Painful gout and bronchitis kept Twain in bed for five and a half weeks during December 1904 and January 1905, greatly adding to his gloom: “He is weak & depressed—It is heart sickening—for he suffers.” Twain’s illnesses drove Isabel frantic with worry, and she became his personal nurse: “He seems quite helpless from the gout & nearly fell in reaching his arm chair—I caught him as his ankles gave way—and it alarmed me.” For treating his various ailments, Twain favored alcohol. When he felt a cold coming on he would automatically reach for whiskey. Sick or well, Twain smoked constantly. His daily intake was approximately forty heart-clenching “smokes” every day. Isabel suspected his dependence actually might have hidden health benefits: “Sometimes I think he must draw nourishment from his smoking, for he smokes so much. & he doesn’t seem to get any thing but good out of it—for himself & for others of us too.” Isabel was fascinated by the essential attachment that Twain had to tobacco and the palliative effect that tobacco apparently had on him:
Andrew Carnegie
I doubt if any smoker has ever been better loved & revered by the spirit of his tobacco than Mr. Clemens is—I’ve never seen any Smoke issue so confidingly, never seen any that is so loathe to leave the smoker. This lingers—lingers, curls around him with the grace of a spirit, and then melts unwillingly worshippingly away—it always has a message for him. Perhaps he hears it. Or perhaps he doesn’t.
William Dean Howells
In spite of his drinking and smoking, Twain finally regained his health, and he eagerly plunged into the New York social whirl, visiting with Henry Rogers, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and William Dean Howells. Andrew Carnegie came to chat and gave Twain some of his personal Scottish whiskey, a blend so treasured that Carnegie shared it with only three other people—presidents Cleveland, Harrison, and Roosevelt. Robert J. Collier sent Twain two boxes of expensive cigars: “Fuel,” Twain gleefully called them, “for the New Year.”
Between his puffing and comings and goings, Twain indulged in his supreme talent—he talked and talked and talked to Isabel:
Today Mr. Clemens hasn’t worked at all—[Twain had just completed “Eve’s Diary.”] He came down stairs & talked with me for a long time about the wonders of Darwin. & he strikes so into the heart of Things—[crossed out: how he makes the heart of you sob while he is talking & you waken in the dead of night with the sob still in you.] … It has been a memorable day because he has talked so much. & he makes you to see visions—Oh Such visions when the silver flow of his speech starts. Oh but he lives a Strong inner life.
With Isabel as his constant companion, Twain regaled her with humorous tales about his life. Isabel described Twain’s conversation as “Like a dream edifice, for you don’t know what is coming next, & his talks build on into exquisite towers & pinnacles & when he sits down the wonderful structure he has built, fades away & you have only & imperishable memory of a hauntingly beautiful thing that you can never remember & never forget.”
One afternoon, Twain’s memory was jogged when Jean’s dog Prosper le Gai (an enormous St. Bernard) came sniffing around while he was having tea with Isabel, Jean, and a Mrs. Dwight. Twain entertained the group with a story about how he had nearly been prevented from visiting Augustin Daly (a famous playwright who adapted Roughing It and Ah Sin) in his New York office during the mid 1880s.
