3. Rearranging the Household
LOOKING FOR A PLACE to spend the summer of 1905—and perhaps, as well, for a place to heal—Sam settled on an artist colony in Dublin, New Hampshire. Dublin was the permanent home of the American landscape painter Abbott Thayer, who had once touted the New Hampshire highlands to his writer friend. If it was a good place for an artist in paint, Sam reasoned, it would also be good for an artist in “morals and ink.”[1] When he heard that the house of the writer Henry Copley Greene would be available that summer, Sam insisted that Katy give it the “once over” before he committed to rent it. Jean volunteered to go along, and so the two trooped off to New Hampshire in the dead of winter. A summer resort, Dublin had no winter accommodations, but the Thayers volunteered to serve as hostelry and sent a sleigh to meet the scouts. After nearly freezing en route, Jean and Katy were delighted by the big roaring fire and piles of blankets that greeted them.[2]
While the pair was chatting with their hostess, Katy noticed that the house had become quite still and the rest of the family had disappeared. When she inquired, Mrs. Thayer told her that they had all gone outside to sleep. “Just stuck themselves down in the snow and covered themselves up good with their blankets! Well—when I heard that!” Katy exclaimed, “I thought they must all be crazy! It made me actually shiver—right there in that warm room.”[3] The Thayers, who believed that an unheated house was what kept them healthy, probably moved outdoors so that their visitors could enjoy the comforts of a heated interior.
Poor Katy had an even greater surprise in the morning. The only access to the Copley Greene house was on cross-country skis, which Katy
“No, I've got to see that house,” Katy insisted. “Your father wants me to.”
“Oh, Katy! You'll never be able to walk on those snowshoes.”
“Well…, maybe not, but I'll try it anyway.”
“So one of the boys mounted me on them snowshoes,” Katy recounted, “and he tied them snowshoes on me good and hard; and Jean got hers on, and we started for that old house. I was beginning to hate it by that time! Oh, I had a terrible time! I fell down twice! And then one of my snowshoes bust off.”[4] But the indomitable Katy persevered and returned to New York from her mission with a favorable report. Despite this inauspicious start, Dublin would prove a balm for at least two members of the family. Clara, however, decided to stay in Norfolk, Connecticut, where she had been in seclusion in a sanitarium since November. She rented a cottage there, and in June she began to practice her singing again.[5]
On May i, 1905, Katy and Jean left for Dublin. Miss Lyon joined them a few days later, and Sam planned to follow shortly. Lyon and Jean found agreeable company in each other that summer. “Dear child that she is—,” Lyon sympathetically observed, “Such a complex nature and yet so entirely simple—Consistent—yet so inconsistent—There is a power in that young nature.” Sensitive to Jean's mood of sadness the day following an especially severe series of attacks, Lyon suggested an outing into the woods complete with a blanket and books. In turn, Jean enjoyed reading aloud to Lyon in the evenings. The older woman also took pleasure in the beautiful view of the local mountain, Monadnock, and the quiet, restful atmosphere of Dublin—the nearest railway station was an hour's drive, and from there, it was another three hours to Boston, six hours to New York.[6]
Jean was wildly enthusiastic about her summer home, delighted as always to be in the outdoors. She also had the chance to practice her woodcarving, which had become both hobby and lifelong avocation since her first lessons in London in 1897. Her studio that summer featured a big fireplace and two large windows that opened into the pine and hemlock woods, as “wild and beautiful as Nature herself made them.” With her carving table nailed to the floor, she was ready to work on making “bookracks.”[7]
If walking, birding, and carving were joys for Jean, her perfect joy was still riding, despite her broken ankle the year before. Patrick McAleer, who had served as the family coachman in Hartford for twenty years, had been hired in March to be her groom. A skilled rider and her constant companion on horseback, Patrick had one drawback—he spit constantly. “[I]t is too unpleasant to put up with,” Jean confessed to her diary, “& yet he is such a dear that I hate to say anything which could hurt his feelings.” Early that summer Patrick helped her buy a horse, a Kentucky bay she named Scott—“sweet and friendly in the stable, so obedient & willing on the road & such a beauty.”[8]
Though she wrote more of plants and animals than people that first summer in Dublin, Jean's most important gift was being welcomed into the little community as one of their own. For the first time in many years, she began to socialize with her peers: the Thayers' children Gerald (Gra) and Galla, the brother and sister Gerome and Nancy Brush, Raphael Pumpelly, Barry Faulkner, and Tom McKittrick.[9] Although she was as much as eight or ten years older than her new friends, Jean's athleticism, the social effects of her illness, and the years she spent largely with her family may have made her seem younger than her age.
