The mornings typically saw the energetic Paine, the machine-like Miss Hobby, and the watchful Isabel encircling the nightshirt-clad Twain propped up in his bed. Twain had long enjoyed the comfort of remaining in his nightclothes and relaxing in his magnificent bed, and he had now found a way to combine work with pleasure. The morning’s dictation completed, Twain would rise and dress. The precious afternoons and evenings at home away from Twain’s public amusements belonged to Isabel. Her desire had intensified, and Twain returned her affection. One early winter afternoon in mid-January, the two shared their mutual feelings. After luncheon Isabel went to Twain’s room to give him a sentimental poem about the Mississippi River sent to him by a southern admirer, Caroline Stern. After reading it through silently, Twain walked over to Isabel, stood next to her, and read her the poem:
Who speaks of Care, of toil, of time?
The night-wind cools the heated deck,
The minstrel river sings in rhyme,
And gathers largesse in our wake.
And like a refrain, Solemn, Slow,
The leadsman’s chant comes from below—
Ma-a-r-r-k Twa-a-ain
Looking her in the eye, “his voice thrilled,” Twain said to Isabel, “There ought to be the echoing cry from the deck.” This intimate moment meant so much to Isabel that, overjoyed, she poured out her feelings at the end of the day: “Oh the richness of his nature, & his brain, & his soul—He sounds the awfulest depths of the tragedies of earth & heaven & hell———he bubbles over with gaity—he melts with grief into silent sobs—he slays with satire your beliefs—he boils over into profanities that make you feel the terror of the thunderbolts that must come—& he is the gentlest, most considerate most lovable creature in all the Earth—Yet how he covers his true self away from most!” She is in the inner sanctum, an intimate of a lesser God. It is, for her, at this moment in time, the most secure place on earth or in heaven.
But the lives of the other Clemens family members were less felicitous. Jean and Clara were decidedly less pleased than Isabel with the new arrangement of the mornings taken over by Paine and Hobby. At his daughters’ expense, Twain had gathered a coterie of people to keep him distracted. Clara dealt with her father’s rejection by physically removing herself from his presence for most of the winter and spring, shuttling between New York City, Norfolk, and Atlantic City. Jean remained at home and her health soon took an awful turn.
3
On January 1, 1906, Jean had had a cluster of three seizures: “Jean—11–1.20–7 P.m. very severe.” Following the typical trajectory of postictal psychosis, immediately afterward she entered a brief lucid state followed by increasing troubling signs of emotional distress. Four days later, Isabel noted “Jean is not well—Not only has her malady increased—but her whole physical condition is at a low ebb.” Psychosis assumes different forms and among them are “marked and varied mood changes.” Twelve days after the cluster attack, Twain tried to read a transcribed autobiography dictation to an unappreciative Jean. Isabel exclaimed about his aborted attempt in her daily reminder: “But oh a disturbing element stopped it. (A mood of Jean’s).” The month would culminate in an episode on Saturday, January 27—one not witnessed by Jean’s father, who had absented himself, this time to Washington, to attend a banquet “full of pretty women in beautiful garments” held in his honor.
This was a tragic day—I came in from a shopping expedition for Jean & others—& when I went into her room for Tea, she told me that a Terrible thing had happened. In a burst of unreasoning rage she struck Katy a Terrible blow in the face—The significance of it is what is so terrible, for now she has done what I have seen in her [crossed out: unescapable] & feared she would do. [Crossed out: She is distressed poor child]—She described the wave of passion that swept over her as being that of an insane person. She knew she couldn’t stop—she had to strike. & she said that she wanted to kill. /& was sorry she hadn’t—to her mind it doesn’t seem right not to finish any job you have begun & she had wanted to kill Katy/
Isabel’s attempt to characterize the episode as somehow being a longstanding personality trait may not be terribly productive. What is clear is that Jean, in behavior consistent with that of one enmeshed in the throes of a postictal psychotic state triggered by the cluster of epileptic seizures she suffered at the beginning of the month, had attacked Katy Leary a second time. Isabel’s interpretations of Jean’s desire to “finish” any “job” and kill the housekeeper was in keeping with the delusional state of postictal psychosis. Isabel’s use of the phrase “unreasoning rage” is descriptive of the fact that sufferers in such a condition do not experience intentionally motivated acts of aggression. Katy was again in the wrong place and the unfortunate recipient of Jean’s response to internal stimuli of which she alone was aware.
