Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Heavy forest fires were blanketing the nearby hills in Washington and British Columbia. Twain, now largely freed from his carbuncles, came down with a cold by the time the party reached Vancouver on August 15, which made his voice hoarse and difficult to hear. Pond, in his diary, expressed continual amazement that he smoked so much. By this point, Livy, whose home cures seemed to give her husband some relief, was dreading the long voyage. And this was when they thought that the first leg would be to Hawaii on the way to Australia; but a cholera outbreak in Honolulu forced them to go directly on to Sydney, which they reached a month later.

  Shortly before he sailed on the Warimoo out of Victoria, Clemens made a public declaration that would resonate around the country and throughout the world. He told the San Francisco Examiner, whose reporter was his nephew Sam Moffett and who had joined the overland traveling party in Seattle, that he would pay his debts in full in the next four or five years. He compared himself to Sir Walter Scott, whose romantic philosophy he detested, but who had also gone bankrupt and then repaid his debts. Twain dismissed the rumor that he was running away from his creditors by undertaking the world tour. Saying that his brain could not be mortgaged for debt, he nonetheless insisted that he wasn’t a businessman, and that “honor is a harder master than the law. It cannot compromise for less than a hundred cents on the dollar.”9 Even though his partner Hall (never mentioned in the interview or anywhere else) owed one-third of the debt, he would pay that as well because Hall couldn’t.

  Pond, whose Eccentricities of Genius (1900) shows that he adored Twain,10 took Kodak snapshots throughout the overland lecture tour. One of the last pictures shows Twain aboard the Warimoo with Clara and Livy on August 23 as the ship prepared for departure. Twain is standing by the rail smoking a long-stemmed pipe. He is wearing a nautical cap under which his pile of woolly hair, grayish white, is clearly visible. In front of the trio on the rail of the ship is mounted a notice in large bold letters reminiscent of the one that had launched Adventures of Huckleberry Finn hardly more than a decade earlier. “NOTICE,” it read, “ALL STOWAWAYS WILL BE PROSCECUTED AT HONOLULU AND RETURNED TO THIS PORT. BY ORDER.” It might as well have said, “BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR.” For Mark Twain, now almost sixty, was starting over for the last time and taking no more chances.

  45 Lost in the British Empire

  It is generally accepted in Mark Twain scholarship, and among ordinary readers as well, that the death of Sam’s eldest daughter in 1896 broke his spirit and turned him into a pessimist. What tends to be overlooked is that his work and his personality always had deep-seated elements of pessimism. Indeed, these elements exist in all serious thinkers. Even the optimistic Emerson, who also lost a favorite child shortly before he revealed the seeds of his darker thoughts in the essay “Experience,” had indicated the same doubt about a benevolent universe in an earlier work entitled “Circles.” In some cases, personal loss of this magnitude seems merely to trigger the full utterance of what has been there all along. “A man,” Twain told a journalist when he arrived in Australia, “could never be a humorist until he could feel the springs of pathos.”1

  There was, however, a distinct change in Twain in the mid-1890s. Certainly, Susy’s death was partly the cause, but among other things it is likely that the physical strain of the world tour was another, even though Clemens felt invigorated both during and immediately afterward. At its outset, he complained more than once to reporters that he was forced to undertake this long and arduous lecture tour at the age of almost sixty in order to pay another man’s debts.2 He was referring to Hall, of course, but this was a vast oversimplification of the financial situation. He was also in mediocre health, not nearly so vigorous as he had been during his stay in New York City just a year before, in 1894. More carbuncles plagued him during the yearlong tour, suggesting a deficiency in his diet. He was continually in danger of catching colds that sometimes led to bronchitis. Indeed, even the health of his immediate family members was rocky, compromised no doubt by their frequent changes of locale and the passive smoke from the many cigars and pipes Twain smoked every day. (“Mark Twain is an inveterate smoker,” a reporter for the Courier in Ballarat, Australia, observed, “and when he relinquishes his cigar it is to transfer his attention to a pipe.”) By the time the world tour concluded in July 1896 and the family had embarked on the Norman for Southampton, England, he had given at least one hundred readings in fifty-three cities. This itinerary took him not only to Australia (twice), but also to New Zealand, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), India, Mauritius, and South Africa.3

