Aftword
A Farewell to Arms (1910)
All are gone but Clara. And her child, who will be born a few months hence.
Clara doesn’t know that I know that. What will become of that one, my grandchild? Will it be a boy, or of the sweeter variety of child?
I wish him or her the best, but I will not live to see it be born and grow up. I know that. It is time for me to go. I do not want to see my grandchild only to have to leave it so soon after becoming acquainted. I will take my leave before then.
So now this—this abridged and totally honest autobiography, including my egotistical pride in my works and what they have accomplished—is my true swan-song. I am, in effect, hammering the last nail into my own coffin as I pen these last words.
What have I accomplished in this life that I have been caused to live as a result of these many odd twists and curious coincidences and serendipitous circumstances and surprises?
I instructed, I preached, I reasoned and debated, I yelled until I was hoarse. I wrote until my fingers betrayed their office and cramped up on me. I undermined shams & follies & exposed frauds & blatherskites with humor—for against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
I wrote my humorous books to this end—not simply to be funny, but as a means to an end—to instruct and to guide, in an effort to change laws and customs and reform men. Everything I have ever written has had a serious philosophy or truth as its basis. I would not write a humorous work merely to be funny.
Humor must not professedly teach, and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
Yes, there was, after all, a method to my madness. To cite a few examples, The Gilded Age was my warning against the excesses of greedy commerce; both “Innocents Abroad” and “Connecticut Yankee” were my anthems castigating aristocracy and phony, hypocritical religionists; even The Prince & the Pauper had an anti-aristocracy and -royalty message back of it; “Huck Finn” was my plea to pacify the pathetic policies of the rampaging political machine—specifically and most especially the dishonest, unjust, and rank policies of post-Reconstruction, the so-called “Jim Crow” laws.
But perhaps I was too subtle; not everybody understood the point behind those works, or the allegories I injected—or perhaps buried—within them. In my final years, I ended what subtlety existed in works of those kind, and directly attacked evil where I saw it, with no attempt made to package those diatribes in humorous wrappers. Some of these essays have been printed already, others await my death—and Clara’s—before they can be printed without harm to me or mine.
If, after these bitter assaults are published, I lose my place in the public’s heart, so be it. If a muzzle is the price of remaining admired and beloved, then all right, I’ll remove the muzzle and go to hell—in the eyes of a portion of the public, that is.
Still, I did what I could. I tried to reform the damned human race and its pathetic ways. I’ve been an artist in morals and ink and an apostle of truth. Was it all in vain? Mankind does not seem to have reformed or improved in any perceptible way.
It is not worthwhile to try to keep history from repeating itself, for man’s character will always make the preventing of the repetitions impossible. Man is a Reasoning Animal. Such is the claim. I think it is open to dispute. But then again, when we remember that we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained. Well, not all of us are mad; sometimes I feel like the only sane person in a community of the mad.
Many have examined man in every age of the world and have perceived that a civilization not proper matter for derision has always been and must always remain impossible to him.
In religion and politics people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing to begin with.
We all do no end of feeling and we mistake it for thinking. And out of it we get an aggregation which we consider a boon. Its name is public opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God. Against all such superstitions I did what I could. Let it go.
Late last year I wrote The Turning-Point of My Life, and published it a couple of months ago. I therein traced the various happenstances & random events & decisions & situations that made me who I was, & made my life what it turned out to be. This, my last document, tells it over again on an expanded plan.
Ultimately, what is most important to me are the answers to these questions: Was I a good Son? Brother? Husband? Father? Friend? The rest, by comparison, is mere embroidery, gingerbread, bric-a-brac.
My life has come full circle: it began with Halley’s Comet scoring a path through the heavens, followed by a series of deaths of family members. I am concluding my life with a similar series of deaths of family members and dear friends, and last night I noticed that Halley’s Comet was visible in the sky, for the first time since my birth.
I will give this manuscript to Katy with instructions on where to hide it, and orders to not tell of its existence or whereabouts during her lifetime. If anyone should thereafter find it, let any proceeds that accrue from it go to my grandchild—or grandchildren.
It is done. It is accomplished. I came in with Halley’s Comet, and I shall go out with it, too. I will. I will it so.
EDITOR’S NOTES: When Twain says “last year” above, he was referring, of course, to 1909.
***
In April, Clara and Ossip were called to Stormfield from Europe due to Twain’s failing health. In My Father, Mark Twain, Clara wrote of their arrival:
He was ready to talk, but spent no words on complaints about his illness. He was pathetically anxious to inform me about the financial state of affairs, expressing regret that there was less than he had hoped there would be. He appeared skeptical also as to whether the sale of his books would continue for more than a brief period after his death. I was too much moved by this evidence of his lingering care for me to trust myself to speak. . . . On Thursday morning the 21st of April, 1910, he awoke with mental clarity and vigor, but not inclined to converse. Then he dozed off. I was sitting by the bedside, when suddenly he opened his eyes, took my hand, and looked steadily into my face. Faintly he murmured, “Goodbye dear, if we meet—.”
