Mark Twain work sells for €79,300

A handwritten chapter of Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad sold for $79,300 at auction, which was well above expectations, the auction house said today.

The Twain work had a pre-sale estimate of between $30,000 and $50,000, Leslie Hindman Auctioneers said.

Last night's fine books and manuscripts auction brought the gavel down on a handwritten high school essay by a young Ernest Hemingway for $7,320, a Potomac Company document signed by George Washington that sold for $9,670, and autographed documents from Leo Tolstoy, Boris Pasternak, Auguste Rodin and Henri Matisse.

"The sales results were astounding, proving once again that property from private collections that is fresh to the market will always attract competitive bidding," said Mary Williams, the auction house's director of books and manuscripts.

Another sale item drawing interest was a "death mask" made of bank robber John Dillinger, which sold for $3,660.

Reuters

Mark Twain’s top travel spots

Mark Twain called the Lion of Lucerne a mournful piece of stone. It's hard to disagree.

from http://www.thestar.com/travel/article/892940--mark-twain-s-top-travel-spots

By Petti Fong

The most famous and beloved travel writer America ever produced once confessed to a reporter that he didn’t even like travelling that much.

He was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri 175 years ago but when Mark Twain landed by steamer ship or at rail stations at various ports and crossings around the world, he was known simply as The American.

In the late 19th century, Twain travelled to destinations most of his readers could never dream about visiting. For him, travel and discovering new cultures and customs was, as he once famously wrote, “fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.”

His motives for travelling were initially financial and he left his beloved home in Hartford, Conn. in order to make money after falling into debt over failed ventures in printing machines.

Twain’s travelogues were eagerly read first by Americans but his audience grew international with readers from around the world who became his travel companions and followed in his footsteps.

As the 100th anniversary of his death approaches on Nov. 30, Star Travel section revisits some of the places Twain travelled to on his journeys around the world as the tramp abroad followed the equator to destinations near and far.

HAWAII

One of Twain’s first assignments was to head to what was then known as the Sandwich Islands for the Sacramento Daily Union in 1866.

“It has been six weeks since I touched a pen. In explanation and excuse I offer the fact that I spent that time (with the exception of one week) on the island of Maui. I only got back yesterday. I never spent so pleasant a month before, or bade any place good-bye so regretfully. I doubt if there is a mean person there, from the homeliest man on the island (Lewers) down to the oldest (Tallant). I went to Maui to stay a week and remained five. I had a jolly time. I would not have fooled away any of it writing letters under any consideration whatever. It will be five or six weeks before I write again. I have not once thought of business, or care or human toil or trouble or sorrow or weariness, and the memory of it will remain with me always.”

The Sacramento Daily Union, 1866

GERMANY and SWITZERLAND

During a visit to the Castle of Heidelberg, Twain took a boat ride on the nearby Neckar River which inspired him to write a chapter in Huckleberry Finn.

“Behind the Castle is a great dome-shaped hill, forest-clad and beyond that a nobler and loftier one. The Castle looks down upon the compact brown-roofed town, and from the town two picturesque old bridges span the river. Now the view broadens, through the gateway of the sentinel headlands you gaze out over the wide Rhine plain, which stretches away softly and richly tinted, grows gradually and dreamily indistinct and finally melts imperceptibly into the remote horizon. I have never enjoyed a view which had such a serene and satisfying charm about it as this one gives.”

In Lucerne, Twain fell ill with what he called a “disease” that led him to want to buy 150 wood-carved cuckoo clocks. He succumbed to purchasing three. There, he went to see the Lion of Lucerne monument that had been carved to commemorate the Swiss Guards who were massacred in 1792 when revolutionaries stormed the Tuileries Palace in Paris during the French Revolution.

“The Lion of Lucerne is the most mournful and moving piece of stone in the world. The Lion lies in his lair in the perpendicular face of a low cliff — for he is carved from the living rock of the cliff. His size is colossal, his attitude is noble. His head is bowed, the broken spear is sticking in his shoulder, his protecting paw rests upon the lilies of Frances. Vines hang down the cliff and wave in the wind and a clear stream trickles form above and empties into a pond at the base, and in the smooth surface of the pond the lion is mirrored among the water-lilies. ... The Lion of Lucerne would be impressive anywhere but nowhere so impressive as where he is.”

