At what point Isabel would be allowed to arrive during the festivities was apparently a very sensitive point of etiquette for Clara, who was opposed to her coming at all. Isabel hoped to be allowed to sit quietly in the public reception room until “speech time;” however, it was deemed socially inappropriate for Isabel to enter Delmonico’s with the Clemenses. She could only arrive later, alone, when the ceremonial part of the evening was about to commence. Isabel was furious at Clara over the slight, and she despaired that her time at such a socially prestigious event would be so limited. She bitterly noted in her journal that Twain thought she would be accompanying him to make an entrance: “That was the reason why he called out to me as he passed my door—‘Clara’s just about ready!’”
Twain’s party would later be remembered by the newspapers as “the most notable festive occasion in New York literary history,”—a “cultural Everest.” The New York Times reported the next day, “There were 170 of his friends and fellow-craftsmen in literature gathered in the Red Room at Delmonico’s for the celebration.” Guests entered the Red Room serenaded by forty musicians conducted by Nahan Franko, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Twain led the procession of guests into the dining room, with the novelist Mary Wilkins Freeman on his arm. The banquet lasted an astonishing (and indigestion-causing) five hours, with fifteen speeches given and nine poems read to the distinguished audience. The first speech of the evening was given in absentia by President Roosevelt and read by Miss Cutting, the president of Vassar College’s Alumni Association.
I wish it were in my power to be at the dinner held to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Mark Twain—it is difficult to write of him by his real name instead of by that name which has become a household word wherever the English language is spoken. He is one of the citizens whom all Americans should delight to honor, for he has rendered a great and peculiar service to America, and his writings, though such as no one but an American could have written, yet emphatically come within that small list which are written for no particular country, but for all countries, and which are not merely written for the time being, but have an abiding and permanent value. May he live long, and year by year may he add to the sum of admirable work that he has done.
At the end of the evening, after a toast by William Dean Howells, Twain rose and proclaimed:
The seventieth birthday! It is the time of life when you arrive at a new and awful dignity; when you may throw aside the decent reserves which have oppressed you for a generation, and stand unafraid and unabashed upon your seven-terraced summit and look down and teach—unrebuked. You can tell the world how you got there. It is what they all do. I have been anxious to explain my own system this long time, and now at last I have the right. I have achieved my seventy years in the usual way: by sticking strictly to a scheme of life, which would kill anybody else. It sounds like an exaggeration, but that is really the common rule for attaining old age. When we examine the programme of any of these garrulous old people we always find that the habits which have preserved them would have decayed us. I will offer here, as a sound maxim this: that we can’t reach old age by another man’s road.
Twain’s speech was so well received that newspapers printed large portions of it in the days following the event. Photographs were taken of the invitees, to be assembled in an album that was given to Twain as a souvenir of the occasion. As a party favor, everyone in attendance was given a foot-high plaster bust of the honoree. By the evening’s close, there were 171 Mark Twains in the room.
Among those invited were Twain intimates Reverend Joseph Twichell, William Dean Howells, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Rogers, and Richard Gilder. Unlike Whittier’s seventieth birthday party, when women were allowed to enter only after dinner, The New York Times noted that there was a plethora of women: “They were not present as mere appendages of their husbands, but as individuals representing the art of imaginative writing no less than the men. An observer looking over the host of diners, after having scanned the list of guests and noticed that every feminine name in it was familiar to all readers, could not but wonder that the women he found corresponding to those names were all young and pretty. The whole gathering did not seem to include half a dozen women with streaks of gray in their hair.” These impressive individuals included the authors Willa Cather, Ruth McEnery Stuart, Louise Chandler Moulton, and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
While initially expected, the socially incandescent novelist Edith Wharton declined to partake in the festivities and sent her regrets. The African American author Charles W. Chesnutt was invited and took his seat at a table with John Kendrick Bangs. Colonel Harvey could not resist the opportunity to publicize Harper’s, and he had packed the guest list with minor contributors to the magazine. When Twain finally rose to speak, he faced an audience that contained many people he had never met. Nearly six weeks after the party Isabel remarked, “Col. Harvey is being much criticised for giving the kind of dinner that he did for Mr. Clemens on his 70th birthday—for it was shameful to sacrifice Mr. Clemens to what is regarded as a great advertisement for Harper.” Colonel Harvey continued his promotional efforts, claiming in an interview published on March 3, 1907, in The Washington Post that he held an exclusive contract with Twain making him the highest paid writer in history, receiving thirty cents a word ($7.10 in 2008).
Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday dinner at Delmonico’s Restaurant. Left to right: Kate Douglas Riggs, Reverend Joseph Twichell, Bliss Carmen, Ruth Stuart, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry M. Alden, Henry H. Rogers
Mark Twain’s Seventieth Birthday Dinner program cover, 1905
Isabel’s frustration increased when Clara began treating her as her personal maid, sending her to pick up purchases at Tiffany’s. A sulky Isabel “mooned about” looking at jewelry that would remain forever out of her reach. Clara often included Isabel in her visits to various dressmakers and hatmakers, which served to hammer home the message that Isabel was a servant, nothing more. Isabel’s role was to admire what Clara had, never to buy anything for herself. A proud woman, Isabel was pained by her plain appearance. She owned three dresses, two for day and a formal dinner gown. While this was typical for women in service, Isabel never viewed herself as the average employee; rather she saw her working status as a temporary inconvenience to be ended as quickly as possible. On one occasion, in an unusually generous act, Twain came to Isabel’s room and gave her $50 to buy a dress, saying, “Not that I don’t like the ones you have but I like variety.” Isabel asked Twain to choose a color for her new dress, “Brown? Gray? Blue.” He responded, “I’d like you to get all the colors of the rainbow.” In his next breath, he reminded Isabel how different her orbit was from Clara’s: “You can’t get as good a dress as Clara gets because she spends much more than $50.00.” Not to be outdone, thrifty Isabel purchased four colors of silk, including turquoise blue and frosty pink, and she and her mother sewed her a new wardrobe. Twain loved bright colors and liked Isabel’s vibrant new appearance “very much.” The King’s gesture meant so much to Isabel that for the rest of her life she kept a precious scrap of fabric, “frosty white & pink with a small black dot,” from what Twain called her “watermelon dress.”
Isabel took to heart a comment by Mrs. Freeman, a friend of Twain’s, who said that “living as I am with the greatest human being, there can be no danger of my ever over dressing the part, the danger will be in my failure to dress up to it. The King would love to have me in rich soft clinging silks of splendid or delicate colors; & when I told him what Mrs. Freeman had advised me to do, he said that she was a wise woman.” Twain, though, sounded a warning note about women’s dress in marginalia he left on his personal copy of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth: “It is almost as stupid to let your clothes betray that you are ugly as to have them proclaim that you think you are beautiful.”
Isabel resented and blamed Clara for her various slights, and her humiliation began to translate into extreme sensitivity about her age and dress. On December 15,
1905, Isabel turned forty-two. She spent a miserable birthday, weeping in her mother’s embrace so that their “tears mingled.” But Twain’s uncustomary financial generosity continued, with Isabel’s mood decidedly improving on Christmas Day, when she awoke to discover on her breakfast tray an envelope “from Mr. Clemens” containing a bonus.
Twain was ill equipped to deal with his daughters’ problems and Isabel’s anxiety, and for the most part he deliberately removed himself from his household’s histrionics, spinning a cocoon of social engagements to insulate him from the fray. During the fall of 1905 he had come and gone, first to Boston to visit the Aldriches and Higginsons and on to the Cambridge Author’s Club for a speaking engagement. Jean was to have accompanied her father to Boston—a trip that would have been beneficial for her by cheering her spirits—but he dodged her company by claiming that she was “too much responsibility.”
