EPILOGUE
How Little One May Tell
How little one may tell of such a life as his!
ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE, Mark Twain: A Biography
THERE WAS NO ONE, not even Mark Twain's surviving daughter, who grieved more than Katy Leary over his death. “It almost cut my heart in two when I looked at him for the last time,” she remembered fifteen years later. “I felt like my life ended then! That I had lost the best friend I'd had in the world.”[1] To the devoted servant, in times of trouble, fell the work of a Clemens family burial and the painful aftermath of tidying up. In 1896 she had packed away Susy's belongings for good; eight years later she gathered the small treasures of her dead mistress; too soon it was Miss Jean's turn to receive her ministrations. And now at last she was picking through the litter of Mr. Clemens's room. Cigars, pencils, matches, pins, and whiskey—the defining effluvia of his intimate habits.
“Oh, it was awful!” Katy remembered. “Every morning while I was putting the things in order, I always locked the door so nobody could come in, because I would cry over everything I picked up—every single thing—because I knew he never would use it again. It was so terrible to think he wouldn't be ever any more in that room.” It took Katy more than a week to bring order to Mr. Clemens's room because she could only work in brief intervals before breaking down. Although the desolation of Stormfield was partially dissipated in the summer with the birth of Clemens's grandchild, Nina, still, Katy was not assuaged. “It didn't seem right to have summer come without him, and I was glad to go away from there.”[2]
Clara and her husband had decided to return to Germany to live. “I would have loved to have taken care of her and the baby,” Katy admitted.
Katy opened a boarding house in New York City, but she did not need to generate much income. The generosity of Sam and Clara meant that she could retire without financial worries. What gave her most comfort, however, was the furniture Clara had given her. “I used to look and look at them,” she said, referring to the chairs and table, “and tried to feel I was with the family again, and try to imagine the old days once more.” She recalled that early in her service, Livy had selected her reading and strictly supervised her social life. “Yes, Mrs. Clemens, she was wonderful and kind—,” Katy announced, “but I could have had a great deal better time going out, if she didn't take quite such good care of me!”[4] Her recollections were shrewd but guileless. She confessed to a “natural” fondness for wine, an inability to be nice to the people she disliked, and an unabashed enjoyment of a risque book she once discovered by accident in Sam's billiard room. But she made no comments about the woman who had tried to take Livy's place, and her complete silence about Miss Lyon seems oddly out of character.
Katy's memoir was told to Mary Lawton and was published in 1925. Her recollections of the old days blossomed under the careful tending of Lawton—who almost certainly excised any remarks about the secretary. Lawton did not, however, invent this strategy of omission; it originated with Clara, Lawton's dearest friend. Elizabeth Wallace, a professor of Romance languages at the University of Chicago, wrote a book on Mark Twain in Bermuda, where she had met and become friends with both Clemens and Lyon. Before the book was published in 1913, she was given a special warning by Paine: Clara would not look kindly on any references to Miss Lyon. The year before, Paine himself had published his biography of Twain—1,587 pages in three volumes, with only a single reference to the secretary and one to the business manager. This was a stunning act of literary amputation. And in her 1931 memoir, My Father, Mark Twain, Clara followed her own dictum and Paine's exampie
Lyon and Ashcroft were undoubtedly aware of the quarantine that surrounded them. But whatever their frustrations with Clara, they had to cope with their own problems, which unfortunately included their marriage. Not unexpectedly, at least from their former boss's perspective, the marital relationship turned out badly. “By this time,” Twain mused less than three months after the pair had set up housekeeping together in Brooklyn, “they loathe each other.” His brag that he would be avenged by their matrimonial misery proved prescient.[6]
The Lioness's judgment at age eighty-four was emphatic. She told Clemens's great-nephew, Samuel Webster, that her marriage “was a mistake.” Eight years earlier she had been even more forthright, telling a private detective posing as a literary agent that “she had taken a husband without loving him.” Lyon blamed Ashcroft, confiding to the undercover detective that her husband had “proceeded to make her life a living hell.” It is easy to believe, however, that the marriage was unpleasant for both partners. They moved to Canada in 1913 and divorced in 1926. Ashcroft, who stayed in Canada, remarried in 1927 and had a successful career in advertising.[7]
