Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  —ISABEL VAN KLEEK LYON

  Clemens family at their Hartford home. Left to right: Clara, Olivia, Jean, Mark Twain, Susy

  1

  By all rights no one should have ever heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He should have lived and died a cipher of rural nineteenth-century America. Certainly his modest beginnings presaged a difficult, abbreviated existence. Yet life takes unexpected turns, and the course that his journey took as Mark Twain would have strained the credulity of the most dedicated fiction reader.

  Born two months prematurely, red-haired Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived to his parents, thirty-two-year-old Jane Lampton Clemens and thirty-seven-year-old John Marshall Clemens, on November 30, 1835. His birthplace was a tiny two-bedroom rented cabin with an outdoor lean-to kitchen in the village of Florida in Monroe County, Missouri, located at a fork of the Salt River. He joined four young siblings: ten-year-old Orion, eight-year-old Pamela, five-year-old Margaret, and three-year-old Benjamin. Another brother, Pleasant, had died in infancy six years earlier. For a time it looked as though he would suffer Pleasant’s fate. No one in his family much expected him to survive. His mother later wrote, “he was a poor looking object to raise.” Of Florida, Twain joked that the dusty little settlement “contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 percent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town. It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much—not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place—even London, I suppose.” Yet in the midst of these decidedly inauspicious surroundings, there was an augury that hinted that this child just might be special. For weeks prior to his birth, the bright trail of Halley’s Comet crossed the nighttime sky.

  After a departing shower of sparks and the passage of years, interest in the comet’s appearance receded. But not so for Jane Clemens, who told and retold the story of the mysterious visitation and how it foretold great things, and most important, not for Twain, who by the end of his life embraced the notion that Halley’s Comet had heralded his coming. He possessed a strong affinity for the celestial body, expressing his hope that he would make his exit when it returned during its seventy-five-year cycle: “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.”

  Maybe Twain felt that a passing comet provided the best explanation for his remarkable life. That this son of Missouri would grow up to be the most famous author in the world and the first global celebrity was so implausible that even Twain had difficulty making sense of his rise: “The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.’” The accomplishments of this “freak” were so many and his fame so enormous that by the end of his life he had come to be considered by those who knew him well as otherworldly. According to a close friend, “He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet—never quite of this race or kind.”

  The family failed to prosper in Florida, and so in 1839 they moved twenty-eight miles northeast, to the bustling riverside town of Hannibal, Missouri, in Marion County. The little boy quickly adapted to his new surroundings and acquired a closely knit group of friends. His boyhood adventures exploring the environs of Hannibal with Tom Blankenship and Laura Hawkins would later be immortalized in his most beloved works, Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

  With the untimely death of his father when he was just eleven years old, his formal schooling ended and his mother apprenticed him to a Hannibal printer named William Ament to learn the trade. Trained as a boy to move individual letters, he would grow up to become a compulsive writer of words. In 1851, he went to work with his brother Orion, who owned a small newspaper, the Hannibal Western Union. It was while working at the Union that he began writing humorous sketches that were occasionally published. Two years later, he traveled north working as an itinerant typesetter in Saint Louis, Philadelphia, and New York City. After a few years spent wandering, he decided he would travel to South America to sail the Amazon and make his fortune in “COCA, a vegetable product of miraculous powers,” which he had read, in a book about the Amazon, “was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of the powdered coca and require no other sustenance.” His plan was to travel by river from Cincinnati to New Orleans and then set sail for Pará (a port city in northern Brazil), where he would establish himself in the lucrative cocaine trade.

  While on board ship he met Horace Bixby, a legendary riverboat pilot. By the time he disembarked in New Orleans, plans for South America had been abandoned in favor of working for Bixby. Bixby had agreed to mentor the young man and they worked together on the Mississippi River from 1857 to 1861. On April 9, 1859, Twain received his steamboat pilot’s license. Working as a pilot brought him not just increased income, but an enhanced social status. To the end of his life, he would regard earning his pilot’s license as one of his proudest accomplishments. He reluctantly decided to leave the river and the ship he was piloting, the Alonzo Child, only when the American Civil War broke out, in 1861, and commercial traffic on the Mississippi was curtailed.

  At loose ends, he accompanied his brother Orion to Nevada, where he had been appointed secretary of the new territory. After trying his hand at silver prospecting, Twain worked as a reporter for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, Nevada. It was in 1863, while he was with the Enterprise, that he began signing articles with the pseudonym “Mark Twain”—meaning two fathoms deep, indicating safe passage, a fond allusion to his time spent working on the river. His first big success as an author came in 1865, when he was living in San Francisco and his short story “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” was published in the Saturday Press on November 18. The story was a sensation, and Twain became known as a western humorist. Newspapers and magazines across the country reprinted this tall tale of an inveterate gambler and his shot-filled frog, Dan’l Webster.

  While in San Francisco, Twain worked as a newspaper correspondent, and in 1867 he registered as a passenger on the Quaker City’s maiden voyage to the Mediterranean, with a trip to the Holy Land as part of the tour. He persuaded the San Francisco Alta California to pay his traveling costs in return for the letters he would send them. These letters ultimately served as the material for The Innocents Abroad. Innocents became a best seller, with more than seventy thousand copies sold in its first year, and remained the best selling of all of Twain’s books during his lifetime.

