Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  His sorrows continued on, as well. Jean Clemens slipped deeper and deeper into the horrors of her epilepsy. She was naturally an agreeable, warmhearted young woman; but her attacks grew so severe that they affected her sanity; twice, in 1905 and 1906, she tried to kill Katy Leary, and was frequently institutionalized. She sought treatment in Germany in 1908, and returned in April 1909 to live at Stormfield.

  Jim Gillis and Thomas Bailey Aldrich died in 1907, and Henry Huttleston Rogers suffered the stroke that hastened his death two years later. On August 1, 1908, Clemens’s nephew, Pamela’s son Samuel, drowned at the age of forty-seven.

  HE SETTLED his literary affairs with the devil. In 1908 he finally set aside “The Chronicles of Young Satan,” which he’d been tinkering with since 1897: it had given way to a more powerful and technically unified short novel that was not discovered until after his death. Its title character, “No. 44, the Mysterious Stranger,” is a boy with miraculous powers who appears in a medieval Austrian village, finds himself an outcast, and forms a friendship with the narrator August Feldner, with whom he shares the secrets of the dream self and the “real” self.

  Perhaps he was inspired by the reemergence, after many years, of the feminine force with whom he’d entered into a continuing dream identity. The Platonic Sweetheart called out to him one final time, in August 1906. The letter from her arrived while Mark Twain was dictating a section of his autobiography. The contact stirred him anew, and with Livy now safe from pain, he finally felt free to write his memories of their shipboard romance. Thus he dictated the passage about the young girl in the unfaded bloom of her youth, with her plaited tails dangling from her young head and her white frock puffing about in the wind of that ancient Mississippi time.

  Her letter revealed a far different image. She was sixty-two now, and desperate. Divorced from or abandoned by her husband, Dake, a prominent judge in Missouri, she was still teaching school, at poverty-level wages. She needed a thousand dollars to support herself and her thirty-seven-year-old, disabled son. Fuming at Dake’s callousness, Mark Twain sent the money.

  In her thankful reply—as reported by Mark Twain—Laura Wright disclosed to her old swain what had happened to her after the two had parted in that long-ago May, when the John J. Roe carried her upriver. The boat struck a snag in the night and took on water. She was steered toward the shore, where the Leavenworths evacuated the passengers. Someone noticed that Laura was not among them. The pilot and the mate rushed back aboard the dangerously listing Roe and knocked on Laura’s cabin door, shouting for her to get out of there at once. She called back calmly that she was still repairing her hoopskirt. Ignoring the men’s frantic urgings, she remained in her cabin until the skirt was presentable, and only then made her way ashore. Was it a dream? Did Laura Wright really send this account to the aging Sam? No such letter is known to exist. The authoritative Way’s Packet Directory, 1848–1994, compiled by Frederick Way Jr., records that the John J. Roe was snagged and sunk, all right—but years later, on the Civil War date of September 12, 1864, at New Madrid, Missouri. She was headed downriver, transporting the 2nd Wisconsin Cavalry. One hundred sixty-five horses were lost. There is no mention of hoopskirts. Perhaps the Roe had been salvaged from the earlier snagging. As with so much of Mark Twain’s dreamlike memory, the truth is hard to tell—unless one includes passionate fantasy in one’s definition of “truth.”

  Laura’s own life seems to have grown nearly as exotic as Sam’s dreams of her. Myths accrued: some claimed that she became a Confederate spy during the war, hunted by the Yankees, with a price on her head. She was said to have fallen in love with a steamboat captain while escaping downriver to New Orleans: Dake. They married after the war, it was said, and moved to San Francisco, where Laura opened a school for young ladies, and attained sophistication. Then abandonment. Then, to the rescue, the Black Avenger of the Spanish Main.

  LAURA WRIGHT Dake emerged out of the mists once more, fifteen years after Clemens’s death. A man named C. O. Byrd recorded his encounters with her, writing in 1964. Byrd was a son of A. K. Byrd, a Missourian born in 1851, and a friend of one Marshall P. Wright, Laura’s younger brother. C. O. Byrd met Laura herself around 1925—in Tinseltown, of all places. It was on the occasion of her eightieth birthday.

