18. The Funniest Joke in the World
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW REMARKED that it was Mark Twain who taught him that “telling the truth's the funniest joke in the world.”[1] Shaw's line captures the genius of great humor: it is always trying to penetrate the fa$ade of self-deceit and the conventions of respectability. Shaw recognized that the connection between humor and truth was central to Twain's writing. Twain continued to take aim at the truths of his life and society as he grew older, but—ever self-conscious about the cash value of his persona—he wrote increasingly for himself rather than his reading public. Consequently he composed, yet withheld from publication, certain controversial material, including an essay condemning lynching that he knew would depress book sales in the South.[2] He also deliberately withheld the 429-page autobiographical expose commonly referred to as the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript.
Twain began writing the manuscript—part history, part rumination, part diatribe—on May 2, 1909, a little less than three weeks after he fired his secretary, Isabel Lyon. She and her new husband, Ralph Ashcroft, are central protagonists in the unpublished work that bears their names. Twain struggled with his narrative for almost four months. He listened to his daughters, consulted his lawyers, and solicited the observations of his close friends and relatives about what had happened in his inner circle. And he observed the maneuvering of his former employees with fresh vigilance. He assimilated other evidence—his general contractor's little black book, newspaper interviews by Lyon and Ashcroft, an independent auditor's report, even memos and letters unflattering to himself that he had written in the Ashcrofts' defense. Twain
This autobiographical quest for self-knowledge was loosely structured as a series of letters to William Dean Howells. Twain believed that by addressing Howells he could imitate a confidential conversation with his friend. He was hoping to “talk right out of my heart, without reserve.”[3] A free-speaking Mark Twain is worth listening to at any age, but especially at the end of a long life when he is intent on turning himself inside out. Twain's series of intermittent conversations with himself is the most sustained and important writing of his final years. Yet—since its public unveiling in 1970—this manuscript has become the most maligned and misunderstood work in his entire oeuvre.
One influential biographer, giving the manuscript its first and most widely accepted interpretation, claimed that Twain and his daughters were “illogical and lacking in compassion.” He charged Clara and Jean with harassing their father's “defenseless and high-strung secretary.” The manuscript, he concluded in an attack on Twain himself, “is a geyser of bias, vindictiveness, and innuendo.” He encapsulated an all-but-definitive stance toward the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript when he concluded: “It condemns a gullible and foolish man for misplacing his trust for so long in such obviously corrupt antagonists as the Ashcrofts whom he created in his own mind.”[4]
For telling the truth about himself, Twain has been accused of being deluded, demented, and worse. Through Lyons guile, Ashcroft's wiles, and some scholarly gullibility, Twain's old age has been discredited. He has also been discredited through stereotypes of the aged and a willingness to believe in decline and venality, ingratitude, and superheated ego in a man of notorious celebrity and recognizable vanity.
“I'd like immensely to read your autobiography,” Howells wrote to Clemens in a real letter. “I fancy you may tell the truth about yourself. But all of it?… Even you won't tell the black heart's-truth. The man who could do it would be famed to the last day the sun shone on.”[5] But Mark Twain did tell the black heart's-truth in the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript, and scarcely anyone has acknowledged it.
While it is undeniable that his manuscript is raw and uncrafted and contains several full-scale evasions, it also includes the most painful personal disclosure he ever committed to paper. The greatest act of courage in Twain's entire body of autobiographical writing is his confession—which he agreed to expose to the public fifty years after his death—that he abandoned his own daughter. Not many parents would voluntarily admit to the entire world “that I, who should have been her best friend, forsook her in her trouble to listen to this designing hypocrite whom I was coddling in the place which should have been occupied by my forsaken child.”[6] Only in recognizing Twain's massive vanity about his public image can one gauge the force of this remarkable revelation.
Twain said he could never “strip myself naked before company,” but that is what he did in this work. He spared himself very little, in an act of brutally frank self-examination that he knew would become public. If he indulged in petty diatribes, such as his fits over his secretary's erratic bill paying, or occasionally slipped in below-the-belt remarks, such as his gibe that Lyon was a three-week-old fetus, he also ruthlessly stripped away his illusions.[7] That he did not accomplish this task systematically is neither surprising nor worthy of condemnation.
The Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript was Twain's therapy, a literal form of recovery. He wrote it in dribs and drabs as events continued to unfold and as he had the time or inclination. On July u, after a visit by the Twichells, he self-consciously told his future reader that he was in no hurry. “It is my only employment; also my only diversion, except billiards—daily from 5 to 7 p.m. with Paine.” Even as he wrote this autobiography for his own edification and enlightenment, he also understood that it had a value beyond the personal. In an act that mixed pride and self-abasement, perhaps only possible for Twain in old age, he offered his “remarkable little tale” to the world. “Come,” he invited his reader, “isn't it just like an old-time machine-made novel?”[8] Realizing that his real-life drama was as melodramatic, stagy, and racy as bad fietion,
He composed the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript like letters from the front. Writing in the wake of constant turmoil, Twain was rocked by one humiliating revelation after another during the summer of 1909. He worked in the chaos of immediate events, often grappling with the impact of an earlier revelation as the next experience exploded around him. The separation between his real experience and his writing about it varied from weeks to years. But even with the longer time lag, his responses were raw and impromptu. Whipped by the maelstrom of circumstance, his mind was neither tranquil nor organized. He was struggling, not to produce a lyrical prose masterpiece, but to overcome his personal demons by writing—the only way he knew how.
Mark Twain began his confession of folly and betrayal not long after what he must have hoped was the climax of his story, the firing of his secretary. He introduced Ashcroft and Lyon as the hero and heroine of his “sordid little romance.” And he named a long list of friends who had been suspicious of his self-described pets, while “I remained peacefully asleep,” as he sheepishly admitted. “I had the most absolute & uncompromising faith in the honesty, fidelity & truthfulness of that pair of rotten eggs all the while. Yes, & so had Clara.” Twain accentuated his unwillingness to listen to any attack upon either their character or conduct by recalling the pattern of gullibility that had been a lifelong defect in his business dealings and outlining how much his blind loyalty in the past had cost him in actual dollars and cents. This time his loyalty was even more expensive, and not in terms of money lost. Poses of gullibility and obtuseness were major devices of his nonfiction writing as well as mainstays of his fictional humor.[9] Yet it was sometimes difficult to find humor in the unfolding events where the obtuseness was his own. On May 27 he candidly owned up to his embarrassing defense of the Ashcrofts, recalling his letter of March u to Clara, where he poured out his admiration, his gratitude, and “esteem without stint.”[10] Ashamed to have written such a slavish and worshipful defense of the pair, he nonetheless appended the whole letter to his manuscript. It is one of the many acts of unflinching honesty in this remarkable autobiography.
Writing at the end of May, he was struck by her erratic work habits, which probably reflected her binge drinking. Over the next three months, Clemens repeatedly circled back to Lyon's pattern of sickness, including her three-day headaches, recognizing at last that she was often drunk in his employ. He confessed that while he had always naively taken her inebriated state for “hysterics,” everyone around him knew she was a lush. As he reviewed her history, her motives, and her character in early June, a touch of the Twain humor struggled to the fore. “[B]etween the Human Race & the Great Humorist she stood erect, impressive, & all alone, like Liberty Enlightening New Jersey, & none of that Race could get a chance to lay a prayer at his feet without her permission.” He remembered that in complimenting her husband, she gushed, “Isn't he dear?… and so honest!” “Honest!” Twain retorted incredulously; “How-ells, it is like one old prostitute praising another's chastity.”[11]
Gathering strength, momentum, and perhaps reassurance from his humor, a determined Twain sat down to write again on June 14. After almost six weeks of reflection, he was ready to plumb Lyon's most vicious crime: keeping his daughter exiled in sanitariums when she was desperate to return to her father's home. He also found the strength to confront his own transgression—his pact with the Devil—exposing his secret collusion in the process that exiled Jean. “It cuts me to the heart, now, to know that Jean made many an imploring & beseeching appeal to me, her father, & could not get my ear,” he confessed with hard-edged candor; “that I, who should have been her best friend, forsook her in her trouble to listen to this designing hypocrite whom I was coddling in the place which should have been occupied by my forsaken child.”[12] No one need ever have known about Twain's compact with his secretary, yet he chose to admit to posterity that he conspired with her not to read his youngest daughter's letters.
