Loss of Jean and Rogers to the Undiscovered Country, and Clara to the Old World (1909)
Chapter 77 of "Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain's Hidden Memoirs"
Chapter 77
Loss of Jean and Rogers to the Undiscovered Country, and Clara to the Old World (1909)
Jean was finally able to come home in the spring of 1909, and ably took over the management of the household.
Shortly thereafter, in the middle of May, I went to New York to visit Rogers, but was met at the train by Clara. She had rushed there to inform me that Rogers had died that day. She didn’t want me to get my first news of it from the press.
I have had many good friends in my life. Some of my boyhood friends in Hannibal remained in my heart all my life. I even saw some of them again in recent decades. Others of my close friends I met on the river, such as Horace Bixby; or during my Nevada and California years, such as Calvin Higbie and the Gillis brothers. Still later came Howells, Twichell, and Gilder. But the best friend of all that I’ve ever had, who wanted nothing from me but friendship, and was always there for me when I needed his help, was Henry Rogers. I served as his pall bearer.
It was a hard loss, and a heavy load. If not for Rogers, I don’t know if we would have ever gotten out of the financial mess I had gotten us into in the mid-’90s. Rogers took things in hand, worked out some legalities, negotiated payment plans, and saw to it that our money was channeled to the right parties at the right time so that we were finally able to come out all right. But more than that, Rogers was a friend and a boon companion. I miss him like a brother.
I lost Clara in a sense, too, late in the year. She married Ossip Gabrilowitsch on the sixth of October, and she and her husband left for Europe shortly thereafter, in early December.
Yes, Clara is gone—and does not need me any longer, for she is well-situated now. Jean was the only one I had left who needed me. Maybe not as much as I needed her. Probably not. Surely not.
When Susy died, Livy was just as stricken as I was. The two had been practically inseparable all of Susy’s life. Livy never got over it, and neither have I. For how could a parent overcome such a staggering blow? I rejoice that Livy is not here to meet the twin of that heartache now that Jean, the baby of our family, has also died.
I have just finished writing an account of her last days, which I have named The Death of Jean. That is the last for me—other than these final lines tracing the turning-points of my life that you are now reading.
When I watched from my upstairs bedroom window here in Stormfield as the hearse drove away carrying its precious cargo to the family plot in Elmira—for I swore I would never watch another of my loved ones be lowered into the ground—I saw my life pass before me as if in vision. It was full of adventure, full of love, full of righteous indignation and a fight for justice and the underdog, but it was, all in all, I admit now, a losing battle. Let your sympathies and your compassion be always with the under dog in the fight—this is magnanimity; but bet on the other side—this is business.
It was mostly a losing fight and business for me for the very reason that I lost my loved ones, and thus my reason to live—all of them but Clara are now gone. My first losses were my sister Margaret, then my brother Ben, and then my father, followed by my brother Henry in the steamboat disaster. Later, my firstborn, my son Langdon. Then my mother. Next Susy. Then Livy, followed by my sister Pamela and my brother Orion. And Rogers. And now Jean.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Twain wrote “The Death of Jean” almost immediately following his daughter’s death. He always processed his intense feelings by putting them down on paper.
He told his lone surviving daughter, Clara, about this in a cablegram informing her of Jean’s death and urging her not to return home for the funeral:
...She lies there, and I sit here—writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking. How dazzlingly the sunshine is flooding the hills around! It is like a mockery. I saw her mother buried. I said I would never endure that horror again; that I would never again look into the grave of any one dear to me. I have kept to that. They will take Jean from this house tomorrow and bear her to Elmira, New York, where lie those of us that have been released, but I shall not follow. I was getting acquainted with Jean in these last nine months. She had been long an exile from home when she came to us three-quarters of a year ago. She had been shut up in sanitariums, many miles from us. How eloquently glad and grateful she was to cross her father’s threshold again!”
In a letter a few days later, Twain wrote Clara the following:
O, Clara, Clara dear, I am so glad she is out of it and safe—safe! I am not melancholy. I shall never be melancholy again, I think. You see, I was in such distress when I came to realize that you were gone far away and no one stood between her and danger but me—and I could die at any moment, and then—oh then what would become of her! For she was willful, you know, and would not have been governable.
