Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  By June 1903, Isabel, in her notations, had developed a nickname for Twain: Marse Clemens (with variations “Marse C” and “Marse”). The name was a likely pun on Thomas Nelson Page’s Marse Chan, the main character in a short story by the same name from his collection entitled In Ole Virginia (1887). Page was a significant southern author, and there would have been an edge to Isabel’s pun, as Marse Chan was a slaveholder in the antebellum south. While Isabel dutifully acted out her proletarian life of service, she never lost her ambivalence toward it. Later she largely dropped the “Marse” slaveholder reference, substituting a new term of submission, calling Twain simply the King in her private notes.

  6

  Isabel found Twain’s daughters fascinating and treated them with great deference. On the surface theirs was a life of incredible privilege, free of worries about money and social status. There must have been many long nights when Isabel could not help but think about what might have been had her father been more successful in business before his death or if her uncle and brother had not passed away. She regarded the strikingly beautiful Clara with a mixture of wide-eyed admiration and increasing envy. Clara possessed a moneyed kind of glamour and had only recently returned from Europe, where she had been studying voice. Her intention was to embark upon a career as a professional contralto.

  Young Clara Clemens

  In January 1903, Isabel wrote that she had lunched with Clara and found her “enchanting”: “A Sweet Sweet morsel of a woman;” and “Alluring beyond words.” Clara was petite with a heart-shaped face, russet curls, and an hourglass figure. A lover of clothes and jewelry, she was always smartly coiffed and stylishly dressed in photographs. Her expression belied the kind of self-assurance possessed by the pretty who have been told all their lives just how attractive they are. There was a certain childlike quality to Clara with her plump cheeks and primped appearance. She grew quickly fond of Isabel, enjoying the older woman’s admiration of her as well as her usefulness to the household. But just a few months after Isabel began her employment, she and Clara were involved in their first awkward scene concerning Twain:

  This morning as I sat writing in the drawing room, the closed door cautiously opened and in visited S.L.C.’s [Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s] head, followed by himself in nightshirt, blanket gown, bare legs and black felt slippers. We settled some business drawing checks etc. and then C.C. [Clara Clemens] appeared (charming C.C.) telling him to go up stairs and get into his clothes. He refused. She was firm. He was for dictating letters. She was firm. So off he trotted, not to get into his clothes, but to go to bed again. Appearing at the landing a few minutes later he called. “Is Clara gone?” I said “no”—and he said “Then I’ll go back to bed.” We chuckled much. He is delightful.

  In that moment, Isabel had aligned herself with Twain against Clara.

  Jean Clemens as a young woman

  Isabel’s relationship with Jean was more consistent. While Clara more closely resembled her mother, Jean was every bit her father’s daughter in appearance. Taller than Clara, Jean had a long, angular face that bore the unmistakable Clemens nose. Brunette, dark-eyed, and slender, she possessed a formal attractiveness and grace. In photographs she is always standing ramrod straight, with her hair pulled away from her face into a bun, and she is less fashionably attired than her trendily corseted sister. Judging from her rather stiff expression, Jean was much more comfortable behind the lens, “kodaking,” than standing before it. Ill at ease and socially awkward around people her own age, Jean preferred romping with children and caring for animals. More intellectual than her pleasure-seeking sister, Jean was fluent in several languages, an avid reader of history, philosophy, and literature, and an advocate of animal rights. Isabel’s first mention of Jean came in relation to her health. Early in January 1903, she noted that when she saw Jean that morning, “she looked badly. Showing how ill she has really been.” At the time, Jean was suffering from pneumonia with a high fever. Later in the week, Isabel wrote that Clara and Twain “have been having a sad time trying to keep Jean’s illness from Mrs. Clemens.”