Sam's arrival was delayed until May 18. In early May, Clara had become ill with what proved to be appendicitis, and on May 10 she had surgery. Once he was assured she was on the way to recovery, Sam made the journey to Dublin—and proceeded to write for thirty-five straight days without a break, a personal record of 31,500 words in five weeks. He claimed he “got the disposition out of the atmosphere.” Twain had fun with “Three Thousand Years Among the Microbes,” the tale of a scientist who was magically turned into a cholera germ in the body of a tramp named Blitzowksi. He entertained his little household by reading from the microbe manuscript on multiple occasions.[10]
Twain also continued work on “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger.” He had No. 44 (an alias for Satan) travel the vast expanses of the universe at will, bring technological wonders back from the future, and even transform himself into a slave who sang minstrel songs. Twain's famous whimsy was specially engaged when No. 44 turned the lady's maid into a cat who could talk. He wrote chapters 26 through 32 in the first two weeks of July, thus completing all but one chapter of the unfinished manuscript he left behind at his death. In addition, he finished
Perhaps encouraged by his daughters' long-standing commitment to animal rights, Twain also agreed to write a protest against bullfighting. “A Horse's Tale,” about an old horse that is eventually killed in the bullring, was published in Harper's Magazine in two installments the following year. He read the tale aloud to Jean and her young friends in early October, toward the end of their stay. When Jean asked him how he could drop one story and work on another, he replied that while he was working on one story, “the tank is filling up for the one just stopped.”[12]
Apparently the scenery was restorative. Sam loved the view from the house he occupied: the “soaring double hump” of Monadnock with the spreading valley at its base, the frame of hills, and beyond the frame the “billowy sweep of remote great ranges” rising to view. But it was the New England fall, he told a reporter, that stirred “his blood like military music.” “In my bedroom dear heart, in my bedroom & drunk again with autumn foliage,” he wrote to Clara in October. “The fact is, I am drunk with it all the time; it began weeks ago, & I have never drawn a sober breath since.” He called it a “landslide of hellfire toned down for Sunday consumption.”[13]
At least one member of the Clemens household “couldn't stand the place,” however, and cleared out as soon as she could. “The country was pretty enough,” Katy Leary admitted, “but you can't live on country!” There might have been amusement enough for the literati but not for someone doing a different kind of work. “If there had only been a dance hall or something lively like that—or maybe even a little bit of moonshine to stir them up! But, oh! that whole country was so quiet! Everybody was always working—I mean writing or painting. It was dull, I tell you, dull!” Little wonder that Katy was the first to leave Dublin, joining Clara, who returned to New York on September 19. After a month together,
If Clara was her old self again, as Katy believed, this also included her strong need for an independent identity. She seemed unable to remain long within her father's orbit, returning to Norfolk, Connecticut, with Katy on January 6. Having set her sights on a professional singing career, Clara began to rehearse with an accompanist and to sing at informal musicals around New York; she also retained a manager. She came home to sing at the end of February and then seesawed between Atlantic City and her New York home three times in the next twenty-one days. While in New York on March 24, Clara looked in on her father in the living room as she was passing out of the house. “[T]hen a blast of cold and bedeviled loneliness swept over him,” Lyon reported, “and made him hate his life.”[15]
If Sam generously supported Clara's free-wheeling lifestyle even as he craved more attention than she was willing to give, he seemed often simply to ignore Jean. Unlike his wife, he made no attempt to integrate her into his busy social world of speeches and engagements. “I'll have to excuse Jean,” he wrote in reply to an invitation from their old family friend Lilian Aldrich, “she would be too much responsibility for me.”[16]