Lyon returned to New York and remained single. She eventually found her way to a small basement apartment in Greenwich Village, where she lived the lifestyle of a “new woman”—cultured, independent, freethinking, and salaried. In public she smoked a thin cigar, and in her apartment, a pipe. She worked as a secretary for the rest of her life, and probably had few material advantages, sustaining herself with memories of the glory days with Twain.[8]
During all those years that Clara successfully shut her out of the story of Twain's life, she was not entirely passive. After her divorce, she conceived a plan to revise her diary. “Some day the penalty for having such perfect living will come,” Lyon had written in ink on January 15, 1905, referring to her life with Twain. “After 28 years—Jan 3/33—,” she inserted in pencil, “No penalty attaches itself to perfect living—No penalties
These “open revisions” might suggest that Lyon's purpose was personal and spontaneous were it not for the discovery of a duplicate diary that she copied in longhand. Referred to by its archival location as the Austin diary, this “work” quietly incorporated Lyon's changes to the original text. By exactly copying her revised text in longhand, she created a new diary. The existence of this duplicate diary in longhand, beginning on January 3 and ending on June 22, 1906, is crucial. It suggests that Lyon intended to edit her original diaries, recopy them by hand, and bequeath those copies to history. It seems likely that she meant to destroy her originals, with their obvious evidence of superimposed revisions. The handwritten copy, standing on its own, could now be substituted for the original.[10] But the switch was never made. Even with all the intervening years, somehow she failed to finish the job. She continued to be employed into her eighties, which may have been a factor in her aborted copying scheme.[11] Probably the task of hand copying proved daunting—not least because she continued to drink heavily.
When she was eighty-four, Lyon granted Twain's great-nephew, Samuel Webster, an interview. “I wouldn't try to drink her under the table if I were you,” Webster joked with a renowned Twain scholar, “as I don't think you have quite the capacity. But maybe I misjudge you. I understand there's a college course for advanced students & they give you a degree.” Despite Lyon's own “advanced degree” in alcohol consumption, which Webster and his wife, Doris, recorded in their observations after an evening with her, she remained in full possession of the charm and persuasive skills that had mesmerized Twain. She soon became their friend and confidante. She gave them her original diaries with all her superimposed revisions, perhaps with publication in mind.[12] Doris Webster produced a typescript copy that, for the most part, adhered to Lyon's
Lyon's interview with Samuel and Doris Webster took place on March 5, 1948. Webster's mother was Mark Twain's niece; his father ran Twain's publishing house, Charles Webster and Company, until he retired out of sheer exhaustion at thirty-seven, a victim of his own vanity and Twain's errant and expansive financial schemes. Two years before the interview with Miss Lyon, Webster had published a book defending his father's honor against attacks in the published portions of Twain's autobiography.[13] Despite the abuse of his father's reputation, Webster still expressed affection and admiration for his great-uncle.
“She was a charming old lady who seems bright as a hawk,” Samuel Webster began the notes of their interview. “She has charm & intelligence & it seemed to us complete sincerity,” his wife agreed. They took dinner at the apartment of a mutual friend, and Lyon told them she “had never talked so freely before.” Doris Webster believed Lyon opened up because of her husband's intimate knowledge of Twain. In her conversation with the Websters, Lyon created the impression that her relationship with Twain had been like that of an exemplary daughter—helpful, observant, deferential, and devotedly attached. Whether spontaneous or deliberate, the persona of the caring daughter played well and perhaps became her last version of their life together. “There was positively no question of romance,” Doris informed a friend five years later, after becoming Lyon's friend. “He was an old man to Isabel, who must have been an exceedingly attractive young woman.”[14]
In reality, of course, Isabel Lyon had been deeply enthralled by Mark Twain's body as well as his mind and yearned to become his wife. “Such a beautiful man he is,” she wrote in 1907, after he slipped into her room “with just his silk underclothes on.”[15] Doris Webster retyped those lines from the original diary, along with countless others that contradicted Lyon's claims. Her romantic desires were inscribed in every nook and cranny of the chronicles of her life with Twain. Yet Doris and her husband found the “caring daughter” persona totally convincing. Lyon's ability to imagine herself into other people's expectations continued to be irresistible.
