2. Heartbreak
IN MAY 1895, the Clemens family returned to the United States and their summer home in Elmira, New York. There Sam made preparations for an extended lecture tour that he hoped would raise the money needed to clear his bankruptcy. In fact, perhaps partly in response to Livy's scruples, he had undertaken to repay all his debts in full. (Early in the previous year he had estimated that his debt was $160,000, an astounding figure for the period.) Livy and Clara were to travel with him. Taking to heart Madame Marchesi's recommendations about her health, however, Susy chose to remain with Theodore and Susan Langdon Crane, her uncle and aunt, at Quarry Farm. Undoubtedly, she also hoped to see her friend Louise Brownell, who was now back in America working on an advanced degree. Jean was to attend school in Elmira. Katy rejoined the family at Quarry Farm, where she stayed to take care of Jean and Susy.[1]
When the train carrying Sam, Livy, and Clara pulled away from the Elmira station on July 14, 1895, the two remaining sisters waved good-bye to their determined parents.[2] Jean and Susy would make Quarry Farm their home for almost a year. Perched on a hilltop, with an expansive view of the river and distant hills, the farm must have seemed like a safe haven after several years of wandering abroad. Jean in particular enjoyed the rural atmosphere, where she had the freedom to express her athletic self.
Mark Twain's lecture tour began in the United States, with stops in twenty-two cities in five weeks. On August 23, Sam, Livy, and Clara set sail from Vancouver, British Columbia, across the Pacific to Australia,
Clara had especially vivid memories of India, where Twain lectured from January to April 1896. She recalled it as a romantic world of elephants, camels, princes, exotic silks, velvets, and jewels, punctuated by mundane, but surprisingly regular brawls at railway stations between private servants and official porters. And she remembered how funny her father looked perched upon an elephant, his uneasy expression framed by gray curls sticking out from under his birch-bark umbrella hat. She loved the gentleness and spirituality of their Indian hosts and admired their self-mastery. So did her father, who, after looking at the men and women kneeling in worship beside the holy waters of the river Ganges, exclaimed: “They spend hours like this while we in America are robbing and murdering.”[4]
In February the first of two devastating blows that would strike the Clemenses in 1896 changed life forever for Jean and her family. While at school the fifteen-year-old Jean had a major seizure. The diagnosis was epilepsy, a condition in which erratic electrical signals in the brain create a variety of disabling symptoms, including grand mal (tonic-clonic) seizures with loss of consciousness and convulsions of the arms and legs and petit mal, or nonconvulsive, seizures with brief lapses of consciousness. Jean suffered from both. Although today most epilepsy can be controlled by medication, in 1896 there was no effective medical intervention.[5]
There were, however, theories and regimens for treatment. Dr. M. Allen Starr, the New York physician in charge of Jean's care, prescribed a daily dose of i-iVi teaspoons of bromide, a sedative with a depressive effect on the central nervous system—and the potential to poison in high enough doses. Starr also recommended a restricted diet: meat only once a day, no sweets, generous servings of green vegetables and fruits, plus l/2 quarts of water daily. He urged regular exercise and purgatives to avoid constipation. “There is nothing to do in an attack but to keep her quiet, loosen her dress, put a spoon between her teeth, and cool
Jean's parents did not rush home to be with her. Perhaps reassured by Aunt Sue or calmed by the counsel of Dr. Starr, they focused on repaying the debt and pushed on with Twain's lecture schedule. What effect this parental choice had on Jean is unclear. In any case, although she probably had several grand mal seizures during the spring, her attacks tapered off by mid-May.[7] The travelers meanwhile enjoyed the charms and endured the rigors of the tour—the latter, according to Clara, included cockroaches, snakes, stifling heat, and unpalatable food. Twain took many notes for another travel book, which was published in 1897 as Following the Equator. From India Sam, Livy, and Clara went to South Africa and finally arrived in England in July 1896, where they joyously anticipated that Susy and Jean would soon join them.[8]
During that time, Susy had begun practicing Mental Science, a less structured version of Christian Science, an interest that had been sparked by a meeting with her old governess, Mary Foote, who was a practitioner and proselytizer of this philosophy. Sam and Livy heartily approved; Katy was unimpressed but held her tongue. Susy had become bored with country life, and after less than half a year she went to New York City for a change of pace. There she stayed with old family friends and sought new friends among other avid practitioners of Mental Science and Spiritualism. Restless or perhaps homesick, she moved on to visit friends in Hartford and then returned to Elmira in the spring. She finally landed in Hartford for the summer, where she stayed with old family friends, the Warners, who were sympathetic to Mental Science. Katy rented a little apartment, and Susy practiced her singing there. When word came that the family on the U.S. side were to set sail for London in a week to rejoin the others, Katy hurried to Elmira to pack up Jean, who was still at the farm. She returned to Hartford only to find that Susy had fallen suddenly and seriously ill. Susy stubbornly insisted that she wanted no doctor, nor any medicine, only treatment by her spiritualist. “No!” replied the levelheaded Katy, who thought Susy's spiritualist was a “pirate” and who had enough authority to intervene. “Nobody will treat you but the
Katy had already moved Susy into the old Hartford house and was by her side night and day. Susy would take medicine from no one else. She suffered raging fevers, which produced pain and delirium. Pacing the floor and scribbling hallucinatory notes, she imagined her companion was La Malibran, a famous Parisian mezzo-soprano of the early nineteenth century, who had died at twenty-eight after being thrown by a horse.[10]
On August 15, Livy's brother, Charley Langdon, sent a cablegram to the family in Southampton, indicating Susy was very ill but was expected to recover slowly. Livy immediately decided that she and Clara would cross the Atlantic while Sam remained behind to attend to the house and other business in England. At about noon on August 16, 1896, Susy went blind; an hour later she spoke her last word. Another cablegram to Guildford, England, on August 18 informed Sam that “Susy was peacefully released today.” Clara and Livy had already set sail, and Sam could only send a heartbroken letter that Livy would not get until after she arrived: “If I were only with you—to be near with my breast and my sheltering arms when the ship lands & Charley's tears reveal all without his speaking. I love you, my darling,—and I wish you could have been spared this unutterable sorrow.”[11]
Livy and Clara, anxious and depressed for their entire voyage, arrived in New York on August 22. They were preparing to disembark when the captain asked to see Clara. He handed her a newspaper with the bold headlines: “Mark Twain's Eldest Daughter Dies of Spinal Meningitis.” Clara relived the moment: “The world stood still. All sounds, all movements ceased. Susy was dead. How could I tell Mother?”[12] Susy had been twenty-four.
