Shortly after Isabel’s card-playing evening with Twain, she left the Whitmores on excellent terms, and in December 1890 she moved to Philadelphia to begin employment with the Danas: “Surrounded by French speech, manners, thoughts & servants. It is an entirely new experience & one wholly unlooked for. If I had planned for weeks the position could not have been more to my fancy.” Charles Edmund Dana was a well-known art critic and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. Isabel was pleased to join a family who shared a university affiliation, like her own, and she enjoyed caring for Millicent Dana, age ten. Yet early in her tenure with the Danas, Isabel wrote an anguished letter to her confidante Harriet Whitmore, revealing that she appeared to be haunted by more than her family’s past difficulties:
I cannot tell you how very happy your letter made me. My life has started all over & I could not tell what might have been said or done in these strange weeks. People become so sadly and easily prejudiced. But, my past is quite past—So very much has occurred—that my brain has not yet ceased whirling.
Isabel declined to clarify just what had prejudiced people against her. A possible explanation for her distress might have been her brother, Charles, who was leading a dissolute life with an Englishwoman by the name of Poppy, whom Isabel suspected was his mistress. Charles’s family disapproved of their relationship, and the couple had gone to live with Poppy’s sister. Poppy had a little girl whom she initially claimed had been adopted, although Isabel believed that she was really Charles’s daughter. Isabel and Charles had a falling-out over his circumstances. Isabel confessed to Harriet Whitmore that she “had so much trouble that my mind was & has since been at a very low ebb. There is nothing in life like mental trouble to under-mine one’s health.” Between begging Harriet to “read between the lines” and assuring her that her happiness would return when she could “forget a little,” Isabel was pleased to note that her wages had increased to “$500 a year and that seems a great deal when I am not expected to teach either music or French.”
4
Twelve years would pass before Twain’s and Isabel’s paths crossed again. During this time, Mark Twain endured the deaths of beloved family members as well as a series of deepening financial crises. Still in mourning over the death of his mother, Jane Lampton Clemens, in October 1890, and that of his mother-in-law, Olivia Lewis Langdon, in November, the winter of 1890–91 saw Twain battling crippling financial reverses. By late spring the entire family, Twain, Olivia, Susy, Clara, and Jean, were exiled by economic circumstances to live as expatriates in Europe. They reluctantly closed their beloved Hartford home and set sail for France. House expenses had averaged $30,000 a year in Hartford, while in Europe the family was able to rent housing and avoid the sizable expenditure of social entertaining.
At the same time, Twain’s Webster publishing firm failed, and on April 18, 1894, at age fifty-nine, Twain entered into voluntary bankruptcy. His debt—approximately $100,000—had been caused by a combination of exorbitant personal living expenses and disastrous speculation. Once heralded in the press for his business expertise (perhaps he believed his generous clippings too much), Twain had made multiple bad investments. The most expensive and unfortunate of these ventures was the Paige typesetter, into which he had poured over a quarter of a million dollars. The entire investment was a loss.
After exploring all possible financial avenues, Twain reluctantly accepted that the only path back to fiscal solvency was through lecturing. He had no taste for the stand-up circuit anymore and was loath to have to consider treading the boards once again—“heart-torturing,” he called it. But he had no alternative. In April he signed a contract, and on May 11, 1895, the Clemenses sailed from Southampton, England, to New York to begin an around-the-world tour intended to rescue the family from its monetary woes. Twenty-three-year-old Susy and fifteen-year-old Jean were left with friends and family in Elmira. Twain appealed to his trusted friend Henry Huttleston Rogers, the Standard Oil baron, as he set off from New York, to “Pray for me.”
On July 14, Twain commenced his speaking tour in Cleveland, accompanied by Olivia and twenty-one-year-old Clara. In less than thirty days, he performed in twenty-two cities, including a stop in Vancouver, before sailing west. The family’s journey lasted a brain-and body-numbing twelve months and took the three ultimately to the southern tip of Africa. In total, Twain headlined almost 150 shows on five continents, and the halls where he appeared were filled to overflow capacity. The trip turned out to be a tour de force; everywhere, a worshipful press and crowds of devoted fans hailed him. Twain capitalized on his lecturing success by writing a popular travelogue, Following the Equator, published in 1897.