Jean’s repeated attacks must have been terribly upsetting for the devoted Katy, who had begun working for the Clemens family the year Jean was born. For twenty-six years, Katy had cared for Jean and had, along with the family, helplessly watched as her health disintegrated. If, indeed, the anger and aggression of the sufferer of the disease is stimulated by the emotional attachment between attacker and victim, then it is understandable why Jean, who was enormously fond of Katy, struck her. In a conversation with Doris Webster in 1948, Isabel spoke about Jean’s affliction and “how at times she was really dangerous. … The epilepsy seems to have been inherited from Livy’s [Olivia’s] side—some relative of hers had it. Livy was very much surprised to find this out. You could tell the day before when an attack was coming—She would begin picking at her dress.”
The next day, January 28, Jean experienced another cluster of seizures, for a total of six seizures in a month’s time. Susan Crane, Olivia Clemens’s older sister, arrived soon after from Elmira to help care for her troubled niece. Twain did not return home until Tuesday, January 30.
At the beginning of the week, with Twain still en route, a worried Isabel visited Dr. Quintard, Jean’s physician. On Friday morning, February 2, Isabel finally spoke to Twain about his daughter. Confronted with the urgent nature of Jean’s situation, Twain unleashed a torrent of angry rhetoric:
I had a very plain talk with Mr. Clemens this morning about Jean’s condition. & told him how on Tuesday I had talked with Dr. Quintard. The dreadfulness of it all swept over him as I knew it would and with that fiercest of all his looks in his face, he blazed out against the Swindle of life—& the … treachery of a God that can create disease & misery & crime. create things that men would be condemned for creating—that men would be ashamed to create. [Crossed out: And you agree with him—you have to]
Later that same day, Jean had another cluster of three seizures. Her father, once again, was not there to witness them. He was having dinner with Dorothea and Richard Gilder, wearing a white tie and what he laughingly described to Isabel as a “pair of ratty old daylight pants—but when I tell the Gilders they’ll overlook it.” Twain would also have had little time to check on Jean over the weekend, as he visited Frank Fuller and his wife, Mary, on Saturday (Frank, one of Twain’s oldest friends, was the ex–acting governor of Utah and president of a health-food company), lunched with Mr. and Mrs. John W. Alexander and Maude Adams (one of the most well-known stage actresses of her time, famous for her signature role as Peter Pan) on Sunday, and entertained Mr. Montague and Mr. and Mrs. Loomis (Olivia’s niece and her spouse) at teatime the same day. Isabel absolved Twain, explaining that he “keeps away from anything that wrings his heart. He has too many speeches to make, too many people to see in these days & he must remain cheerful.”
On Monday, February 5, 1906, outside of the regular consultation days of Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, Isabel and Jean went to visit Dr. Frederick Peterson, “who is going to have charge of her case—her pitiful malady—if he feels that he can benefit her. She has been running down rapidly & looks badly—& is ill—really very ill—” Peterson was forty-seven years old and stood an imposing six feet four inches tall
. He was the first professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and was widely recognized as the most prominent epilepsy specialist in the country. Well known as a pioneer in psychiatry and neurology, he was also regarded as a mental-health advocate. He served as chairman of the Section of Neurology and Medical Jurisprudence of the American Medical Association from 1898 to 1899, as president of the New York Neurological Society from 1899 to 1901, and was president of the American Neurological Association in 1924. Peterson considered the social ostracism of epileptics as cruel and undeserved, and he founded Craig Colony, located in Sonyea, New York, the first comprehensive epilepsy center established in the United States, where severe epileptics could receive treatment and lead full and meaningful lives. Peterson was appointed president of the board of managers at Craig Colony in 1895.
