4. Looking for Love
THE IMAGE WE HAVE of Mark Twain in his later years, as portrayed by both scholarly and popular writers, embodies a consistent theme of pessimism and despair, beginning from the time of Susy's death in I896.[1]“The last two decades of Mark Twain's life veered into a dead-end despair,” one critic wrote, describing him as “a man poisoned with self-loathing” and a “bitter and neurotic cynic.” Another characteristically remarked, “Mark Twain lived the last fifteen years of his life a bitter pessimist.” “Crippled,” “brittle,” “dulled,” and possessed by a “rage at the obscenity of life” was another influential critic's characterization of the aging Twain.[2]
There are a few dissenting voices.[3] “[T]his notion of a sustained despair is beginning to look like a disposable myth of Mark Twain criticism,” one commentator has hopefully observed.[4] But even as several scholars have challenged this myth, it continues to thrive. Perhaps the image of Mark Twain laid low reflects a nagging cultural apprehension of tragedy lurking behind success; or perhaps it satisfies an inclination to denigrate men of distinction. How better to undercut the great humorist than to show him lost in a cloud of impenetrable gloom and despair at the end?
One literary scholar, after examining Twain's entire published and unpublished output for the thirteen years before his death, concluded that the author was not so much despairing as inconsistent. Twain's purposes vacillated continually among contradictory goals—to write a popular novel; to write for his own amusement; to write serious philosophy; to write influential polemics; to write broadly appealing comedy
As he aged, Twain seemed eager to express his ideas more freely and directly than in the past, which is probably why his enthusiasm for lengthy fiction waned and autobiography became his great love. Nonetheless, many of his short pieces, especially those with political intent, are brilliant; some of his fragmentary writing is memorable; and his autobiographical work carries out a courageous purpose that is consistent with most of his late composition: to make human pride, including his own, look ridiculous.[6]
Furthermore, to compare his writing of twenty years earlier to the later works is to recognize the fallacy of attributing unique despair to the elder Twain. In his early fifties, he was no less skeptical and pessimistic than in his seventies. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurs Court, published in 1889, with its vision of mass annihilation resulting from technological “progress,” is as bleak and blistering an indictment of humanity's meanness as the much later No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger. Even Huckleberry Finn, though it is sometimes regarded as hopeful and affirming for its idyllic descriptions of nature and its sympathetic portrayals of Huck and Jim, takes an exceptionally dark view of both individual capacities and institutional values. The reenslavement of Jim at the end can be read as an uncompromising indictment of the failure of Reconstruction and the negative aftermath of the Civil War. Mark Twain, then, was always a person of many moods, in and out of print-gloomy and pessimistic but also cheerful, energetic, and loving. To the end he retained a degree of optimism at least equal to his vaunted despair.[7]
The truth is that after Livy died, Sam began to indulge himself. He went through a year of deep grieving for his wife, but the first summer spent in Dublin was a healing experience, and he returned to New York with a zest for life that would have been noteworthy in a man much younger than his seventy years. He worked only when it suited him. And when he did, he spent huge amounts of time on his autobiography. He played billiards to the point of satiety—and was unapologetic. He sought diversion and fun in his own home and in society. He indulged the freedom to travel when and where he fancied. He wrote letters to little girls he met and innocently pestered them in person. He acted on his
After a stimulating winter in New York, Sam and Lyon returned to Dublin in mid-May for a second summer, full of positive anticipation. But for Sam the experience was disappointing.[10] This time he had rented the Upton house, which stood at the edge of a beautiful beech forest, some two or three miles from the town. Though the views of lake, forest, hills, and distant mountains were like a painting, the location sometimes seemed remote and austere. Apparently even the servants found it depressing. And once again, Clara spent no time in Dublin, preferring to spend another summer in Norfolk, Connecticut, where she was near her doctor. Only Jean was athletic enough to enjoy prowling around the countryside. She had arrived earliest, on April 30, with Katy and three servants to help her get settled in the new house.[11] Twain planned to continue his autobiographical dictations in Dublin, so Alfred Bigelow Paine and the stenographer, Josephine Hobby both rented lodgings in the village and drove out to the house each morning. Twain began dictating on May 21, soon after he arrived. He skipped his dictation on June 5, the second anniversary of Livy's death, and did not resume till June 7, when he talked for more than two hours about his wife's last days in Florence. He had a personality that did not stay long in the shadows, however, and he soon resumed livelier reminiscences. When the weather cooperated, he would pace up and down the long veranda of the house, pausing now and then to soak in the vistas of the imposing blue mountain, Monadnock, and even bluer horizon. As the days got warmer, he would sometimes sit in a large rocking chair on the veranda, smoking and gazing at the hills, while he spoke slowly and deliberately of his past associations with Ulysses S.
