Other than his finance difficulties, from which he recovered with his speaking tours, did Mr. Clemens have any so-called “skeltons in closet” or was he as real as I saw him portrayed early this morning in the film “The Adventures of Mark Twain”?
Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court is an awesome book, IMO!
Quasi
I DVR’d The Adventures Of Mark Twain. I’ll try to watch it this weekend.
I haven’t heard of any scandals concerning S. Clemens; at least, I don’t remember any.
Once Upon A Classic had an A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court episode starring Richard Basehart as King Arthur and Roscoe Lee Browne as Merlin. Loved it. I wish I could get a copy of it. DVD, download… doesn’t matter. I liked the bit where Hank introduces advertising.
Keep thy Lady from gettething slayed
Protect her with a real sharp blade
Lord Pelinore!
(Pelinore!)
Swords!
For Lords!
Arthur: Heralding the goods, as it were.
Everything I’ve read about him indicates he was a devoted family man, so no scandals of that nature anyway.
His attitudes toward other cultures and races aren’t always congruent with enlightened liberal 21st century thought, but for a white guy born and raised in the South before the Civil War, he was better than OK.
His later writings, including some that were not published in his lifetime, are replete with darkness, nihilism, atheism, and touches of misanthropy that could come as a shock to those who think of him as a funny old guy who made wisecracks and wrote books for boys (which was never entirely accurate of course).
Twain was always a bit pessimistic, and probably had what would be now called depression, at least in his final years.
Still, when I think of the greatest American creative artists of all time, Mark Twain is always at the very top of my list…
The thing about Twain and his “skeletons” was that he practically gloried in them. I mean he was something of a deserter during the Civil War and he joked about that. He had little use for religion in a time where the majority of the population was highly religious, He admitted to having questionable journalistic ethics a number of times, he ducked out on a couple duals he was challenged to on moral and ethical grounds during his journalism days.
For heaven’s sake his first short story discribes cheating at a small town contest. Any man who has as much fun with his weaknesses probably doesn’t have many he hasn’t exposed himself. — probably a bad choice of words.
The most sordid rumors involved his Angel-Fish, his nickname for the many little girls he was friends with in his later years. Personally I think it was entirely innocent: he was the father of 3 beloved daughters, one of whom (Susy, his favorite) died as a young adult in the 1890s and her death devastated him, while the other two grew up, and he had no grandchildren during his lifetime, so he was looking to recapture his favorite years when his kids were small.
Susy Clemens was a bit of a scandal: she was expelled from Bryn Mawr and even objective biographers admit that the implications of the expulsion and of letters between Susy and her friend Louise Brownell are that it was due to her and Louise’s lesbian relationship. Today this is a “yawn”- famous man has gay daughter- but of course at the time it was hushed up. Susie died of spinal meningitis soon after; it would be interesting to see how Twain would have reacted to a “full blown” [no pun intended] lesbian daughter, especially since she was his favorite.
A couple of biographers have claimed he was gay, particularly before his marriage, but as with almost any 19th century figure other than Walt Whitman or Oscar Wilde evidence is scant and I think mainly it’s an attempt to sell books about a man who’s been written about hundreds of times.
His racial views were REMARKABLY enlightened for his time. Huckleberry Finn may hold some sort of record for uses of the word ‘nigger’ but Jim is one of the most admirable characters in American literature: he’s loyal, brave, and loving- not just to Huck but to his family [the whole reason he’s running away is to avoid being sold downriver and to work to buy his wife and daughter out of slavery], and his superstition is due to the complete ignorance many slaveowners imposed on their slaves. Twain also paid the tuition of the first black student accepted at Harvard, and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It” is still incredibly powerful 135 years after he wrote it. Twain’s who I default to when it’s mentioned that atheists can’t be moral: a monogamous loving family man who was a century ahead of millions of his Christian contemporaries in racial views.
The Ken Burns documentary about him (and, even more, the AudioBook version of it, which has a LOT more material) don’t mention anything. Nothing else I’ve read about Twain suggests hidden awfulness. For the stuff that’s out in the open, Twain himself served briefly in the Confederate militia, but, by his own admission, he “skedaddled”. He certainly wasn’t trying to hide this – he wrote The Private History of a Campaign that Failed about it. He was broke when a depression hit during his stsay in San Francisco, and he ran out on payments. He admitted to starting to lie in his Autobiography. Aside from ythese self-admitted sins, I don’t know of anything.
His real trouble was a tendency to blame himself – he blamed himself for his brother’s death when he followed him on the steamboat. He contemplated suicide in San Francisco. He blamed himself for his first child’s death, and for not being around when his daughter died. Again, that’s all pretty much out in the open.
