10. Stormfield
ISABEL LYON HAD HATCHED the dream of building a little cottage for herself in Redding, Connecticut, during the summer of 1906. At the time, she was much taken with Albert Paine, who had cultivated her dream in the hopes of persuading Clemens to buy property next to his own home in Redding. Under their influence, Clemens had bought his first parcel of land there on March 24, 1906, and added to his holdings in May and September.[1] He had authorized his best friend's son, John Howells, to draw up plans for the house. Clara also wholeheartedly supported the project, even though she never intended to make it her permanent home. With Clara and Lyon conspiring, the plans became increasingly elaborate. In 1907, even though Clemens had signed a contract to build, the project almost folded—both because of cost and because of the isolation of Redding. Construction had already begun when Clemens changed his mind again and tried to stop the building in August. But John Howells's hard-headed reckoning of the financial losses that would result now that construction had begun squelched the last noises about pulling out.[2] In an unusual groundbreaking ritual, Lyon and an entourage of men, including the architect and Paine, “dug each a tiny shovel of earth on the appointed spot… and then they poured in some whiskey.” “I wonder why?” she added with mock-innocence.[3]
Clara's rather grandiose ideas continued to affect the architect's plans after the groundbreaking. She envisioned a suite for herself, and the blueprints were changed at the last minute to assuage Howells's and Lyons fears of her displeasure. Or so it appears.[4] Clemens refused, much to the chagrin of his friends, to discuss the Redding house or be consuited
Six weeks before Sam's move-in date of June 18, 1908, trouble over the Redding house erupted between Clara and Lyon. The overt cause was Clara's sense that she was being ignored in the choice of new furnishings.[6] The Lioness's decorating skills may have threatened Clara's pride in her own taste and discernment, or Clara's vision for the house in the planning stages may have involved a greater investment in the interior design than Lyon had calculated. A deeper miscalculation was at work, however.
Over the past year there had been a gradual shift in the once close and affectionate relationship between the two women. In June 1907, Lyon had gushed that “Santa [a pet name for Clara] was bursting with glee tonight and called me Nan-Pan-Pete-Pan and snuggled her darling head in my neck.”[7] And she continued—at least for a while—her practice of signing checks for Clara without hesitation. As late as January 1908 Lyon was blowing flattery in Clara's direction like a windmill in a hurricane: “The very air must love to caress her as she passes through it” and “The King and C.C. are perfect companions for me.”[8] But sometime during the spring their love feast ended. In the late fall of 1907, after the Knickerbocker Trust scare, Clara had been put on a budget. Since Twain lost no money in the bank failure, the financial rationale for this squeeze was hazy to her—and many others. Obviously, by spring the Redding house was draining money from Twain's coffers; even so, he should easily have been able to afford Clara's extravagances. But this was the time when Lyon's loyalties were shifting from Paine to Ashcroft, who was now her chief confidant and advisor. He also became Clemens's “self-appointed” business manager.[9]
“There was hardly anything for him to do,” Clemens sniffed later, “except errands & small matters.” Again in the hairpin business, Clemens entrusted Ashcroft with “ten or twelve thousand dollars” for a new company that never held a stockholders' meeting, made no official reports or accounting, and returned not a penny—while Clara found herself strapped for cash.[10] In March and April 1908, in fact, Clara suffered a serious
“Headache. So ill all day, for I wept without control for hours last night, because I was exhausted,” Lyon disclosed on May 2, 1908, “—and the fact that Santa misunderstood all my efforts in working over the house-My anxiety over the finishings, my interest in my search for the right thing for the King's house has all been misinterpreted, and the child says I am trying to ignore her.” The tone is placating. “All my effort has been to please her, to keep her from the dreary search of hours and hours to find the right thing, or shape or color,” she pleaded. “I am only trying to save his money and Santa's strength—Oh, so ill I am.” Unfortunately, the secretary misunderstood the source of her trouble with Clara. “Somebody has put all these sickening ideas into Santa's head—and I feel that my interest in the house is dead forever,” she concluded two days later.[12]
The real source is apparent in a letter to Lyon written from England six weeks later by Will Wark, Clara's accompanist and a key member of her touring entourage. Clara had left for one of her many recuperating periods in Europe, with travel companions in tow, including Katy Leary. Wark listed a few expenses, so Lyon would “understand just how the money is being used,” barely pausing before he blurted out, “I shall probably have to send for more [money] in a few days—It is really something fierce.” Defensively noting “We really haven't wasted any money,” he ticked off his plans to save money—concerts near London next year “on shares so that Clara won't be under any expense” and an upcoming stay at a cheap country place in France—and nervously begged for reassurance, using the family's pet name for Lyon: “Now Nana please tell me frankly if you think Clara is spending too much.” Hopeful that Nana would be sending another cash transfusion, he wrote that they both “would give anything to have you here,” and he closed with the ironic but sincere “We need you.”[13]
