At Stormfield in October 1909 he gathered his scattered and pitifully shrunken family together for the last time. On a clear autumn day Clara and the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch were married by Twichell, and after the wedding service Clemens posed with his daughters, his Oxford gown over a white suit, a last flash of brilliant plumage in sunlight. When the couple had driven off, Clemens was alone with Jean, trusted and adored, “a surprise and a wonder” to him now that she had finally come into her own. Some of his youth was restored to him briefly. Each morning during Howells’ last visit to Stormfield that autumn, before Howells was even dressed he heard Clemens calling his name through the house, “for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with someone.” On December 23 Jean telephoned to the New York manager of the Associated Press Clemens’ denial of a familiar rumor: “I hear the newspapers say I am dying. The charge is not true. I would not do such a thing at my time of life. I am behaving as good as I can. Merry Christmas to everybody!” The next morning it was Jean who was dead; she had had an epileptic seizure in her bath. On Christmas Day, too ill to travel, Clemens stood at the window and watched the hearse moving downhill through a heavy snowstorm. “I have never greatly envied any one but the dead,” he said to Paine. “I always envy the dead.” It was only then, after writing his account of her life and sudden death, that he considered his autobiography, and his career, finished: “I shall never write any more.”
In August 1908 Sam Moffett drowned in the surf off New Jersey. Clemens came back from the funeral in New York broken by the heat, depressed and tired. He was sick in bed for a few days; as soon as he was on his feet again and back at the billiard table with Paine he had a sudden dizzy spell and lost his memory. He forgot which was his ball, even which game they were playing. The following June he went to Baltimore to talk at the graduation exercises of one of his Angel Fish at St. Timothy’s and to tell the girls not to smoke, drink or marry to excess. In his room at the Belvedere he had an undisguised attack of angina pectoris, and he came back to Stormfield sick. He said it was “tobacco heart” and he tried to cut down his cigars from forty to four a day. He was resigned to a drawn-out invalidism and decline. With this form of heart disease, he said, “you get run over by a freight train before you can get rid of yourself.” His attacks became more frequent and severe, some of them brought on by “mental agitation.” He read a passage from “The Turning-Point of My Life” to Paine and Jean, sensed they were disappointed, clutched at his chest. He began to lose enough sleep, he said, “to supply a worn-out army.” At first he could relieve his chest pains by drinking hot water. Later on only hypodermic injections helped. “I can’t hurry this dying business,” he said to Paine. “Can’t you give me enough of the hypnotic injunction to put an end to me?”
In New York on January 5, 1910, a day before he sailed to Bermuda, he had his last meeting with Howells. They talked about labor unions as the “sole present help of the weak against the strong”; they also talked about dreams. “You never wrote anything greater, finer than that turning point paper of yours,” Howells wrote two weeks later, and Clemens, cherishing this praise as much as he had cherished Howells’ review of The Innocents Abroad forty years earlier, wrote across the top of the page: “I reckon this spontaneous outburst by the first critic of the day is good to keep, ain’t it, Paine?”
He began to fail rapidly in Bermuda, was afraid that he would die there and lie in an undertaker’s cellar. Paine came for him, and they sailed for home on April 12. On the trip back Clemens drowsed under the morphine, and when he half woke he talked about his dreams: He was at some college, on the platform, but by now he had had his fill of honors—“Isn’t there something I can resign and be out of all this? They keep trying to confer that degree upon me and I don’t want it.” Or there was a play, but he could never find anyone to be the general manager—the Superintendent of Dreams had gone for good. At Stormfield before he slipped into coma his last continuous talking was about “the laws of mentality,” about Jekyll and Hyde and dual personality. To the end he remained as much an enigma and prodigy to himself as he was to the thousands at the Brick Presbyterian Church in New York who filed past the casket, topped with a single wreath of laurel, where he lay in a white suit.
* Including cash and securities, house and land in Connecticut, two horses, a cow, and several vehicles, his estate was worth about $200,000 in 1910, according to Mr. Thomas G. Chamberlain, a trustee. At the final accounting in 1963, after the death of Clara Clemens Samossoud, the estate totaled $867,565.
