by Ron Powers
Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots”…defended it against the next gang of “robbers” who came to steal it and did—and became swelling-hearted patriots in their turn. And this Transvaal, now, is full of patriots, who by the help of God, who is always interested in these things, stole the land from the feeble blacks…59
“ABOUT THE time this reaches you we shall be cabling Susy and Jean to come over to England,” Clemens happily wrote to Rogers from Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in late June.60 His odyssey was approaching its homeward phase. A visit to the Kimberley diamond mines, some sightseeing in Cape Town, a final round of public appearances and private soirees, and finally, on July 15, the Clemenses (along with the ever-companionable Mr. Smythe) boarded the S.S. Norman for the sixteen-day passage northward to Southampton, England. They had set out on the tour from Elmira on July 14 the previous year. Counting the voyage from Southampton to America just before that, the three had been in transit for fourteen months. Utterly fatigued by the “slavery” of the lecture platform, Clemens nonetheless anticipated a round of speaking engagements in London before finding a cottage in some village near the city where he could spend six months writing his book about the tour in peaceful seclusion. His lecture receipts totaled somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000—satisfying, but well short of his $100,000 goal. He felt confident that the book would bring in the remainder. As he relaxed on board, the future seemed hopeful once again. Harper’s had released Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc in May, with Mark Twain’s name on the cover (though not on the title page). Harper’s Magazine would begin serialization of Tom Sawyer, Detective in August, and would feature the novella in a new collection later in the year. Most satisfyingly, though, the five Clemenses would be reunited. The Norman docked at Southampton on July 31, and a day or two later, Livy cabled Katy Leary in Hartford to arrange passage to England for Susy and also for Jean, who was still in Elmira. Livy had delayed sending this instruction until the ship was safely in port, just to be sure she and the others would not be “at the bottom of the sea” when the cable reached home. “Susie & Jean sail from New York today, & a week hence we shall all be together again,” Sam notified William Dean Howells on August 5.61
But on August 3, the eve of her departure for New York, Susy became feverish and begged for a delay. Katy called a doctor despite Susy’s protests that she wanted her healer. The doctor pronounced the young woman overworked—though “work” was hardly the center of her life now. Katy Leary helped her from the Warners’ to her old bed in the Clemens house, at her request. On August 4 Susan Crane informed the Clemenses by cable that there had been a delay; departure would now be on the 12th. At Southampton, Livy sprained an ankle—the first injury any of them had sustained over the fifty-three thousand miles. This postponed her search for a summer house for the family, but Clara located a temporary lodging in Guildford, a graceful 12th-century farming village southeast of London, where Lewis Carroll was living out his final years, and they moved in. As Livy’s ankle healed, another cable from Susan Crane arrived. In this one she admitted that Susy was a little ill. Suddenly frantic with anxiety, the three packed their bags for an emergency departure home, and returned from Guildford to Southampton. Another telegram awaited them there: Susy’s recovery (from what, it did not say) would be “long but certain.” Sam elected to regard this as news that Susy was not in mortal peril, and decided to stay on in England. Livy and Clara boarded the S.S. Paris, bound for New York, on Saturday, August 15. On that same day, the doctor in Hartford reconsidered his diagnosis: the patient was suffering from meningitis. The rare but lethal infection had entered Susy’s system as either bacteria or a virus; she may well have contracted it inside her family house. By now it had begun its work of swelling the meninges, the lining of the brain and spinal cord.
Sam waved his wife and middle daughter out of the harbor and returned to Guildford. He tossed and turned for four nights, blaming himself for this latest ambiguous crisis. It was his fault: if he had listened to his sister and helped discourage Annie Moffett from marrying Charles Warner, there would have been no bankruptcy, no need for this trip, no need to leave Susy behind. On the day after Livy’s departure he wrote to her,
My heart was wrung yesterday. I could not tell you how deeply I loved you nor…how I pitied you in this awful trouble that my mistakes have brought upon you…I shall never forgive myself while the life is in me. If you find our poor little Susie in the state I seem to foresee, your dear head will be grayer when I see it next. (Be good and get well, Susy dear, don’t break your mother’s heart.)62
By that time Susy was beyond help. She was probably beyond help from the outset: antibiotics might have killed the infection; but penicillin was yet thirty-two years away. The Twichells hurried home from the Adirondacks to be at her side, and the Cranes arrived from Elmira, along with Jean. She became a wraith, pacing the rooms and halls of the Hartford house, raving and scribbling pages of half-coherent notes across forty-seven pages, in outsized handwriting. The notes are at once demented—she thought she was a Parisian mezzo-soprano named La Malibran, who’d died young more than half a century earlier—and Joycean in their allusiveness:
Say I will try not to doubt and I will obey my benefactress Mme. Malibran…Now go and hold this song. Nothing but indecision Go on Go on Yes does she bow her too white head? She must she must she must Yes my black Princess…Tell her to say—God bless the shadows as I bless the light…In me darkness must remain from everlasting to everlasting forever sometimes less painful darkness but darkness is the complement of light yes tell her to say she trusts you child of great darkness and light to me who can keep the darkness universal and free from sensual taint…The Universe is united You may not dissever greatnesses of the earth…63
When she heard the familiar bell tinkling down on Farmington Avenue, she would float to the window and intone, “Up go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter. Down go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter.”64 As her mother and sister steamed westward toward her, hopelessly out of reach, her father in England lay brooding about how “the calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.”65 On August 16, Susy came upon a gown of her mother’s in a closet and kissed it, thinking it was Livy.66 Then Susy lost her sight. She groped for things to touch; found Katy Leary’s face with her hands, and screamed, “Mamma!,” her last word.67 She lapsed into unconsciousness an hour after that and never awoke. Two days later, at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18, 1896, she died.
