SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 73 (of 78)
First Angelfish (1906, 1907)
Chapter 73
First Angelfish (1906, 1907)
I missed my wife; I missed my daughters. Susy was dead; Jean was away; and Clara was living her own life. Not only did I miss my daughters, but especially as they had been in their early years. Sadly, I could never get them back. Not at that age. And not Susy at all. I had reached the grandpapa stage of life; and what I lacked and what I needed, was grandchildren—though I didn’t know it at the time.
When I met Dorothy Butes, she so reminded me of my own girls at that age that I was as good as rendered powerless in her presence. Her wish was my command, and I spoiled her as a result. But that is a grandfather’s privilege, is it not? And this was my way of playing grandfather.
In fact, Dorothy was the first of many surrogate granddaughters that I collected for my aquarium. I eventually called these special girls “Angelfish” and formed a club with official rules, planned outings, and a clubhouse—the billiards room in Stormfield, once it was built.
Although always sweet toward these girls, Clara did not always seem completely happy with my catch. Perhaps she thought I should wait until she should provide me with real grandchildren before I started filling the position of grandfather with other people’s children. Maybe that is why she is on the brink of starting her family—so that her child will jump to the head of the procession and receive the attention from me that is currently focused on my Angelfish. It is too late for that, though.
EDITOR’S NOTES: Lest moderns suspect some impropriety concerning the visits of these young girls, Twain’s “Angelfish” were always accompanied by their mothers when they came calling.
Twain’s daughter Clara obliquely alluded to the Angelfish when she wrote the following:
Father took very strong likes and dislikes, but he loved almost all children and had a charming way with them that quickly won their affection in return. He liked to go driving or paying calls with some little child as companion and this feeling increased as he grew older. In fact, in the last years of his life the youthful side of his nature lay uppermost, partly perhaps because he found this the best way to crowd out melancholy thoughts.
Besides Butes, there was another Angelfish named Dorothy who is worth mentioning. After meeting one another as Twain was returning from his final trip to England (where he had gone to receive his honorary doctorate from Oxford), Dorothy Quick visited Twain in Tuxedo Park, New York, where he spent the summer of 1907 (H.H. Rogers and his wife Mary had a home near there), and at other residences subsequent to that.
In 1961, Quick wrote the book Mark Twain and Me about her girlhood friendship with him. A Disney television movie of the same title, starring Jason Robards as Twain, Amy Stewart as Quick, and Talia Shire as Jean Clemens, was released in 1991.
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Although many view Twain as a bitter old man in his final years—due to the many bereavements he endured, and based on the volcanic ire with which he castigated systems and governments and events around him in various screeds and polemics written during these years—it is enlightening to examine what he said during a speech in the middle of 1907:
When a man stands on the verge of seventy-two you know perfectly well that he never reached that place without knowing what his life is—heartbreaking bereavement. And so our reverence is for our dead. We do not forget them; but our duty is toward the living; and if we can be cheerful, cheerful in spirit, cheerful in speech and in hope, that is a benefit to those who are around us.
Biographer A.B. Paine also argued against the idea of Twain being a full-time curmudgeon, even in his last years. He wrote concerning this:
Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years ... Yet, at heart, no man loved his kind more genuinely, or with deeper compassion, than Mark Twain.
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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.