Susy’s BiographyⒶapparatus note continued—Death of Mr. Langdon— Birth of Langdon Clemens—Burlesque map of Paris.
From Susy’s Biography.Ⓐapparatus note
PapaⒶapparatus note wrote mamma a great many beautiful love letters when he was engaged to mamma, but mamma says I am too young to see them yet; I asked papa what I should do for I didn’t (know) how I [begin page 360] could write a Biography of him without his love letters, papa said that I could write mamma’s opinion of them,Ⓐapparatus note and that would do just as well. So I’ll do as papa says, and mamma says she thinks they are the loveliest love letters that ever were written, she says that Hawthorne’s love letters to Mrs. Hawthorne are far inferiorⒺexplanatory note to these. Mamma (and papa) were going to board first in BufaloⒶapparatus note and grandpa said he would find them a good boarding-house. But he afterwards told mamma that he had bought a pretty house for them, and had it all beautifully furnished, he had also hired a young coachman, Patrick McAleer, and had bought a horse for them, which all would be ready waiting for them, when they should arive in Bufalo; but he wanted to keep it a secret from “Youth,” as grandpa called papa. What a delightful surprise it was! Grandpa went down to Bufalo with mamma and papa. And when they drove up to the house, papa said he thought the landlord of such a boarding-house must charge a great deal to those who wanted to live there. And when the secret was told papa was delighted beyond all degree. Mamma has told me the story many times, and I asked her what papa said when grandpa told him that the delightful boarding-house was his home, mamma answered that he was rather embariesed and so delighted he didn’t know what to say. About six months after papa and mamma were married grandpa died; it was a terrible blow on mamma, and papa told Aunt Sue he thought Livy would never smile again, she was so broken hearted. Mamma couldn’t have had a greater sorrow than that of dear grandpa’s death, or any that could equal it exept the death of papa. Mamma helped take care of grandpa during his illness and she couldn’t give up hope till the end had realy come.Ⓔ Ⓐapparatus note
Surely nothing is so astonishing, so unaccountable, as a woman’s endurance. Mrs. Clemens and I went down to Elmira about the 1st of June to help in the nursing of Mr. Langdon. Mrs. Clemens, her sister, (Susy Crane,)Ⓐapparatus note and I did all the nursing both day and night, during two months until the end. Two months of scorching, stifling heat. How much of the nursing did I do? My main watch was from midnight till four in the morning—nearly four hours. My other watch was a mid-dayⒶapparatus note watch, and I think it was only three hours. The two sisters divided the remaining seventeen hours of the twenty-four between them, and each of them tried generously and persistently to swindle the other out of a part of her watch. The “on” watch could not be depended upon to call the “off” watch—excepting when I was the “on” watch.
I went to bed early every night, and tried to get sleep enough by midnight to fit me for my work, but it was always a failure. I went on watch sleepy and remained miserably sleepy and wretched straight along through the four hours. I can still see myself sitting by that bed in the melancholy stillness of the sweltering night, mechanically waving a palm-leaf fan over the drawn white face of the patient; I can still recall my noddings, my fleeting unconsciousnesses, when the fan would come to a standstill in my hand, and I would wake up with a start and a hideous shock. I can recall all the torture of my efforts to keep awake; I can recall the sense of the indolent march of time, and how the hands of the tall clock seemed not to move at all, but to stand still. Through the long vigil there was nothing to do but softly wave the fan—and the gentleness and monotony of the movement itself helped to make me sleepy. The malady was cancer of the stomach, and not curable. There were no medicines to give. It was a case of slow [begin page 361] and steady perishing. At long intervals, the foam of champagne was administered to the patient, but no other nourishment, so far as I can remember.
A bird of a breed not of my acquaintance used to begin a sad and wearisome and monotonous piping in the shrubbery near the window a full hour before the dawn, every morning. He had no company; he conducted this torture all alone, and added it to my stock. He never stopped for a moment. I have experienced few things that were more maddening than that bird’s lamentings. During all that dreary siege I began to watch for the dawn long before it came; and I watched for it like the duplicate, I think, of the lonely castaway on an island in the sea, who watches the horizon for ships and rescue. When the first faint gray showed through the window-blinds I felt as no doubt that castaway feels when the dim threads of the looked-for ship appear against the sky.