NOTES
The notes that follow are keyed to the text by page number and catch phrase. In general I have cited primary sources only. The following abbreviations and short tides have been used:
PERSONS
EB Elisha Bliss
OLC Olivia Langdon Clemens
MMF Mary Mason Fairbanks
FBH Francis Bret (t) Harte
WDH William Dean Howells
HHR Henry Huttleston Rogers
JHR James H. Riley
WR Whitelaw Reid
JHT Joseph Hopkins Twichell
BOOKS, PERIODICALS, AND MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
AL American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism, and Bibliography, Durham, N.C., 1929—.
AU-1924 Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain’s Autobiography, 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924.
AU-1959 Charles Neider, ed., The Autobiography of Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959.
Barrett Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, University of Virginia, Norfolk, Va.
Berg-NYPL Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library.
BM Samuel C. Webster, Mark Twain, Business Man. Boston: Little, Brown, 1946.
Bowen Theodore Hornberger, ed., Mark Twain’s Letters to Will Bowen. Austin, Tex.: University of Texas, 1941.
Brown Franklin Walker and G. Ezra Dane, eds., Mark Twain’s Travels with Mr. Brown. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.
Eruption Bernard DeVoto, ed., Mark Twain in Eruption. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940.
F Dixon Wecter, ed., Mark Twain to Mrs. Fairbanks. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1949.
L Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain’s Letters, 2 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1917.
Life as I Find It Mark Twain, Life as I Find It, ed. Charles Neider. Garden City, N.Y.: Hanover House, 1961.
LinL Mildred Howells, ed., Life in Letters of William Dean Howells, 2 vols. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Doran, 1928.
LL Dixon Wecter, ed., The Love Letters of Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949.
MF Clara Clemens, My Father, Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1931.
MMT William Dean Howells, My Mark Twain. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1910.
MTH Henry N. Smith and William M. Gibson, eds., Mark Twain Howells Letters, 2 vols. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960.
MTN Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., Mark Twain’s Notebook. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1935.
MTP Mark Twain Papers, University of California Library, Berkeley.
NF Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm: Mark Twain’s Hartford Circle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.
Paine Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, 3 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1912.
Record Arlin Turner, Mark Twain and G. W. Cable: The Record of a Literary Friendship. East Lansing, Mich.: Michigan State University Press, 1960.
Speeches Mark Twain’s Speeches. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1923.
TIA D. M. McKeithan, ed., Traveling with the Innocents Abroad. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1958.
W Albert Bigelow Paine, ed., The Writings of Mark Twain, “Definitive Edition,” 37 vols. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1922-25.
Yale Yale University Library.
Chapter One (pages 13–38)
14. “Necessary stock in trade”: SLC to Orion and Mollie Clemens, Oct. 19, 1865, from San Francisco (MTP).
14. “More friends”: BM, 89.
15. Pistol to his head: The most explicit of SLC’s several references to the episode is a marginal comment, Apr. 21, 1909, in his copy of J. R. Lowell’s Letters, quoted in Los Angeles Times, Apr. 15, 1951.
15. “Bohemian from the sage-brush”: Albert S. Evans (“Amigo”) in Gold Hill News, Feb. 12 and 19, 1866, quoted in Mark Twain, San Francisco Correspondent, ed. Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson (San Francisco, 1957), 39- 40.
15. Venereal disease: Also Artemus Ward to SLC, January 1864, Austin, Tex. (MTP): “Why would you make a good artillery man? Because you are familiar with Gonorrhea (gunnery).” Paine omits this passage, which may be just a pointless joke, from his text in L, 93-94.
16. “I’d rather”: MTN, 35. Wakeman is described in his daughter’s introduction to his autobiography, The Log of an Ancient Mariner (San Francisco, 1878),10.
17. “Out of luck”: MTN, 47.
20. “Well, James”: WDH, Literary Friends and Acquaintance (New York, 1910), 35-39.
21. “Make your mark”: Brown, 176.
21. “Hard even for an American”: Brown, 163.
22. “Clipper built girls”: Brown, 88-89.
23. “I’ll not do it yet”: BM, 90-91.
24. “He went marching”: Brown, 92-94. Beecher’s pulpit style and mannerisms: David Macrae, The Americans at Home (New York, 1952), 65-71; Constance Rourke, Trumpets of Jubilee (New York, 1927), 149 ff.
