Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  Between 1904 and 1910 Clemens merely acted out the role of Mark Twain, attending countless dinners, taking cruises on Rogers’s boat, and making a series of visits to Bermuda with various friends. Practically his every move was reported in the press, and he was instantly recognized wherever he went. This became even truer after 1906, when he started wearing white suits year-round. (“I wore full evening dress of white broadcloth—just stunning!” he once wrote his daughter Clara.) That spring, for example, Rogers and Clemens attended a championship billiards match at Madison Square Garden between a Frenchman and an American. As the Frenchman was about to make his shot, the audience gave up a great cheer—which both puzzled and distracted the player, who ultimately lost the match. The applause had been for Mark Twain, who was then leaving the auditorium with Rogers. The New York Times reported that “Mark Twain saluted the spectators by throwing kisses to them, and when [the French player] saw this he waved his hand to the retiring humorist and resumed his play.”7

  There were, to be sure, periods of literary clarity during this six-year decline. He wrote “The War Prayer” in 1905 and saw it turned down by Harper’s Bazaar. “The Czar’s Soliloquy” was also written and published in 1905. And starting in 1906 Mark Twain began dictating several hundred thousand words of his “Autobiography,” not completed until 1909. As for works of fiction, we know that Twain had written the first twenty-five chapters of “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger” by the time his wife died in 1904. And we recall that he had in fact worked on chapters 8 through 25 during the winter of 1904. The first-person narrator, August Feldner, is sixteen at the time of the story (slightly older than Huck Finn), telling it while looking back as an old man of indeterminate age. And the village of Eseldorf, judging by some of its inhabitants, is based on Hannibal; indeed, several of them are drawn from people listed in “Villagers of 1840 –[5]3.” (The good priest, Father Peter, is based on Orion.) Twain returned to the story in the summer of 1905, just after drafting “3,000 Years among the Microbes,” whose narrator is actually named Huck. Chapters 26 through 32 of this final version of “The Mysterious Stranger” are cleverly bizarre and indeed anticipate the kind of postmodern fantasies found in the fiction of, say, John Barth. These chapters include a woman transformed into a talking cat, a black minstrel show (“I’s Cunnel Bludso’s nigger fum Souf C’yarlina”), attacks on Mary Baker Eddy and czarist Russia, and the running of the world’s history backwards, the last perhaps owing something to Dante’s Inferno.

  He returned to the manuscript in 1908 to write chapter 33, apparently intended as the penultimate chapter of the book. Here we have the parade of skeletons from the reversal of time (“Among them was the Missing Link”) and this final sentence: “Then, all of a sudden 44 waved his hand and we stood in an empty and soundless world.” This conclusion was his subtle condemnation of God, but he had marked yet another chapter as the “Conclusion of the Book,” chapter 34, which he had written in 1904, just before Livy’s death, that stands today as his parting diatribe. Everything, No. 44 tells August, is a dream. “Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams . . . because they are so frankly and hysterically insane—like all dreams.” Insane most of all, he continues, is “a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short.”8

  Chapter 34 was indeed pessimistic, but this last literary outburst was also The Joke. Human existence was all a practical joke and a “swindle” that sent Mark Twain out of the world laughing, albeit bitterly.

  In 1908—the same year in which he stopped all work on “The Mysterious Stranger”—he suffered yet another of life’s swindles in the sudden death by drowning of Sam Moffett at the age of forty-seven, then at the peak of his journalistic career as editor of Collier’s Weekly. After attending the funeral in August in New York City, Clemens felt faint from what was diagnosed as sunstroke. This loss of a nephew whose professional career he had advised was followed in 1909 by the death of Henry Rogers on May 19. As Clemens reached Grand Central Station from Connecticut on his way to visit Rogers for a few days, Clara greeted him with the sad news. Reporters were there, also. “I am inexpressibly shocked and grieved,” he told them. “I do not know just where I will go.”9 The man who, he believed, had helped him more than anyone else had left him. An even bigger blow, however, soon came in the death of his youngest daughter, Jean, on the morning of Christmas Eve 1909, in what most likely turned out to be yet another drowning.

  Within hours of getting the horrible news, he began what was first published in Harper’s Monthly almost a year after his own death, in slightly expurgated form, as “The Death of Jean.” Clemens had just returned from his sixth trip to Bermuda. Stormfield was filled with holiday decorations and presents arranged by Jean. That morning, Katy came to his bedroom with the sad announcement “Miss Jean is dead!” She had suffered a grand mal seizure and could not get herself out of the bathtub, where Katy found her. As had been the case with Livy, this ever-faithful and long-serving domestic was on hand to usher yet another of Sam’s loved ones out of his life. He had temporarily lost Jean to a series of sanitariums for her epilepsy, but then she had returned to him and even forgiven his failure to look after her personally instead of allowing the “bitch” Lyon to sweep his daughter out of his life. “There are no words,” he wrote, “to express how grateful I am that she did not meet her fate in the house of a stranger, but in the loving shelter of her own home.” His memorial to her formed the closing chapter of his autobiography. He wrote it during the day of her death and into Christmas Day, visiting the body at intervals the way he had Livy’s the night she died in Florence. He finished his tribute the following day as a snowstorm swirled around him. Keeping his vow after Livy’s funeral never to attend another family member’s burial, he decided to imagine it instead—the way he had had to imagine Susy’s more than a decade earlier. He could picture the Langdon homestead in downtown Elmira with Jean’s coffin standing where her mother’s had, where Susy’s had, where he and Livy had stood forty years earlier to be married. “How poor I am,” he wrote in this final chapter of his autobiography, “who was once so rich!”10

