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Bermuda was cherished by Mark Twain or Samuel Langhorne Clemens These islands were his second home and he loved them, as a 1913 English magazine wrote about extensively most people in Britain, Canada, Europe, USA and elsewhere who appreciate the writings of Samuel Langhorne Clemens otherwise known as Mark Twain are unaware that in his later years he spent a great deal of time in Bermuda, his second home, to which he escaped to "get away" from the noise and rat race of the USA and troubles that often dogged him there. His first Bermuda visit - very significant for him as it turned out - was as a passenger on the SS Quaker City, 1,800 tons, powered by both steam and sails. She left New York City on June 8, 1867, bound for the Mediterranean, Black Sea and Holy Land. Her first call was at Horta in the Azores on June 21-23, then Gibraltar and points further east. She arrived back in New York on November 19, via Bermuda. During the voyage, he penned "The Innocents Abroad." In Bermuda, he wrote or was inspired to write several of his most significant and last literary pieces; played miniature golf; contributed to petitions including the banning of the automobile in Bermuda; and entertained some of his famous literary and political friends including Woodrow Wilson (before he became President of the USA). He also actively promoted Bermuda as a tourist and social paradise and found time to involve himself significantly in fund-raising activities for local institutions such as the then infant Bermuda Cottage Hospital (now the large and well equipped King Edward VII Memorial Hospital). The house where he spent most of his time was Bay House, at 4 Old Slip Lane, a private access off Pitt's Bay Road in Pembroke Parish near the island's capital city of Hamilton. The main house is still where it was, on higher land above the water. It faces west, with extensive grounds going right down to the sea and lovely uninterrupted views of nearby small islands in the Great Sound. At tht time, the waterside home was owned by the Allen family from the USA. Mr. Allen was the Assistant USA Consul General in Bermuda who kept a low profile as far as Twain was concerned. But his wife Marion Schyler Allen was not so reticent. For the first three months of his stay she wrote almost daily of his visits. She noted that it was largely through Twain's affection for her young daughter Helen that she, her husband and family came to know him so well - and ultimately shared some of the last Bermuda moments of his life. For example, it records how on Christmas Eve in 1909 Twain's youngest daughter Jean died in her bath at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut, following an epileptic seizure and how Twain was so struck by grief that he turned to Bermuda and his friends the Allens for some consolation. More than two months before Jean's tragic death, Twain's other daughter Clara got married and moved away. It has been noted in other writings that she was on her honeymoon when her father died in April 1910, but in fact it was more than five months after her marriage. In 1913, three years after his death, the article by Marion Schyler Allen entitled "Our Friend Mark Twain" formed part of an 80 page manuscript in the English magazine The Strand. It was supressed for decades because Twain's daughter Clara and Albert Bigelow Paine - Twain's official biographer - felt that such an intimate portrait night reveal some strange things about the American writer. It seems they were very afraid at the time that local writings about Twain would do harm to his reputation. In fact, there is evidence of a chilly exchange of letters between Clara and Mrs. Allen. When Twain's daughter refused to allow publication of the latter's manuscript, Mrs. Allen quietly contacted The Strand magazine in London. England, which promptly published an extract. It was such a shame that the great friendship struck up and consolidated between Twain and the Allen family was not perpetuated after his death by the family and business associates of the great author. Aspects of Bermuda he relished during his first visit -Twain viewed the enormous rubber tree (still there) in the grounds of Par-la-Ville Park, in front of where the Bermuda National Library now stands. It had been the town house of Postmaster William B. Perot, who laid out the gardens in the mid 1800s. Mark Twain pretended to be disappointed with the rubber tree. He complained - with a twinkle in his eye - that it did not bear a crop of hot water bottles and rubber overshoes! He penned the famous phrase that Bermuda was a paradise but one had to go through hell to get there. It was because ships' voyages made him sea sick. He hated ships with a passion but had no other means of crossing seas and oceans. During a long fourth visit in 1877, he became impressed by the status of black Bermudians who enjoyed basic Human Rights freedoms and liberties still missing in his homeland despite the outcome of the Civil War a quarter century earlier. In a long article on Bermuda he published in the USA, titled Rambling Notes on an Idle Excursion, he gave perceptive insights of an island that had crafted a social system as uniquely suited to its particular needs as its architecture. It was a vivid and detailed