Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  Spring brought a new threat to Isabel’s peace of mind in the form of another, much younger woman. At the end of March, Twain made the acquaintance of thirty-year-old Charlotte Teller Johnson, author of a novel, The Cage, and two plays, Mirabeau and Joan d’Arc. Charlotte lived with her grandmother just down the street from Twain, at Number 3 Fifth Avenue, which she called the “A Club” house. Charlotte paid an unexpected call on Isabel and asked if she could introduce a Nikolai Tschaykoffshi, a Russian revolutionary agitator, to Twain. Twain agreed. Charlotte returned later that same afternoon with Tschaykoffshi in tow and made the introductions. As she prepared to leave the two men alone, Twain asked Charlotte who she was, and when he discovered that she was the author of Joan d’Arc, he asked her to return the next day and read it to him. She did, and he was greatly moved by her as well as by her subject. Shortly afterward, on April 11, Twain attended a dinner at Charlotte’s home with “her revolutionary tribe,” including Maxim Gorky, Zinovii Peshkov (Gorky’s adopted son), and Ivan Narodny. Isabel noted that the dinner party, which she was not invited to attend, totaled “13—such a hellish superstition it is.” To Isabel’s great consternation, over the course of the next three months the vibrant Charlotte visited Twain almost every day. Isabel’s disdain for Twain’s talented new friend grew to the extent that after one visit, she uncharacteristically swore, saying Charlotte “paid me damn compliments.”

  By May, Isabel felt such an overwhelming sense of panic about Twain’s new relationship that she visited a palm reader. The seeress, Miss Hyde, only upset her more when, after gazing upon her overworked digits, she forecast “calamity for me a great hence. & the ghost—the demon of that Calamity is ever beside me.” For a woman as high strung and nervous as Isabel, Miss Hyde’s prediction was enough to drive her to near collapse. Yet she still refused to believe that all her efforts to secure a future with Twain might be in vain. The next day she was forced to resort to extreme measures to ease her tension during a rare visit by Clara.

  [Crossed out: I am sitting here at 2.30 in the morning. I couldn’t cant sleep.] Down stairs. I hear Mr. Clemens cough. I have taken 2 heavy drugs—but they dont effect—a terrible anxiety weighs—up Fifth Ave—drays drag themselves—Horses I suppose are in front of them—[Crossed out: I feel a calamity—] The Valley of the Shadow Mr. Clemens called this house—Trunks are around [crossed out: but the terror is heavy upon] me—[Crossed out: When Santa started for Gilders tonight I told her I’d go for whiskey—but there was no whiskey to quiet me—Foolish for me to think it would—it doesn’t]

  Undoubtedly, what drew Twain to Charlotte Teller Johnson was the combination of her youth and her talent. She probably reminded him a great deal of his lost daughter Susy, an aspiring writer. The two discussed their various writing projects, and Twain assured Charlotte that she possessed “greatness”—indeed, “more of it than you suspect, I think.” The admiration was mutual, and Charlotte appeared to inspire Twain to finally complete his “Gospel,” What Is Man?, which he had been working on for years (he claimed in his preface to the 1906 edition that he had begun the work “twenty-five or twenty-seven years ago”).

  5

  The season in New York was long and wearying for the Clemens family, with tensions exacerbated by the public’s adulation of Twain and his private friendship with Charlotte Teller Johnson. Jean’s suffering, Twain’s frequent absences, Clara’s antagonism, and Charlotte’s flattering attention to Twain all proved too much for Isabel. A seeming reprieve arrived in May, however. On a Monday afternoon, after Twain and Charlotte had a morning farewell chat, Isabel and Twain left New York for the distant climes of Dublin, New Hampshire, arriving on May 15 at the house Twain was leasing, called Upton House. Jean had happily abandoned New York for Dublin two weeks earlier with the devoted Katy; her maid, Anna Sterritt; and Mary, the cook. Thomas Bigelow Paine and Miss Hobby (Miss Hobby had been talked into quitting her job at The Century Magazine by Isabel and Paine so as to come and work for Twain) joined them on May 20, with the massive Orchestrelle arriving a few days later.

