Mark Twain's Other Woman Read online

  ALSO BY LAURA SKANDERA TROMBLEY

  Constructing Mark Twain: New Directions in Scholarship

  (coeditor with Michael J. Kiskis)

  Critical Essays on Maxine Hong Kingston (editor)

  Mark Twain in the Company of Women

  Epistemology: Turning Points in the History of Poetic Knowledge

  (coeditor with Roland Hagenbuechle)

  FOR SPARKEY

  My Son

  My Gift

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  ONE • “TOO PERFECT FOR LIFE”

  THE LATE 1880S-FALL 1905

  TWO • THE GATHERING STORM

  FALL 1905-FALL 1908

  THREE • “ANOTHER STRIPPED & FORLORN KING LEAR”

  FALL 1908-APRIL 21, 1910

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Illustrations

  Lotos Club program in honor of Mark Twain, January 11, 1908 (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Clemens family at their Hartford home (Courtesy of the Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Conn.)

  The Hartford house exterior (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

  The Hartford house library (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

  Georgiana Van Kleek Lyon and Isabel Van Kleek Lyon (Courtesy of the Lyon family heirs)

  An advertisement for the Hale & Kilburn Manufacturing Co. (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Mark Twain cigar box (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Young Clara Clemens (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

  Jean Clemens as a young woman (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Archive, Elmira College)

  John Kendrick Bangs

  Villa di Quarto (Courtesy of “Mark Twain from an Italian Point of View,” The Critic, 1904, and www.twainquotes.com)

  Olivia Langdon Clemens, 1895 (Courtesy of Steamboat Times)

  Clara Clemens and Don Raffaello Stiattisi, Florence, Italy, 1904 (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Olivia Langdon Clemens, dead at age fifty-eight, Florence, Italy (Courtesy of Robert Slotta and www.marktwaincollector.com)

  Mark Twain House and Brevoort Hotel, Fifth Avenue between East Eighth and East Ninth streets, New York City, 1935 (Photograph by Berenice Abbott. Museum of the City of New York. Gift of Federal Works Agency, Works Progress Administration, Federal Art Project, 1943)

  Andrew Carnegie

  William Dean Howells

  Louise and Charles Lyon (Courtesy of the Lyon family heirs)

  Colonel George Harvey

  Frank Doubleday (Courtesy of Princeton University Library, Manuscripts Division)

  Insert card issued by the Mogul Egyptian Cigarettes Company, summer 1909–fall 1910 (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday dinner at Delmonico’s Restaurant (Photograph from Harper’s Weekly, December 23, 1905)

  Mark Twain’s Seventieth Birthday Dinner program cover, 1905 (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington, January 22, 1906

  Albert Bigelow Paine (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Edith Wharton, 1905

  Mark Twain at a dinner at Charlotte Teller Johnson’s house, April 11, 1906

  Charlotte Teller Johnson (Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

  Bromidia, a popular all-purpose patent medicine (Courtesy of Antique Cannabis Museum)

  Mark Twain with his white velvet cape in Tuxedo Park, New York, 1907 (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  The wood shop at Hillbourne Farms, Katonah, New York

  Rev. Joseph Twichell and Mark Twain en route to Bermuda, January 2, 1907 (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Mark Twain and Isabel Van Kleek Lyon’s trip to Bermuda, February 22–April 11, 1908 (Courtesy of Robert Slotta and www.marktwaincollector.com)

  Mark Twain and Dorothy Quick, 1907 (Courtesy of Library of Congress)

  Mark Twain receiving his honorary doctorate of letters degree at Oxford University, June 1907 (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, ca. 1908–09

  Louise Paine, Mark Twain, and Dorothy Harvey on Twain’s first day at Stormfield

  Mark Twain at Stormfield

  Mark Twain at Stormfield (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Mac Donnell Rare Books)

  Mark Twain at Stormfield with Ralph Ashcroft, W. E. Grumman (stenographer), and Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, 1909 (Courtesy of the George Eastman House Still Photograph Archive)

  Mark Twain, Clara Clemens, and Marie Nichols at the piano, 1908 (Courtesy of www.imageenvision.com)

  Charles Wark and Edith Cullis’s wedding day, October 10, 1903 (Courtesy of Jim Leonard, a Wark family heir)

  Hillbourne Farms exterior (Author’s collection)

  Arnold electric vibrator, manufactured by Arnold Electric (Courtesy of the Bakken Library and Museum, Minneapolis, Minn.)

