I am posting this review on behalf of Larry Howe who wrote it.

Barbara

~~~~~

Video Review

_Mr. Twain's Neighborhood Nook Farm_. Connecticut Public Broadcasting,
2002. 54 min. 56 sec., VHS. Pricing information not yet available.

Many items reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from
the TwainWeb Bookstore, and purchases from this site generate commissions
that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit
<http://www.yorku.ca/twainweb>

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

Larry Howe <[log in to unmask]>
Roosevelt University

Copyright (c) 2002 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.


Given all of the biographical material devoted to Mark Twain, and given all
of the recent video productions examining his life and career, one might
wonder what a 55-minute video could possibly do to warrant our attention. A
number of directorial decisions might also give some Twain experts pause.
The voice-over that conveys the words of Twain himself is at times a weak
impersonation of Hal Holbrook's well-known portrayal of Twain. Glimpses of
Twain, played by an actor bearing a strong resemblance to Sam Clemens,
periodically flicker on the screen. In one, we see him through a
velvet-curtained window, not yet white-haired or arrayed in white linen,
but nonetheless smoking his ubiquitous cigar. In others, we see him and
Olivia Langdon Clemens mounting the staircase upon entering their
just-completed Hartford mansion; walking with Joseph Twichell through a
pastoral landscape, presumably discussing the experiences that would become
the genesis of _Life on the Mississippi_; or playing with his children,
laying out the History Game on the lawn at his Nook Farm home. In these
shots and others like them, the camera angle is oblique, the depth of field
shallow, and the lighting soft. The effect is to make Mark Twain present,
but not central to the shot. For a scholarly audience these choices might
be troublesome, as might be some of the chronology of the material or other
documentary images meant to convey national crises. But the indirect
dramatization of the man turns out to be an appropriate choice of
presentation for Roynn Lisa Simmons, the producer and script writer: the
primary focus in this story is not Mark Twain but Nook Farm, the rather
remarkable Hartford neighborhood that Sam Clemens and family called home
during the heyday of his career.

Although Twain is the most well known resident of Nook Farm, a wide and
notable cast of figures made this an influential and historically
significant community. Despite the title, the video gives considerable time
to issues and figures other than Mark Twain and weaves together three
related but different narrative strands: the high profile conflicts between
the Beecher family, who were central to the Nook Farm neighborhood and the
culture of the period generally; the rise and fall of Mark Twain as writer
and businessman; and the subsequent efforts to preserve the history that
Nook Farm represents.

The video outlines the history of this community from its inception in
1853, when John Hooker and Francis Gillette bought and subdivided the
140-acre farm into residential parcels, through the career turns of its
most celebrated neighbors, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain, and
concludes with the twentieth-century status of the Nook Farm legacy. Stowe
and Twain share that stage with writer and newspaper publisher Charles
Dudley Warner, Civil War general and Connecticut governor Joseph Hawley,
women's rights activist Isabella Beecher Hooker, and minister Twichell, as
well as other notable nineteenth-century figures who visited this
exceptional community. The history is presented both in light of the
leading figures' lives with insights from John Boyer, the Executive
Director of the Mark Twain House, and Katherine Kane, the Executive
Director of the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and in reference to the
context of the evolving nineteenth-century culture with commentary by Joan
Hedrick, Professor of History at Trinity College and Richard Wightman Fox,
Professor of History at University of Southern California. Their insights
help to frame the presentation of the biographies and social history with
respect to business, political, religious, and gender issues of the
cultural era.

Expert commentary can often turn the task of relating this history into the
dry stuff of scholarly generalization. But to the credit of the filmmaker
and the experts, the story is told with nuance and vitality. In part, the
liveliness of the tale stems from the headlining-grabbing scandals that
punctuate it. These scandals affected the reputations of the Beechers and
centered on the debate about women's rights that divided the influential
Beecher clan. The first scandal stemmed from Stowe's article in an 1869 of
the _Atlantic Monthly_ which accused Lord Byron of conducting an incestuous
affair with his sister. Stowe wrote from a moral platform on this topic and
out of a sense of justice to Byron's wife. But her fame as the writer of
America's great abolitionist novel was not enough to innoculate her from a
backlash. Her own popularity suffered, and her family moved from the Oak
Home mansion at Nook farm to a smaller and more affordable house. The
second scandal involved allegations of sexual impropriety within Stowe's
own family. Henry Ward Beecher, one of the era's most visible religious
figures, was accused of adultery with Elizabeth Tilton, first,
journalistically by Victoria Woodhull who had hoped to gain support for her
cause of "free love" in the emancipation of women by pointing out the
hypocrisy of opponents like the morally influential Beecher; and then,
second, in a civil complaint filed by Theodore Tilton against Beecher for
alienation of Elizabeth's affections. The "trial of the decade" that ensued
did not settle the question of Beecher's actions. And the rift between the
older sister Harriet, who sided with Henry, and the younger sister
Isabella, who did not, was felt throughout this elite community. Isabella's
suspicions about her brother were supported by her bond with Woodhull and
her own sense of women's ascendancy. At the height of her enthrallment with
the prospect of women's emancipation, Isabella was persuaded by a spiritual
medium that she would emerge on New Year's Eve as the leader of a
matriarchal government that would spread from the United States around the
globe.