Still, his next confession had to be almost as difficult. Hovering “like a pair of anxious and adoring nurses,” the Ashcrofts would not let him out of their sight. They watched to see “that I didn't catch cold or get run over by a baby wagon,” he quipped. “And I liked that nursing & petting & was vain of being a person who could call out such homage, such devotion.” This confession of vanity was a humbling act of contrition. Joining self-deprecating humor and acumen in his phrasing, he called the Ashcrofts his “crutches,” his “carbuncles,” and “worshiped pets of mine.” He drips acid on them, as his critics have noted disapprovingly, but they fail to see that he did not spare himself. “The pair were laughing at me all of the time, but I never suspected,” Twain told the world. Though he exaggerated their mockery, in doing so he was frankly acknowledging his foolishness.[13]
On June 19 he returned to the more mundane history of the audit of his secretary's accounts. At this time he conveyed in detail his conversations with Ashcroft about the business manager's plans to marry Lyon. This is where he makes his self-conscious remark about King Lear. They thought they owned him body and soul, he wrote. They thought “I couldn't help myself; that all in good time they would be indisputably supreme here, & I another stripped & forlorn King Lear.”[14] It is a powerful image of his folly, his weakness, and the vulnerability of old age.
On June 30, he gathered courage for another engagement with the painful treatment he had accorded his daughter Jean. He faced the fact that Jean could have returned home two years ago “but for the scheming of that pitiless pair & my own inexcusable stupidity!”[15] Dr. Peterson's conviction that Twain would be disturbed by Jean's presence in Redding was unshakable, he reported, even in the face of protestations by Clara and the family physician, Dr. Quintard. For three years, Lyon had been conducting a form of shuttle diplomacy between Jean's doctor and father, assuring Peterson that Twain did not want his daughter at home while telling Twain that the doctor thought Jean was too sick to return. Only through Twain's direct and forceful intervention on April 14, 1909, was a concession won for an experimental week at home. Jean returned—permanently—to her rightful place by her father's side on April 26, where they both embraced the chance to become a family again. Twain exulted briefly over his reunion with Jean in his writing but then almost compulsively returned to the narrative of his secretary's fall.
On July ii he finally reached the point in his story when he fired Lyon. After that climactic moment, nearly three months behind him in real time, the narrative slackened, and Twain lost direction for a spell of several weeks. Jumping from subject to subject, he became apoplectic over her erratic bill-paying habits. Scarred by his previous bankruptcy and sensitive to his hard-earned reputation as a scrupulous debtor, he seemed to take the payment of a bill upon receipt as a matter of honor. “At my very laziest,” he deadpanned about relative speeds during one of his diatribes on her bill paying, “I could hear myself whiz, when she was around.” He vented more spleen over her lackadaisical pattern of paying bills—letting them lie for from six weeks to as much as four months—than almost any of her other sins.[16] Incorporating long-term statements from department stores is just one illustration of his focus on the inessential. Flailing in trivia, he almost drowned in misdirected fury.
His business manager's insulting letter of April 29 was another target of his wrath. In suggesting that his boss was too weak to stand up to his daughter Clara, Ashcroft revealed his contempt for Twain in this missive. Twain was furious and flung venomous insults back at Ashcroft through his pen. “It stands in a class by itself: it is the Literary Vomit of the Ages,” he wrote intemperately. He also fulminated over Ashcroft's plot to drive the servants away and gave grand significance to the deceptions involving his young butler, Horace. But in late July and early August, Twain once again zeroed in on his central narrative, and here he observed that for all her wiles, for all her lust for power and her vicious plotting, Lyon was guiltless of the plan “to rob us, strip us naked, take the roof from over our heads.” That was Ashcroft's department, he declared.[17] Reporting Ashcroft's brag to young Harry Lounsbury about selling Twain's house over his head, he showed how this led in late May to the discovery of the fraudulent power of attorney. Twain spent some time discussing possible ruses used by Ashcroft to obtain the power of attorney without his knowledge. By August n he was incisively probing why the Ashcrofts needed or wanted such control. He also owned up to the embarrassing act of signing the transfer signatures on all his Mark Twain Company stock, thus making them negotiable and giving anyone with access to his safety deposit box the chance to sell his literary rights out from under him.
