Final Chapters

by Jim Bernhard

  Before facing that inevitability, he filled his life with madcap adventures, irreverent challenges to conventional behavior, and several literary masterpieces. Author of major classics that include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and his most highly revered work, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain began his career as a printer’s devil in Hannibal, Missouri, not far from where he was born—in Florida, Missouri, on November 30, 1835, as Samuel Langhorne Clemens.

  The sixth of seven children, he completed only the sixth grade before going to work at age eleven after his father died. At eighteen, Sam went east, and as he recalled, “I became a newspaperman; I hated to do it, but I couldn’t find honest employment.” He worked on newspapers in New York and Philadelphia before returning to Missouri to embark on a career as a riverboat pilot on the Mississippi.

  The Civil War soon put a stop to river traffic, and Sam joined his brother in Nevada, tried his hand (unsuccessfully) at silver mining, then went to work for a series of newspapers in Nevada and California. He also began to publish stories using the pen name “Mark Twain,” derived from a riverboat phrase that means two fathoms, or twelve feet, in depth.

  Twain went to Hawaii, Europe, and the Holy Land as a newspaper correspondent. On one trip, he met his future brother-in-law, Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister, Olivia, and Twain fell in love literally at first sight. They courted for two years before marrying and settling first in Buffalo, New York, and then Hartford, Connecticut, in a twenty-five-room house that cost $45,000—close to a million dollars in today’s money. By this time, Twain’s writing was providing a handsome living, and he devoted the next seventeen years to writing the major novels that would be his legacy.

  Primarily known as a humorist, Twain used his acerbic wit to comment on religion and death. Nominally a Presbyterian, he was nonetheless caustically critical of organized religion. “Faith,” he once remarked, “is believing what you know ain’t so.” And he said, “If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.” Although Twain attended church services and asserted that he believed in God, he discounted many of the tenets of Christianity, such as the infallibility of the Bible and retribution for sins in an afterlife. “Death,” Twain once remarked, “is the only immortal who treats us all alike, whose pity and whose peace and whose refuge are for all—the soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved.”

  For a decade or so, during the 1890s, Twain and Olivia traveled widely as he lectured throughout the world. By this time, a series of bad investments had plunged him into bankruptcy, and he relied upon lecture tours to restore his finances. In 1896, the Twains’ daughter Susy died of meningitis at the age of twenty-four while visiting their Hartford home. Twain never returned there, and he and Olivia settled in New York.

  After Olivia’s death, Twain’s last years saw a gradual lessening of his mental capacity, and he became a cantankerous and cynical curmudgeon, speaking against the government so vehemently that some accused him of treason. In 1908, he moved to his final home, Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut, which is where he died of heart disease on April 21, 1910, at the age of seventy-four.

  The New York Times had a detailed account of his final hours, which read in part:

  Samuel Langhorne Clemens, “Mark Twain,” died at 22 minutes after 6 tonight. . . .

  Although the end had been foreseen by the doctors and would not have been a shock at any time, the apparently strong rally of this morning had given basis for the hope that it would be postponed for several days. Mr. Clemens awoke at about 4 o’clock this morning after a few hours of the first natural sleep he has had for several days, and the nurses could see by the brightness of his eyes that his vitality had been considerably restored.

  His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise, the first signs of which he could see out of the windows in the three sides of the room where he lay. The increasing sunlight seemed to bring ease to him, and by the time the family was about he was strong enough to sit up in bed and overjoyed them by recognizing all of them and speaking a few words to each.

  For two hours he lay in bed enjoying the feeling of this return of strength. Then he made a movement [and] asked in a faint voice for the copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” which he has always had near him for the last year, and which he has read and re-read and brooded over.

  With his glasses on he read a little and then slowly put the book down with a sigh. Soon he appeared to become drowsy and settled on his pillow. Gradually he sank and settled into a lethargy. . . . At 3 o’clock he went into complete unconsciousness. At twenty-two minutes past 6, with the sunlight just turning red as it stole into the window in perfect silence he breathed his last.

  It is certain to be recalled that Mark Twain was for more than fifty years an inveterate smoker, and the first conjecture of the layman would be that he had weakened his heart by overindulgence in tobacco. Dr. Halsey said to-night that he was unable to say that the angina pectoris from which Mark Twain died was in any way [related to] nicotine poisoning. Some constitutions, he said, seem immune from the effects of tobacco, and his was one of them. Yet it is true that since his illness began the doctors had cut down Mark Twain’s daily allowance of twenty cigars and countless pipes to four cigars a day. . . .

  Twain’s funeral was two days later at the Brick Presbyterian Church on 5th Avenue at 37th Street in New York. The Associated Press reported:

  The body reached New York shortly before noon in a private car, in which rode Mrs. Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Samuel Clemens’ only surviving daughter, and her husband; Dan Beard, the artist, Twain’s lifelong friend; James Langdon of Elmira; Katie Leary, for thirty years the housekeeper at Stormfield, and other house servants. At the head of the coffin stood Claude Benzollete, for many years Twain’s valet, who refused to move from the side of his dead master.

