Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens

by Jerome Loving

  After Livy became too weak to run the Clemens household and Clara needed to get back to her own life, the family hired Isabel V. Lyon, an attractive thirty-four-year-old spinster who lived with her mother in Hartford. She joined the Clemens establishment in November 1902, the Whitmores having recommended her. She had worked for them as a governess. Her main duties for the Clemenses were that of secretary, but after Livy’s death she would eventually take over the management of the entire household. The family maintained Lyon’s services and took her with them to live in their villa in Florence.

  The traveling party—consisting of Sam, Livy, Clara, Jean, Katy, and nurse Margaret Sherry—boarded the steamship Princess Irene on October 24 bound for Naples. Because of an eye injury, Isabel Lyon followed with her mother a couple of weeks later. Howells was sorry to see his friend go back to Europe. He told his sister a few days before they left: “Clemens, I suppose, will always live at Florence, hereafter. He goes first for his wife’s health, and then because he can’t stand the nervous storm and stress here. He takes things intensely hard, and America is too much for him.”13

  52 A Death in Florence

  Howells was right. Mark Twain expected to live several more years abroad, most likely in Florence. After the two-week voyage on the Princess Irene nearly exhausted Livy and set her back months in her recovery, it became clear that he would never return to America while his wife still lived. The passengers in their first-class accommodations had been “very noisy,” and Livy “got but little sleep.” No sooner had they reached Italy on November 5 and established themselves in the Villa Reale di Quarto than she suffered “a bad and disabling burn” from carbolic acid, commonly used then as an antiseptic and disinfectant. The very next day she had a major asthma attack—one of “those (breathless) bad turns,” the first for “2 or 3 months,” as Clemens wrote Rogers.1

  November in Florence was rainy and foggy. The house was vast and lacked “the home feeling.” The first floor was divided into twenty-one rooms for the Clemens party—in a house two hundred feet long. There were several large rooms on the top floor, but they were reserved for the servants, none of whom could speak English. Only Jean could converse with them. Twain found it “unspeakably awkward & harassing,” but his frustration manifested itself productively in “Italian without a Dictionary,” appearing in Harper’s Weekly for January 1904. “It is almost a fortnight now,” he wrote, “that I am domiciled in a mediæval villa in the country, a mile or two from Florence. I cannot speak the language; I am too old now to learn how, also too busy when I am busy, and too indolent when I am not; wherefore, some will imagine that I am having a dull time of it. But it is not so. The ‘help’ are all natives; they talk Italian to me, I answer in English; I do not understand them, they do not understand me, consequently no harm is done, and everybody is satisfied.”

  Like the mother collie in “A Dog’s Tale,” he now used words without knowing their meaning, taking them at random. “I get the word out of the morning paper. I have to use it while it is fresh, for I find that Italian words do not keep in this climate. They fade toward night, and next morning they are gone. But it is no matter; I get a new one out of the paper before breakfast, and thrill the domestics with it while it lasts.” This lightheartedness belied the fact that Livy was now a permanent invalid. By December the family was back to seeing her for only five minutes a day at times. When she rallied later that month and the Italian weather (which she had come for) beckoned her outdoors, she stayed on the veranda too long and caught tonsillitis. To make matters worse, the American-born countess who was their landlady made their life a hell, shutting off phones and water at different times, because she was angry about having to live in an apartment over her stable in order to rent her villa. During the course of their stay and beyond, Twain initiated several lawsuits to seek revenge for her treatment of them.2

  As the tension from Livy’s failing health mounted in the Tuscan winter and spring of 1904, Twain kept writing, as he seems always to have done in the face of personal hardship. In May he told Rogers that he was sticking “close to the house.” By then visits to Livy’s room (only next door to Sam’s) were restricted to those five-minute intervals again, with an exception again made for Clara, who was permitted to see her mother one hour a day. It was “deadly lonesome on the days when the pen refuses to go.” “It’s a whole-day thing, too,” he added, “for the girls are as busy as bees, and far away in their corners of this barrack, so we are not likely to meet, except at dinner—for we all breakfast in bed, and I take no luncheon.” During that time he wrote “Italian with Grammar,” a follow-up to his earlier piece, much resembling his satire on the German language in A Tramp Abroad. Published in Harper’s Magazine in August, it began: “I found that a person of large intelligence could read this beautiful language with considerable facility without a dictionary, but I presently found that to such a person a grammar could be of use at times. It is because, if he does not know the Were’s and the Was’s and the Maybe’s and the Has-beens’s apart, confusions and uncertainties can arise. He can get the idea that a thing is going to happen next week when the truth is that it has already happened week before last.”3