He again recognized how close to being Lear he really was. “[T]hey were feeling absolutely sure they could turn me against Clara, drive her off the place, & reign over Stormfield & me in autocratic sovereignty”—a sovereignty that included exiling his youngest daughter forever. After coming so far in his narrative, however, Twain confessed a surprising feeling about his former secretary. “I think I pity her,” he acknowledged, “but I hope to be damned if I want to.”[18]
Sometime around the middle of August Twain shifted his focus once more. After a month of silently swallowing sensational press coverage about his suit against the Ashcrofts, he sought an outlet for his frustration in writing. The Ashcrofts had captured public attention in a series of lurid press conferences and newspaper interviews, but because he believed that any public statement on his part would only make his former employees more newsworthy, Twain vented his spleen in the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript. Spending more than a week privately correcting falsehoods in the newspaper accounts, he also fantasized about what he would like to say to the press. “If it suits Mrs. As ideas of propriety to wash her private linen in public, let her do it,” he wrote in one sample news release that he set aside. “It is her privilege; I never wash mine at all.” He even composed a letter to the Associated Press, which he never intended to have published. “It is the best way to quiet your indignant soul,” Twain noted of a practice he had used for forty years—“putting on paper what I would have liked to say.”[19]
Probably around the third week of August, he shifted back to narrating his life—about a month behind the events in real time. He picked up the story as Lyon returned in mid-July to her cottage in the Connecticut countryside, having declared to reporters that she intended to confront her former boss and settle their dispute. After waiting several days for her to appear at Stormfield, Twain's lawyer, Charles Lark, took the initiative. Under intense pressure from Lark—detailed in the narratives written by Jean and Clara, which are included in the manuscript—Lyon re-deeded her cottage back to her former boss. When Ashcroft returned from England in late July and entered negotiations with Twain's lawyers, Twain discovered that what his business manager could not achieve in an actual settlement, he could nonetheless claim as fact in the New York Times. Twain had charged Miss Lyon with dishonesty “everywhere except in print,” he asserted privately—a telling qualifier that explained
On August 30, 1909, Twain composed one of the most important sections of this autobiographical narrative, in which he categorically denied that he had had any thought of marrying Lyon. “In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only the one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her.” If he had secretly harbored even a flicker of marital interest, his lady-in-waiting would undoubtedly have waltzed him down the aisle. She used every wile she knew, and then some, but her boss never wavered.[21] Livy's ghost probably did save him from total surrender to the Lioness. “Miss Lyon compares with her as a buzzard compares with a dove,” he wrote. “(I say this with apologies to the buzzard.)” Manipulatable in almost every conceivable corner of his life, persuaded to all sorts of uncharacteristic actions by his secretary, Clemens never wavered in the marriage department. His claim that she had no sexual attraction for him, however, is suspect. Calling her a “little old superannuated virgin,” he wrote that “her caressing touch—and she was always finding excuses to apply it—arch girly-girly pats on the back of my hand & playful little spats on my cheek with her fan—& these affectionate attentions always made me shrivel uncomfortably—much as happens when a frog jumps down my bosom.” One of the most revealing passages Mark Twain ever wrote about his sexuality is a denial. “Howells, I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon, I would rather have a waxwork.”[22]
Clemens could not bear the thought of any physical attraction to the woman he now abhorred; the woman he now believed was rotten to the core; the woman he now recognized had pushed him to betray his daughter; the woman who almost took him over bodily. “[S]he was an old, old virgin, & juiceless,” he wrote, “whereas my passion was for the other kind.”[23] His after-the-fact revulsion at any hint of Lyons allure is understandable at the end of August. But the evidence of his constant
Does a man read romantic poetry to a woman whose very touch he recoils from in distaste? Does he take her along as his boon companion on frivolous vacations to Bermuda? Does he let her into his bedroom for daily tete-a-tetes? In calling her a “little old superannuated virgin,” he demeaned her sexuality while maintaining his own persona as a virile lover. Yet his masculine vanity was clearly overwrought. It is doubtful that her affectionate attentions “always” made him “shrivel uncomfortably.” If he had shriveled more, Lyon would have had much less power in their day-to-day transactions. Clemens's confession of abandoning his daughter is real, but his denial of sexual feelings for his former secretary is a sham. In his frank self-examination at age seventy-three, this was one blind spot he could not see around.
To his credit, in the midst of his denials, he paused to check the facts. “I have stopped the press,” he wrote, “to call Clara in & ask her if she & Jean were ever afraid I would marry Miss Lyon.”
Clara responded with a blast of candor. “No, we were not; but we were afraid she would marry you.”
“Really & truly afraid, Clara?”