The winter of 1905–6 was a cruel one for Jean, isolated in New York and suffering again from grand mal seizures—including an unusual cluster of six in late November, according to Lyons records. “I have been wretchedly ill & run down in every possible way,” she confided in a letter to her Dublin friend Nancy Brush, “& everyone believes the country as early as possible will be the best cure.” To Nancy, Jean lamented that she felt “obliged to do nothing at all” because of her health. Her mood was not helped by news that Patrick McAleer was dying of stomach cancer. Besides correspondence, only New York visits by Dublin friends afforded her pleasure. Lyon diagnosed Jean's condition early in the New Year: “Not only has her malady increased, but her whole physical condition
Sam's attitude toward his daughter and her epilepsy was not permanently fixed, but he never changed his feelings about its devastating effect upon his wife. “Her disease,” he wrote earnestly before his death, “and its accompanying awful convulsions, wore out her gentle mother's strength with grief & watching & anxiety, & caused her death, poor Livy!” He moved from despair over Jean's lack of progress in Europe, to rage at the strain his daughter's illness was placing on his wife's health and well-being, to deep resentment after Livy became seriously ill, to blame after she died. This deep-seated blame surely cast a pall over their relationship. But if her father faulted Jean, his attitude toward her affliction also softened after his wife's death, perhaps because there was no one to buffer him against the full force of her malady. Calling it an “unearned, undeserved & hellish disease,” he told Clara that he wished to learn to make a just allowance for Jean's condition. She is “not strictly responsible for her disposition & her acts when she is under its influence,” he reminded himself, adding “(if there is ever a time when she is really free from its influence—which is doubtful).”[18]
Sam's disparagement of Jean's disposition was likely based upon the then widely accepted concept of an “epileptic personality or temperament.” Persons with epilepsy were considered to be unpleasant, “careless in speech, prone to exaggeration, illogical in conversation, irritable in controversy, and erratic in ideas.” A late-nineteenth-century medical text issued a common warning that “epileptics are self-willed, obstinate as a rule, easily angered.”[19] In retrospect, Sam blamed epilepsy for Jean's rotten disposition from the age of twelve—fully three years before the onset of her disease. Perhaps forgetting the determination he had himself noted in the four-year-old who had countermanded him, in German, he described her as a lovely, joyous, affectionate, gentle, cooperative child who had transformed into a monster at twelve: “wilful, stubborn, rude, conceited, insolent, offensive.” He was encouraged to project the traits of a so-called “epileptic temperament” backward in time by a physician who told him Jean “had long been possessed by this hideous disease.”[20]
The mood changes he observed, however, might easily be found in many healthy adolescents. Moreover, Jean's tumbleweed existence, starting at age eleven, did nothing to improve her disposition. After her attacks began, the disease itself took a heavy toll on her psyche, but the negative emotional effects she suffered were probably induced as much by the era's culture of prejudice around epilepsy. A common fear of and repugnance at the loss of bodily control meant “that people liable to this loss are subjected to rejection and hostility” in many cultures. This potential for rejection weighed heavily upon Jean.[21]
Whatever his feelings, Sam was certainly willing to take responsibility for her medical treatment. “Poor child, she is turning her hopes again toward a surgical examination and possible operation,” he had informed Clara in late October 1905, before their return from Dublin. “She wants an X ray examination, & we must see Dr. Hartley about it when I come.”[22] But for all his sympathy Sam did not really know his youngest child. He had never been close to Jean before his wife died, and he seemed, as a single parent, not to know how to bridge the gap between them. That distance helped sustain his belief in her “epileptic temperament.”