  I took her to the swankiest night club in Hollywood for the celebration where she was the life of the party. She was about five feet tall, a cultured refined lady and had a keen sense of humor. We became intimate friends and I saw her frequently…13

  It was on one of these visits that C. O. Byrd held in his hands a collection of treasures unimaginable.

  …[W]e happened to be talking about Mark Twain. She took me to her bed room, had me open her trunk, and got out several packages of letters from Sam Clemens. For several hours she read me portions of many of the letters. Then she told me that she had offers from several magazines who wanted to buy the letters. I think Lippincotts offered her $20,000.00. I know that some of the letters were written during the war…14

  Laura Wright Dake told C. O. Byrd that her sisters and brother had urged her to sell the letters—she was yet again in need of money—but she refused.

  She made me promise, on my honor, that after her death I would destroy the letters and not let anyone read them. She said Sam Clemens wrote them to her and for her and that they were not to be published.15

  C. O. Byrd, sadly enough, was one of a breed already vanishing in the early 20th century: a gentleman who kept his word.

  CLARA CLEMENS and Ossip Gabrilowitsch were married at Stormfield in October 1909. Joseph Twichell presided. The father of the bride wore his red Oxford gown over a white serge suit and under the tasseled Oxford cap. He gave his last public speech that year, at a Baltimore school for girls. And then the final decline began. Clemens had suffered chest pains in the summer of 1909. In the fall of that year, working rapidly against a deadline he must have sensed, he composed Letters from the Earth, the eleven dispatches from Satan, again visiting his favorite planet, to friends around the universe. Bitterly satirical, and uproariously funny, the letters picked apart the Bible, the Ten Commandments (especially the commandment about adultery), and Man’s self-satisfaction. He read the letters to prim Paine as he finished each, and Paine, who collaborated with Clara in their suppression until her death (they were published in 1962), laughed himself silly. He and Paine traveled to Bermuda in November of that year; they were houseguests of Mr. and Mrs. William H. Allen, and Sam celebrated his seventy-fourth birthday near the great beaches he’d come to love. He made it back to Stormfield a few days before Christmas, in time to peek in on the “surprise” tree that Jean was decorating in the loggia (the small rooftop room) with foil and candles. On the night before Christmas Eve, he walked hand in hand with his daughter from the dining table to the library, where they talked happily until nine. Beside the door to her bedroom, they kissed each other’s hand. At 7:30 the next morning Clemens was jolted awake by Katy Leary, who burst into his room to blurt out, from behind his head: “Miss Jean is dead!”16 She had suffered a seizure in the bathtub and slipped under the water, unable to call for help. She was twenty-nine.

  A wailing lament for her, coupled with cynical gratitude for her release—tidied up by Paine—formed the final chapter of his autobiography.17

  Would I bring her back to life if I could do it? I would not…In her loss I am almost bankrupt, and my life is a bitterness, but I am content: for she has been enriched with the most precious of all gifts…death.18

  HE RETURNED to Bermuda on January 5, seeing Howells for the last time on the night before his departure. Howells had ten years of life left, but his era of tremendous influence had passed, and he had become a sort of living ghost, “the dean of American letters.” The two spoke of labor unions, and said good-bye, not realizing it was forever. Clemens traveled with Joe Twichell, stayed with the Allens, and played miniature golf with the vacationing Woodrow Wilson. On March 25, he booked passage for home, explaining in a letter to P
aine that he did not want to die in Bermuda. Within days after that, the chest pains attacked him again. Paine sailed to the island to bring him home; they departed on April 12. Clemens arrived back at Stormfield two nights later. Paine and Claude Joseph Beuchotte, the butler, carried him in a canvas chair from the carriage to his upstairs room and his doctors. There he waited for two days for Clara and Ossip to join him. He wanted morphine, but the doctors refused him.

