Autobiography of Mark Twain (169 page)

For a much more detailed chronology, see
Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, and Essays, 1852–1890
(Budd 1992a, 949–97).

Biographies are provided here only for Clemens’s immediate family—his parents, siblings, wife, and children. Information about other relatives, including Olivia Clemens’s family, may be located through the Index.

John Marshall Clemens
(1798–1847), Clemens’s father, was born in Virginia. As a youth he moved with his mother and siblings to Kentucky, where he studied law and in 1822 was licensed to practice. He married Jane Lampton the following year. In 1827 the Clemenses relocated to Jamestown, Tennessee, where he opened a store and eventually became a clerk of the county court. In 1835 he moved his family to Missouri, settling first in the village of Florida, where Samuel Clemens was born. Two years later he was appointed judge of Monroe County Court, earning the honorific “Judge,” which young Clemens unwittingly exaggerated into a position of great power. In 1839 he moved the family to Hannibal, where he kept a store on Main Street and was elected justice of the peace, probably in 1844. At the time of his death, he was a candidate for the position of clerk of the circuit court, but died some months before the election. He was regarded as one of the foremost citizens of the county, scrupulously honest, but within his family circle he was taciturn and irritable. A contemporary reference to John Clemens’s “shattered nerves,” together with his extensive use of medicines, may point to some chronic condition. His sudden death from pneumonia in 1847 left the family in genteel poverty. When his father died Clemens was only eleven; he later wrote that “my own knowledge of him amounted to little more than an introduction”
(Inds
, 309–11; 4 Sept 1883 to Holcombe, MnHi).

Jane Lampton Clemens
(1803–90), Clemens’s mother, was born in Adair County, Kentucky. Her marriage to the dour and humorless John Marshall Clemens was not a love match: late in life she confided to her family that she had married to spite another suitor. She bore seven children, of whom only four (Orion, Pamela, Samuel, and Henry [1838–58]) survived at the time of her husband’s death in 1847. The widowed Jane left Hannibal, Missouri, and between 1853 and 1870 lived in Muscatine, and possibly Keokuk, Iowa, and in St. Louis, Missouri, initially as part of Orion Clemens’s household and then with her daughter, Pamela Moffett. After Clemens married and settled in Buffalo, New York, in 1870, Jane set up house in nearby Fredonia with the widowed Pamela. In 1882 she moved to Keokuk, Iowa, where she lived with Orion for the rest of her life. She was buried in Hannibal’s Mount Olivet Cemetery, alongside her husband and her son Henry. Her Hannibal pastor called her “a woman of the sunniest temperament, lively, affable, a general favorite” (Wecter 1952, 86). She was the model for Aunt Polly in
Tom Sawyer
(SLC 1876),
Huckleberry Finn
(SLC 1885), and other works. After her death in 1890 Clemens wrote a moving tribute to her, “Jane Lampton Clemens”
(Inds
, 82–92, 311).

Orion (pronounced O’-ree-ən) Clemens
(1825–97), Clemens’s older brother, was born in Gainesboro, Tennessee. After the Clemens family’s move to Hannibal, Missouri, he was apprenticed to a printer. In 1850 he started the Hannibal
Western Union
, and the following year became the owner of the Hannibal
Journal
as well, employing Clemens and Henry, their younger brother, as typesetters. In 1853, shortly after Clemens left home to travel, Orion moved with his mother and Henry to Muscatine, Iowa. There he married Mary (Mollie) Stotts (1834–1904), who bore him a daughter, Jennie, in 1855. He campaigned for Lincoln in the presidential election of 1860, and through the influence of a friend was rewarded with an appointment as secretary of the newly formed Nevada Territory (1861). Mollie and Jennie joined him there in 1862; Jennie died in 1864 of spotted fever. That year Nevada became a state, and Orion could not obtain a post comparable to his territorial position. Over the next two decades he struggled to earn a living as a proofreader, inventor, chicken farmer, lawyer, lecturer, and author. From the mid-1870s until his death in 1897, Orion was supported by an amused and exasperated Clemens, who said that “he was always honest and honorable” but “he was always dreaming; he was a dreamer from birth”
(Inds
, 311–13; see AD, 28 Mar 1906 and notes).

