Elmira New York is Mark Twain Country but it is Difficult to Find His Spirit There

Approaching Elmira, New York, I had an irresistible urge to sing a hit song by the Oak Ridge Boy's, substituting the word Elmira for Elvira.

"Elmira, Elmira

My heart's on fire Elmira

Giddy Up Oom Poppa Omm Poppa Mow Mow"

However, my heart's not really on fire for Elmira. It's a fairly attractive city, although it must not have seemed so to the Confederate soldiers held in the prison camp there, one fourth of whom died.

But I did not go to Elmira to see what one historian calls Helmira,. I went to visit St. Mark's shrine, Mark Twain that is. Elmira advertises itself as Mark Twain Country, although Hannibal Missouri, Hartford Connecticut and several other communities can make the same claim.

Rudyard Kipling claimed to have traveled all the way from India to visit Mark Twain in Elmira,. We had only traveled 160 miles. We stopped first at the Mark Twain Exhibit at Elmira College, which contained some photographs, a stereopticon, Twain's donkey cart, an old typewriter and a few other relics in three small rooms.

The gift shop in one corner sold cups, neckties and other Twain memorabilia. It also had copies of Twains books and books about Twain, the latter outnumbering the former.

We--my wife, my daughter and I--then went up the street, walking between borders of golden and yellow balloons tied to golf tees pegged into the ground to the front lawn of the college where Mark Twain's study stands. It looks like a very large, glassed in gazebo, although the iconic status of Twain gives it the air of the first story of a pagoda.

Except as a model for the kind of study I might like to have, it was a disappointment. Several antique chairs with signs warning us to not sit on them, a few more photos and trinkets, beat-up copies of some of Twain's works and a girl guide sitting at Twain's desk to answer our questions were all that it contained. On the way out, my wife asked the girl if Twain had any living descendants. "No," she said. "His grand-daughter [Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch] died of a barbituate overdose in 1966 and that ended his line."

Leaving the college, we drove through the rag-tag, bag lady end of Elmira and took a left past the Volunteers of America thrift store. A couple miles outside of Elmira, we arrived at Quarry Farm on a hill overlooking Elmira and the Chemung River. Life on the Chemung must have been a lot easier for Twain than life on the Mississippi by the looks of the beautiful house and grounds.

Signs at the end of the driveways said, "Private Drive. No Admittance." I don't know if Twain would have permitted such signs to be posted. The house never did belong to him, but to his sister-in-law. However, he visited many summers and wrote some of his best known books there: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court among others. Here he also wrote a lesser known book, 1601, whose two main themes are flatulence and fornication, which his friend the Rev. Joseph Twitchell enjoyed while his more secular literary friend, William Dean Howells, found distasteful.

Like the premature obituary of Mark Twain that appeared in 1897, the reports of Elmira as Mark Twain Country are exaggerated. Little maps of Chemung County appear on travel brochures and by using various lakes and rivers, the artist turns the county into a portrait of Twain. But he's just not there. His body might be buried in Elmira, Twain scholars study him at the college and reside at Quarry Farm but his spirit is missing.

But maybe I can't blame it all on Elmira. My own opinion of Twain has gone downhill lately. I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn this past summer for the third time and felt that it is a good book, a seminal book, but Ernest Hemingway too was exaggerating when he said, "All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn'."

I'm sure that I was also influenced by the latest book I read by Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain God's Fool, which reveals what a stinker Twain was during the last ten years of his life. Hill rips the genial, comic mask off Twain, and shows how petty, cruel and misanthropic he could be. His treatment of his daughters and his secretary of many years was particularly contemptible.

Maybe next time I go to Elmira, I will take a look at Twain's gravestone. I will also visit the site of Helmira, where Twain's Confederate compatriots were really roughing it while he was prospecting, becoming a journalist, avoiding the war, and carrying on other enterprises that would later appear in his book, Roughing It.

Meanwhile I will keep reading more about and by Twain because I think the boundaries of the real Mark Twain country are the front and back covers of his books.