Katy, too, dreaded her first encounter with Livy. “I could hardly bear to look at Mrs. Clemens just at first,” she remembered. “It was something awful when she turned to me and held out her hands and said, ‘Katy, Susy's gone—Life has killed her!’”
“Oh, Mrs. Clemens, no!” Katy cried. “No, she just died. God wanted her—and so she died.”
Katy's religious determinism offered little comfort to the anguished mother in that desolate moment. The balm Livy needed was more intimate. She asked Katy to repeat all the little things that had occurred before
After Susy's funeral, Livy, Clara, Jean, and Katy sailed for England, where they spent the rest of 1896. Sam took his two surviving daughters for walks by the river or into Regent's Park. But “everywhere,” Clara concluded sadly, “we met an atmosphere of world-loneliness.” Clara claimed that when she was growing up she never realized her older sister was the favored child. Susy's death may have made that distinction clear at last to her and added a bittersweet dimension to the experience of mourning. “It was a long time before anyone laughed in our household,” Clara recalled. Jean, whose life had already been turned inside out by epilepsy and who had watched helplessly as her grief-stricken mother and sister returned to America too late to do anything but bury Susy, was as gloomy as the rest of the family. As a diversion, no doubt, she took lessons in woodcarving, which became a lifelong hobby.[14]
Following a quiet spring in London, Sam settled his family on the shores of Lake Lucerne, amidst the beauties of Switzerland, where they endured the one-year anniversary of Susy's death. This was not an easy summer for the grieving parents, who were forced as well to cope with the downturn in their youngest daughter's health. At some point in the previous year, Livy had taken the opportunity to talk to Dr. Starr. Although the New York specialist said that a complete recovery was improbable, he had offered a slim and tantalizing hope: he believed that if their daughter's convulsions could be staved off for a year, the family might expect a cure.[15]
Jean had been taking a daily dose of bromide since her first grand mal seizure in February 1896, and her attacks had stopped several months before she was reunited with her family. In the summer of 1897, however—three months beyond the doctor's indicator mark for recovery—Jean
At the end of September 1897, the family moved to Vienna, where Jean had no convulsions for three months. Clara had persuaded her parents to favor Vienna because she could study with the famed piano teacher Theodore Leschetitkzy. Clara's passion for music was not diminished by her family tragedies. Influenced by the American singer Alice Barbi, her friend, Clara announced she was switching her musical efforts from piano to voice in the summer of 1898. (According to Katy, however, Clara was frustrated at the piano by her small hands.)[17]
Unfortunately, Jean had another grand mal seizure on January 2, 1898. A Viennese specialist increased her bromide to two doses a day, with three to six doses for “extraordinary emergencies.” “He warned us to be cautious in the use of this poison,” Sam acknowledged, “& we were careful to obey.” But the consequence of his advice was devastating for parents and daughter alike. From January 2, 1898, to July u, 1899, Sam and Livy watched Jean obsessively for any sign of an impending attack. Compelled to treat their adolescent daughter with clinical objectivity, they subjected the poor girl to unceasing scrutiny and themselves to unwavering vigilance. “It was like watching a house that was forever catching fire,” Sam reflected, “& promised to burn down if you ever closed an eye.” “The signs of coming trouble,” possible indicators of petit mal, that they watched for were painfully intimate gestures: a sudden loss of facial expression, “as if a light had been blown out”; the cessation of speech for the briefest of moments, perhaps in midsentence; nervous gestures of fingers and hands, as if their daughter were searching for something they knew she could never find.[18]
But the Clemenses' burden did not end at mere observation. They had to time the intervals between her symptoms and adjust her medication. If her petit mal occurred sporadically, Sam reported that “nothing was done,” but “if they came at brief & shortening intervals, & amounted to half a dozen within an hour, an extra bromide-powder was administered.” If the shortened intervals continued, they added more doses of the deadly poison—up to five on two occasions and the absolute
For fourteen and a half months, Sam and Livy kept a daily record of fingers picking nervously and aimlessly, of hands searching for a phantom pin in dress or bed clothes, of the briefest cessation of speech in midsentence, of eyes suddenly blank.[20] On guard day and night for the smallest changes in Jean's behavior, her parents felt rewarded for their strenuous watchfulness so long as they avoided a major attack. But on March 19, 1899, Jean had a grand mal seizure. In her father's revealing metaphor, the house burned down.
