Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Susy was twenty-four at the time of her death. The question remains as to what or who she might have become, whether she would have survived the burden of being “Mark Twain’s daughter.” “It kills me to think of the books that Susy would have written, and that I shall never read now,” Twain told Rogers in the wake of his terrible loss. “This family has lost its prodigy.” Ever since her early teens, when she began the biography of her famous father, it was clear that she was the most promising of the three girls. In a stream of letters to his wife, he rehearsed the misery of their loss. Noting that he possessed “no letter that Susy wrote me,” he told Livy that he had “never wholly ceased to hope that some day Susy would take up my biography again. That is, I kept up a vague hope that she might take to making occasional notes and that my death would bring back the lost interest in the matter & that she would then write the book.”3 (Such a book would have to wait until 1931, when his only surviving daughter, Clara, published My Father, Mark Twain.)

  Following the cue of her mother, Susy was said to have preferred the more serious Mark Twain to the humorist, but if so, she also maintained an appreciation for works like Huckleberry Finn and Pudd’nhead Wilson. While living in Florence and reading the romantic poets, she formed an acquaintance with the daughter of John Addington Symonds, the Victorian writer who bluntly asked Walt Whitman whether his “Calamus” poems about male friendship weren’t tinged with the theme of homosexuality (Whitman dodged the question by claiming paternity of six illegitimate children). Among this Oxford star and closeted gay man’s books was a biography of Shelley, whom Susy had found naughty but “adorable.” Symonds’s most distinguished work was the seven-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–86), a study with which Susy might well have been acquainted. In Florence she was also an admirer and acquaintance of Vernon Lee, the writer of supernatural tales who was in turn a disciple of Pater and the cause of art for art’s sake. Susy was delighted to have met Oscar Wilde, the aesthetic movement’s most famous literary product, in 1891 while her family was vacationing in Ouchy, Switzerland. She described for her Bryn Mawr friend his “soft brown [suit] with a pale pink flowered vest, a blue necktie and some strange picturesque white flower in his button hole.”4 If Bryn Mawr awakened her intellectually, Florence, where other artists influenced by the symbolism and imagery of the Pre-Raphaelites abounded, nurtured her initial development into an aesthete for whom homoerotic or free love was, at least, an option.

  That young woman, of course, was not the Susy whom Mark Twain was trying to remember in his letters, journals, and autobiography. Nor was she the genteel daughter of a proper Victorian mother who supposedly preferred the highbrow writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens to those of Mark Twain, an image of Susy first put in place by Paine with the strong encouragement of Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch. In the wake of Susy’s death, her father “read her private writings” (including the letters of Louise Brownell, which her parents very likely burned, since they have not been found) and must have been dismayed by the secret change she had undergone while living abroad in Florence and Paris. “Bryn Mawr began it,” her father told himself. “It was there that her health was undermined.”5 Yet there is no evidence that it was her health that changed at Bryn Mawr; it was her point of view, her concept of herself as no longer Mark Twain’s daughter or “Susy,” but Olivia Susan Clemens. Ill as she was in her final days in the Hartford mansion, there is something deeply suggestive in her delirious refrain about the trolley cars’ obedience to “Mark Twain’s daughter.” Twain sensed something had changed as soon as she left for Bryn Mawr and so found any excuse to visit her there. He loved her as a daughter, but he didn’t want to lose her to anyone else or anything else. That is why he kept hoping she would regain her interest in finishing his biography, even if he had to die to get her to do it. And this is why in 1906 he published in the North American Review, within selections from his autobiography, excerpts of what she had written.