“We are living in solitude, but it is a pleasant one,” Sam wrote to Clara in a contented mood. A few days earlier, however, he had been reduced to browsing through old copies of the weekly magazine Littell's Living Age. He quipped that he felt as if he were “looking at an asphalt pavement,” and one morning in his dictation he commented, “I feel for Adam and Eve now, for I know how it was with them The Garden of Eden I now know was an unendurable solitude. I know that the advent of the serpent was a welcome change—anything for society.” But even if he dubbed his summer home “the Lodge of Sorrow” and more ironically “The House of Mirth,” it did offer some diversions. He never lost his ability to get large enjoyment from absolute simplicity. The antics of cats, for example, never failed to amuse him. Watching kittens he had named Sackcloth and Ashes chase insects gave him unequivocal pleasure. “He laughed extravagantly,” Paine observed after one performance, “and evidently cared more for that moment's entertainment than for many philosophies.”[13]
And one diversion in particular reveals the oversimplification of the myth of Twain's sustained geriatric despair. The Dubliners regularly amused themselves on summer evenings by playing charades, with two teams that mixed adults and children. Generally Twain and the artist George de Forest Brush were team captains, and Lyon and Jean played on opposite sides. One night Mr. Brush's side chose to act out “Monad-nock.” The first syllable, “moan,” was dramatized as an Irish wake, “add” as a school scene, and “knock” as a satire of a spiritualist's meeting. Finally, as was their custom, the whole word was presented as a group of hikers camping overnight who were frightened by unrecognizable animal noises. Then Twain's team did “cocktail”: first a scene with roosters and hens, then another school scene in which Twain was the teacher and “gave a talk on the art of telling a story,” Jean recalled. “He explained that it wasn't necessary to have a point but to tell the thing well.”
Brush's team next did “multiply,” followed by Twain's “champagne.” “Sham” was dramatized as a kitten imitating a lion and scaring a brave
That summer Twain also played, with delight and gusto, an emperor with a tiny top hat secured with a scarf around his chin, an archer shooting the apple off of William Tell's head, a telegraph operator, a doctor pumping a baby's stomach with a pair of fire bellows, a roaring Irish drunk, a guide to the Statue of Liberty (played by the visiting Colonel Harvey), an oculist advising a woman who had mislaid her glass eye on the prices for a speckled replacement, a veterinarian, a prosecuting attorney, and even a lover trying to coax his desperately shy fiancee into a kiss.[15]
When Dublin's diversions paled, Sam left to spend a month playing billiards and junketing on Henry Rogers's yacht, Kanawha.[16] Besides the occasional cruise, he enjoyed a regular routine in New York of nights on the water and days on land. After sleeping on the yacht, Sam was dropped off at 21 Fifth Avenue around eleven, where Katy, who had returned to New York on May 16 after getting Jean settled, was ready to offer her own version of indulgence. Sam did not usually take lunch, but Katy, wanting to entice him with something special, arranged with a local bakery to make a fresh huckleberry pie every forenoon. “I try to think of all the things you like—to try to make you happy,” she told him proudly.[17] He would devour half the pie and a quart of ice-cold milk each day, much to their mutual delight.
“I have worked pretty steadily for 65 years,” he wrote to his friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a well-known writer, “and don't care what I do with the 2 or 3 that remain to me so that I get pleasure out of them.”[18] If Twain is to be characterized in this period by single words, vain, self-indulgent, and fun-loving would seem at least as accurate as gloomy, despairing, and bitter.
