Lady Jane's Castle

Mark Twain's mother, Jane Lampton Clemens (1803-1890), believed that her father's family had aristocratic roots and could claim kinship with the Earl of Durham. Supposedly, the Lamptons were a collateral branch of the earl's family, the Lambtons. Jane liked to say that Lambton Castle in County Durham was her ancestral home.

Her son dismissed such talk as fantasy and said there was no point in boasting about family ties to an old castle. "She might as well be proud of being descended from a mortgage," he joked. 

In truth, the castle was constructed in the 1820s, when Jane was a young woman living in Kentucky and Tennessee. But it was built to look old, and presumably Jane concluded that it must be her family's ancient home when she saw an illustration like the one above in some book or periodical published in her son's youth. Years later, Twain learned that the earldom wasn't even created until 1833. 


Shortly after his mother's death he used his novel The American Claimant to satirize the idea of Americans looking to profit from imagined aristocratic ties. The main character, a hopelessly impractical Washington lawyer, insists that he is the rightful Earl of Rossmore and gives his daughter, Sally, the title "Lady Gwendolen." 


Perhaps the most famous thing in the book is the author's bold assertion at the beginning: "No weather will be found in this book."

They Still Jump Frogs, Don't They?

Mark Twain's story about miners betting on the leaps of local amphibians has inspired the folks at the annual fair in Calaveras County (in the foothills of California's Sierra Nevada Mountains) to hold a "Jumping Frog Jubilee." It takes place in May.


How far can the frogs fly? The record jump is 21 feet.


Justin Bookey made a funny documentary about the contest. That's Justin with one of the county frogs in the picture above.

Modest in Annapolis

On a visit to Annapolis, Maryland, in May 1907, Mark Twain was the guest of the state's governor, Edwin Warfield, whose large, florid face with white goatee made him look like a Kentucky colonel long before Harland Sanders laid claim to that image.


Twain liked Gov. Warfield, especially after the politician called him "one of the greatest men in the world" during one of the author's public appearances in Annapolis.


"Who am I to contradict the Governor of Maryland?" Twain asked, doing his best to seem modest. "Worm that I am, by what right should I traverse the declared opinion of that man of wisdom and judgment?"

Neighbor Stowe

Facing Mark Twain's old mansion in Hartford is this graceful house that once was the home of Harriet Beecher Stowe. A small lawn separates the two places, both of which sit well back from busy Farmington Avenue.

It was here in July 1896 that Harriet Beecher Stowe died in her 85th year. In old age her mental abilities faded, and she was often seen wandering in the neighborhood. Sometimes, as Twain recalled in his autobiography, she appeared suddenly in other people's houses and surprised the residents with childlike games.


"The doors always stood open in pleasant weather," Twain wrote of his neighborhood. "Mrs. Stowe entered them at her own free will, and as she was always softly slippered and generally full of animal spirits, she was able to deal in surprises, and she liked to do it. She would slip up behind a person who was deep in dreams and musings and fetch a war-whoop that would jump that person out of his clothes. And she had other moods. Sometimes we would hear gentle music in the drawing-room and would find her there at the piano singing ancient and melancholy songs with infinitely touching effect."

Mark Twain's Previously Unpublished Remarks on the Death of Geronimo and Teddy Roosevelt's African Safari

On Feb. 18, 1909, the New York Times reported that Geronimo had died the day before at Ft. Sill, in Lawton, Oklahoma, where he was officially a prisoner of the United States. The cause of death was given as pneumonia. 

Eight days later Mark Twain wrote to his daughter Jean, who was a strong advocate for the civil rights of Native Americans: "That poor old Geronimo! I am glad his grand old patriot heart is at peace, no more to know wrong & insult at the hands of the Christian savage."

Elsewhere, in this same letter to Jean, Twain comments on President Theodore Roosevelt's plan to undertake an African safari soon after leaving office in March 1909. The author didn't think much of Teddy's policies or his personal values: "The wild creatures the President is going to Africa to hunt are very much his superiors in morals, conduct, disposition & respectability, I think."

Roosevelt's safari, which had the support of the Smithsonian Institution, captured or killed over 500 big-game animals like the one featured below in a photo from the Smithsonian's archives.

Not So Homely

"I want to see one stunning portrait of myself before I get homely."--Mark Twain

The Middle of Nowhere

When Arthur Rothstein took this photo in 1940, the once prosperous mining town of Virginia City, Nevada, was almost a ghost town. It's a bit more lively today and attracts lots of tourists, but the drive there from Carson City still feels like a trip to the middle of nowhere, with rugged hills and mountains stretching far into the distance on all sides.

Near the height of its glory, when Samuel L. Clemens was writing for the local Territorial Enterprise, the town was full of colorful--and often dangerous--characters, and life was never dull. But it was still in the middle of nowhere, and that's worth keeping in mind when recalling that this was the unlikely birthplace of the most famous literary career in American history. It was early in 1863 that the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise began publishing articles by Sam Clemens under his new pseudonym of Mark Twain. 

 

A River Runs Through It

 

 

Several people have told the story of the elderly Jorge Luis Borges visiting Hannibal in the early 1980s and asking to be taken to the river's edge so that he could dip his hand in Mark Twain's river.