pen portrait of a Victorian but relaxed Bermuda and it elevated the genre of travel writing to an art form because he concentrated on the people of Bermuda he met and got to know rather than the places of Bermuda he liked. He knew he had found more treasures exploring the human soul than in sightseeing attractions. A recurring theme in the essay is Bermuda's temperate racial climate which enabled black Bermudians both to keep pace with their white kinsmen and in some ways outstrip them. Twain liked the great strides Bermuda had made after its own official Emancipation, many decades before the USA's flawed first versions came into being. He admired the fact that on the ships he used to steam to Bermuda, as soon as they reached the city of Hamilton they attracted well dressed and well spoken blacks, local farmers and exporters just like their white fellow countrymen, who gave passengers lining the railing details of the prices their onions were getting in New York. And Twain spent much of his time in Bermuda being introduced to other aspects of Bermuda by a young black entrepreneur who owned and operated his own donkey trap as a kind of public taxi. He became acquainted with and enjoyed experiencing a thriving black culture at ease with its older white equivalent and with its hallmarks of industry, self respect, independence of thought and freedoms in action. He fought for a "motorless Eden" Bermuda But he was outraged when the first ever automobile in Bermuda, owned by the American newspaper magnate James Gordon Bennett, arrived on the latter's luxurious, coal burning, steam yacht "Lysistrata" which anchored in Hamilton Harbor in March, 1906. It didn't matter in the slightest to Twain that James Gordon Bennett's name and publishing empire carried prestige everywhere, as the organization which in 1871 had commissioned the young American journalist, Henry Morton Stanley, to go find the distinguished British explorer and missionary, Dr David Livingstone, who disappeared into Central Africa without a trace. Several months into his mission, Stanley duly found Livingstone in a little village on Lake Tanganyika, outstretched his hand and spoke his famous greeting: "Dr Livingstone, I presume?" Bermudians were entranced when Mr. Bennett's beautiful motor car was landed. They watched in awe as the proud owner's uniformed combined chauffeur and mechanic swung the crank handle at the front of the vehicle and the engine roared into life on the City of Hamilton dock. It was an automobile worthy of the prestige of the Bennett family. At the turn of the century, "horseless carriages" were being manufactured by a number of American companies. Bennett could have purchased an "economy" car from one Henry Ford whose manufacturing company had been launched in 1903. He could have selected a more expensive one, for example, a Packard, as manufactured by James Ward Packard; or an Oldsmobile, from the "stable" of Ransom Eli Olds. But Bennett looked to Europe for his fancy motorcar. There, the French were producing the Peugeot, Renault and De Dion Bouton. More than three decades would pass before any more motor cars were allowed to make an appearance on Bermuda's roads. In his final years, Twain spent more and more time in Bermuda But he was not in the best of spirits. His health was fading and he had suffered some financial losses in the USA from bad investments. With his special friend Henry Rogers and his few other stalwarts, mostly American, in Bermuda he voiced pessimistic views of mankind, or read aloud the poetry of Rudyard Kipling. He wrote The Turning Point in My Life for Harper's Bazaar magazine. By then, Wilson had launched his bid for the US Presidency. He returned to Bermuda at a later date, following his election as US President, but before his inauguration. On April 21, 1910 Mark Twain, died at his permanent home in Redding, Connecticut, at the age of 75. He barely had time to get home from his Bermuda home from home, to settle his affairs. Bermudians received the sad news the next day, via the local telegraph office he had used so frequently to cable his publishers in the USA with his articles and stories - and then the local and overseas newspapers with their obituaries and related stories. Many Bermudians were distressed by the news. They remembered him fondly, from his frequent extended visits and home on Pitt's Bay Road. They saluted him as one of the most distinguished visitors Bermuda ever had; a man who graced Bermuda with his presence. For more details of Mark Twain's life in Bermuda, refer to the book "Mark Twain and the Happy Island" by Wallace, Elizabeth. 1913. Chicago, McClug. 139 pages, illustrated. For more on his life in general, browse Mark Twain. His contributions to world literature Under his pen name of Mark Twain, Samuel Langhorne Clemens etched irrevocably into American and world literature his own unique stamp of language, substance, style and home-spun wit. Born in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835, he achieved worldwide fame during his lifetime as an author, lecturer, satirist, and humorist. Since his death, his literary stature has further increased. Prominent later writers, among them Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, declared his works such as "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" as major influences on 20th century American fiction. Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri, on the Mississippi River. His began to write seriously at the age of 12, shortly after his father's death in 1847. His circumstances and lifestyle were such that he could not go to an expensive school or attend college. Instead, as a teenager, he was apprenticed to a printer, then joined his brother Orion's newspaper the Hannibal Journal, for which he wrote copy and became familiar, via assimilation, with some of the frontier humor of the time, such as George W. Harris's Sut Lovingood yarns and other works of the so called Southwestern Humorists. From 1853 to 1857, Twain visited and worked as a freelance writer and printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati, corresponding with his brother's newspapers under various pen names After a visit to New Orleans in 1857, he learned the difficult art of steamboat piloting, an occupation he followed until the beginning of the US Civil War effectively closed the river to commercial traffic. But it supplied the background for his Old Times on the Mississippi (1875), later included in the expanded Life on the Mississippi (1883). In 1861, Twain journeyed via stagecoach to Carson City, Nevada, with his brother Orion, who had been appointed territorial secretary. He made several unsuccessful attempts to mine silver and gold in the region and then returned to writing as a correspondent for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise. He began signing his humorous and imaginative sketches under the pen name of "Josh," but early in 1863 he adopted the now famous name Mark Twain, which he borrowed from the phonetic sound of the call, in local dialect, of a typical Mississippi leadsman's yell meaning that the river water over which a steamboat passed was two fathoms (12 feet) or more deep, therefore safe for a steamboat to navigate. Twain went to San Francisco in 1864. He achieved a measure of national fame while based there, with his story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" (1865), after being referred to in jocular fashion as the "Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope." A trip to Hawaii in 1866 furnished articles for the Sacramento Union and, on his return to the mainland, materials for the first lecture in what then became for him a long and successful career as a public speaker. The following year he traveled to the Mediterranean, the Holy Land and Bermuda, from where he dispatched letters to San Francisco's Alta California news journal. In their revised form (1869), they were his "The Innocents Abroad" which won him virtually immediate international attention. In 1870, Twain married Olivia Langdon of Elmira, New York. This was the moment in his career when, as a married man and established writer, his far ranging wanderings by himself ceased for an appreciable period and his lifestyle became more Eastern than Mid-western or Western. After serving briefly as editor and part owner of the Buffalo Express, he moved to Hartford, Connecticut, in 1871, abandoning journalism in order to devote his full attention to serious literature. There, and during summers in Elmira, he produced "Roughing It" (1872), an account of his Western years; "The Gilded Age" (1873, with Charles Dudley Warner), a satire of get rich quick schemes and political chicanery; the new pieces for "Sketches, New and Old" (1875); and "Tom Sawyer" (1875), his classic tale of boyhood. An European sojourn in 1878-1879 inspired, in 1880, "A Tramp Abroad". Also in that year, on hearing of the death on August 17, in Norway, at the age of 70, of one of his favorite composers, the Norwegian Ole (Bournemann) Bull, one of the greatest 19th century violinists and a seminal figure in Norwegian music composition, Mark Twain wrote, in great admiration: "If Ole Bull had been born without arms, what a rank he would have taken among the poets! Because it is in him, and if he couldn't violin it out, he would talk it out, since, of course, it would have to come out! " Twain continued his writings with "The Prince and the Pauper" (1882), his first historical novel. He completed "Life on the Mississippi" in 1883 and, after establishing his own firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, published in 1884 what became his masterpiece, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." He later turned to history again in the allegorical satire "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889), his powerful indictment of political and social injustice. Twain was far more adept as a writer than as a businessman. Financial problems began to plague him and eventually prompted Twain to move to Europe in 1891, just after finishing "The American Claimant" (1892). In 1894, following the failure of his publishing company and of the Paige typesetting machine in which he had invested heavily, Twain could not stave off, and had to declare, bankruptcy. During this period he turned out a number of works, generally inferior to his best: "The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson" (1894), "Tom Sawyer Abroad" (1894), "Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc" (1896), and "Tom Sawyer, Detective" (1896). In 1895, to help recoup his losses, he embarked