SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 62 (of 78), part 2
A Ruck of Rags (The Tale of Lost Essentials) (1896), part 2
Chapter 62
A Ruck of Rags (The Tale of Lost Essentials) (1896), part 2
Editor’s Notes, continued: In a February 1897 letter to William Dean Howells, Twain wrote of he and Livy’s ongoing sadness:
The mood will pass some day—there is history for it—but it cannot pass until my wife comes up out of the submergence. She was always so quick to recover herself before, but now there is no rebound and we are dead people who go through the motions of life.
Exactly one year after Susy’s death, in the summer of 1897, Twain wrote a poem which he entitled In Memoriam Olivia Susan Clemens. It contains the stanza:
And then when they were nothing fearing, and God’s peace was in the air,
And none was prophesying harm—
The vast disaster fell:
Where stood the temple when the sun went down,
Was vacant desert when it rose again!
Soon after the first anniversary of Susy’s death, Twain alluded to it in a letter to Twichell from Lucerne, Switzerland:
This is paradise here—but of course we have got to leave it by and by. The 18th of August has come and gone, Joe, and we still seem to live.
In early 1898, Susy was still very much on Twain’s mind and in his heart. In a letter to Howells, who had lost his young daughter “Winnie” (Winifred), he wrote:
“If you were here I think we could cry down each other’s necks, as in your dream. For we are a pair of old derelicts drifting around now, with some of our passengers gone and the sunniness of the others in eclipse.”
Twain devoted several chapters of his autobiography to Susy. He wrote much about Livy, too, and an entire essay on Jean following her death. Of Langdon he wrote little, likely because he felt an even more direct and immediate guilt as regards his son’s death, and didn’t want to think about it any more than he had to, let alone speak or write about it.
Nevertheless, Twain doubtless had Langdon in mind when he wrote the following in late 1891 in the article MARK TWAIN AT AIX-LES-BAINS):
Mighty has been the advance of the nations and the liberalization of thought. A result of it is a changed Deity, a Deity of a dignity and sublimity proportioned to the majesty of his office and the magnitude of his empire, a Deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chains and will in time be freed from the rest by the several ecclesiastical bodies who have these matters in charge. It was, without doubt, a mistake and a step backward when the Presbyterian Synods of America lately decided, by vote, to leave him still embarrassed with the dogma of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with how much of anxiety he watched the balloting, nor with how much of grieved disappointment he observed the result.
Twain eulogized his other close family members who died in his adulthood (his mother, his brothers Henry and Orion, and his sister Pamela), but did not write as much about Clara, who outlived them all by several decades. Twain’s reluctance to commit thoughts of Clara to paper and posterity were probably due to that very fact (that she was still living). Her “career” was not yet over, so he couldn’t really sum up her life as yet.
Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was published in 1896, shortly before Susy’s death. Susy at age seventeen was the model for Joan.
Twain had begun writing “Joan of Arc” late in 1892, then set it aside until 1894 (the year his last American novel, The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, was published), and finished the manuscript the following year. After serializing an abridged version for magazine publication, the full-length book was published in 1896. Twain said of it:
Possibly the book may not sell, but that is nothing—it was written for love.
You can listen to this chapter here.
~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^~^
Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.