I was well and strong, but I was a man and afflicted with a man’s infirmity—lack of endurance. But neither of those young women was well nor strong;Ⓐapparatus note stillⒶapparatus note I never found either of them sleepy or unalert when I came on watch; yet, as I have said, they divided seventeen hours of watching between them in every twenty-four. It is a marvelous thing. It filled me with wonder and admiration;Ⓐapparatus note also with shame, for my dull incompetency. Of course the physicians begged those daughters to permit the employment of professional nurses, but they would not consent. The mere mention of such a thing grieved them so that the matter was soon dropped, and not again referred to.
All through her life Mrs. Clemens was physically feeble, but her spirit was never weak. She lived upon it all her life, and it was as effective as bodily strength could have been. When our children were little she nursed them through long nights of sickness, as she had nursed her father. I have seen her sit up and hold a sick child upon her knees and croon to it and sway it monotonously to and fro to comfort it,Ⓐapparatus note a whole night long, without complaint or respite. But I could not keep awake ten minutes at a time. My whole duty was to put wood on the fire. I did it ten or twelve times during the night, but alwaysⒶapparatus note had to be called every time, and was always asleep again before I finished the operation, or immediately afterward.
No, there is nothing comparable to the endurance of a woman. In military life she would tire out any army of men, either in camp or on the march. I still remember with admiration that woman who got into the overland stage-coachⒶapparatus note somewhere on the plains, when my brother and I crossed the continentⒶapparatus note in the summer of 1861, and who sat bolt upright and cheerful, stage after stage, and showed no wear and tear. In those days, the one event of the dayⒶapparatus note in Carson City was the arrival of the overland coach. All the town was usually on hand to enjoy the event. The men would climb down out of the coach doubled up with cramps, hardly able to walk; their bodies worn, their spirits worn, their nerves raw, their tempers at a devilish point; but the women stepped out smiling and apparently unfatigued.
From Susy’s Biography.Ⓐapparatus note
AfterⒶapparatus note grandpapa’s death mamma and papa went back to Bufalo; and three months afterward dear little Langdon was born. Mamma named him Langdon after grandpapa, he was a wonderfully beautiful little boy, but very, very delicate. He had wonderful blue eyes, but such a blue that mamma has never been able to describe them to me so that I could [begin page 362] see them clearly in my mind’s eye. His delicate health was a constant anxiety to mamma, and he was so good and sweet that that must have troubled her too, as I know it did.Ⓐapparatus note
He was prematurely born. We had a visitor in the house and when she was leaving she wanted Mrs. Clemens to go to the station with her. I objected. But this was a visitor whose desire Mrs. Clemens regarded as law. The visitor wasted so much precious time in taking her leave that Patrick had to drive in a gallop to get to the station in time. In those days the streets of Buffalo were not the model streets which they afterward became. They were paved with large cobblestones, and had not been repaired since Columbus’s time. Therefore the journey to the station was like the Channel passage in a storm. The result to Mrs. Clemens was a premature confinement, followed by a dangerous illnessⒺexplanatory note. In my belief there was but one physician who could save her. That was the almost divine Mrs. Gleason, of ElmiraⒺexplanatory note, who died at a great age two years ago, after being the idol of that town for more than half a century. I sent for her and she came. Her ministrations were prosperous, but at the end of a week she said she was obliged to return to Elmira, because of imperative engagements. I felt sure that if she could stay with us three days more Livy would be out of all danger. But Mrs. Gleason’s engagements were of such a nature that she could not consent to stay. This is why I placed a private policeman at the door with instructions to let no one pass out without my privity and consent. In these circumstances, poor Mrs. Gleason had no choice—therefore she stayed. She bore me no malice for this, and most sweetly said so when I saw her silken white head and her benignant and beautiful face for the last time, which was three years ago.
Before Mrs. Clemens was quite over her devastating illness, Miss Emma Nye, a former schoolmate of hers, arrived from South Carolina to pay us a visit, and was immediately taken with typhoid fever. We got nurses—professional nurses of the type of that day, and of previous centuries—but we had to watch those nurses while they watched the patient, which they did in their sleep, as a rule. I watched them in the daytime, Mrs. Clemens at night. She slept between medicine-times, but she always woke up at the medicine-times and went in and woke up the nurse that was on watch and saw the medicines administered. This constant interruption of her sleep seriously delayed Mrs. Clemens’s recovery. Miss Nye’s illness proved fatalⒺexplanatory note. During the last two or three days of it, Mrs. Clemens seldom took her clothes off, but stood a continuous watch. Those two or three days are among the blackest, the gloomiest, the most wretched of my long life.
