Chapt Eight- One Flesh- Two Legacies

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

 

With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.

 

As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

 

While God is marching on.

 

(Chorus)
Glory, glory, hallelujah!

 

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

 

Glory, glory, hallelujah!

 

Our God is marching on.

 

                    1861- Julia Ward Howe

Chapter 8

One Flesh

The Two Legacies of Mark Twain

All through the centuries, women have been the most faithful, or religious if you will, bound by maternal obligations, homemaking, depending a great deal on husbands and God to survive and find contentment and purpose. In my own life, I often noticed the disproportionate involvement of females in church life. Men were there because they were expected to be. It was good for appearances. Women were there because they believed. And trying to tame men, and serve God, they had a lot to pray about... Acknowledging that "saints" are mere humans, here is the story of a Victorian saint, assigned to one of the greatest challenges to any woman in her time: to daily match wits with our “Lincoln of American Literature.”

Rich, warm aromas fill the room, as silver and fine china glisten upon a perfectly spread tablecloth. Jervis Langdon, rotund and dignified, takes his chair at the end of the sumptuously served dinner table, and his little family habitually bows their heads in unison. The news has just reached them in Palmyra, New York that Abraham Lincoln was elected as President of the United States. Langdon prays an extra-long prayer of thanksgiving, for Lincoln embodies his greatest hopes for America and her millions of Negro slaves. His wife and children listen respectfully to him as he thanks God for the food on his table, the health of his family, and the prospects that Lincoln will somehow end Slavery- and the widening division in the Country.

It is impossible for us today to relate to this structured domestic scene of piety, formality and patriotism. We have never known the delightful ring of silver serving dishes, or the severity of a New England coal magnate, or an election where the results could trigger a bloody civil war. We have never felt the weight of the world on our family meal, wondering what the future might bring, or been called to pray during such circumstances. Maybe any circumstances. Most of us have never known anyone like Jervis Langdon, who manipulates men and forests and coal mines like a chess game; a man so comfortable in his own sphere that he has fashioned his own lifestyle of Faith, complete with his own set of rules.

Langdon is a force to be reckoned with. A tireless entrepreneur, he has built a lumber and coal trade that extends across Pennsylvania to New York, and used his wherewithal to establish Palmyra as a major way-station for the infamous “Underground Railroad.” With his help and the committed energies of Frederick Douglass, a personal friend, and other Abolitionists, they will eventually oversee the successful yet illegal conveyance of over eight hundred runaway slaves to Canada. Considered to be “contraband,” by Federal Law, aiding any one of them would be grounds for a serious fine and even imprisonment, and every member of his household might easily be implicated in violating the controversial Fugitive Slave Law. But these risks have been ignored and their possible sting long forgotten over the years. Each person is satisfied to be a“living sacrifice,” if necessary, for the cause of Christ, as they perceived it.

Ever since Langdon offered the hand of friendship and freedom to Frederick Douglass, over twenty years before, his place in history has been as if etched in New England granite. His three children have never known any different than to be ready to support him in his righteous yet clandestine cause. Religious and self-sacrificial, the Langdons love their country but answer to a “higher Law” than that of the United States of America.

Slavery is considered a curse on the Nation, an evil that should be rubbed out, and the sooner the better. No mere “Sunday Christians,” the Langdons are guided by Holy Scripture and governed by conscience, as a lifestyle. They take their conflict with the laws of man as a matter of course, and live in quiet, winsome joy as mediums of human freedom, and followers of Jesus.... “Greater love hath no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.” This is the family table upon which young Olivia Langdon, a pretty teen-ager, feeds her body and soul…

                                                                              “//”

“... a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh'?

So then, they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore, what God joined together let not man separate.”

Jesus

Olivia Clemens was the archetype for the traditional American wife and mother. Her story is as heartwarming, and yet as heartbreaking as could be told, proving that there is no “normal.” There is no perfect family, and that no matter how wise or blessed you are, no matter how beautiful your life or lovely your children, there is no safe zone to avoid life's surprises or tragedies- and partly because there is no protection from falling in love with someone who might turn your world upside down...

Only a monumental ego would see a small likeness of a girl in a locket, perhaps an artistic fantasy, and trusting in his own charm and good fortune, think that this could lead him back across the sea to love and marriage. But that is what happened. Sam Clemens had sailed the oceans, excavated the Rockies for gold, entertained the masses, and dined with Royalty… he must have been feeling invincible.