While the tour was a triumph and allowed Twain to follow the good advice Olivia and Henry Huttleston Rogers had given him—namely, to repay his creditors dollar for dollar—it dealt him a devastating personal blow. The three Clemenses sailed from Capetown, South Africa, arriving in Southampton, England, on July 31, 1896. After landing, they impatiently waited for Susy and Jean to set sail from New York so that the family could be reunited. A letter arrived explaining that Susy was ill, followed a few days later by a reassuring cable informing them that she would be all right, although her recuperation would be lengthy. Olivia and Clara immediately set sail for New York to assist with her recovery.
Twain was alone when a second cable arrived, on August 18, informing him that Susy, his favorite daughter and the child most similar to him in many respects, had died an agonizing death from meningitis at the family’s home in Hartford while her mother and sister were still en route. For two weeks, Susy’s fever spiraled and she grew delirious, sometimes wandering through the empty house. She watched the traffic passing on Farmington Avenue and called out, “Up go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter. Down go the trolley cars for Mark Twain’s daughter.” As the infection spread, she went blind. She found a gown belonging to Olivia hanging in a closet and spent her last hours stroking and kissing the dress, believing in her delirium that her mother was dead. She clutched the dress and wept with grief. Near the end, she lapsed into a coma. When she died, Susy was just twenty-four years old. In an entry for his autobiography Twain declared, “It is one of the mysteries of nature that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunder-stroke like that and live.” For the rest of his life, Twain mourned his lost daughter. Olivia, Clara, and Jean returned to England after Susy’s burial in Elmira and they remained in Europe in deep mourning for four years.
The homesick family finally returned to the United States in 1900. When the sixty-four-year-old Twain disembarked from the S.S. Minnehaha on October 15, he was greeted by hordes of reporters who hailed him as a “genius,” a man of “unsullied honor,” and “the bravest author in all literature.” The New York World exclaimed the next day, “There was the familiar bushy hair, the twinkling, semi-mysterious eyes, the peculiar drawling voice, half Yankee, half Southern, the very low turndown collar of the West and the immaculate shiny silk hat and long frock of the effete East. He looked as young as he did twenty years ago, and younger than he did when he shook American dust off his feet in 1891.” The New York Times declared that Twain “never looked better, was in splendid humor.” Reporters noted that at dockside he was as spontaneously funny as ever, and quoted what became a famous aphorism: “I never told the truth in my life that someone didn’t say I was lying, [and] I never told a lie that somebody didn’t take it as a fact.” America lay before him, rushing to adore and deify him.
His family could not emotionally bear to return to Hartford and settled instead in a rented town house in Manhattan at 14 West Tenth Street. Twain’s days of writing books that were to become literary classics were behind him, and he embraced the life of a celebrity while associating with the millionaire industrialists Henry Rogers and Andrew Carnegie and such political and cultural luminaries as President Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Jane Addams, and Helen Keller. He basked in the extravagant flattery given him and happily chose from dozens of social invitati
ons and lucrative lecturing opportunities.
For the next seven years, Twain would be interviewed and quoted by the press more often than anyone else. He became America’s best-known pundit, leaving his daughter Clara to wonder out loud how her father “could manage to have an opinion on every incident, accident, invention, or disease in the world.” He encouraged the press to ask him about all contemporaneous topics and even invited them to come photograph him smoking in bed. Twain reveled in his popularity and understood that in large measure the public’s continuing interest in him was related to his obliging the press.