In the winter of 1906, Sam's attention may have been increasingly drawn to a relationship that seemed to present no such difficulties. When she entered employment in his household Isabel Lyon was single. In Florence she had had her flirtation with a priest. And just before they had all departed for Florence she had set her sights on a widower. “How I kept on a strange sympathy with that man when he lost his wife—” she confided to her diary eighteen months later, “but it didn't find a footing, he didn't need the sympathetic wave for he married his typewriter ever so soon.” Seeing the couple out driving on Easter Sunday, 1905, she reflected on matrimony: “I've known several men who have married several times—they couldn't live without the companionship and sympathy of a woman—And I like the thought of it—,”[23]
In the wake of Livy's death, Lyon had observed a respectful distance from her employer, seeming almost worshipful of both the living and the dead. “All my days I go the softlier because of his influence—” she observed. “His influence and the influence of the holy dead.”[24] Slowly,
“think a very great deal of Miss Lyon,” Twain wrote with emphasis to Clara in June 1905. His high opinion of Miss Lyon continued to grow throughout that year, but he maintained certain family boundaries, excluding her, for example, from any responsibility for Jean's medical treatment. Lyon was nonetheless pervasive. “She sat at table & in the drawing-room when there was company & when there wasn't,” Sam observed; “our intimates became her intimates; they visited her & she visited them; of her own motion & by her own desire she became housekeeper.” The secretary had begun to “evolute,” he explained several years later. “Not swiftly. No, quite slowly, & by stages: one affectation, one sham, one artificiality at a time.” By his own admission, he had few defenses against flattery, and his secretary regularly buttered him up, not with a knife but a trowel.[25]
Lyon, of course, did not see it that way. “Oh, the richness of his nature, and his brain and his soul,” she rhapsodized in her journal in January 1906. “He sounds the awfulest depths of the tragedies of earth and heaven and hell—he bubbles over with gaity—he melts with grief into silent sobs—he slays with satire your beliefs—he boils over into profanities that make you feel the terrors of the thunderbolts that must come—and he is the gentlest, most considerate, most lovable creature in all the earth—yet how he covers his true self away from most!” And in February: “What a glorious creature he is! It is his greatness—his genius—his magnetism—his strong humanness—and his great sweet soul.”[26]
By that winter her relationship to Sam had clearly begun to expand. “Mr. Clemens and I were in the northbound subway train,” she wrote in her diary, “he had been acutely aware of a beautiful girl who sat on ‘the port side of the car.’” At dinner he asked Lyon if she had noticed the woman.
“No—I hadn't seen her—”
“Didn't see her! Why her beauty filled the car!” Clemens expostulated.
“When I reached C.C.‘s [Clara's] room after dinner,” Lyon continued, “I confessed to her that I hadn't seen that beautiful girl because I had been trying not to look at a glorious young God of a man. The littie
As Lyons attitude toward her employer evolved during the winter of 1906, so too did her feelings toward his youngest daughter. “This was a tragic day—,” she stated ominously in her diary on January 27, 1906. “I came in from a shopping expedition for Jean and others—and when I went into her room for tea, she told me that a terrible thing had happened.” According to Lyons report, Jean said that “[i]n a burst of unreasoning rage she struck Katie a terrible blow in the face—.”
“The significance of it is what is so terrible—,” Lyon continued, openly signaling her intent to interpret the blow. “[F]or now she has done what I have seen in her [unreadable] and feared she would do—(She is distressed poor child)—She described the wave of passion that swept over her as being that of an insane person—” Lyon wrote dramatically. “She knew she couldn't stop—she had to strike—and she said that she wanted to kill.” Thus ends the passage as originally written.[28]
That Jean hit Katy in the face seems possible, though Jean herself never mentioned the incident in her diary or letters. But if that fact seems simple, its meaning is ambiguous. If Jean did hit Katy, the blow clearly brought remorse—and perhaps a need to confess—as Lyon acknowledged in her important parenthetical phrase “(She is distressed poor child).” The incident may have been accidental, occurring during one of Jean's grand mal seizures, characterized as they are by involuntary movements of the arms and legs. Or perhaps the blow was intended, as Lyon seemed so ready to believe (“she has done what I have… feared she would do”). Jean had a temper, and her father had more than once called her disagreeable. But no one had ever suggested that temper led to violence, and Lyons own indication of Jean's remorse further reinforces this judgment.