  More than the writing, it was the humor that kept him sane during this period, which was surely, except for the death of Susy, the darkest one in his life. When he returned (for an hour a day, as he told Twichell) to “The Mysterious Stranger” stories, the humor in Satan’s view of the human race still came across. In one he wrote in January 1904 called “Sold to Satan,” a tall, slender, and graceful Satan tells the narrator, “Do you know I have been trading with your poor pathetic race for ages, and you are the first person who has ever been intelligent enough to divine the large commercial value of my make-up.” Thinking of stocks and his own investments, Twain has Satan give the narrator a physics lesson about radium, whose power fuels the furnaces of hell. Such an investment in this element will enable the narrator, in partnership with Satan, to make “a killing on the market” once radium is combined with the soon-to-be discovered polonium to give the world its first taste of radioactivity. It is as if Satan were a reflection of Twain himself in his greed to make as many fortunes (or conquests of souls) as possible. And in this way Twain was making fun of himself—of his own human weakness for grandiosity.4 When we read the indictment in Hamlin Hill’s Mark Twain: God’s Fool (1973) of a man who was banal and acrimonious, a raging Lear in his final decade, we have to remember Twain’s intuitive and conscious sense of himself as no better than any other fool claiming membership in the human race.

  Not long after the Clemens family arrived in Florence, Orion’s wife, Mollie, died. This news was kept from Livy, as was the death that spring of Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s son. Any bad news, the doctors feared, could set off another asthmatic attack or provoke her “nervous prostration.” Curiously, Twain claimed between 175 and 200 books from his brother’s library and had them sent to Susan Crane’s home in Elmira for safekeeping. If there was one thing he and Orion had in common, it was their intellectual interest in the world. They were both avid readers and writers. Both brothers wrote autobiographies: Orion’s (what there was of it) is no longer extant, but Twain got back to his—a project he had toyed with for more than thirty years—while in Florence, dictating to Isabel Lyon.5

  Writing his own version of the past was in large part another way to escape the pain of watching his wife grow weaker. The American Plasmon investment also became more troublesome, and by February he was confessing to Rogers that it was “one of those investments of mine that I am ashamed of.” His bank account with Rogers had now dwindled to just under twenty-five thousand dollars, less that half of what it had been before he left Europe in 1900. One bright interlude in his life that winter of his discontent was Clara’s debut on the concert stage in Florence, which “astonished the house—including me—with the richness and volume of her voice, and with her trained ability to handle it.”6 Clara was a talented singer as well as an accomplished
pianist, but apparently her vocal chords were injured by bronchitis or some other throat ailment, for this career ultimately took her nowhere. In any case, even with great talent, it wouldn’t have been easy with the iconic Mark Twain as her father. The best she could ultimately do in the face of that competition was to marry an artist.

  Olivia Langdon Clemens died on June 5, 1904. She was fifty-eight years old. “We are crushed,” Twain told Aldrich in one of the letters he wrote in the next day. Even though it had been obvious that she was fading, her death came as a shock to Twain and his two daughters. It sent Clara into emotional collapse and led to Jean’s first attack in thirteen months. Livy had suffered a fatal heart attack at around 9:15 that evening. “She was mercifully spared the awful fate she has been dreading,” he told his sister-in-law, “death by strangulation.” He recalled going into her room on the night of her death to say good night. Seeing her in good spirits for the first time in a while, he was moved to do something he had seldom done since the death of Susy: “I went up stairs to the piano & broke out into the old Jubilee songs. . . . Jean came straightway & listened—she never did it before. I sang ‘Sweet Low, Sweet Chariot,’ & the others.” Livy, he recalled, told the nurse, “ ‘He is singing a goodnight carol for me’—& almost in that moment she passed away.”7