DR. RICE boarded the Paris at the quarantine stop in New York Harbor to tell Livy and Clara the news, but they had learned it the previous day, at sea. Walking to the ship’s saloon to pick up the daily mail, Clara learned from a steward that the captain wanted to talk to her.
He handed me a newspaper with great headlines: “Mark Twain’s eldest daughter dies of spinal meningitis.”…[T]he world stood still. All sounds, all movements ceased. Susy was dead. How could I tell Mother? I went to her stateroom. Nothing was said. A deadly pallor spread over her face and then came a bursting cry, “I don’t believe it!” And we never did believe it.68
Sam was standing in the dining room of the cottage at Guildford, his mind blank of thought, for a blessed interval, when the cable arrived: “Susy was peacefully released to-day.”
“It is one of the mysteries of our nature,” he observed years later, “that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.”69
With no chance of arriving home in time for the funeral in Elmira, Clemens stayed on alone in the Guildford house, his mind a garden of morbid rage and sorrow. He grieved that he could not say farewell to his daughter in her coffin, but there were coffins enough in Sam’s imaginative visions. “I wish there were five of the coffins, side by side,” he wrote to L
ivy; “out of my heart of hearts I wish it…How lovely is death; & how niggardly it is doled out…”70
“I eat—because you wish it; I go on living—because you wish it; I play billiards, and billiards, & billiards, till I am ready to drop—to keep from going mad with grief & with resentful thinkings.”71
The absence of condolences from friends in America infuriated him; everything infuriated him, or tormented him. “All the circumstances of this death were pathetic,” he wrote to long-time Hartford friend Henry C. Robinson: “—my brain is worn to rags rehearsing them.”72 Some of his friends hesitated because the alternative was excruciating. Howells relived the death of Winifred when he heard of it, he told Charles Warner.73 He managed to reach out in gentle empathy in mid-September.
There is really nothing to say to you, poor souls, and yet I must write…to say that we suffer with you. As for the gentle creature who is gone, the universe is all a crazy blunder if she is not some where in conscious blessedness that knows and feels your love…You are parted from her a little longer, and that’s all, and the joint life will go on when you meet on the old terms, but with the horror and pain gone forever.74
Sam answered his old friend with gratitude, but then added,
To me our loss is bitter, bitter, bitter. Then what must it be to my wife. It would bankrupt all vocabularies of all the languages to put it into words…75
He recalled the parting on the platform of July the previous year, with Susy waving in the glare of the electric lights.
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…
Will healing ever come, or life have value again?
And shall we see Susy? Without doubt! without shadow of doubt, if it can furnish opportunity to break our hearts again.76
These corrosive lamentations in letters and notebooks began a literature of grief for Susy that would spill from Samuel Clemens for the rest of his life.
44
Exile and Return
(1896–1900)
Susy was buried in Elmira in the Langdon plot. Livy, Clara, and Jean sailed back to England after the funeral along with Katy Leary. Jean regularly suffered from epileptic attacks now. The family found a small four-story brick house in Tedworth Square, a tiny pocket between King’s Road and Royal Hospital Road in Chelsea, and there they burrowed in. Clemens kept the address off the envelopes of letters he sent, for fear the press would discover it. “It was a long time before anyone laughed in our household,” Clara later wrote.
Father’s passionate nature expressed itself in thunderous outbursts of bitterness shading into rugged grief. He walked the floor with quick steps…1
She added the acute observation, “there was no drawl in his speech now.”2
Clara Clemens has been reductively remembered in literary history as the chief architect of Mark Twain’s politically and emotionally neutered posthumous reputation: the nation’s avuncular cracker-barrel sage. This is an accurate legacy, but it overlooks the incisiveness and eloquence that heightened her own observations of her father, as set down in her book. Susy was not the only poet among the daughters. “A Sunday in London looked like an array of misspent hours,” Clara wrote of the autumn days in 1896.
Father would take Jean and me for a walk…into Regent’s Park…[E]verywhere we met an atmosphere of world-loneliness. Poor women seated aimlessly and alone on benches…A stray cat, a stray leaf, a stray—Oh, everything looked adrift and unattended.3
It was on such days, Clara recalled, “that Father created the habit of vituperating the human race.”
What started as formless criticism grew into a sinister doctrine. There was no hope for the human race because no appreciable improvement was possible in any individual. Each one was presented with certain qualities which could not be altered.4
Man as Machine. As fatally flawed, eternally irreparable Machine.