Katy offers no clues about this incident. Certainly, the housekeeper did not publicly signal any fear about Jean. Of course, she may have been masking her distrust for the sake of Jean's father and sister—and Jean herself—all of whom she loved. Whatever the case, she continued to care for Jean in a motherly fashion. And she continued to occupy the
Lyons interpretation was strikingly negative, visibly framing the event as an expression of homicidal passion. “She knew she couldn't stop,” Lyon wrote, “she had to strike—and she said that she wanted to kill.” It is difficult to sort out what Jean might actually have said from Lyons telling. And if this was indeed what Lyon had “feared she would do,” if she had anticipated that Jean could turn violent, then this expectation would almost certainly have affected her ability to interpret the incident without bias. Just three weeks earlier, however, she had sympathized with Jean's loneliness and need for love from the entire family—in which Lyon included herself.
This would seem to signal that an important shift was taking place in Lyons attitude toward Jean. With Sam in Washington from January 25 to January 30, Lyon apparently seized the initiative and decided to have a talk with Dr. Quintard, the family's general practitioner, about Jean's state of mind. This private chat was the first of many consultations she had with Jean's doctors—a practice Sam acquiesced in and ultimately encouraged.[30]
That people with epilepsy exhibited violent behavior was not only a popular prejudice of the era but was also held as a scientific belief. The Italian physician Cesare Lombroso convinced many of his peers that epilepsy was the cause of criminality. The American Journal of Insanity warned in 1890: “the history of epilepsy is the history of violence, of crime, of homicide.” And The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease later listed “aggressive violence without cause” and “an irresistible impulse, leading to suicide and murder” among the dominant characteristics of the condition.[31] Thus Lyon's assumption that Jean was prone to vicious criminality and violence mirrored the thinking of her period.[32] Nonetheless, there was something unusual about it.
On the basis of hundreds of patient case files, letters to doctors, and family questionnaires filled out in the early decades of the twentieth
Lyon became an intimate in the Clemens family, yet she maintained—or returned to—the attitudes of a stranger toward Jean. Certainly Sam saw no halo around his youngest daughter's head, but he never detected any proclivity to violence. Yet as Lyon became more entwined in the family, her apprehension and prejudice toward Jean seemed to grow.
Yet another shift in the configuration of the household took place in the winter of 1906. On January 3, Twain went to dinner at The Players, a private men's club from which he had resigned three years earlier. According to Lyon, a bookkeeper had posted “S.L. Clemens for non-payment of dues,” which had triggered his angry resignation. After Livy's death, however, the club's members coaxed him to return. That evening, Twain apparently told David Munro, one of the Players, that he had found Albert Bigelow Paine's biography of Thomas Nast “damn good.” Munro passed the compliment to Paine.[35]
Paine, who was then forty-four and twice married, had been staff editor for the children's magazine St. Nicholas and had written a number of other books for both adults and children. Hearing the secondhand compliment, he mustered his courage and quickly called on Twain with an audacious proposal to write his official biography. After some preliminaries, Twain looked at the younger man with one of his piercing stares and asked: “When would you like to begin?”
“Whenever you like. I can begin now,” Paine replied.[36]
Paine did offer one suggestion: that he bring a stenographer who could take notes as Twain recalled incidents and episodes for the book. Twain, who had enjoyed using dictation in Florence, immediately took to the idea — with Paine to prod his memory and act as audience. But he altered a few features. He would pay for the stenographer, he told Paine, and he would own the results, which Paine could consult at any time. Twain decided to use the occasion to continue his autobiographical musings, again letting free association determine his pathway through the past.[37]
The first dictation, on January 9, 1906, set a pattern for many of the rest. Twain was in bed, propped against “great snowy pillows,” and “clad in a handsome silk dressing-gown” with his pipes, cigars, and papers on his bedside table. Paine remembered that the bedside lamp cast a glow on his mane of white hair and chiseled face. Smoking constantly, Twain began with the history of the Comstock mines, then drifted back to recollections of his childhood, only to reconnect with current affairs near the end of his musings. “We were watching one of the great literary creators of his time in the very process of his architecture,” Paine reported. He and the newly hired stenographer, Josephine Hobby, were so totally absorbed in the play of Twain's mind that they were amazed to find that over two hours had passed. Lyon kept notes, sitting in an easy chair and watching Twain talk. “He was magical this morning,” she observed.[38]
Twain was elated. “Narrative writing is always disappointing,” he explained. “The moment you pick up a pen you begin to lose the spontaneity of the personal relation, which contains the very essence of interest. With shorthand dictation one can talk as if he were at his own dinner-table — always a most inspiring place.” Twain devoted himself to these dictations for the rest of the year, racking up a record 134 in spite of his hectic schedule of banquets, speeches, and public gatherings.[39]
In the winter of 1905–6 alone, Twain made no less than a dozen formal speeches in addition to his constant stream of informal remarks. He was always being called upon for commentary or entertainment, and he simply stopped preparing his talks. Paine believes that his daily dictations had given him the confidence that he needed to trust the inspiration of the moment. But his confidence drew from other sources as well. The press lionized him: reporters pestered him constantly for quotes, and his activities were zealously tracked. The public clamored for him.