  But unlike the restful and pleasing Copley Greene house, Upton House was much smaller and more isolated. There exist two dramatically different narratives about the quality of the time spent there that summer. Paine (with whom Miss Hobby shared a nearby cottage) claimed years later in his introduction to Mark Twain’s Autobiography that Upton was a “perfect setting” for Twain’s dictations. Isabel vigorously refuted Paine’s halcyon recollection in a scribbled note on the margin of the page, in which she declared that Upton was absolutely “not a ‘perfect setting,’” that it was “out of the world, & an ugly house.” Apparently the living room was too small for Twain’s taste and he took a particular dislike to a marble-topped table located in the center of the room, ordering that it be moved to the side to create more space: “Katy the maid put it back in the morning, & when Mr Clemens saw it, he roared ‘Take that damned thing to the cellar.’”

  Jean’s epilepsy continued to worsen despite the quiet, pastoral surroundings. She became practiced at predicting the onset of her seizures, at times experiencing nausea shortly before an attack, although the severity of her illness and its capriciousness continued to frustrate her best efforts to keep it at bay. Over the summer, she recorded in her diary the frequency and severity of her seizures as well as her unease over her forgetfulness. When one reads the tally that Isabel and Jean kept in their personal journals, it becomes clear that at minimum Jean suffered more than thirty-two seizures from May to mid-October (this did not include all her petit mals, which sometimes occurred up to twenty times in a single day).

  On at least six separate days she experienced cluster seizures, in Jean’s words “petit-mals … fearfully long, many of them,” the precursor of postictal psychosis. In her journal entry for May 3, Jean wrote: “My memory about where the various friends live here in Dublin, is terrible. Yesterday, I felt decidedly vague about which road to turn up to go to the Thayers’ house. Nothing could be more idiotic than that, considering where I lived all last summer.” During the first two weeks of May, she recorded how her multiple petit mals (“little short touches of absentmindedness,” in her words) made her “wretchedly tired” and “afraid.” On May 4, she described a particularly difficult day:

  As soon as I wakened, by five o’clock, I realized that I was going to be ill, but I hoped, after yesterday’s result, that the attack would pass off in a few petits-mals early in the morning. I didn’t take the pills quite as promptly as perhaps it would have been well to do so, because I hate to get into the habit of taking drugs like that when I feel a thing coming on. The petits-mals were fearfully long, many of them, but toward eleven o’clock I went down the hill with Anna & was fairly well during the walk. I had times of being very bad indeed & fairly well, all day long. After lunch I took a nap & when I first wakened felt well. … Katy really tho’t the danger of an attack was over, & so did I but we were wrong. It finally came right after my supper, about eight o’clock. It was a medium one.

  During the early summer, Isabel wrote to Dr. Peterson several times informing him of Jean’s worsened state. At the end of June, Peterson wrote back to Isabel in response to her inquiries as well as Jean’s. He was disappointed to learn that Jean’s “mental and nervous improvement do not keep pace with the physical change for the better,” and included a stronger prescription of bromides. Yet despite the increased dosage, Jean continued to deteriorate. She was enormously discouraged about being forced to live in what she considered to be a state of limbo, neither child nor adult woman, and on July 4, she confronted the depressing nature of her existence:

  Why must I live on aimlessly, with nothing to do, utterly useless, all my life? I who long so for the love and companionship that only a man can give, and that man a husband. The affection of friendship between man & woman does not suffice; & of course the love between two women cannot even be considered in the problem of this hunger. Am I never to know what love means because I am an epileptic and
shouldn’t marry if I had the chance? I seem never to be attractive to men. … Will I have to go on indefinitely leading this empty, cheerless life without aim or real interest?

  Adding to Jean’s pain was her disappointment about failing to establish a romantic relationship with Gerry Brush. When she learned in July that the Brush family was intending to live in Italy for two years, the news made her “ill.” “Two years!” she exclaimed. “I shall be twenty-eight then and all the young Brushes will begin to regard me as a stolid old maid; too old for them to bother about. Why can’t they jump forward seven or eight years, or I jump back???” In October, she wrote at length about her growing feelings for Gerry:

  What can I do? I have a decided feeling that I love Gerry and yet I ought not to. I’m much too much older than he and to show real affection, I ought to force it to become merely a quiet, warm affection such as a boy & girl can perfectly well have for each other. The hard part of it is that the older I grow—the nearer & nearer to old-maidhood—I get more & more anxious to marry. I know perfectly well that while my illness flourishes I ought not to think of any such a thing, but the idea of spending all of my older years practically by myself—Clara & I won’t want to live together very much and we aren’t especially sympathetic, anyway—is perfectly hideous. … I believe that the desire to marry is so strong in me that no matter what man, provided he was at all nice, were to propose to me & seem to be in love, that I should almost at once fall in love with him, or at least imagine myself to be in that state. Of course father would at once raise every objection, no matter whether I were better in health, or who the man might be, but if I could believe myself in love & loved, I should pay no attention to his desires … so tremendously hungry for love—marriage—makes me fear, almost believe, that I shall never have it.