Pamela (pronounced Pə-mee’-la) A. (Clemens) Moffett
(1827–1904), also known as “Pamelia” or “Mela,” was Clemens’s older sister. Born in Jamestown, Tennessee, after the Clemens family’s move to Hannibal she attended Elizabeth Horr’s school and in November 1840 was commended by her teacher for her “amiable deportment and faithful application to her various studies.” Pamela played piano and guitar, and in the 1840s helped support the family by giving music lessons. In September 1851, she married William Anderson Moffett (1816–65), a commission merchant, and moved to St. Louis. Their children were Annie (1852–1950) and Samuel (1860–1908). From 1870 Pamela lived in Fredonia, New York. Clemens called Pamela “a lifelong invalid”; she was probably the model for Tom’s cousin Mary in
Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn
, and other works
(Inds
, 313).

Olivia Louise Langdon Clemens
(1845–1904), familiarly known as “Livy,” was born and raised in Elmira, New York, the daughter of wealthy coal merchant Jervis Langdon (1809–70) and Olivia Lewis Langdon (1810–90). The Langdons were strongly religious, reformist, and abolitionist. Livy’s education, in the 1850s and 1860s, was a combination of home tutoring and classes at Thurston’s Female Seminary and Elmira Female College. Always delicate, her health deteriorated into invalidism for a time between 1860 and 1864. “She was never strong again while her life lasted,” Clemens said in 1906. Clemens was first introduced to the shy and serious Livy in December 1867; he soon began an earnest and protracted courtship, conducted largely through letters. They married in February 1870 and settled in Buffalo, New York, in a house purchased for them by Livy’s father; their first child, Langdon Clemens, was born there in November. In 1871 they moved, as renters, to the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford, Connecticut, and quickly became an integral part of the social life of that literary and intellectual enclave. They purchased land and built the distinctive house which was their home
from 1874 to 1891. Young Langdon died in 1872, but three daughters were born: Olivia Susan (Susy) in 1872, Clara in 1874, and Jane (Jean) in 1880. Clara later recalled her mother’s “unselfish, tender nature—combined with a complete understanding, both intellectual and human, of her husband”; she took “care of everything pertaining to house and home, which included hospitality to many guests,” and made “time for lessons in French and German as well as hours for reading aloud to my sisters and me” (CC 1931, 24–25). To her adoring husband, whom she addressed fondly as “Youth,” Livy was “my faithful, judicious, and painstaking editor” (AD, 14 Feb 1906; see also AD, 13 Feb 1906). In June 1891, with their expenses mounting and Clemens’s investments draining his earnings as well as Livy’s personal income, they permanently closed the Hartford house and left for a period of retrenchment in Europe; thenceforth Livy’s life was spent in temporary quarters, hotel suites, and rented houses. When Clemens was forced to declare bankruptcy in April 1894, the family’s financial future was salvaged by the expedient of giving Livy “preferred creditor” status and assigning all Clemens’s copyrights to her. In 1895–96 she and Clara accompanied Clemens on his round-the-world lecture tour. The death of her daughter Susy in 1896 was a blow from which she never recovered. She died of heart failure in Italy in June 1904.

Olivia Susan Clemens
(1872–96), known as “Susy,” was Clemens’s eldest daughter. Her early education was conducted largely at home by her mother and, for several years starting in 1880, by a governess. Her talents for writing, dramatics, and music were soon apparent. At thirteen, she secretly began to write a biography of Clemens, much of which he later incorporated into his autobiography; it is a charming portrait of idyllic family life. Susy accompanied her parents to England in 1873 and for a longer stay abroad in 1878–79. In the fall of 1890 she left home to attend Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, but completed only one semester. In June 1891, the Clemenses closed the Hartford house, and the family, including Susy, left for a period of retrenchment in Europe that would last until mid-1895. Susy attended schools in Geneva and Berlin and took language and voice lessons, but increasingly she suffered from physical and nervous complaints for which her parents sought treatments including “mind cure” and hydrotherapy. After the European sojourn Susy chose not to go with her father, mother, and sister Clara on Clemens’s lecture trip around the world (1895–96); she and her sister Jean stayed at the Elmira, New York, home of their aunt Susan Crane. In August 1896, while visiting her childhood home in Hartford, Susy came down with a fever, which proved to be spinal meningitis. She died while her mother and sister were making the transatlantic journey to be with her. “The cloud is permanent, now,” Clemens wrote in his notebook (Notebook 40, TS p. 8, CU-MARK; see AD, 2 Feb 1906).