The Tramp Abroad: Volume 1 and Volume 4

ENGLAND

Twain had wanted to write a travel book about his time in England and did end up writing two novels set in England: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and the Prince and the Pauper. But as he explained in a dispatch to the Hartford Courant, he couldn’t satirize England in the way he wanted.

“I have spent a great deal of time in England. I made a world of notes but it was no use. I couldn’t get any fun out of England. It is too grave a country and its gravity soaks into the stranger and makes him as serious as everyone else. When I was there I couldn’t seem to think of anything but deep problems of government, taxes, free trade, finance. One is bound to respect England, she is one of the three great republics of the world but she is not good text for hilarious literature. No, there wasn’t anything to satirize—what I mean is, you couldn’t satirize any given thing in England in any but a halfhearted way, because your conscience told you to look nearer home and you would find that very thing at your own door. A man with a humpbacked uncle mustn’t make fun of another man’s cross-eyed aunt.”

Hartford Courant, 1879

MISSISSIPPI RIVER

Before and after the American Civil War, Twain was a steamboat pilot, one of his many occupations throughout his lifetime. Life on the Mississippi was part memoir based on his experiences when he was a young man training on the steamboats and the second half was about Twain revisiting the Mississippi years later.

“Mississippi steam boating was born about 1812, at the end of thirty years, it had grown to mighty proportions; and in less than thirty more, it was dead! A strangely short life for so majestic a creature...it killed the old-fashioned keep-boating, by reducing the freight-trip to New Orleans to less than a week. The railroads have killed the steamboat passenger traffic by doing in two or three days what the steamboats consumed a week in doing.”

Life on the Mississippi, 1883

SWEDEN

In 1899, Twain, his wife and his 19-year-old daughter Jean, who were all in ill health, left London for Sweden to be treated by a noted osteopath, Heinrich Kellgren. Twain, then 64 years old, had had a long history of physical ailments including a severe long lasting common cold. But despite his health problems, he was besotted with the scenery, writing that happiness is a Swedish sunset.

“I’ve no business in here — I ought to be outside. I shall never see another sunset to begin with it this side of heaven. This is the place to be. I have seen about 60 sunsets here; and a good 40 of them were away and beyond anything I had ever imagined before for dainty and exquisite and marvellous beauty and infinite charm and variety. America? Italy? The tropics? They have no notion of what a sunset ought to be. And this one—this unspeakable wonder. It discounts all the rest. It brings the tears, it is so unutterably beautiful.”

Letter to a friend in 1899

VICTORIA, VANCOUVER

In 1895, Twain began a lecturing trip around the world which began in Paris. He and his family sailed to America arriving on the west coast in midsummer. In August he spoke at the Vancouver Opera House to a standing-room-only crowd and then met with reporters. Suffering from a bad cold, he spent a few days in his room reading books and writing letters before travelling to Victoria where he was to set sail to Sydney Australia.

“We moved westward about mid-afternoon over a rippled and summer sea; an enticing sea, a clean and cool sea, and apparently a welcome sea to all on board; it certainly was to the distressful dustings and smokings and swelterings of the past weeks. The voyage would furnish a three-weeks holiday, with hardly a break in it. We had the whole Pacific Ocean in front of us, with nothing to do but do nothing and be comfortable. The city of Victoria was twinkling dim in the deep heart of her smoke-cloud, and getting ready to vanish and now we closed the field-glasses and sat down on our steamer chairs contented and at peace.”

Following the Equator, 1895

INDIA

At 60 and looking so frail local papers warned him to leave before the time of the great heat, Twain travelled to India. Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine noted that Twain, who travelled up and down the length of India, stayed at the home of an Indian prince and loved the country so much that in his notebook he had written in capital letters “INDIA THE MARVELOUS”.

“This was the most enjoyable time I have spent in the earth. For rousing, tingling, rapturous pleasure, there is no holiday trip that approaches the bird flight down the Himalayas in a handcar. It has no fault, no blemish, no lack except that there are only thirty-five miles of it, except five hundred....So far as I am able to judge, nothing has been left undone, either by man or nature, to make India the most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds. Nothing seems to have been forgotten, nothing overlooked.”

Following the Equator, 1897

Twain aficionados celebrate

FROM
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2010/11/18_twainparty.shtml

By Kathleen Maclay, Media Relations 18 November 2010

BERKELEY — Publication of the first of Mark Twain's long-awaited, three-volume autobiography was celebrated with gusto Wednesday night (Nov. 17) at a campus gala marked by reverence, irreverence and fun, as well as by heart-wrenching and guffaw-producing recitals of his work.