In a letter sent by the same post Clara asked, “Why don't you feel as if everything were all right?” and answered her own question with no hint of trouble: “Probably because you are tired out.” “Dear little Nana we often speak of you & wonder how you are. I am sorry, sorry that you have been depressed—depression is too awful and so unreachable sometimes,”
Ashcroft, however, was taking a hard line toward Clara. “Clara Clemens traveled about like a prima donna,” he sneered in a later financial report, “with a violinist, accompanist and maid in her train.” This attitude was infectious—and ultimately disastrous for Lyon. During the more than three months that she was abroad, Lyon practiced some industrious cost-cutting on Clara's side of the ledger. “I must do Miss Lyon this justice: she was faithful & diligent in persuading me (when Clara was on the other side of the water),” Twain testified, “to send her only two or three hundred dollars whenever she asked for five hundred.” According to him, his secretary argued that “the more money she had on hand the more careless & squanderous she would be with it.”[15]
Both Ashcroft and Lyon had started to act as if Twain's money was their own. They became convinced that they were putting the brakes on a careless daughter's endless demands for their money. Clara was not a thrifty soul; nevertheless Lyon was foolish to scrimp on her pet and thus earn her enmity. As long as Twain's secretary was depriving Jean, she was safe. But when she began tightening the other daughter's purse strings, she was courting danger.
Twain moved into the Redding house on June 18, 1908, and initially christened his Italian-style villa “Innocence at Home,” a title brimming with irony. His youngest daughter was barred from crossing the threshold on the contrived orders of her doctor. His other surviving daughter
With preternatural vision, Clara insisted on renaming the Redding house “Stormfield” when she returned from Europe in September. Her father readily acquiesced. Clara's choice appealed to him because the loggia end of the house was built with money he received for his magazine piece “Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven.” Twain had finally published his burlesque of a conventional afterlife, written and revised over nearly forty years, in the December 1907 and January 1908 issues of Harper s Monthly.
Twain's heaven was a busy place where work was essential to combat boredom. With typical Twainian insight and irony, it also included pain and suffering. “You see,” explained Captain Stormfield's celestial guide, “happiness ain't a thing in itself—it's only a contrastwhh something that ain't pleasant.” The guide concluded that the pain and suffering in heaven, because it was temporary, created “plenty of contrasts, and just no end of happiness.” Happiness in Twain's heaven had another unexpected feature. Almost everyone wished himself young again, but only a fool was inclined to remain young. As a person gained knowledge and experience in paradise, his guide informed Stormfield, “he lets his body go on taking the look of age, according as he progresses, and by and by he will be bald and wrinkled outside and wise and deep within.”[17] Qualities of mind defined enjoyment in heaven if not on earth.
Twain had a second reason for thinking Stormfield an appropriate name—the Redding house was set on a hilltop and would be a magnet for storms. He little knew what storms were brewing.[18]
Lyon had dedicated herself to separating Jean from her natal home since the summer of 1906. She privately renewed her resolve the following summer: Jean was never to live with her father again, she announced in
Certainly Clemens himself was enthusiastic about the “healthy environment,” describing his villa as regally perched above richly wooded hills, with only half a dozen houses in sight, cool breezes in the summer, and no sounds but the singing of birds. He wrote one of his Angelfish that “the stillness and serenity bring peace to the soul.” And he and his guests spent much of their time in the arched loggia, which opened out from the living room to Connecticut vistas and the country air. But even as he welcomed schools of Angelfish to “Innocence at Home,” Sam made no objection when his youngest daughter was barred from moving into his new house. “Yes-indeedy, it was just too bad that there wasn't a solitary junior member of the family here to help me christen the house,” he chirped. “But you know the adage: Man proposes, but God blocks the game.”[20]
In fact, Clemens had planned to visit Jean in Gloucester for an unprecedented two days before he moved to Redding, but he soon abandoned that notion. Jean may not have been able to locate suitable housing for her father, after Dr. Peterson barred him from staying overnight in her house. It was at this time that Clemens told an obviously disappointed Jean to be thankful for Peterson's good work and “to testify our thankfulness by honoring his lightest desire. Your mother would say this too,” he piously intoned, “out of her grateful heart.”[21]