  Susy’s biography of her father was more than nineteen thousand words—an extensive narrative for someone only thirteen years old. It breaks off in midstream, but what there is of it is a clearly focused chronicle. She was a precocious girl who, if we can believe her father, pondered the mysteries of the human condition as if she were an adult. As a child, he recalled, she was impressed and perplexed by the cyclical nature of existence. As a child of eight, she decided to stop praying. When asked why by her mother, she replied that the Indians had prayed to more than one god, “but now we know they were wrong. By and by it can turn out that we are wrong. So now I only pray that there may be a God and a heaven—or something better.” Later on she wanted to know about the law of proportions; that is to say, how we discriminate between something deemed tragic and the sad but merely trivial things in life.6 While Twain may well have been projecting his own theory of tragedy onto his memories of his daughter (the law of proportions comes up in “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts), it seems impossible that he was creating such recollections out of whole cloth. The fact alone that her parents sent her to a genuine college at a time when the women’s rights movement was growing is itself significant. Even in the nineteenth century, Bryn Mawr wasn’t simply a finishing school.

  Twain blamed himself for his daughter’s death as he had for the deaths of his brother and his only son. If he had not so foolishly gotten himself into business and then into such debt, the family would never have been forced to wander abroad for so many years; he wouldn’t have had to undertake the lecture tour around the world; and they wouldn’t have separated themselves from their daughter for a year before her death. Livy at least saw Susy in her coffin when she lay in state in the Langdon house before being buried in Elmira. Twain had to imagine it, which he did most vividly. “I seem to see her in her coffin,” he told his wife. “I do not know in which room. In the library, I hope; for there she and Ben [Clara] & I mostly played when we were children together & happy.”7

  He also blamed God for the “ghastly tragedy” of Susy’s early death. “How cruel it was; how exactly & precisely it was planned; & how remorselessly every detail of the dispensation was carried out,” he told Howells, whose own daughter Winifred had died tragically in 1889. “Susy stood on the platform in Elmira at half past ten on the 14th of July, 1895, in the glare of the electric lights, waving her good-byes as our train moved westward on the long trip. . . . One year, one month, & one week later, Livy & Clara had completed the circuit of the globe, arriving at Elmira at the same hour in the evening, by the same train & in the same car—& Susy was there to meet them—lying white & fair in her coffin in the house she was born in.”8 This anger was part of the normal grieving process, of course, but the humorist in Twain could not help feeling battered by the incongruity of the tragedy. Another mysterious stranger, death, had come to town unexpectedly and turned the tables. Twain’s pessimism, certainly enhanced by his worshipped daughter’s death, simply acknowledged the cosmic scheme within and for which humor existed in the first place. Humor was finally all we had. Even Emerson had seen it in “The Comic.” When anyone gets out of harmony with nature—that is, expects a world without death, even in the wildest reaches of his imagination—he inevitably becomes the object of humor and then of pity.

  Livy returned to England with two daughters instead of three at the end of August. By the 11th of September the family had moved from Guildford to London—at 23 Tedworth Square, Chelsea, for $1,350 a year—“not to live in public there, but to hide from men for a time & let the wounds heal,” he told Whitmore, who was again trying to rent the Hartford house for the Clemenses. He would write Following the Equator in the silence of Susy’s permanent disappearance. He would not lecture anywhere in the coming year. He had expected to lecture in Britain that fall and perhaps in the United States in the spring, he told Orion and Mollie, “but the unspeakable bereavement . . . has necessarily quenched all desire to continue on the platform.”9 To keep safely hidden from the public eye during their yearlong bereavement, they gave
out only the address of his British publisher, Chatto and Windus, except to close friends and family.

  It was in the fall of 1894 that fourteen-year-old Helen Keller came into Twain’s life. Now sixteen, this already celebrated deaf and blind woman was hoping to attend Radcliffe College and in need of money for that purpose. Prompted by the wife of Laurence E. Hutton, then at Harper’s Monthly, Twain urged Rogers to help with Keller’s support. (Rogers paid for all of Keller’s time at Radcliffe.) Perhaps Clemens was moved in part by the fresh memory of his own daughter, also a college student, who had gone blind shortly before her death. “We have lost her, & our life is bitter,” he told his wife on November 27, 1896, her fifty-first birthday: “We may find her again—let us not despair of it.” In the meantime he began not to blame himself alone for the loss of Susy, but also Charley Webster, now more than five years moldering in his grave. Sam had not written his sister Pamela as often as he wrote Orion, he explained, for the letters he did write he often tore up before sending. “I was not able to keep Webster out of them, the primal cause of Susy’s death & my ruin.” Webster, he now insisted of the individual he had once so trusted with his business interests, had “no likeable qualities,” unlike his successor Hall. He was “all dog.” As time went on, he was even willing to expand the blame for Susy’s death to the Warners and other neighbors in Hartford at the time.10