  Only a handful of people met the body at Grand Central Station. No loving hands lifted it from the car to the hearse. That task was delegated to the undertaker and his assistants.

  Slowly the cortege drove to the old brick church, where the body remained until the funeral services began at 3 o’clock. The church filled quickly. Holders of tickets were admitted first. Millionaires and paupers rubbed elbows in the vast crowd that stood outside. The body, clad in the immaculate white serge suit which marked Twain in his old age, lay coffined in front of the altar. The only floral piece was a wreath garlanded by the hand of Dan Beard.

  At 3 o’clock the immediate family seated themselves in front of the coffin. Rev. Dr. Henry Van Dyke of Princeton and Rev. Joseph H. Twitchell of Hartford, Twain’s old chums, robed in their vestments, took their places in the chancel. For a quarter of an hour the two ministers sat silent, their heads bowed in prayer.

  No sound was heard through the dark old edifice save a muffled sob. Dr. Twitchell, Twain’s oldest and dearest friend, was convulsed with tears. His massive frame shook as he brushed the white locks from his forehead and gazed down into the face of his dead friend.

  Then Dr. Van Dyke rose and read the beautiful funeral service of the Presbyterian faith. At its conclusion he spoke briefly of Samuel L. Clemens, his friend, not Mark Twain, the author.

  [Then] Dr. Twitchell walked to the altar, from which he might gaze down at Mark Twain’s face. His voice was inaudible, and the tears poured down his cheeks as he asked God’s blessing upon his friend, and the world’s friend. He clasped the altar rail and seemed to be speaking to his old chum as he brokenly sobbed out a prayer.

  Twain was buried in his wife’s family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira, New York, his grave marked by a twelve-foot (two fathoms, or “mark twain,”) monument.

  THOMAS HARDY

  Thomas Hardy, the preeminent English novelist and poet, who lived to be eighty-seven, almost became the baby thrown out with the proverbial bath water. At his birth on J
une 2, 1840, in the tiny Dorset hamlet of Higher Bockhampton, the attending doctor believed him to have been stillborn and was prepared to dispose of the “corpse.” A vigilant midwife, however, detected signs of life and rescued the infant from an exceedingly premature departure. Having survived this close call, Thomas grew up in a middle-class household headed by his fiddle-playing, stonemason father. His mother home-schooled him until he was eight, when he was sent to Mr. Last’s Academy for Young Gentlemen in Dorchester, where he learned Latin and read widely on his own.

  There was no money for a university education, so Thomas was apprenticed to an architect in Dorchester, then headed for London to study at King’s College, after which he launched his career. While successfully working as an architect and winning some notable prizes for his designs, he began to write novels, though with less success. One of his early novels, serialized in a magazine, gave rise to the term “cliffhanger,” as a character was literally left hanging off a cliff at the end of one episode.

  Hardy moved back to Dorset for a time, and in 1870, while working on a commission in Cornwall, he met Emma Lavinia Gifford, whom he married in 1874. That was also the year that he had a major success with his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, which enabled him to give up architecture and become a full-time writer. The Hardys moved often among various locales in Dorset, also maintaining a London home.

  Hardy’s later novels, which included The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure, were fairly gritty slices of realism for their time. Jude the Obscure met with such criticism for its perceived attack on the institution of marriage that the Anglican Bishop of Wakefield burned it—“Probably in despair,” said Hardy, “at not being able to burn me.” He wrote no more novels after 1895, and instead turned his attention to several books of existentially bleak poetry.

  In 1912, the death of his wife, from whom he had been estranged, contributed to Hardy’s dreary outlook on life—which brightened a bit in 1914, when at the age of seventy-four, he married his thirty-nine-year-old secretary, Florence Dugdale.

  Having previously declined a knighthood because he felt it was an unsuitable way to honor a literary man, Hardy in 1910 accepted the more prestigious Order of Merit, which is limited to twenty-four members. Incidentally, Hardy was repeatedly passed over for a Nobel Prize in literature (as were such contemporaries of his as Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, and Joseph Conrad, during years when the Prize was granted to such now largely forgotten authors as Sully Prudhomme, Rudolf Eucken, Paul Heyse, Selma Lagerlöf, and Carl Spitteler).

  Hardy was raised in a nominally Anglican family, but as an adult he was skeptical of Christian orthodoxy and wavered among a variety of beliefs—agnosticism, Deism, and spiritualism. Fascinated by ghosts, he also retained a fondness for Christian rituals. His pessimistic worldview is often expressed in his poetry, most of which was written in the latter part of his life.

  In “The Impercipient,” published in 1898, he laments his lack of faith:

  That from this bright believing band

  An outcast I should be,

  That faiths by which my comrades stand

  Seem fantasies to me,

  And mirage-mists their Shining Land,

  Is a drear destiny.

  Four years later, in “In Tenebris,” he writes:

  Black is night’s cope;

  But death will not appal

  One who, past doubtings all,

  Waits in unhope.

  In December of 1927, Hardy fell ill with pleurisy, which taxed his heart, and just after nine o’clock in the evening on January 11, 1928, at the age of eighty-seven, he died at Max Gate, the home he had built near Dorchester. The cause of death was listed as “cardiac syncope” (inadequate blood flow to the brain), compounded by “old age.”