An advertisement for the Hale & Kilburn Manufacturing Co. Faces in the trolley window, left to right: Clara Barton, Thomas Edison, unknown, Mark Twain, Madame Curie, President Teddy Roosevelt, General Nelson Miles, Admiral George Dewey, President Grover Cleveland, unknown
Mark Twain cigar box. The selling phrase on the box: “Known to Everyone—Liked by All”
In record time, Twain had come back from being a failed businessman and was seen once more as an icon of integrity and accomplishment. Recognized and read worldwide, he exulted in his astonishing achievement. Such was his iconic status, as one critic has observed, Twain “was almost a living statue.” A cigar-box label, circa 1910, succinctly conveys the goodwill he enjoyed: “Mark Twain: Known to Everyone—Liked by All.”
Isabel’s life in the interim was a troubled mixture of familial instability and loss. On April 25, 1893, thanks to her long-term employment with the Danas, she had saved enough money to purchase some land from her sister, Louise, and brother-in-law, Jesse Moore, for $200. A small house, Choisy, was constructed for her mother just south of Louise’s home, financed with the remainder of the proceeds of the sale of their house in Tarrytown. (The house stands today at 143 Main Street in Farmington.) On December 5, 1893, tragedy struck the family again when Isabel’s brother, Charles, died at age twenty-four. In a manuscript detailing the Lyon family’s history in Tarrytown, his death is recorded as a heart attack.
Years later, Isabel confided to Jean Clemens that her brother’s death was a suicide. Brother and sister had reconciled by that time, yet Charles’s relationship with Poppy was unraveling due to his drinking and gambling. Isabel worried that he had fallen in with a “bad set of very fast young men.” Charles wrote Isabel a confessional letter about his misery and, immediately afterward, she received a cable informing her that her brother had died. Upon returning home Isabel visited the physician who had performed her brother’s postmortem examination and said, “‘Charlie committed suicide.’ He was so amazed that he blurted out: ‘How did you know that?’ which finally proved it.” Charlie had deliberately overdosed on morphine. A horror-struck Isabel could not bear to tell her mother, and the public record was falsified.
Losing her brother was a tragedy compounded by the manner in which he died. The specter of suicide in the nineteenth century was so terrifying that families went to great lengths to hide the truth. Society regarded suicide as a disgrace, and all surviving relatives were left stigmatized by association. The children of a suicide bore the risk of being socially ostracized, and their chances of marriage were substantially reduced, as it was strongly believed that they and any of their offspring would have a propensity for insanity and violence as well as suicide. This was an era of “strong family ties,” and it was imperative that families do nothing to risk their social standing. Isabel must have felt a particular kinship with Jean to reveal her family’s great secret. Perhaps she thought there was the possibility of common ground in view of the fact that Jean suffered from an illness that also carried a social stigma—epilepsy, a cruel disease that was little understood and greatly feared. In April 1894, four months after her brother’s death, a grieving Isabel accompanied the Danas on a tour of Germany and Italy, her second trip with them to Europe.
5
While Twain had regained his financial equilibrium, a shadow was cast over his heady mixture of affluence and notability, and it came in the form of Olivia’s declining health. She had spent a lifetime fighting serious maladies. In her youth she had made a miraculous recovery from spinal tuberculosis that the members of her family and closest friends had expected would finish her. She had endured four pregnancies and survived the heart-wrenching deaths of her son, Langdon, and her daughter Susy.
While Olivia was understandably both proud and relieved at her husband’s phoenix-like professional and financial rebirth, their restored affluence also meant an enormous increase in their social activity. Olivia’s delicate health and Twain’s fame would result in an invitation to his former whist partner, Isabel Lyon, to come work for the family. Keeping up with all of the correspondence directed toward Mark Twain had become an enormous task that Olivia and her daughters could no longer perform, and so the family looked for assistance. They consulted their old friend Harriet Whitmore, who enthusiastically recommended Isabel. On June 30, 1902, Olivia effusively thanked Harriet:
My dear Friend:
Indeed I was most glad to get your letter (as I always am) and especially glad of the news that it contained regarding Miss Lyon. Yes, I am going to want just such a person in the Autumn. I have been wishing ever since you spoke to me of her that I could see her.