  Jean’s bout with pneumonia, while serious, proved a relatively minor event when compared to her chronic malady—as early as 1896, when Jean was fifteen, she had begun to experience blackouts that eventually were diagnosed as epileptic seizures. Twain tried to explain his daughter’s condition to Henry Rogers in a letter written when Jean was in her twenties: “Jean’s head got a bad knock when she was 8 or 9, by a fall. Seven years ago she showed capricious changes of disposition which we could not account for; and four years ago the New York experts pronounced her case epilepsy. This we learned when we got back from around the world. We put her into the hands of the world’s head expert in Vienna, who said that in some cases this disease had been outgrown, but that he knew of no authentic instance of its cure by physicians.” Twain’s attribution of the cause of Jean’s ailment was in agreement with the prevailing medical wisdom at the time. A late-nineteenth-century medical textbook, Diseases of the Nervous System: Or, Pathology of the Nerves and Nervous Maladies, which Jean’s doctors likely used as a reference, provides an exhaustive list of causes for epilepsy including “fright, anxiety, grief, over mental exertion, dentition, indigestion … blows on the head, falls, sunstroke.”

  Based on descriptions in family letters and Isabel’s writings, it appears that Jean suffered from idiopathic epilepsy, a form of epilepsy that typically occurs in children and teenagers. Treatment included giving the patient “bromides of potassium, lithium, and sodium, and the oxide of zinc.” At times she took thrice-daily doses of sodium bromide, a sedative. Bromides were dangerous business and reserved as a last resort for patients with severe epilepsy. Doctors would prescribe them in order to completely suppress attacks, but often they were so strong that patients would be reduced to a “constant hebetude” (a dullness of mind and mental lethargy).

  In conjunction with their prescriptions, patients were advised to avoid alcohol, eat more “vegetable than animal food,” and to regard sexual intercourse as presenting “great danger.” Medical textbooks gravely warned that masturbation would cause “in general the greatest number of fits,” and “intellectual employment requiring deep thought is injurious.” The recommended lifestyle was clean, asexual, healthy country living with plenty of exercise, including such pursuits as “gardening, horse exercise, the gymnasium, swimming.” Jean and her family had spent years seeking cures at various European and American sanitariums, and they believed with a hope born of desperation that frequent osteopathic sessions would have a beneficial effect. Yet, despite the family’s heroic efforts, Jean continued to suffer from both petit mal and grand mal seizures. Current research asserts that if epileptic patients do not achieve seizure control through drug treatment within two years of their initial diagnosis, only a handful of these unresponsive patients will “ever achieve control.” Jean, without benefit of modern drug therapy, was not among those fortunate few, and she would spend the rest of her life searching for a cure.

  Epilepsy was little understood at the time, and those who suffered from the disease were regularly stigmatized and shunned by society, shunted off to mental asylums, poorhouses, and jails. The Clemenses did their best to protect their daughter from the social effects of the disease, and her condition was never publicly mentioned. Barred from ever entering the social whirl that young women of her wealth and status would typically embrace, in accordance with medical opinion at the time Jean spent a great deal of her time outdoors. A budding amateur naturalist, she loved hiking and being in the woods. Isabel frequently wrote about the days they spent together watching black and white creeping warblers, hummingbirds, and field sparrows through their opera glasses.

  While Isabel had daily contact with Clara and Jean, her interactions with Olivia were decidedly more remote. After Olivia had spent months incommunicado, Isabel’s first work done directly at her request came in April 1903, when Isabel wrote to Frank Whitmore on Olivia’s behalf regarding the
dismantling of the Hartford home. The family had painfully concluded that they could never live there again because of their memories of Susy, and so in the spring the mansion was sold for a paltry $28,000, less than a quarter of its original cost. Acting upon Olivia’s orders, Isabel asked Frank “if the little cherubs over the door between the dining room and library have been taken down. If not will you kindly have them removed at once, before anyone has a chance to see them and believe that they are a part of the house; for they go with the mantelpiece.”