Jean, meanwhile, had returned to Dublin like a shipwrecked sailor grasping for a life raft. Her winter had been difficult and isolating, and her spirits soared at the prospect of the physical activities of country life and of seeing her friends. Energetic, fun-loving, and playful, Jean relished the rambunctious companionship of youth and continued to feel more at home with “children” than adults in Dublin. “I was very much surprised,” Jean wrote in the middle of the summer, “when Mrs. Cheney said that she wanted me to see her daughter Ruth…, although she was a good deal older than I am. I asked Ruth's age and found it to be twenty-one. And this occurred on my twenty-sixth birthday!” Jean sometimes joined friends eight to ten years her junior in children's games such as stillpond or duck-on-the-rock, both frenetic variations on the game of tag.[19]
On one memorable night at the Thayers', supper was interrupted by a spontaneous food fight. Jean had “a desperate fight with both Robert and Gerry,” she reported gleefully. “The latter nearly squashed me and if someone didn't come to my assistance he would certainly have won and carried off our grapes.” The evening continued with word games including “twenty questions.” She had a “beautiful time”—but the attack that followed the next day greatly dampened her spirits. The seizure had come sooner than her usual pattern, and she attributed the bad outcome to her “excitement” the previous evening. “This wretched, miserable disease,” she wrote. “If I have any fun, the suffering at once follows.”[20]
Nonetheless, she relished being outdoors. Climbing Monadnock was a favorite activity for all ages. Jean climbed with children and adults, going up the mountain with her best friend, Nancy Brush, who was ten years her junior, and Hildegaarde Henderson. She made another ascent with Albert Bigelow Paine, Lyon, and Nancy's eighteen-year-old brother, Gerry Brush. The foursome had a grand time, and even Lyon enjoyed the company, commenting that Jean was in a “wonderfully sweet mood.”[21]
Jean's first climb in the middle of July, however, had raised red flags in the family circle. Both Sam and Clara, who weighed in by mail, objected to the lack of a chaperone in her hike up Monadnock with Tom McKittrick. “It wasn't about my health then but about the propriety of
As Jean's comment reveals, Lyon's influence in the household was increasing. It was also decisive and one-sided. “She invariably disagrees with anything I suggest that doesn't absolutely agree with Father,” Jean observed. Sam and Lyon did not allow Jean to go anywhere alone, even to an amateur theatrical production in the local village.[24] These restrictions seemed excessive to her.
In fact, Jean yearned for independence and the autonomy that would follow if she had an income of her own. “For some time I have been hoping that I can earn a little something from my carving,” she admitted, “but unfortunately carving is very slow work & fairly hard work besides.” Vowing to apply herself with greater diligence to what had been merely a hobby, she finished three bookracks to sell by the end of the summer.[25] Jean hired carpenters to prepare and assemble her wood, but she did the drawing, carving, and staining herself, tiring work for a person whose strength was sometimes sapped by illness. Jean concluded that unless she was very well, the work was likely to “develop absent-mindedness,” her term for petit mal, “and that is to be avoided.”[26]
Carving was not only physically demanding work, it was time-consuming as well. She calculated that it took her slightly over fifteen hours to apply the design and to finish carving one bookrack. If sales outlets were scarce and she could sell no object for more than $10, as she
If she was no healthier in Dublin, Jean's ability to cope with the psychological dimensions of her disease improved dramatically there. She decided to break with the familial strategy of concealment. Whether as a response to her mother's death, to the acquisition of friends, or to her own maturation, she became more open and adopted a less secretive stance in her summer home. Still fearful of prejudicial behavior, however, she remained reluctant about naming her condition. “I told them that I am given to having fainting turns which are very troublesome,” she wrote in May 1906 about a conversation she had had the previous summer with Mr. Brush and his son, Gerry. “I felt as though I really ought to tell them what my disease is and yet I had a feeling that restrained me. It occurred to me,” she revealed, “that with all his small children, if he knew, Mr. Brush might be afraid to have me about as much as I hope to be, because even when they have been told that there is always ample warning, people often are afraid & don't quite believe that that is so.”[28]