  As he worked away on Following the Equator in the winter of 1897, his grief got heavier. “You have seen our whole voyage,” he told Twichell. “You have seen us go to sea, a cloud of sail, & the flag at the peak; & you see us now, chartless, adrift—derelicts; battered, water-logged, our sails a ruck of rags, our pride gone. For it is gone.” He hadn’t fully realized that Susy was such an integral part of the rest of them. “I did not know,” he told his old friend and confidant, “that she could go away, & take our lives with her, yet leave our dull bodies behind. And I did not know what she was.”11 In fact, he didn’t know what she had become. At least until she got to Bryn Mawr, she was always “Susy,” her diminutive nickname reinforcing the image of his darling teenage biographer and prenubile philosopher. There is no record whatever of either of her parents entertaining the prospect of her marriage, even though she was twenty-four—almost exactly the same age at which her mother married. And this was in a Victorian era in which the first and last question asked of any unmarried woman—the matter recently dramatized in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady—was, Whom would she marry? Instead, Twain kept rehearsing the parent-child scenario, never forgetting that his daughter’s last word was “Mamma.”

  With the loss of the first daughter, the parents were keeping firm watch on the second (and the third, Jean, whose epilepsy would soon become still more apparent). When Clara took a fall at a London gymnasium in June, they canceled an engagement with James R. Clemens, a distant relative (father of Cyril Clemens, tireless promoter and amateur scholar of Mark Twain in the twentieth century who before long turned out to be a pest). When Clara decided to continue her piano training under the famed Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna, the whole family moved there with her that autumn, following a vacation in Switzerland. Sam and Livy were determined never again to separate themselves from either one of their remaining daughters. With Susy gone, the feeling was that anything could happen at any time. Telling his old friend Frank Fuller of his plans, Clemens announced that he had recently finished his new book—“and just in time, too, for by reports I am now dead. Posthumous works always sell better than others.” When James Ross Clemens had recently been ill, the jumpy press leaped to the conclusion that Mark Twain was dying, a mistake he made famous by calling the report of his death an exaggeration. He claimed that he wasn’t even trying to be funny, but it turned out to be one of his most enduring quips. The American public hadn’t forgotten his financial dilemma. And a campaign to collect money to help him pay off the debt had begun at the New York Herald, but before it got off the ground, Livy made Sam insist that it be stopped and all money returned to the contributors. He was tempted not to stop it, for he was still feeling the fatigue of his debt, especially after going nearly all around the world to extinguish it, only to learn that lecture receipts were only enough to pay off a third.12

  The success of Following the Equator (it sold thirty thousand copies within three months of its publication), along with wise investments made for the Clemenses by Henry Rogers, vanquished almost all of the debt by the winter of 1898.13 But remarkably, Rogers also had to expend some effort to keep Twain from getting back into debt, for the speculator in Sam Clemens was still tempted by risky investments. By then, the family was ensconced at the lush Metropole Hotel in Vienna with its balls and dinners. It would be almost another two years before they returned to America, but Twain’s final phase as a writer was already taking shape. The pain of Susy’s death would never go away, but it was a fainter memory by the time they finally returned home without her.