After the massive effort of her parents to ward off an attack, Jean must have experienced not just the physical blow but a deep sense of loss and failure. Little wonder that her self-image was shattered. Sam and Livy, beaten and defeated, probably experienced a similar sense of having failed, as they had somehow failed Susy. “There was nothing for us to do,” Sam admitted bleakly, “but go on watching & dosing, & wait for the end.”[21] Despairing of any progress, they ceased their record keeping if not their vigilance.
Not all was misery during their Viennese sojourn. For one thing, by January 1898 Sam had managed to pay off all his bankruptcy debts. And Mark Twain's celebrity remained undiminished. During those two years, the family received visitors in a steady stream, generally from five o'clock in the evening on. Clara invited her famous piano teacher to a dinner party, and he asked permission to bring two former students. A man of many talents, Leschetitzky spoke almost without interruption for three hours and awed even Mark Twain with his oratorical skills. Clara was more impressed by the “unusual intellectual gifts” of his students, who she said held “the fixed attention of the other guests at dinner, when Leschetitzky stopped to take his breath.” One of them, the Russian pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch, would eventually become her husband. Katy remembered “lots of officers for beaux” who came every day to pay court to Clara as well.[22]
In Clara's memory, however, callers came almost exclusively to see her father, who did not always appear, sometimes preferring to write or take long walks instead. Clara dreaded making the announcement that Mark Twain was absent, knowing the intense disappointment it would create in the faces of those whose wandering eyes rarely rested for long on her. And if the event was “graced by his presence,” she remembered some years later, “my existence was on the level of a footstool—always an unnecessary object in a crowded room.”[23]
Still, as Clara recognized, she also benefited from the two-edged sword of her father's celebrity. One morning, on a day of celebration in Vienna, Sam and his daughters left their hotel early to check out the festivities. When they returned, a huge crowd had gathered across the street from their hotel, hoping to catch a glimpse of the emperor and his procession. With much effort, they succeeded in swimming through the crowd, only to discover that armed guards blocked their path to the hotel. Suddenly a mounted policeman came charging up: “For God's sake, let him pass,” he said to the patrolman on foot. “Don't you see it's Herr Mark Twain?” Clara acknowledged that she felt as important as if she were a member of the royal family.[24]
But there was no doubt who was king. If, as Sam maintained, music eventually developed Clara's latent spiritual and intellectual side, she still sometimes felt overpowered by her father's intellect, never sharing in that special bond that Susy and Sam had enjoyed. Clara often heard a warning voice inside her head that she mimicked in her memoir: “Take care. He may appear to be harmless, but without action or words he can smother you dead, smother you with the mere greatness of his intellect.”[25] This warning voice only grew stronger in her young adulthood.
Having heard of a Jonas Henrik Kellgren, a Swedish osteopath who had some success with epilepsy patients, in July 1899 the family left London, where they had been for several months, in pursuit of a new cure. They spent the summer in Sanna, Sweden, where the whole family took treatments at Kellgren's sanitarium, including Clara, who had been advised by Susy's old mentor, Madame Marches!, that she was not yet strong enough to embark on her newly chosen career as a singer. The stay was
Curious and open to nontraditional medicine, Sam also took daily treatments that summer and kept a health diary. He wanted to observe the Kellgren technique, he explained, and also “get myself freshened up for work.” Sam's routine included resistance exercises for his arms and legs, stretching and bending, body kneading and massage, and other carefully prescribed movements. He came to believe that fifteen minutes of Kellgren's physical manipulations were worth two hours of exercise in an ordinary gymnasium.[27]
His enthusiasm for Kellgren's treatment extended to his daughter's condition. Kellgren divided sufferers into two types—those who inherited the disease and those whose symptoms resulted from injuries—and he believed he could cure the latter. The family thought Jean's case fit this type, recalling that she had fallen and hit her head when she was ten and had lain unconscious for three hours. One patient with epilepsy told Sam that Kellgren had cured her disease in two summers. Sam longed for the same result for his daughter and was thrilled by Jean's early progress, noting an improvement in his youngest daughter's disposition after only four days. He credited the Kellgren treatment for transforming her from a moody, irritable, willfully negative person to someone cheerful, lively, cooperative, and in “brisk health.”[28]
The Kellgren treatment was indeed the cause of this change, for it stopped her daily dose of bromide. In higher dosages such as Jean had been taking in Vienna, bromide can produce many negative side effects, including apathy, irritability, memory failure, intense headaches, and withdrawal. The positive result of ending Jean's bromide regimen was immediate, and it was enhanced by the mandatory exercise and massage, games, dances, hiking, picnicking, and other outdoor activities that Jean loved.[29]
Although Sanna was a welcome relief for her body, she did not share her father's optimism and found no matching curative for her soul. Epilepsy had taken a deep toll on her personal life, and even without the effects of bromide, the fact of the disease left Jean less than “cheerful” at heart. No real friends, no demonstrable talent, and abominable health was how she self-consciously summarized the causes of her melancholy
If Jean was keenly aware of epilepsy's harmful effects on her own life, it is doubtful that she fully understood the negative effects on her father, and those effects have generally been overlooked by others as well. The deepening of Twain's famous melancholy and pessimism about the “damned human race” is most often associated with Susy's death in 1896. Certainly this was a dreadful blow to both parents, but the family had already suffered a blow with the onset of Jean's epilepsy just six months before. Although Sam never discussed Jean's epilepsy in the tragic language he used to describe the loss of his eldest daughter, he wrote a chronicle of Jean's “illness,” not for publication, in which he expressed feelings of fierce frustration, raging powerlessness, and bone-weary tension, strikingly captured in his metaphor of a house forever threatening to burn down if he closed an eye.[33]
Although Livy bore the brunt of Jean's disease within the family, Sam had required of himself unrelenting vigilance and sacrifice, as he revealed in a comment written at the Kellgren treatment center. “The attack due at midnight did not occur,” he noted with evident relief. “No petit mal yesterday and none today. Jean is in good spirits and brisk health. For once the approach of attack-time gave us no solicitude. We provided no night-watch last night, and went to bed at the usual hour and to sleep without uneasiness and without any conversation about the probabilities.”[34] Sam and Livy could temporarily pass their anxious burden to others.
