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By Root 624 0

Twain was enchanted. The picture was “something more than a human likeness,” he proclaimed. The girl’s name was Olivia Langdon; within a year of Twain’s return in 1867, he and Livy were engaged.

Now, in 1877, the couple lived in Hartford with their young daughters Susy and Clara. But though these were happy years for Twain, he found himself increasingly absorbed by memories of his rustic childhood. He’d just published the semiautobiographical The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; a year before that had come the wonderfully vivid sketch of piloting life serialized in the Atlantic Monthly as “Old Times on the Mississippi.” But he was writing, he knew, of vanished lives. He would never live in a steamboat’s cabin again, or a Washoe tent, or even a modest house in Hannibal, Missouri. His home now was a fabulous “steamboat Gothic” mansion on Nook Farm, a Hartford community that included artists, social reformers, and writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe; the house and its surroundings were perfect symbols of Twain’s new social aspirations.

So by December 1877, Twain was deeply torn. Memories of childhood and the frontier dominated his creative life. But he also hoped that writing about those memories would allow him to break from them, to join the elevated reaches of the eastern literary high society. Stories such as “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut” and “The Personal Habits of Siamese Twins” told of doubles and alter egos. Earlier in the year he even published a straightforward travelogue of Bermuda under the name Sam Clemens; he struggled to find the right balance between the raw, powerful language that made him famous and what he hoped would be greater respect from America’s best-known literary writers.

An invitation to speak at a birthday dinner for abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier seemed a terrific opportunity. The roster of the guests was stunning: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, all assembled like a “row of venerable and still active volcanoes” at Boston’s Brunswick Hotel, along with less famous (but, in an immediate career sense, just as important) luminaries from the Atlantic Monthly. Twain planned to begin in his normal rustic style, pivoting at last into lavish praise of the three famous writers. But the event, he later reported, was a disaster; and when Mark Twain, one of history’s gutsiest public speakers, says he bombed, you know that something went really hair-raisingly wrong.

As he waited to speak, Twain ate and drank for over three hours. It was a banquet in high Victorian style, and it’s easy to imagine the scene: the elaborate floral centerpieces, the blue-and-white china, the polished silver and shining glass. An enthusiastic reporter from the Boston Daily Globe recorded the evening’s menu:

MENU

OYSTERS ON SHELL Sauterne

Soups.

PUREE OF TOMATOES AU CROUTONS.

CONSOMMÉ PRINTANIER ROYAL Sherry

Fish.

BOILED CHICKEN, HALIBUT À LA NAVARINE.

POTATOES À LA HOLLANDAISE.

SMELTS PANNE, SAUCE TARTAR Chablis

Removes.

CAPON À L’ANGLAISE.

RICE.

CAULIFLOWER.

SADDLE OF ENGLISH MUTTON À LA PONTOISE.

STRING BEANS.

TURNIPS.

Champagne.

MUMM’S DRY VERZENAY.

ROEDERER IMPERIAL.

Entrees.

FILET OF BEEF, LARDED, SAUCE FINANCIÈRE.

ÉPINARDS VELOUTÉES.

VOL-AU-VENT OF OYSTERS À L’AMÉRICAINE.

SQUABS EN COMPOTE À LA FRANCAISE, TOMATOES.

SAUTÉES.

TERRAPIN STEWED, MARYLAND STYLE.

SORBET AU KIRSCH Claret

Game.

BROILED PARTRIDGES ON TOAST. CANVASBACK DUCKS.

WATER CRESSES, SWEET POTATOES,

DRESSED LETTUCE Burgundy

Pastry.

CHARLOTTE RUSSE. GELÉE AU CHAMPAGNE.

GÂTEAUX VARIÉS.

CONFECTIONERY.

FRUIT. DESSERT.

COFFEE.

Twain was a long way from Hannibal—its raccoon and greens and corn pone, its hoecake and simply fried fish. At the Whittier dinner, course after course was accompanied by its own specialized silver; it was an era deeply in love with ice-cream knives and fish cutters, orange cups and banana bowls. Oyster forks had been around for decades;