Actress Rita Morena reads Twain selections. "The Autobiography of Mark Twain" was published on Monday, 100 years after his death, according to his specifications and The Bancroft Library's Mark Twain Papers and Project editing team. Although already busy with the next volume of the autobiography, most of the editors were on hand for the event, modestly accepting congratulations and talking Twain, Twain and more Twain.

At The Bancroft, a crowd of 200-plus, which included a few celebrities and famous authors, investigated displays of Twain manuscripts and handwritten musings and watched a short, black-and-white video clip of actor Val Kilmer transformed into Twain, the pen name of Samuel Clemens.

The group then ambled over to the nearby Heyns Reading Room to listen to readings of select Twain writings by actress Rita Moreno; authors Michael Chabon, Eric Karpeles, Mary Roach and Ayelet Waldman; UC Berkeley professor-authors Robert Hass and Maxine Hong Kingston; film editor Walter Murch; library advisory board member Bob Haas and UC Berkeley Chancellor Emeritus I. Michael Heyman. Kilmer contributed via an audio recording.

Chabon reprised Twain's observations about his 70th birthday and Thanksgiving Day, the extermination of early settlers’ neighbors, and the setting aside of a day every year to wipe clean the national conscience, while Hass recalled Twain’s conclusion that people go to heaven for the weather and to hell for the company.

Throughout the evening, a photo team snapped more than 100 shots of individuals, pairs and groups posing on a special Class of 1959 memorial bench, with its whimsical sculpture of a seated Twain stretching an arm along the back.

At the end of the evening, celebrants lined up for a free and increasingly hard-to-get-your-hands-on copy of the autobiography. UC Press is already on its sixth printing and reports that, despite a large number of back orders, stock should be available by mid-December.

WHY THE SILENCE OVER THIS ASSOCIATION?