25. “That old day”: SLC to Edward House, Jan. 14, 1884, Hartford (Barrett—photostat in MTP). SLC recalled the meeting in a letter to Charles H. Webb, Feb. 16, 1896, Darjeeling (Yale).
26. George Carleton: Eruption, 143-46.
27. “Son of a Bitch”: MTH, 133.
27. “Carleton insulted me”: MTH, 132.
27. “Prominent Brooklynites”: Brown, III.
28. “Allow me to introduce”: Brown, 113-15.
28. “Fumes of bad whiskey”: N.Y. World, Feb. 18, 1877.
29. He wrote Webb: Mar. 19, 1867, St. Louis (Barrett—photostat in MTP).
30. Mercantile Hall: For SLC’s promotion compaign and the text of his talk see Fred W. Lorch, “Mark Twain’s Sandwich Island Lecture at St. Louis,” AL, XVIII, No. 4 (January 1947), 299-307.
31. “Pretty complimentary”: Brown, 136.
31. “One never feels comfortable”: Alta California, Feb. 5, 1868. SLC used the watch metaphor in LL, 116-17. On Feb. 1, 1894, SLC told Frank Fuller: “That old lecture is not in existence—I tore it up. Stanley made a pretty full report of it …” (Yale).
31. Lectured in Hannibal: Brown, 143-46.
31. “Return and meet grown babies”: Hamlin Hill, “The Composition and Structure of Tom Sawyer,” AL, XXXII, No. 4 (January 1961), 386.
32. “One of the greatest liars”: Paine, 107.
32. “So cheerful”: Brown, 156-57.
33. “Damnable errors”: L, 124.
33. “Everything looks shady”: L, 124.
34. “Damned secessionist”: BM, 93.
34. “The chance offering”: N.Y. Daily Tribune, May, 11, 1867. SLC paid tribute to Fuller in 1868 (LL, 26-27) and 1906 (AU-1959, 170-730).
35. Night in a New York jail: Brown, 187-91. Years later, in a dinner-table conversation with Clara and WDH, SLC said, “I passed a night in jail once…. Drunk, I guess” (MTN, 400).
35. “Honest poverty”: Brown, 236.
36. “I published it”: L, 127.
37. Mortimer Neal Thomson: Fred W. Lorch, “Doesticks and Innocents Abroad,” AL, XX, No. 4 (January 1949), 446-49.
37. “Domed and steepled solitude”: Brown, 259-61.
37. “I guess that something”: Brown, 277-79.
37. “I will have to get even”: BM, 90.
37. Madame Caprell: BM, 52-57.
38. “Full of unworthy conduct”: L, 128.
38. Wrote goodbye: Bowen, 15-16. SLC’s last night in New York before sailing is described in his letter to John McComb early the next morning (published in the Boston Sunday Globe, Nov. 29, 1964).
Chapter Two (pages 39–56)
40. “Stop the boat”: F, xxiv.
40. “Swapping false teeth”: SLC’s comments on the other passengers are in MTN, 56-60, and Notebook No. 7, MTP.
40. Gibson: Henry F. Pommer, “Mark Twain’s ‘Commissioner of the United States,’” AL, XXIV, No. 3 (November 1962),385-92.
40. Cutter: John T. Winterich, “The Life and Works of Bloodgood Haviland Cutter,” Colophon, I, Part 2, May 1930.
41. “Vacancy in the Trinity”: Brown, 275-76.
41. “Sodom and Gomorrah”: TIA, 309.
41. Griswold’s book: SLC’s copy of Sixty Years with Plymouth Church is in MTP.
41. “The only notoriety”: Rock County Chronicle, II, No. 2 (June 1956).
42. “Captain Duncan wishes”: MMF, “Cruise of the Quaker City,” Chautauquan, January 1892.
42. “I basked”: W, I, 11.
43. “My audience is dumb”: L, 528.
44. “Most refined”: BM, 97.
45. “Burned-out crater”: MMF, Chautauquan, January 1892.
45. “Something sober”: Journal Letters of Emily A. Severance (Cleveland, 1938), 217.
46. “You don’t know”: F, 3.
48. “I am glad”: TLA, 97.
50. “Don’t make any arrangements”: SLC to Frank Fuller, Aug. 7, 1867, Naples (Yale).