He then traveled to Washington, D.C., twice with Colonel Harvey to lobby for copyright reform and to dine with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Isabel reported, “Mr. Clemens found [the first lady] charming—simple—& without any shred of self consciousness—a lovely woman.” Returning home in time for the gala seventieth birthday celebration, he delighted in being showered with telegrams, tributes, and flowers. Isabel celebrated his homecoming, proclaiming in her daily reminder: “Mr. Clemens’s 70th birthday—But he is only a young & beautiful 50.” Her fantasized connection to the great man was fueled by the swirl of the social season that followed.
Between his travels, Twain received Booker T. Washington at home, lunched with Howells, dined with Mary Elizabeth Mapes Dodge (an author and the editor of St. Nicholas: Scribner’s Illustrated Magazine for Girls and Boys), met and dined with the members of the Astronomical and Astrophysical Society, was honored with a banquet by the Society of Illustrators, was welcomed back and made an honorary member at the Players Club (healing a rift created three years earlier when he had been cited for nonpayment of dues), and had tea with Poultney Bigelow. Isabel was especially delighted with Bigelow’s return visit, as she found him extremely attractive.
All in all, Isabel was thoroughly incapable of faulting Twain. Given the power asymmetry of their relationship, her lot was to applaud and to forgive. He was the show; she was the animated audience. She was caught just like the hapless fly in Blake’s poem: “Such an impulsive man he is. … He’d have to have a history [crossed out: men & women with] temperaments like his are pretty apt to spring over Conventionalities. I think they cant help it.” Twain complained to Isabel about his constant social engagements, saying that he missed the quiet of New Hampshire, as his days were so busy “that there isn’t much chance for work or rest.” As the author of his own manic schedule, Twain seemed most determined to avoid writing and parenting.
With the public ever clamoring for his presence, Twain gladly made a number of local public appearances. On December 19 he spoke at Sarah Bernhardt’s benefit for Russian Jews at the Casino Theater, an event Isabel attended. To Isabel’s delight, the great Sarah stopped by Twain’s box to have a word with him before she went onstage. Isabel basked in the twin glow of their presence: “It was a delight to watch those rare geniuses chat.” After describing how Twain sauntered out onstage “amid giant applause,” Isabel concluded (and then tried to obliterate): “& that is my daily bread. Bread!”
Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington, January 22, 1906
Twain faced his largest audience on January 22, 1906, at Carnegie Hall, where a packed house had gathered to celebrate “the great 25th anniversary of the founding of the Tuskegee institute in Alabama.” An ebullient Twain, who enjoyed a three-minute “wave of applause,” stepped onto the stage and took his seat next to Booker T. Washington. Isabel was beside herself with enthusiasm: “I was so excited—that I wanted to cry & laugh & sing.” That evening a different social unfortunate would have to sit with the “‘Garden’ folk;” Isabel would reign over a box with other guests including her mother and the Reverend Twichell. At long last, Isabel faced New York society front and center, unencumbered by the nettlesome presence of the Clemens daughters. Nothing could have kept her from her social triumph that evening, including a terrible accident Jean had suffered earlier that day. That morning Jean was gripped by a seizure so violent that she fell and severely burned her arm on a hot radiator. But daughters and illness be damned, Isabel and Twain would have their evening in the spotlight. When they visited the bedridden Jean two days later in her room to show her the illustrations for his book A Horse’s Tale, she was only “half aware” of them.
At the very time when Jean was most in need of her father’s ministrations, he turned away and chose the stage of public acclaim. Rather than extending himself to his family, Twain withdrew into again considering his biography. While Howells had politely refused to write the authorized biography of his old friend, Twain had not given up the idea. A minor Harper’s writer who had been in attendance at the Delmonico’s fête was about to make Twain’s ardent desire for hagiography a reality.
