1835 Two days after Samuel L. Clemens’s (i.e. Mark Twain’s) death, a reader wrote to the New York Times to draw the editor’s attention ‘to a peculiar coincidence’.
Mark Twain, born Nov. 30, 1835.
Last perihelion of Halley’s comet, Nov. 10, 1835.
Mark Twain died, April 21, 1910.
Perihelion of Halley’s comet, April 20, 1910.
‘It so appears’, the paper’s correspondent pointed out, ‘that the lifetime of the great humorist was nearly identical (the difference being exactly fifteen days) with the last long “year” of the great comet’.
In fact the coincidence was noted, and actually predicted, by the writer himself, recollecting, doubtless, with some justified self-importance the line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: ‘When beggars die, then are no comets seen / The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.’
Thirty years before he died, an 1881 interview with Twain was published under the title ‘Mark Twain’s Preparations for a Possible Encounter With the Comet’. In 1909, as his angina worsened, he made the much quoted remark:
I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year [1910], and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together’. Oh, I am looking forward to that.
That Twain came into this world and left it along with Halley’s comet is universally noted as one of the pleasing symmetries of literature. Astrology and literary history rarely concur so neatly.
But is it neat? A spoilsport article by Louis J. Budd, ‘Overbooking Halley’s Comet’ (in the Mark Twain Circular, January 2000), modifies and – arguably – overturns the coincidence of birth, death, and comet. According to Budd, Twain’s Halleyan entrance and exit works ‘only if we arrange the facts loosely’. He goes on:
Astronomers use perihelion as one of the pivotal (no pun) dates of its schedule. That’s when its orbit comes closest to the sun. However, rubberneck fans of the comet date its fly-bys by its visibility without a telescope … In 1835 such visibility began in very late September, peaked on 9 October in England, and faded out before the end of that month (track ‘Comet’ through the precisely indexed London Times). An astronomer in New England calculated that visibility would peak there on 16 October … Perihelion occurred on 15 November, and the next Clemens baby [i.e. Twain] arrived on the 30th.
In 1910 the earliest, dim sighting without telescope was claimed for 29 April. Visibility in New York City – at a commuting distance from Redding, Connecticut [where Twain died] – peaked on 18 May. Twain had died on 21 April, the day after perihelion.
Budd’s observations about observation seem irrefutable. But literary history will always prefer to ‘arrange the facts loosely’.