"The Mississippi River is the source of Mark Twain's strength," the blind author is reported to have said. "I want to touch the river." 


I can't vouch for the story, but it has the ring of truth to it. I do know that Borges was visiting the middle of America during the early Eighties because, to my surprise, I saw him one day in that period walking toward me on Kirkwood Avenue in Bloomington, Indiana.


With his large head, thinning silver hair, milky eyes, and elegant three-piece suit, he wasn't easy to miss on a quiet overcast morning. There was a younger woman walking with him, gently guiding him along the wide sidewalk. She didn't introduce herself, but as I later learned she was Maria Kodama, his constant companion in old age and eventually his wife. (I believe that the reason for their visit to Bloomington was to see their friend Indiana University professor Willis Barnstone.)


His face lit up when I said, "Hello, Mr. Borges." I shook his hand and told him the usual things people say at such a time--how much I admired his stories, and how delighted I was to meet him. He had not wearied of meeting admiring strangers like me, for he held on to my hand and thanked me for my praises as though hearing them for the first time.

When I said my name, he replied with gentlemanly grace, "How nice to meet you, Mr. Shell-den."

It's good now to recall his kind smile and to picture that soft hand I held in mine dipping itself into Mark Twain's timeless river. 


 

Over the Rainbow

One of Mark Twain's great friends in the last years of his life was the young Broadway star Billie Burke, whose warm manner and trilling voice he adored. She would use both qualities to advantage many years later when she played Glinda, the "Good Witch," in the MGM production of The Wizard of Oz. 

In the cast of that film, she was the oldest major actor--at fifty-four, she was five years older than Frank Morgan (the Wizard) and eighteen years older than Margaret Hamilton (the "Wicked Witch"), both of whom look ancient compared with the radiant Billie. Though her voice and face are now familiar to millions, her fame in middle age as a character actor has obscured the fact that she was once a great leading lady. When Twain knew her, she was a rising star in her twenties with luxuriant red hair.

Twain called her "Billie Burke, the young, the gifted, the beautiful, the charming."

Rhetorical Question of the Day

"If books are not good company, where will I find it?"--Mark Twain

In December 1908 Alvin Coburn took this color photograph of Twain at the author's house in Redding, Connecticut, using the new autochrome process. The picture was later used as the frontispiece for Archibald Henderson's 1911 short study of Twain's life and career.

"A Cure for Melancholy"

125 years ago this month the world had its first glimpse of the Great American Novel, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was published in England and Canada in December 1884. (The American edition didn't appear until February 1885.) As the early promotional material promised, the book was "a mine of humor" and "a cure for melancholy." Those original readers got the laughs they were expecting. But, of course, they also got a lot more--a powerful indictment of a society that had once defended so zealously the right to buy and sell human beings like Huck's new "comrade" Jim.

Up in Smoke

Mark Twain could smoke up to twenty cigars a day, and they were often stogies from the Marsh Wheeling Company of West Virginia. Founded in 1840, the company was one of the first to be associated with the cheap cigars called "stogies" (after the Conestoga wagons passing through Appalachia.)

Even in Twain's day Wheeling cigars were regarded as a strong smoke. In his autobiography Twain proudly recalls his butler telling him, "There is not a cigar in the house but those old Wheeling 'long nines.' Can't nobody smoke them but you. They kill at thirty yards."  

Birthday Boy

One hundred and seventy-four years ago today Samuel L. Clemens was born in Missouri. As he pointed out in old age, the state was lucky to get him. 

"Missouri was an unknown new state," he said, "and needed attractions."

The Buck Stops Here

At the height of his fame, Mark Twain was said to be the richest writer in America, and the rumor was that magazines were willing to pay him a dollar a word.

An admirer once sent Twain a request for his autograph and enclosed a dollar. The author kept the money and replied not with his signature but with the single word "Thanks," in accordance with his rumored rate.

I like to imagine that the aforesaid dollar was an 1899 Black Eagle Silver Certificate like the one pictured above--now worth a lot more than $1.00.

Mark Twain and Dracula

You can find Mark Twain in the most unexpected places--for example, the pages of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), where the fearless vampire hunter Professor Van Helsing mentions "an American" who once defined faith as "that faculty which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue." Twain put it better when he said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."

Twain and Stoker were on close terms for almost twenty years, getting together for the last time in 1907, during Twain's final visit to London. They spent that time swapping ghost stories beside a flickering fire at a London pub--the Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese in Fleet Street. You can still get a pint there.

107 Years Ago Today

It's not often that you have a chance to read a new letter by Mark Twain, but the December issue of Harper's Magazine features one from the last decade of his life that is remarkably candid, and very entertaining. It was written 107 years ago today, on November 26, 1902. As the editors of Harper's mention, part of the letter is quoted in my new book. If you'd like a preview of the kind of fresh material you'll see in Mark Twain, Man in White, take a look at the current issue of Harper's, pp. 21-22. You can subscribe here.