Jean's reaction is a poignant example of “felt stigma”—avoidance of full disclosure of some condition in anticipation of a damaging or hurtful response.[29] Although within weeks of this anxious entry, Jean had confided in her four closest Dublin friends—Nancy and Gerry Brush and Gra (Gerald) and Galla Thayer—without any negative consequences, she still avoided using the word “epilepsy.”[30] Nevertheless she began to gain more confidence after confiding in her mates. As she told more people about her condition, she also spoke more freely in her diary. Where previously she had referred only sporadically and euphemistically to her symptoms, by the summer of 1906 she began to use the term “petit-mal,” noting that “some of them were very long.”[31]
Jean suffered mild petit mal on a regular basis, experiencing “short touches of absentmindedness” that came in the morning and toward evening. One morning she reported a “remarkable” occurrence: she did not vomit after breakfast.[32] “Again I feel well,” she wrote on another
But she could cope with these brief lapses of consciousness. What she dreaded were the grand mal seizures-“hideous attacks” as she called them. During her stay in Dublin, Jean braved major attacks on three to five days each month.[34] She often received warnings of an impending grand mal, lamenting that “they are never false arrivals. I have learned to believe their statements and not to love them in consequence.” As if to confirm her warning signs, she reported two major attacks the following day. The onset of menstruation was one signal; others included extreme restlessness and irritability.[35]
Servants cared for Jean during her attacks, trying to prevent her from injuring herself. “I fell off the bed and onto my face on the floor,” Jean recorded early in the summer. “I struck my cheek bone and made it sore but without bruising it.” Usually her caretakers had more success. “Anna said she had never seen me so violent before,” Jean revealed about another episode, “and that it had been difficult to keep me on the bed.” (Though Anna calls her “violent” here, neither she nor Jean gives the word any significance beyond the physical manifestations of her seizure.) As a result her eyes ached and her back and sides were lame. Aftereffects of a major seizure included weakness, exhaustion, and depression. She described herself as “limp and lifeless” and “blue.”[36]
Jean constantly worried about her mental capacities. Afraid of embarrassing herself by what she forgot, she was particularly anxious about her “bad memory.” A conversation with one girlfriend was revealing.
At that time Jean was under the care of Dr. Frederick Peterson, having switched specialists in the winter after Lyons consultation with Dr. Quin-tard, the family physician who probably made the referral.[38] Peterson had been an assistant physician at Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane before successfully lobbying for a state-sponsored institution exclusively devoted to the care and treatment of persons with epilepsy in New York State. As a result, in 1896 the Craig Colony for Epileptics was established in southwestern New York on an isolated i, 8oo-acre property that was formerly the site of a Shaker colony. Peterson was its first president. Though sensitive to the social prejudice faced by epileptics, Peterson believed it was best to isolate them in order to prevent the spread of epilepsy to future generations. His attitude was far from unusual. Studies completed as late as 1983 show physicians' attitudes toward patients with epilepsy were often negative; three-quarters of a century earlier the situation was far worse. Unable to control the symptoms, much less effect a cure, physicians experienced continual frustration. Combined with stereotypes of menacing corruption brought on by neurological degeneration, medical views of epilepsy during this period were intensely hostile.[39]
There was no evident hostility, however, in Peterson's treatment of Jean during that second Dublin summer. He employed the standard regimens that included diet, drugs, and other physical restrictions. Jean was taking “prevention pills,” perhaps in the family of bromides, commonly prescribed at the time. The doctor believed that delaying an attack, even if only for a day, was a step toward gradual improvement. Following the theory of an “exciting cause,” he had Jean on a strict diet of cooked eggs at dinner. He also wished her to eliminate any overexer-tion, undue stress, and excitable entertainment. After a seizure, she was required to take a “regulation nap.”[40]
Jean chafed at the restrictions. “Oh! this horrible disease,” she cried, “how many things it interferes with, and, roughly speaking spoils utterly,” referring to an invitation to stay with friends which she had to turn down. It also spoiled another pleasure. “It isn't enough to have this fiendish disease, but in the endeavor to improve it, riding has to be declared the most injurious occupation for me!” “Will I ever get rid of it?” she asked herself. “And if I do will it be before I am so much older than these friends that they won't want me around any more? I can't really have any hope.”[41] But the truth is that both Jean and her father did hope for a cure.