Like much of Sam Clemens's life, when he applied his powerful will, events played out just as he wanted them. At the “end” of Sam's first visit, he arranged with the carriage driver to contrive a sensational “accident” upon his “leaving,” one which he had performed before. The result would be that he could fake an injury and arrange for an extension of his visit, and with any luck, finagle many more casual contacts with his hand-picked, but unknowing future bride.

Olivia in fact ended up his private “nurse,” willingly playing along with his feigned incapacitation, and in their charade they soon grew fond of each other. Sam wasted no time expressing his desires, but the Langdons as a unit, as “one flesh,” proved to be a tough nut to crack. He wrote the family minister during that time, entering “Tuesday and Tuesday night she avoided me and would not do more than be simply polite to me because her parents said NO absolutely, (almost)- Wednesday they capitulated and marched out with their sidearms- Wednesday night she said over and over and over again that she loved me but was sorry she did and hoped it would yet pass away.”

 Clemens meets Charles Langdon's sister... 

his future wife 

For better or for worse...

Olivia Langdon, after considerable resistance and romantic vacillations, became Mrs. Samuel Clemens. Suddenly the power which bonded her parents now united Sam to Livy. They became one. But Olivia was no garden butterfly. She had a zealous Faith, built on activism, far more risky and heroic than anything Sam had ever experienced. “Livy” had all the traits, and had experienced all the danger and excitement of a bona fide Union spy, who had earned her stripes and wisdom beyond her years- an unexpected trait for those of her sex.

Clemens's marriage to Olivia turned out to be another example of his charmed existence. And he knew it. He once wrote to her: “I am notorious, but you are great- That is the difference between us. You had a sentence in your letter that all the culture and all the genius and all the practice in the world could not improve.” He later pin-pointed that “sentence” as her resolute optimism in the face of adversity. Livy was irreversibly positive. Little did he understand that this trait did not emanate from her, but through Faith in her God.

Livy was not only a classic beauty who could hold his focus for a lifetime, she was a woman of impeccable character and superior intellect who could manage the self-destructive leanings of her famous husband. And he seemed to defer to her immediately, if not a tad begrudgingly. She became his idol, his confidant, and most importantly his censor. Sam would write more travel lampoons, but she gradually steered him towards home, even the seminal home of his boyhood, to powerful and enduring themes about community, belonging, human rights and man's calling of a “higher law.”

Daughters Susy and Clara Clemens

The list of Twain's books is a marvel, their variety of style and points of view are impressive. Their success has been well praised and documented. Clemens never quit growing or changing, and under Livy's tutelage, he never quit improving. But to his and his wife's credit, “a writer” never became who he was. He was first and foremost an indulgent father, and always cherished his girls more than his life. They had four children, a son who died young, and three spirited daughters who filled the home with music and impromptu plays and provided Clemens, the eternal child, an affectionate gang for whom he would always be the titular head. Perhaps the most endearing evidence of Mark Twain’s inner charm and sweetness were his communications and interactions with them.

Oldest and youngest daughters,

 Jean and Susy

Sam Clemens demonstrated the kind of fatherhood which became our American standard. Few fathers in any era have ever lived up to it. Sadly, Sam never softened where it came to spiritual matters. It was up to Livy to plant the love of God and trust in His Will in their daughters. Like many women in love, no doubt Livy assumed the fallacy that he would soften with time, with her help. In the end it was she who was changed more. But Sam and all of his friends and associates lifted Olivia up as a near saint, a bastion of integrity, and Samuel Clemens's most valuable friend and asset. In the beginning of their intellectual duel, he had been sure beautiful Olivia could not resist him. Unfortunately for her inner peace, he was right.

The two had a policy of charity, and gave generously to causes they supported. They had a soft spot for the downtrodden, and almost anyone with a sad story. Sam was especially motivated to help black people, whenever the occasion presented itself. He was known by those who knew him to actually be prejudiced, overly favorable towards black persons; Hiring them whenever he could, quietly funding the educations of those in whom he saw special potential. The problem for Mark Twain was how prejudiced he was against everybody else, and how quickly he showed his contempt. So much so, Livy once had to scold him about his racial bias towards non-blacks... “I will give you a motto,” she instructed, “and it will be useful to you if you will adopt it: Consider every man colored until they are proved white.”