Immediately accepted into the family's inner circle, Paine was soon sharing long chats with Lyon on their favorite topic-Mark Twain. “This morning Mr. Paine said such a beautiful thing about Mr. Clemens,” Lyon sighed, and then repeated Paine's words: “Oh, he's the King-he's the King and it's so glorious to know he is crowned.”[41] They were full of rhapsodic praises for the man they called “King”: “yes—he was far and away the King above all the others.”[42]
They were not the only ones. William Dean Howells used this grand appellation in a public birthday salute to the man he privately called “old scratch-gravel.”[43] Twain's publisher at Harper's, Colonel George Harvey, threw him a lavish seventieth birthday party at Delmonico's in December 1905. The guest list was a veritable who's who of American literati. Toastmaster Howells read a sonnet he had composed for the occasion, ending with: “Joke of a people great, gay, bold, and free,/I type their master-mood. Mark Twain made me.” Then, raising his glass, Howells began the official toast: “Now, ladies and gentlemen, and Colonel Harvey, I will try not to be greedy on your behalf in wishing the health of our honored and in view of his great age, our revered guest. I will not say, ‘Oh, King, live forever,’ but ‘Oh, King, live as long as you like!’”[44]
Howells, however, consciously refused to treat his friend like royalty. Though they both lived in New York, Howells remarked that they did not see each other often now. Various ailments as well as their advancing age were partially to blame, but not completely. “He expected me to come to him,” Howells noted, “and I would not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends.”[45] For Howells, affection and admiration were not the same as worship.
Lyon was incapable of making that distinction. Acolyte and high priestess, she worshipped the king with increasing fervency. More than
Keeping a diary seemed a crucial part of her worship. “Never, never on sea or shore of spiritual or terrestrial being could there be a man to equal Mr. Clemens,” she wrote in March 1905. “The subtlety of his magic and he doesn't know it.” Other entries echoed this reverential tone.[47] “These pages are full of repetitious adoration of the King,” she self-consciously glossed her own diary the following year, “but that's how they should be, for each day brings its wave of recognition of his greatness and my spirit sings and claps its silent hands over the wonder and the beauty of him. He is the saint and the shrine before the saint —the God behind it all.”[48] The awed Miss Lyon of these entries is humbly sacerdotal in Clemens's presence, almost simple in her praise of him. Yet an entry recorded the day after Clemens arrived in Dublin in May 1905 warns that appearances can be deceiving.
“Chiefs can read everybody — but who can rightly read chiefs—” Lyon asked innocently.
And she replied: “That makes me think of a little story I once read about a king — a mighty King whose life was governed by the words of an ignorant body servant — There was no greater wisdom in the land than the King's — and yet, by a sinister word the man servant could blast the better judgment of the King — could cause the King to condemn as worthless — as self seeking — the service and homage of those who would gladly place their hands between those of the King — in token of eternal obedience — and the King never saw that it was only jealousy in the man servant.”[49]
Some time after the original entry, an addition, actually a comment on the original, was added in a lighter ink. Following “a mighty King whose life was governed by the words of an ignorant body servant,” Lyon inserted: “No one suspected it.”[50]