In the fall of 1899, following their summer in Sweden, the family settled in London to continue Jean's treatments at Kellgren's main clinic, which was located there. But after a year of disappointing results, Sam and Livy decided to return to America. Whatever their other reasons, they were plainly tired of European life. Perhaps spurred by his anticipated homecoming, Twain had a creative burst during the summer months, working on a fantasy about a Satanic visitor to earth, a theme he had been exploring for some years and would continue to develop. Nonetheless, he was weary of being rootless after nine years of travel. “The poor man is willing to live anywhere,” Livy wrote, “if we will only let him ‘stay put.’”[35]
“If I ever get ashore,” Twain quipped to reporters waiting for him to alight on American soil on October 15, 1900, “I am going to break both of my legs so I can't get away again.” His entire family shared his enthusiasm at being home. “America! America! It was wonderful to be there again,” Clara exclaimed. The family decided to settle in New York; they could not face their old Hartford home without Susy.[36]
Mark Twain, welcomed to his country as a celebrity, was immediately showered with unstinting admiration and the fawning attention of press and public. His reception was like an unending party where more and more guests arrived every hour and no one ever left. As host of this grand bacchanal, Twain seemed never to weary. He plunged into the banquet circuit with enthusiasm. “Old friends and new crowded into our parlor,” Clara said, “and made us feel we had lost much by staying away from home so many years.” Twain especially rejoiced in the companionship of his old friend William Dean Howells: the luncheons, the talks, the excursions, the politics, the jokes. Both men joined in hearty condemnation of the Boer war and America's imperialism in the Philippines and took public stands denouncing President McKinley's policies. “[W]e are old fellows,” Howells described his camaraderie with Twain to his sister, “and it is pleasant to find the world so much worse than it was when we were young.”[37]
But Twain's political essays were more than exercises in curmudgeonly humor; they were serious efforts to change the direction of American foreign policy. Soon after reaching American soil, he became vice president of the Anti-Imperialist League of New York. In February 1901 he published “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” a scathing critique of American imperialism. Twain tackled head-on the most important
With many old family friends now just a carriage ride away, social invitations for the Clemens daughters arrived in flurries that first autumn. They attended dinner parties at the home of Dr. Clarence Rice, their father's physician and family friend, and one in their father's honor given by Henry Huttleston Rogers. Clara had a new voice teacher and continued to pursue her musical career. At the same time she felt herself strongly attracted to the pianist Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was now also in the United States, but she worried that marriage would be incompatible with her career. Nevertheless, Gabrilowitsch, who made his American debut on November u, 1900, at Carnegie Hall, sought to spend as much time with Clara as his concert schedule and her inclination would allow. Katy carried messages back and forth between his hotel and her home, deliberately assisting the budding romance.[39]
Meanwhile, in the diary she began keeping after the family settled into their new home at 14 West loth Street, Jean expressed her delight in Gabrilowitsch's Carnegie Hall concert. She recorded many trips to the theater and her passion for opera. She also enjoyed a reception at Delmonico's for her father, given by the Association of American Authors. And she participated in almost all the activities of the month-long social whirl that followed their return.[40]
But some invitations came exclusively to Clara, leaving feelings in the household unsettled. Howells's daughter Mildred, called “Pilla,” asked
Clearly, a climate of hostility and mistrust surrounded epilepsy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1903, Congress would pass an immigration law that added epileptics, along with the insane, beggars, and anarchists, to the list of immigrants to be turned away at Ellis Island. Negative stereotypes of viciousness, criminality, cunning, and immorality long associated with epilepsy remained virulent.[42] In the face of prejudice that cast people with epilepsy as moral and physical degenerates, Jean's intimate circle kept her condition to themselves, but this still did not spare her from feelings of ostracism.