Livy in too many ways became Sam's conscience, but at least he had the good sense to listen to her. She pained over his overbearing, outspoken ways, and overt criticism of people with whom he disagreed. “You go too far, much too far in all you say, and if you write in the same way as you have in this letter people forget the cause for it and remember only the hateful manner in which it was said.”

She begged him to change his manner, but acknowledged that he did not want to. “Think of the side I know; the sweet dear and tender side- that I love so.” The voice of womanhood, of human reason, was in mortal combat with a mighty man, out of control... “Does it help the world to always rail at it?”

Olivia did not mince her words. Her poignant admonishments in her private letters to him burn through the decades, fresh and to the point. Sadly, we are probably more affected than Sam was. It was the only ammunition she had, and she shot to kill. “You always dwell on the evil until those who dwell beside you are crushed to the earth and you seem almost like a monomaniac. Oh! I love you so and wish you would listen and take heed.”

So lovingly, faithfully, Olivia took on a lifetime project. It was to be a death match from the beginning, and in this friendly marital tournament they both would eventually lose the thing most precious to them. She would finally capitulate and lose her orthodox Faith, her health and eventually her gracious tolerance of him. He would lose her, without true reconciliation, but with self-condemnation, and without a Savior-god to forgive him of those things which he could not forgive in himself. With no higher authority, and his idol gone, his life ended in anti-climatic nihilism.

The Clemens family had great world adventures and cultural activities which provided their lives a constant diet of excitement and cultural enrichment. But Sam found that he never saw a fledgling invention that he should not invest in. Over his first decade as the Country’s rising star, he lost a great deal of the money he had made, especially in his pride of life, the Paige type-setting machine. Eventually his finances were in a shambles, as failing investments and publishing projects absorbed most of his attention, and his creativity suffered from so much distraction.

The charmed path lit up again when Sam met H. H. Rogers, a wealthy oil tycoon who offered to help him recover to financial solvency. Desperately the flustered business dabbler yielded in humble gratitude. His new business manager instructed him to continue his European retreat, and encouraged him to get out of Dodge and stay out- to take a huge trip, (and thus stop his habitual entrepreneurial risk-taking) and go on a lecture tour, something he dreaded, and over time and good management, he could recoup his losses.

Meanwhile his investments would be gradually, mercifully liquidated. This proved to be a drawn-out nightmare, but Twain was saved from the pain of the mess he had made, and they extended their nomadism for what turned out to be over a decade of travels throughout Europe. And Rogers, a very wealthy man, was able to consult and cajole Clemens to eventual financial victory.

When the Clemens's arrived in Paris in 1891, he set out to glean all he could, as he perfected his outline for a faded, half-written manuscript, now over ten years old, a book he had researched for most of his career, and was finally ready to finish, about Joan of Arc.

Joan of Arc was not likely to have been what Mark Twain's devoted readers were expecting. Fans have a way of boxing in their idols, preferring that their preconceived notions be regularly reinforced. Creative minds are supposed to stay in their original lane. Surely a heroine less rooted in Roman Catholic tradition or something more edgy and realistic would have fit his reputation. Was this not the innocent lass built of myth and pompous French nationalism, a veritable Catholic prophet and savior, who was supposedly instructed by angels to save France from British domination? An agnostic like Clemens only needed a paragraph to destroy such foolishness. But Twain shocked the world with his conclusions.

There is no doubt that his wife and daughters had instilled a new and ill-fitting digit in his novelist’s spine; Idealism. The Clemens's women were gradually taming his natural toxicity. As he researched and wrote, Twain’s Joan emerged as compelling, wonderful and innocent, and all that was good in womankind. It has to be that his novel about Joan was a tribute to the spiritual truth and authenticity he had come to know in Olivia. And Susy and Clara and Jean. Joan became like a daughter to him, and had there been a sequel, she would have wrecked his career.

In a strange reversal, Mark Twain found and embraced in Joan that which he would not receive from the Christ of the Bible; someone sent by God, true and pure, literally, heroically sacrificing themselves for their fellow man. Both were betrayed, put to death by the religious establishment. Somehow a young French girl could convince him to believe, where a Jewish carpenter could not.