That her “good daughter” persona prevailed over a mountain of contrary evidence aided Lyons effort to promote a “bad daughter” image for Jean. She told them “a good deal about Jean's illness,” and the Web-sters, who shared the still-common, though mistaken, association of epilepsy with violence, had no trouble believing that Jean “was really dangerous.” It was here the accusation that Jean had made “homicidal attacks” on Katy Leary originated. The Websters eventually read Lyons diary entry for January 27, 1906, in which she wrote, “In a burst of unreasoning rage she [Jean] struck Katie a terrible blow in the face-She knew she couldn't stop—she had to strike—and she said that she wanted to kill.” Lyon also claimed that Jean had made an earlier murderous attack, on November 26, 1905. The date had such clarity, she told the Websters, because she had recorded it in her journal in a simple code. The entry read: “Jean. 3—pm 8 PM Katie,” with the word “Katie” underlined twice. “This refers to an attack on the maid Katie Leary, that Miss Lyon told me about,” Webster noted on the typescript of the journal and continued, “Jean was getting dangerous, and the doctor told Miss Lyon never to let Jean get between her and the door, and never to close the door.” Significantly, Lyon actively campaigned against Jean, depicting her as a dangerous person “when one of these attacks was on.”[16] Almost forty years after Twain's death, she was still anxious to cast herself as his protector and guardian angel.
She also managed to convince the Websters that Paine was jealous of Jean, an idea so lacking in corroboration as to be absurd, but perhaps a revealing projection of her own feelings. Paine had wanted to remove Jean from the Redding house, Lyon told the gullible duo, and replace her with his wife. She was obviously campaigning against Paine too in 1948, attempting to construct him as the selfish, manipulative schemer and herself as the high-minded person who saved his job as biographer.[17]
The pattern that Lyon established in her 1948 interview with the Websters reflects the changes that she made to her original diaries, most likely in the 19305. Paine and Jean were prime targets. She sometimes deleted favorable remarks or added negative comments in entries about Paine, such as “Old Fraud!” On two occasions, she made revisions to strengthen the impression of Jean as a homicidal killer. In the entry for January 27, 1906, she added these lines in a penciled revision: “and was sorry she hadn't—to her mind, it doesn't seem right not to finish any
Surprisingly, Clara, who had once been her pet, received minimal attention in Lyons revisions as well as in her interview with the Websters. Though she told them that Clara “took a dislike” to her and got her dismissed, Lyon did not appear to dwell on Clara's shortcomings. In her seventies and eighties, the daughter who still troubled her was Jean.
Lyon was also occasionally troubled by the specter of Mark Twain. She must have suspected, though she had no concrete evidence, that he had written something quite negative about her.[19] Perhaps fearing his condemnation in writing that would surface someday, she took the precaution of excising an especially revealing passage about him in her diary. As a rule, she only lightly edited descriptions of Twain's behavior, character, conversation, or writing. But there is a glaring exception. “I often think that if the value of his approval is great, then the value of his disapproval is greater,” she wrote in her original 1906 entry about Twain, “with his loveliness and depth of character he can see and overlook many weaknesses, human weaknesses—but where his [sic] really condemns—you won't ever find any condemnation juster.” She concludes, “He has temporary prejudices, thousands of them, but you learn the differences between those and the things he really condemns.” This entire passage is missing from her Austin diary, which she rewrote by hand.[20]
Lyon strove to vindicate herself in her own eyes as well as the eyes of the world. That she succeeded in the world's eyes is no small triumph, even if she did not live to savor her victory. But for all her anxiety about her future reputation, she surely would never have expected, or even wanted, to be a heroine at Twain's expense. The shrine she kept to his
A new neighbor, not knowing Lyon's absolute dread of hospitals, called an ambulance when she fell in her apartment. While the attendants were lifting her into the vehicle, Isabel Lyon had a heart attack that ended her life. She was almost ninety-five.[22] If Clara let herself believe with Lyon's death in 1958 that her family history was safe, she would have been deceived. Her protective strategy was on the verge of collapse when she herself died four years later.
