BOOK REVIEW

_"The Loveliest Home That Ever Was": The Story of the Mark Twain House in
Hartford_. By Steve Courtney. Introduction by Hal Holbrook. Dover
Publications, 2011. 144pp. Paperback. $19.95. ISBN 978-0-486-48634-5.

Many books reviewed on the Mark Twain Forum are available at discounted
prices from the Twain Web Bookstore. Purchases from this site generate
commissions that benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit
<http://www.twainweb.net>

Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Kevin Mac Donnell

Copyright (c) 2012 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

When Mark Twain wrote to his wife Livy in March 1895, four years after they
moved from Hartford, he gave her full credit for making their Hartford house
a home, and ended his praise with the words that give this book its title.
Twain was effusive in his fondness for his Hartford home and expressed his
feelings eloquently when he wrote his friend Joseph Twichell two years later
that "our house was not unsentient matter--it had a heart, & 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."  Between 1895 when Twain wrote Livy, and 1897 when he wrote
Twichell, his daughter Susy had died in the home, and the question of
whether Twain and his family would ever return home to Hartford was in
doubt. Financial problems soon settled the matter and the home was put on
the market in 1902 and sold in May 1903, for less than half what it had cost
to build. In his brief prose-poem introduction, Hal Holbrook recalls how he
has witnessed the resurrection of this home to its former "dignity come back
in polished butternut and gold" and how "its former tenant and his family
seem to whisper there in the rooms and on the porches--a way of life gone
long ago and dearer now for the loss of it." This book wholly succeeds in
conveying all of these feelings to the reader--the abiding affection Twain
had for his abode during his most fruitful years, the exuberance of the
Victorian decor and the grand jazzy beauty of its architecture, the drama of
daily life in the years when the Clemenses lived there, an oh-so-close brush
with destruction and demolition decades later, the meticulous (and ongoing)
restoration, and the enchanting whispers of lives gone by.

Twain and his family moved to Hartford in October 1871, and leased the
nearby Isabella Hooker home while their new house was under construction. In
September 1874, when construction was not quite finished, they moved in, and
they moved out in June 1891. The years between were filled with endless
dinner parties, billiard games, the raising of three daughters through their
formative years, the meteoric rise of Twain's literary success and the
ascendance of his social standing in the elite Nook Farm neighborhood,
gawking pedestrians, a steady flow of visitors like William Dean Howells,
Bret Harte, Charles Dudley Warner, Harriet Beecher Stowe and others, and a
major remodeling in 1881 by Louis Comfort Tiffany and Candace Wheeler of
Associated Artists fame. During those seventeen years Twain angrily threw
shirts out upstairs windows when he found buttons missing, Clara waited
patiently for a calf to grow up into a horse, George the butler stood behind
his screen laughing before the punch-lines at Twain's oft-told dinner-table
stories, and Livy tried without success to demonstrate to her husband how he
sounded when he cursed. Summer months were nearly always spent in Elmira at
Quarry Farm with Livy's relatives, where the children could enjoy country
life and the outdoors while Twain could closet himself in his hilltop study
and compose his greatest works. The other months of the year were spent in
Hartford receiving visitors, hosting parties, conducting business matters,
playing billiards, and revising proofs.

Steve Courtney frames his tour of the home around a newspaper article
written by Mary Mason "Mother" Fairbanks, the woman only seven years Twain's
senior, who Twain had befriended during the _Quaker City_ voyage and adopted
as his second "mother" and confidante on matters of the social graces. In
1874, just before the Clemens family was to move into their new home,
Fairbanks visited Hartford while the Clemenses were in Elmira and was given
a room-by-room tour of the house by Twain's architect, Edward Tuckerman
Potter. She painted vivid word-pictures of the home and these are
effectively used by Courtney to introduce each chapter. Courtney provides
helpful backgrounds on Potter and his school of architecture, the city of
Hartford, and the community of Nook Farm, and the text is generously
illustrated with contemporary photographs of interiors and exteriors, some
familiar and others not, as well as breathtaking vibrant color images of the
home in its present-day restored glory. The contemporary images have been
carefully researched and placed in accurate context. The modern images are
carefully framed and taken with shallow depth-of-fields when appropriate to
bring into sharp focus the details of a given room while at the same time
conveying the luxurious surroundings beckoning in the hallways and rooms
beyond a doorway. The result is that the reader, through a thorough blending
of picture and text, experiences the past and present flung up before him
with almost Proustian intensity. Functioning both as a history of the home
and a guide for visitors, the text is unburdened with footnotes, but the
ample bibliography makes Courtney's sources obvious, and the index is
excellent.

Both the Twain scholar and the general reader will learn things they did not
know. For example, in 1957 Clara Clemens was asked to recall how the house
was furnished and where things were, and she scribbled copious notes on a
set of floorplans detailing where various pieces of furniture had stood.
Some of her notes are reproduced. The long-accepted story of the home being
built to resemble a steamboat is debunked. The oft-asked question of how
much it cost Twain to build his home is answered--the more likely figure of
about $66,650 is substantially less than the figures of $100,000 to $167,000
that have been quoted in years past. Details on the restoration of the house
are explained and updated since the last book on this subject was published
by Wilson Faude in 1978. Although the inclusion of Potter's floorplans (they
were printed on a small sheet in 1902 as a sales brochure) might have made
it easier to follow the tour from room to room, the superb photographs by
John Groo clearly convey the flow from room to room as the tour moves
chapter by chapter from the entry way on the first floor, through the house
to the billiard room on the third floor, down to the servants' quarters and
kitchen (newly restored), and then out onto the porches and the exterior.

The general effect of this skillful presentation is to inspire a curiosity
in the reader to explore further the Nook Farm community and the Colts,
Warners, Stowes, Twichells, Hookers, and other Hartford families who were in
frequent social contact with the Clemenses. Those hired by the Clemenses to
build and decorate their home have been the subject of books themselves, and
the excellent bibliography points the way for readers who want to further
examine the fascinating lives and accomplishments of Edward Potter, Louis
Comfort Tiffany, and Candace Wheeler (the "mother" of American interior
design). But most of all, this volume inspires a desire to visit the home
and see it for yourself. If you have never toured the home and never get the
chance to see it, this book is the next-best thing, and if you have seen it
before, this book will provoke a longing to return and listen for those
whispers in the rooms and on the porches.