The old Mark Twain would have gladly had Joan of Arc belly dancing for the French generals... and then the priests at her trial. And much more, and that delicious treatment would have sold many books. But a rock-slide of uncharacteristic sentimentality had knocked the Twain convoy off-course.

Typically, he recoiled from putting his name on the manuscript, in fact he was reluctant to even assign it to Mark Twain. Instead he hid under the cloak of a Fifteenth Century scribe he named “Sieur Louis de Conte, ” and sent it to the States for magazine serialization. Much later he would confess that he had penned the touching legend, not written for money but for love. In order to do that however, Jehanne d'Arc was passed over to fashion a Joan who ended up the savior of his choosing, a shameless whitewash that had little scholarly merit. The critics panned the book and his fans were confused or something far worse: ambivalent. But Livy and his daughters loved it. Resolute as ever, Twain loved his goddess so much that he did not apologize to anyone.

Still, it was such an unwelcome departure from his popular and usually cynical persona. Fans do not want their jesters to become eulogizers. Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was published and then forgotten in 1896, and its failure would have sunk most authors. Terminally insolent, Sam considered it his finest achievement. But to critics, Joan of Arc had mysteriously taken the starch out of the lion of American literature. And there was a more subtle and perhaps devastating effect from the story, being read as it developed every night to Clemens's daughters. As the family barely kept their heads above the waters of solvency... an entry in Susy's journal read simply “Tonight Joan of Arc was burned at the stake.”

Was Twain's love affair with saintly Joan, which suddenly climaxed with her cruel and unjust treatment from the church, a bitter pill for young girls who had been raised with ambivalent attitudes towards organized religion? Might Twain's eloquently described burning of Joan been the last straw in their own search for God in traditional places? Joan may have been an inspiration to the believing world, but simultaneously a horrific indictment of the organized Church, and a warning to children bred in non-conformism.

Besides a world-famous author, Mark Twain had become as Paine his biographer described, “a moralist and sage,” the toast of Europe, and even little Jean was impressed with the spread of his notoriety. But as children often do, they can say more than they intend to. She once observed;

“Why Papa, if it keeps on like this, pretty soon there won't be anybody for you to get acquainted with but God.”

Jean Clemens

Her older sister Susy was more analytical... She once sized up his spiritual position this way:

“He doesn't like to go to church at all, why I never understood, until just now, he told me the other day, that he couldn't bear to hear anyone talk but himself, but that he could listen to himself for hours without getting tired, of course he said this in a joke, but I've no doubt it was founded on truth.”

Clara Clemens- "Sass Mill"

Clara, who Twain lovingly called “Sassmill,” was the most vocal and flagrantly insolent. She requested and was sent to a private music school in Vienna. There she would study under Leschetizky, the most renowned musician in Austria, and meet her future husband, a gazelle-framed Russian teenager with heavenly virtuosity, named Ossip Gabrilowitsch. They were able to forestall marriage for a decade, wisely allowing their talents to fully mature independently.

Clara with her music instructor

Over the years, Sam quietly went back and forth to the States, discreetly negotiating his bankruptcy, which eventually saved his financial situation... By 1895, the family had enjoyed extended stays in London, Berlin, the French Riviera, Rome and Florence. The girls studied under prestigious voice coaches, and were commended as talented singers, but according to Susy's coach in Paris, she was physically underdeveloped, needing sunshine and old-fashioned farm work to enlarge her lungs. Needless to say, that never happened.

This innocent appraisal of Susy, the oldest and most gifted daughter, may have been the first objective voice that did not make excuses for her fragile temperament or frail constitution. This observation seems prophetic now, as she passed away from spinal meningitis in 1896, about a year after returning to the U.S.. By then the youngest daughter Jean had already experienced her first epileptic seizure. The next few years were to be a crushing test for the Clemens family, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

The first tragedy was a swift, horrifying decline and death of Susy, the Clemens's budding luminary. Her demise might have been more complicated than the explanation provided in the newspapers, that Susy had suffered with a fever and then succumbed to spinal meningitis. Olivia and Clara came home to a rocked household, a beautiful young woman dead, and a dark trail of tormented scrawlings written in the nearly illegible hand of a psychotic. Susy had become convinced, in her dying days, that she was being directed about numerous spiritual matters by a famous French singer who had been dead almost sixty years.