The “association” between Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain lasted all their life and even after Robert Louis Stevenson’s death in 1894 Mark Twain continued to read and comment his books. But at the end of Twain’s life, he died in 1910, his attitude towards the Scottish novelist deeply changed as if something inside of him was been irremediably broken. He seemed exacerbating some sense of guilt which was been one of the bases of his mind. One effect of Twain’s feelings of guilt, according to Alexander E. Jones was to exclude sex from his writings. In accord with the conventional opinion of psychiatrists, Twain’s strong interest in obscene stories is to be considered a form of exhibitionism and to be related to phallic sexuality. Because pornography, unlike sex, may be interpreted as having its existence outside the limits of conventional society, its amoral; and under certain circumstances men, not women, are free to enjoy it. In this connection, Jones notes, Eden before the Fall was masculine to Twain: many passages in his works describe male nudity; except in early writings, his unclothed females are not women but little girls.. -He did expect to his wife Livy to exert a purifying influence on his speech, his writings, his manners and his habits. For Twain as to many others, home should be only a womblike place, a haven from the trials and temptations of the world of trade, politics, greed and corruption. Robert Louis Stevenson could be a temptation for him because of his talent and his audacity in living his life, challenging the Ocean and moving to Samoa. The Scottish novelist never forgot Twain and tried all his life to maintain a correspondence but the author of Tom Sawyer seemed not ready for standing over the time for a relationship so strong intellectually. Many problems devastated his soul. According to Van Wyck Brooks “his unconscious desire was to be an artist, but this implied an assertion of individuality that was a sin in the eyes of his mother and a shame in the eyes of society”. He had abdicated that spiritual independence without which the creative life is impossible. He was “to lose himself” now, to quote Whitman’s phrase, in “countless masses of adjustments”.
“We have no real morals” Twain wrote in one of his later letters “but only artificial ones, morals created and preserved by the forced suppression of natural and healthy instincts”. That is not true of the man who is master of himself. The morality of the free man is not based upon the suppression of his instincts, it is based upon the discreet employment of them: it is a real and not an artificial morality, therefore, because the whole man subscribes to it. (…) Mark Twain (…) the artist had been submerged in the bourgeois gentleman, the man of business, the respectable Presbyterian citizen.” The jovial, democratic humorist most readers identify as Mark Twain was just a clown mask for the real-life Clemens, who could be insecure, brooding, even reactionary and racist. “Inventing Mark Twain”, a biography of the master of American letters by Andrew Hoffman brings into full view the complex vulnerability of the novelist. Hoffmann claims he had several gay encounters when he was young a bombshell on the world of Mark Twain. It was in the 1860’s in the mining town of Virginia City, Nevada. Twain's close relationship with Clement Rice, a rival reporter with whom he lived in Virginia City and dubbed "the Unreliable", created "barroom conversation" and "sparked the rumour mill", Hoffman reports. Later there was Artemus Ward, a "frankly homosexual" columnist, who also lived under a pseudonym and who penned a letter to Twain beginning with the words "My Dearest Love". And there was Dan DeQuille, a fellow Territorial Enterprise writer. As well as running the paper together, the two were room-mates. "We have the 'sweetest' little parlor and the snuggest little bedroom," DeQuille wrote. "Here we come every night and live - breathe, move and have our being, our bodies." Women were scarce in a frontier man's world. It was common for men to profess ardent love for each other, in what came to be labelled homo-erotic relationships. "Though most western men appear to have visited female prostitutes, they also typically lived in male pairs, sharing resources and beds; this was especially true among prospectors," Hoffman writes. How often they "physically expressed their affection escapes determination,"
But over the time Sam Clemens learned to be Mark Twain, got married with Livy and tried all his life to be a writer, only a good writer. The meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson could be an impressive moment of his life. A moment that the Scottish novelist tried to continue with the letters that he sent during the years asking for a friendship that Twain might not stand for.
Was Robert Louis Stevenson an homosexual too? Stevenson's homosexuality is probed in “Robert Louis Stevenson” by Claire Harman . A contemporary of the writer, Andrew Lang, once wrote that Stevenson "possessed, more than any man I ever met, the power of making other men fall in love with him". Many of Stevenson's closest male friends were homosexual, as the beloved friend Henley, and, as Harman suggests, he "could not have been unaware of the homoerotic forcefield he generated". She draws on some recent queer readings of Stevenson's work, too, such as Elaine Showalter's persuasive account of Jekyll and Hyde as a novella-without-women about "homosexual panic". No more can be told for both, Twain and Stevenson. They met, once or more in New York, something strong happened between them, they tried to continue a correspondence but they followed their destinies separately. Only the memories of this survived all their life.
November 15th the first volume of the Mark Twain autobiography will finally see the light of day.
Twain had left instructions that his autobiography could not be published in full until 100 years after his death. This 760-page first volume, published by University of California Press, has taken about six years to put together. Twain is very frank in the book, venting about people he didn’t like and telling about sexual details of his life. Maybe also about Robert Louis Stevenson?

(28)Alexander E. Jones “Mark Twain and Sexuality” PMLA 71 (Sept. 1956): 596-616
(29)Wyck Brooks-The ordeal of Mark Twain, E.P. Dutton & Co, 1970 p. 219-220
(30)Inventing Mark Twain,the Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens,by Andrew Hoffman, New York: William Morrow, 1997
(31)“Myself & the other fellow-A Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, by Claire Herman, Harper Collins publishers, 2005