In spite of the best efforts of Peterson and Lyon to keep father and daughter apart, for once God threatened to block their game. Learning of the death of his old friend Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Clemens made plans to attend the memorial service in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the end of June. He was accompanied by Paine, in whom he had a
Though her father's visit to Gloucester did not end Jean's exile, it resulted in a scheme whereby Jean would buy a farmhouse near Stormfield. The place Sam had in mind turned out to be “a poor trifling thing,” he informed his daughter, “like the rest of the ancient farm houses in this region, it has no room in it.” Paine had confirmed that the house was uninhabitable, at which point Sam threw up his hands. “I am so sorry,” he wrote Jean. “I wish I could situate you exactly to your liking, dear child, how gladly I would do it. And I wish I could take your malady, & rid you of it for always. I wish your mother were here; she could help us. I will not try to write any more. I love you dear, dear, dearly, & I am so sorry, so sorry. What can I do?”[24]
Clemens's uncharacteristic effort must have triggered alarm bells in his secretary, but Jean's own scheming apparently sent her into full alert. “Miss Lyon has a house near ours—which father gave her—and she is going to sell her Farmington home,” Jean told Nancy Brush sometime in July. “My hope is that Dr. Peterson will let me live in her house—if Miss Lyon is willing, next winter.” Initially Jean had reasoned that her father and Miss Lyon would be back in New York City for the winter, and Lyon's cottage on the Redding property would be vacant. But when she learned that her father intended to stay in Redding all year—and that therefore Lyon would be in residence at Stormfield—she reported
If Lyon panicked at the news that Jean hoped to live in her cottage, she did not lose her strategic poise. Jean's name was placed on the passenger list of an ocean liner—with Berlin as her ultimate destination. Jean loved Germany and had once even considered trading off a summer in her beloved Dublin for one in Germany. But this news came to her in late July “like thunderbolt from a clear sky,” as she wrote her friend Nancy, and she was initially resistant to trading her father for Germany. “I have just had a note from Jean expostulating against going to Germany,” Peterson confided to Lyon, “but I will write her that she must do so for the sake of her future.” “As I wrote Father,” Jean confided to Lyon herself, “I am delighted and distressed, both. I had hoped to be with him this winter. No one was ever more astonished than I when I read the decision.” Determined to be reunited with her father, Jean wound up derailed by the one alternative that was genuinely inviting. Even though she felt “rather badly about going,” she admitted to Nancy, “[o]f course I am wildly excited at the idea of going abroad again & of seeing Berlin—I saw it last when I was only eleven years old.”[26]
Four months with the Cowles sisters in Gloucester obviously enhanced the prospect of Berlin. “I don't want to be unkind,” Jean insisted to her friend, “but I am so deadly sick of those two girls (women) that I can hardly bear to look at them.” Although, predictably, Jean could feel pity for them—“I am no longer fond of them but their lot is a terribly hard one,” she wrote to Lyon—she was nonetheless eager to be rid of them. Mildred had been threatening to throw herself off the rocks of Gloucester all summer, and Jean “quaked at the mere idea” of prolonging her contact with either sister. At the same time she remained conflicted
Jean's powerlessness was reinforced in the firing of George O'Con-ners — for two years her groom and driver on land, first mate at sea, and all around boon companion — whom she had hoped to keep on Twain's payroll while she was in Berlin. “He has been restful & almost invariably helped calm me when I was overwrought,” she explained to Lyon, “& he has often pulled me out of myself & the unhappy life at Katonah, here & at times, in Greenwich.” Lyon preferred to keep the newly hired Harry lies. “To me, it is the most horrible injustice,” Jean argued. “We haven't ever treated our servants so before & surely Father would consider it right to let Harry go in order to keep George if he appreciated what a help he had been to me.” Softening, she pleaded, “You are the planner & arranger & you can do what I beg & can make Father see the justice of it if you only will.”[28] George was laid off, while Harry remained on the payroll.
Routinely treated as if she were eighteen rather than twenty-eight, Jean allowed herself to be ordered about and relied upon higher authority for direction. Her problems were not just the lack of an independent income (which was a huge barrier in itself) but a lack of self-confidence bred by the stigma of her disease. For Twain fitfully and for Lyon fully, Jean became her disease. Most tragically, Jean too let her identity wrap itself around her epilepsy. With massive outside pressure to collapse herself into her illness, she most often identified herself as a patient in search of a cure, an all-consuming role that put her fate in the hands of others.
