A Family Sketch, and Other Private Writings by Mark Twain etal. (review)

Benjamin Griffin’s A Family Sketch, and Other Private Writings enhances our understanding of Samuel Clemens within the context of his home and family both in Hartford and Elmira. In this beautiful, cozy volume, readers experience daily life and family dynamics through domestic incidents, anecdotes, and observations written by Clemens as well as his wife and oldest daughter.

Griffin’s concise introduction is essential to our understanding of this delightful book which, as he explains, “publishes in full, for the first time, the two most revealing of Mark Twain’s private writings about his family life, neither of them actually written for publication” (1). Although portions of the title essay had been included in the Autobiography, this volume—the latest remarkable accomplishment of the Mark Twain Project—allows readers the pleasure of encountering it, in its entirety, gathered in one place. Begun in 1896 as a memorial to Susy after her death, the opening sentence of “A Family Sketch” merges the facts of her birth and death with a succinct account of her life: “Susy was born in Elmira, New York, in the house of her grandmother, Mrs. Olivia Langdon, on the 19th of March, 1872, and after tasting and testing life and its problems and mysteries under various conditions and in various lands, was buried from that house the 20th of August, 1896, in the twenty-fifth year of her age” (13). The paragraph that follows adds an array of impressions and insights cadenced in that familiar, impassioned voice which readers have met before in portions of letters, essays, and stories—a voice seeming more invocation than prose. Clemens writes, for example, that Susy “was a magazine of feelings … her waking hours were a crowding and hurrying procession of enthusiasms, with each one in its turn differing from the others in origin, subject and aspect. Joy, sorrow, anger, remorse, storm, sunshine, rain, darkness—they were all there: they came in the moment, and were gone as quickly” (13). Clemens modulates from a voice weighted with loss to one that still finds joy in a life lived, and not only the life of Susy, but Clara, too, and then, as Griffin notes, of “the entire household—family and servants, too. Servants, especially, we might say” (2). What a delightful array of anecdotes follow—tales of George Griffin, Patrick McAleer, Katy Leary, Rosina Hay, and Maria McLaughlin. The tacit message is clear: the Clemens servants were an integral part of their extended family. Wonderful accounts all, available to readers today after a sequence of events moved the manuscript from the Doheny Library in Los Angeles along a circuitous route to its present home at the Bancroft Library in Berkeley. Near the end of the various stories of the family and servants included in “A Family Sketch,” Clemens declares, “From all these friends and acquaintances the children unconsciously gathered something, little or much, and it went to the sum of their training, for all impressions leave effects, none go wholly to waste” (40).

The final anecdote in “A Family Sketch” is of great interest in connection with Clemens’s “A True Story” (1874). Titled “The Farm,” it introduces readers to Elmirans who “strongly reinforced” the “children’s training” (40) as well as the “minor helps” (41) at Quarry Farm. Clemens notes that it was the servants who most affected the children, while the gentrified adults were the “minor helps.” Quarry Farm as a place, too, is given credit: “The view commanded the sweep of the valley, with glimpses and flashes of the river winding through it, the wide-spread town, and the blue folds and billows of the receding Pennsylvania hills beyond. My study stood (and still stands) on a little summit a hundred yards from the house and at a higher elevation. It was octagonal, glazed all around, like a pilot house, with a sun-protection of Venetian blinds” (41). The mention of the...