A beautiful tintype Susy Clemens, in 

her late adolescence,  terribly defaced, 

adding to her mystery. 

Susy had been ripe for a meltdown, and had become overwhelmed with the restrictions of society. She had written right before they came back to America:

“I do think it is hard to be young. One is so horribly alive, and has so much temperament one can't bear things well, and oh dear, one never gets any serenity.”

Susy was no epileptic, but she knew about Jean's medications, and had become frustrated at her own sexuality. Unable to act on it, and rejected by her college partner and most of society for her feelings, she was at a crossroad, as she had been raised to “trust her own feelings” and intellect above all else. The antidote was readily available, perhaps in her own medicine cabinet, drugs her younger sister took which would solve her problem... but she probably had no idea they were deadly toxic when taken in improper doses.

It is possible, even quite likely that Susy, earnestly desiring to muffle her sexuality, began to experiment with her sister’s prescriptions. Rather than meningitis, this could better explain the gradual poisoning and blindness and bizarre hallucinations she experienced in the last days of her life.

Burning up from within, out of her earthly mind, Susy refused any medical attention. In her last moments she became blind, while trying to write the instructions she was receiving from a dark spirit named Madame Malibran. Madame Malibran had been a singing sensation in the 1850’s, traveling Europe and the States before dying fairly young in a horse accident. It was impossible that the two had ever met. It was a mystery as to how or where Susy had heard of this person, or why she had such a personal knowledge and identification with her, a singer who had been dead for forty years. But the spirit of Madame Maria Felicia Malibran demanded obedience and told Susy, dying and burning with a fever, to say many things; to repeat her orders as she received them, and to continue her spiritual quest regardless of the people in her circle who might not approve or understand.

The structured terminology, the canyon of time and culture between Susy and Malibran, and the confidence which Susy displayed in her journey seems to suggest that the free-thinking young woman had fallen into the clutches of hypnotism or very dark spiritual influences. Curiously, the language transcribed even sounds poetic and ancient... certainly within Susy's literary abilities, but later she refers to Malibran worshipfully as “the magnificent darkness of the Lord.”

This was not just a few moments of a confused mind, but hours of enthusiastic spirit channeling and determined, even desperate attempts to write everything down, as if she was advancing into another universe and was trying to leave evidence of her spiritual quest.

Later Olivia would lament the whole breakdown in spiritual leadership in the family- regretting that she he had been badly managed by those in charge, and admitting that Spiritualism had been a terrific and evil influence. This confession must have been bitter, as Spiritualism was almost as common as Christianity among the Clemens's friends and associates. They were often surrounded by a number of modern “prophets” who might have led Susy into her own one-way version of Alice in Wonderland.

As his family began to fall apart, Sam Clemens's soul was exposed, with no stable personalities to guide his crumbling raft. After realizing what a soul-grinder he was putting his grieving wife through, Sam had a temporary change of heart. Never quite positive about his most outrageous postulates, Sam would often, if only momentarily, reverse himself. He often spoke and wrote of “Providence” and eternal damnation, and quoted the Bible. As much as he tried, he could never successfully expunge his own deeply embedded Judeo-Christian paradigm. Even Mark Twain had a deep-seated need.

Tormented with doubt and grief, Sam capitulated and wrote Livy that he had been wrong, that he would never question God or the concept of heaven again, that he was grateful to know Susy's final destination, which they would all someday share. These were all temporary revelations, which came in the front door and quickly blew out the back, but not before Livy could embrace them and take them with her to her Eternity. She wrote him that “I am truly very thankful that you “more believe in the immortality of the soul than disbelieve it.” Although he was apparently vexed at his own flip-flop, Livy coaxed that he should be pleased, because with Faith a person has so much more to do, to work for, to look forward to.

As Clemens lived on, he became convinced that Earth was all the hell this universe needed. Of course that is what every unbeliever is counting on.

Ignoring Susy's communications with the dark side preceding her death, Sam momentarily imagined a heaven where the Clemenses would all be together again, as a writer might do, inventing acceptable rules to his own Universe, in spite of whatever doctrines each of them might have embraced. Sam could never resist any heart-warming pleasure, he loved to hate and punish, and he loved even more to forgive and indulge. Livy hoped his admission would lead to intellectual investigation, even a sampling of orthodoxy, which would fortify his newfound faith; That he would try as hard to understand God as he had tried to abolish Him.