Sam—and his secretary—may have been overzealous in their efforts to shield Jean from physical harm, but they offered meager help for her acute emotional vulnerability. Her father made allowances for her moods and reacted with pity to her suffering, but his patronizing forbearance was actually a high barrier to their intimacy. Nevertheless, his capacity to enjoy life could transcend even his own psychological barriers, and he responded charitably to his daughter's fun-loving side. “Father is almost invariably indescribably sweet and sympathetic about all my interests,” Jean wrote under the spell of Dublin. “No one could possibly be as lovely as he always has been about my romping young friends. Some of these he has liked but he is always lovely to all of them.” For her part Lyon sometimes denigrated Jean in her presence, reinforcing her fears that she was stupid and unattractive, yet they could still have their moments of tenderness. Lying on the grass one early September evening with Lyons rubber cape spread beneath them, they watched the stars and giggled together like sisters.[42]
Jean also gained a rare sense of being admired by a few men, mostly middle-aged, who expressed appreciation. For its scarcity alone, any shred of praise was hoarded. When she was dressed as the Empress of India for a charade one evening in early September, with colorful scarves and silver necklace, George Brush “was tremendously enthusiastic.” He told her, Jean recalled, that “he had always loved me but that he was dead in love with me now! Costumes and looking well,” she dryly moralized, “seem capable of accomplishing a good deal.” And Jean returned the compliment: “There are precious few people that I am as fond of as I am of Mr. Brush and of late I haven't seen him nearly as frequently as I love to.”[43]
Another middle-aged man, Albert Bigelow Paine, admired Jean's looks, photographed her extensively, and sometimes teased her gently. “She dressed always in white,” he remembered, “and she was tall and pale and classically beautiful, and she was often silent, like a spirit.” By the time of his departure from Dublin, Jean confessed, “I felt almost like weeping—he has always been so sweet to me.” Months earlier in New York, Paine had remarked presciently to Lyon that Jean “had the tragic beauty of a young queen doomed to the block.”[44]
What Jean ached for, however, was not the appreciation tinged with tragedy of middle-aged men but romance, and, at twenty-six, she threw herself at one young man with all the finesse of a sixteen-year-old in the throes of her first crush. “[T]o my unspeakable happiness,” Gerry Brush called the day after she arrived in Dublin. As “sweet, gentle, courteous and attractive a boy as I ever hope to see” was how Jean described him. “I realize more than ever how really fond I am of him,” she confessed, “consequently, I can't help wishing our homes weren't so far apart.” This was the moment when her crush began in earnest.[45]
In less than a month she discovered a rival: Gerry was taking frequent walks with Anna Cabot. “He is much Anna's superior,” was Jean's initial response. She fervently searched for signs that Gerry's relationship with Anna was nothing “more serious than friendship” and that her own had romantic possibilities. Gerry spoke of Anna in a “perfectly commonplace way,” she reported, “so that I have begun to think that he hasn't started any foolishness yet.” Yearning for her own foolishness, she was much encouraged at the end of June when she had two dances and an hour's tete-a-tete with him.[46]
“The desire to have Gerry feel a real affection for me is so strong, that I am going to try and see if I can make it develop,” Jean vowed. “It may be,” she worried, “that I show too much pleasure in his company, too much affection and admiration for him.” Deciding to show less enthusiasm without being unfriendly, she reasoned that “when a girl does show those things openly, it usually follows that the man quietly takes it all for granted… and thinks very little or almost not at all, of the girl.” But her resolution quickly crumbled. “No, that won't do, Gerry,” she responded after he turned down a dinner invitation. She pushed to see
Her joyful surge was soon quashed by gnawing uncertainty over Gerry's feelings for her. A shuttlecock for Cupid, one day she was overjoyed, feeling confident that he truly liked her. But the next day she saw Gerry and Anna in the village together and decided that “his friendship for Anna is so much greater than it is for me.” She calculated in mid-August that he had only come to see her once without a direct invitation and that all the walks or drives were at her instigation. Crestfallen, she resolved not to show her sorrow or to force herself upon him again.[48]
Jean's hunger for affection was riddled with self-doubt, and she pondered her life experience in a series of painful questions: “Why must I live on aimlessly, with nothing to do, utterly useless, all my life? I who long so for the love and companionship that only a man can give, and that man a husband Am I never to know what love means, because I am an epileptic and shouldn't marry if I had the chance?”