  Selling their home was traumatic for all the members of the family, but it proved particularly upsetting for Olivia. This was the home she had helped design, whose construction she had overseen, and the strain of sorting out the family’s effects took a heavy toll on her physical health and mental state. Isabel carefully recorded her rare sightings of Olivia: “I saw Mrs. Clemens twice in 1903. Riverdale; frail & very lovely in her flowing black silk garments, & soft white lace shawls, or scarfs. She didn’t try to be a picture out of the lovely Italian School. She was that picture in the quaint frocks made of rare stuffs; & with her glorious dark eyes that said every thing to you, or said nothing.”

  Isabel was “summoned” by Olivia in June, and by her careful record was allowed to spend exactly six and a half minutes in her presence. Olivia was reclining on a couch and Isabel observed, “Such a tall woman with thinnest of hands. She wore a black silk wrapper—and when she smiles she is very lovely. C.C. [Clara Clemens] sat over at one side & watched us.” Isabel politely wrote that she found Olivia “charming”—“I do not wonder that Marse worships her.” On that same day, Isabel painstakingly wrote above the date in her daily reminder that Twain had given his first gift to her, a signed photograph of himself. Abjuring a more prosaic gift like a book or an essay, Twain instead gave Isabel an image of himself to gaze upon. One could hardly imagine a comparable luminary, such as William Dean Howells, doing such a thing. With Olivia unable to give him much notice because of her ill health, Twain seemed to be inviting Isabel to fulfill his thirst for attention. The next day Isabel noticed Olivia momentarily taking air on the balcony: “Oh she is sweet beyond words. Instantly putting one at ease—as the greatest Souls Ever do. By their Simplicity.”

  While Isabel was filled with admiration for the Clemenses, she was simultaneously trying to escape her working-class life by attempting to establish a romantic relationship with another famous humorist. John Kendrick Bangs was one year older than Isabel, and, like her, he had been born in New York State. He had graduated with his doctorate from Isabel’s father’s alma mater, Columbia, and had spent an additional year studying law there. A journalist, dramatist, and author, Bangs was called “the Humorist of the Nineties.” He was the editor, at various times, of at various times, of Literature, Harper’s Weekly, New Metropolitan, and Puck. Bangs and Twain knew and liked each other, and they published each other’s work. Just prior to Twain’s return to the United States in the fall of 1900, likely as a ploy to drum up the newspapers’ interest in his return, Twain announced to the press that he had decided to make a presidential run against McKinley on the Plutocratic Ticket and nominated Bangs as his running mate. The American public loved the joke.

  Twain and Bangs belonged to the same social set, and Isabel met Bangs courtesy of Twain. A month after she began working for the Clemenses, Twain’s sixty-seventh birthday dinner was held at New York City’s Metropolitan Club. Bangs attended, along with such literary and business luminaries as William Dean Howells, Hamlin Garland, George W. Cable, Booth Tarkington, and Henry Rogers. Four months later, on April 5, 1903, Bangs’s wife, Agnes, died, and he was left a highly eligible widower with three young sons. Isabel wrote in her daily reminder: “How I kept on a strange sympathy with that man when he lost his wife … but it didn’t find a footing. He didn’t need the Sympathetic wave for he married his Type writer ever so soon.” Despite Isabel’s best efforts, just a little over a year later, on April 27, 1904, Bangs married Mary Blakeney Gray, formerly his secretary. On Ascension Sunday 1905, while riding a Fifth Avenue bus with her mother, Isabel caught a glimpse of her former crush driving in a fancy Victoria carriage with his new wife. Instead of being bitter about her lost opportunity, she comforted herself with the thought of new possibilities:

  John Kendrick Bangs

  But That’s no harm—I’ve known of several men who have married several Times—They Couldn’t live without the Companionship & Sympathy of a woman. And I like the thought of it—There’s a comfort in sitting beside a man sometimes—for instance this morning in church. I sat beside a quiet man. He scarcely moved.

  Evidently, Isabel had a soft spot for wealthy humorists, a strong yearning for the good life, and a large dose of ambition—and she would have another chance.

  7

  The Clemens family had begun planning another move to Europe in the hope that a change in climate might improve Olivia’s condition. Early in June 1903, Twain asked Isabel to accompany them to Florence. She excitedly agreed and was disappointed when plans for renting a suitable villa failed. Twain, thinking that Italy was impossible, for a brief period gave serious consideration to relocating the family to California, but finally a villa in Florence was secured.

