Mark Twain's Final Year
Troubles and Redemption: Rogers, Jean and Bermuda
Mark Twain was devastated by the passing of his good friend, Henry Huttleston Rogers, May 19, 1909. He received the news from his daughter upon arriving in New York, where he expected to visit with Rogers. Which daughter is not specified but I suspect it was Clara. Both Jean and Clara were then living at Stormfield but Clara was more likely to be spending time in New York City. Fears, in his Day By Day, includes an article from The New York Times, May 20, p.1: “A telegram apprising Mr. Clemens of the death of his old friend had been sent to Redding yesterday morning, but Mr. Clemens did not receive it, and did not know that Mr. Rogers was dead until after he arrived. As Mr. Clemens left the station he looked greatly grieved, and was leaning heavily upon the arm of his daughter, Miss Clemens, who had accompanied him to New York from Redding. Tears filled his eyes and his hands were trembling.”
The article goes on the say “ Miss Clemens explained that her father had left his home not knowing anything about the death of his friend, and had expected to enjoy the day with him. The members of the Rogers household, knowing that he was coming, had notified her as soon as the death had occurred, that she might break the news to him as gently as possible. The first intimation, she said, that her father received that Mr. Rogers was not living and in good health was from herself.”
The New York Times article reports that Mark Twain’s daughter had accompanied him from Redding and that the Rogers family had notified her, being unable to reach Twain. If Twain’s daughter was at Stormfield at the time of Rogers’ death, she could not have received a telegram before their departure, just as Sam did not receive notice. She must have been in New York to receive it and then met her father at the station.
Fears’ entry for May 19th continues: Mr. Clemens and his daughter lingered in the waiting room on the main station for a few minutes. Then Mark Twain, still leaning on his daughter’s arm and looking toward the ground, walked slowly to the street through the Forty-second Street exit, Together they proceeded to the Subway station and boarded an uptown express.
Later in the day Mr. Clemens went to the home of Urban H. Broughton, son-in-law of Mr. Rogers, where they were joined by other friends of the family. After spending a few minutes there he reappeared and went away in a carriage. He did not go to the Rogers home and it was said that he had probably returned to Redding.
The funeral, at which Sam was a pallbearer, was in New York City, May 21st. . The body was taken for burial by train to Fairhaven.
This was also the time that Mark Twain’s trust in two of his closest advisors and assistants was destroyed, generally referred to as the Ashcroft-Lyon Affair.
On May 25 Sam recorded going to New York to check with a secretary of the late H.H, Rogers, Miss A. Watson, who had been put in charge of looking into the financial records to see if the Ashcrofts had committed theft. Apparently Katherine Harrison, who was Rogers’ personal secretary and had done most of the heavy lifting for Rogers in handling Sam’s finances, was too busy dealing with Standard Oil Company issues following Rogers’ passing.
Fears includes this passage:
About the 25th of May Paine & I went down to New York. Stanchfield [a lawyer] wanted the examination of checks & vouchers transferred to a man-a public & responsible account, incorruptible by injured-servant tears & maudunn sentimentality. So Paine & I went to the Standard Oil, & I delivered my message to Miss Watson in one of the private offices. She was very frosty; whereby I knew Miss Lyon had been crying down the back of her neck & saying damaging things about me; & that Miss Watson was further incensed against me because those deadly figures had damaged the Ashcrofts in her estimation, & she had failed to find any want to undamage them.
She was just a little inconsistent. In the beginning she remarked, gloomily, that the examination had cost her ten days of exhausting & frightful labor; whereas toward the end of her talk she remarked that the labor had been very light, because the vouchers & checks tallied so well that it was but little trouble to check them up. “Check them up.” ‘That was her expression. She used it again, a month later, when she sent her bill
If there was any bright spot in Mark Twain’s final year, it was the return of his youngest daughter, Jean, to his home. Isabel Lyon had been largely responsible for Jean’s banishment from the Twain household, by convincing them that Jean needed to be kept in a sanitarium. Lyon’s motivations for this are still debated.
On July 18th Twain wrote to Clara, on an ironical aspect of the Jean Clemens, Ashcroft-Lyon affair.
Clärchen dear Jean is a surprise & a wonder. She has plenty of wisdom, judgment, penetration, practical good sense—like her mother—& character, courage, definiteness, decision; also goodness, a humane spirit, charity, kindliness, pity; industry, perseverance, intelligence, a clean mind, a clean soul, dignity, honesty, truthfulness, high ideals, loyalty, faithfulness to duty—she is everything that Miss Lyon isn’t.
She went twice with the lawyer, & saw Miss Lyon stretched upon the rack. It was necessary. There had to be a witness, or Miss Lyon would deny on a Sunday what she confessed on a Saturday, & there wasn’t another witness to be had but Paine or me—& of course neither of us would do.
Oh, the irony of it! that reptile Lyon mistress of our house these several years & Jean barred out of it & as being an impossible!
...
God will punish Paine. I know it. Because he is so intemperately glad over yesterday's tragedy.
Clara and Ossip Gabrilowitsch would marry October 6, 1909 and soon depart for Europe. Twain, along with Albert Bigelow Paine, traveled to Bermuda November 22nd and returned again on December the 18th.