“Yes, really & truly…. [S]he seemed to have gotten such a hold upon you,” Clara told her father bluntly, “that she could make you do whatever she pleased. She was supreme. She had everything her own way in the house.” Clara did not attempt to spare his feelings, perhaps because he had already faced a complete description of his own predicament. “She had stopped making requests,” Clara continued, “she only gave orders. You never denied her anything.” Clara hammered away, and he reported her criticism in exquisite detail, almost relishing his comeuppance. “You were putty in their hands, father,” his daughter continued, “and they could mould you to any shape they pleased. That had not been your way, before; you had a will of your own—before the Ashcrofts came.”[24]
Shaping the narrative, even though he was ostensibly quoting his daughter, Twain returned to his greatest humiliation and excoriated himself. “Once you wrote a letter to Jean—& it was probably a real letter,” he had Clara say, “a letter from father to daughter—a letter with some feeling in it, some sympathy, not a page or two of empty & unex-citable commonplaces such as Miss Lyon was accustomed to dictate to you as replies to that poor friendless exile's appeals—”
The phrasing is pure Twain, as is the flagellation. “By God I can't stand it, Clara!” he had himself interrupt, in dialogue mode. “[I]t makes me feel like a dog—like the cur I was; if I could land Miss Lyon in hell this minute, I hope to be damned if I wouldn't do it—and it's where I belong, anyway. Go on.”[25]
He himself went on, describing the time he had written a “real letter” to Jean, the letter he gave to Lounsbury to mail, only to have his courier intercepted by Lyon on the false pretext that Twain wanted to add something he had forgotten. Neither Lounsbury nor Twain saw that letter again. “Do you think that that letter ever reached Jean, father?” Clara asked him accusingly.
“No, I dorit think it. I think that that misgotten gutter rat destroyed it,” he replied.[26] But he saved his most biting sarcasm for himself.
“Well, that's all. I don't want Clara to come in here any more,” Twain mockingly announced. “I like the truth sometimes, but I don't care enough for it to hanker after it. And besides, I have lived with liars so long that I have lost the tune, & a fact jars upon me like a discord.”[27]
Why did the Ashcrofts attain so much power over me? Why did they gain such mastery over my life? Why did I become the Ashcrofts' mental slave? In the closing days of August, Twain directly tackled the questions that would haunt any reader of the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript. How could a man of such intellect and insight, with a matchless ability to demolish pomposity and fakery be taken in by such poseurs?
Twain's answer was hypnotism, first proposed to Clara by her close friend Mary Lawton. Clara passed on the theory to Clemens, who believed that it looked “reasonable” since no one could think of any other plausible way to account for his “enslaved condition.”[28] At first glance, Twain's willingness to believe that he was hypnotized seems foolish and
Twain's contemporary, Hippolyte Bernheim, perhaps the most important late-nineteenth-century proponent of the psychological approach to hypnotism, saw it “as the induction of a peculiar psychical condition which increases the susceptibility to suggestion.” This “[s]us-ceptibility to suggestion occurs in the waking state,” Bernheim insisted. Indeed, according to one historian of psychology, Bernheim believed that hypnosis was “a form of behavior continuous with normal waking behavior, capable of being produced in nearly everyone.”[29] While Twain may not have read the work of Bernheim or his disciples, he closely perused an article by Dr. Frederik Van Eeden, “Curing by Suggestion,” which utilized Bernheim's work. Van Eeden described the power of suggestion in very ordinary actions: persuasive dialogue, vivid images, strong assurances, and rising expectations.[30] As it happened, Twain stumbled upon this piece on the very day that he and Clara had their discussion of hypnosis.
Van Eeden insisted, citing Alfred Binet, that “the aptitude of taking and realizing suggestions—is a normal faculty of the human mind, but greatest in youth.”[31] He added, however, that old people were sometimes as susceptible as children to suggestion. Twain knew that Van Eeden's unflattering description of the docile and childlike elder applied to his behavior. So impressed was he by this account that he cut and pasted an entire paragraph into the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript. “Old people,” the excerpt began, “though in all appearance still independent and responsible, are often entirely under the suggestive influence of some masterful or interested person.” Reading that line before bedtime, Twain recognized himself. “I have seen cases,” the article continued, “of rich old men apparently normal, who acted entirely against their original character, against their true inclinations, against their own interests, under the influence of some nurse or attendant who had succeeded in mastering the master's mind.”[32]
Here Twain identified a controlling factor in his mental servitude. He was one of those wealthy old people whose money had made him vulnerable to takeover by his caretakers. “In such cases the intriguer knew how to apply his suggestions,” the excerpt concluded, “so as to rule at
Hypnosis was the explanatory device he used to understand his condition. But another more recent concept, unavailable to Twain, probably more accurately describes his plight. Dubbed “learned helplessness syndrome” by modern behavioral psychologists studying animal conditioning, the term has been applied by less technically minded educators and social workers to children, the disabled, and the elderly who can be taught to think and act with total dependence upon their caretakers.[34] Twain indeed may have believed that he could not live comfortably without the ministrations of his caretakers. Certainly, he became a victim of their “care” for him. “I couldn't even go… to New York (an hour & a half distant), without one or both of them along to see that I didn't catch cold or get run over by a baby wagon,” he wrote ironically. They kept “solicitous watch over me all the time,” he remembered, “like a pair of anxious & adoring nurses.” “I was never able to get to my room in time to take my clothes off unassisted—he was always at my heels,” Twain wrote of Ashcroft's ministrations; “he always stripped me, he put my night-shirt upon me, he laid out my clothes for next day, & there was no menial service which he omitted.”[35] Nobody but an infant or a king has his clothes taken off at night. Such a level of physical attention, when added to the psychic cocoon of ease and comfort the Ashcrofts provided, left Twain limp and docile.
