1870: Marries Livy February 2 and moves into furnished house in Buffalo purchased by her parents. Jervis Langdon dies of stomach cancer in August. Son Langdon Clemens born prematurely in November.
1871: Publishes Mark Twain’s (Burlesque) Autobiography. Sells interest in Buffalo Express, moves to Hartford’s Nook Farm, and rents home from Hooker family.
1872: Publishes Roughing It and Mark Twain’s Sketches (London); lectures in England in the fall. First daughter, Olivia Susan Clemens (Susy), is born March 19. Only son, Langdon, dies June 2.
1873: Publishes The Gilded Age with Charles Dudley Warner. Lectures in London in the fall.
1874: Colonel Sellers, the play based on a character in The Gilded Age, opens in New York City. Publishes “A True Story” in the Atlantic Monthly. Publishes Mark Twain’s Sketches (Hartford). Second daughter, Clara Langdon Clemens, is born June 8. Moves into his newly constructed home in Nook Farm.
1875: Publishes “Old Times of the Mississippi” in the Atlantic and Sketches, New and Old.
1876: Writes 1601; writes Ah Sin with Bret Harte; publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
1877: Production of Ah Sin in Washington, D.C. Visits Bermuda with Joe Twichell. Delivers Whittier Birthday Dinner Speech in Boston. Markets “Mark Twain’s Patent Self-Pasting Scrapbook.”
1878: Publishes Punch, Brothers, Punch!
1878–1879: Lives in Germany, Italy, France, and England.
1880: Publishes A Tramp Abroad. Third daughter, Jane Lampton Clemens (Jean), born July 26.
1881: Meets George Washington Cable. Publishes The Prince and the Pauper.
1882: Travels down the Mississippi and visits New Orleans; returns upriver, stopping over in Hannibal on his way to St. Paul, and returns to New York and Hartford. Makes initial investment in the Paige Compositor. Writes “The Walt Whitman Controversy.”
1883: Publishes Life on the Mississippi.
1884: Founds the Charles L. Webster Publishing Company. 1884–1885: Lecture tour with Cable.
1885: Publishes Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant.
1888: Publishes Mark Twain’s Library of Humor; receives honorary master of arts degree from Yale.
1889: Publishes A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.
1890: Mother Jane Lampton Clemens dies October 27.
1890–1891: Susy Clemens, preferring to use her first name, Olivia, with classmates, attends Bryn Mawr College.
1891: Family closes up Hartford house and sails to Europe. Twain stops further investments in the Paige Compositor. Arranges to write at least six travel letters from Europe for American newspaper publication.
1892: Publishes Merry Tales and The American Claimant. Family resides in Berlin and later Florence.
1893: Befriended by robber baron Henry Huttleston Rogers, vice president of Standard Oil, Twain makes frequent trips back to United States to look after his interests in his flagging publishing company and the Paige Compositor, in which he still owns many shares.
1894: Charles L. Webster Publishing Company declares bankruptcy. Twain publishes Pudd’nhead Wilson.
1895: Abandons his interests in the Paige Typesetter. Publishes “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.” Family returns to the United States and resides for the summer at Quarry Farm in Elmira.
1895–1896: Lecture tour to Australasia, which becomes the basis for Following the Equator (1897).
1896: Susy Clemens dies of spinal meningitis August 18. Family establishes residence in England. Jean Clemens diagnosed with epilepsy. Publishes Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, as well as Tom Sawyer Abroad, Tom Sawyer, Detective, and Other Stories. Meets William James.
1897: Brother Orion Clemens dies December 11. Following the Equator published.
1897–1899: Establishes residence in Vienna so that Clara can study piano. Begins writing “Which Was the Dream?” “The Great Dark,” and other dreamscapes.
1898: Pays off all debts related to Webster & Company bankruptcy. Possibly meets Sigmund Freud in Vienna, then still working on The Interpretation of Dreams.
1898–1899: Works on the first two “Mysterious Stranger” drafts: “The Chronicle of Young Satan” and “Schoolhouse Hill.”
1899: Publishes “Stirring Times in Austria,” “Concerning the Jews,” and “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg.”