  When he returned to her room to measure the impact of his playing on his wife, he found her sitting up in bed with her head on Katy’s shoulder and the nurse on the other side. Clara and Jean were standing at the foot of the bed looking dazed. This at least was Twain’s recollection in the days following the death. Many years later, when one of Clara’s closest friends and a former actress, Mary Lawton, transcribed Katy Leary’s memories of her service in the Clemens family, the story comes down to us a little differently. It suggests that Twain unconsciously conflated the night he played the Negro spirituals for her with the night of her death. Katy recalled that Livy died in her arms without anyone else being present in the room. She also recalled that the singing occurred “a few days before.” Whatever the actual sequence of events, Twain evidently spent much of that night alone with the corpse of the woman who had meant the world to him—the woman who had married him when he so desperately needed the social grooming that Mary Fairbanks (having now also died, in 1899) had maternally applied. He would be at sea once again without Livy—for the rest of his days. “I have been down stairs to worship that dear face,” he wrote Sue Crane five hours after Livy died, “& for the first time in all these long years it gave no heed.”8

  Epilogue

  Mark Twain also died that early June day. Samuel Clemens would live another six years. Unfortunately, it was as an old man lost in the twentieth century. “I am tired & old,” he told Howells, “I wish I were with Livy.” To his brother-in-law Charley, the person who had first introduced him to his wife of thirty-four years, Clemens described himself as “a man without a country. Wherever Livy was, that was my country. And now she is gone.” Clemens and his daughters returned to New York City on the Prince Oscar at the end of June and then to Elmira, where Livy would be buried alongside their daughter Susy and infant son, Langdon. At first the remaining Clemens trio clung together even in the absence of the force that had bound them. In preparing to leave Florence, the “trunk-packing” went on for four days—“and Livy not superintending. That has never happened before.” Even when they had packed up to leave Riverdale in 1903, this matriarch had given “instructions from her bed.”1 After the funeral, whereupon Clemens vowed that he would never witness the lowering into the grave of another he loved, the three spent the summer of 1904 in a cottage next door to Richard Watson Gilder’s property in the Berkshire Mountains not far from Lee, Massachusetts. Once Twain established a permanent residence in New York City at 21 Fifth Avenue that fall, however, the final breakup of the remaining family of Samuel Langhorne Clemens began.

  One problem was that Clemens, like most fathers in the nineteenth century, had always dealt with his daughters through their mother, or certainly with her help. Another was that his world fame kept him from them, or they from him. Clara, now aged thirty, wanted to establish her own identity as a concert singer; it was hard enough to do that without a famous father always stealing the scene, as he did with a curtain speech after one of her first New England performances, or simply upstaging her by his ubiquity in the press. Clara, as noted, was a better pianist than a contralto, something her father may have come to realize in 1907 when he characterized her various singing performances as “warbling around the country.” Jean, almost twenty-four, was weighed down by her medical condition. People in her condition at that time were simply considered unpleasant at best and dangerous at worst. One medical text on the disease described epileptics as “self-willed, obstinate as a rule, easily angered.” Although there is a poorly documented incident of Jean’s striking Katy Leary in anger, her diaries suggest that she was otherwise a gentle-minded young woman who simply wanted, first, more attention from her father and, second, a love interest of her own. Her medical condition served only to confirm for her father the bitter fact that his daughter was yet another victim of biology. “God Almighty alone is responsible for your temperament, your malady, and all your troubles and sorrows,” he told Jean in 1907. “I cannot blame you for them and I do not.”2

  Still another factor in the family’s disintegration was Isabel Lyon, who, after Livy’s death, tried to take her place. Lyon, the daughter of a Latin and Greek professor at Columbia, had taken her widowed mother to Hartford when she went to work for the Whitmores, before joining the Clemens family in 1902. As her diaries demonstrate, she was an intelligent, observant witness to the family’s doings for almost five years after Livy’s death. She was also completely devoted to Clemens, whom she christened her “King” and with whom she was vaguely ambitious of becoming queen. In this dream she was probably never directly encouraged by Clemens, who said on several occasions that only one woman had ever possessed his heart, and she was now in the grave.3 Little by little and almost accidentally, Lyon got into trouble by becoming too deeply involved in the family’s affairs and thus wedging or appearing to wedge herself between Clemens and his two daughters, especially Clara, who finally forced her dismissal in 1909. Then there was the matter of whether or not Jean actually needed institutional care (both daughters were hospitalized at times, Jean for epilepsy, Clara for “nervous prostration”), but Twain scholars today still differ over whether Lyon engineered Jean’s banishment to a sanitarium simply to get her out of the way. Yet that offense, if indeed she was guilty of it, was a misdemeanor compared to her interfering with Clara and her father’s bank account.