  On Sunday morning Clara arrived, and Mark Twain brightened and spoke of his plans for the summer. Outside, the new century stumbled toward its Sand Belt; in a few weeks the leading crowned heads of Europe, including Archduke Ferdinand, would assemble in London for the funeral of King Edward VI, their last mingling before World War I ignited. Clemens’s breathing grew heavier that evening, and his speech began to slur. He took an opiate and began to speak of dual personalities, and he faded some; and a little later he blurted out something about the laws of mentality; and after a while went to sleep, and faded some more. Halley’s Comet was inside the orbit of Venus now, traveling at three million miles a day toward its perihelion, its closest point to the sun, which it reached on Tuesday, April 19. On that day Mark Twain sent for Clara to come and sing for him, and she managed some Scottish ballads, which seemed to comfort him. No one in the house took note of the comet, though it burned brightly that night. Soon it would be gone. By Wednesday, his mind was wandering out of control, and he had trouble making himself understood, and faded some more. On Thursday morning, April 21, he rallied faintly and tried to read from a volume of Seutonius at his bedside. The Mexican people prepared for revolution against the tyrant Porfirio Díaz; an uprising of Albanians against the imperial Turks sent cracks through the Ottoman Empire; plans for war and revolution pulsated through the damned human race. A little before noon, he sent Clara to find Paine, and when Paine arrived, Mark Twain indicated a pair of unfinished manuscripts and whispered, “throw away,” and pressed Paine’s hand, and that was the last moment Paine had with him. He faded some more; tried to write a note, but his fine handwriting had deserted him. Electricity lighted cities now, but the lamps were going out. He dozed into the early afternoon; awoke; took the hand of Clara beside him; faded some more; managed to say, “Good-bye,” and then murmured something that might have been, “If we meet—” and then he faded again, and kept on fading, until there was nothing left of him to hold back the Great Dark descending on the world, except his words.

  * This was what Sam called the vehicle in his notebook.

  Notes

  ABBREVIATIONS

  PROLOGUE

  1. MTA, p. 1. The quotation, like those that follow here, has been corrected against the original manuscript in the Mark Twain Papers (MTP) at the University of California, Berkeley.

  2. MMT, p. 6.

  3. Ibid., p. 94.

  1: “SOMETHING AT ONCE AWFUL AND SUBLIME”

  1. MTA, p. 10.

  2. Ibid., p. 7.

  3. Dixon Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952), p. 44.

  4. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, OMT, pp. 29–30.

  5. Retold by Annie Moffett Webster in MTBM, p. 44.

  6. MTA, p. 6.

  7. Ibid.

  8. See the Biographical Directory in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, Mark Twain Library edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 316.

  9. From “Mark Twain’s Cousin,” The Twainian (July–August 1952), pp. 1–2, cited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin in Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 164.

  10. MTA, p. 6.

  11. See “Jane Lampton Clemens” in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 89.

  12. See “A True Story Just as I Heard It,” in Sketches, New and Old, OMT, p. 202.

  13. Ibid.

  2: “THE WHITE TOWN, DROWSING…”

  1. N&J, vol. 3, p. 39.

  2. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000).

  3. William Dean Howells, Literary Friends and Acquiantance (New York: Harper & Bros., 1901), pp. 3–4.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Ibid.

  6. George Washington Harris, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral Born Durn’d Fool” (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1997), pp. 152–53, electronic edition. “This work is the property of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text.”

  7. Twain and Warner, The Gilded Age.

  8. Ibid.

  3: OF WORDS AND THE WORD

  1. “Former Florida Neighbor of Clemens Family Head of School Attended Here by Mark Twain,” Hannibal Evening Courier-Post, March 6, 1935, p. 12B, printed in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 338.

  2. Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians, p. 338.

  3. “Italian without a Master,” in The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories, OMT, pp. 171–72.

  4. “The Awful German Language,” in A Tramp Abroad, OMT, pp. 607, 610.