1900: Moves to England and finally New York City, where the family rents 10 West 10th Street. Publishes The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg, and Other Stories and Essays.
1901: Publishes “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” Summers on Lake Saranac in the Adirondacks. Rents “baronial mansion” at Riverdale-on-the-Hudson.
1902: Visits Hannibal for the last time in conjunction with his going to the University of Missouri to accept an honorary Litt. D. degree. Summers at York Harbor, Maine, where Jean suffers two epileptic attacks. Livy suffers severe asthmatic attack and heart problems that prostrate her for six months. Isabel V. Lyon is hired as secretary. Jean contracts double pneumonia.
1902–1903: Works on “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Summers in Elmira.
1903: Family returns to Riverdale; embarks for Florence in fall.
1904: Livy’s health deteriorates. Works on “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Sister-in-law Mollie Clemens dies January 15. Livy dies in Florence June 5.Family returns with body to Elmira. Sister Pamela dies August 31. Twain establishes residence at 21 Fifth Avenue, New York.
1905: Summers in Dublin, New Hampshire. Writes “3,000 Years among the Microbes” and “The War-Prayer.” Publishes “King Leopold’s Soliloquy.”
1906: Publishes What Is Man? anonymously. Continues work on “No. 44.” Appoints Albert Bigelow Paine as his official biographer.
1907: Visits Bermuda with Joe Twichell. Receives honorary Litt. D. degree from Oxford. Publishes Christian Science.
1908: Occupies “Stormfield” home in Redding, Connecticut, designed by John Howells. Nephew Samuel E. Moffett dies suddenly August 1. Suffers first attack of angina pectoris in August.
1909: Writes chapter 33 of “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Publishes Is Shakespeare Dead? and Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven. Drafts “Letters from the Earth.” Henry Rogers dies in May. Clemens suffers second attack of angina in June. Clara Clemens marries Ossip Gabrilowitsch at Stormfield October 6. Visits Bermuda with Paine in November and part of December. At Stormfield, daughter Jean Clemens dies in bathtub after an epileptic seizure on Christmas Eve.
1910: “Death of Jean” published in Harper’s Monthly in January. Travels to Bermuda, falls ill, and returns in the company of Paine. Dies of heart failure April 21. Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch, Twain’s only grandchild, born August 18.
1936: Ossip Gabrilowitsch dies September 14.
1944: Clara Gabrilowitsch marries Jacques Samossoud May 11.
1962: Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch Samossoud dies November 19. 1966: Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch dies January 16.
Prologue
“She was always beautiful,” Mark Twain wrote of his mother following her death in 1890. The woman who had given birth to Samuel Langhorne Clemens died in her eighty-eighth year. At the end, even with her mind in the fog of senility, she still knew him perfectly, this third son who had been born two months premature. “But to her disordered fancy I was not a gray-headed man [of almost fifty-five], but a school-boy, and had just arrived from the east on vacation.” Actually, to be at her bedside, he had traveled from Hartford, Connecticut, where he had lived with his wife and three daughters for almost two decades, but he was soon to embark on a third decade in European exile. Jane Lampton Clemens had lived with her eldest son, Orion, and his wife in Keokuk, Iowa, on the Mississippi River, since 1883. “I knew her well during the first twenty-five years of my life,” he wrote, “but after that I saw her only at wide intervals, for we lived many days’ journey apart.”
