Chapter 76
Death Of A Namesake (1908)
My nephew and namesake Samuel Erasmus Moffett, son of my sister Pamela, died in 1908, only four years after his mother had. She was fortunate to have missed this event—the losing of a child is the most heartbreaking thing there is.
Samuel was a baby when Orion and I headed west in 1861. We spent a little time together as he covered the western swing of my worldwide lecture tour in 1895; he was writing for a San Francisco newspaper at the time.
Young Samuel—for I will always think of him thus—perished in the crashing waves of the Pacific, within sight of his wife and children, who had remained on shore while Samuel struck out into the roaring surf. He was drowned, and the world lost a good man and a prodigious intellect.
It does not seem right for me to have outlived my namesake. It is almost as unbecoming in me as outliving my own children.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain wrote a eulogy of his namesake nephew entitled Samuel Erasmus Moffett: His Character and His Death. He noted therein that Moffett espoused and promoted various causes, including but not limited to: the need for fire escapes in New York tenement houses; saving the American forests; providing free meals for poor school children; old-age pensions; safety appliances to protect factory workers; and even universal peace.
As to Moffett’s concern for the tenement-dwellers in New York, he may have become aware of their plight from a letter his uncle wrote that was printed in early 1868 in his old paper, the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, which reported on the poverty and squalor of those residents.
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In early 1908, Twain gave a speech to the Lotos Club on Fifth Avenue in New York, where he recalled to mind a number of the favorite compliments he had received over the years, and related an account about the type of fame he and the author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (and other writings) valued the highest:
Robert Louis Stevenson and I, sitting in Union Square and Washington Square a great many years ago, tried to find a name for the submerged fame, that fame that permeates the great crowd of people you never see and never mingle with; people with whom you have no speech, but who read your books and become admirers of your work and have an affection for you. You may never find it out in the world, but there it is, and it is the faithfulness of the friendship, of the homage of those men, never criticizing, that began when they were children. They have nothing but compliments, they never see the criticisms, they never hear any disparagement of you, and you will remain in the home of their hearts’ affection forever and ever. And Louis Stevenson and I decided that of all fame, that was the best, the very best.
Shortly after that speech to the Lotos Club, Twain arranged two meetings for women only (with the sole exception to that rule being himself). He called these “Doe meetings.” They were his way of countering complaints made by some of the fairer sex regarding their exclusion from the standard men-only “stag parties.”
Two of these took place within a month of each other; Twain’s daughter Clara presided as hostess, while Twain (surprising nobody) supplied most of the talk. Among the guests were Ethel Barrymore and Kate Douglass Riggs (the former Kate Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm). Riggs was apparently a guest on both occasions, as she noted, “A lady who is invited to and attends a doe luncheon is, of course, a doe. The question is, if she attends two doe luncheons in succession is she a doe-doe? If so, she is extinct and can never attend a third.”
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As a doting husband and father of mostly daughters, the egalitarian Twain was sympathetic to feminine suffrage. He once said, “We easily perceive that the peoples furthest from civilization are the ones where equality between man and woman are furthest apart—and we consider this one of the signs of savagery. But we are so stupid that we can’t see that we thus plainly admit that no civilization can be perfect until exact equality between man and woman is included.”
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