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Mark Twain's Aquarium - The Samuel Clemens-Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910 (Hardcover)
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Mark Twain's Aquarium - The Samuel Clemens-Angelfish Correspondence, 1905-1910 (Hardcover)
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What I lacked and what I needed,"" confessed Samuel Clemens in
1908, "was grandchildren." Near the end of his life, Clemens became
the doting friend and correspondent of twelve schoolgirls ranging
in age from ten to sixteen. For Clemens, "collecting" these
surrogate granddaughters was a way of overcoming his loneliness, a
respite from the pessimism, illness, and depression that dominated
his later years. In Mark Twain's Aquarium, John Cooley brings
together virtually every known communication exchanged between the
writer and the girls he called his "angelfish." Cooley also
includes a number of Clemens's notebook entries, autobiographical
dictations, short manuscripts, and other relevant materials that
further illuminate this fascinating story. Clemens relished the
attention of these girls, orchestrating chaperoned visits to his
homes and creating an elaborate set of rules and emblems for the
Aquarium Club. He hung their portraits in his billiard room and
invented games and plays for their amusement. For much of 1908, he
was sending and receiving a letter a week from his angelfish.
Cooley argues that Clemens saw cheerfulness and laughter as his
only defenses against the despair of his late years. His
enchantment with children, years before, had given birth to such
characters as Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Huck Finn. In the
frivolities of the Aquarium Club, it found its final expression.
Cooley finds no evidence of impropriety in Clemens behavior with
the girls. Perhaps his greatest crime, the editor suggests, was in
idealizing them, in regarding them as precious collectibles. "He
tried to trap them in the amber of endless adolescence," Cooley
writes. ""By pleading that they stay young and innocent, he was
perhaps attempting to deny that, as they and the world continued to
change, so must he.
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