The Clemenses’ incognito days did not last long, Sam found.
Our address discovered after three weeks of peaceful seclusion. Given to some reporter by Chelsea librarian? But how did he know me?5
How would one know Mark Twain? From his ubiquitous photographic image, of course; but one may have had to do a double-take. The famous shock of hair and bushy eyebrows were nearly devoid of shading, now; the mustache wiry, less carefully trimmed. Pouches had formed under his eyes, and lines had etched themselves into his forehead and jawline. (“Wrinkles should merely show where the smiles have been,” he’d written with pathetic insouciance in his notebook.)6 He’d become an old man who had forgotten a few things, including the extent of his fame.
HARPER & BROTHERS had published Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc on May 1, 1896, some three months before Susy died, and the reviews began appearing almost immediately, allowing the possibility that Susy read some of them. They were generally not kind, except those that were kind to a fault. Literary criticism for decades had lacked the diagnostic tools necessary to fully illuminate Mark Twain’s revisionist genius in such groundbreaking books as The Innocents Abroad and Huckleberry Finn. In the 1890s younger intellectuals such as Brander Matthews, a professor of dramatic literature at Columbia University, were integrating cultural and political standards in their reviews. Now, as Mark Twain’s gifts declined, the critics were at last proficient enough to fully articulate his limitations. The novel’s strongest sections, many reviewers agreed, were the fifteen chapters in Book Three that recount Joan’s trials for heresy by a French religious court after her string of victories over the English. This was perhaps a bittersweet compliment by Mark Twain’s lights: the power of these chapters derives mostly from the translated Latin records of the trials, which the author followed scrupulously. Their very presence in the novel owed to Henry Mills Alden, the editor at Harper’s Weekly who persuaded Mark Twain to expand his original intention to merely summarize them at the novel’s end.
The Boston Literary World scorched the novel for its anachronistic idioms such as the line that a French general “broke Joan all up” by swearing, and having a 15th-century judge tell a colleague to “Shut up in the devil’s name,” and it faulted Mark Twain for his inability “to write with that naivete of spirit so characteristic of all writers of the fifteenth century.”7 The Brooklyn Eagle similarly complained that “there is about the manner of the story a modern sentiment or feeling that seems entirely out of keeping with the spirit of Joan’s time.”8 “Joan is a nice little American girl of the mid-nineteenth century,” observed the New York Bachelor of Arts, adding that Mark Twain has turned “into a prosy, goody-goody writer of Sunday-school tales in his old age.”9
Brander Matthews’s opinion mattered particularly because of his high esteem for, and friendship with, Mark Twain. He had been among the few who’d plumbed beneath the surface “annoyances” of Huckleberry Finn back in 1885, celebrating the novel as a revolutionary triumph in psychological point of view. (“One of the most artistic things in the book…is the sober self-restraint with which Mr. Clemens lets Huck Finn set down, without any comment at all, scenes which would have afforded the ordinary writer for endless moral and political and sociological disquisition…In Tom Sawyer we saw Huckleberry Finn from the outside; in the present volume we see him from the inside.”)10 Clemens in turn respected Matthews despite having argued with him about copyright issues and having lampooned him mercilessly as one of the “professors” who overpraised the works of James Fenimore Cooper. Matthews would write the introductory essay for a collection of Mark Twain’s stories and sketches published in 1899; Mark Twain would one day give a speech that consisted almost entirely in tonal variations on the name “Brander Matthews.”
In an essay published in the May 28 edition of Life, Matthews let Mark Twain down as gently as he knew how. Mark Twain “was once a writer of comic copy,” the critic
noted, the faint praise nearly successful in covering up the damnation; and he genuflected once again to the “creative power” of Huckleberry Finn. But finally “Mark Twain as a historical novelist is not at his best,” because by this last decade of the century, “the “historical novel is an outworn anachronism.”11
Howells, balancing once again between friendship and principle, placed one foot upon each ice floe and tried for dear life to remain upright. His review in the May 1896, edition of Harper’s Weekly began with a lengthy vaporizing defense of historical fiction in general and Mark Twain’s two previous efforts in particular. Turning at last to the book at hand, he grudgingly conceded that Joan of Arc contained “a good many faults,” including its unevenness, its failed “archaism,” and its “outbursts of the nineteenth-century American in the armor of the fifteenth-century Frenchman.” Despite all, he summed up, “the book has a vitalizing force.”12
UNDAUNTED, MARK Twain noted in his journal on October 24, “Wrote the first chapter of the book today,”13 the chronicle of his recent travels. He continued writing through the damp London winter and early spring of 1897. He wrote rapidly and grimly, often well into the night. Livy kept herself from staring at the walls by editing his pages as they issued—she’d lost interest in people, her own reading, nearly everything. The book that he was producing—its working title was “Round the World”—was to be undistinguished, merely competent. And yet in a certain way, it was the most important work he ever did—simply because it was work. Work was all that kept him motivated enough to meet each day, and the only discharge of his terrible, hell-tossed nights.