Peterson’s research on epilepsy and insanity was voluminous, with over two hundred publications, including one work that would prove particularly apt in relationship to Jean’s affliction, Epileptic Insanity. His best-known book, Nervous and Mental Diseases, published in 1911, five years after Isabel and Jean’s visit to him, would become a standard for generations of physicians. In his chapter “Epilepsy,” there is a discussion concerning “psychic equivalents of the epileptic attack” where “immediately following the fits, we may have a variety of acute mental disturbances.” These disturbances included homicidal acts; however, “as a rule, [patients] have no knowledge of such acts.” In addition, “sudden wild, maniacal outbursts, in which the patient may be destructive and dangerous to others, are encountered, and these may terminate suddenly or be protracted for several days.” Peterson may have been the first physician to recognize what is now identified as postictal psychosis, without actually naming it as such.
While Peterson was well published as a medical writer, he also had a literary side that would have appealed to his new patient and her father. He was an accomplished poet with a special interest in Chinese poetry and art and had published four books of poetry under his pseudonym, Pai Ta-Shun.
The visit to Peterson proved to have a palliative effect upon the household; Jean went for over a month without a seizure. Isabel’s spirits also improved and she once again dwelled on the joy of being part of the Clemens home in an entry she later tried to obliterate:
All these days are full of interesting doings—A steady flame of delight burns through every hour; it burns—but Sometimes the fog of little trying circumstances will obscure it until the wit comes to make you see right through the fog to the wonderful wonderful flame—I don’t want any Earthly Thing outside of this house—And it is such a com-fort to have Mr. Paine full of the love of the daily dictation, missing not a gesture—not a word—not a glance. but treasuring it all in his good heart.
She added a more calculating note the next day (which she later crossed out), musing, “As I grow older I marvel more & more over the fact that anything I long for with a strong steady silent desire, comes to me in Time. It never fails.” At the end of February Isabel and Twain went day-tripping: “Mr. Clemens he suggested that the joys of a trip in the subway from Astor Place to the Northern terminus would be considerable, for he loves the Subway. I said doubtless he would enjoy it. Then he asked me if I’d like to go. It was a [crossed out: dear] & happy suggestion.” A white-suited Mark Twain delightedly riding along in a subway car must have been quite a sight for the average New Yorker.
Yet this happy, confident mood would prove short-lived. On March 21, Jean left to spend a week or two in Lakewood, New Jersey, fifty-eight miles away, at a well-known winter resort for the wealthy located on fourteen acres. Jean wrote Isabel that she had become unwell once again, and Isabel recorded three seizures: at 9:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 4:00 p.m. on March 25: “Lakewood, very bad day.” Jean unexpectedly returned home on March 27, looking ill and “quite pale.” During Jean’s absence, Twain grew increasingly melancholy, and he erupted in a tirade to Isabel on March 24:
This is the wretched day when Mr. Clemens went down to the living room & there wasn’t anyone there—For a half hour he waited for a human being & none came to stay. C.C. [Clara] looked in upon him as she passed out of the house—& then a blast of cold and bedeviled loneliness swept over him & made … him hate his life—C.C. was late for luncheon—& Mr. Clemens loathed the meal. He dropped his 2 hard water biscuits with a bang on the mahogany Table. in … a cursing wave of … bitterness. [crossed out: reached me & made me wretched too.] These are the agony days when he [crossed out: misses] knows Mrs. Clemens is gone.
4
Had Isabel chosen to, she would have realized that there were ominous auguries in the events of the fall and spring of 1905 and 1906. While her earlier reading of Kipling’s story “An Habitation Enforced” buoyed her upwardly mobile hopes, a second fictional work sank them. Edith Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth was published on October 14, 1905, and became an instant literary sensation. Wharton’s realism captured the zeitgeist of a generation with her insider’s depiction of New York’s upper class, inciting the reading public’s obsession with wealth, ritual, and status. Demand for the book far outstripped its availability. An astounding thirty thousand copies were sold within three weeks of its initial printing, and an additional sixty thousand copies were ordered after the first month. For many of the one hundred thousand readers who had purchased the book within seven weeks of its publication date, the novel’s inherent tragedy had less to do with Lily Bart’s sad ending than with Wharton’s detailing her heroine’s failure to succeed in her quest for class mobility. Wharton had penned the feminine antithesis to Ragged Dick, and this cautionary tale about the upper class held an irresistible appeal for the fascinated public.