The Modern Tom and Becky

I suspect that if Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher were able to step into modern Hannibal from the pages of their book they'd end up at the riverside for the YMCA mud volleyball tournament, which my old colleague at the Daily Telegraph in London--Toby Harnden--reported on last July. As Twain understood, mud and childhood go together, especially in that childhood paradise he created in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, where Hannibal is transformed into the All-American sleepy river town of St. Petersburg. 

Julian Simmonds took the photo below in Hannibal, Missouri, on July 4, 2009. He is one of the great photographers for the Telegraph, which has a long tradition of running first-rate pictures with feature articles. For more examples of his fine work, check out this gallery at the Telegraph site.

Mark Twain's Political Cat

When he was living in Manhattan in 1907, Twain adopted a stray cat whom he called Tammany. A tough little feline with a habit of staying out late, Tammany became one of Twain's favorite pets. The name was a sly reference to the symbol for the New York political machine, the Tammany Tiger. Like some of the roguish characters associated with Tammany Hall's Boss Tweed, Twain's cat liked getting into fights.

Shortly after Twain moved to his new mansion at Redding, Connecticut, in 1908, Tammany met her match in the woods surrounding the house. "Tammany is dead," Twain lamented. "I am very sorry. She was the most beautiful cat on this western bulge of the globe, and perhaps the most gifted. She leaves behind her, inconsolable, two children by her first marriage--Billiards and Babylon; and three grandchildren by her second--Amanda, Annanci, and Sindbad. She met her death by violence, at the hands of a dog."

The first appearance of the Tammany Tiger was in the above cartoon by Twain's friend, Thomas Nast, who was also responsible for popularizing the elephant symbol for the Republicans and the donkey for the Democrats. 

Breakfast with Mark Twain

A welcome guest at Mark Twain's Hartford home, William Dean Howells recalled that his friend liked to have breakfast in "the little semi-circular conservatory," and that "breakfast was Clemens's best meal, and he sat longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner."  

Support the Mark Twain House in Hartford 

Mark Twain's Aviary

"She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot."

_______ Mark Twain
              Chapter LVII, Following the Equator

In Twain's Footsteps

When he was living in Hartford, Connecticut, in the 1870s and 1880s, Twain liked to take long walks from his mansion on Farmington Avenue to the woods of Talcott Mountain, about eight miles west of town. Even in the early 21st century the trail along the mountain ridge still looks down on miles of rolling countryside with only scattered signs of development.

Often his companion on these walks was Joseph Twichell, his liberal-minded family minister. They discussed everything, from religion and politics to history and sex. Twain felt free to speak his mind with Twichell, who was used to being around men of all types, having served in the Civil War as a chaplain in one of the Union army’s roughest regiments. The reverend was especially tolerant of his friend’s swearing, telling him once that he believed “some men’s oaths are more worshipful than some men’s prayers.”

 

 It was for their private amusement that Twain wrote his bawdy parody of life at the Elizabethan court, 1601, the manuscript of which they would take on their walks and read out loud for laughs. (The little story features frank discussions of sexual matters amid much breaking of wind at court.) As the happy father of nine children, Joe Twichell was no stranger to the joys of sex, and Twain took pleasure in making wry references to the reverend’s virility. When someone once asked him how many children Joe had, he replied, “I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him since morning.”


Here's another view from Talcott Mountain.

Go hiking at Talcott State Park

A Different View of Mark Twain's Grave

Samuel L. Clemens and family are buried in Elmira, NY, as most fans of Twain's work know, but unless you've visited the graves at Woodlawn Cemetery, you wouldn't know this backward view of the site. The stones in the foreground mark the graves of Twain's daughter Clara Clemens and her first husband, the Russian pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. The four stones in the background are those of the author, his wife--Olivia--and daughters Susy and Jean.

The names are carved into the top of the stones, but there are also moving inscriptions on the front of those for the two daughters who died young--Susy and Jean. I find the one for Jean especially moving. It's adapted from Macbeth: "After life's fitful fever she sleeps well." From about the age of 16 until her death at 29 in 1909, Jean suffered from epilepsy and died after a seizure on the morning of Christmas Eve.

The pillar towering over the graves was erected by Clara Clemens, who outlived everyone in her family by many years. The pillar is a tribute to both her father and her husband Ossip, who died in 1936. I haven't measured it, but people say it's twelve feet high--equal to two fathoms, which in the old steamboat days on the Mississippi was called "mark twain."


At the base, Clara (who died in 1962) included this inscription: "Death is the starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow. To the loving memory of my father and my husband. C.C.G. 1937."

I like the simplicity of Twain's headstone.

It reminds me of the grave of another man whose biography I've written--George Orwell. Both writers are buried under simple stones in picturesque graveyards. Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair) was buried at a small cemetery in the Thames Valley village of Sutton Courtenay. Most people don't know that Eric Blair was influenced in his choice of a pen name by Mark Twain. Like the American writer he admired, he used a name taken from his experience with a river. The River Orwell was a favorite stream of his in Suffolk, where his family lived for a time.


I remember Orwell's friend David Astor telling me about the decision to bury Orwell at Sutton Courtenay, where the Astor family had an estate. David died in 2001, and now I understand that he is buried near Orwell's grave.