Prejudice is often a companion of fear. Although families seldom feared the epileptic, they almost always feared the stigma that the disease imparted to the sufferer and sometimes to the entire family. Social attitudes inevitably mold parental strategies of freedom or restriction. Certainly Livy struggled against the stigma of her daughter's disease, but one thing is certain: she refused to give in to the isolation that can be epilepsy's worst side effect. If concealment of the condition was the family's preferred strategy for dealing with Jean's epilepsy, Livy still insisted upon a normal role for her daughter in their active social calendar and kept Jean tightly integrated into the family circle. Forced by her illness to leave an afternoon tea, Jean was able to rejoin her family for dinner but then excused herself early after getting angry at her mother and sister. “A little later Mamma came up here,” she reported, “and without really saying anything I could see that she wished to make up so I said I might come down at nine thirty & play cards. I didn't want to a bit. All I wanted to do was to sit still & cry, but I knew that I would not be allowed to remain alone so after Clara had come in to see about my coming down stairs I finally went.” The remedy was effective. “I am not sorry I did go,” Jean confessed, “because I felt for the time being a trifle less melancholy.”[43]
For the summer of 1901 Sam took his family to Lower Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. There they were visited by Howells's son John, who, as Howells later wrote his old friend, reported that Sam was “only partially satisfied with the universe, whence I infer that you think it has not improved since I last saw you.” Mark Twain's particular dissatisfaction then was with the condition of ex-slaves and their children. That summer at the lake he wrote an extraordinary satire, “The United States of Lyncherdom,” in which he put forth a plan to stop what he called “this epidemic of bloody insanities.” American missionaries in China, he suggested, should return to their homeland where there was much greater need for their services. “O kind missionary, O compassionate missionary,” Twain implored, “leave China! Come home and convert these Christians!” Worried about book sales in the South, however, he never published this essay, hoping someone else would write the book on lynching that he foreswore.[44]
In October 1901, as if to cement both their fame and their friendship, Yale University granted honorary doctorates to Doc Howells and Doc Clemens, as the “old fellows” began to call each other. Sam had rented a baronial mansion in Riverdale, a fashionable area of the Bronx overlooking the Hudson, and the two friends were now a “time-table's length away.” But the timetable held no sway over Doc Clemens, who commanded a train from gatemen and train starters no matter the scheduled arrival or departure. Twain always had to stop off at the men's room, Howells noted gleefully to a mutual friend, with “me dancing in the corridor, and holding his train for him. But they would not let it go without him, if it was the Chicago limited! What a fame and a force he is!” Writing to the same friend some months later, Twain returned the compliment: “Old Mr. Howells was here day before yesterday, on his way to a reception, for he is very gay and societous. It was raining like hell. I never saw such an indiscourageable old dude. But he is sweet & lovely as ever.”[45]
In a house that boasted a dining room sixty feet long and thirty feet wide, Sam was back to operating in his usual style—careless of personal finances and ready once again to believe in rags-to-riches investment schemes. He was touting Plasmon, the wonder protein powder that eventually cost him $50,000. “He was apt,” Howells observed sagaciously,
Living only a 4O-minute trolley ride apart in Maine, the old “dudes” regaled each other regularly—telling stories and sharing their manuscripts. Twain continued work on Which Was It?, a novel he had begun in the summer of 1899 and returned to at Saranac Lake, Riverdale, and now again at York Harbor. In this story Twain's protagonist becomes a robber and a murderer who struggles with the burden of a guilty conscience and especially fears exposure at the hands of his mulatto servant.[47] The longest of his unfinished novels, it relied on a device that Twain repeated obsessively in his late fiction: the main character only dreams his catastrophes. Perhaps the author wished that he could as readily banish his own intimate afflictions.
At the time, Sam was coping with a personal strain that he did not share with Howells, choosing instead to take another friend into his confidence. “Then I saw it,” he told Henry Rogers in July 1902, in a rare revelation. “I have seen it only three times before, in all these five fiendish years.” The “it” was one of Jean's grand mal seizures, objectified and abstracted from the person of his daughter. Blaming her seizures for creating the “fiendish” qualities of those years, his phrasing conferred a loathsome quality on his daughter's illness.[48] And even allowing for his peripatetic lifestyle, the claim that he had witnessed only three of Jean's attacks is astonishingly low. Self-conscious avoidance appears to be the likely reason, for Jean was having grand mal seizures almost every three weeks that summer, and he was painfully aware of this.
Still, there were indications that Sam was not simply keeping away. “Papa has gout rather badly,” Jean had written two years earlier, “but when he heard me jump upstairs, I was cussing my luck to Katie, he came right up to see if I had fainted.” (“Fainted” was Jean's euphemism
Sam had made use of Henry Rogers's yacht to transport his family to York Harbor. Ostensibly this was so they could travel in comfort and style, but his deeper motive was to avoid any public exposure of his daughter's epilepsy. It would have been “the equivalent to being in hell,” he confided to Rogers, in thanking him for making their seclusion possible. “The scare and anxiety would have been unendurable.” He believed that in fact he and Livy had held off a seizure during an exhausting vigil while on board. Revealing what may be another reason he actually saw so few attacks, he gave most of the credit to his wife, who was “alert, and up the most of the time two nights—and I helped,” he added, “after a man's fashion—and so the convulsion was staved off.”[50] A “man's fashion” is undefined, but clearly this division of labor was a fateful constant in his response to Jean's illness and allowed him perhaps to submerge her suffering in her mother's.
