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Cyril Clemens, Truman Speaks (1946)

Cyril Clemens was a man whose main claim to fame was being a distant cousin of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as author and humourist Mark Twain. He consequently formed an ambitious international organisation which aimed to honour Twain and unite the world in a shared love of culture.

Born to wealthy parents in St Louis Missouri in 1902, Clemens met Mark Twain once when he was seven years old, but he admitted that he had little interest or knowledge of his cousin’s importance at the time. All this was to change in the early 1920s, when Clemens was invited to give a speech on Twain for a local women’s club, conducting research which would ignite a lifelong passion for all things Twain.

Using money from a family inheritance to fund what would otherwise be an untenable lifestyle, Clemens founded an International Mark Twain Society, with the aim of keeping Twain’s name alive by linking it with 20th-century authors and other famous people who professed admiration for Mark Twain. The society began producing a Mark Twain Quarterly, later renamed the Mark Twain Journal, and quickly succeeded in its task of signing up statesmen, celebrities, and other leading figures from around the globe. The stated goal was ‘to knit the whole world in bonds of cultured peace’, and a ‘Mark Twain Medal’ was gifted to people as diverse Mussolini and FDR.

Clemens’s passion for Twain led him to try his hand at biography, and he even wrote letters which were published in several Australian newspapers asking for Twain anecdotes from the famous author’s trip to Australia in 1895. Once he proved himself to be capable in the biographer’s artform, Clemens broadened his focus and began producing short sketches of famous authors and politicians, including George Bernard Shaw, A.E. Housman, Mussolini, Sir Robert Walpole, and John Galsworthy.

However, beyond Twain, the only full-length biography Clemens produced was an early study of The Man from Missouri – Harry S. Truman released in 1945. Truman Speaks was a follow up volume of edited Truman speeches, which was published by the Mark Twain Society.

Menzies met Truman during a prime ministerial trip to Washington in 1950, a key moment in the development of the Australian-American alliance as it came in the immediate aftermath of the outbreak of the Korean War and Australia’s prompt commitment to join the United States in the defence of South Korea. It appears that during this trip Clemens succeeded in signing Menzies up to the Mark Twain Society.

Later that year, Clemens sent Menzies a copy of Truman Speaks, with an inscription reading: ‘To Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies Knight of Mark Twain with the Editor’s best wishes Cyril Clemens October 1950’

‘Knight’ Menzies was quite a fan of Mark Twain and greatly enjoyed his humour, though this would not necessarily be obvious from the Menzies Collection without the quixotic entry in the Truman book. The Collection contains a copy of Twain’s The Innocents Abroad, but copies of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which Menzies is known to have purchased in the early 1920s have been lost.

In a speech Menzies delivered for Father’s Day 1960, he would quote Twain while saying he had produced Menzies’s ‘favourite story’ about the relationship between fathers and sons:

‘You know, when I was a boy of sixteen I used to discuss things with my father. He was very, very ill-informed. He appeared to have everything all wrong. I had to put him right continuously. But by the time I was twenty one, do you know, I found it remarkable to discover how much the old man had learned in five years.’