51. The visit to the summer palace at Yalta: TIA, 142-62.
52. “Coaling going on”: C. E. Shain, “The Journal of the Quaker City Captain,” New England Quarterly, XXVIII, September 1955, 388-94.
52. “I saw her first”: AU-1959, 183.
53. “I’ll be goddamned”: MTN, 89. For SLC’s later opinion of Slote, see F, 247-49.
54. “Ignorant, depraved”: MTN, 93.
54. “J. Christ & Son”: Notebook No. 9, MTP.
55. He started to write: SLC told Webb about the play in a letter from Washington, Nov. 25, 1867 (facsimile in The Quaker City Holy Land Excursion, An Unfinished Play, privately printed, 1927). But he denied its existence in a letter to “Mr. Buell,” Dec. 29, 1905, New York (Barrett—photostat in MTP).
55. “The pleasure ship”: TIA, 313-19.
56. “Make the Quakers get up”: BM, 94-95.
56. “I’m tired hearing”: TIA, 309-13.
Chapter Three (pages 57–75)
57. Senator William M. Stewart’s account of SLC in Washington is in his Reminiscences (New York, 1908), 219-24.
59. “Good for three nights”: SLC to Frank Fuller, Dec. 5, 1867, Washington (Yale).
59. Lobbying on Orion’s behalf: BM, 96; L, 149, 150.
60. “I have thrown away”: LL, 61-62.
61. “We are perhaps”: L, 140.
61. “I wrote fifty-two”: L, 141-42.
62. “No book of literary quality”: WDH, “The Man of Letters as a Man of Business,” Scribner’s, October 1893.
63. “Talented men of the age”: L, 145-46.
63. “Don’t dare to smoke”: F, 15-16. SLC’s first newspaper impressions of Hartford were published in the Alta California Mar. 3, 1868.
64. “I want a good wife”: F, 7-8.
64. “I wish I had been”: Bowen, 16-17.
64. “Morality and huckleberries”: Alta California, Sept. 6, 1868.
65. “Proud to observe”: Alta California, Feb. 5, 1868.
65. “The fortune of my life”: AU-1959, 174. I follow the chronology of H. G. Baetzhold, “Mark Twain’s ‘First Date’ with Olivia Clemens,” Missouri Historical Society Bulletin, XI, January 1955, 155-57.
66. “A visiting Spirit”: LL, 43.
66. “I hardly knew”: L, 144.
67. “Dear Folks”: F, 12. The text of the speech is in Speeches, 31-33.
67. There
was slang: F, 13.
67. “I acknowledge”: F, 18-21.
69. New York Tribune: “The White House Funeral,” dateline Washington, Mar. 4, 1869 (clipping in MTP).
69. “If the Alta’s book”: F, 24.
70. “Son of the devil”: F, 29.
70. Some of the newspapers: The reviews are quoted in Paul Fatout, Mark Twain on the Lecture Circuit (Bloomington, Ind., 1960), 89-90.
71. “Any lecture”: LL, 165-66.
72. “School-boy days”: W, II, 330-31.
73. “Settle down”: F, 29-30.
73. “If you wanted”: MMT, 19.
73. “Head of my breed”: L, 102.
74. “Unusual and dominant nature”: T. Edgar Pemberton, The Life of Bret Harte (New York, 1903), 74-75.
74. “Trimmed and trained”: L, 182-84; this is also the source for the story about the Overland’s cover emblem. Among others testifying to FBH’s brilliance as editor and mentor was Charles Warren Stoddard, in his Exits and Entrances (Boston, 1903), 248.
74. “Harte read all the MS.”: SLC to C. H. Webb, Nov. 26, 1870, Buffalo (Barrett—photostat in MTP).
74. “Bret’s very best sketch”: SLC’s marginalia in his copy (MTP) of The Luck of Roaring Camp (Boston, 1870).
Chapter Four (pages 76–93)
76. Commonplace book: MTP.
76. “Square, flat-footed” LL, 33.
77n. “Her specialty”: AU-1959, 11.
79. “Born reserved”: AU-1959, 185-86.
80. “I do not regret”: LL, 18-20. The salutation is: “My Honored ‘Sister.’”
80. “I believe in you”: LL, 25.
81. “What you need now”: Paine, 287; Bowen, 14.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 57