“It comes near to killing Mrs. Clemens every time,” he lamented in that same July letter to Rogers, “and there is not much left of her for a day or two afterward. Every three weeks it comes. It will break her down yet.” His sympathy was wholly for Livy. Little more than a month later, he announced the collapse he had predicted to Rogers, blaming “Mrs. Clemens's five years of constant anxiety and periodical shocks and frights on Jean's account.”[51]
On August 12, 1902, Livy became desperately ill, with sensations of suffocation so intense that her husband thought she was dying. She survived the attack, but a hoped-for full recovery never materialized. On September 23, still in York Harbor, the family again thought Livy was close to death. But Clemens wrote the next day that a Boston specialist had cheered everyone up—even the patient. The doctor banished family members from the sick room, and a professional nurse was installed with Livy's approval. Howells, repeating to a friend the diagnoses Clemens passed on to him, stated that Livy suffered from organic heart
After the family returned to Riverdale on October 16, the doctors continued to believe that Livy should be saved from all “dangerous emotions,” in Sam's phrasing; only Clara, who had hurriedly returned from Europe, was trusted to be with her mother. Sam and Jean were barred from the sickroom—both undoubtedly taxed Livy's nerves. In Jean's case the tensions surrounding her epilepsy were undeniable. Sam's exile was shorter (he was back in the sickroom for brief rendezvous after an initial hiatus of three months), but the reasons for it were more complex.[53]
A loving husband but a demanding personality, Sam had a spirit of boyishness that Livy had captured in her pet name for him, “Youth.” “The heart of a boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but always a wilful boy,” was how Howells saw him. Aware of his shortcomings, Sam understood and accepted his own banishment with grace. Livy found some compensation for her sickroom seclusion, he told Howells, “in the reflection that now she should not hear so much about ‘the damned human race.’” Actually the compensation she found was in the little notes that Sam sent to her sickroom several times a day. Clara called them “rainbows during the storm,” noting that “the colors were never the same.”[54]
“Don't know the date nor the day,” Twain wrote his wife during his exile. “But anyway, it is a soft and pensive foggy morning, Livy darling, and the naked tree branches are tear-beaded, and Nature has the look of trying to keep from breaking down and sobbing, poor old thing. Good morning, dear heart, I love you dearly.” Another note concerned a question about the lease on their house. “I will write Mr. Appleton what you say, Livy dear. My understanding was—was—was—oh, well dang it I don't know what it was—I don't reckon I had any. Often I have an understanding that I don't understand, and then I come to find out I didn't. Sleep well, Dearest.”[55]
Livy asked him to write in her boudoir, so that she could hear him clear his throat. “[I]t would be such a joy to feel you near,” she wrote. “I miss you sadly, sadly. Your note in the morning gave me support for the day, the one at night, peace for the night. With the deepest love of my
Perhaps finding solace, or merely distraction, Twain was somehow able to continue working when Livy fell ill. Inspired by a five-day visit he had made to his boyhood home of Hannibal in May 1902, he spent time on a book about Huck Finn at age sixty, though he would destroy this manuscript some years later. He also returned to writings about Christian Science that he had begun in Europe, and he published a four-part satirical essay on Mary Baker Eddy, beginning in December 1902 in the North American Review. His attack on Christian Science has to be put in the frame of his family history. Twain believed that a man's imagination had the power to heal “imaginary ailments.” Christian Science, he freely acknowledged, would save people from “imagination-manufactured diseases Meantime,” he slyly added, “it will kill a man every now and then.” Two of his children had died from the disastrous effects of real disease—and it was not lost on him that Susy had been a follower of a version of Christian Science. Added to that, the unremitting suffering of Jean and Livy must have fueled his interest as well as skepticism in the new religion. What he dubbed “its principal great offer: to rid the Race of pain and disease” was a desire he sympathized with but found thwarted in his own life. At his publisher's request he worked feverishly to expand the Christian Science articles into a book, finishing in the spring of 1903, only to have the manuscript gather dust at Harper's for several years before it was finally published.[57] This was the only long book that he saw from composition to print in the last twelve years of his life.
Twain also resumed work on the story he called “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” The first chapter in this tangle of intermittently composed manuscripts was actually salvaged from “The Chronicle of Young Satan,” which he had abandoned when he sailed for America in 1900. Most of the rest of the dream-fantasy was written in three stages over the next several years. From late October 1902 through May 1903, in circumstances that were often defined by Livy's illness, he finished the first seven chapters.[58]
During these months he had some assistance from a new secretary. Isabel Lyon had been living with her mother in Farmington, Connecticut, in a house she had built next door to her sister and brother-in-law. Before her illness, Livy had planned to hire the Whitmore's former governess to be her private secretary. Isabel was eager for work, and so Sam took over her employment. “Slender, petite, comely, 38 years old by the almanac,” was how Twain remembered her when she was hired, “& 17 in ways & carriage & dress.” She was hired as a correspondence secretary but was gradually given more responsibilities, including a role as chaperone for Jean and Clara at various social functions. Lyon boarded out and apparently saw little of Mrs. Clemens.[59]
At the end of 1902, Clara wrote Mrs. Whitmore to thank her for recommending Lyon. “She not only is sweet and attractive, entirely lacking any disagreeable qualities,” Clara observed, “but she is also a pleasure for she has a cheerful manner and way which are particularly welcome in a house at time of illness & consequent depression.”[60]
