Submitted by scott on
Start Date
End Date

From pages 120-23 The Life of Mark Twain - The Middle Years 1871-1891:

Under the best of circumstances, Sam preferred to summer at Quarry Farm than to simmer in Hartford. With Livy in the final trimester of her pregnancy and with her history of miscarriages and premature births, the Clemenses hurried there from an excess of caution early in the spring of 1874. On March 20 Sam advised Howells that Livy was “an invalid yet but is getting along pretty fairly.” Shortly after hosting Mary Mason Fairbanks and her teenage daughter Mollie—who impressed Sam “as the darlingest, daintiest, sweetest vision” of maidenhood he had seen in a “long, long time’—and after terminating the rental agreement on the Hooker house, the clan left Hartford on April 15 and spent two nights in New York at the new Windsor Hotel on Fifth Avenue. While in the city Sam and Livy dined with Dan Slote, Fairbanks, and her son Charles, who remembered later that he “almost forgot to eat, in my enjoyment of the conversation.” The Clemenses arrived at the Langdon mansion on Main Street in Elmira on April 17 and attended a performance of Rip Van Winkle starring Joe Jefferson at the Elmira Opera House the evening of May 4, though Livy “got herself pretty full of back-aches.” The next day, in anticipation of Livy's confinement, they moved to Quarry Farm. There they could depend upon the care and attention of three servants—the washerwoman Charlotte, the cook and former slave Mary Ann Cord, and Mary Lewis, the wife of their African American tenant farmer John Lewis—as well as Susy’s German nursemaid Rosina Hay, Nellie Bermingham’s successor.

On June 8, the seventh anniversary of the departure of the Quaker City for Europe and the Holy Land, Clara Clemens, christened after Clara Spaulding, was born at the farm. Livy was attended by Rachel Brooks Gleason, only the fourth woman physician in the United States and one of the directors of the Elmira Water Cure, downhill from Quarry Farm. Sam gloated to Joseph Twichell that the baby was “the great American Giantess—weighing 7 3/4 pounds, & all solid meat.” Livy was unable to nourish the baby, however, and Clara was allergic to cow’s milk, condensed milk, and pabulum. “Two or three times the baby has threatened to wink out like a snuffed candle, at 5 minutes notice,” Sam wrote Orion when Clara was seven weeks old, “& each time the trouble was laid to prepared food.” Sam and Livy hired a series of wet nurses, including Mary Lewis; a nursemaid named Maggie O'Day; and Mary McAleer, the wife of the Clemenses’ coachman Patrick McAleer, but each time the wet nurse went dry or something happened.—We have fled to wet nurses four times & to-day we are after two others downtown. Livy is about worn out; the present wet nurse is pumped out; & my profanity is played out—for it no longer brings healing & satisfaction to the soul.” Finally, they turned to Maria McManus or McLaughlin, the “wife of a worthless Irishman,” who remained a year until the Bay [baby] was weaned. Once, Sam discovered, Maria had invaded his cache of beer and “drank 200 bottles of the 252,” and “it was the dryest month I ever spent since I first became a theoretical teetotaler.” Yet Sam always regarded Maria with unqualified admiration, She was as “healthy as iron” and

had the appetite of a crocodile, the stomach of a cellar, & the digestion of a quartz-mill. Scorning the adamantine law that a wet-nurse must partake of delicate things only, she devoured anything & everything she could get her hands on, shoveling into her person fiendish combinations of fresh pork, lemon pie, boiled cabbage, ice cream, green apples, pickled tripe, raw turnips, & washing the cargo down with freshets of coffee, tea, brandy, whisky, turpentine, kerosene—anything that was liquid; she smoked pipes, cigars, cigarettes, she whooped like a Pawnee & swore like a demon; & then she would go upstairs loaded as described & perfectly delight the baby.

with a milk cocktail equivalent to infant forty-rod “but which only made it happy & fat & contented & boozy.” Clara thrived on Maria’s milk, Sam remembered thirty years later, because “no other milk had so much substance to it.”

Livy's sister Susan Crane, anticipating the distractions of a newborn, had built “the loveliest study” for Sam to write on a bluff a hundred yards from the main house, “It is octagonal,” he bragged to Twichell,

with a peaked roof, each octagon filled with a spacious window, & it sits perched in complete isolation on top of an elevation that commands leagues of valley & city & retreating ranges of distant blue hills. It is a cosy nest, with just room in it for a sofa & a table & three or four chairs—& when the storms sweep down the remote valley & the lightning flashes above the hills beyond, & the rain beats upon the roof over my head, imagine the luxury of it! It stands 500 feet above the valley & 2 1/2 miles from it.

Sue Crane had designed the study to resemble the pilot house of a Mississippi steamboat and from its vantage point Sam surveyed the Chemung River bisecting the town and the topography of northern Pennsylvania. The gazebo was a retreat almost as secluded as the cabin at Walden Pond or, at the very least, “it is remote from all noise,” Sam bragged. “On hot days I spread the study wide open, anchor my papers down with brickbats & write in the midst of hurricanes.” He worked there almost every summer until 1891, and it was where he composed most of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), The only better setting for an author, Sam argued in years to come, was solitary confinement in prison, the one perfect condition for perfect performance.” Only John Bunyan, Miguel de Cervantes, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a few other authors enjoyed such “opportunities for working..”


From Page 145:

Sam and Livy left their daughters at Quarry Farm in early August in the care of the Cranes and a wet nurse.  They first visited Sam's mother and sister in Fredonia, then David Gray and his wife in Buffalo, overnighting in Canandaigua, New York, before returning to Elmira on August 14. ...


 

Type of Feedback