The thing he remembered most about “this first and closest friend” was her abidin
g interest in “people and the other animals.” At one point during his boyhood they shared their home with nineteen cats, undoubtedly nostalgic kin to the felines later found in one or two of his works. “She was the natural ally and friend of the friendless.” It was even asserted that his mother would, as a faithful Presbyterian, put in a good word for the devil himself. Prayer often saved a sinner, “but who prays for Satan?” he recalled her asking him. “Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?”1 Satan, a staple of Sam’s fundamentalist Christian upbringing in Hannibal, Missouri, would appear in his last long narrative as an innocent youngster who carelessly contributes to the misery of the human condition. In the second of three drafts of what is generally referred to in this biography as “The Mysterious Stranger” stories, Twain sketched, as he noted in an 1897 journal entry, “Satan’s boyhood—going around with other boys & surprising them with devilish miracles.” This boy devil—one of his last boyhood creations, who is a companion of Huck and Tom—is also the last of such strangers in the fiction and humor of Mark Twain. At the story’s end in the most authoritative version, he rushes in Tom Sawyer–like to announce the punch line to the cosmic joke called life—that there is “no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell.”2
For most of his career as a writer who became world famous in his thirties, Mark Twain lamented that he was appreciated mainly as a humorist, a sore point shared by most members of his family. Their favorite book was not Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but The Prince and the Pauper or, worse, his life of Joan of Arc. Writing anonymously in the latter’s serial publication, Samuel Clemens wrote in the standard English of William Dean Howells and Henry James, something he could do quite well. For whenever readers or auditors saw or heard the name “Mark Twain,” they expected to laugh. He had a “call,” as he told his older brother Orion in 1865, “to literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous.” With the publication that year of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” in the last issue of Henry Clapp’s New York Saturday Press, the same journal that published the work of another particularly vernacular writer, Walt Whitman, he had turned his “attention to seriously scribbling to excite the laughter of God’s creatures.”3 Yet he always insisted, recording it in his autobiographical writings, that humor was only a “fragrance.” In any serious literary work, it should never be applied forcibly. Noting the oblivion to which most of the humorists of his day had already been consigned, he wrote that he had lasted for thirty years because humor was merely a by-product of a higher aim. “If the humor came of its own accord,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I have allowed it a place in my [work], but I was not writing [it] for the sake of humor.”4
In fact, the source of Mark Twain’s humor was ultimately deadly serious, as indeed it is with the springs of all authentic or lasting humor. In declining to edit a comic periodical for the McClure Syndicate in 1900, he wrote: “For its own interests, humor should take its outings in grave company; its cheerful dress gets heightened color from the proximity of sober hues.” Throughout the fiction of Mark Twain, a stranger or an event is usually introduced to pull the rug out from under our expectations. In the famous Jumping Frog story, for example, it is a stranger who fills Jim Smiley’s frog with quail shot so that he loses the contest—and the bet. Ultimately, the new guy in town becomes a “mysterious stranger” who turns out to be a close relative of the devil himself. As Bernard De Voto wrote almost eighty years ago: “In Mark Twain’s humor, disenchantment, the acknowledgment of defeat, the realization of futility find a mature expression. He laughs and, for the first time, American literature possesses a tragic laughter.”5 We laugh, of course, at the incongruity between illusion and reality, often the tragic rupture between expectation and outcome. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who, ironically, would later be perceived as one of the victims of Twain’s humor in the notorious Whittier birthday dinner speech of 1877, observed in the essay “The Comic” that man “is the only joker in nature.”6 This was true, sadly enough, because only humans could see how often life presented itself outside the context of the ideal. Its incongruity was ultimately laughable. In his 1877 speech, Twain had thought it would be “funny” to associate Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes with drunken miners and to take lines from their best work out of context. It was incongruous and thus funny, but as the more diplomatic Howells recalled years later, he had also “trifled with” great reputations.7
Describing his first seven sickly years, living “altogether on expensive allopathic medicines,” Twain recalled, no doubt facetiously, that he once asked his mother how she felt about him in those early days. “With an almost pathetic earnestness she said, ‘All along at first I was afraid you would die’—a slight reflective pause, then this addition, spoken as if talking to herself—‘and after that I was afraid you wouldn’t.’ ”8 Jane Clemens was surely the wellspring of her son’s pointed humor. The stranger in the work of Mark Twain isn’t, therefore, simply a person, but always the embodiment of this kind of unexpected twist in the narrative. In his very first truly popular work we find the same kind of grimly ironic humor in the description of Jim Smiley’s addiction to gambling: regardless of the consequences, he would selfishly bet on anything, including whether the parson’s wife, whose illness was showing improvement, would probably die anyway. Much of Twain’s humor is “funny” today simply because it is so serious in what it says about the human condition, or what Twain supposedly called the “Damned Human Race” (this exact phrase never having been found in his collected writings or letters).9