  While on board the Quaker City, Twain befriended young Charles Langdon of Elmira, New York. After the trip’s conclusion, Charles invited him to attend a reading by Charles Dickens in New York City. There he met Langdon’s father, Jervis Langdon; his mother, Olivia Lewis Langdon; and his sister, Olivia Louise Langdon. Twain was immediately attracted to the well-educated, wealthy, pretty young woman, and after a year-and-a-half-long courtship, the two were married, on February 2, 1870, in the parlor of the Langdon mansion in Elmira.

  A decade younger than her husband, Olivia proved to be Twain’s ideal companion. Erudite, genteel, and possessed of a keen sense of humor, Olivia encouraged her spouse’s literary pursuits. The couple moved to Buffalo, New York, where Twain had become a co-owner of the Buffalo Express newspaper. Their first child, a son, Langdon, was born nearly nine months to the day after their wedding. Buffalo did not suit them and their son Langdon was a sickly child who passed away after just nineteen months. The couple relocated in 1871 from Buffalo to Hartford, Connecticut, where they had three more children and resided for the next twenty years. This period constituted the happiest time of Twain’s life. The Clemenses spent their winters in Hartford and summered in Elmira, at Susan Crane’s home, Quarry Farm. Susan was Olivia’s older sister, and it was ther
e that Twain did most of his writing.

  To those around him, Twain possessed a seemingly endless amount of energy. His intense intellectual curiosity compelled him to crisscross the globe (he sailed the Atlantic Ocean twenty-nine times) and to amass an enormous personal library with thousands of volumes. He was an individual who craved conversation, and he flourished as the center of attention. For Twain, dialogue was everything, and it is estimated that he wrote fifty thousand letters over the course of his lifetime in addition to more than three thousand newspaper and magazine articles and more than thirty books. His creative capacity appeared limitless, and when he was not writing he talked. The only impossibility, it seemed, was for Twain not to express himself. He was so confident of his imaginative powers that he claimed he never needed to worry about inspiration: “I made the great discovery that when the tank runs dry you’ve only to leave it alone and it will fill up again in time, while you are asleep—also while you are at work at other things and are quite unaware that this unconscious and profitable cerebration is going on.”

  In addition to his correspondence, newspaper articles, and book-length manuscripts, he was a dramatist and wrote scores of short stories. By age fifty-four he had written many of what would come to be considered classics of American literature. His books The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Abroad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Life on the Mississippi (1883), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) had catapulted him into the highest ranks of American writers, and he was read and beloved by the general public as well as by the literary elite. Writing to his close friend William Dean Howells, Twain bragged about his proletarian popularity: “High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.” A beloved public intellectual in his later years, he frequently wrote opinion and critical essays that were widely published. Over the course of his career Twain managed to move from being regarded as a satirical humorist to a serious author, a feat no other American writer could claim. During his lifetime, Twain was declared to be the “one living writer of indisputable genius” in the United States. And while Twain is remembered for his writing legacy, perhaps his greatest talent, which unfortunately no one today will ever see or hear, was his ability to command the platform as one of the greatest stand-up comedians who ever lived.

  2

  By early 1890, Mark Twain had every reason to be well satisfied with his life. Living in his spectacular mansion in Hartford, Twain adored his close-knit family circle, and at age fifty-five he relished fatherhood. Pictures from that period show a beaming Twain with his dignified, attractive forty-five-year-old wife, Olivia, and their three lovely daughters. Susy, eighteen years old, wanted to become an author and at age thirteen had written a biography of her father; Clara, age sixteen, studied piano and voice and dreamed of a concert career; and Jean, just ten years old, loved animals and making mischief. The local newspaper, the Hartford Courant, proudly claimed that Twain “has taken a leading place in literature, in society, and in business in America.” The entire family enjoyed socializing and frequently opened their home to friends and visitors for lavish evenings of fine dining and entertainment.

  His literary reputation well established, Twain was also recognized for his financial acumen, and highly regarded for his humanitarian inclinations. When his publishing firm, Charles L. Webster and Company, published Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs in 1886, he was regarded as Grant’s savior, rescuing the dying general’s family from certain poverty. Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant became a best seller, and Grant’s family received an astonishing $400,000 (75 percent of the royalties, according to their contract with Webster and Company), giving them a Gilded Age tax-free fortune.

  While Twain was never deficient in ego, even he appeared to be a bit overwhelmed by his good fortune: “I am frightened at the proportions of my prosperity. It seems to me that whatever I touch turns to gold.” For this little-schooled country boy from Missouri, all that success meant Twain had conquered the impossible. Harper’s Weekly hailed him for lifting “himself high in the ranks of American authorship. He is not only a humorist, but he is a writer of rare and peculiar power. … While other men are living on what they have done, Mr. Clemens is continually progressing. He is a growing man, and each year he accomplishes some new feat in literature.” In a profound sense, Twain had come to symbolize America’s promise and hopes for continued prosperity.