  Mark Twain, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, and Ralph Ashcroft

  Henry Rogers

  Ossip Gabrilowitsch and Clara Clemens at the piano (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Pictures and Prints Division)

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon’s home before renovation

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon’s home after renovation

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon and Ralph W. Ashcroft’s wedding day, March 18, 1909, in front of the Church of the Ascension, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street (Courtesy of the Lyon family heirs)

  Jean Clemens with Prosper le Gai (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Clara Clemens and Ossip Gabrilowitsch’s wedding day, October 6, 1909, at Stormfield in Redding, Connecticut (Courtesy of Library of Congress, Pictures and Prints Division)

  Mark Twain in Oxford regalia (Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers & Project, University of California, Berkeley)

  Mark Twain (Courtesy of the George Eastman House Still Photograph Archive)

  Rejected Enfred Anderson design for a Mark Twain monument (Photograph taken by the author at the Elmira Historical Society, Elmira, New York)

  Grave marker erected to Mark Twain and his son-in-law, Ossip Gabrilowitsch (Photograph by Hurley Hagood)

  Nina Clemens Gabrilowitsch (Author’s collection)

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon in later years in her apartment at 7 Charles Street, in Greenwich Village, New York City, 1950s (Courtesy of the Lyon family heirs)

  Insert card issued by the Mogul Egyptian Cigarettes Company, summer 1909–fall 1910 (Courtesy of Kevin Mac Donnell, Austin, Texas)

  Preface

  Sitting alone in a little room in an old house in Montreal, I am thrown back through the years—by a single packet of written matter, which proves to be the “forms” dictated by Mr. Clemens to me as his private secy. For answer to letters, invitations, the gifts of books—His private secretary—so private that the very mention of me is with held from the world by the turn of fate—Private—

  —ISABEL VAN KLEEK LYON

  An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910. Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has ever determined exactly what took place during those final years and how his experiences affected him, both personally and professionally. Writers have speculated on whether his final years were ruled by a growing misanthropy, or whether he retained hi
s keen sense of humor as he made his incisive social commentary. The public version for nearly a century has been that Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges. “I am not an American,” Twain defiantly wrote, “I am the American.” However, lives are complicated, Twain’s extraordinarily so, and as one long intrigued by the vagaries of Twain’s life, I sensed that there had to be more to the story than the carefully cultivated, homogenized version that had been intact for so long. While writing my cultural biography Mark Twain in the Company of Women in the early 1990s, I became interested in exploring the relationships he enjoyed with women throughout his life—sexual, emotional, intellectual, and professional. Contrary to what I found in previously published biographies, my conclusion then was that Twain was heavily dependent upon women, and that from the outset of his writing career he had routinely sought feedback from women he had befriended and respected. Twain, naturally, expressed it best, saying that he had not had “much of a literary friendship with men.” He did so with women, among them his mother, Jane Clemens; his friend and mentor Mary Fairbanks; his spouse, Olivia, and daughters Susy, Clara, and Jean; and more than a hundred women writers from five countries.

  While researching the personal connections Twain cultivated with women, I found that contrary to contemporary perceptions of his work (that he wrote principally about boys and men), females had always been a mainstay of his writing. He covered their activities as a reporter; highlighted them in the short stories “Hellfire Hotchkiss” and “Wapping Alice,” among many others; included them in his most celebrated works, Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; featured them in two later novels, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Pudd’nhead Wilson; wrote hundreds of letters to prepubescent “Angelfish;” and spent the last year of his life writing “The Death of Jean” and the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript.”

  After publishing my book, I was haunted by a lingering feeling that there was much about his final years that remained to be discovered. I decided to further investigate the individual I suspected had played the largest role in his life during that period and who possibly held the answers to my questions about Twain’s life and writings. Why had his mood turned so bitter toward the end of his life? What was the reason for his estrangement from his daughters? Why did he compose the bizarre “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript”?

  The key that turned the lock and helped reveal the answers to these questions and many more was Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. For a hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twain’s life. After the death of his wife in 1904, Twain spent the last six years of his life largely in Isabel’s company. To free himself from having to deal with professional and business matters, he willingly delegated the management of his schedule and finances to her. She was slavishly devoted to Twain: running the household staff, nursing him during his various illnesses, arranging amusements to keep boredom at bay, managing his increasingly unmanageable daughters, listening attentively as he read aloud what he’d written that day, acting as the gatekeeper to an enthralled public, and overseeing the construction of his final residence, Stormfield.

  And then something happened that led to a dramatic breakup.

  This book is an exploration of their relationship. In his final months, Twain resorted to giving vituperative press conferences and ranting in personal letters about how Isabel had injured him. He was obsessed with her and wrote about her for hours every day, all the while suffering from angina pains and attacks of gout. His feelings were so strong that he needed almost a ream of paper to express them. Yet, despite the inordinate attention Twain gave her before his death, Isabel has remained a friendless ghost haunting the margins of Mark Twain’s scholarship. For decades, biographers deliberately omitted her from the official Twain story. Her potentially destructive power was so great that Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain’s handpicked hagiographer, allowed only one timorous reference to her in his massive three-volume work, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912).

