“He Was So Rarely Beautiful”: Langdon Clemens

Langdon had been ill; he was finally diagnosed with diphtheria.

He died on June 2. Samuel and Olivia were devastated.

Michael Kiskis’ spare prose underscores the severity of Olivia and Samuel Clemens’ loss of their firstborn child—a son, Langdon Clemens. Olivia, too weak to travel to Elmira for the burial, remained in Hartford, and Samuel felt he could not leave his wife alone. So it was that nineteen months after his birth, Langdon Clemens was buried—with no parents in attendance—near his recently deceased grandfather and namesake in the Woodlawn Cemetery in Elmira “after being laid out in the parlor of the Langdon home in Elmira, the same parlor in which the Clemenses were married.” Kiskis contemplatively suggests, “Absent parents are ubiquitous throughout Clemens’ major fiction. It’s not unreasonable to think that that absence was driven by Clemens’ sending off his first born to face the grave alone.”¹ Perhaps this is so. What is clear, however, is that letters written by Samuel and Olivia offer insight into the life and death of Langdon Clemens and underscore the impact of their firstborn on both parents.

Viewed within the context of the nineteenth century, Langdon’s death is statistically and sadly one of many childhood deaths of that day. The mortality rate for the 1870s indicates that 175 of every 1000 children died in infancy.² Samuel and Olivia were already acquainted with death. Of Samuel’s seven siblings, only three survived to maturity. Additionally, just two months before Langdon’s death, Emma Nye, Olivia’s girlhood friend, died of typhoid in the Clemens’ home in Buffalo. Olivia’s father had passed away three months before Langdon’s birth. Loss had repeatedly visited them; so, too, with Langdon’s birth, had muted joy.

As we examine letters by Samuel Clemens during the period of their firstborn’s life, we garner an understanding of his early reactions to fatherhood. Much later in life, Clemens revealed his burden of guilt connected with his son’s death. Lesser known, however, are the responses of Olivia to the life and death of her only son. While Samuel bore the anguish of Langdon’s death in silence for almost thirty-four years—and then made bare his remorse during an autobiographical dictation in 1906 further corroborated by W. D. Howells in his 1910 My Mark Twain—Olivia shared her feelings of loss at the time of their son’s death. Her delight at Langdon’s birth followed by her grief at his death is revealed in letters written to her sister, Susan Crane; to her sister-in-law, Mollie Clemens; and to her husband. Her various statements, paired with those of Clemens, offer insight into the early parenting years of Samuel and Olivia.

Langdon Clemens arrived almost a month early on November 7, 1870. A Western Union telegram to the new grandmother in Elmira announced his birth and reported “mother & child doing well.”³ Five days later, in a letter written by Clemens in the voice of his son to Hartford friends the Reverend Joseph and Harmony Twichell, Langdon explains the circumstances leading to his early arrival. He “was not due here u on this planet until some about the first week in December, but my mother took a hurried drive to the depot one day & the consequence was that it was all the doctors & nurses could do to keep me from looking in on the family that night. By faithful exertions,” the newborn reports, “they got me staved off till two weeks, & by jings I missed the earthquake.” Here Langdon suggests that a drive to the train depot—possibly strenuous—with fellow Quaker City passenger Mary Mason Fairbanks on October 19, one day before an earthquake occurred in the northeast and north central portion of the continent, was the catalyst that eventually led to his early birth. Langdon adds, “At birth I only weighed 41/2 pounds wh with my clothes on—& the clothes were the chief feature of the weight, too, I am obliged to confess” (4:236–37). Samuel Clemens shared this premature birth statistic with his...