Prosper appeared just then—& that threw the talk into the lovely story of Mr. Clemens’s trip to New York to keep an appointment with Mr. Daly. And how Mr. Daly’s big Irishman wouldn’t admit Mr. Clemens,—he hadn’t admitted anyone to that Sanctum for 25 years without instructions from Mr. Daly to do so—This day there hadn’t been any instructions. … Mr. Clemens had been told how to find the Sanctum—Go into a court—from a street & go to the first door that you see—There was the door but behind it was the big Irishman—No—Mr. Clemens couldn’t see Mr. Daly—And no one was allowed to smoke there either. So Mr. Clemens put his cigar down—But … that morning the New Haven news dealer who boarded the train had … only New Haven papers … they were better than nothing—So Mr. Clemens bought one & read it all—advertisements even—one whole page was given up to a Bench Show [an animal show], & the only illustration was that of a big prize $10,000 St. Bernard—Mr. Clemens read it all—Read the dimensions & weight & name of that dog—got the name of the head man of the Bench Show too—As he stood trying to convince the big Irish-man that Mr Daly wanted to see him—that the business was of interest to … Mr Daly … and the Irishman … blandly said “Yes they all say that—” a big St Bernard … entered the little room—The Irishman’s face changed as the Splendid creature walked in—& he had just asked Mr. Clemens the nature of that business—& Mr. Clemens told us that he couldn’t say he was a lecturer, he wouldn’t stand any show with the Irishman—but he did say he was the bench show man from New Haven. The Irishman flew around, pulled off his vest—hadn’t any coat on—& dusted the only Chair for Mr. Clemens—& Mr. Clemens did it all for us—he dusted the chair—he was the happy worshipful Irishman to a dot—& he told us how he guessed the length & height & weight of that dog so captivating the Irishman that he showed Mr. Clemens the way up to Mr. Daly’s sanctum to the utter amazement of Mr. Daly.
This was not the first time Twain had spun his Daly yarn, but Isabel had never heard it before, and she loved his impression of the bench-show man. Not surprisingly, Twain told Isabel stories that reflected well on him. In his telling, he was worry free as well as the focus of her attention. Another anecdote related how Twain’s nephew Samuel Moffett had made his way in journalism.
[Samuel] had been left a sum of money by his father’s death, & he put it in a fruit farm; “but the worms came along & they ate up the fruit then the trees, & then they started for the house, but Sam left about that time.” He tried all sorts of ways to find work out there in California & finally wrote to Mr. Clemens asking for a letter of introduction that might bring him work on a newspaper. Mr. Clemens said he’d do it if his nephew would abide by the rules that he would give him. And the rules were these: Ask for his work—but for work without any pay—do anything he was asked to do—Sweeping out the office if need be—and never mention the pay—let his employer do that. Moffett did it. And he climbed steadily until now the Editor of the World is trying to induce him to decline a very good offer from Collier’s weekly—for they want him to take charge of an Historical Department—a most congenial work for Mr. Moffett. While at a very good salary—and the World people want him to assume a responsible and well paying assistant-editorship on their own paper. They would pay a higher salary than Collier will—but … the latter position is worth more than just mere money.
This tale is a curious one, and highly suspect as to its historical accuracy. Twain predictably cast himself in a favorable light as the wise, thrifty uncle whose sage advice launched young Samuel’s career. Yet when Samuel Moffett’s father died, he was only five years old—a bit young to be investing in fruit farms. Also, William Moffett, Samuel’s father, was a Saint Louis merchant whose business was ruined by the Civil War, and there was no money for such a bequest to his young son. After William’s death, the surviving family members (his mother, Twain’s sister, Pamela, and siblings Annie and Samuel), managed on his modest life insurance. Samuel Moffett eventually did enter the newspaper business, at age twenty-two, working for a paper in Oakland, California, while a student at the University of California at Berkeley. Indeed, Twain’s embroidered recollection resembles the “model boys” stories (the best known of which was Horatio Alger, Jr.,’s novel Ragged Dick), where the lead characters were moralistic role models ordained to do good. Earlier in his life Twain had mocked these stories, and had published a satire, “The Story of the Bad Little Boy,” in 1865, when Samuel Moffett celebrated his fifth birthday.
Why Twain shared such an elaboration with Isabel is worthy of consideration. Twain was wracked by a lifelong insecurity, and his story serves to portray him as benevolent and caring. This was a time when his relationship with hi
s daughters was becoming increasingly distant, and his paterfamilias account could be interpreted as a means of reassuring himself against possible accusations of neglect. In retrospect, it is significant that Twain chose to tell Isabel, a working woman who had lost her father, about the success of a fatherless young man, approximately her age, who was fortunate enough to have had such an important benefactor. Unlike the industrious Samuel, no matter how hard Isabel worked or how thrifty and virtuous she was, there was no encouragement offered by anyone that ultimately she could become an assistant editor and entertain competing employment offers. For Isabel’s generation there was no female analogue to Ragged Dick. In telling Isabel the story, Twain may have been revealing his willingness to act as her patron, albeit more in a traditional patriarchal sense than a professional one.