You can’t imagine what a darling she was, that last two or three days. And how fine, and good, and sweet, and noble—and joyful, thank Heaven!—and how intellectually brilliant. I had never been acquainted with Jean before. I recognized that.
But I mustn’t try to write about her—I can’t. I have already poured out my heart with the pen, recording that last day or two. I will send you that—and you must let no one but Ossip read it.
Goodbye. I love you so! And Ossip.
Father
Twain told his biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, that “The Death of Jean” would be the last chapter of his autobiography. Whether Twain already knew he was going to write these “turning-points” and wanted to throw Paine off track and trace of the trail, we will probably never know. It is quite possible that Twain simply changed his mind about what would mark the end of his autobiography.
On the night before her death, Jean and her father chatted in the library until nine, later than they normally stayed up. At Twain’s door, Jean said, “I can’t kiss you good night, father. I have a cold and you could catch it.” He kissed her forehead, and then she kissed his hand. They parted with the mutual and usual, “Sleep well, dear!”
When Paine published Twain’s essay on his youngest daughter’s death in 1911, the year after Twain himself died, Paine prefaced it with the following comments:
The death of Jean Clemens occurred early in the morning of December 24, 1909. Mr. Clemens was in great stress of mind when I first saw him, but a few hours later I found him writing steadily.
“I am setting it down,” he said, “everything. It is a relief to me to write it. It furnishes me an excuse for thinking.” At intervals during that day and the next I looked in, and usually found him writing. Then on the evening of the 26th, when he knew that Jean had been laid to rest in Elmira, he came to my room with the manuscript in his hand.
“I have finished it,” he said; “read it. I can form no opinion of it myself. If you think it worthy, some day—at the proper time—it can end my autobiography. It is the final chapter.”
Four months later—almost to the day—(April 21st) he was with Jean.
Another very brief portion of the essay is extracted below:
I lost Susy thirteen years ago; I lost her mother—her incomparable mother!--five and a half years ago; Clara has gone away to live in Europe; and now I have lost Jean. How poor I am, who was once so rich!
. . .
Seventy-four years old twenty-four days ago. Seventy-four years old yesterday. Who can estimate my age today?
***
In her book Mark Twain & Me, Dorothy Quick noted a change in her friend after the death of Jean:
He looked his age for the first time. In fact, he seemed suddenly to have grown years older and very worn. The once erect figure was a little stooped. He no longer threw back his chest, but the old flame was in his eyes when they met mine.
***
In My Father, Mark Twain, Clara wrote about the death of Rogers:
In 1909 Father lost his wonderful friend, Henry H. Rogers. I was spending a few days in New York and saw the report of his death in the morning paper. Knowing that Father was coming to town that day, I hoped I could gently break the news to him myself and was indeed relieved to find, when I met him at the station, that he had not yet seen the newspaper. But there is no way to break sad news so that it does not carry a brutal shock with it. The expression of grief on Father’s face was pitiful to behold. I got him to the hotel and made him lie down, for he looked so delicate, enveloped in this shadow of sorrow. He could think of nothing else for many days.
Clara may have felt the need to deliver the news of Rogers’ death to her father directly due to her own experience on how she had learned of her sister Susy’s death – from a newspaper headline.
Shortly before Rogers’ death, Twain gave a speech in which he at first roasted his friend, but then turned serious, first mentioning Rogers’ help to Helen Keller, then to himself and his family:
Without the public knowing about it, he rescued, if I may use that term, that marvelous girl.
. . .
I would take the opportunity to tell something that I have never been allowed to tell by Mr. Rogers, either by my mouth or in print, and if I don’t look at him I can tell it now.
In 1893, when the publishing company of Charles L. Webster, of which I was financial agent, failed, it left me heavily in debt. … He saved my copyrights, and saved me from financial ruin. He it was who arranged with my creditors to allow me to roam the face of the earth for four years and persecute the nations thereof with lectures, promising that at the end of four years I would pay dollar for dollar. That arrangement was made; otherwise I would now be living out-of-doors under an umbrella, and a borrowed one at that.