  Because of a cholera outbreak in Honolulu, the closest Twain got to the islands he had roamed as a young man almost thirty years earlier was a glimpse of Diamond Head on Oahu. With the loss of his Hawaiian engagement, along with the one in San Francisco, he was already behind schedule in his scheme to pay off his debt. As it turned out a year later, his lecturing netted him only between $20,000 and $25,000, leaving him with a balance of $50,000 still owed to creditors. The Warimoo crossed the Equator on September 5 and arrived in Sydney on September 16. Here he spent nine days and lectured four times, billed as “Mark Twain at Home.” He was described in the press upon his arrival as “spare and undersized.” Still recovering from his last bout of bronchitis, he tried to limit himself to one cigar a day, to be enjoyed at bedtime. “But desire persecuted me every day and all day long,” he later observed in Following the Equator; “so, within the week I found myself hunting for larger cigars” in order to better endure the limit of one a day. Within a month, this cigar had grown to a length of “four feet,” the humorist suggested; he soon returned to the “liberty” of smoking ten regular ones each day.4

  His advertised lecture billing allowed him to select just about anything from his oeuvre, and he often reached all the way back to material from his first Jumping Frog collection in 1867, such as “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” the story about the accident-prone suitor who kept losing body parts. Another was “His Grandfather’s Ram,” a platform favorite that originally appeared as chapter 53 of Roughing It in 1872. The English-speaking world throughout the British colonies was familiar with his works, especially The Innocents Abroad, Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn. Audiences were therefore excited to “read” the author in person, and they also respected Twain as more than a funny man, finding sorrow in his stories as well as humor. One New Zealand correspondent later reported in “A Talk with the Famous Humorist” that his conversation “was not replete with ‘funnyisms,’ ” that he was in fact “a brilliant conversationalist, who talks in polished and incisive English,” in spite of the twang in his voice, something also noted by several other reporters during the tour. Twain’s reading of Huck’s decision not to turn Jim over to the slave catchers (“Small-pox & a Lie to Save Jim”) particularly touched them, even though these British subjects lived in colonies where the indigenous peoples were an oppressed majority. In Natal, South Africa, where there were ten blacks to every white, Twain later recorded, “natives must not be out after curfew-bell without a pass.”5

  The future vice president of the American Anti-imperialist Society mulled over the situation in which more and more primitive and semi-primitive peoples from undeveloped parts of the world were being absorbed as new “countries” by European powers, especially Great Britain. He wasn’t sorry, he wrote in Following the Equator, that “all the savage lands in the world are going to be brought under subjection to the Christian governments of Europe.” “The dreary and dragging ages of bloodshed and disorder and oppression,” he naively predicted, “will give place to peace and order and the reign of law.” Yet he was uneasy when in Bombay he saw a servant struck in the same way his father had cuffed the family’s slave Lewis back in Hannibal, “for trifling little blunders and awkwardnesses.” Generally, he tried to smooth over the prickly problem of human aggression on the world stage by reasoning that “no tribe, howsoever insignificant, and no nation, howsoever mighty, occupies a foot of land that was not [initially] stolen
.”6 This of course had been the point of condemning landed aristocracy in A Connecticut Yankee—that the victorious thugs of one generation became the kings and queens of the next. Now, however, he was abroad on British soil and in anxious need of lecture receipts, so he silenced his criticisms even as he stored up impressions that he would later use to condemn what he saw on this trip across the British Empire.

