People who love Huckleberry Finn or Letters From the Earth will disagree, but I think “The Death of Jean” might be the most remarkable thing Mark Twain wrote.
Samuel Clemens’s daughter Jean was epileptic. She died in her bath on the morning of Christmas Eve, 1909. She was 29.
Mark Twain was 74 and would die four months later. He wrote the essay, telling Albert Paine, his biographer, that it was the last chapter of his autobiography. He said: “I am setting it down — everything. It is a relief to me to write it. I furnishes me an excuse to think.”
I love that phrase: “excuse to think.” That’s what writing is.
The essay is grief, that most powerful force that unravels the strongest personality. Here’s what struck me:
• He had an obsession to recall every detail of the last 24 hours of his daughter’s life. It’s the terror of fading memory. We can’t recall an entire life. But the final day might be within our grasp. So we search ourselves for every last detail.
• The grieving survivors can’t help themselves: They search for a cause, and thus for blame. Jean Clemens, like her mother, exhausted herself with Christmas preparations. She was generous to all. She’d worn herself out, leaving herself vulnerable. This theme, written clumsily, is in two places. The great writer couldn’t just finish it and leave it alone.
• Jean had a German dog that resembles The Enormous Dog that Lives at Our Place. (German shepherds were just emerging as a breed.) Mark Twain loved cats. But that dog loved Jean. And so an old man and a dog became partners in mourning.
• Source: Twain’s essay appeared posthumously in Harper’s in January 1911. I have it in Harper Essays, edited by Henry Seidel Canby; New York: Harper & Brother Publishers, 1927, pp. 146-59.
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