A Meeting of Minds

As the new director of Elmira College's Center for Mark Twain Studies in 2004, my earliest acquaintance with Robert Hart Hirst was through the publications produced under his direction, beginning with the six stellar volumes of Mark Twain Letters. While so much of Mark Twain's writing inspires or entertains, his letters changed my life. When visitors to the Center would ask what my favorite Mark Twain work was, I would mention a few titles here and there and then conclude with the statement: “But I most love his letters.” For me, Mark Twain's emotion, energy, and spontaneous word choice reveal themselves best there. Those six volumes of correspondence with his family, friends, editors, and business associates became beloved sentinels on the bookshelves behind my desk, constant companions and sources of inspiration, eventually abounding with hundreds of folded-at-the-corner pages, underlining, and notes.Over time, I came to understand that Robert Hirst, the General Editor in charge of those six magnificent volumes and so many other Mark Twain works, was only an email away. Whenever thorny questions about Mark Twain's life and writings arose, it was a comfort to know that a far, far greater mind than mine was only a SEND away. Attached to that wonderful mind, incredibly, was an equally generous heart and ready wit. I could even call him Bob. How could that be? How could my puny understanding of Mark Twain allow me to call this giant mind, this overflowing repository of information, by his familiar name? Eventually I would meet Bob face-to-face, travel to the Bancroft Library, and become, over time, slightly less self-conscious in reaching out with my many questions. Over our years of friendship and correspondence, I have never lost—and never will—my feelings of awe for him.After completing my doctorate, I began preparing my dissertation for publication, learning first-hand the daunting tasks involved in bringing a scholarly edition of letters to fruition. Without Bob's generous backing and willing advice, Gravity: Selected Letters of Olivia Langdon Clemens would never have made its way into print. His support, both tacit and spoken, sustained me through the long processes of selecting, organizing, and formatting the documents, creating explanatory notes, and finally, seeking formal copyright permissions to publish the volume. I was especially terrified about this last task, readily agreeing with Mark Twain: “Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”1 The explanation on the Mark Twain Project's website that “the copyright status of each individual article, letter, dictation, or other literary work must be ascertained before UC and the Mark Twain Foundation can decide whether permission to republish is required” was especially intimidating. If so many guidelines existed about publishing the words of Mark Twain, I couldn't help but wonder if the same held true for letters written by his beloved wife.With Bob's gracious and reassuring help, I learned to navigate this confusing world, seeking (and obtaining) permissions from university and private libraries as well as individual collectors who had shared Olivia's letters with the Mark Twain Project. The Mark Twain Foundation also had to consent to the publication, adding yet another layer of complexity. Without Bob's help, I imagine that I would still be sitting at my laptop, fearful that I was about to violate copyright somewhere, somehow. His patient guidance with photographs was the same.More broadly, when it comes to clarifying facts, I believe there is no other mind that can traverse the whole of Mark Twain studies as well as Bob. For example, when I came upon a suggestion in one of Olivia's early letters that her younger brother Charles had been sent overseas on the Quaker City in order to quell his too early attraction for a prospective wife, I casually asked Bob's opinion. In response, he immediately sent me a detailed explanatory note he had prepared on this very topic for the Project's forthcoming edition of The Innocents Abroad. It contained not only the answer to my question, but also an abundance of useful historical context—more information than I could ever possibly have hoped for: Emily Severance believed that [Charlie] was also “being sent to Europe in the hope that he might recover from a love affair.”2 The woman in question was doubtless Ida B. Clark (7 March 1849–17 December 1934). On 29 August 1867, Langdon wrote his sister Susan from the Quaker City as it neared Constantinople, “I would like very much to be tonight where I was one year ago, viz with that Church St. Young lady out riding by moon light but it cant so be & I must be content where I am.”3 According to Boyd's City Directory, the Clark family lived at 203 Church Street in Elmira, so Charles’ statement dates their courtship to at least August 1866, when Ida was seventeen. Charles's parents evidently felt his romantic intentions might lead to a premature marriage. One year after he returned home, in late November 1868, he wrote to Alice B. Hooker: “Please be a little careful about what you say in regard to Ida in the presence of either Father or Mother, because they are a little exercised on the subject, as they are watching Libbie & hate to have me fall into the same error, therefore if you will please say nothing in their presence I will thank you very much.”4 But he very shortly did reveal “his love for Ida” and in early 1869 they became engaged, and married on 12 October 1870, several weeks after the death of Charles's father, Jervis.5The liberality of Bob's gesture epitomizes his generous spirit.Later in my project, I recall puzzling over an uncharacteristically angry letter Olivia wrote to her husband in 1902 concerning a conflict that involved an obscure thirty-five-year-old American writer named Marie van Vorst. Although this letter—in which she scolds, “Youth darling, have you forgotten your promise to me? You said that I was constantly in your mind & that you know what I would like & you would not publish what I would disapprove. Did you think I would approve the letter to Marie van Vorst?”—has made its way into numerous biographies of Mark Twain over the decades, the specific cause of Olivia's consternation is a mystery. Hoping to unravel this conundrum, I set about learning all that I could about van Vorst, who grew up in a prominent Manhattan family and had published poetry and prose both in the U.S. and abroad. In 1901, she co-authored a novel with her sister called Bagsby's Daughter, which explored the doings of a wealthy Chicago family. A year later, she published a second novel, Philip Longstreth, which focused on a well-to-do young man devoted to improving the lot of the poor despite his family's opposition. This book was also notable for van Vorst's use of local dialect and dialogue, which added to its realism. As a young writer, Marie seemed exactly the kind of person in whom both Olivia and Samuel would have taken great interest. Olivia's diaries of guests indicate that Marie visited the Clemens family on New Year's Day in 1902 and then stayed overnight twice at their home in Riverdale that March. But nowhere could I find evidence of a letter from Mark Twain to the author.My curiosity was piqued, and I couldn't help but wonder: what did Bob know about Marie van Vorst? Although he was unaware of the mysterious letter that had upset Olivia, he did, in characteristically generous fashion, send me scans of two poems that she wrote for Mark Twain, dedicated to him with “reverence and love” on that New Year's Day visit. They are “roundels”—an intricately patterned poetic form consisting of three, three-line stanzas with alternating rhyme. While their subject matter shed no light on the controversy, the sight of van Vorst's elegant script offered an intimate glimpse of the Clemenses’ social life and the degree of his literary stature. The privilege of seeing these manuscripts—even in digital format—faded ink on fragile paper with delicate edges—is akin to the finest form of alchemy to me. I could even imagine the scent of the past rising from the pages. (Figure 1.)As I gazed at the roundels, suddenly, for a moment, I was there, breathtakingly transported through time and space. Marie's lovely feminine script—her spacing so balanced and exact, her punctuation precise—visually conveyed the warmth of her affection towards Clemens. It was hard to imagine that any ire that Samuel might have felt toward Marie should have deserved expression. Possibly it all was, as Olivia had suggested in her cautionary, frustrated missive to Samuel, a fleeting rage best left unspoken, unshared? Through the unexpected gift of these private, unpublished texts, Bob had once again deepened and enriched my understanding of Mark Twain.In 2010, the centenary of Mark Twain's death, volume 1 of his Autobiography appeared, a herculean undertaking produced under Bob's leadership along with his team of magnificent editors. One reviewer called the publication “an unmatched and probably unsurpassable pinnacle of editorial achievement . . . arguably the single greatest product of modern American editorial scholarship.” This description holds true for all of Bob's extraordinary work. My gratitude for his leadership, knowledge, generosity, and kindness runs deeper than I can express.