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.