MANY POINTS IN COMMUN

However Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain had many common points starting from the issue of duality. They were both popular and great literary writers. Twain was both Eastern and Western, vernacular and genteel, journalistic and artistic speaking both as an optimistic voice of the people and as an embittered misanthrope; both writer and performer, author and businessman, Clemens and Twain. He wrote in 1898 “The Siamese twins” enlightened by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde.
For Stevenson and Twain the women world looks like an unknown universe that is better not to explore. Both are not interested in female representation. Most of Mark Twain’s female characters are girls, matrons, or “spinsters”, and most of these are seen from the limitations of a boyish perspective. Both were icons of their time, creating themselves myths. Stevenson the myth of the South Seas, Twain the myth of the West but it is interesting to stress that Mark Twain made six long voyages on the Pacific, which he first saw while visiting San Francisco in May 1863. Both dreamt about pirates. Allusions to “pirates”” freebooters” and “robbers” pervade many Mark Twain writings. His Autobiography claims ancestors who were pirates in Queen Elizabeth’s time, adding that he himself had wanted to be a pirate-a boyhood fantasy also recalled in the opening paragraph of “Old times on the Mississippi”. They both dreamt about the Southern Cross, one of the symbols of the Pacific myth.
A place apart is represented by Edinburgh and more generally Scotland. Not only because Robert Louis Stevenson was born there but also because for the irony of faith Mark Twain spent a pleasant time in Edinburgh as well as in region. It was in 1873. On this trip, Mark Twain made a pilgrimage to Sir Walter Scott’s Abbotsford home and the whole family became friends with Doctor John Brown. They planned to revisit Brown in Scotland at the end of their 1878-1879 trip to Europe, but poor weather and exhaustion encouraged them to go directly home from Liverpool in early September. Symbol of his passion for Scottish’s world was a beautiful and an enormous handcarved mantel purchased in Scotland and featured in the big library at Hartford. When the Twain’s family came to Edinburgh Robert Louis Stevenson was 23 years old. He did not write yet his masterpieces, while collaborating with the Edinburgh University Magazine. He had not chance at that time to meet the already most famous American writer. They ignored the existence of each other. The meeting was only postponed by fate.
Even living in different places and continents, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain besides knowing each other knew many people related to both lives. For irony of fate some Mark Twain’s works were reviewed by Stevenson’s friend William Hernest Henley. Another friend of both, Robert Louis Stevenson and Mark Twain was Charles Warren Stoddard, a poet and travel writer. In November 1873, he went to England with Mark Twain as his personal secretary (before meeting Stevenson in California), though the American novelist later claimed to have paid his passage merely to have company. His picturesque lodging is commemorated in the Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson. He met him in San Francisco. From him he borrowed the books of Herman Melville, Typee and Omoo, and the South Sea Idylls, which charmed Stevenson alike with their subject and their style.
Both Twain and Stevenson knew Edmund Gosse, Walt Whitman, Charles Fairchild and his wife Elisabeth (who commissioned to Sargent a portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson).And also Sir Henry Irving, Henri Adams, Sidney Colvin, that marched in front of Mark Twain in Oxford, in 1907 and edited the Edinburgh edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s works and Stevenson’s letters.

Google’s Robert Louis Stevenson Treasure Island Logo

Saturday, November 13th is Robert Louis Stevenson’s 160th birthday. Robert Louis Stevenson is a famous writer including some works Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden f Verses, Kidnapped, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

For his special birthday, Google has a special Treasure Island logo.

TWAIN'S MARGINALIA ABOUT STEVENSON

The marginalia play an important role in the reconstruction of the Twain and Stevenson friendship. Mark Twain collected an impressive library of books dispersed over the years in a variety of ways. Some books were given to family and friends, others were lost in transit, particularly during the many moves of their household. Twain himself often cut volumes apart to use long quotations in his own work. Twain liked Browning but no other poets, admired Stevenson, read Kipling and had no affection for Thackeray. He loved to read books but he also liked to write marginalia. Marginalia can be seen as a conversation between readers. The marks a reader has left on a page are like spoor prints to follow. Marginalia are a reader's maps. They were also written to be shared; they were forms of correspondence. In this case between two novelists.
The most remarkable work of classification of Mark Twain’s Marginalia has been made by Alan Gribben. Stevenson is mentioned many times because Mark Twain owned many books of him or about him but only some of them have marginalia.
(some examples:
-An Inland Voyage, London: Chatto & Windus, 1896
with inscription “Jean Clemens/ Vienna/Dec 25th 1897/Mamma” auctioned in 1976,
-Kidnapped; Being memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the year 1751 (publ.1886), “Prince Otto, by author of Kidnapped”, A Lowden Sabbath Morn. Illus. By A.S. Boyd. London: Chatto & Windus, 1898,
inscribed by Clemens in black ink “To Livy/on her next birthday/ SL Clemens/Kaltenleutgeben, August ’98,
-Prince Otto: A Romance (publ. 1885),“Prince Otto by the author of Kidnapped”,The strange Case od Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde (publ. 1886),Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (publ. 1879),Treasure Island (publ. 1883),The Pocket R.L.S./ Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson, London:Chatto & Windus, 1904. The flyleaf conteins a foreign-language inscription of two lines, perhaps Samoan. There are also marginalia. Some passages are marked with vertical lines on many pages 57,81,89,100,122,137,140 (beside “Words are for communication not for judgement”), 144, 145,146,148,158, 161 (the word “steadfast” is underscored in line 7), 197.
Other marginalia could be read in The Wrong Box (with Lloyd Osbourne), New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889. The figure “3,501,249” written in pencil on page 43, possibly by Clemens; “commence” changed to “commune” in pencil by Twain on page 187; “of “ inserted between the words “disposing them”, in pencil, probably by Twain, page 199.)