  He finished his initial tour of Australia by the end of October, when he went first to Hobart in Tasmania and then to New Zealand to spend the next six weeks giving lectures. “We are having a darling time in Australasia—all three of us,” he told his nephew Sam Moffett. “We don’t seem to be in a foreign land, we seem to be at home.” He was starting to enjoy lecturing again. Twain spoke of the labor problems in the United States and of the “negro problem, for which he frankly professed himself unable to see a solution,” according to at least one interviewer. He was less optimistic about his own country’s problems, it appears, than he was about those of the British Empire. This may have been because he was wary of engaging in the kind of facile analysis that European travel writers had often produced after visiting the United States.7

  The Clemens trio spent Christmas in Melbourne and New Year’s Day in Adelaide, where they embarked on the Oceana for the long voyage to Sri Lanka. By January 18 they were in Bombay. Twain’s three “At Homes” in the city attracted large audiences. In Delhi an Englishman who had built a mosque for his harem and an English church for himself underscored the oil-and-water mix of the English and Indian cultures. “That kind of a man,” Twain wrote in Following the Equator, “will arrive, somewhere.” When they finally reached South Africa in early May 1896, Livy and Clara remained in Durban while Sam toured various towns. He told Rogers, to whom he had been sending lecture receipts to be applied to his debt, that he actually regretted seeing his tour come to an end: “I would like to bum around these interesting countries another year and talk.” In early July he was reunited with his wife and daughter in Port Elizabeth. From there he congratulated Rogers on his recent marriage (his first wife had died not long after the dedication of the Fairhaven courthouse in 1894). He thought to cable his congratulations, but hesitated for fear that his telegram might arrive “in the midst of mourning for some bereavement.” (The same message in a letter wasn’t as likely to signal urgency and risk being opened and read during “mourning for some bereavement.”) This empathic anxiety, however, proved ominous. “About the time this [letter] reaches you,” he told Rogers, “we shall be cabling Susy and Jean to come over to England.”8

  He was especially anxious to see Susy because that winter she had suffered another bout of bronchitis. Her meningitis that summer may have been the indirect or delayed result of her cold, for the disease sometimes occurs when bacteria from an upper respiratory infection enter the bloodstream and infect the meninges. Thinking her poor health mainly psychosomatic, her father urged her to engage in mental healing. He was “perfectly certain,” he told her, that such things as colds and carbuncles came “from a diseased mind, and that your mental science could drive them away.” He closed with the phrase “From him who loves you.” That spring he had to console Frank Whitmore on the death of his son.9

  There is a pall that hangs over the book he wrote about this roundthe-world lecture tour. Following the Equator is a pensive, even brooding work in which every significant human activity, except for the author’s recollections, is clearly in the past and done for. It signals the end of the literary life in which he had usually balanced hope against futility. The fact that this travelogue was conceived mainly as a venture to continue to pay down his debt and written so quickly (without Twain’s usual interruptions) is no doubt part of the reason for its seeming numbness. In spite of Twain’s invigoration at the end of the tour, his record of it finds him in a state of psychological collapse. Two years after its publication, he told Howells: “I wrote my last travel-book in hell; but I let on, the best I could, that it was an excursion through heaven. Some day I will read it, & if its lying cheerfulness fools me, then I shall believe it fooled the reader. How I did loathe that journey around the world!”10

  He concluded his book by describing the much-needed rest the family trio got on the voyage to England. “I seemed,” he wrote, “to have been lecturing a thousand years, though it was only a twelvemonth.” Yet he expressed pride in having made such a long trip, even if he didn’t recall having enjoyed delivering most of the lectures. “It seemed a fine and large thing to have accomplished—the circumnavigation of this great globe in that little time,” he wrote. Then the writer who came in and went out (though not quite) with Halley’s Comet also commented on a report that “another great body of light had flamed up in the remoteness of space which was traveling at a gait which would enable it to do all that I had done in a minute and a half.” “Human pride is not worth while,” he wrote in the last sentence of Following the Equator: “there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.”11

  The anxious parents sent that cable to retrieve Susy and Jean as soon as they arrived in Southampton at the beginning of August. Nervous about their long-awaited family reunion, Livy wanted to make sure she, Clara, and her husband were safely on land themselves before beckoning their two daughters across the sea. But not long after signaling the girls to join them, Twain reported in a letter to Pond on August 10: “Susy & Jean are not on their way hither, we do not yet know why.” Not yet worried or alarmed, they took up quarters in the Highfield House in Guildford about an hour outside of London while they looked for a quiet house in the country where Twain could write his book. When the news finally came that Susy was ill, her condition was described as serious but not life threatening. “To-day,” he told a friend in London, “we are troubled a little by news that our eldest daughter is ill in America. We cannot all get away immediately, but Mrs. Clemens & Clara will sail to-morrow & I shall follow 3 days later if the cablegrams do not improve meantime.” On August 18, the day Susy died in Hartford, Twain received a cable that said his daughter was improving. He decided to postpone his trip in the hope that Livy would find Susy well enough along the road to recovery to bring her back to England in another month or so.12

