twins of genius and emerson and longfellow and holmes and twain and john greenleaf whittier

Both Twain and Cable wanted to promote either recent or upcoming work as they went through America from New England to Missouri. They traveled from Boston and Lowell in the East to St. Paul in the West; from Montreal in the North to Louisville and St. Louis in the South. Twain, always short on cash, wanted to hype his upcoming Huckleberry Finn, which was scheduled to be published in December 1884 but was actually released in mid-February 1885. Cable, a native of New Orleans, had written Old Creole Days in 1883, but his most recent work was The Grandissimes. He had become increasingly controversial, and then an outcast, in his native South because of stories like The Negro Question or Silent South, in which he argued for the full legal equality of blacks and whites in America. Thus, both authors of the tour were Southerners by heritage (Twain made Hannibal, MO famous), though neither could expect a sympathetic reception of his work in the South, and hence they went no further South than St. Louis.

The Itinerary

They got "warmed up" for several days in New England. From November 5-17 they "performed" in seven cities (New Haven; Springfield; Providence; Melrose; Lowell; Boston; Hartford). What the excellent web site on the tour doesn't tell you however, is that one of the deep "background facts" was Boston's mixed feelings about Twain. Why? Well, it goes back to the 70th birthday celebration in December 1877 for one of the favorite sons of the Boston area, John Greenleaf Whittier. Twain was the speaker at the banquet party, and, as Perry argues, it was one of the "few times he completely misjudged his audience" (Grant and Twain, 146). The story of the banquet appeared first in the Boston Herald, but then was reprinted in the New York Times on December 20, 1877. Twain used the occasion to lampoon three of Boston's most illustrious literary lights: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. Anyone who has lived in Boston for a while knows that Boston takes itself far more seriously than it ought, and that it thinks of itself as a sort of secular missionary to the rest of the country, originating ideas which the rest of the nation will only adopt decades later (abolition, for example, readily comes to mind). Because it takes itself so seriously, Boston doesn't have a very good sense of humor or, to put it differently, it only accepts humorous criticisms of itself from certifiable insiders. It is a way to make sure that the club's boundaries are clearly defined, I think.

Twain's Tall Tale

In any case, on the occasion of Whittier's 70th birthday, December 17, 1877, Twain told an obvious "tall tale" about this distinguished literary trio. Here are his actual words, as narrated by the New York Times:

"This is an occasion peculiarly meet for the digging up of pleasant reminiscences concerning literary folk; therefore, I will drop lightly into history myself. Standing here on the shore of the Atlantic and contemplating certain of its biggest literary billows, I am reminded of a thing which happened to me 15 years ago, when I had just succeeded in stirring up a little Nevadian literary ocean-puddle, whose spume-flakes were beginning to blow thinly Californiaward. I started an inspection tramp through the southern mines of California. I was callow and conceited, and I resolved to try the virtue of my nom de plume. I very soon had an opportunity. I knocked at a miner's lonely log-cabin in the foot-hills of the Sierras just at nightfall. It was snowing at the time. A jaded, melancholy man of 50, bare-footed, opened to me. When he heard my nom de plume, he looked more dejected than before. He let me in - pretty reluctantly, I thought - and after the customary bacon and beans, black coffee and a hot whisky, I took a pipe. This sorrowful man had not said three words up to this time. Now he spoke up and said in the voice of one who is secretly suffering: "You're the fourth - I'm a going to move. "The fourth what?" said I. "The fourth literary man that's been here in 24 hours - I'm a going to move." "You don't tell me!" said I; "Who were the others?" "Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Emerson and Mr. Oliver Wendell Holmes - dad fetch the lot!" [Reprinted in Mark Twain's Speeches (1910) 1ff.].

This amusing tale is all Twain, as you can easily tell. But then he went on to tell how the host had described each one of his guests:

"They came here just at dark yesterday evening, and I let them in, of course. Said they were going to Yo Semite. They were a rough lot - but that's nothing - everybody looks rough that travels afoot. Mr. Emerson was a seedy little bit of a chap - red-headed. Mr. Holmes was as fat as a balloon - he weighed as much as 300, and had double chins all the way down to his stomach. Mr. Longfellow was built like a prize-fighter. His head was cropped and bristly - like as if he had a wig made of hair-brushes. His nose lay straight down his face, like a finger with the end joint tilted up. They had been drinking - I could see that. And what queer talk they used! Mr. Holmes inspected this cabin, then he took me by the button-hole..."

When the reviews of Huckleberry Finn came out in the Boston papers eight years after this event, this book, which would become probably the greatest American novel yet written, was panned by one Boston paper as "singularly flat, stale, and unprofitable." One week later another Boston paper described the work as "wearisome and labored." Nobody, another paper said, would really want to read it.

Well, I have wandered a bit from where I started, so let's turn back to the itinerary and to the Twain/Cable tour.

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