Mark Twain (1835–1910) began as a humorist and ended as a pessimist, a determinist who found in both science and biblical fables ironic ways of showing the cruelty and unhappiness of man as the only being on earth who knows the difference between good and evil and yet inevitably chooses evil. At the outset of his writing career, he was satisfied to be regarded by the public as a humorist—an author of the “left hand,” as it was said of literary comedians of the Old Southwest—instead of as a serious writer of “literature.”10 Yet during his career, his work underwent a major transformation that reflected the vicissitudes of his life as a printer, Mississippi River pilot, Civil War soldier, western newspaper reporter, travel writer, lecturer, publisher, creator of hymns to childhood, and ultimately, the author of one of America’s honored classics. He was also an inventor whose self-pasting scrapbook made him money, and an investor and publisher whose company went bankrupt. Like Whitman, he was an outsider in a genteel literary society whose greatest work was essentially “banned in Boston.” Yet as a humorist he was also part of that society and lived the life of a rich man in Hartford for twenty years, and abroad for almost a decade, and finally resided in New York City and Redding, Connecticut. If we count all those trips he made up and down the Mississippi, his trek out west and to Hawaii, and his innumerable trips—sometimes monthly in the 1890s—to Europe, Mark Twain probably traveled more than almost any other American in the nineteenth century. All the while, he was also traveling on the frontier of American literature, making inroads into areas hardly touched by his predecessors.
Mark Twain, the nom de guerre he adopted in 1863, first became famous essentially for telling anew, and in the best tradition of the humor of the Old Southwest, an unoriginal story about a frog. With the success of this and other tales, he became a travel writer, whose formal travel books were The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator. Yet in a broader sense, all his works were travel books, episodic in their plots. Twain never quite knew where he was going when he started a book, often only with financial gain at the forefront of his mind. Though clearly a literary genius, he was not at the outset a disciplined writer and early in his career seldom spent time on revision. When he “ran out of gas,” as he often put it, he would put the work away for months or years. This was repeatedly the case for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, his greatest work, whose unfinished manuscript he threa
tened to burn at one point. Huckleberry Finn was not only his greatest book; it was a travel book that took him furthest into the mystery of existence.
For most of his life this artist considered himself a businessman whose main talent at making money lay not only in authorship and lecturing but also in investments that culminated in a bankrupt publishing company and the loss of many thousands more on the Paige Typesetter—indeed more than four million dollars in today’s money. He always wanted to become rich, not particularly because of his humble childhood in Florida and Hannibal, Missouri, but because he was around the impressionable age of thirteen when the California Gold Rush of ’49 swept through Hannibal and took a number of its inhabitants out west. He went west himself in 1861 in the company of Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of Nevada. He eventually prospected for gold and silver, but “struck it rich” only when he became a writer, though initially as a newspaper reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. This opportunity eventually took him to California and other newspaper jobs—in which his great talent lay in reporting his travels, initially in the Hawaiian Islands in 1866—and ultimately to a parallel career as comic lecturer in the tradition of Artemus Ward, who died at an early age in 1867, thus clearing the stage for his friend and protégé.
Twain struggled with the problems of the world more and more as he went through life. He finally became the mysterious stranger he had repeatedly conjured up between “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” and “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” (the last of three versions of this posthumously published work). In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), for example, an acclaimed work in its own day that is seen by some today as a literary failure, he set out to celebrate the democracy of the common man and ended up condemning humankind. He had briefly found his faith in man in Huckleberry Finn, but he had also lost it in the overall process of writing this book. Huck Finn gave way to Hank Morgan, and once that happened, the writer’s imagination was doomed to relive childhood Calvinist myths in satires on God and heaven. Especially after the sudden death of his favorite and clearly talented daughter Susy in 1896, he even became a stranger to himself, waking up in a world in which the relationship of God to man is no more than that of a town drunk to one of his microbes. Twain woke up in the twentieth century. Here the essentialist world of God-centered order gave way to a helpless relativism mandated by modern science and its central theory of evolution. In such a brave new world, as Mark Twain wryly noted, God created the monkey just for practice. Then he made man.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 2