  Hardy had wished to be buried next to his first wife in Stinsford, a Dorset village near his birthplace, but his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, felt that the great author should be interred in Westminster Abbey. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin agreed, and a tug-of-war ensued over Hardy’s remains. A compromise was reached by removing his heart, to be buried in Stinsford, and cremating the rest of him, with the ashes to repose in Westminster Abbey.

  A widely circulated story claimed that after his family physician, Dr. E. Mann, had excised the heart, it was stored in a biscuit tin in a garden shed to await burial. The family cat, named Cobweb, somehow managed to open the can and, finding what it took to be a massive treat for a carnivore, ate the heart. Next morning, the undertaker realized what had happened, dispatched the cat, and buried it with the partially digested contents of its stomach in the grave in St. Michael’s churchyard next to Mrs. Hardy. This story is denied—heartily—by most Hardy experts.

  The pallbearers at the Abbey funeral were a distinguished literary lot that included Rudyard Kipling, George Bernard Shaw, John Galsworthy, A. E. Housman, J. M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, plus Prime Minister Baldwin.

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Robert Louis Stevenson, author of such much-read works as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses, is the twenty-sixth most-translated author in history—according to a UNESCO list on which he ranks well below Barbara Cartland, Danielle Steele, and Nora Roberts.

  Born in Edinburgh on November 13, 1850, Stevenson came from a family of lighthouse engineers. After studying at Edinburgh Academy, he enrolled in the University of Edinburgh with the intention of following in his family’s engineering footsteps. He switched to law, but after finishing his degree, decided instead to be a writer. As such, he felt it only appropriate to adopt the ways of a dissolute bohemian, sporting long hair, wearing velveteen jackets, and frequenting Edinburgh’s taverns and brothels, as writers were (and may still be) wont to do.

  Stevenson’s visits to France yielded some travel articles and also introduced him to an American woman, Fanny Osbourne, eleven years his senior, separated from her husband and with two children. When Fanny returned to California in order to obtain a divorce, the love-struck Stevenson followed her, sailing second-class on a steamer and then traveling by train from New York to Nevada. He became ill during the journey and spent months recuperating before he and Fanny married in San Francisco. The new family returned to Britain to make their home in Scotland.

  Stevenson continued to write short fiction, virtually inventing the literary genre of the short story. During one wintry Scottish afternoon, his stepson entertained himself by drawing a map of a “treasure island,” which inspired Stevenson to write one of his most famous works. Treasure Island established Stevenson as a popular and financially successful writer.

  The family returned to America, intending to live in Colorado for its healthful air, but wound up instead at Saranac Lake, a spa in New York’s Adirondack Mountains. In 1888, fulfilling a long-held dream, Stevenson decided to sail around the world with his family. He chartered a yacht in San Francisco and went first to the Society Islands, then to the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii), where he befriended King Kalakaua and finished his novel The Master of Ballantrae. Finally, the family settled in Samoa, where they constructed a house and Stevenson became a revered figure in Samoan society.

  Stevenson was reared by a Presbyterian family and a staunch Calvinist nanny, but as a young man, he declared that he was an atheist. His views on religion and an afterlife have been the subject of much speculation. He wrote to his friend Edmund Gosse: “If I could believe in the immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be true; but . . . the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies, the conscience, sleeps well at last.” He went on to say that a man “can tell himself this fairy tale of an eternal tea-party; and enjoy the notion . . . that his friends will yet meet him. But the truth is, we must fight on until we die . . . when all these desperate tricks will lie spellbound at last.”

  Despite this rejection of Christian belief, Stevenson held regular family pr
ayers in Samoa and even taught briefly in a Presbyterian Sunday school. Perhaps his religious views are best summed up in a vague theism, as he expressed when he wrote to a friend, “I am religious in my own way, but I am hardly brave enough to interpose a theory of my own between life and death. Here both our creeds and our philosophies seem to me to fail.”

  Sickly all his life, Stevenson suffered from childhood with chronic tuberculosis, several bouts of meningitis, and sciatica. His health was probably not enhanced by his chain-smoking, heavy use of alcohol, and occasional reliance upon cocaine.

  On the evening of December 3, 1894, on the verandah of his home in Vallima, Samoa, Stevenson was chatting with his wife while straining to open a bottle of wine. Suddenly he put the wine down, and said to her, “What’s that? Does my face look strange?” Then he collapsed and died within a few hours of a brain hemorrhage, at the age of forty-four.

  His body was carried the next day by six Samoans to the peak of Mount Vaea, where he was buried in a Presbyterian service overlooking the Pacific Ocean. As Stevenson had wished, his tomb was inscribed with his poem, “Requiem”:

  Under the wide and starry sky,

  Dig the grave and let me lie.

  Glad did I live and gladly die,

  And I laid me down with a will.

  This be the verse you grave for me:

  Here he lies where he longed to be;

  Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

  And the hunter home from the hill.

  Although the text of the original poem was “home from sea,” it was misquoted on his tomb as “home from the sea,” as it usually appears today.