By early July 1903, Sam and Livy had returned to Quarry Farm, where Clara and Jean joined them the first week of August. There Sam was able to enjoy something of his old companionship with Livy, devoting himself to her and spending little time on his own work. She seemed to improve slightly at the family retreat where they had spent twenty summers, but lying on the porch most days with her husband by her side, she stared at the hills and dreamed of another world of light and warmth. Happy memories of calm, serene days under clear skies drew Livy's thoughts back to Florence. Perhaps she hoped for a miracle in another clime—and on October 24, the family entourage, including Jean, Clara, Katy, Livy's nurse, Sam, and Miss Lyon and her mother, boarded the Princess Irene and set sail for Italy.[61]
The Villa de Quarto—a cavernous fifty-room mansion-was not ready when they arrived, for the owner had been unwilling to allow advance preparations. Countess Masiglia, the intransigent landlady, remained on the grounds and seemed bent on creating trouble for her tenants. The villa was approached down a long garden drive, bordered by poplars and cedar. The countess capriciously locked the gates, making it impossible at times for Livy's doctors to reach her. She turned off all the water to the mansion, which meant the family could not flush the toilets. The vicious woman even stopped the Clemenses' telephone service. According to Katy, “She was mad at having to rent her villa, ‘cause she had to live in the stable herself.” Sam was understandably livid and began backing lawsuits against her.[62]
The villa was nonetheless a beautiful place. Both Sam and Livy had rooms on the ground floor, which opened to a trellis-framed terrace edged by a lovely garden. Olive-pulp bricks burned bright in the palatial fireplaces, and the scent of roses, laurel, and orange blossoms floated from the garden through their open windows at night. While she and her sister occasionally went into the city to tour the museums and shops, with Lyon as their chaperone, Clara remembered that Sam would pace the terrace by the hour, loving the view of distant city roofs, ancient turrets, and church spires flashing in the sun.[63] Livy also loved the terrace but was soon confined to her bed, requiring round-the-clock care, with her nurse in attendance during the day and Katy at night. The mood inside the villa became increasingly somber.
Twain, evidently worried about the family's finances, wrote several pieces for publication while he was in Italy. His most effective was “The $30,000 Bequest”—a tale of greed and the obsessive dreams of riches gone sour. He also worked on a large chunk of “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” Apparently Jean typed the manuscript as her father finished sections of his composition. In Florence he wrote chapters 8 through 25, as well as his ending, which became chapter 34. “It is all a Dream,” the mysterious stranger reveals in that chapter, “a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but You. And You are but a Thought—a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!”[64] Although this work was not published in Twain's lifetime, it is the most respected literary creation of his late years, perhaps because it resonates with doubts about life's meaningfulness.
Twain also spent some time doing autobiographical dictations. It was in Florence that he hit upon the method he would use for composing most of his memoirs—free association. Autobiography, he told Lyon, was “like narrative and should be spoken.” When the mood struck, Sam would dictate to her in a little room that overlooked the terrace. He paced up and down while talking slowly, and she wrote rapidly in longhand. At the end of their sessions he would carry away a copy of his dictations.[65] Though unaffected by considerations of coherence or reader interest, these autobiographical outpourings became the most ambitious and, arguably, his most engaged writing of his late years.
Lyon stayed on the edge of the family circle, living in the servant's quarters on the grounds of the villa and taking occasional dictation; she saw very little of Mrs. Clemens. Her main preoccupation was the local priest, Don Raffaello Stiattisi. Their relationship had begun with an exchange of Italian lessons two nights a week for an equal number of English tutorials. “Yes, he is very lovely and is showing us a new world,” she sighed after lesson number one. As time passed, Don Raffaello was coming regularly to visit “for a little or a long while,” she wrote in her diary. “He grows more beautiful each day as priest and man.” Lyon and Stiattisi had several romantic dinners in the hills above Florence. On one occasion they sat outdoors, listening to music and watching the city lights come out while the sun set on the Arno. “Best of all, always and forever was Don Raffaello with his beautiful face, his lovely buoyancy of manner, and his great sweetness of soul,” she wrote devotedly. It did not seem to bother her that her mother made these encounters a three some.[66]
Although she still managed to take voice lessons in Florence and even made her singing debut there on April 8, in a concert arranged by her teacher, Clara sat with her mother every afternoon during this time. She was the one family member who had complete access to the sufferer almost from the beginning of her illness. Sam kept a faithful vigil. Restricted to two brief visits a day at the villa, he broke the rules with regularity, slipping in to be near his beloved. Livy would put her arms around his neck, and he would hold her and kiss her tenderly. He refused to believe his wife would die, yet he knew that Livy would never
One night, he came downstairs after he had seen her, sat at the piano in the parlor, and began to play and sing the old African spirituals they both loved. The music brought her joy, Katy observed—but not peace. “She so dreaded death, poor timid little prisoner,” Sam revealed to Twichell, “for it promised to be by strangulation.”[68]
In the end, Olivia Clemens was spared her worst nightmare. On June 5, 1904, she died in Katy's arms—one short breath and she was gone. Her husband rushed to her side, took her in his arms, and held her for the longest time. “How beautiful she is—” he said, crying, “how young and sweet-and look, she's smiling!” Both daughters put their arms around his neck and wept, Katy remembered, “as though their hearts would break.” Later that night Katy found Clara curled up in a little heap under the casket. Sam stayed awake but paced like a sleepwalker between his bedroom and his wife's room all night. Jean had her first grand mal seizure in thirteen months soon after.[69]
