(Summer 1897)
The death of his daughter Olivia Susan—Susy—of meningitis on 18 August 1896 was felt by Clemens as an “unspeakable disaster.”1 Susy had died in the Hartford home before Clemens could return from Europe, where he had just concluded his global lecture tour of 1895/1896. “To me our loss is bitter, bitter, bitter,” he wrote to W. D. Howells. “What a ghastly tragedy it was; how cruel it was; how exactly & precisely it was planned; & how remorselessly every detail of the dispensation was carried out.”2 Clemens had idolized Susy, and he never fully overcame his grief and resentment. In the following August, which brought the first anniversary of Susy's death, he was still sorrowing. He was then summering at the Swiss village of Weggis, beside Lake Lucerne, and there on August 18 he composed the poem “In Memoriam Olivia Susan Clemens.” In it he represented Susy as a spirit “all of light” dwelling within a temple attended by “adoring priests”:
And then when theyWere nothing fearing, and God's peace was in the air,
And none was prophesying harm—
The vast disaster fell:
Where stood the temple when the sun went down,
Was vacant desert when it rose again!3
[begin page 130]
In all likelihood it was during the stay at Weggis, which lasted from mid-July to the last week of September, that he wrote “In My Bitterness.” (The piece is written on a paper which Clemens used only at Weggis and shortly thereafter.) This anguished complaint may also have been written on August 18. It expresses what he managed to keep out of the memorial poem—his deep anger and sense of Nemesis, his idea that a malevolent deity had laid a trap and sprung it upon him. A few months later he wrote to Howells, who had also lost a daughter, “It is my quarrel—that traps like that are set. Susy & Winnie given us, in miserable sport, & then taken away.”4 Clemens probably saw it as a particular irony of his situation that, having long derided the notion of a special providence, he was now forced to consider himself the personal victim of a scheme of providential retribution.
In the first sentence of “In My Bitterness” Clemens left a blank space in the phrase “in the years that you have lived” (thus). He may have intended to fill in Susy's exact age. Born 19 March 1872, Susy died at the age of twenty-four.
The title has been supplied for this edition.
In my bitterness I saidⒶalteration in the MS, blaspheming, “Ah, my darlingⒶalteration in the MS there you lie, rescued from life; fortunate for the first time in the yearsⒶtextual note that you have lived;Ⓐalteration in the MS there you lie dumb and thankless, in this the first moment that ever you had anything to thank God for; there you lie, poor abused slave, set freeⒶalteration in the MS from the unspeakable insultⒶalteration in the MS of life, and by the same Hand that flung it in your face in the beginning. But I lie: you have still nothing to be thankful for; for you have not been freed out of pity for you, but to drive one more knife into my heart.
“There—that is something which I have noticed before: He neverⒶalteration in the MS does a kindness. When He seemsⒶemendation to do one, it is a trap which He is setting; you will walk into it some day, then you will understand, and be ashamed to remember how stupidly grateful you had been. No, He gives you riches, merely as a trap; it is to quadruple the bitterness of the poverty which He has planned for you. He gives you a healthy body and you are tricked into thanking HimⒶalteration in the MS for it; some day, when He has rotted it with disease and made it a hell of pains, you will know why He did it. He gives you a wife and children whom you adore, only that through the spectacle of the wanton shames and miseries which He will inflict upon them He may tear the palpitating heart out of your breast and slap you in the face with it. Ah yes, you are at peace, my [begin page 132] pride, my joy, my solaceⒶemendation, He has played the last and highest stake in HisⒶemendation sorry game, and is defeated: for, for your sake, I will be glad—and am glad. You are out of His reach forever; and I too; He can never hurt me any more.”
The manuscript is copy-text. No ambiguous compound is hyphenated at the end of a line in the manuscript.