pen out and re-work the words. He says fixing published work would be akin to using a pen warmed-up in hell.