And she lamented, “I seem never to be attractive to men. Is that also entirely due to my disease?… And if a man that I could love loved me would it really be an actual wrong for me to marry him because of the possibility of the children inheriting my malady?”[49]
At that time, many physicians and psychologists shared the thinking of Dr. Peterson and would have answered affirmatively. The idea of transmitting so-called “degenerate” heredity was of great concern to scientists and social scientific professionals, who urged a variety of remedies including institutionalization and sterilization.[50] Jean was obviously influenced by this climate of opinion, but her fear was also intensely personal.
“Will I have to go on indefinitely leading this empty, cheerless life without aim or real interest? Oh! it does not seem as though I could. This hunger, this passionate desire is so constant, that every time I see a young man that I like I begin to hope that he may before long do more than like me. Even when they are younger, as is generally the case, than I am, I cannot help wishing, wishing, wishing, that some day they may overlook my age my stupidities and especially my disease.” Hers was a heartbreaking lament. “If only my memory could be good when I am
Despite her efforts that summer to be more open about her disease, Jean's “felt stigma” was a powerful discouragement and only deepened her lack of confidence. She found little to counter her sense of inferiority from her immediate family. Sam treated her like a child, in one instance correcting her grammar and reproving her use of slang in front of company. Jean resented her father's scolding and yearned for freedom. “That is a good deal why I can't get away from the feeling that I really would like to marry,” she confessed. Lyon was generally no help either, praising Clara extravagantly, talking endlessly of the sister's “marvelous grace, subtlety, and wonderful powers—genius—.” Jean herself saw Clara as talented and charming-and observed with some consternation that Clara had “the sort of charm and loveliness that make numberless people love her and yet she has decided not to marry. What an uneven mystery Life is!” Still Jean had no patience for Lyon's effusions. “I have known for a very long time,” Jean commented astutely, “that to Miss L. Clara is heaven & earth, but I never get sufficiently used to her gushings for them not to bore, and as a rule, even annoy me.”[52]
Lyon illustrates Jean's point by waxing poetic in her journal over “Santissima”—one of her pet names for Clara: “You who make a shrine of any house you inhabit—you who are a gift to every one who falls under your sweet thrall.” At a later date Lyon cooed, “The very air must love to caress her as she passes through it.” By comparison she found little to gush over, much less appreciate, in the youngest daughter. “The evening went well,” Jean remarked after a dinner with Gerry Brush, “even though when Miss Lyon is about I am always more painfully conscious of my ignorance and stupidity.”[53]
Jean did find some comfort in praise from a peer, Gra Thayer. “We were perfectly agreed in the heartiest affectionate approval of Jean as we now (then) knew her,” she quoted from a letter he had written. “This we said, among other things that though Clara was charming, of course, yet we failed to understand how folks could be drawn from you to her, inasmuch as the ‘higher criticism must inevitably and instantaneously reverse the verdict!” The “we” included Gerry, and Jean was “thankful” to hear the verdict and reassured that Gerry “didn't dislike being with me.”