During their first year together after Olivia’s death, Isabel and Twain’s bond intensified. Although they had been born on opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon Line (he in Missouri and she in New York), had dissimilar upbringings, and were separated by a yawning generation gap, they were members of the same intimate club of pain and memory. The roots of their special affinity had been created decades earlier when they experienced the death of their fathers at a vulnerable age: Twain, a sensitive child, was only eleven years old and Isabel was just nineteen. While it is impossible to know the full extent to which they were emotionally affected by losing a parent, in reading through their personal papers and remembrances one sees telling signs.
Twain’s reminiscences to Isabel about his father, John Marshall Clemens, were apparently not numerous, but the ones Isabel recounted were quite sentimental and at odds with Twain’s own ambivalent portrayal of him in his autobiography. Isabel recorded two occasions when Twain spoke to her about John Clemens. On Saturday morning, March 24, 1906, a teary-eyed Twain blurted to Isabel, “‘This is the day my father died, fifty nine years ago’ … as he looked at the date on the morning newspaper—The Times—He remembers it all distinctly for he was just at the age when events stamp themselves indelibly—He drew the sparkle in his eye back into its sheath … after he saw & received the copy of Simplicissimus [a satirical German weekly magazine] that I brought in to him.”
Twain told Isabel he would share with her the only joke his father had ever made in his presence: “He went with his father when a very little boy, into a room where there were many loaves of bread—200 or more, & the bread was very moldy & covered with blue cobwebs. It surprised the boy, & he asked his father where it came from, & he answered. ‘From Noah’s Ark.’” A simple joke, but so unexpected from a usually taciturn man that this rare moment of camaraderie would be remembered by Twain for the rest of his life. In 1950 Isabel told Doris Webster that while Twain shied away from mentioning his father, he spoke quite frequently about his mother.
Isabel’s writing about her own father is remarkable for its silence—he makes scarcely a ripple in the hundreds of pages she generated during her six and a half years with Twain. On July 28, 1904, she spent the evening playing euchre with Twain and Jean when Richard Gilder stopped by to visit. Richard and Twain began reminiscing about Horace Greeley (the founding editor of the New York Tribune), prompting Isabel to recall when she had met him:
I was a little bit of a girl & got into a Broadway stage with father & mother. I sat or stood between my mother & a man upon whose knee I rested my little hand and I remember that Father whispered something to Mother that made her look very proud for her little daughter’s hand was on Horace Greeley’s knee & he didn’t brush it off.
In Isabel’s retelling of her childhood memory, the status reference is clear—beaming parents watching their child hold a famous man’s knee. This is the only mention Isabel is known to have made of her father, and he is a sidebar in a story about Horace Greeley. While she makes constant, often daily, references to her mother, Charles Lyon is a ghost to whom his daughter almost never gives voice. For Twain and Isabel, fathers were a convenience, their deaths inconvenient. As adults, Isabel clung to her mother and Twain talked about his. Mothers were the central figures for the two.
John Marshall Clemens and Charles Harrison Lyon may have exacted an emotional toll on their families, but in both cases financial catastrophe followed. In the years prior to John Clemens’s death, his family had endured a steady downward economic spiral and faced bankruptcy. When he died, of pneumonia at age forty-eight, his unexpected passing left his wife and four children in dire straits from which they escaped only years later, after Twain became a successful lecturer and writer. As a double cruelty, Twain endured the humiliation of insolvency twice in his life—the first time at his father’s hands, the second at his own. Isabel, too, knew how it felt to be reliant upon the charity of extended family and neighbors. When Charles Lyon died, Isabel entered the petit bourgeois life, a circumstance she resented. Her halcyon country days abruptly ended, and she was forced to depend upon the kindness of family friends for employment. She had been raised to understand the importance of social position, and she understood that her family had lost theirs along with their wealth.
