Finding Langdon at Quarry Farm (A Quarry Farm Testimonial)

EDITOR’S NOTE: We occasionally feature testimonials from recent Quarry Farm Fellows and Residents, which combine conversational illustrations of their research and writing process with personal reflections on their experiences as Twain scholars, teachers, and fellows. Applications for Quarry Farm Fellowships are due each Winter. Find more information HERE.

Charline Jao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Literatures in English at Cornell University. Her research broadly focuses on grief, print culture, and gender in the American nineteenth century. Her dissertation, “Early Lost,” looks at the temporality of child death and separation in texts by nineteenth-century American women writers, with an emphasis on events not easily absorbed into sentimentalism or nation-making such as infanticide and abandonment. Jao is the creator of two digital humanities projects: Periodical Poets, a catalogue of poetry published in New York City periodicals run by Black editors in the nineteenth century, and No Stain of Tears and Blood, a collection of material related to the abolitionist free labor/free produce movement. Her research has been supported by the Cornell Rural Humanities Initiative, The Center for Mark Twain Studies, and the American Antiquarian Society. Jao is also the 2024 Michael J. Kiskis Quarry Farm Fellow Recipient.

Charline Jao has delivered two talks for CMTS in the past. You can find them here:

• Charline Jao, “Langdon’s Pencil: The Infant Voice in Mark Twain’s Langdon Letters” (July 10, 2024 – The Park Church)
• Charline Jao, “A Yankee in Kennedy’s Court: The Humorous American Story and The Mark Twain Prize” (May 11, 2022 – Quarry Farm Barn)

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The impact that the Langdons and Quarry Farm had on Mark Twain and his work was profound. Any scholar working on Twain with the fortune of staying at Quarry Farm will no doubt find a link to their research, whether in the view of the Chemung River Twain had when penning his most famous works, the rooms where the Clemens girls played, or, of course, that amazing porch where the family and friends would gather.

Quarry Farm, in the story of my project, is less joyful. When examining Samuel and Olivia Clemens’s letters in the 1870s about their firstborn son Langdon, Elmira appeared in select moments, mainly in descriptions of nurses and Susan Crane tending to Olivia and Langdon as both go through periods of serious illness. In one of the few images of Langdon we have, taken in the studio of Elmira’s John E. Larkin, Crane sits in for Olivia who is too ill. When Langdon passes in 1871, the couple does not attend the burial in Woodlawn Cemetery because Olivia is too unwell to travel from Hartford. Their absence, as they were undoubtedly pained by grief, was on my mind during my stay.

My project grew out of my dissertation’s focus on child loss in nineteenth-century America, and how efforts to narrate loss that feels both exceptionally untimely and tragically common often brushed against typical scripts of acceptance and resolution. With the help of collections manager Kathleen Galvin who scanned several letters for me, I was struck by the ways these family letters oscillate between sadness, detachment, fear, and – perhaps most curiously – humor. Despite my early comment about the bleak nature of this period, there are many moments of joy, care and play in these documents. Focusing on the handful of letters where Samuel ventriloquizes his son to friends and relatives (writing and signing letters “from” Langdon), I repeatedly asked – in proposals, out loud to my husband, to the attendees at my lecture, to Barbara Snedecor who has also written about these letters – why? Why, when your son and wife are in precarious states of health, create this brazen persona?

Quarry Farm helped me tackle this question: through the scans Kathleen sends me, the extensive upstairs library, and the dedicated time to think about the Clemens in their own domestic space. There was no miraculous discovery, as gaps in correspondence and a conspicuous silence on Langdon throughout Twain’s life keep me somewhat speculative; though the works of Michael J. Kiskis, Joseph Csicsila, and others show me that I’m in good company. In my two weeks, I thought about what it would mean to read the Langdon person as a literary and personal exercise, and I gave more and more thought to Twain’s reflection on this period in the autobiographical dictations that make up his autobiography. (It is his deference to Susy’s Papa throughout that helps me once again find Langdon.) 

After my fellowship, I now feel a deeper closeness not only with the Clemens and Langdon family at Quarry Farm, but with the Center for Mark Twain Studies and their rich history of preservation, collection, stewardship, and support. While I love a good museum, I have always admired the Langdon family’s stipulation that Quarry Farm become a space for scholars. What an amazing cohort I get to join! In addition, being able to speak in the same spot Thomas K. Beecher did as part of the Park Church Lecture Series also gave me an opportunity to take stock of the radical history of Western New York in the nineteenth century and how this history shaped my time at Cornell University, something I appreciated even more after attending Mary Lemak’s talk on Rev. Annis Ford Eastman the following week. 

Beyond my project, the fellowship was full of other memorable moments: encounters with beloved cats Grey Greg and Dr. Carmichael, watching fireflies from the porch, and jokingly exclaiming, “Look at us Roughing It” every few hours (apologies, I know it’s low-hanging fruit). In my second week, I was reading through some of the bloodier and more gothic Twain stories from Life on the Mississippi and The Innocents Abroad and lightning struck! Not figuratively either; Elmira was hit with a thunderstorm that caused a massive outage, uprooted trees, and other kinds of damage. I still feel like I was inviting trouble.