Halley’s Comet reached perihelion (made its closest approach to the earth during its sojourn through the skies) on April 19th, 1910. Similar to how the last occurrence of the comet’s perihelion came just prior to Twain’s birth in 1835, two days later, on the 21st, Twain died at sunset in Stormfield.
Old friend and neighbor Joseph Twichell gave an emotional prayer at Twain’s funeral service in New York. Immediately following that, Twichell was summoned home to the deathbed of his wife, Harmonie.
***
Twain’s eulogy was delivered by Henry Van Dyke. In it he said:
We are here reminded of the frailty of mortal flesh and the brevity of our way on earth. We think of Mark Twain not as a celebrity, but as a man whom we loved. We remember the reality that made his life worth living -- his laughing enmity of all sham; his love for the truth; his honesty; his honor.
We know how he met with adversity, toiling years to pay a debt of conscience, following the injunction to do all things honorably as well as all things honestly. We know how he loved his family and his fellow men. We knew Mark Twain and we loved him.
Nothing is more false than to think that the presence of humor means the absence of seriousness. It was the showing up of the unreal sham, the untruth, that made Mark Twain’s humor. He was serious in his real humor. But we know that Mark Twain never laughed at the frail, the weak, the poor and the humble. He used his humor, but for things good and wholesome. He made fun without hatred. He laughed many of the world’s false claimants out of court. Under all his humor he made us feel the pathos of life’s realities, for he exposed the sham.
Now that he is gone, we who loved him -- and we all loved him who knew him -- will miss him. We are glad to give thanks that he left such an honorable name.
To name just a few, among others present at Twain's first funeral service (there was another private ceremony the following day in Elmira) were William Dean Howells, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Sidney Porter (“O. Henry”—who died a month and a half later, at the age of forty-seven), Robert Underwood Johnson (who was a supporter of and collaborator with Twain’s close contemporary John Muir), and Henry H. Rogers, Jr.
***
Four months after his death, a girl who was to be Twain’s only grandchild, Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch, was born at Stormfield to Twain’s daughter Clara and her concert pianist husband Ossip Gabrilowitsch.
***
In the epilogue to her poignant book Mark Twain & Me (which was written in middle age), Dorothy Quick explained what she had intended to achieve with the work:
I have tried to write this book through the little girl’s eyes, not through my own grown-up ones, because I felt that only that way could I give the right picture of the Mark Twain I knew and loved—the portrait that I am sure is what he would want. “Show me as I was, Dorothy, the real me,” I can almost hear his slow, drawly voice saying.
And at the very conclusion of her book, Quick summed up Twain’s lasting influence and impact on her:
To have known him as I did was a rare gift which, as the years go by, I appreciate more and more fully. Just to have revolved in his radius for a few brief years was an unforgettable privilege. To have had his love and his interest, his faith that I would accomplish something, was even greater, and the desire to fulfill his hopes for me will always remain an integral part of my being—a goal I will strive constantly to achieve.
But one thing is certain, whether I make a success of writing or not: Mark Twain brought more into the life of this little girl than anyone could guess. Entirely apart from the literary angle, the influence of a man like Mark Twain in a child’s life is incalculable. I don’t know how the other Angel Fish feel, but I am sure it must be the same with them as it is with me. For the time we knew him we lived in a rarefied atmosphere in which all things of life seemed to assume their true and proper proportions. We learned the simplicity of the great and the unassumption of the rich and true heart that held honor before everything and exalted right thinking and living to its highest degree.
The very fact of having been in such an atmosphere cannot help but clear the lungs of the murky dust of everyday life; it cannot help but give an incentive to carry on—to try to be as noble and as fine as he was in every way.
And that is the heritage that Mark Twain has not only given to me, who loved him, but to the whole world.
NOTE: This is the last installment from “Rebel With A Cause”; from now, the schedule for posts will be:
Sunday: Sundays with Mark Twain (Mark Twain, Bible Scholar); will end late 2024
Tuesday: The Best of AI Imaging; will continue indefinitely but not necessarily “forever”
Thursday: A Bass Riff; could end in a few months
Random/Surprise: Whatever comes to my mind; it could be a poem, a short story, an article, or what have you. These appear an average of once or twice a week, but there can sometimes be several in a single day.
The amazon page for “Rebel With a Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs” is here.
Free writings of mine can be read or downloaded here.