Twain's role in all of this controversy was intentionally peripheral. He
attended the Beecher-Tilton trial as a cultural observer, and, though he
and his family had rented the Hooker home for three years while his mansion
was being built, he forbade his wife from visiting Isabella during the
Beecher family's conflict. Choosing the wrong side could have devastating
social consequences, but maintaining a careful connection to this
culturally active community still offered valuable advantages. Like Twain's
own navigation around scandal, the video's narrative drops this emphasis
when it centers on his growing career and cultural influence during this
period. Boyer recalls the story of how _The Gilded Age_ emerged from a
challenge by Mrs. Clemens and Mrs. Warner. And he credits it with
crystalizing the tensions--political, social, economic--of the era. Not
surprisingly, a large part of the video's narrative is absorbed with the
Mark Twain house itself. Boyer points out that the house, though viewed by
contemporary visitors as a nostalgic Victorian monument, was in its day a
modern marvel and reflected modern tastes and the currents of thought of
the local environment. The extravagant design helped to position the
Clemens family conspicuously in the vanguard of this society.

The adventurous style reflected in the house's design and decor is repeated
in Clemens's business dealings. His technological fascination with the
Paige typesetter has often been cited as the ill-fated investment that
bankrupted him. The video rehearses this material as well as Clemens's
involvement in the business of publishing. Even before the Ken Burns film
publicized the fact, it was generally known that Clemens had secured
six-figure royalty payments for Grant's widow, a success that was countered
by the failure of the Paige fiasco. But the video also points out that the
Grant contract was a "sweetheart deal" that Clemens's negotiated in order
to rescue Grant's family from bankruptcy. The narration also notes that
Clemens's publishing company paid a $100,000 advance to Henry Ward Beecher
for his memoirs, a manuscript that Beecher's failing health prevented him
from ever delivering. The Paige investment, according to Boyer, is
calculated at about $130,000 over nearly four years, no small sum, to be
sure. But the payment to Beecher had to have been a huge blow to Clemens's
economic security. The acknowledgement of this fact in the Twain legend
here should blunt the emphasis that has been placed on the Paige debacle as
the key to the reversal of his fortune. Granted, Clemens had
unrealistically high hopes for the success of the typesetter, and its
failure left its mark on _A Connecticut Yankee_, but the degree to which
his bankruptcy has been attributed to that investment alone should be
recalibrated. Clemens's lavish lifestyle and his profligate business
sense--as witnessed by the Beecher contract--suggest that the typesetter
was simply one element in the often told story of his bankruptcy.

Financial failure forced the Clemenses to close the Hartford house 1891 and
to live abroad. But even after having vacated the mansion, it became the
site of another more personally wrenching tragedy, the death of his
daughter Susy in 1896 of meningitis, upon returning to Hartford from Elmira
en route to join her parents in Europe. The video very touchingly deals
with this somber episode and how it changed the house that was once the
vital center of their family and social life. After that bitter loss,
Clemens returned to the Nook Farm house only once, and by himself, and the
video includes a voice-over of his reflections of the house and what it
means to have the shadow of death cast upon it. The family never lived
there again and sold it in 1903.

The last portion of the video's narrative chronicles how Catherine Day,
granddaughter of Isabella Beecher Hooker and childhood friend of the
Clemens girls, raised money to purchase the Twain house on behalf of a
Hartford preservation society. Over the years, it was transformed into
apartments, a school, and a home for the Hartford library. Now, owing
largely to the efforts of Day, the Twain house and Oak Home, Harriet
Beecher Stowe's house, are restored Victorian museums of the lives of their
inhabitants and the remarkable era and unique community that influenced so
deeply the culture and identity of the United States. The closing minutes
of the video emphasize the value and importance of preservation efforts
such as these. Unstated, but just as important, is the need to maintain
these particular monuments. The funding for maintaining national treasures
like the Mark Twain house, and archives such as the Mark Twain Project at
the University of California, is always precarious. A video production such
as _Mark Twain's Nook Farm Neighborhood_ helps to re-emphasize the need for
Connecticut citizens--the primary audience of Connecticut Public
Broadcasting--and all of us to recognize the deep meaning that historic
sites hold. For this purpose, the video's production values are on target.
The parlor piano that plays through much of it, the variety of
images--photographic, journalistic, dramatic re-enactment--and the
informative narration and expert commentary instill in us an appreciation
of the period and a sense and an understanding of why it all matters.

Connecticut Public Broadcasting has used this video as reward for pledges
to their seasonal fundraising. Supporting public broadcasting of this
caliber is its own reward. And yet finally, the need to support historic
preservation and public broadcasting suggest the compatible missions of
both, and the challenges that these initiatives face as potential
competitors for the same funds. In our current gilded age, one fears for
the continuation of historically significant resources like the Mark Twain
House and the Mark Twain Project and Public Broadcasting and National
Public Radio among a much wider and diverse spectrum of important but
underfunded social institutions.