  Clara, who had married Ossip Gabrilowitsch on October 6, 1909, in her father’s Connecticut house, had departed for Europe only weeks before her sister’s death and did not return for Jean’s funeral. She would soon return, however, in preparation for another. Her father would suffer a stroke that signaled the increasing danger of his angina. Yet he continued to smoke. And he continued to write. He made his last important contribution to American literature in the fall of 1909, only weeks before Jean’s death. Not published until 1962, the year of Clara’s death, the work was called Letters from the Earth.

  It was the final appearance of the Mysterious Stranger, and here the mask fell away to reveal none other than Mark Twain himself. Essentially it is a satire on the whole idea of heaven and the “Bible God.” In reality God is revealed to be an idler and possibly a drunk who created His “little toy-world” and then effectively abandoned it. In the narrative, Satan is banished once again by God “for a day” because of his “flexible tongue” that criticizes the Creator. Thrown out into space, Satan decides this time to investigate the earth and report back to his fellow archangels, St. Michael and St. Gabriel. “Man,” Satan tells his colleagues, “is at his very very best . . . a sort of low grade nickel-plated angel,” yet man blandly refers to himself as the “noblest work of God” and thinks he is God’s pet. In fact, man stands in God’s eyes below the housefly. There are, of course, Twain’s familiar ideas that humans are machines and their despicable conduct is not their fault. Their crimes are merely an imitation of God the Father, who made humanity miserable through accidents, war, and disease.11

  Twain, as we have seen, had been fascinated with the concept of Satan since child
hood. In Is Shakespeare Dead?—published as a small book by Harper’s in 1909, reluctantly because of its largely unoriginal argument against Shakespeare as the author of the plays—he considered what we knew about Shakespeare to be based on evidence as flimsy as that supporting the case for the existence of Satan. “When I was a Sunday-school scholar something more than sixty years ago,” he wrote, “I became interested in Satan, and wanted to find out all I could about him.” He eagerly began to ask questions of his teacher, who appeared reluctant to answer them, especially the one about “Eve’s calmness” when confronted by a snake. He asked his teacher, quite logically, “if he had ever heard of another woman who, being approached by a serpent, would not excuse herself and break for the nearest timber.”12

  The eleven epistles in Letters from the Earth become increasingly angry and bitter as Mark Twain drops the mask of the devil entirely and decides, like his most famous protagonist, to “go to hell.” What kept these letters from being published for so long was not the blasphemy (that became more acceptable in literature after the age of Howells and the twentieth century; even Dreiser’s Sister Carrie was allowed back in circulation in 1907) but his writing openly about human sexuality, especially the capacity of women to desire and to endure more intercourse than men. In his obituaries, he would be celebrated as “a clean-minded man.” Yet in Letter VIII he wrote that “during twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy), from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle.” Imagine the shock his usual censors—his wife and Howells—would have felt at reading about a woman’s being “ready for action.” One has to ask here whether Clemens wasn’t engaging in pornographic fantasies, not simply the scatological humor he had allowed himself in 1601. His excuse for discussing such issues so frankly is that the woman’s sexual drive is simply another human compulsion “commanded by the law of God,” but Sam’s own loneliness had to be a factor. Whatever its source, this delicate subject matter didn’t suit Letters from the Earth any better than it did his life and other work.13

  Samuel Langhorne Clemens died of heart failure on April 21, 1910, at six o’clock in the evening. He had suffered two distinct attacks of angina pectoris in August 1908 and June 1909 and was told to “cut” his smoking down, advice he ignored. He had, however, gladly obeyed his doctors’ recommendation to avoid exercise in order to protect his “smoker’s heart.” The Gabrilowitsches had returned from Europe before the death. Clara—the last of his “fair fleet” of ships—was pregnant, but for some reason—perhaps because of her father’s fragile condition—she didn’t tell him. But in a deathbed note to her, he indicated that he may have known anyway. “Dear,” he wrote in a hand almost indecipherable: “You didn’t tell me, but I have found out that you—Well, I . . .” The rest is illegible.14 He was buried in Elmira beside the rest of his family. Clara lived another fifty-two years, married twice, and died almost a pauper, borrowing money from friends. Her first husband, as noted, became the conductor of the Detroit Symphony. After he died of stomach cancer in 1936, Clara moved to Southern California and, for a time, lived comfortably off the estates of her father and late husband.

