One hundred years ago today Mark Twain died.
Everybody knows something about Mark Twain. Everybody feels something about Mark Twain, even if their association with his life and works has been scanty and vague. If you start asking, you realize people tend to believe that Twain is not only part of America but, somehow, part of themselves. Thomas Edison said it for all of us: "An American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person he generally selects Mark Twain."
What of the people Mark Twain loved best in his life?
Samuel Clemens was different from the beginning. He felt things more keenly than others felt them. He saw things other people didn't see. He wanted things other people didn't seem aware of.
He discovered the first piece of himself when Horace Bixby, pilot of the Paul Jones, agreed to take him on as a cub pilot, for an arduous two-year training period — paid for by the trainee! These men who plied the mighty Mississippi, learning her every bend, shallow and snag, every island and bayou, every invisible fathom, every sunken ship along the 1,200-mile long channels upriver and down, were considered first cousins to the gods. And they were paid an impressive $250 a month to prove it! Sam was able to pay off his $400 debt to Bixby in no time at all, send money home and also save an impressive sum.
The dream was working for him, and he urged his younger brother, Henry, to sign on as well. Henry began as a mud clerk aboard the Pennsylvania, eager to experience all he could and work his way up. But the Pennsylvania exploded near Memphis and Henry, flung into the steam and fire, lay suffering six days with scorched lungs before he died — some say of an overdose of morphine given to ease his pain.
Sam collapsed when he heard the news, and he carried the guilt of his brother's death for the rest of his life. When he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," he created a younger half-brother for his hero, named Sid. Later, in his autobiography, he acknowledged, "But Sid was not Henry. Henry was a very much finer and better boy than ever Sid was."
By the time he signed on aboard the vessel Quaker City for a world tour, Samuel Clemens had begun to earn a national reputation as the writer Mark Twain, the final name he adopted for himself, borrowed from the leadsman who called out his readings of the river's depth to the pilot. The cry of "Mark Twain!" was a happy sound, for it meant a safe depth of 12 feet, where the boat could move freely on.
Out of this tour, in 1869, came the book "Innocents Abroad," and also a friendship with Charles Langdon, son of a wealthy coal businessman. Charles showed his companion a photo of his sister, Olivia, and for Twain it was truly love at first sight. Knowing himself to be unworthy of both her and her family, he nevertheless won their approval and trust, and married "Livy" in February 1870.
Although he enjoyed the image of himself as the blustery, untamed male, swearing and smoking big cigars, he was devoted to the frail, intelligent woman who, by some miracle, loved him, and he understood the depth of good fortune which was his. His eldest daughter, Susy, wrote "Papa," a book about her father, when she was only 13. "We were a very happy family," she stated, giving many an instance to illustrate it."
Storytelling was a ritual in their home. Evenings Twain would stretch himself out on the rug in his lavish Hartford, Conn., home, and ask a child to select an item from the room, any item, and he would make up a story about it, a story that was guaranteed to delight.
Tragedy struck the young family early. Olivia's beloved father, Jarvis, died during the first year of their marriage. Their first child and only son, Langdon, lived for only 18 months and Livy, struggling under the strain, contracted typhoid fever, and was so close to death herself, that Sam whisked her back to Elmira, N.Y., where Olivia's family could help care for them.
They were to spend summers at Quarry Farm, the lovely property nestled in the hills above Elmira, owned by Livy's sister who, childless herself, opened her home and heart to the Clemens clan. She built a special, octagonal, free-standing study for Sam, placed at a safe and quiet distance from the house. Here he wrote many of his greatest works including "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer" and "The Prince and the Pauper."
When Twain heard that President U.S. Grant, bankrupt and dying of throat cancer, was writing his memoirs, he undertook the printing of them under Webster & Company, a publishing house he owned with his son-in-law. Twain sent salesmen, many of them Civil War veterans, all over the country to promote the two-volume book. He had offered the president, who died within days after finishing the manuscript, 75 percent of the profits, and his widow, Julia, realized more than $400,000 in royalties. "There is no higher literature," Twain maintained, "than these modest, simple Memoirs."
"He did more than any living man," Susy boasted of her father, "to make Grant die without dread or regret."
Mark Twain struggled with chasms of financial distress much of his own life, but this he could handle, and did. It was the bleeding of his heartstrings that unraveled his courage and strength. His beloved Susy died of spinal meningitis in 1896, while he was on a lecture tour in Europe, tormented to distraction not to be by her side. Livy died eight years later, in 1904, and Jean, who had suffered from epilepsy since she was a child, died the day before Christmas only five years after, in 1909, leaving Twain one surviving daughter, Clara, to outlive him.
When Livy died in Italy, following long months of illness, the New York Times reported, "Mrs. Clemens died painlessly. Mr. Clemens kneels continually by the coffin. He speaks to no one."
After their first 13 years of marriage, he had written remarkable praise to Olivia:
"The longer I know you, the more I esteem and honor you for your rare wisdom, your peculiar good sense, your fortitude, endurance, pertinacity, your justice, your charity — your genuine righteousness, and your unapproachable excellence in the sublime and gracious offices of motherhood."
"He is a good man, and a very funny one," Susy wrote of her father. "He has got a temper, but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever saw, or ever hope to see."
In 1909 Mark Twain said, "I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.'"
And so it was. Twain died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910, one day after the comet's closest approach to Earth.
Winston Churchill, who deeply admired Mark Twain, said, "You cannot deal with the most serious things in the world unless you also understand the most amusing."
Samuel Clemens blazed across our skies, and the glow of his wit and wisdom is blazing still — as immortal in the annals of Earth's history as Haley's Comet, and more so — because he was loved.