“Well, we got to America somehow,” Katy summarized the interim. The funeral was held on July 14, in the same house in Elmira, New York, where Livy and Sam were married; and the service was conducted by the same preacher, Joseph Twichell. After the coffin was lowered in the grave, “Clara gave a great cry,” Katy recalled, “and threw up her hands and her father caught her in his arms and held her.” Her cry pierced the heart of every mourner. Clara had turned thirty just three days after her mother's death. With her own life still so unformed, this must have given her loss a special import. Jean's loss would prove less immediate. Denied her mother's presence for so long, she had grown gradually accustomed to her absence. She could have no idea then what her mother's death would mean to her life. Sam, watching Livy lowered into the clay, vowed that he would never allow himself to witness another loved one's descent into the grave. Lyon, still caught up in her flirtation with Don Raffaello, felt her keenest sorrow in their separation.[70]
If there is no better judge of a person's character than her servant, Katy Leary's observations about her mistress are unimpeachable. “She'd been so wonderful to everybody all her life, so kind and loving and with so much common sense—always wantin’ to help everybody, and so generous, too, with everything she had,” Katy observed. “There aren't so many people like that in the world, and it makes those that are left behind lonely—as if a great hole had come into your life that you'd fallen into, and never was going to get up again.”[71]
Sam had certainly fallen into a great hole after his wife's death. Livy had managed everything, made every plan—looked after every domestic detail. Howells hoped Sam's daughters could pull him out of that hole and help to close it—but then he caught himself. No one, he realized, not even her children, could take Mrs. Clemens's place.[72]
Sam was not only bereft, but also wracked with guilt. “I try not to think of the hurts I gave her,” he agonized to his sister-in-law, Susan Crane, “but oh, there are so many, so many!” “And so, a part of each day Livy is a dream & has never existed,” he confessed to Twichell. “The rest of it she is real, & is gone. Then comes the ache, & continues. Then comes the long procession of remorses, & goes filing by—uncountable.” Her father had a habit of torturing himself, according to Clara, “with self-accusations of imaginary shortcomings and selfishness.” The devastating loss may account for much of his free-floating guilt, but it is likely, as Clara speculated, that a more specific hurt was preying on his mind: Livy, he believed, had never gotten over Susy's death, and it was because of his willingness to gamble large sums on wildly speculative investments that they had been separated and Susy had died without her mother. However realistic and grievous his remorse, his sorrow was even more painful. “[S]he was our life, and now we are nothing,” he told his friend Richard Gilder, the editor-in-chief of The Century.[73]
“She was just like the foundation to a house,” Katy wisely explained, “and now that one of the great props was gone, we had to turn around and fill it up somehow.” Turning around, the bereaved family, including Katy and Lyon, retreated to an extra cottage on the Gilders' farm in Tyringham, Massachusetts. But Sam was restless there and made frequent trips to New York, where the family had decided to rent a house in the fall. Clara was planning to run the household after they found a
Jean, however, always found country life restorative and especially welcomed the opportunity to go riding. She was out on a moonlight ride on July 31 with the Gilders' son Rodman when a trolley car spooked her horse. Trolley, horse, and girl collided. The horse was killed, and Jean was flung fifty feet and knocked unconscious. Though badly bruised, her only serious injury was a broken ankle that kept her in bed for a fortnight.[75] Sam called Clara's doctor, warning her to keep the newspapers' lurid accounts of Jean's accident away from his daughter. He told the doctor he would break the news gently in person. What really happened was a little different.
“He entered my room,” Clara remembered, “and, after a brief greeting, handed me a newspaper with the headlines: ‘It is hoped that Mark Twain's youngest daughter, Jean, may live. Her horse fell on her and crushed her.’” He then began to tell Jean's story in his most agitated and dramatic style. Shocked and horrified, Clara later wondered why “his actions were so at variance with his intentions.” She never asked him. But she roused herself to return to Tyringham to check on Jean for herself.[76]
When the family finally moved in November to their New York address, 21 Fifth Avenue, Clara had already busied herself with its decoration. This “kind of got her mind off herself and her troubles,” observed Katy, who was especially taken with the lavender wallpaper Clara had chosen for her music room. Sam also fussed with the interior, and Katy helped unpack and arrange the old Hartford furniture, likely looking its age in design if not in wear.[77] The Hartford House had been sold in 1903.
The winter of 1904–5 was hard. Uncharacteristically reclusive even when not indisposed, Sam caught bronchitis and spent more than a month in bed in the dead of winter. But he also began a period of productivity, turning to writing as a form of both refuge and recovery. Fired up at the end of January by a bloody massacre of Russian strikers gunned down by the czar's guards in St. Petersburg, he wrote “The
If Twain used his writing as a form of recovery, his daughters had no such refuge to fall back on. Clara retreated again to the isolation of a rest cure in a private New York sanitarium, and when she did not improve, her doctor sent her to another sanitarium in Norfolk, Connecticut, where she accepted no correspondence from her family for almost six months. Jean lived a friendless and solitary life; another old family physician and friend, Dr. Edward Quintard, was in charge of her malady. Perhaps as both compensation and solace, Sam bought Jean an Aeolian Orchestrelle, a full-sized player reed organ that filled the house with Beethoven sonatas and symphonies, Chopin nocturnes, and Scottish airs.[79] Managing the household by default, Katy grieved over the loss of Livy's generalship. Isabel Lyon was now permanently living in: taking care of Sam's correspondence, playing cards with him and Jean by the hour, and perhaps beginning to dream of the family generalship for herself. She was undoubtedly the cheeriest member of the household.