  PART IV

  The Mysterious Stranger

  47 City of Dreams

  In some ways, fin de siècle Vienna became the Clemens family’s sanctuary from the lingering horrors of Susy’s death. For one thing, Twain knew the Germanic culture better than most Americans and so, as America’s most famous living writer, fit easily and even comfortably into the social fabric of the city. Having lived for extended periods in Heidelberg, Bad Nauheim, Munich, Berlin, and Weggis, Switzerland, he could understand and speak some German, though still with considerable discomfort. This center of the Austro-Hungarian Empire offered many distractions from the family’s grief, although Twain in his letters and journals often wrote about it. To ward off the depression that accompanied it, he threw himself into his work, starting any number of literary projects, including the first two versions of “The Mysterious Stranger” and the small masterpiece that came almost directly out of the city’s sometimes violent politics, “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.” After a few months in the Hapsburg capital, he told his friend Howells that he couldn’t possibly survive “without work now. I bury myself in it up to the ears.” It was mainly, he added, to shake off “the deadness which invaded me when Susy died.”1 No stoic when it came to the death of a loved one, he seldom kept these feelings to himself.

  In a fine study, Carl Dolmetsch has painted in the background and most of the details for this important period.2 The Clemenses had come to Vienna so that Clara might study piano with the famous Leschetizky. As Clara remembered it more than thirty years later, the family did not fully immerse themselves in the diversions of Vienna until Herr Leschetizky committed himself to allowing Clara to become one of his pupils. She and her father went to the master’s home at Karl Ludwig Strasse 42, where Clara made a plea in German and played the piano (she was more fluent at both than her father). “Poor Father,” she recalled, “had to listen to a long speech addressed by Leschetitzky to him explaining what I needed in the way of technical preparation before he could accept me as a pupil for lessons with him,” mainly lessons from one of Leschetizky’s more senior pupils—his normal method of conducting his large classes of ten students or more. Clara saw her father’s face “droop more and more as this German cataclysm fell upon him,” until the other master in the room finally asked “for just one bit of information—were we to remain in Vienna?”3 With that question answered in the affirmative, the last phase of Mark Twain’s literary career began.

  Clara never rose to the level of concert pianist, but she clearly had musical talent and at her best could skillfully play Chopin nocturnes, distinctly above the amateur level. She and Susy had been playing the piano since they were six or seven years old, when their Hartford neighbor and wife of Charles Dudley Warner first gave them lessons. After growing up on concerts and musicales in Hartford, it was almost natural for Clara to want to come to the musical capital of the world (even though that reputation for Vienna was coming to an end) to study with a master who had taught such famous artists as Paderewski and Schnabel. Another pupil, not nearly so famous but a musi
cal prodigy to be sure, was Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Clara’s future husband, known at the height of his career as “the poet of the piano.” He later conducted the Detroit Symphony for eighteen years until his death from cancer in 1936. Clara met him formally at a dinner party her parents gave in order to bring together Charley Langdon, who was visiting with his family from Elmira, and Theodor Leschetizky, who was central to the social life of Vienna.4

  The Clemenses were ensconced in the Hotel Metropole in the center of Vienna. They had initially tried for a furnished house, but the hotel, in its desire to advertise itself as the home-away-from-home of the famous Mark Twain, made him a very generous offer. For around $440 a month, they lived in an upper-floor suite that contained a parlor, a music room, a study, and four bedrooms. Normally such accommodations would have cost almost twice as much. The only drawback, as Twain told Rogers, was the bathroom, which was “50 yards distant, and as I was often tired and they didn’t allow bicycles in the halls, I didn’t take any baths that year. I was never so healthy and warm in my life.” His joking aside, this may be the first indication of Twain’s fascination at the end of the century with alternative medicine and health foods such as Plasmon, whose stock (to Rogers’ chagrin) he soon began to buy. The apartment was otherwise well suited to his needs. Clara recalled how much her father wrote in it that first winter, “sometimes in bed and often pacing the floor. He walked rapidly back and forth from end to end of our long salon with his hands behind his back and his lips moving for half an hour at a time, and then sat down to a table and wrote.”5