  5. Speech delivered in New York, April 5, 1889, in Mark Twain Speaking, edited by Paul Fatout (Ames: University of Iowa Press, 1976), p. 245.

  6. Mark Twain’s Autobiography, edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Bros., 1924), p. 173.

  7. Mark Twain’s Notebook, prepared for publication and with commentary by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Bros., 1935), p. 303.

  8. Originally published in the Californian, December 23, 1865, as “The Christmas Fireside for Good Little Boys and Girls.”

  9. Originally published in the Galaxy, May 1870.

  10. MTA, p. 41.

  11. Letters from the Earth, edited by Bernard De Voto (New York: Perennial Library, 1974), p. 20.

  12. “Villagers of 1840–3,” in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 104.

  13. Letters from the Earth, p. 40.

  14. MTA, p. 123.

  15. MTB, vol. 3, p. 1534.

  4: THE HANNIBAL DECADE

  1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, OMT, pp. 83–84.

  2. Letter to William Bowen, February 6, 1870; MTL, vol. 4, p. 50.

  3. MMT, p. 58.

  4. MTB, vol. 1, p. 58.

  5. The Innocents Abroad, OMT, p. 628.

  6. Ibid.

  7. MTBM, p. 265.

  8. MTA, p. 67.

  9. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, OMT, p. 63.

  10. “Villagers of 1840–3,” in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 99.

  11. MTA, p. 58.

  12. Ibid., p. 60.

  13. Ibid., pp. 58–59.

  14. Ibid., pp. 60–61.

  15. Ibid., p. 59.

  16. MMT, p. 30.

  17. “Concerning the Jews,” in The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg and Other Stories and Essays, OMT, p. 254.

  18. MTA, p. 30.

  19. MTA, p. 28.

  20. Lewis Leary, Mark Twain’s Correspondence With Henry Huttleston Rogers, edited and with an introduction by Leary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), p. 5.

  21. First quote is from The $30,000 Bequest, OMT, p. 33; second from The American Claimant, OMT, p. 149.

  22. MTA, p. 25, corrected against the 1897–98 manuscript in MTP.

  23. As described by Paine in MTB, vol. 1, p. 41.

  24. “Villagers of 1840–3,” p. 104.

  25. “Jane Lampton Clemens,” in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 89.

  26. MTA, pp. 5–6.

  27. MTA, p. 26.

  28. “Jane Lampton Clemens,” p. 84.

  29. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, p. 36.

  30. Biographical Directory in Huck Finn and Tom S
awyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 323.

  31. Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 112.

  32. The Gilded Age, OMT, p. 98.

  33. MTB, vol. 1, p. 74–75.

  34. Ibid., p. 75.

  35. Courtesy, Robert Hirst, Mark Twain Project.

  36. Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal.

  37. Philip Ashley Fanning develops this theory in Mark Twain and Orion Clemens: Brothers, Partners, Stranger (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003).

  38. Letter to Samuel Clemens, June 14, 1880; MTHL, vol. 1, p. 315.

  5: APPRENTICE

  1.Roughing It, OMT, p. 292.

  2. Ibid., p. 292.

  3. Ibid.

  4. See “Editorial Agility” in the Hannibal Journal, September 16, 1852, p. 3. It is signed “W.E.A.B.” (W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab), one of Sam’s pen names. It is a highly scornful description of Ament, who is not named, but who behaved similarly to the character described.

  5. In her book of that title, published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985.

  6. As noted in The Story of Hannibal, by J. Hurley Hagood and Roberta Hagood (Hannibal, Mo. Standard Printing Co., 1976), p. 37.

  7. Wecter, Sam Clemens of Hannibal, p. 163.

  8. Letter to Olivia Clemens, January 23, 1885; LLMT, p. 233, quoted in Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians: And Other Unfinished Stories, p. 334.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Ibid.

  11. MTA, p. 88.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Ibid., p. 90.

  14. N&J, vol. 3, p. 305.