But shortly after a spiritual reversal, he would revert to Heaven as being mere human invention, a wishful fantasy. Still the sound and comfort of it was irresistible. In the end, Clemens's unresolved anger, depression, and written blasphemies pushed Olivia away into a heartbreaking relational crisis. For her loving soul there was the horrifying realization that Sam was probably never going to share her eternal Heaven. Meanwhile they had raised their precious but fragile daughters in this sieve of religious confusion. Amazingly, in later years Livy had spent a great deal of time experimenting with her daughter's religion, hoping to hear from Susy again through various spiritualists. As they moved around Europe, she was always open to the neighborhood fortune teller, or a Hindu palmist, anyone who might give reassurance to her family's spiritual homelessness.

Brokenhearted and spiritually adrift, Livy wanted somehow to justify Susy's spiritual adventure, even if it meant violating her own. Conversely she must have been often reminded of the mental security and inner peace she had enjoyed from the Faith of her childhood, one that had provided a lifetime of refuge even if sometimes corrupted. What slippery slope had she slipped down into? And what psychological or spiritual support did her living daughters now have as they slid down with her?

It was all too much. Her heart began to fail. And her bedroom became her only refuge from Sam and his relentless, godless rebellion. The doctor had forbidden him to even talk to her through the door. This was no way to sustain a marriage, or a life, but it would not last long.

Livy's heart attack led to a desperate return to Europe to engage supposedly superior doctors who might help her, and to provide her with as idyllic and restful a place as they could afford.

It was off to Italy, to a gated suburban villa, with servants and daughters in tow. The doctors had stipulated several things, that Olivia needed peace and quiet, real solitude, and was forbidden regular visits from Sam. Clara would continue her previous tasks as the go-between, and censor of information, even lie if necessary. A new person, Isabel Lyons, would take Olivia's place as secretary. Here enters the most mysterious, and up until quite recently, perhaps the most ignored person and a curiously ignored series of events in the Clemens family story.

While in Florence, one of his love notes during the doctor's restraining order illustrates Clemen's vacillations:

“I do love you so my darling, and it grieves me so to remember that I am the cause of your being where you are. I WISH- I WISH- but it is too late. I drove you to sorrow and to heart-break just to hear myself talk. If I ever do it again when you get well I hope the punishment will fall upon me the guilty, not upon you the innocent.”

Of course, as is often the case with all of us, it was too little, too late. Livy never recovered. One of Clemens's pet peeves was how God allowed bad things to happen to good people. To Clemens, the only kind of God worth believing in was one who gave you favor in this life, a reward for believing in Him; An obedient god waiting at your disposal, who fixed things. Especially the messes we make out of life. There should have been rewards for saints like Livy, for good behavior. But he could not seem to connect Livy's health to his own.

Meanwhile, Mark Twain had already penned numerous blasphemous stories, even fictitious interviews, writings of Satan from a first person point of view. He once wrote;

“I have no special regard for Satan, but I can at least claim that I have no prejudice against him.”

Olivia was mortified and insisted that he not publish these kinds of ejaculations, which were later released long after his death by his biographer Albert Bigelow Paine and daughter Clara as “Letters from Earth.” Heartbreak, heart disease and depression stole the final years of Livy's courageous if somewhat compromised life. And then there were the “mysteries.”

“The telephone was dead.” Those were the ominous words of Clara Clemens in her nostalgic book, My Father, Mark Twain. But these words were about an emergency concerning her mother, a little explored incident in 1904 during Olivia Clemens' dying days while convalescing in Italy. And these words naively introduced a mystery, that during Olivia Clemens's death throes, the family discovered that their telephone lines had been cut. It could have been the inspiration for any number of television murder mysteries. But it was real.

Even more suspicious, later they discovered that someone had inexplicably locked the entry gate to their compound on the outskirts of Florence. The doctor who finally answered their desperate pleas could not enter their villa to give assistance, and after waiting some time he eventually gave up and left. Olivia barely survived, and the curious incident led to her decline and death a few months later. It seemed that someone wanted Olivia to exit the stage, sooner than later, and did everything they could to assist her demise. What followed after their return to America was enough suspicious activity to launch a Hitchcock movie.