Jean died Christmas Eve, December 24, 1909. It was first ruled by the examining physician of the county that Jean’s death was due to drowning, evidently during a seizure. A later investigation showed she had not died directly from drowning but more probably from possibly strangulation due to epilepsy or from heart failure; the body was found in the bathtub only partly submerged and the lungs contained very little water.
He wrote of Jean in his final autobiographical entry:
There was never a kinder heart than Jean’s. From her childhood up she always spent the most of her allowance on charities of one kind and another. After she became secretary and had her income doubled she spent her money upon these things with a free hand. Mine too, I am glad and grateful to say.
She was a loyal friend to all animals, and she loved them all, birds, beasts and everything—even snakes—an inheritance from me. She knew all the birds; she was high up in that lore. She became a member of various humane societies when she was still a little girl—both here and abroad—and she remained an active member to the last. She founded two or three societies for the protection of animals, here and in Europe.
She was an embarrassing secretary, for she fished my correspondence out of the waste-basket and answered the letters. She thought all letters deserved the courtesy of an answer. Her mother brought her up in that kindly error.
She could write a good letter, and was swift with her pen. She had but an indifferent ear for music, but her tongue took to languages with an easy facility. She never allowed her Italian, French and German to get rusty through neglect.
Her unearned and atrocious malady—epilepsy—damaged her disposition when its influence was upon her, and made her say and do ungentle things; but when the influence passed away her inborn sweetness returned, and then she was wholly lovable. Her disease, and its accompanying awful convulsions, wore out her gentle mother’s strength with grief and watching and anxiety, and caused her death, poor Livy! Jean’s—like her mother’s—was a fine character; there is no finer.
Twain ends his autobiography with:
When Clara went away two weeks ago to live in Europe, it was hard, but I could bear it, for I had Jean left. I said we would be a family. We said we would be close comrades and happy—just we two. That fair dream was in my mind when Jean met me at the steamer last Monday; it was in my mind when she received me at this door last Tuesday evening. We were together; we were a family! the dream had come true—oh, preciously true, contentedly true, satisfyingly true! and remained true two whole days.
And now? Now, Jean is in the grave!
In the grave—if I can believe it. God rest her sweet spirit!
The loneliness of Stormfield was too much for Sam Clemens to bear, so he departed for Bermuda January 5, 1910, arriving at Hamilton on the 7th. Donald Hoffman, in his book “Mark Twain in Paradise” writes of this eighth visit to the island:
Clemens began the first of ninety-five days on the Islands, his longest stay. He wore a black mourning band on his left arm, and when he wrote Loomis that day from Bay House he used stationery bordered in black. “I have just arrived,” he said, “& am very much pleased with the weather.”
Clemens resumed his pattern of reading and writing in the mornings, then taking carriage rides in the afternoons. Helen Allen’s blurry snapshots sometimes showed him dressed in white—“my dontcareadamnsuit,” he called it—and seated in a rocker on the Bay House lawn, smoking. When he showed Mrs. Allen his chapter on the death of Jean, saying it was the last he would ever write, tears welled in his eyes.
Occasionally he suffered chest pains, she wrote, but a cup of almost boiling water usually relieved him at once, “and two or three more were sure to do so.” In spite of his angina, and the serenity of Bay House (so close to town, but unknown to most Bermudians even today), Clemens continued to make excursions. Mrs. Allen watched over him and took along a thermos of hot water.
I don’t want to die here, for this is an unkind place for a person in that condition. I should have to lay in the undertaker’s cellar until the ship would remove me, & it is dark down there & unpleasant.
When he came to leave the Islands, on Tuesday, April 12, he was too weak to be dressed. Wrapped in his coat and a few rugs, Clemens was carried in a canvas chair to the SS Corona, then taken by the tender to the RMS Oceana.
Sam arrived in New York April 14 and returned to Stormfield the same day. Clara and her husband Ossip returned from Europe on the 16th
Mark Twain died April 21, 1910, one day after Halley’s Comet came to perihelion. The New York Times, p. 1, Apr. 22 covered Twain’s passing. They noted that “Mr. Paine says that all heart went out of him and his work when his daughter Jean died. He has practically written nothing since he summoned his energies to write a last chapter memorial of her for his autobiography.”
The article writes of his last moments:
“For two hours he lay in bed enjoying the feeling of this return of strength. Then he made a movement and asked in a faint voice for the copy of Carlyle’s “French Revolution,” which he has always had near him for the last year, and which he has read and re-read and brooded over.
The book was handed to him, and he lifted it up as if to read. Then a smile faintly illuminated his face when he realized that he was trying to read without his glasses. He tried to say, “Give me my glasses,” but his voice failed, and the nurses bending over him could not understand. He motioned for a sheet of paper and a pencil, and wrote what he could not say.
With his glasses on he read a little and then slowly put the book down with a sigh. Soon he appeared to become drowsy and settled on his pillow. Gradually he sank and settled into a lethargy. Dr. Halsey appreciated that he could have been roused, but considered it better for him to rest. At 3 o’clock he went into complete unconsciousness.
Later Dr. Quintard, who had arrived from New York, held a consultation with Dr. Halsey, and it was decided that death was near. The family was called and gathered about the bedside watching in a silence which was long unbroken. It was the end. At twenty-two minutes past 6, with the sunlight just turning red as it stole into the window, in perfect silence he breathed his last.”