Clara Langdon Clemens
(1874–1962), called “Bay,” was Clemens’s second daughter. Born in Hartford, Connecticut, she was mostly educated at home by her mother and governesses. During the family’s sojourn in Europe between 1891 and 1895, Clara enjoyed more independence than her sisters, returning alone to Berlin to study music. She was the only one of Clemens’s daughters to go with him and Livy on their 1895–96 trip around the world. The death of her sister Susy, and the first epileptic seizure of her other sister, Jean, both came in 1896: “It was a long time before anyone laughed in our household,” Clara recalled (CC 1931, 179). The
family settled in Vienna in 1897. Clara aspired to be a pianist, studying under Theodor Leschetizky, through whom she met the young Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch (1878–1936). By 1898 Clara’s vocation had changed from pianist to singer, a career in which she found more indulgence than acclaim. After her mother’s death in 1904 Clara suffered a breakdown and was intermittently away from her family at rest cures in 1905 and 1906. She was financially dependent on her father but spent less and less time in his household, traveling and giving occasional recitals. Increasingly suspicious of the control exerted by Isabel V. Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft over her father and his finances, Clara convinced Clemens to dismiss the pair in 1909. She married Gabrilowitsch in 1909; their daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch (1910–66) was Clemens’s last direct descendant. Between 1904 and 1910 Clara lost her mother, her sister Jean, and her father; at the age of thirty-five, she was sole heir to the estate of Mark Twain, which was held in trust for her, not to be disposed in its entirety until her own death. For the rest of her life she used her influence to control the public representation of her father. Gabrilowitsch died in 1936; in 1944 Clara married Russian conductor Jacques Samossoud (1894–1966). Her memoir of Clemens,
My Father, Mark Twain
, was published in 1931. She spent the last decades of her life in Southern California. Clara’s bequest of Clemens’s personal papers to the University of California, Berkeley, in 1962, formed the basis of the Mark Twain Papers now housed in The Bancroft Library.

Jean (Jane Lampton) Clemens
(1880–1909), Clemens’s youngest daughter, was named after his mother but was always called Jean. Like her sisters, she was educated largely at home. In 1896, however, she was attending school in Elmira, New York, when she suffered a severe epileptic seizure. Sedatives were prescribed, and for the next several years her anxious parents tried to forestall the progress of her illness, even spending the summer of 1899 in Sweden so that she could be treated by the well-known osteopath Jonas Kellgren. Her condition, which worsened after her mother’s death in 1904, and the household’s frequent relocations, gave Jean little chance to develop an independent existence. In late 1899 she began teaching herself how to type so that she could transcribe her father’s manuscripts. She also loved riding and other outdoor activities, and espoused animal and human-rights causes. In October 1906 Jean was sent to a sanatorium in Katonah, New York, and remained in “exile” until April 1909, when she rejoined her father at Stormfield, in Redding, Connecticut. Over the next months she enjoyed a close, happy relationship with him and took over Isabel Lyon’s duties as secretary. Jean died at Stormfield on 24 December 1909, apparently of a heart attack suffered during a seizure. Over the next few days Clemens wrote a heart-breaking reminiscence of her entitled “Closing Words of My Autobiography” (SLC 1909).

This text of Clemens’s speech at his seventieth birthday celebration was printed in
Harper’s Weekly
on 23 December 1905 with the title “Mark Twain’s 70th Birthday: Souvenir of Its Celebration” (SLC 1905g; see AD, 12 Jan 1906). It is likely that the
Harper’s
text was based
on a manuscript that Clemens provided. No manuscript has been found, however, and the source of the magazine text has not been determined.

Clemens was introduced by William Dean Howells, who commented:

Mr. Clemens has always had the effect on me of throwing me into a poetic ecstasy. (Laughter.) I know it is very uncommon. Most people speak of him in prose, and I dare say there will be a deal of prosing about him to-night; but for myself, I am obliged to resort to metre whenever I think of him.

Howells then read his own “Sonnet to Mark Twain” in which the “American joke”—personified as a “Colossus”—expounded his role as the bringer of joy and freedom and announced, “Mark Twain made me.” Howells concluded with the toast, “I will not say, ‘Oh King, live forever,’ but ‘Oh King, live as long as you like!’”