In 1960 Caroline Harnsberger published an idiosyncratic, unreliable account of Twain's family life that featured a heroic portrait of Clara. Ironically, Harnsberger, an enthusiastic admirer of Twain's ever-vigilant daughter, was the first to break her code of silence. Harnsberger cobbled together a collection of lies and half-truths about Twain's last years from Ashcroft's newspaper accounts and interviews. Jean was depicted as quarrelsome and antisocial, but the rest of Clemens's family was blameless, and she portrayed the Ashcrofts as innocents.[23] Once again Ralph's expertly crafted public relations job had protected his image and that of his wife.
Harnsberger got one thing right. Clara had been contentedly married to Ossip Gabrilowitsch. But Harnsberger, eager for the happily-ever-after ending, was undeterred by the fact that Gabrilowitsch died of cancer in 1936. After Clara remarried, Harnsberger rhapsodized that she “entered ‘a multifarious strata of rainbowism.’” Unfortunately, the pot of gold at the end of Clara's rainbow was a whopping $351,154.97 in promissory notes borrowed by her second husband, Jacques Samos-soud, an unemployed orchestra conductor whose serious gambling habit brought Mark Twain's only surviving child to the brink of financial ruin. She was reduced, in the late 19505 and early 19605, to borrowing money from her friends, including Harnsberger. Clara even signed a promissory note for $13,950.03 to her secretary.[24]
Ironically, just as Clara had challenged the financial stewardship of Lyon and Ashcroft, so her daughter, Nina Gabrilowitsch, contested the fiscal conduct of her stepfather, whom she accused of fraud and undue influence after her mother died. A settlement was reached, but only
Mark Twain's last descendent died the same year that Justin Kaplan published Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which won critical acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize. Kaplan's account of Twain in his old age was perceptive, albeit cautiously abridged. Only once did he seem to ratify Twain's point of view about Ashcroft and Lyon, observing that he “had grounds enough to charge them with mismanagement and possibly larceny.” This was probably the line that brought the threat of a lawsuit from Ashcroft's relatives in Canada. Although they ultimately realized they did not have legal grounds to sue, the Ashcrofts eventually had their revenge from a different source.[26]
After Lyon died in 1958, her diaries and notebooks remained in the care of Samuel and Doris Webster. Lyon had stipulated that they were not to be made available to researchers until after Clara's death. Eventually they were deposited at the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1973 Hamlin Hill published God's Fool, crowning the Ashcrofts as innocent martyrs, victims of one vicious daughter, Clara; one homicidal daughter, Jean; and a vain forgetful old man who created the corruption of his loyal servants in his own mind. Hill triumphantly broke through the wall of censorship that had so obscured Twain's late years. Although he had access only to excerpts from Jean's diaries, he read the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript and all the accompanying materials as well as all versions of Lyons diaries except the Austin version. And he chose to trust the secretary and mock the boss—letting Isabel Lyons diaries define his facts and shape his interpretation of Twain's family life.[27]
Mark Twain is a household word; his secretary's name has been known to few outside the world of Twain scholars, yet she won the battle over the narrative of the last years of her boss's life. Twain wrote the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript to wipe her off the field of battle, but the literary establishment
After many years, it is time for prejudice and prevarication to give way to an honest and compassionate story. Surely Jean deserves better than to be characterized by her seizures. Doubtless Twain would have raged at the gullible establishment. He would have laughed at his failure to convince them that his most humiliating confessions were true. He would have railed at the damned human race—in which he almost always included himself—yet he would have understood the biographer's difficulty in sorting out the truth.