Isabel was completely traumatized by Wharton’s novel. Repelled, yet obsessively drawn to it, she attempted to read it on three separate occasions. The experience proved so upsetting that she stopped reading altogether for months: “Perhaps I’m discouraged from attempting anything more felicitous, by the great horror left [crossed out: within me] by ‘The House of Mirth.’” Each time she tried to read the book, she had to “dash it aside full of pain over its dread-fulnesses.” Deeply depressed by Wharton’s narrative, Isabel found no succor even in sleep. At the end of the paragraph in her reminder in which she decries Wharton’s text, she wrote and then crossed out, “Oh such tragic dreams—Such devastating dreams All day I drag myself along for the sadness they create.”
Edith Wharton, 1905
What could Wharton’s story have provoked within Isabel to create such an emotional furor? The House of Mirth traces the life of a single woman from a distinguished, although financially ruined, New York family who possessed a particular kind of wealth, namely her striking physical attractiveness. But Lily’s riches, her singular beauty, prove ephemeral, and her social and economic capital decreases with each birthday. On the verge of turning thirty, Lily realizes she is no longer a brand-new freshman and is quickly becoming, as Isabel said, a socially unacceptable, “rusty ‘Soph.’” Lily’s awful awareness that her shelf life is running out fails to save her, and her ambivalence about marrying into the very class that would allow her to lead a financially and socially advantaged life ultimately proves fatal.
Through the actions of the hapless and ultimately hopeless Lily, Wharton exposed the upper layers of New York’s Gilded Age society. This was an era when the city’s traditional upper class, consisting of old Dutch families (like Isabel’s mother’s parents the Van Kleeks) and Yankees dating back to the Revolutionary War, had given way to the showy excesses of the nouveaux riches, such people as Mark Twain. The newly affluent, their fortunes made in business, railroads, real estate, stocks, banking, and publishing, forced the elite set to open its ranks, and the new members swaggered in with impunity. Ostentatious displays of wealth became the currency for status. Social life was no longer restrained behind the walls of private clubs and homes; instead, enormous residences, opulent hotels, and expensive restaurants were built where showy celebrations were held as t
he newly rich paraded their finery up and down the fashionable arteries of the city. Old and new money mingled and married, and changing one’s social class upwardly must have seemed within the realm of the possible. In this environment, wealthy widowers like John Kendrick Bangs marrying their secretaries must have confirmed what the public so desperately wanted to believe, that fairy tales do come true. Yet with every plucky success story that gave women like Isabel hope, there were plenty of other, much darker, tales that Wharton’s novel made visible. “Never take anything for granted,” Clara’s advice to Isabel, could have been a Greek choral refrain in The House of Mirth.
Wharton’s realism threatened Isabel’s ambition. Isabel found far too much to identify with in the novel—indeed, Lily was Isabel’s doppelganger. Both women had come from formerly well-established families; both had long passed the ingénue stage of life as well as the socially acceptable age for a first marriage; both were pressed into playing endless games of cards to humor their benefactors (Isabel had the additional duty of pumping away for hours at the Orchestrelle); both worked as secretaries to the wealthy; and both had their share of enemies. Ultimately, Lily makes a fatal social gaffe, for which the upper class would prove unforgiving. She sinks beneath a storm of sexual innuendo, having been falsely accused of having an affair with her benefactress’s oafish husband. Would the same fate await Isabel?
Mark Twain at a dinner at Charlotte Teller Johnson’s house, nicknamed “A Club,” April 11, 1906. Among those present, Robert Collier and Arthur Brisbane
Charlotte Teller Johnson
The House of Mirth ends with Wharton’s Lily dying alone in a poor tenement room, abandoned as a formerly attractive object that had lost its appeal. Isabel’s great horror was the ugly possibility that the same fate might await her. But she refused to accept that her life could imitate fiction, wanting so much to believe that she was secure and central to the life of Twain’s household and needed by him. Isabel, like others in Wharton’s reading audience, blamed authorial malfeasance for Lily’s tragic death, instead of interpreting the ending as the logical outcome of a novel critical of materialism and the fantasy of upward mobility.
Mark Twain's Other Woman Page 12