That summer Isabel Lyon also yearned for grand passion. “So wonderful is he—” she crooned about Twain, “that all others are bleak—So full of surprises of thought and action that there is no monotony where he is.”[55] Starving for physical affection and inclined toward self-dramatization, she was continually frustrated by what seems to have been an elaborate tease on Sam's part. While he was in Dublin, he was in the habit of reading poetry to Jean and Lyon in the evening. “Such reading it is,” the secretary sighed. “There never was any one to read so beautifully before—and to charm you so—and hurt you so—.” One summer evening, with Jean at the Brushes, Lyon listened alone to selections from The Rubaiyat. One thinks, of course, of its most familiar passage:
A book of Verses underneath the Bough, A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness—Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! (quatrain 12)
“Oh what a gifted man he is—what a marvel,” she swooned. “[H]e is overflowing with a buoyancy belonging to a man of 45.”[56]
For Lyon the “wilderness” of Dublin failed to transform into paradise, and she was dosing herself with Bromidia, a sedative, to help her sleep at night. She attributed her insomnia to loneliness, adding tellingly “not because one is alone, either—,”[57] When Sam fled Dublin, Albert Bigelow Paine helped take up the slack. But when he left too, to be with his family, her mood dramatically worsened. “I cast my thoughts toward the ones with whom I would willingly be—but I am Prometheus—and am chained to the rock and daily my soul is torn out of me—no—not my soul—not my soul.”[58]
Clearly the rock Lyon saw herself chained to was Jean. Sam expected his secretary to remain with Jean and act as her guardian when he was away, for they both believed his youngest daughter could never be left
Stuck in Dublin trying to manage Jean while Twain and Paine were free to roam, Lyon became irritable and unpleasant. But her nervousness grew beyond irritability. On the way to celebrate July 4 at their club, the two women stopped at the post office and George, the groom, was dispatched on an errand. “[W]hen the horse jumped a little at the sound of firecrackers, Miss Lyon screamed,” Jean reported, “and then screamed at each firecracker thereafter, even though Scott [the horse] was stoical. With George back in the wagon, she continued to scream at any strange sound.”[60]
A few days later, on a day in which Lyon described herself in her diary as sad and moody, she and Jean quarreled over the contents of a letter to Twain. Hoping to fool her father into mistaking her handwriting for the secretary's, Jean wrote a few silly lines in a note that Lyon had already begun. According to Jean, the governess was determined to spoil the innocuous little joke; when Jean playfully tapped her on both cheeks to interrupt her tattling, Lyon indignantly tore the letter in half, snapping that “she wouldn't stand such treatment,” Jean reported, “& that she wouldn't write Father at all, now.”[61]
Strangely enough, Lyon completely ignored this incident in her diary, writing instead about her walk to Thorndyke Pond, her sad mood, and her desire to read Nietzsche.[62] Her silence is puzzling given the fears she had earlier expressed about Jean's violent proclivities. Jean herself was rather surprised that there was no “atmosphere” between them as a result. Lyon seemed lost in her own world.
Romance was not the only longing affecting Lyon that summer. Soon after he had become almost a part of Twain's household in New York, Albert Paine spoke to her about a farmhouse on a seventy-five-acre piece of land for sale near his home in Redding, Connecticut, where he lived
Interestingly, she visualized the farmhouse as her accepting lover, in contrast to the recalcitrant Sam. “I didn't think he would want it,” she wrote, seeming to imply an emotional rejection as much as a judgment about a building. “I couldn't think he would want anything that I want—,”[64] Petulant and wounded capture her attitude on that March day in 1906.
For Lyon, the farmhouse translated into the willing lover she would embrace at any cost. No obstacle was insurmountable, and she worked with an exhausting diligence to satisfy her longing. Persuading Clemens, with his usual reckless faith in good investments, to buy the property proved easy. Prodded by both Lyon and Paine, he purchased land in Redding less than two months after Paine joined the inner circle and continued to add to his holdings in May and September I9o6.[65] Owning the property would be moot, though, if he could not be persuaded to build a permanent residence in the Connecticut countryside—a more difficult proposition.
Lyon had several key players to win over. Jean was delighted with the prospect of escaping New York in the winter but worried that with a country home in Connecticut her father would not want to summer in Dublin.[66] Reassured that Dublin would not be abandoned, she became an enthusiastic ally. But Clara, absent from his household as frequently as possible, remained to be convinced. She held sway as the eldest, and Lyon, intuitive and shrewd about social power, had long ago understood Clara's influence in Twain's entourage. Admiring her beauty and her beaux, Lyon constantly flattered Clara, thereby winning her affection and even her trust. “Nana” was Clara's pet name for the secretary, and “Santa Clara” or “Santissima” were Lyon's affectionate rejoinders.[67] Apparently Clara was sufficiently interested in the project to meet her in New York in mid-August to sketch plans for the Redding house with the
Paine was already more than an ally, having planted the idea in Lyons mind to begin with. He cultivated her enthusiasm with a mix of altruism and blatant self-interest: he would be a neighbor and a readily available billiard partner for Sam, and, of course, it would be highly advantageous to him if the subject of his newest research project were to live next door. After Paine and Lyon surveyed the property together, he even offered her a strip of his own land on which to build a little house. But there was a condition attached. “[I]f I am good, very good,” she reported as if some concrete promise had been extracted by Paine, and she vowed “Oh, I must be good—monotonously good—,”[69]
Good about what is never made clear, but perhaps the shrewd contractor and jack-of-all-trades, Harry Lounsbury had the answer. He saw her fall off his “sleeping couch onto the floor” the first night she ever spent in Redding. According to Lounsbury, she had requested whiskey for a sick headache and then drank the entire quart in two hours.[70]
Lyon seemed as susceptible to masculine flattery as she was to whiskey, and during that second summer in Dublin, Paine showered her with attention. They walked together; they philosophized under a hemlock tree in the rain; they sat on the sunset rock and talked about their obsession—Twain. They frequently walked to an isolated cottage, where Paine once comforted her “weeping mood. He is a rare good man,” she noted, “and how I have needed him this year.”[71] Paine's motive for befriending Lyon no doubt originated from his interest in Twain, whom they both revered. But their intimacy seemed to grow beyond mutual admiration of the King during the summer.
