The Project Gutenberg EBook of My Mark Twain, by William Dean Howells

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Title: My Mark Twain
From "Literary Friends And Acquaintances"

Author: William Dean Howells

Release Date: August 22, 2006 [EBook #3390]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by David Widger

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--My Mark Twain

by William Dean Howells

MY MARK TWAIN

I.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
intimated my reservations concerning the 'Innocents Abroad', but I had
the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one's self
prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling
on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
will not suffer me the word, then he was Bac