Speaking of Angel Fish, several wrote about their experiences with Twain at Stormfieldand none of them implied anything at all improper. Dorothy Quick wrote a full length book called Mark Twain and Me (filmed) and it’s obvious she adored him. Her only source of pain from her friendship with him came from the fact that after Jean (and DAMN, if his obituary of her doesn’t move you then you’re soul dead) died he completely lost any will to live.
As the picture of Stormfield may imply, he did not die broke as is sometimes reported and in fact was probably richer than he had ever been. His estate came in at around $700,000 in 1910, making him a multimillionaire by todays standards, and his estate and royalties supported his surviving daughter and his granddaughter Nina (born a few months after his death) in great comfort for their entire lives.
An extremely minor skeleton is that contrary to some accounts Twain had no problem whatever with declaring bankruptcy and wiping the slate when his finances failed. It was his wife and his friends who convinced him to pay off every penny through his writings and his tours. Nevertheless this was late Victorian era- he could have overruled his wife with complete impunity, but he didn’t, and went on the tours for years and years and repaid every creditor dollar for dollar plus interest.
Many years ago, I visted Twain’s home in Hartford, CT. It was very interesting, and I remember seeing the typesetting machine (in the basement), that Twain blew a bundle of money on.
Did Twain lose the house in his bankruptcy? He made a vast amount of money, but he spent like crazy-he liked to entertain lavishly, and travelled a lot.
I got the impression that his last years were pretty sad, owing to the deaths of his children.
No, he never lost it. The family did close it for a while when he was on his “rebuilding the fortune” tour both to save money on its upkeep and because the girls were in college and his wife accompanied him on tour anyway. He loved that house.
Unfortunately his daughter Suzy died there while he was in Europe, and after that he was never able to use it again. He and his wife returned there to get some of their personal effects, but I don’t believe either of them ever so much as spent the night there again due to the memories and the devastation of their daughter’s death. (Livy Clemens had many relatives and friends in the area so if they ever needed to be in Hartford they stayed with them.)
Found it, just finished reading it. Wow. Thank you for inspiring me to find it.
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Some trivia: Twain had a beautiful library/study- several actually- but almost never wrote in it. He preferred writing- longhand- in bed, and then typing it on a porch or in a small outside building like this onebuilt for him at his in-law’s house in Elmira.
Charles Dickens was similar- he had a beautiful study with the big desk and all but preferred writing in places like the tiny chalet guesthouse behind his ‘big house’. (Dickens had 10 children, an unhappy marriage, and later a needy much much younger mistress, which explains one of the reasons he preferred modest place with privacy to luxury.)
George Orwell tore him down a bit in an essay called Mark Twain – The Licensed Jester. His offenses were apparently those of being unfunny, self-aggrandizing, and hypocritical.
Personally I don’t find it terribly damning.
Maybe Orwell was a James Fenimore Cooper fanand sought revenge.
Agreed, and he’s already been nominated here: Greatest American elimination game (setup thread) - The Game Room - Straight Dope Message Board
I remember no scandals, if you can call them that, that haven’t already been mentioned.
If you ever have the chance to tour his house in Hartford, Conn., you should. I did about 15 years ago and it was fascinating. My favorite memory from the tour was that his family parlor had a very big fireplace with a huge mantelpiece. Our guide told us that his wife liked to accumulate little knickknacks on their many travels and display them on the mantelpiece. Every night when he was home, Twain would tell a bedtime story to his little girls, mentioning every knickknack and weaving it (or what it represented) into the story, going from one side to the other. When he got to the far end, he’d conclude the story, and the girls would be sent upstairs with kisses to bed. Mrs. Clemens would change the knickknacks from time to time, and Sam never told the same story twice! Quite an imagination.
The Ken Burns bio of him is excellent, BTW.
Yeah, one does sort of seem to echo the other.
This makes me wonder, did Cooper ever pen a complaint about anyone from the generation before his? Have any prominent authors recently written anything nasty about Orwell? Perhaps there is a whole chain of literary discontent.
Not what one would consider a “scandal,” more of a semi-harsh judgment rendered by George Orwell in his 1943 essay, “Mark Twain: The Licensed Jester”:
Hmmm. Would it be fair to Orwell to say that he was perhaps a bit envious? Not trying to slam him; I just wonder.
I’ve made a study of Orwell’s life, and I very much doubt it.
There is Snowball’s Chance, which is John Reed’s parody of Animal Farm, but I wouldn’t call Reed “prominent.”
