At the beginning of August, I drove up to Elmira, NY for the Ninth International Conference on Mark Twain Studies, hosted by the Center for Mark Twain Studies (CMTS) at Elmira College. Several of my coworkers from The Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford were there, including our executive director and both members of our curatorial department. It was a truly international conference, as well, despite its small size; I attended several panels with scholars from Europe and Asia.
I was there to participate in a flash session entitled “Mark Twain Studies: Surviving Change, Embracing the Future,” organized by Susan K. Harris. I was the only person on the panel not working on Twain in an academic context, and perhaps more importantly, I was the only person on the panel with a background in history, not English. My disciplinary training and my day-to-day work is rooted in different sources, methods, and goals than people who teach Twain in a literary studies context. These differences shaped my experience at the conference more broadly, and I enjoyed the way being immersed in a different disciplinary space pushed me to think in new ways.
The conference included some really excellent and incisive papers that showed where Mark Twain Studies could go–with the understanding, of course, that there are many forces working to prevent growth and success in every academic field, not least of which is the lack of full-time secure employment. Two that really stood out to me were in the same panel on the last day of the conference. The first was from Matt Seybold: “Frazier’s Smartphone & Twain’s Notepad: The Vigilante Origin of American Police”. Matt is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College and host of the American Vandal podcast.
The other paper that really got me thinking was Virginia Maresca’s “‘Treachery on both sides’: Twain’s Lessons to Modern America on White Victimhood”. Through the tireless efforts of the conference’s organizer Joe Lemak, director of the CMTS and assistant professor of history at the college, many of the papers presented are available on YouTube and are well worth your time. Both Virginia and Matt’s papers probed the ways that Twain’s experiences and writings can, for lack of a better cliché, help us think about the challenging world we live in today.
This is definitely a conference that embraces the weird side of its subject and the ways people have interpreted him. One panel that really showcased that was David Bianculli and Mark Dawidziak’s “All The Twains Meet: The Film and TV Portrayal of Mark Twain,” which explored the highlights (and lowlights) of the genre. Did you know Bing Crosby once portrayed Mark Twain on film? I can’t unsee it, and now you won’t be able to either.
But as funny as this panel was, I also found myself tearing up as I watched repeated depictions of one of the most painful moments in Sam Clemens’ life, the Christmas Eve 1909 drowning death of his youngest daughter Jean. I fully admit that because of what I do at the museum, I spend more time thinking about how to interpret the history of the Clemens family and their home than I do thinking about Sam Clemens’ writing. I work in the home where Jean grew up. At times, I was really challenged by the tension between “Mark Twain” and Sam Clemens in the conversations at the conference, and even by the lack of tension at times.
But if the Clemenses spent two decades in Hartford, and Sam Clemens was famously born in Missouri, why is this conference in Elmira? This city in New York’s Southern Tier was the home to the Langdon family, including Olivia Langdon, the wife of Sam Clemens.
In case you were wondering, that estimated driving time is a lie.
Sam and Livy were married here in Elmira, and the family spent more than twenty summers at Quarry Farm, the property of Olivia’s sister Susan Crane and her husband Theodore. Olivia attended Elmira College, and her father was a founding trustee. The entire Clemens family is also buried in Elmira.
Photos by the author unless otherwise indicated.
Quarry Farm is a historic property, but it’s quite different from the Twain House in Hartford where I work. Parts of the house are preserved and/or restored to what it was like in the 19th century, but other parts, like the kitchen, are much more modern. This allows CMTS, which is the steward for Quarry Farm, to offer a number of residential fellowships each year for Twain Studies scholars working on all kinds of projects. Earlier in 2022, Jodi (our Director of Collections) and Mallory (our Assistant Curator) were up at Quarry Farm as fellows, working on an upcoming exhibit at the museum.
Quarry Farm. Lvklock, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
While we were in Elmira, Jodi and I roamed all around the city to film an episode of our webseries for kids, Catching Up With The Clemenses. We talk about Elmira all the time in our work at the museum in Hartford, so we were excited to get a chance to show our viewers around.
Jodi filming some b-roll on the crispy Quarry Farm lawn. While the northeastern US remains stuck in a drought, it actually rained (briefly) all four days I was in Elmira, always when we were walking somewhere.
One of the most important parts of Quarry Farm is actually on the Elmira College campus today: Twain’s octagonal writing study.
Stopping for a selfie with a while Jodi films in the background.
Even though I work every day in the Twain House, it was really enjoyable to spend some time with other people who like thinking about Mark Twain, in a space that is absolutely infused with the man, his family, and their history.
Also I went to Wegmans four times.