  3

  Into this heady atmosphere of congratulation, wealth, and celebrity walked twenty-six-year-old Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. One afternoon in the late 1880s, Mrs. Harriet Whitmore asked Isabel to deliver a package of books to her good friend Olivia Clemens. Isabel was glad to do this task for her mistress, as it provided a welcome break from her duties as governess to the Whitmores’ six children.

  Isabel was let into Clemens’s Hartford home by George Griffin, the family’s African American butler, and led across a marble floor into the ground-floor library where Olivia was waiting. While Isabel was no stranger to wealth (as a child she had enjoyed the privileges ofthe upper class due to her parents’ affluence and social status), she had never before witnessed such opulence as this. The “Steamboat Gothic”–style mansion had cost approximately $120,000 to build in 1874. Designed by Edward Tuckerman Potter, the house had the effect of awing and overwhelming its visitors. The exterior featured a curved front porch, soaring turrets, fancy red brickwork, and colored roof tiles. With nearly twenty rooms, the house boasted a staff of seven and Hartford’s first telephone in a private residence. Guests were received in an extravagant entrance hall with wood-paneled walls and ornamental detail carved by Leon Marcotte of New York and Paris. Candace Wheeler, America’s first female decorator, had designed the hall and stenciled the room’s original paneling in silver, with the walls and ceiling painted red with patterns of dark blue. The library was an ornate space designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s firm. A massive carved wooden fireplace mantel, originally from Ayton Castle in Scotland, dominated the room.

  Hartford house exterior (above) and library (below)

  After delivering Harriet Whitmore’s books into the hands of Mrs. Clemens and politely chatting with her, Isabel made her exit. She did not see Twain that day. Her opportunity came a short time later when their paths crossed at the home of the Whitmores. Franklin Gray Whitmore, Twain’s business advisor and close friend, belonged to the Friday Evening Club, a regular gathering of Hartford men who drank whiskey, smoked cigars, and played billiards with Twain in his study throughout the 1880s. The Whitmores were also old friends of Isabel’s parents. Twain was invited for an evening of cards, and he arrived sans Olivia ready to play competitive whist. Isabel was recruited to be his partner and quickly managed to trump his ace—a rather unsubtle way of entering the game. Years later, Isabel gleefully recalled to her close friend Doris Webster, “A kind of war broke out around the table but I said nothing and continued to play, taking all the remaining tricks. Trumping his ace was my only way of getting in.”

  Petite and attractive, with liquid brown eyes, long chestnut-colored hair, and porcelain skin, Isabel was twenty-eight years younger than Mark Twain, whose red hair was now going gray. She was representative of a new working class remembered today as the “new woman.” These turn-of-the-century white women were employed as secretaries, governesses, stenographers, or clerks; they were formally educated, they lived away from home, and they enjoyed greater freedoms than their mothers ever had. Most of the “new women” lived independently for a few years prior to marriage while earning a living wage, typically $ 10 a week.

  Georgiana Van Kleek Lyon and Isabel Van Kleek Lyon

  Twain realized that he had found a good whist partner in Isabel. When he was invited for a return engagement, he agreed to come only “if I can play with the little governess.” Clever gamesmanship would come to define their relationship.

&nb
sp; At the time of their convivial meeting, Isabel was still emotionally raw from a series of tragic personal losses. Born on December 15, 1863, in Tarrytown, New York, Isabel was the oldest of the three Lyon children. Her parents, Charles and Georgiana, were considered members of the town’s gentry. Georgiana Van Kleek was Charles’s second wife and was twenty-four years younger than her husband. Her family was Dutch and her father had owned a good portion of Hartford’s prestigious Hudson Street. Education ran in the Lyon family. Charles Lyon likely first met Franklin Whitmore when the two were studying at Columbia University in the early 1860s. Charles was a published writer and orator, an author of Greek and Latin textbooks as well as assorted learned essays. The Lyons resided at their country estate, Spring-Side, located near where the Bear Mountain Bridge stands today, overlooking the Hudson River. Spring-Side was adjacent to Irving Park, a one-hundred-acre property owned by Charles. In 1859, four years before Isabel was born, Charles had decided to subdivide Irving Park and advertised it in a lavish illustrated monograph. Individual lots were available for purchase with financing information included.

  But Charles Lyon died suddenly, on May 12, 1883, with his ambitions of becoming a real estate magnate unrealized, and the comfortable life Isabel assumed was always to be her birthright disappeared. She had just turned nineteen. Charles left no appreciable estate other than the family home. Making matters worse, Isabel’s uncle, William T. Lyon, died just fifteen months after his brother, on August 13, 1884. The remaining family members moved to Farmington, Connecticut, where they rented an elegant home, Oldgate, still standing today, and the women took in sewing to support themselves. The house was located near the well-known Miss Sarah Porter’s school, and the family established a social connection with the faculty. With her father and uncle deceased and no inheritance forthcoming, Isabel was forced to enter a life of service, and she embarked upon a series of nanny positions. Her first known job was with the Claghorne family in West Hartford, and from there she joined the Whitmores in Hartford.