The resulting periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life. During one of these spasms of humorous possession I sent down to my newspaper office for a huge wooden capital M and turned it upside-down and carved a crude and absurd map of Paris upon it, and published itⒺexplanatory note, along with a sufficiently absurd description of it, with guarded and imaginary compliments of it bearing the signatures of General Grant and other experts. The Franco-Prussian war was in everybody’s mouth at the time, and so the map would have been valuable—if it had been valuable. It wandered to Berlin, and the American students there got much satisfaction out of it. They would carry it to the big beer halls and sit over it at a beer table and discuss it with violent enthusiasm and apparent admiration, in English, until their purpose [begin page 363] was accomplished, which was to attract the attention of any German soldiers that might be present. When that had been accomplished, they would leave the map there and go off, jawing, to a little distance and wait for results. The results were never long delayed. The soldiers would pounce upon the map and discuss it in German and lose their tempers over it and blackguard it and abuse it and revile the author of it, to the students’ entire content. The soldiers were always divided in opinion about the author of it, some of them believing he was ignorant, but well-intentionedⒶapparatus note; the others believing he was merely an idiot.
Hawthorne’s love letters . . . are far inferior] Julian Hawthorne included the love letters in his biography of his parents, issued around the time that Susy was writing. All of Clemens’s extant letters are published in Mark Twain’s Letters, Volume 3 (Hawthorne 1885; see “Calendar of Courtship Letters,” L3, 473–80).
He was prematurely born . . . followed by a dangerous illness] The “visitor whose desire Mrs. Clemens regarded as law” was apparently Mary Mason Fairbanks; her visit, and the dash for the station with which it ended, occurred in late October 1870. Langdon was born one month prematurely, on 7 November 1870. Three months later, in early February 1871, Olivia began to show symptoms of typhoid ( L4: 5 Nov 1870 to OC, 222 n. 5; 17 Feb 1871 to JLC and family, 332 n. 1; for Langdon’s death see AD, 22 Mar 1906).
Mrs. Gleason, of Elmira] The Clemenses sent for Dr. Rachel Brooks Gleason (1820–1905), a physician and cofounder of the Elmira Water Cure, a health resort at which Langdon family members had often been treated (22 Feb 1871 to OC, L4 335 n. 2).
Before Mrs. Clemens was quite over her devastating illness, Miss Emma Nye . . . illness proved fatal] Clemens reversed the actual sequence of events. Emma Nye (1846–70) was staying with the Clemenses on her way from Aiken, South Carolina, to Detroit; she lay ill with typhoid fever in the Clemenses’ own bed for almost a month, dying there on 29 September 1870. Olivia’s illness followed Nye’s death ( L4: 31 Aug 1870 to PAM, 186 n. 3; SLC and OLC to Fairbanks, 2 Sept 1870, 189 n. 2; 7 Sept 1870 to Wolcott, 191; 9 Oct 1870 to Redpath, 206 n. 1).
a crude and absurd map of Paris upon it, and published it] In the fall of 1870, newspapers closely followed the reports of the Franco-Prussian War. The German army began advancing on Paris in early September, and many American newspapers published maps showing the city’s fortifications. Mark Twain’s burlesque (reproduced below) was printed in the Buffalo Express on 17 September 1870 (SLC 1870d). Clemens’s inscription on it reads: “Mr. Spofford, could I get you to preserve this work of art among the geographical treasures of the Congressional Library?” (see 10? Oct 1870 to Spofford, L4, 207).
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Source documents.
TS1 (incomplete) Typescript, leaves numbered 320–26 (half of 326 and all of 327–30 are missing), made from Hobby’s notes and revised: ‘Thursday . . . it did.’ (359 title–362.2).TS2 Typescript, leaves numbered 462–71, made from the revised TS1.
TS4 Typescript, pages 719–28, made from the revised TS1.
The pages missing from TS1 were discarded by Paine when he edited the dictation for MTA . Hobby incorporated the revisions that Clemens made on TS1 into TS2, and they were incorporated into TS4 as well. TS4 has no authority for the text that survives in TS1. Where TS1 is missing, however, TS4 was collated and its one variant reported, because TS2 and TS4 derive independently from TS1 and therefore either may incorporate authorial readings not present in the other. When TS2 and TS4 agree, they confirm the readings of the missing portion of TS1.
Paine reviewed TS2 for possible publication in the NAR, querying much of the text to suggest omission. Clemens decided not to publish any of the dictation and did not revise TS2.
Marginal Notes on TS1 and TS2 Concerning Publication in the NAR