Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years

Book by Trombley Laura Skandera

ONE

“Too Perfect for Life”

THE LATE 1880s TO FALL1905

Today has been very full of the joy of living—I wrote letters and read some in the morning. Looked out of my window just in Time to see Dear Mother look up at me on her way home from Church and in the afternoon she came over. Later I played cards with my chief. Some day the penalty for having such perfect living will come.
—ISABEL VAN  KLEEK LYON

1

By all rights no one should have ever heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He should have lived and died a cipher of rural nineteenth-century America. Certainly his modest beginnings presaged a difficult, abbreviated existence. Yet life takes unexpected turns, and the course that his journey took as Mark Twain would have strained the credulity of the most dedicated fiction reader.

Born two months prematurely, red-haired Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived to his parents, thirty-two-year-old Jane Lampton Clemens and thirty-seven-year-old John Marshall Clemens, on November 30, 1835. His birthplace was a tiny two-bedroom rented cabin with an outdoor lean-to kitchen in the village of Florida in Monroe County, Missouri, located at a fork of the Salt River. He joined four young siblings: ten-year-old Orion, eight-year-old Pamela, five-year-old Margaret, and three-year-old Benjamin. Another brother, Pleasant, had died in infancy six years earlier. For a time it looked as though he would suffer Pleasant’s fate. No one in his family much expected him to survive. His mother later wrote, “he was a poor looking object to raise.” Of Florida, Twain joked that the dusty little settlement “contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town. It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much—not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place—even London, I suppose.” Yet in the midst of these decidedly inauspicious surroundings, there was an augury that hinted that this child just might be special. For weeks prior to his birth, the bright trail of Halley’s Comet crossed the nighttime sky.

After a departing shower of sparks and the passage of years, interest in the comet’s appearance receded. But not so for Jane Clemens, who told and retold the story of the mysterious visitation and how it foretold great things, and most important, not for Twain, who by the end of his life embraced the notion that Halley’s Comet had heralded his coming. He possessed a strong affinity for the celestial body, expressing his hope that he would make his exit when it returned during its seventy-five-year cycle: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”

Maybe Twain felt that a passing comet provided the best explanation for his remarkable life. That this son of Missouri would grow up to be the most famous author in the world and the first global celebrity was so implausible that even Twain had difficulty making sense of his rise: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’ ” The accomplishments of this “freak” were so many and his fame so enormous that by the end of his life he had come to be considered by those who knew him well as otherworldly. According to a close friend, “He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet—never quite of this race or kind.”

The family failed to prosper in Florida, and so in 1839 they moved twenty-eight miles northeast, to the bustling riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri, in Marion County. The little boy quickly adapted to his new surroundings and acquired a closely knit group of friends. His boyhood adventures exploring the environs of Hannibal with Tom Blankenship and Laura Hawkins would later be immortalized in his most beloved works, Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

With the untimely death of his father when he was just eleven years old, his formal schooling ended and his mother apprenticed him to a Hannibal printer named William Ament to learn the trade. Trained as a boy to move individual letters, he would grow up to become a compulsive writer of words. In 1851, he went to work with his brother Orion, who owned a small newspaper, the Hannibal Western Union. It was while working at the Union that he began writing humorous sketches that were occasionally published. Two years later, he traveled north working as an itinerant typesetter in Saint Louis, Philadelphia, and New York City. After a few years spent wandering, he decided he would travel to South America to sail the Amazon and make his fortune in “COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous powers,” which he had read, in a book about the Amazon, “was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of the powdered coca and require no other sustenance.” His plan was to travel by river from Cincinnati to New Orleans and then set sail for Pará (a port city in northern Brazil), where he would establish himself in the lucrative cocaine trade.

While on board ship he met Horace Bixby, a legendary riverboat pilot. By the time he disembarked in New Orleans, plans for South America had been abandoned in favor of working for Bixby. Bixby had agreed to mentor the young man and they worked together on the Mississippi River from 1857 to 1861. On April 9, 1859, Twain received his steamboat pilot’s license. Working as a pilot brought him not just increased income, but an enhanced social status. To the end of his life, he would regard earning his pilot’s license as one of his proudest accomplishments. He reluctantly decided to leave the river and the ship he was piloting, the Alonzo Child, only when the American Civil War broke out, in 1861, and commercial traffic on the Mississippi was curtailed.

At loose ends, he accompanied his brother Orion to Nevada, where he had been appointed secretary of the new territory. After trying his hand at silver prospecting, Twain worked as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. It was in 1863, while he was with the Enterprise, that he began signing articles with the pseudonym “Mark Twain”—meaning two fathoms deep, indicating safe passage, a fond allusion to his time spent working on the river. His first big success as an author came in 1865, when he was living in San Francisco and his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the Saturday Press on November 18. The story was a sensation, and Twain became known as a western humorist. Newspapers and magazines across the country reprinted this tall tale of an inveterate gambler and his shot-filled frog, Dan’l Webster.

While in San Francisco, Twain worked as a newspaper correspondent, and in 1867 he registered as a passenger on the Quaker City’s maiden voyage to the Mediterranean, with a trip to the Holy Land as part of the tour. He persuaded the San Francisco Alta California to pay his traveling costs in return for the letters he would send them. These letters ultimately served as the material for The Innocents Abroad. Innocents became a best seller, with more than seventy thousand copies sold in its first year, and remained the best selling of all of Twain’s books during his lifetime.

While on board the Quaker City, Twain befriended young Charles Langdon of Elmira, New York. After the trip’s conclusion, Charles invited him to attend a reading by Charles Dickens in New York City. There he met Langdon’s father, Jervis Langdon; his mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon; and his sister, Olivia Louise Langdon. Twain was immediately attracted to the well-educated, wealthy, pretty young woman, and after a year-and-a-half-long courtship, the two were married, on February 2, 1870, in the parlor of the Langdon mansion in Elmira.

A decade younger than her husband, Olivia proved to be Twain’s ideal companion. Erudite, genteel, and possessed of a keen sense of humor, Olivia encouraged her spouse’s literary pursuits. The couple moved to Buffalo, New York, where Twain had become a co-owner of the Buffalo Express newspaper. Their first child, a son, Langdon, was born nearly nine months to the day after their wedding. Buffalo did not suit them and their son Langdon was a sickly child who passed away after just nineteen months. The couple relocated in 1871 from Buffalo to Hartford, Connecticut, where they had three more children and resided for the next twenty years. This period constituted the happiest time of Twain’s life. The Clemenses spent their winters in Hartford and summered in Elmira, at Susan Crane’s home, Quarry Farm. Susan was Olivia’s older sister, and it was there that Twain did most of his writing.

To those around him, Twain possessed a seemingly endless amount of energy. His intense intellectual curiosity compelled him to crisscross the globe (he sailed the Atlantic Ocean twenty-nine times) and to amass an enormous personal library with thousands of volumes. He was an individual who craved conversation, and he flourished as the center of attention. For Twain, dialogue was everything, and it is estimated that he wrote fifty thousand letters over the course of his lifetime in addition to more than three thousand newspaper and magazine articles and more than thirty books. His creative capacity appeared limitless, and when he was not writing he talked. The only impossibility, it seemed, was for Twain not to express himself. He was so confident of ...