In late June Lyon traveled to Boston with Sam, who was bound for New York to escape his boredom with Dublin. Leaving him at the train station, she “went to shop and shop—with a foolishly miserable heart in my breast.” But she surprised herself upon her return to Dublin, finding peace for the “first time—this year.” Paine was chiefly responsible. They walked to the upper pasture and “the talk was steady and full of
When Paine returned from his trip to Redding, he and Lyon walked to the isolated cottage where they talked—“How we did talk!” Reviewing this scenario the following day, she asked, “What will this day bring?” “The grass is down!” she answered curiously. And then, in a highly charged and highly suggestive passage: “It was so ripe, so ready and willing, to be slain. (3 men have been working at it all the morning.) It began to be so tired; and when the scythe swept through it, it lay so still, as if glad and full of rest—like other deaths.”[73]
“These are such beautiful days. The mountain has brought life to me,” she wrote several days later, after climbing Monadnock with Paine. “Who could have thought that within the month there could be an awakening such as mine—an awakening out of black poisoned misery into the meaning of the mountain and the meaning and sacredness of life, whether in solitude or not.” If it was the scenery that “awakened” her, she had a memorable day with nature because one year later she honored the anniversary of “The Monadnock Day” in her journal. Whether a partner in flirtation only or in actual embrace, she seemed a woman ripe for lovemaking.[74]
The summer's end brought unsettling developments. On a brief visit to New York in mid-September, Lyon must have had a discouraging talk with Clara and the architect, for the combined news of cost and logistics was gloomy. “Lioness told me that the idea of building at Redding, Conn., has been given up for the present,” Jean confided, applying the nickname she had been using since midsummer.[75] John Howells calculated that the house would cost a minimum of $47,000; not prohibitive in itself but daunting when two other houses had to be rented and
The day after Lyon returned with news that the Redding project looked doomed, Sam left Dublin for New York to attend Clara's North American solo debut in Norfolk on September 23. One critic praised her beauty and her voice, admitting she had yet to gain complete control of a song but predicting that she would be “one of the few good contraltos of America.” Sam proudly wrote Jean that “It was a clean straight triumph.” Paine too was gone and so could offer no immediate support. And Jean suffered her first major seizure of the month. Lyon called it “a dreadful kind of day — for Jean would not let me out of her sight.” Trying to cheer Jean up, she put on a clown costume, but apparently the results were disappointing. “It was a dreadful kind of a day,” the Lioness repeated, “for she couldn't keep it up.” “The seriousness of Jean's disease is increasing and I am very anxious about her—” Lyon wrote on September 20 after the second attack that month. Yet Jean had been suffering as many as five grand mal seizures a month that summer.[77] Lyons judgment that Jean's condition was worsening had no objective base. But it is a subtle clue.
Lyon herself suffered an emotional collapse on the evening of September 23. She took to her bed and, three days later, Jean noted that “Lioness is better but she has really been having a slight nervous breakdown.” Lyon “went to pieces” — self-described, “and stayed in a dark room all day — suffering.” “She is in terrible pain,” Jean commiserated, “and her being very nervous is a natural enough result, but even though I recognize that it doesn't make it any less irritating to be told, on going in to inquire after her condition, not to speak to her and to go out.”[78] Jean's sympathy was not welcomed.
Lyon displayed a set of behaviors in this pivotal crisis that she was to repeat many times while living in Twain's household. These strange interludes,