Thanks to The Elmira College-Center for Mark Twain Studies Fellowship that I got in 2007 I can now report the only marginalia, never entirely published, concerning Robert Louis Stevenson in a book housed in the Katharine and Robert Antenne Collection in the Elmira College's Mark Twain Library directly consulted by me. The Katharine and Robert Antenne Collection has an interesting story.
Katharine was the great niece of Kate Leary (1856-1934). Katy Leary was born to Irish immigrants in Elmira, New York. Her sister Mary was a maid in the Langdon family house. In 1994 Elmira College received the gift of the Antenne Collection, consisting of a number of volumes from Mark Twain’s personal library. At the time of Twain's death, Katy Leary was given these books by Clara Clemens, Twain's only surviving daughter.


In the Katharine and Robert Antenne Collection there is only one book referring to Stevenson. This is an anthology of English letters .

“To him all his listeners are alike and the same sermon will fit them all. He is evidently as ignorant as a priest or a Bible- or a god. In any human assemblage the lion and hyena are present, also the louse, the lamb, the tiger, the snake, the goat, the dog, the cat, the dove, the vulture- so on.
What is “right” for one of these dispositions is “wrong” for the rest. And censurable? No. They do not create their dispositions. They cannot sin with them: only their creator can do that.”

This marginalia are a commentary to a letter that Robert Louis Stevenson, already married with Fanny Vandergrift, wrote in Davos to his mother on December 26th, 1880, from Hotel Belvedere.
It is a letter where Stevenson explains “his religion of kindness”. Some excerpts of the letter can help clarify the Mark Twain’s marginalia. Stevenson writes:

“It is much more important to do right than not to do wrong; further, the one is possible, the other has always been and will ever be impossible; and the faithful design to do right is accepted by God: that seems to me to be the Gospel, and that was how Christ delivered us from the law (…) Faith is not to believe the Bible, but to believe in God: if you believe in God (or, for it’s the same thing, have the assurance you speak about) where is there any more room for terror?” .

From the God of Robert Louis Stevenson in capital letters to god of Mark Twain in small letters.
Stevenson wrote the letter at the beginning of his career and his matrimonial life. Twain wrote the Marginalia at the end of his life. 30 years of difference, a new century between them. The Mark Twain perspective of life has been changing. 1909, the year of the Mark Twain’s marginalia is a very critical time for the author. In 1909 except for his daughter Clara and Jane, that will die that year in December, all the family is gone. His wife Livy, his son Langdon, his daughter Susy. Twain has moved to Stormfield, his last home near Redding, Connecticut in a an 18-room, two-story Italianate villa built on a hill overlooking the Saugatuck Valley designed by John Mead Howells. He is famous all over the world, in 1908 he created the Mark Twain Company to control the use of his pen name and protect his literary copyrights. He is the symbol of the American myth but he is alone. He also invented the “Aquarium Club”. From 1906 until he died, in 1910, he admitted more than a dozen girls (called the Angelfish) to his informal club; he corresponded with them frequently and often had one or two girls-and their mothers-as houseguests. When Clara Clemens returned from Europe in September 1908, she disapproved of the Angelfish and forced her father to cut back his contacts with them. Shortly before he died Mark Twain was rumored to have behaved improperly with a girl in Bermuda named Helen Allen, but evidence for this is inconclusive after his death Clara discouraged publication of anything concerning the Angelfish.
In the “Mysterious Stranger”, written from 1890 to 1910, he remarked “Nothing exists; all is a dream. God, man, the world, the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars- a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space-and you!…And you are but a thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities”. The King as he was called last years of his life was ready to die. Death would pick him up the following year, with the Halley’s Comet.
If the Mark Twain marginalia to the Stevenson letter inscribe themselves in a more general perturbed moment of his life is also true that we must not lose sight of the facts. After years of gentle and appreciative words now Twain is rough and violent against Stevenson. Why? What happened between them? Something did broke up?

(25)Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction by Alan Gribben 2 vols, Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980).
(26)“The great English letter-writers”, by William J. Dawson and Coningsby W. Dawson, vol. I, Harper & Brothers Publishers, New York and London, MCMIX. the marginalia are at page 99.
(27) from “Selected letters of Robert Louis Stevenson” edited by Ernest Mehew, Yale University press, 1997