Mark Twain (1835-1910) was - and still is - a beloved American writer, essayist and humorist. He is one of those people who gained a lasting popularity by works that seem to have caught something important in the self-perception of a nation: His fictive characters like e.g. Tom from in "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" (1876) and its sequel "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (1884) stand out as "true Americans", but - and that's the great part of it - you don't have to be an American to love them. Twain was called "The father of American literature", but as it is he also was a father in the world of realities as he had four children, i.e. one son who died in early infancy and three daughters. Sadly enough, two of these three girls also died young and only one, Clara, married and had one child, her daughter Nina Gabrilowitsch.

Clara Langdon Clemens

It seems that the surviving Twain-daughter had some traits in common with the fictional boy-characters her father had created. She was prone to mishaps as she had an inkling for adventurous exploits like e.g. sledding down steep slopes. When growing up she not only dreamed of being her own woman, away from her family of a, at that time, mortally sick mother and sister, and an absent father, but also of becoming an opera star. However, that career wish was never fulfilled although she on several occasions performed succesfully as a recital singer. She also had some fame as a fine pianist, but she married a genuine musical prodigy, the Russian pianist‚ composer‚ and conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch. They had one child, namely their daughter‚ Nina (1910-1966), who was to become the last one in the Twain-bloodline as she never married, but remained a spinster all through her life. When Ossip Gabrilowitsch died in 1936 Clara married another Russian musician, Jacques Samoussoud, and lived with him in California until she herself died, 88 years old.

Nina with her parents, Clara and Ossip Gabrilowitsch

The only grand-daughter of Mark Twain wasn't a female "Tom Sawyer", but she exhibited some traits that have been seen as something she had inherited from her famous grandfather, namely alcoholism. Something he himself didn't own up to. When she was found dead in 1966 she was surrounded by empty whisky bottles and something that indicated a grave narcotics problem. She never met her famous grandfather who died four months before she was born, but she felt related to him in many ways which made her chose his family name "Clemens", naming herself Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch. As it was she lived off her inheritance from him after she had had to drop her dreams of becoming a great photographer.

Her life was spent in travels and one gets the impression that she somehow never started to grow into the person she might have become had she not chosen drugs and spirits as the most important to her. She did have a somewhat mysterious affair with an artist by the name of Carl Roters for several years. Clara did not approve of him as she thought he was to blame for her daughter's drinking, but he himself said that he didn't want to marry her because of her addiction to alcohol and drugs. In 1941he married someone else.

The only descendant of "the father of the American literature", Mark Twain seems so very bleak and colorless that she in my opinion resembles a "ghost" of what might have been, but which never became a reality. Well, she wasn't either her grandfather or her mother, and somehow she seems to have lacked most of what constituted their personality. She is in many ways a very mysterious individual and it has been said about her that she is the least known relative of Mark Twain which is quite sad as she was his only true descendant.