  The drama of Sam Clemens’s life after 1904 clearly devolved into the mock-heroic of daughters and domestics. The ostensible reason for recent scholarly focus on these years is to debate the myth of Mark Twain’s geriatric despair following Susy’s death in 1896 and Livy’s in 1904. Yet few lives end happily; most flicker down to nothing. In 1912 Paine quoted Mark Twain’s facetious solution to the problem of old age, probably made in 1908: “If I had been helping the Almighty when He created man, I would have had Him begin at the other end, and start human beings with old age. How much better it would have been to start old and have all the bitterness and blindness of age in the beginning! . . . Think of looking forward to eighteen instead of eighty!”4 That way life would end simply with the animal spirit—instead of with a body plagued by gout, carbuncles, a heart condition, and what he finally conceded was due to his heavy smoking, “permanent bronchitis.” Physically and intellectually, after 1904 Clemens was no match for the domestic intrigue that enveloped him.

  Ralph Ashcroft was another wildcard thrown into this mix. A native Englishman, he came to Twain’s attention in 1903 as the treasurer of the American Plasmon Company, and he helped to resolve some misunderstandings between Clemens and his fellow investors. Although never a full-time employee of Clemens’s, he acted as his business manager and accompanied the writer in 1907 to Oxford, where
Twain received an honorary doctorate along with such greats as Auguste Rodin. Like Twain, the French sculptor was obsessed with the concept of the devil as an apt symbol of humanity and spent the greater part of his adult life working on a huge piece entitled The Gates of Hell. Ashcroft kept elaborate notes on Clemens’s doings in England, and he made himself equally useful to him upon their return. Eventually, Ashcroft and Lyon married, perhaps as a convenience in order to continue serving Clemens or perhaps to protect each other from prosecution, for they soon got into trouble by assuming too much control over the household, persuading or tricking Clemens into signing a sweeping power of attorney that gave them legal control over all his assets. By this time, Clemens could count on twenty-five thousand a year from Harper’s in addition to payments for the magazine articles he regularly published. Although Lyon probably spent more of Clemens’s money than was authorized on her wardrobe and a nearby cottage in Redding, Connecticut, that he deeded to her, there is little or no evidence that either she or Ashcroft acted against Twain’s best interests while in control of his finances. Clara, however, didn’t see it that way, and eventually the two were dismissed amidst newspaper accounts of threats to sue and countersue.5

  A third outsider was Albert Bigelow Paine, who became not only Clemens’s authorized biographer in 1906 but also for much of that time his constant companion, especially after the writer moved to “Stormfield,” the seventy-six-hundred-square-foot mansion with eighteen rooms in Redding designed as an Italian villa by Howells’s son John and built for Clemens in 1908.6 Paine, a writer for Harper’s Weekly and later an editor at St. Nicholas, a children’s magazine (which had published “Tom Sawyer Abroad”), had published a biography of Thomas Nast in 1904, a task that had involved asking Twain for permission to quote his letters to Nast. This biography was probably the accomplishment that most recommended him to Clemens. Paine, who also became one of Twain’s frequent billiards partners, vied with Lyon for access to the “King” and to letters that she hoped to edit, but eventually he was the victor when she and Ashcroft were turned out in 1909. Significantly, there is only a single mention of Isabel Lyon in the multivolume biography Paine published in 1912. Paine also became Mark Twain’s literary first executor and, along with Clara, kept watch over his documents and manuscripts for another generation, always with an eye to protecting the author’s reputation so that his books and posthumous editions would continue to sell. Paine wasted no time getting out his biography, which appeared two years after Twain’s death. In fact, he began researching and writing the life while his subject was still alive.