His was not in the end an old age of weakness, of helpless failure, or of fear. He was a more fortunate, less tragic Lear, who betrayed his own daughter but got her back—almost miraculously. In the end he lost her not to his folly but to a cruel fate. For this he was grateful—and in genuine humility he wrote her valedictory, “The Death of Jean.” He was appalled at his secretary's meanness and, yes, angry at the cost his family had paid for his colossal selfishness. But Mark Twain did not die a forlorn man. He knew, to a depth that most human beings never plumb, that he had not deserved his daughters' love, and yet they gave it anyway. He understood that this was his grace and he took it to his grave.
Twain also knew how difficult it is to read a text. Therefore, the last word belongs to him in a short fable he wrote in June 1906 and read aloud to Jean and her friend Nancy Brush that summer in Dublin. Among the writings of his late years, this little piece may be obscure, but it is a coda on historical evidence—his gently imaginative and deeply moral judgment on all who grapple with the past.[29]
A FABLE
Once upon a time an artist who had painted a small and very beautiful picture placed it so that he could see it in the mirror. He
The animals out in the woods heard of this through the housecat, who was greatly admired by them because he was so learned, and so refined and civilized, and so polite and high-bred, and could tell them so much which they didn't know before, and were not certain about afterward. They were much excited about this new piece of gossip, and they asked questions, so as to get at a full understanding of it. They asked what a picture was, and the cat explained.
“It is a flat thing,” he said; “wonderfully flat, marvellously flat, enchantingly flat and elegant. And, oh, so beautiful!”
That excited them almost to a frenzy, and they said they would give the world to see it. Then the bear asked:
“What is it that makes it so beautiful?”
“It is the looks of it,” said the cat.
This filled them with admiration and uncertainty, and they were more excited than ever. Then the cow asked:
“What is a mirror?”
“It is a hole in the wall,” said the cat. “You look in it, and there you see the picture, and it is so dainty and charming and ethereal and inspiring in its unimaginable beauty that your head turns round and round, and you almost swoon with ecstasy.”
The ass had not said anything as yet; he now began to throw doubts. He said there had never been anything as beautiful as this before, and probably wasn't now. He said that when it took a whole basketful of sesquipedalian adjectives to whoop up a thing of beauty, it was time for suspicion.
It was easy to see that these doubts were having an effect upon the animals, so the cat went off offended. The subject was dropped for a couple of days, but in the mean time curiosity was taking a fresh start, and there was a revival of interest perceptible. Then the animals assailed the ass for spoiling what could possibly have been a pleasure to them, on a mere suspicion that the picture was not beautiful, without any evidence that such was the case. The ass was not troubled; he was calm, and said there was one way to find out who was in the right, himself or the cat: he would go and look in that hole, and come back and tell what he found there. The animals felt relieved and grateful, and asked him to go at once—which he did.
But he did not know where he ought to stand; and so, through error, he stood between the picture and the mirror. The result was that the picture had no chance, and didn't show up. He returned home and said:
“The cat lied. There was nothing in that hole but an ass. There wasn't a sign of a flat thing visible. It was a handsome ass, and friendly, but just an ass, and nothing more.”
The elephant asked:
“Did you see it good and clear? Were you close to it?”
“I saw it good and clear, O Hathi, King of Beasts. I was so close that I touched noses with it.”
“That is very strange,” said the elephant; “the cat was always truthful before—as far as we could make out. Let another witness try. Go, Baloo, look in the hole, and come and report.”
So the bear went, when he came back, he said:
“Both the cat and the ass have lied; there was nothing in the hole but a bear.”
Great was the surprise and puzzlement of the animals. Each was now anxious to make the test himself and get at the straight truth. The elephant sent them one at a time.
First, the cow. She found nothing in the hole but a cow.
The tiger found nothing in it but a tiger.
The lion found nothing in it but a lion.
The leopard found nothing in it but a leopard.
The camel found a camel, and nothing more.
Then Hathi was wroth, and said he would have the truth, if he had to go and fetch it himself. When he returned, he abused his whole subjectry for liars, and was in an unappeasable fury with the moral and mental blindness of the cat. He said that anybody but a nearsighted fool could see that there was nothing in the hole but an elephant.
MORAL, BY THE CAT
You can find in a text whatever you bring, if you will stand between it and the mirror of your imagination. You may not see your ears, but they will be there.