{"id":118332,"date":"2017-11-28T09:00:05","date_gmt":"2017-11-28T14:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=118332"},"modified":"2017-12-01T15:04:17","modified_gmt":"2017-12-01T20:04:17","slug":"mark-twains-disturbing-passion-for-collecting-young-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/11\/28\/mark-twains-disturbing-passion-for-collecting-young-girls\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Twain\u2019s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Photo courtesy Library of Congress (Prints and Photographs division).<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his \u201cangel-fish,\u201d he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown\u2014his favorite, Susy, was dead by then\u2014and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and Twain, the creator of one of literature\u2019s most famous adolescents, surely celebrated boys\u2019 cheeky energy. There was more, then, to his strange sorority than an elderly man\u2019s yearning for grandchildren, more even than nostalgia for his daughters\u2019 childhoods. \u201cAs for me,\u201d Twain wrote at the age of\u00a0seventy-three, \u201cI collect pets: young girls\u2014girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent\u2014dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears.\u201d<\/p>\n

Innocent they were, but not as naive as he seemed to think. Certainly they knew that he was a celebrity: that was how it started,\u00a0when fifteen-year-old Gertrude Natkin saw him leaving Carnegie Hall on December 27,\u00a01905, after a matinee song recital by the German soprano Madame Johanna Gadski. Twain, after all, was instantly recognizable, even before he decided to wear only white. He noticed her, to be sure, saw that she wanted to speak to him, introduced himself and shook her hand. The next day, she wrote to thank him: \u201cI am very glad I can go up and speak to you now \u2026 as I think we know each other.\u201d Describing herself as his \u201cobedient child,\u201d she ended her note, \u201cI am the little girl who loves you.\u201d He responded immediately, calling himself Gertrude\u2019s \u201coldest & latest conquest.\u201d Their correspondence was playfully flirtatious: he called her his \u201clittle witch\u201d; she called him \u201cdarling.\u201d He sent her a copy of his favorite book, the writings of \u201ca bewitching little scamp\u201d named Marjorie, who had died just short of her ninth birthday, in Scotland in 1811. \u201cI have adored Marjorie for six-and-thirty years,\u201d he confessed in an essay. The child, who confided startlingly sophisticated remarks about books, history and religion in her journal, seemed to him \u201cmade out of thunderstorms and sunshine\u201c: \u201chow impulsive she was, how sudden, how tempestuous, how tender, how loving, how sweet, how loyal, how rebellious \u2026 how innocently bad, how natively good,\u201d he exclaimed. \u201cMay I be your little \u2018Marjorie\u2019?\u201d\u00a0Gertrude asked coyly. That is how Twain addressed her, in letters filled with what the two called \u201cblots,\u201d or kisses\u2014until 1906, when he was taken aback by her turning sixteen. \u201cI am almost afraid to send a blot, but I venture it. Bless your heart it comes within an ace of being improper! Now back you go to 14!\u2014then there\u2019s no impropriety.\u201d Their correspondence ended, and Twain set his sights on younger girls.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Buoyed by Gertrude\u2019s effusive declarations of love, Twain discovered that it was easy to find other young admirers, primarily\u00a0from among his fellow passengers on holiday trips to Bermuda. By 1908, he had collected ten schoolgirls, dubbed them his \u201cangel-fish,\u201d and awarded them membership in his Aquarium Club. In Bermuda, he had special shimmering enamel lapel pins designed for them to wear on their left breast, above the heart. In the spring and summer of 1908, one biographer notes, Twain\u2019s letters to his angelfish comprised more than half of his correspondence: one letter sent or received every day. Many contained invitations to the girls to visit him in his palatial house in Redding, Connecticut, which he named Innocence at Home. \u201cI have built this house largely, indeed almost chiefly, for the comfort & accommodation of the Aquarium,\u201d\u00a0Twain announced in a mock-serious document that he sent to his angelfish, containing the rules and regulations of the club. The lair of the angelfish was his Billiard Room.<\/p>\n

Twain recounted, in an autobiographical entry, how he found his \u201cjewels.\u201d One morning in Bermuda, as he walked into the breakfast room,<\/p>\n

the first object I saw in that spacious and far-reaching place was a little girl seated solitary at a table for two. I bent down over her and patted her cheek and said, affectionately and with compassion, \u2018Why you dear little rascal\u2014do you have to eat your breakfast all by yourself in this desolate way?\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

They arranged to meet after breakfast and, he reported, \u201cwere close comrades\u2014inseparables in fact\u2014for eight days.\u201d A friend later told him that the twelve-year-old girl had asked if he was married, and when learning that he was not\u2014his wife had died\u2014said, \u201cIf I were his wife I would never leave his side for a moment; I would stay by him and watch him, and take care of him all the time.\u201d Twain attributed the remark to the girl\u2019s \u201cmother instinct,\u201d and willingly submitted, characterizing himself as a \u201cdegraded and willing slave.\u201d In 1907, on board a ship taking him to England, where he would receive an honorary degree from Oxford, Twain found the sixteen-year-old Frances Nunnally, with whom, he said, he \u201cgrew quite confidential,\u201d and who became, however briefly, an angelfish; on the return trip, he befriended the nine-year-old Dorothy Quick, who, a newspaper reporter noted, \u201cguarded him closely during the voyage,\u201d sitting on his lap, with her head leaning against his shoulder. He called her \u201cmon amie,\u201d another reporter wrote, and stood on deck with his arm \u201cthrown paternally around the child\u2019s shoulder,\u201d at one\u00a0point giving her \u201ca fond little hug.\u201d<\/p>\n

