Clara Clemens

Writer

• Born: June 8, 1874
• Birthplace: Elmira, New York
• Died: 1962

Biography

Clara Langdon Clemens was born on June 8, 1874, at the Elmira, New York, farm of her mother’s sister, where her own family spent most of their summers. Her mother, Olivia Langdon Clemens, was the daughter of one of the wealthiest families in Elmira. Her father, Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was better known to the world as the author Mark Twain. Through most of her life, Clemens would live under her father’s shadow.

Clemens and her sisters, Susy and Jean, received their early education in the family mansion in Hartford, Connecticut, under the supervision of their mother and private tutors. Clemens later attended Hartford’s public high school. During the 1890’s, when her family was living in Europe, she attended a boarding school in Germany and studied music under Theodor Leschetizky in Vienna.

In 1895, Clemens was the only one of Twain’s daughters who accompanied him and her mother on a year-long round-the-world lecture tour. Shortly before Clemens and her mother returned to the United States in August, 1896, Clemens’s older sister, Susy, died in the family’s Hartford house. The family never returned to that home. The following year, the Clemenses relocated to Vienna, where Clemens resumed her music studies. After the family returned to the United States in 1900, she studied singing in New York. When her mother died in 1904, Clemens suffered a nervous breakdown and spent a year recovering in a Connecticut sanitarium.

In October, 1909, Clemens married Ossip Gabrilowitsch, a music student she had met in Vienna. A Russian Jew, Gabrilowitsch was an accomplished pianist and orchestra conductor. Clemens’s younger sister, Jean, died in December, 1909, leaving Clemens as Twain’s sole heir. She was with her father when he died at his Redding, Connecticut, home on April 21, 1910. She and her husband then remained in Redding until she gave birth to her only child, Nina Gabrilowitsch, in August, 1910.

The task of preserving Twain’s legacy and public image fell to Clemens, as the only child to survive her father. She and her father’s hand-picked biographer and literary executor, Albert Bigelow Paine, mutually agreed to maintain a nonoffensive public image of Twain, to suppress publication of some unpublished manuscripts, and to restrict access to his personal papers. Clemens’s influence helped to color public views of her father through the remaining five decades of her life.

Meanwhile, Clemens and her family settled in Germany after her father’s death. However, the outbreak of World War I in 1914 made her Russian husband an enemy national in Germany, so they returned to the United States and remained there permanently. In 1918, they moved to Detroit, Michigan, where Gabrilowitsch assumed the directorship of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. Clemens occasionally sang at her husband’s concerts and participated in Detroit theater groups. In the 1930 census, she listed her occupation as opera singer, writer, and actress.

In May, 1923, Clemens published an article in the music magazine Etude, titled “How I Got Rid of Nervousness in Public,” about her cures for stage fright. Four years later, she followed it with her first book, Why Be Nervous, which offered her tips for relaxation. She also contributed introductions to several new editions of her father’s writings and wrote a biography, My Father, Mark Twain. After her husband died of stomach cancer in 1936, she wrote My Husband, Gabrilowitsch.

In 1938, a year after the death of Paine, Twain’s literary executor, Bernard DeVoto was appointed editor of the Mark Twain Papers but was not given the power to publish any of them without Clemens’s permission. Throughout DeVoto’s eight-year tenure in that position, Clemens allowed him to publish only one new book, Mark Twain in Eruption (1940), which he compiled from unpublished autobiographical writings. DeVoto resigned his position in 1946.

In 1939, Clemens moved to Hollywood, California. In 1944, she married another Russian musician, Jacques Samossoud, a handsome man twenty years her junior who also happened to be a compulsive gambler. To cope with her mounting mental and physical stress, Clemens turned to Christian Science. Meanwhile, her daughter Nina was becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol, and her new husband’s gambling debts were growing. To pay off these debts, Clemens in 1951 sold her Hollywood mansion and an extensive library of her father’s personal books and effects, and she and Samossoud moved to a comfortable motel in San Diego.

Her book, Awake to a Perfect Day: My Experience with Christian Science, described what she called her spiritual and physical healing through Christian Science. Faced with continuing financial difficulties and pressure to publish more of her father’s material, Clemens finally relented and allowed the publication of Letters from the Earth, a book that DeVoto had edited in 1939. The first new Twain material published in two decades, the book became a national best-seller and spurred new interest in Twain’s writings.

Clemens died in 1962. Her biographies of her father and husband provided history with first-hand glimpses of their lives. However, she is remembered for suppressing the publication of her father’s works.