  This brief respite was shattered when he learned later that day that his daughter had died—“released” as her aunt and uncle said in their cable. Much as he had feared when writing to congratulate Rogers on his remarriage, tragedy had intervened between the sending and the receipt of his good tidings. Livy and Clara were still aboard the SS Paris on their way to America and not aware of what awaited them there. Twain began the first of what became a long series of letters to his wife in which he agonized over their loss. “Oh, my heart-broken darling,” he wrote her on August 19, “no, not heart-broken yet, for you still do not know—but what tidings are in store for you! What a bitter world, what a shameful world it is.” He cabled Dr. Rice to be on hand when their ship reached New York and to have all other friends and family kept out of sight, “for if you saw them on the dock,” he told his wife in yet another letter that she would read after she learned of her daughter’s death, “you would know; and you would swoon before Rice could get to you to help you.”13

  Dr. Rice joined the ship at quarantine, but would be too late to carry out this humane plan, for the terrible news had reached Clara and Livy the day before the ship docked. “On my way to the saloon for letters,” Clara remembered, “I was told the captain wished to speak to me. . . . He handed me a newspaper with great headlines: ‘MARK TWAIN’S ELDEST DAUGHTER DIES OF SPINAL MENINGITIS.’ There was much more, but I could not see the letters. The world stood still. All sounds, all movements ceased. Susy was dead. How could I tell Mother? I went to her stateroom. Nothing was said. A deadly pallor spread over her face and then came a bursting cry, ‘I don’t believe it!’ And we never did believe it.”14

  46 Mark Twain’s Daughter

  Olivia Susan Clemens died in the house in which she grew up. “Susy died at home,” Twain r
eminded Twichell, who had been on hand in Hartford when the end came. “She had that privilege.” That winter when Susy caught her cold, she also became restless and nervous, perhaps tired of the isolation of Quarry Farm in Elmira. She had been “commanded” by her singing teachers in Europe “to live on a hill, . . . valleys being forbidden—and gather vigor of body” so that she could “go back to Paris and prepare for the stage (opera).” Her voice, they told her, “was competent for the part of Elsa and Elizabeth in Lohengrin and Tannhäuser.” She went to Hartford to see old friends, staying at the Nook Farm home of Charles Dudley Warner and practicing her singing. By the summer, Katy Leary had traveled there to be ready to collect Susy and Jean, who had come separately to Hartford, for their voyage to England and the long-awaited family reunion.1

  Twain had been having trouble with the first tenant of his Hartford house, so it evidently lay empty but fully furnished for at least part of that summer. Although Susy was staying at the Warners’, she practiced her singing in the family home. When she became ill, the doctor advised Katy to move her into the Farmington Avenue mansion, and that is where Mark Twain’s eldest daughter spent her final days. The doctor first diagnosed her illness as not very serious, then pronounced it meningitis, in the middle of what Paine describes as “that hot, terrible August of 1896.” Dazed and confused, Susy roamed the Farmington Avenue house, dwelling on its familiar surroundings. At one point, Twain recorded in his journal, “she found a dress of her mother’s hanging in a closet and thought it was her mother’s effigy or specter, and so thought she was dead, and kissed it and broke down and cried.” During her wanderings, she repeated, “It is because I am Mark Twain’s daughter.” “In the burning heat of those final days in Hartford,” Twain recorded in Paine’s edition of the notebooks, “she would walk to the window or lie on the couch in her fever and delirium, and when the cars went by would say: ‘Up go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter. Down go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter.’ This was no more than a day or two before the end.” In her hallucinations, she imagined that she was the companion of a famous Parisian opera singer, a woman who, when she died sixty years earlier, had not been much older than Susy herself.2