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Albert Bigelow Paine was forty-four years old, the author of a book of verse, and two years earlier had published a well-received biography of the political cartoonist Thomas Nast. Paine’s portrayal of Nast emphasized his humble beginnings and his reformist perspective in politics, most famously demonstrated in his Boss Tweed cartoon series. Paine was an enormous admirer of Mark Twain; he later confided to Isabel that “it had always been his dream, ambition, to write Mr. Clemens’s biography, but he never came close to the prospect of it until Mr. Clemens said to Mr. David Munro that Paine’s book on Thomas Nast was ‘damn good’—& Munro told … Paine.” In an odd coincidence and one that would endear him to Twain, Paine was also the father of three little girls: “Louise aged 11–a little poetess—Frances aged 7—& Tiny Joy aged 3.”
Albert Bigelow Paine
Paine visited Twain at his home on Saturday, January 6, 1906, nearly one month to the day after seeing him at Delmonico’s, to speak with him about writing his biography. Apparently the morning meeting went well, because later that same day, according to Isabel, Paine immediately started the “collecting of the many notes from the Ms. Trunk.” Twain could now literally direct the stories of his life: while Paine wrote his official biography, Twain continued writing his autobiography. Paine persuaded Twain to hire a secretary to take shorthand as he dictated his autobiography, a move Isabel applauded, as she was uncomfortable with the audio “Columbia graphophonic” recordings that had been made of Twain’s voice (none of which has survived), finding them macabre: “There is something infinitely sad in the voice as it is reproduced from the cylinders, and how strickening it would be to hear the voice of one gone.”
Twain’s chosen biographer began work on Tuesday, January 9, arriving promptly at eleven o’clock in the morning with Josephine Hobby, a stenographer. Twain dictated for an hour, talking about his early days out west with his friend Joe Goodman and the Big Bonanza mine, and Isabel watched “his wonderful rising color—& his brilliant eyes—as he warmed to the subject.” This new arrangement, Twain exclaimed, was “enchanting & an inspiration—‘I would like to have relays of short-handers—& keep them at it for six hours on a stretch.’” His ideal dictation audience had been assembled—nonjudgmental, interested in every utterance, each word recorded for posterity—and since he owned every word, Twain would have the power to vet everything before it was published.
Paine fell to his twin tasks with equal enthusiasm. He began assembling all of the papers Twain had intended for his autobiography that had been amassed over the years, as well as organizing and researching material for his intended biography. A little over a week after Paine had started coming to 21 Fifth Avenue, Twain ruminated to Isabel about the kinds of biography that had been published, thinking out loud about just how candid he planned to be: “he drifted into the Biography chat, as is his wont in these days—& he said that so few—no autobiographers—were ever very frank. Bayard Taylor was … ‘so self
satisfied—& sat back & licked his chops’—but it was all delightful. and then Mr. Clemens said that he was going to be frank—not once but many times—(There were Rousseau confessions—but [crossed out: Mr. Clemens was] I am going to leave that kind alone, for Rousseau had looked after that end—)”
Seven months after these initial bold thoughts, a more restrained Twain concluded, “A man can’t tell the truth about himself—He couldn’t write it, for he wouldn’t dare read it if he could—& no one could stand the strong truth of it.” Any surprises to be found in Twain’s autobiography or Paine’s biography would be manufactured by Twain in much the same fashion as he had written his stories. He had successfully invented a fictional Eve to tell the story of human creation through the pages of her diary, and his persona, Mark Twain, would tell his life story through the pages of his autobiography. Twain had developed a creative medium through which he could give a fictionalized account of himself that would enlarge his already larger-than-life presence in American mythology.
Paine surely understood the conditions under which he would be allowed to write the story of Twain’s life, and Isabel was initially thrilled with the King’s biographer. She viewed him as a faithful, obedient employee who shared her adoration for Twain. With Paine as a loyal member of the household, Isabel could rest assured that no painful revelations would emerge to besmirch the Mark Twain legacy, and, she hoped, her own presence in Twain’s story would be recognized.
Mark Twain's Other Woman Page 11