on a world lecture tour, later described in "Following the Equator" (1897). His writings of the late 1890s and 1900s became more pessimistic than ever. Although his financial situation became more healthy, further stress and sorrow came with the deaths of Twain's eldest daughter Suzy in 1896 and of his wife in 1904. His "The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg" (1898) and "What Is Man?" (1906) are scathing examinations of various aspects of the worst of human nature. Yet they imply that proper understanding of human motivations can result in progress. Recent writings about Twain, such as the Mark Twain Papers series, suggest that the period during which he was thought to be less productive and more morose was not at all the wasteland earlier assumed. Twain contributions to world classical music An extract from the MS of the upcoming 2,400 page reference book "Anniversaries & Great Moments in Classical Music History," by Keith & Lois Forbes, Bermuda His literary works have also had a very considerable influence on the compositions of various prominent composers. For example, when the American composer Charles Edward Ives wrote his important symphonic work FOURTH OF JULY, for which he assembled a heterogeneous orchestra and built in a wildly dissonant climax representing the explosion of fireworks so common in a Fourth of July celebration, he noted in a memorandum that it was pure program music - and pure abstract music. He also added this quotation from Twain's "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn": "You pays yer money and you gets yer choice." In 1945, the American composer Charles Wakefield Cadman premiered his overture HUCKLEBERRY FINN GOES FISHING. It also was inspired by Twain's 1884 literary masterpiece, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." And on May 18, 1950, in Bloomington, Indiana, the opera THE JUMPING FROG OF CALAVERAS COUNTY, written in 1949-1950 by the German born American naturalized composer Lucas Foss, enjoyed its first performance. It is based on Twain's "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Other composers have drawn on Twain's literary works as inspirations for their musical offerings. Twain's son-in-law, the classical music pianist, conductor and composer Ossip Gabrilowitsch An extract from the MS of the upcoming 2,400 page reference book "Anniversaries & Great Moments in Classical Music History," by Keith & Lois Forbes, Bermuda On November 16, 1900, the Philadelphia Orchestra gave its first concert, with Fritz Scheel conducting. Had Twain managed to be present for the historic occasion, he might have been very curious indeed about the piano soloist who performed so well. He was the distinguished Russian born pianist, conductor and composer Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then 22 years old, in his first few months as an immigrant. He had studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Glazounov, Liadoff and Rubinstein and at 16 won the Rubinstein prize. He underwent further studies in Vienna with Leschetizky, from 1894 to 1896, after which he began touring with considerable success. This Philadelphia concert occurred some time before Gabrilowitsch met Clara Clemens, Twain's singing, surviving daughter. Gabrilowitsch then went on to consolidate his USA reputation with a particularly fine series of orchestral concert programs in New York in 1907, no doubt pleasing his future father-in-law immensely in the process. On October 6, 1909, in Redding, Connecticut, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, then 31 years old, married Twain's daughter Clara, with Twain present. She then became known to the literary world as Clara Gabrilowitsch. Like her father, she appreciated good classical music and was inspired by it. She was even contemplating a professional career as a singer, with her fine voice that was reputed to range from contralto to mezzo soprano. But her marriage and dedication to it came first. Little did the happy couple realize at the time that Twain had only six months left to live. He would have been been proud, indeed, had he been able to know ahead of time what further heights his Russian born son-in-law would reach in the world of classical music. On September 14, 1936, Gabrilowitsch died in Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 58, after a distinguished musical career. He was mostly resident in Munich, Germany, from 1904 to 1914, where he conducted the Konzertverein concerts from 1910 to 1914. Clara went with him often. Between 1912 and 1916 he toured European and American musical centers, giving a series of historical piano recitals to illustrate the growth of the concerto. He was appointed the conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra in 1918, a post which he filled with great distinction until 1935. He also served as one of the leaders of the Philadelphia Orchestra and as a featured guest with other major American orchestras. He was an esteemed ensemble performer and considered one of the most brilliant and scholarly soloists of his time. His compositions included OVERTURE RHAPSODY, for orchestra; ELEGY, for cello; piano pieces and songs. He endeared himself immeasurably to his European and American audiences. |
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