  My curiosity was further piqued when I visited the Mark Twain Papers & Project at the University of California, Berkeley, in the early 1990s and examined its Isabel Lyon materials. Robert Hirst, the general editor of the project, patiently carried out stacks of dusty boxes and folders. No formal cataloging of the collection had ever been done. In a cardboard box, I discovered Isabel’s original daily reminders, diary, notebooks, date book, and letter book. She had exhaustively recorded the events of each day she had spent in Twain’s presence. In a manila folder, I found letters written by Twain scholars decades earlier, and without exception they agreed that Isabel was “a slovenly writer and not a perceptive observer.” This was a forgotten woman.

  What had been her attachment to Twain? I wondered. How had her writings come to be part of the Mark Twain Papers & Project? I was intrigued by the voluminous and eloquent personal record she had kept of her years with him and the small regard she was held in by the scholarly establishment. Isabel’s is the only such detailed record of Twain’s last years that exists. Why had her papers been dismissed? Could it be that as a member of the working class, a secretary, she had been considered unimportant by members of the scholarly community? Perhaps there was something more to all of this, a deeper reason that no one had discovered. I decided that I would read through all of her writings.

  I soon realized that there were some unusual aspects to Isabel’s ephemera, beyond the fact that it was scattered all over the country, from California to Texas, Wisconsin, and New York. There was the sheer size of the collection; Isabel wrote constantly during her years with Twain. Also, her daily reminders and diary are heavily edited, and in some cases hunks of pages have been ripped out. There is no mention of when this editing took place or why, or whether she was the one who removed the pages. In addition, Isabel made an undated, edited, handwritten copy of her 1906 daily reminder. It appears that she made this separate second version with the intention of either misleading anyone who would read the reminder or as a backup in case the original was stolen. Finally, as I discussed this project with various scholars, archive directors, and memorabilia collectors, I heard repeated rumors of a 1909 diary that had mysteriously vanished.

  It took years to transcribe the personal writings that Isabel left behind, my eyes straining to decipher the handwriting she had scratched out. Thoughts obscured, in order to protect her inner life from voyeurs like myself. For Isabel was a possessor of secrets about the Clemens family so enormous that Twain and his daughter Clara were determined that she be forever silenced. There is irony in the fact that one of America’s greatest writers devoted the end of his life to ensuring that one woman would never be able to tell her stories. After Isabel had been summarily fired by Twain, he lived one year longer, full of malice and terribly lonely. Mentally and emotionally he could never let her go. Twain finally delivered his coup de grâce in a letter sent to his daughter Clara, branding his former companion “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction.”

  Twain had spent decades ruminating over how to control future depictions of his life. He had chosen Albert Bigelow Paine as his official biographer in part because of his tractability, and went so far as to direct that parts of the autobiography he dictated remain unpublished until one hundred years after his death—a wish that has been granted by the Mark Twain Papers & Project. With no one left to contest him and with his authorized biography and autobiography representing his final say on the subject, Twain’s monolithic version of his life would stand forever. Paine ever so delicately noted in the preface to his biography that “certain happenings” included within would “differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of Mr. Clemens himself,” volunteering that in his autobiography Twain “made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance—seeking … ‘only to tell a good story.’” Paine was quick t
o reassure the reader that his biography was unfailingly accurate, as it was “supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items.” Isabel, with her intimate knowledge of the family’s secrets, had become an infuriating annoyance—the only obstacle standing in the way of Paine’s account and Twain’s “good story.”

  Against this background, in 2001 I had a conversation with Isabel’s grandnephew, David Moore, then in his early seventies, in which he reminisced about his beloved relative: about how loving Isabel had been toward him, always giving him a fifty-cent piece on his birthday (“A lot of money in those days”); how she frequently visited him when he was a boy and how he looked forward to seeing her; how when she moved to New York City she lied about her age because she was afraid prospective employers would think she was too old; how she loved Christopher, her Siamese cat; and how after she died, David traveled from Connecticut to New York with his parents and older sister to clear out her small apartment (“crammed with stuff”). David told me that his sister had known her best, but that she had died. He asked if I knew what Mark Twain had said about his great-aunt: “So you know about him calling her a slut?” I told him I did. It was at that moment that I realized that biography is a genre that bleeds.

  The purpose of this book is to lift the layers of what has come to be accepted as truth about Mark Twain’s life and to explore what actually existed in the beginning and what finally remained at the end. Indeed, this account directly contradicts the well-established, genteel, and genial image of one of America’s literary icons. This is a story that Mark Twain was determined no one would ever tell.

  ONE

  “TOO PERFECT FOR LIFE”

  THE LATE 1880S-FALL 1905

  Today has been very full of the joy of living—I wrote letters and read some in the morning. Looked out of my window just in Time to see Dear Mother look up at me on her way home from Church and in the afternoon she came over. Later I played cards with my chief. Some day the penalty for having such perfect living will come.