Twain\u2019s collection of girls was well known, inspiring some adult women to press for membership. One came for dinner \u201cdressed for 12 years, & had pink ribbons at the back of her neck & looked about 14 years old.\u201d Impressed, Twain gave her an angelfish pin. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of lady-candidates,\u201d he wrote to a young angelfish, \u201cbut I guess we won\u2019t let any more in, unless perhaps Billie Burke.\u201d The vivacious and youthful comedienne, twenty-three\u00a0at the time, was a favorite actress of Twain\u2019s: \u201cBillie is as good as she is pretty,\u201d he remarked to an angelfish after dining with Burke and a few other Broadway performers. He had met her after a performance of My Wife<\/em>, a play whose May-to-December theme fitted his fantasies, and Burke often visited him at his Manhattan town house whenever she was working in the northeast.<\/p>\n

During the years that Twain collected his angelfish, he spurned the companionship of his real daughter, Jean, who had been living in medical institutions where her epilepsy could be monitored. In the summer of 1908, Twain\u2019s secretary and assistant, Isabel Lyon (the Lioness, he called her, and she called him King), arranged for Jean to live in Gloucester, Massachusetts; she stayed there briefly, unhappily, until she left the country with friends. In 1909, Jean returned to Twain\u2019s home, where she drowned in a bathtub, having suffered a seizure.<\/p>\n

By the time Jean died, Twain\u2019s blatant cavorting with angelfish had been thwarted by his other daughter, Clara. In the summer of 1908, Clara returned from a European concert tour and was appalled by her father\u2019s new interest. Rechristening the Redding house Stormfield, she put an end to the angelfishes\u2019 visits. The house had lost its innocence, and by that winter Twain began to complain irritably about his declining health and spirits. An odd resurfacing of the angelfish obsession occurred in 1910, just weeks before his death, in letters and notebook entries regarding the fifteen-year-old Helen Allen, a moody young woman who fascinated him. \u201cShe is bright, smart<\/em>, alive<\/em>, energetic, determined, high-tempered, intense<\/em>,\u201d he wrote; but she was also disappointing, preferring romance literature to poetry, and responding to Twain\u2019s witticisms and attempts at banter with \u201cmute indifference.\u201d More disappointing still, she had a boyfriend, and Twain was jealous: he cautioned Helen to preserve her innocence; he wanted the younger man out of the way.<\/p>\n

Twain\u2019s obsession with adolescent girls can be explained in part by his exalting of his own teenaged years\u2014years of daring and adventure. His wife, after all, had nicknamed him Youth, and his most memorable fictional characters, of course, are the adolescent Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. Twain focused not on young boys, though, but sexually innocent girls from ages ten to sixteen, with undeveloped boyish bodies and with whom he carried out titillating flirtations. Photographs of Twain and his angelfish show them standing or sitting close to him, their bodies touching his,\u00a0with his arms around their shoulders or waists. They might be his daughters; or they might be his lovers. His notes about Helen Allen reveal a yearning to be more than protector, mentor and grandfather. Twain regretted aging, claiming the vigor of a much younger man. \u201cAt 2 o\u2019clock in the morning I feel old and sinful,\u201d he remarked, \u201cbut at 8 o\u2019clock, when I am shaving I feel young and ready to hunt trouble … as though I were not over 25 years old.\u201d<\/p>\n

The quintessential adolescent of the time, who leapt gloriously onto the London stage in 1904 and Broadway in 1905, was Peter Pan, the boy who refused to grow up. Like Mark Twain\u2019s Huck Finn, Peter flew to uncharted territory rather than submit to becoming civilized by his family.<\/p>\n

Mark Twain praised the play with his customary enthusiasm, gushing that<\/p>\n

all the implacable rules of the drama are violated, yet the result is a play which is without a defect … It is a fairy play. There isn\u2019t a thing in it which could ever happen in real life. That is as it should be. It is consistently beautiful, sweet, clean, fascinating, satisfying, charming, and\u00a0impossible from beginning to end. It breaks all the rules of real life drama, but preserves intact all the rules of fairyland, and the result is altogether contenting to the spirit.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cThe longing of my heart,” the seventy-year-old Twain added, \u201cis a fairy portrait of myself: I want to be pretty; I want to eliminate facts and fill up the gap with charms.\u201d Twain saw in Peter the adolescent he so fervently wished to be, eternally.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Linda Simon is Professor of English Emerita at Skidmore College and the author of <\/em>The Greatest Shows on Earth: A History of the Circus (2014) and <\/em>Coco Chanel (2011), both published by Reaktion.<\/em><\/p>\n

This essay is excerpted\u00a0from\u00a0<\/em>Lost Girls: The Invention of the Flapper by Linda Simon. Reprinted with permission from<\/em>\u00a0Reaktion Books Ltd. \u00a9 2017 by Linda Simon. All rights reserved.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  In 1905, when seventy-year-old Mark Twain began to collect a bevy of adolescent girls, whom he called his \u201cangel-fish,\u201d he defended his predilection by insisting that he longed for grandchildren. His own daughters were grown\u2014his favorite, Susy, was dead by then\u2014and he was lonely. But grandfathers can have grandsons as well as granddaughters, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1315,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[31777,31781,1569,31785,31778,8735,31782,31783,31784,31779,1766,31780,6376,3065],"class_list":["post-118332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-angelfish","tag-billie-burke","tag-carnegie-hall","tag-clara-clemens","tag-gertrude-natkin","tag-huckleberry-finn","tag-isabel-lyon","tag-jean-clemens","tag-linda-simon","tag-madame-johanna-gadski","tag-mark-twain","tag-my-wife","tag-pedophilia","tag-peter-pan"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMark Twain\u2019s Disturbing Passion for Collecting Young Girls<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Twain had a penchant for collecting schoolgirls, whom he dubbed his \u201cangel-fish,\u201d and 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