Whitmania

A post from the not-so-distant past, when I went to Camden and finally saw Walt Whitman's house, the house he lived in toward the end of his life and died in. It's well set up inside by the Park District, but being rather out of the way and unassuming, I don't know how much foot traffic it draws. It's in a little row of houses -- I didn't take the best photos, as you'd have to step out into traffic to get a good angle. Combined with the Camden Aquarium, it's a nice day.

The house is well set up inside, but no photos are allowed. A fair amount of Whitman's own possessions are scattered about to give the air of authenticity. I particularly recall a pair of his boots. The garden out back is lovely, and if you're a Whitman fan, you will recall that Horace Traubel spends quite a lot of time detailing the social gatherings that would happen in the garden and at this house generally.

Steinbeck's Salinas

I read somewhere that Salinas is to Monterey as Oakland is to San Francisco; overlooked, less developed, cheaper, and with a bit of a chip on its shoulder. Of course, Salinas doesn't have a waterfront, which is a serious problem from a tourism point of view. However, it does have just as solid a claim to Steinbeck as Monterey.

I don't know much about the history of the creation of the National Steinbeck Center, but I can assure you that it is one of if not the best literary museum in the United States. Tourist guides say so, so it must be true. No, in all seriousness, it is an impressive museum, with tons of interactive exhibits for the kids (you can pick a pony's hoof in the Red Pony section, which actually is a little macabre -- I mean, it's a hoof. A real hoof. No longer attached to a pony). Tons of screens constantly show clips from Steinbeck films and plays. Quotes are everywhere, some manuscripts are on display, recreations of settings and so forth. The single best exhibit is Rocinante, the custom-built truck/camper/Winnebago that Steinbeck drove around the country on his Travels with Charley, the most famous and well-regarded of his late works. My photo of it did not come out too well, sadly.

Just a couple of blocks away from the museum is Steinbeck's childhood home, mentioned in East of Eden. It's now a restaurant, which sadly was closed on Memorial Day. Oh well. Authors' houses are sometimes barely interesting when they're set up as museums, let alone as restaurants. I'm a trifle surprised that there was no move to make this part of the museum; I don't know if there's any real relationship between the two. We also drove past the high school, but I skipped the graveyard where his ashes are interred. Some were scattered into the wind on a seaside cliff in California, a fitting memorial.

Aunt Harriet's House

The Harriet Beecher Stowe house and center and archives and the house next door are all right next to the Mark Twain house, literally a quite energetic stone's throw away. Unfortunately, the house itself is rather unassuming, as you see, compared to Twain's brick craziness or even the stone and brick Day House next door to the Stowe house, which is part of the complex. Still, it's a cute Victorian house, and I would have been delighted to tour it if only I had had time. The lovely, friendly women at the center were not exactly delighted when I sprang in cheerily and announced that I wanted to take a quick run around the property, and I had a Twain tour in twenty minutes. Most people seem to make this choice, sadly for the Stowe-ites.

Also unfortunately, she didn't live here while she wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; she lived in Maine then. But it would still have been interesting to get some insight into her staunchly religious and conservative life. I was doing some UTC work recently and read that she had such a horror of the theater that she wouldn't sanction a dramatic version of it for years, and when she went to see it, it was the first time in her life she had stepped foot in the theater.

Next time I'm in Hartford. I promise.

Twain down; 999 to go

On the way to the Hartford airport yesterday, I managed to get out to the Mark Twain house and take a tour. It is one hell of a fancy Gilded Age house, let me tell you. The outside is impressive enough, as you can see, with its painted brickwork, whimsical gables, and considerable balconies (as well as a gorgeous porch that bows in and out rather than just putting a six-foot rim on the house). Just about everyone on the tour with me gasped when they stepped inside, though. The restoration has been long, expensive, and entirely successful; the walls and ceilings are all hand-stenciled. In the entryway, it's done with a silver paint meant to look like mother-of-pearl inlay in the gaslight.

The rest of the house is equally ornate, with tons of heavily carved wooden furniture, tiled fireplaces, and the various Victorian knickknacks that a connoisseur might expect (stuffed birds, always charming). But there are definitely Twainian touches, including a billiards room with billiards sticks and balls, as well as cigars and pipes, stenciled on the ceiling. It was in the corner of that room that he wrote his most famous novels.

The living room was a very fancy, well-designed Victorian room, formerly with a view of a small river now buried underground, but the tour guide told us that the pieces on the mantel were part of a storytelling game Twain played with his daughters. He would have to tell a story using all the pieces, from a picture of a cat in a ruff to a painting of an unknown girl who they named Emmeline (like the dead Grangerford daughter and bad poetess in Huck Finn) . If he left anything out, he had to begin again.

At the far end of the living room was a small greenhouse, which you can see in this photo of the back of the house. I can only imagine how expensive such a feature was back then, but it added a lot of light to the otherwise typically dark house.

The museum, in a separate building, featured several memorabilia from Twain's life, including two printing presses that he used/bought, a couple of pipes, steamer trunks, spears from South Africa, etc. There was also an exhibit of Tiffany glass. Louis Comfort Tiffany's firm, Associated Artists, did the interior design of the house, and so the museum used to get a lot of gifts of glass; unfortunately, the glassware was made at a slightly later period, so they couldn't faithfully use any of it in the restoration. But it's all still gorgeous. I remember seeing a quote from Brad Pitt in a book about Tiffany, saying that he didn't care much for fancy cars, but if he could get a Tiffany window for $50,000, he'd snap it up.

We were informed at the end of the tour that the book 1,000 Places to See Before You Die (or something equally cheerful) included the Twain House. I have to go look at what the other 999 are now. I mean, I've been to a lot of authors' houses (so many that I decided to add a new label for this post and others to come), and most are fantastic; the Balzac and Dickens houses were highlights. I think the few that make your 1,000 depend on your reading taste. But I do strenuously recommend this to anyone in the Hartford area, especially if you have even a passing interest in Twain and his work. It's also right next door to the Stowe house, about which more another day.

On the second day...

...no turtledoves, but a fun trip to Appleton, WI, hometown of one of my favorite middle-brow American authors, Edna Ferber. Who, you may ask? Well, Edna won a Pulitzer Prize and was very popular in her own time, hanging out with the glitterati and theatre folks of NYC, but now it's the movies made from her books that are remembered, chiefly Showboat and James Dean's Giant. That's her with Jimmy to the left, apparently either demonstrating or learning how to twirl a lasso.

The beautiful Appleton historical museum, which looks oddly like a castle (former Masonic temple) had a small but informative and well-chosen cabinet on Ferber, including two of her typewriters (she hated hand-writing) and lots of her first editions. (Houdini, the other famous Appletonian, had a whole floor.) The gift shop also was selling a novel of hers that I had never encountered before, a tale of a logging family called Come and Get It.

Afterwards, we drove around town looking at Edna's old stomping grounds, including two houses that she lived in, the former site of her father's dry-goods store (on Main Street), and the temple she attended, the best-preserved of them all. All of these spots are immortalized in her most autobiographical novel, Fanny Herself. It doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of the temple's congregation, though; Ferber seems to have resented them for looking down on her mother for working after her father's death, rather than starving to death genteelly.

On the way out of town towards Neenah, I even got to see the paper mills mentioned as destroying the environment in Fanny. To be sure, they're still belching out a tremendous amount of smoke, and I'm sure the land around them is no prettier than when Ferber took a swing at them.