In his autobiography, Twain wrote this about the financial quagmire that Rogers was able to lead the Clemens family out of by means of his deft maneuverings:
We were strangers when we met and friends when we parted, half an hour afterward. The meeting was accidental and unforeseen but it had memorable and fortunate consequences for me. He dragged me out of that difficulty and also out of the next one—a year or two later—which was still more formidable than its predecessor. He did these saving things at no cost to my self-love, no hurt to my pride; indeed, he did them with so delicate an art that I almost seemed to have done them myself. By no sign, no hint, no word did he ever betray any consciousness that I was under obligations to him. I have never been so great as that and I have not known another who was. I have never approached it; it belongs among the loftiest of human attributes. This is a world where you get nothing for nothing; where you pay value for everything you get and 50 per cent over; and when it is gratitude you owe, you have to pay a thousand. In fact, gratitude is a debt which usually goes on accumulating, like blackmail; the more you pay, the more is exacted. In time you are made to realize that the kindness done you is become a curse and you wish it had not happened.
Mr. Rogers was a great man. No one denies him that praise. He was great in more ways than one—ways in which other men are great, ways in which he had not a monopoly; but in that fine trait which I have mentioned he was uniquely great; he held that high place almost alone, almost without a sharer. If nobilities of character were accorded decorations symbolizing degrees of merit and distinction, I think this one could claim rank, unchallenged, with the Garter and the Golden Fleece.
Twain’s appreciation of Rogers seems to have known no bounds, but on some level he apparently realized that their relationship was indeed symbiotic, for Twain’s friendship worked as a decorative protection for Rogers, as Twain’s popularity and reputation for defending the common man caused people to take a more charitable view of this particular robber baron.
Their mutual friend Andrew Carnegie wrote Twain a letter of condolence on hearing of Rogers’ death, adding the following:
Well, his memory will be kept green in your heart and I doubt not history will do him justice because you will take care to record him as your friend in need, showing the real man. Goodnight, Saint Mark.
And although Twain said Rogers never asked anything in return for his financial finaglings/ministrations to assist the Clemens clan, the Standard Oil executive did once express concern in a letter to Twain about an upcoming magazine series about Standard Oil to be written by famed and feared muckraker Ida Tarbell. Twain reacted by telling a friend at the magazine (McClures) that Tarbell should interview Rogers prior to submitting her article. The result of that was that an interview with Rogers conducted by Tarbell did take place. Tarbell described Rogers as “candid”; the series was probably at least slightly less denunciatory as a result of Twain’s intervention.
Another time, Twain was approached with an offer to publish a book deriding, denouncing, and exposing Rogers and his cohorts individually and Standard Oil in general. In an 1894 letter to Livy, Twain wrote of this incident:
When I arrived in September, lord how black the prospect was—how desperate, how incurably desperate! Webster and Co. had to have a small sum of money or go under at once. I flew to Hartford—to my friends—but they were not moved, not strongly interested, and I was ashamed that I went. It was from Mr. Rogers, a stranger, that I got the money and was by it saved. And then—while still a stranger—he set himself the task of saving my financial life without putting upon me (in his native delicacy) any sense that I was the recipient of a charity, a benevolence—and he has accomplished that task; accomplished it at a cost of three months of wearing and difficult labor. He gave that time to me—time which could not be bought by any man at a hundred thousand dollars a month—no, nor for three times the money.
Well, in the midst of that great fight, that long and admirable fight, George Warner came to me and said:
“There is a splendid chance open to you. I know a man—a prominent man—who has written a book that will go like wildfire; a book that arraigns the Standard Oil fiends, and gives them unmitigated hell, individual by individual. It is the very book for you to publish; there is a fortune in it, and I can put you in communication with the author.”
I wanted to say:
“The only man I care for in the world; the only man I would give a damn for; the only man who is lavishing his sweat and blood to save me and mine from starvation and shame, is a Standard Oil fiend. If you know me, you know whether I want the book or not.”
But I didn’t say that. I said I didn’t want any book; I wanted to get out of the publishing business and out of all business, and was here for that purpose and would accomplish it if I could.
Twain further defended Rogers on another occasion, when somebody made the charge that Rogers was of the ilk which Twain had denounced and lampooned in his book The Gilded Age. The accuser intimated to Twain that Rogers’ money was tainted. Twain agreed, replying, “Yes, it’s tainted—‘tain’t mine, and ‘tain’t yours.”
Twain was dedicated to truth and justice, but there may have been times when he was even more devoted to tried and true friends.
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