His vulnerability to this condition of learned helplessness was not just accounted for by his age. The foundation was laid years before by Livy, who relieved her husband of almost every mundane task and assumed almost complete responsibility for his children. “Mrs. Clemens always had the management of everything in the old days,” Katy observed. “She made every plan—looked after everything Mr. Clemens never crossed her in any plan and never upset anything she did.”[36] Thus, he had already been conditioned to rely on someone else for almost all his family's everyday needs. But several additional factors made him more vulnerable to takeover after his wife's death.
First, he decided that he had at last earned a rest and that he would please himself in his old age. He set his mind to divesting himself of responsibilities,
If it is accurate to say that many of Lyons moves to control him were instinctual, it is also true that she operated on a Machiavellian level of such complexity as to put to shame Twain himself. He became totally reliant upon her household management, her personal advice, and her familial services. These included making all the medical decisions, paying all the bills, doing all the shopping, and arranging all the details of his trips. The list is long. His every move was carefully orchestrated by Lyon, who was joined in the last two years of her vigilant tenure by Ralph Ashcroft.
Twain's other major blind spot was his refusal to recognize how much work this had entailed. By the beginning of the summer, his anger had slammed shut the door of validation. He unselfconsciously attacked Lyon with a remark that was both racist and sexist, claiming she was “much the laziest white person I have ever seen, except myself.”[38] In applying this bigoted censure to her, he was showing contempt for the energy and time demands of the “woman's work” that his secretary constantly performed in place of his wife.
Neither Mr. or Mrs. Ashcroft was the source of Clemens's laziness, selfishness, or stupidity, but they are accountable for deliberately deceiving and deluding him. He trusted them and was not an ungenerous boss, giving them gifts and opportunities to make money, even if he did not reward them with an adequate salary. They responded to his trust by attempting to govern him completely—including his money. His scandalous passivity came from his own indolence but also from their sinister manipulation.
The Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript is not great art, but there is something grand about it nonetheless. For Twain confessed the most painful truth of his old age. In trying to tell the “black heart's-truth” about himself, he had to confess that he had almost lost himself-in his seventies. That he came very close to being taken over by another human being and close, very close to losing both his daughters. “She was master, & I was slave,” he said bluntly. “She could make me do anything she pleased. In time—& no long time—she would have become permanently supreme here, & Clara would not have been able to stay in the house, nor Jean to enter it.”[39]
Twain's autobiography is an admission of the folly of old age, not without a cushion of exculpation but yet with the force of a head-on collision with reality that was his greatness as a writer. And it is an affirmation of life—not an easy, mellow, peaceful lyrical prose poem but a raging, disorganized, frustrated, guilty struggle to understand what went awry. Consider it a manuscript written during the process of unraveling a mystery—the mystery of his capitulation to a seduction of the mind.
What Mark Twain grappled with at seventy-four was the problem of self-identity, which is not just a problem for the young. “It should haunt old age,” observed another American author, “and when it no longer does it should tell you that you are dead.”[40] Shakespeare's Lear asks: “Who is it that can tell me who I am?” Twain's quest for an answer to this question in the summer of 1909 makes the autobiography compelling. “Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise,” the Fool in Shakespeare's play tells Lear. Both Lear and Twain acted with supreme folly in old age. Neither could tell their loyal friends from their betrayers.
Critics have suggested that the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript is an exercise in the senseless phantasms of dementia brought on by Clemens's despair and loneliness, thus extending the parallels between him and King Lear. But the living character does not suffer the same tragedy as his fictional counterpart. Writing the manuscript was Twain's journey toward wisdom. He examined in gritty if embarrassed episodes his susceptibility to the sycophantic lies that cost his daughter three years of often hellish exile. He owned up to his servile dependence on the