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.