  After an exhausting summer spent packing and caring for the increasingly incapacitated Olivia, the Clemenses sailed in October, along with Katy Leary, the family’s longtime housekeeper and Olivia’s personal nurse. Isabel and her mother were originally supposed to travel with the party, although due to an injury to Isabel’s eye, the women were delayed two weeks. (Isabel would seek treatment for her wounded eye for years without finding relief.) On November 7, 1903, Isabel and Georgiana set sail from New York Harbor on the S.S. Lohn under the command of Captain Bolte. Isabel delighted in the adventure of it all:

  This begins my third trip to Europe. As the days of life increase in value, the wit to write of them decreases—Their significance is too profound—But now we are away out in midocean. … The big pier, and the scores of emigrants and all the spirit of sea life made Mother look sad, and our hearts nearly burst. I realized what we were leaving and also what it meant to Mother.

  During a brief landing at Gibraltar, Isabel was elated to learn that the “very young man” who was acting as her guide had traveled with Twain and his daughters two weeks prior. She briefly deliberated whether to tell him about her attachment to the Clemenses and decided against it. In Gibraltar she and her mother had an exciting hiking and carriage tour, and she was pleased to make the acquaintance of a handsome soldier. When the ship docked in Naples, Isabel was disappointed to see the “quality” passengers disembark. Isabel and her mother left the ship in Genoa and spent the night at the Eden Palace Hotel. The next day the two caught their train to Florence.

  On Friday, November 20, they finally arrived and were met at the station by Jean Clemens, wearing an incongruous lorgnette. The next morning Isabel and her mother started for the Villa di Quarto,

  where Mr. & Mrs. Clemens are established for the Winter & which place was to be the Seat of my work. We drove for a long way through the city which was not interesting. drove through fog & a damp penetrating air. to finally pass the barriere & to wind along a narrow walled-in road, to a height above the fog where the villa is situated about 3 1/2 or 4 miles from Florence. I don’t know why my heart kept sinking. but it did—and I kept looking at Mother to see how she took it. but she was pretty much stunned by this time. However. I don’t think I’ll write how disappointed, discouraged, & despairing we were when we discovered that the Quarto villa was so far from Florence that we could not be established in a pension. It is enough that we found right here on the villa property a nice little furnished villino. It is rented by one Mori-Ubaldini, a flourishing clock maker on the Piazza del Duomo, who uses it for 2 or 3 of the hot Summer months, when to stay in the city is an impossibility,—or a discomfort. It is neatly furnished. is built all of stone of course. And we pay the modest sum of 250 lire or fifty dollars for … six months.
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  Villa di Quarto

  Isabel’s dark mood lightened when she saw her charming “villino,” and she was heartened by the friendliness of her Italian neighbors. While “boarding out” was typical at the time and Isabel was agreeable to the expense, Twain’s expectation that Isabel should pay for her own living expenses would come back later to torment both of them.

  On January 17, 1904, writing from the “Villino di Quarto,” Isabel reflected on what had happened to her over the previous two months, including sailing to Italy and assisting Twain in his initial dictations for his autobiography. In her journal she worried that due to all of her recent activity she had been unable to keep her entries current. She decided that she would go back and try to remember and write about the prior two months before they vanished forever, “for someday I shall want to read it. No one else will ever care, but I shall.”

  Isabel thought that the Villa di Quarto, the Clemenses’ leased mansion, was hideous. On January 17, she wrote that the villa could have been “a very Splendid Barracks”:

  It was built for Cosimo I. & has been lived in by royalties of one kind & another from time to time but at present is owned by the wife of the Count Raybaudi-Massiglia. I say the wife. for Count Massiglia is far away serving his country as Consul, in Persia or Siam. and he is likely to stay there too; and it seems to me that for the sake of peace, or freedom, he has left this villa in the hands of the Countess.