It would seem obvious, then, that Jean was being sent to Berlin as a patient in search of a cure, to consult with a world renowned German specialist. “I am going to see a physician of whom Dr. Peterson highly approves,” Jean informed her friend Nancy on August i. Yet a few days later, Dr. Peterson told Jean that he had never heard of Dr. Hofrath von Renvers, the physician she was being referred to for treatment. His name had come to Lyon through some old family friends, the Stanch-fields, who were enthusiastic about his treatment of their daughter. Peterson had in fact written to another doctor, whom he considered the best in Germany, and was waiting for a reply to his query. Lyon, however,
Initially, in a burst of enthusiasm, Lyon had included herself in the trip abroad. “The plan was for me to take Jean to Germany, but I must not go away from the King, ever—He is too wonderful.” Wonderful he may have been, but the immediate reason she declined to leave his side was that she was worried about his health. On August 6, Sam had what everyone thought was a violent bilious attack, akin to what is called “stomach flu” in the early twenty-first century. He thought it was brought on by the intense heat during a journey to New York City to attend the funeral of his nephew, Samuel E. Moffett, who had drowned while on a family vacation. Lyon also discovered that ten days earlier Sam had become dizzy and disoriented during a billiard game with Paine. “I have lost my memory. I don't know which is my ball. I don't know what game we are playing,” he told Paine. The condition passed in an instant, and neither man thought much of it at the time. But Lyon told her old friend and employer, Mrs. Whitmore, that the doctors and Colonel Harvey, Twain's publisher, “have vested me with the high moral obligation of never leaving the King alone again.” Describing herself as “moving through this house with my spirit hands folded in prayer that I may be the right woman in the right place,” she vowed not to leave Clemens's side, unless she could entrust him to the care of Ralph Ashcroft.[30]
Clemens recovered rapidly, but by then the secretary had another source of anxiety. She and Ashcroft were worried about the influence Paine might have in her absence. Twain's biographer had remarkable staying power, in spite of Lyons best efforts to discredit him with her boss, and he remained determined not to be driven from the inner circle. With Clara returning home just as Jean was about to be shunted off to Europe, Paine insisted on joining the welcoming party, even though he knew his presence was unwelcome to some. “We met Santa today at the Cunard pier,” Lyon recorded on September 9. “Paine came in pale,
Working relentlessly behind the scenes, Ashcroft continued to egg Lyon on in an attempt to cut Paine off from his sources, and thus disable his biography of Twain. The secretary described one revealing instance in which she phoned Paine to demand that he return some letters, with Ashcroft “standing beside me to courage me up.” In another, she gave her sidekick two letters Paine wrote to her and noted that Ashcroft kept her from reading another “that must have been terrible.”[32] But the shrewd biographer was surprisingly difficult to detach. For nine months the campaign had been waged against him but he had not decamped from the battleground. Paine lost several key skirmishes, however, and the outcome of this literary war did not appear favorable to him after Twain moved to Redding in the summer of 1908. At their apex of power, Lyon and Ashcroft wrested considerable literary control away from Paine.
“She persuaded me that Paine had dark & evil designs,” Twain wrote a year later. Those designs included “clandestinely reading letters he hadn't any business to read; always dishonorably slipping away with important letters & papers, & leaving behind him no list of them & no receipt.” In fact Paine did, by his own admission, take important biographical materials and place them in a safety deposit box, fearing that Lyon would block his access to them. He undoubtedly left no list or receipts for his holdings. But his motivation was not “dishonorable,” as he demonstrated with the biography he eventually published. Lyon also led her boss to believe that Paine would use so many letters in his biography that the proposed volume of Twain's correspondence to be edited by Clara and Lyon would be commercially damaged. As a result of her influence, in August Colonel Harvey was given the official biographer's role, with final editorial power over Paine's work. More significantly Twain placed severe limitations on Paine's use of quotations. At Lyons behest, Twain even added a codicil to his will that restricted Paine's use of letters to only “such as she approved.”[33]
“In a word, she never missed an opportunity for poisoning his mind against me,” Paine recognized. Defenseless and disheartened, the biographer found his position “so distasteful and distressing,” he confessed later, “that more than once I was on the point of laying down my work
Paine's mistakes at the game merely gave the famous author another opportunity for amusement. Twain always enjoyed his opponent's “perplexities.” In return Paine loved to watch Twain lose his temper when he himself was playing badly. But Paine was there for more than his own entertainment. He devoted a number of hours each day to being beaten at billiards because, he explained, “the association was invaluable” for his research. Paine became Twain's intimate while playing billiards; and because he was always willing to play what Twain called “the best game on earth,” he held onto a crucial advantage: access to the King.[36]