Their mutually troubled pasts left Isabel and Twain particularly vulnerable when death repeatedly visited their family members. Although early and sudden death was a frequent visitor in all social classes in these times, the loss of loved ones was never routine. In addition to surviving his wife, two children, and his parents, Twain had lost his sisters Margaret and Pamela, and brothers Benjamin and Orion, as well as his younger brother, Henry. The emotional balance Twain had been able to establish as a family man was ruptured by the death of Susy and utterly broken with Olivia’s passing. Jean’s horrible illness was more than Twain could bear to deal with by himself, and Clara was becoming ever more isolated from her family.
Isabel also struggled with incapacitating emotional stress. With her father, uncle, and brother gone, Isabel remained close to her sister, Louise Moore, and formed a particularly reverential relationship with her mother, calling her “Saint Mother.” Isabel constantly worried about Georgiana’s health and well-being, and found her physical presence so comforting that she rented a room for her at 19 East Ninth Street, near Twain’s residence. When her mother was away, Isabel complained about how “very lonely” she was, while wondering how she dared to “be lonely in the presence of a loneliness like Mr. Clemens’s.” Isabel’s fretting frequently resulted in tension headaches that sometimes lasted for days; she described them as “strange, nervous,” and “Terrible.” She complained that they “shut me away from physical & mental activitie.” Surely the stress of her living situation exacerbated Isabel’s condition, yet that was likely just one of the causes. Isabel’s “emotional strain” or depression may have been due to the mysterious blackmail threat, to her unresolved grief over her family’s devastation, her fear that she might suddenly lose her mother, and her frustration over not establishing a more permanent relationship with Twain.
Louise and Charles Lyon
For years Twain and Isabel were witnesses to the disintegration of their family circles. It was only natural that the two of them, with their twin histories of grief and displacement, would find each other compatible.
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The winter, spring, and summer of 1905 were an especially happy time. Isabel raved about Twain: “Never never on Sea or shore of spiritual or terrestrial being Could there be a man to equal Mr. Clemens. The subtlety of his magic and he doesn’t know it. He cant half enjoy himself and Oh the pity of it—for he would so appreciate himself—It is Cruel. After dinner Jean & finally I gave him music until a late hour. I am stupefied.” Living with Twain and associating with his friends, Isabel was becoming who she felt she always should have been. She was a lady reinvested with social status, who had time to read and think and write. She had been reborn.
Twain was increasingly relying upon Isabel to deal with matters that he chose not to entrust to his daughters. She was given carte blanche to control the household accounts, deal with merchants, and write checks. She also r
ead all of Twain’s personal mail and was charged with keeping the curious and adoring public at bay. When someone tried to contact Twain through Isabel, he jokingly called it “tampering with the sentinel.” Isabel was well aware of the privileges associated with her position, and visitors frequently reminded her of her good fortune. A Mrs. Judd, who had called on Twain, fussed over Isabel after her visit with him: “She showered very sweet speech upon me & kissed my forehead in homage for the man, who stands as my Complete master. She said that I will not need a heaven when I die for I have it here. She doesn’t half suspect the truth of her words. She wondered how I ‘managed it’ to become his secretary. Those things aren’t managed They just Come to one—& you mustn’t try to ‘manage’ them into existence.”
Such modest demurring aside, ensuring her future was exactly what Isabel had in mind, and part of her management included a revised opinion about adultery. When the handsome American journalist and author Poultney Bigelow came to visit Twain a year after their return from Italy, Isabel expressed her sympathy for his rather tangled personal relationships in a diary entry she later crossed out: “His love for another woman than his wife, you don’t see that behind the mask of him. Why don’t I condemn the man or woman who loves outside of his or her marriage bond? Most married women of my age do condemn, and roundly—but I don’t.” Isabel’s sexual wishes are right on the surface, and she clearly identifies with the other woman and the philandering man.
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