Now if I can possibly manage it I will plan to have her come up here for a few days and see me. We have a guest room, until Clara gets here then we shall have none. This week there is coming a young lady to spend July with Jean. If I can get in a few days between her going & Clara’s coming I will ask Miss Lyon to be my guest for a few days, making her my guest from the time she leaves the Hartford (or Farmington) station.
I [would] like better if possible to arrange to have Miss Lyon have a boarding place outside. With one exception I have always done this & have found it more satisfactory. I think also Miss Lyon would find it so. We can of course talk that all over.
I am deeply grateful to you for letting me know of her & I should have been greatly distressed if she had slipped away from me after what you said about her & I could not help hoping she would break her present engagement.
The visit was a success, and Isabel was hired. She was thirty-eight years old when she arrived early in October 1902 at Riverdale-on-Hudson. Mark Twain was a month shy of his sixty-seventh birthday. The family had taken a three-year lease on a lavish twenty-eight-acre estate named Wave Hill overlooking the Hudson River and the Palisades.
Isabel was thrilled with her new situation. She later told Doris Webster that she had been honest with Twain about her lack of training as a social secretary: “But I said I can’t possibly use a typewriter and I don’t know shorthand. M.T. said ‘Well I wouldn’t have one of those goddam machines in the house and I couldn’t read it if you did write shorthand.’” (Twain undoubtedly realized the incongruity of his remark, since he had purchased a typewriter for $125 in 1874 and had later boasted about being the first author to type a manuscript, namely A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.)
Isabel’s professional limitations notwithstanding, the Clemenses were delighted with her. In keeping with the customs of the other “new women” as well as with Olivia’s wishes, Isabel did not live in. She was quite pleased with her salary, as Twain paid her more than average, $50.00 a month, an increase of $8.40 a month over what she had been paid by Charles Dana.
From the outset, Isabel’s effectiveness was gauged more by her talent at dispelling the anxiety the family was feeling about Olivia’s deteriorating condition than by her secretarial expertise. She worked for the Clemens family eight months before ever interacting with Olivia. Two months after her arrival, a grateful Clara expressed her appreciation to Harriet Whitmore:
I want to tell you how thankful we are that you told us about Miss Lyon for she is really a treasure and enormous comfort;
She not only is sweet and attractive, entirely lacking any disagreeable qualities but she is also a pleasure for she has a cheerful manner and way which are particularly welcome in a house at time of illness & consequent
depression.
I am so glad we have her & I know my Mother will be when she knows her.
I see her very little & still have quite an affection for her.
Isabel immediately understood the special advantages her position held and began keeping a written record of her time with America’s most famous author and celebrity in the form of letters she sent to her mother, Georgiana. Months afterward, she was distressed to discover that her mother had purposely destroyed her correspondence. Georgiana excused herself, claiming that the letters were “so personal” she felt they should not be saved. To preserve her observations, beginning in 1903 Isabel began keeping a series of daily reminders and a diary.
While Clara may have delighted in her “cheerful manner,” Isabel was a woman burdened by painful secrets. On New Year’s Day 1903 she wrote, “Alone I watched the New Year in, and the old one gently die, before I went to bed & to sleep—Two days ago a blackmail letter came and I did not like it—It froze my very heart.” Perhaps the sender was someone who knew about her dissolute brother and threatened to expose his unprincipled lifestyle and sudden death. She never says.
Isabel was immediately awestruck by Twain. She was impressed by the famous individuals who wrote and visited him as well as by his lavish surroundings. Yet she possessed enough insight and intelligence to look beyond glamour and wealth. Early on she noted that there was a profound difference between the man Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his public persona, Mark Twain, and wondered how he was able to manage the weight of his public identity: “His private humor was one of his most darling possessions—Subtle—often profound & often Soaring with a swift birdlike flight into the upper reaches of men’s Mental skies. Never the obviousness of Mark Twain, Timed & Tuned for a mixed audience.”
Mark Twain's Other Woman Page 3
