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Last Mark Twain Posting! PROMISE!
Jul. 8th, 2010 05:33 pmRon Powers glosses over the end of Sam Clemens’ life with the words, He aged, and he died. Death and loss and the embarrassment of his own failing body haunted his final years, and sometimes “despair,” a word that has often been draped over his life after Livy like a shroud. (That there is some bee-you-ti-ful prose!)
But I was curious so I went to the library and checked out Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain: God’s Fool to read all about what Powers was too discreet to get into.
In his dotage, Clemens developed a fixation on little girls that seems to have rivaled Humbert Humbert’s. Powers dismisses the attraction as platonic, but I don’t think so.
For one thing Clemens called the girls his “Angel Fish” – an innocuous enough term unless you know your Suetonius which Clemens certainly did, it was favorite bedtime reading. Emperor Tiberius who began Rome’s descent into corruption after the death of his sanctimonious stepfather, kept a villa in Capri whose pools he stocked with… little boys. Tiberius called them pisciculi – little fish. He trained his pisciculi – and I quote – “to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles.” This is one of the most famous passages in Suetonius. No way Clemens was not alluding to it with the nickname he chose for his nymphets.
For another, there was an… incident… that precipitated his last flight from Bermuda home to Connecticut. Powers doesn’t get into it, implies merely that Clemens wanted to die in his own bed.
But Hamlin Hill gets into it, insofar as one can at a hundred years’ remove.
Clemens was singularly obsessed with a girl called Helen Allen, the adolescent daughter of the American consul. He wrote her mash notes. Years later an employee of Twain’s publisher wrote of … some story… which … is something very terrible that happened in Bermuda shortly before M.T.’s death… It is something unprintable…
I assume he flashed his shriveled old man cock at her. I assume too that he was half senile when he did it, that this may have been a form of sexual signaling popular in the mining towns of his youth.
Other than that, Clemens descent into death was strictly King Lears-ville. He had three daughters with whom his relationships were very bizarre. They were constantly going into neurasthenic declines, neurasthenia being the psychopathologic illness so popular among upper class women throughout the 19th century whose exact epidemiology remains unclear. One daughter had died of spinal meningitis while Clemens was abroad repairing the family finances; the nicest was an epileptic who drowned in her bath. Clara, the middle daughter, the one Clemens – never afraid to play favorites! – seemed to like the least lived until 1963 when she died in San Diego. (I don’t know whether the circumstances were mysterious. Of course, I would like them to be.)
I didn’t cry at the end of the Powers book, but I cried at the end of Hill’s. It’s that quality I can’t really articulate. When he died something changed forever; there will never be any going back.
But I was curious so I went to the library and checked out Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain: God’s Fool to read all about what Powers was too discreet to get into.
In his dotage, Clemens developed a fixation on little girls that seems to have rivaled Humbert Humbert’s. Powers dismisses the attraction as platonic, but I don’t think so.
For one thing Clemens called the girls his “Angel Fish” – an innocuous enough term unless you know your Suetonius which Clemens certainly did, it was favorite bedtime reading. Emperor Tiberius who began Rome’s descent into corruption after the death of his sanctimonious stepfather, kept a villa in Capri whose pools he stocked with… little boys. Tiberius called them pisciculi – little fish. He trained his pisciculi – and I quote – “to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles.” This is one of the most famous passages in Suetonius. No way Clemens was not alluding to it with the nickname he chose for his nymphets.
For another, there was an… incident… that precipitated his last flight from Bermuda home to Connecticut. Powers doesn’t get into it, implies merely that Clemens wanted to die in his own bed.
But Hamlin Hill gets into it, insofar as one can at a hundred years’ remove.
Clemens was singularly obsessed with a girl called Helen Allen, the adolescent daughter of the American consul. He wrote her mash notes. Years later an employee of Twain’s publisher wrote of … some story… which … is something very terrible that happened in Bermuda shortly before M.T.’s death… It is something unprintable…
I assume he flashed his shriveled old man cock at her. I assume too that he was half senile when he did it, that this may have been a form of sexual signaling popular in the mining towns of his youth.
Other than that, Clemens descent into death was strictly King Lears-ville. He had three daughters with whom his relationships were very bizarre. They were constantly going into neurasthenic declines, neurasthenia being the psychopathologic illness so popular among upper class women throughout the 19th century whose exact epidemiology remains unclear. One daughter had died of spinal meningitis while Clemens was abroad repairing the family finances; the nicest was an epileptic who drowned in her bath. Clara, the middle daughter, the one Clemens – never afraid to play favorites! – seemed to like the least lived until 1963 when she died in San Diego. (I don’t know whether the circumstances were mysterious. Of course, I would like them to be.)
I didn’t cry at the end of the Powers book, but I cried at the end of Hill’s. It’s that quality I can’t really articulate. When he died something changed forever; there will never be any going back.
Samuel Clemens married an heiress named Olivia Langdon. She had no sense of humor. She hailed from Elmira, a town I know better than I want to: It’s also the ancestral seat of the Plunkett family into which I married. 