  In 1944 she married Jacques Samossoud, an unemployed orchestra conductor and friend of Gabrilowitsch. He was also a gambler who eventually spent most of his wife’s money at a San Diego racetrack. Clara left the enormous cache of her father’s manuscripts and papers to the University of California in 1949 and, before she died in 1962, bequeathed what remained of her assets to Samossoud and (upon Samossoud’s death) a second beneficiary, Dr. William E. Seiler, a racetrack associate of Samossoud’s who had allegedly provided Clara with drugs.15 In spite of all the efforts Twain made to insure that his descendents would be financially secure, much of his financial legacy was ultimately shared by two “frauds” whose behavior reminds us of nothing so much as the Duke and the King, two of Twain’s most enduring characters.

  Clara’s daughter, Nina, like Huck Finn, was something of an orphan with parents whose busy lives may have prevented them from having a close relationship with her. During a career in which he associated professionally with such greats as Rachmaninoff and Toscanini, Gabrilowitsch was often absent from home as a guest conductor either in other American cities or abroad. Clara inevitably accompanied him, leaving Nina at home.16 Born in August 1910, this only child, who may have shared her Russian father’s melancholia, graduated from Barnard College in 1934. When Clara died, having earlier settled a one-milliondollar trust on Nina, who was therefore left out of her will, the daughter decided to sue Samossoud (who quickly settled out of court) to secure what she considered her fair share of her mother’s estate. She of course had never known her grandfather, but she claimed to have read all his writings. And her grandfather, condemned to look for his grandchildren among his “Angel-fish,” only suspected her imminent existence in his final days.17 Sadly, Nina’s life was anything but angelic. She became an alcoholic and a drug addict. She died four years after her mother at age fifty-five, possibly a suicide. Nina was found dead on January 16, 1966, in a Los Angeles motel that she frequented. The New York Times reported that several bottles of pills and alcohol were in the room. It also reported that the day before her death Nina told a bartender, “When I die, I want artificial flowers, jitterbug music and a bottle of vodka at my grave.”18 Six months after Nina’s death, her stepfather, Samossoud, died and the income from the estate began to flow to Dr. Seiler. What remained of Nina’s original million-dollar legacy was divided between the Red Cross and Yale, as per Clara’s instructions.

  It seems that if Nina did read Mark Twain, the main lesson she picked up was the Mysterious Stranger’s revelation that life was a “swindle.”

  Conversely, Sam Clemens as Mark Twain experienced one of the fullest and most famous lives on record. He suffered, it must be conceded, great personal losses toward the end, but through it all his towering sense of humor and profound empathy seldom failed him for long. His name recognition a century after his death is probably greater than that of most famous Americans living or dead, and equally prominent on the world stage. He was the culmination of a long history of American humor beginning first in New England before the Civil War and developing in the Old Southwest both before and after the war. It was there in the Missouri backwoods of Hannibal that he picked up its ironic angle on the world. In such small towns of the American hinterland, the “stranger” was always mysterious, at least at first, and sometimes a trickster, as in “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.” Yet human beings are always easy prey to the stranger because of the greed ingrained in their system. When the parson suggests that his wife, who has been seriously ailing, may get well, Jim Smiley, before he thought, wagers that “she don’t.” Mark Twain’s greatest book, and one of the greatest American novels ever written, celebrates and laughs at these human flaws in a series of episodes along the Mississippi River, a stream that cuts through the heart of America. In Adventures of Huckleberry Finn we find ourselves looking through the eyes of a young observer who struggles to distinguish between illusion and reality in the world to which his adolescence introduces him. And the difference between what we expect and what we find is, amazingly, at once funny and tragic—from the runaway slave who becomes a conscientious father to Huck to the reprehensible Duke and the King, who ultimately sell Jim down the river. What appeals to us in all of Twain’s fiction, even in the parade of skeletons in “The Mysterious Stranger,” is both horrible and hilarious—because it is humanity stripped of its pretensions, and ridiculed because of them. We both laugh and cry because, in the words of James M. Cox, this is “the fate of humor.”19 What begins as tragic becomes with enough time humorous, and what at a distance appears funny is up close ultimately tragic, for that is the fate of the human condition.

  APPENDIX A

  Clemens Genealogy

  APPENDIX B

  Books Published by


  Charles L. Webster & Company

  1885

  Grant, Ulysses S Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, volume 1.

  Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  ———. The Prince and the Pauper (originally published in 1881).

  1886

  Grant, Ulysses S Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, volume 2.

  1887

  Cox, Samuel Sullivan. Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey.

  Crawford, General Samuel Wylie. The Genesis of the Civil War: The Story of Sumter, 1860–1861.

  Custer, Elizabeth. Tenting on the Plains; or, General Custer in Kansas and Texas.

  Hancock, Almira Russell. Reminiscences of Winfield Scott Hancock.