Sweet, devoted Clara mentioned this terrifying series of deadly “coincidences” as an aside in her book, which was intended to add some color to their tragic misadventure. But strangely, trustingly, she never publicly connected the dots of these and other Twain family mysteries. Caught up in the glow of Mark Twain's worldwide aura, Clara had spent a lifetime alternately testing and adoring her father, and was content now to launch his legacy higher onto the Olympus of mankind's greatest achievers. And that would require more than a little willful ignorance. It certainly was not from fear. It was more likely masterful manipulation. Her sister once said of Clara, “Nobody's braver but GOD!”

And daughter Clara was bold, and cunning, and her management of her father's contrived legacy included the suppression of the true Clemens account- and the obfuscation of the dysfunctional Clemenses, and the real narrative which was in fact a much darker saga. Punctuated with mismanagement, the unseen Twain legacy included bankruptcy, premature deaths of two of his children, sabotage of Olivia's health, a staff who surgically embezzled him, and an unethical biographer who embalmed Twain's image as he squeezed every drop of blood from it.

The true Clemens family legacy falls way below the majestic literary Olympus which Clara and Clemens's biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine constructed for posterity. Twain's story is really a litany of tragic coincidences, and there are far less coincidences in life than we would prefer to think. At least not strands of them that light up like a Christmas tree, with no apparent source.

Because of the subterfuge, Mark Twain became a credible prophet of modern Agnostic philosophy. His religion and vision of America became a moral substitute among the learned, and he became the magnetic demi-god of the New Age; The Everyman's conscience of Western culture.

In some ways Livy was fortunate to have died in the relative tranquility of Florence, and never to have lived to see the scandals and lawsuits and public humiliation which followed the years of Isabel Lyon's service; The banishment of Jean to various sanitariums; the publishing of Twain's heretical essays; and poor Jean's sudden death in the bath tub one Christmas Eve.

Isabel Lyon- Sam- Jean Clemens

The “Lord had spared her,” as they say. The tintype photograph of a sheared Twain with Isabel and Jean leaning on his lap suggests that there had been a close relationship before the ill-fated trip to Florence, and that Livy's illness may have already begun to diminish Sam's dependence on her for companionship. And Jean probably had begun to suspect some degree of impropriety which led to her convenient removal... for her own good.

Livy may have been spared the grief, but not the knowledge that she may have let an insolent narcissist shape the spiritual center of their home. And if there were such things as Eternal ties that bind, or religion that saves the soul, or faith which prepares each person for the afterlife, she had not just dropped the torch, she had let it go out.

Still, their faithful maid Katy Leary claimed to have witnessed proof of the spiritual transformation of Samuel Clemens:

“Although he was always arguing and joking about religion and they all said he was an unbeliever, I don't think he was. I know he wasn't. I know he wasn't, because when Jean died, years afterwards, and we stood looking at her, he says to me: “Oh Katy, she's in heaven with her mother...”

“Now, if he hadn't believed in heaven or hereafter, he wouldn't say that would he? Oh, I think- I am sure he believed in the hereafter. But he was pretty serious in arguing about religion.”

Katy saw clearly that if there is a God who created the heavens and the earth; if He is willing and able to grant immortality of the soul, to reside eternally at a place mortals know as “Heaven,” then if one believes in that immortality, she or he inadvertently also believes in God. A person who believes in Heaven, no matter how irreverent or heretical, is no atheist. What a shame then to live a lifetime at odds with that God who wants to grant souls Eternal Life!

And regrettably, sometimes it is left to the mother to stand in the gap, between a man's arrogance and pride and Eternal salvation, for her whole family!

Given his indomitableness, Mark Twain thought that Livy was a splendid wife and mother, and their friends would have agreed. Some of her success as a mother was attributable to the fact that she was allowed more control with her children than with her spouse. Clemens could never make himself do what she did out of duty and wisdom, but he understood and appreciated her...

Speaking of his daughters, Sam Clemens also explained Livy's bedrock character which burned through her role as a disciplinarian:... “They... knew that she never punished in revenge, but in love; and that the infliction [punishment] wrung her mother-heart, and was a sore task for her... to deal out penalties was against her nature; but she did deal them out, firmly and unflinchingly, for the great love she bore her children.”

In the final assessment, it is all any responsible mother can do.