  AS WELL AS BEING ATTRACTED to Gerry Brush, Jean developed an attachment to Gerald “Gra” Thayer, son of Abbott Thayer and brother of Gladys (called Galla) and Mary. Twain had known Emma Beach, Abbott Thayer’s second wife, for decades, having met her when they were both passengers on the Quaker City. Abbott was a well-known artist, celebrated for his idealized portraits of women as well as for being one of the first artists to design military camouflage. He was joined in his camouflage efforts by his friend George de Forest Brush and his son Gerry. Thayer’s son, Gra, was an exceptionally handsome young man, who told Isabel and Jean about his impulsive, naked sprint up Mount Monadnock. “I think it was a glory of a thing to do,” Isabel enthusiastically wrote, “Think of that strong young naked white creature dashing along through the winter woods. Think of him standing alone among the mighty rocks on the top of that mountain. It is the great primeval call of the wild—& there seems to me to be something akin to a religion in it.”

  To try to divert Jean’s attention from naked young men and unhappy thoughts of spinsterhood, Isabel urged her, with little success, to pursue an interest in carving and to complete a decorative box as a gift for one of her cousins. A weary Isabel wrote that “Jean’s insolences—poor child—& the great lonely hours” drove her and Twain to distraction.

  While Jean and Isabel enjoyed a close and warm relationship, Jean was often verbally abusive to those around her—“venomous” was Isabel’s adjective—and her behavior had become increasingly erratic. Isabel feared that Jean’s physical attacks upon Katy Leary might be repeated with her: “In Jean’s present condition it isn’t safe for me to be alone with her—She could easily lapse into the violence the doctors fear may come in time.” In one despairing entry (later crossed out), an exhausted Isabel dramatically compared herself to Prometheus: “I cast my thoughts toward the ones with whom I would willingly be—but I am Prometheus—& am chained to the rock & daily my Soul is Torn out of me—No—not my Soul—not my Soul.” Isabel ignored her personal physician’s orders to leave Jean and go away for a rest cure, deciding instead to “take hold of the condition mentally—I must heal it from within—& in my own lame way I shall do it. I did quiet the quivering nerves.”

  Twain hated life at Upton House and left whenever he could find an excuse to do so, absenting himself for over a month to make various visits to friends. While it might be tempting to view Twain as a neglectful father because of his deliberate absences from his stricken daughter, a likelier explanation is that he could not abide watching her suffer. He had confessed to Henry Rogers in 1902 that he rarely witnessed his daughter experiencing seizures: “I have seen it only three times before, in all these five fiendish years.” Seizures can be terribly frightening to observers. When a grand mal seizure strikes, the individual may shriek as the air from the lungs is expelled. Jean had a distinctive cry that signaled the onset of a seizure and she would vomit. Sufferers will typically become rigid and fall, and then the muscles will relax and tighten, causing convulsions. Typically Jean’s convulsions would render her unconscious and she would become incontinent. After the seizure had concluded, she would be left confused and bruised. Usually people who experience grand mal seizures have no memory of what occurred. Being a passive observer to his daughter’s affliction was more than Twain could stand; indeed, a gloomy Twain disliked his living circumstances so much that he gave the house various descriptive titles including Wuthering Heights and the Lodge of Sorrow. Yet the last nickname Twain chose could not possibly have given Isabel less comfort—the House of Mirth. Whatever Twain called the house, the months spent there were an unmitigated failure.

  Jean’s physical and mental condition had so deteriorated by September that Isabel insisted that Twain return to Dublin, something she was loath to ask him and he was equally reluctant to do. After a weeklong siege in mid-September when Jean suffered multiple seizures, an exhausted Isabel, in her words, “went to pieces.” As Jean’s primary caretaker, Isabel was overwhelmed. Throughout her months sequestered in Dublin, a depressed Isabel smoked cigarettes (an utterly taboo act for a woman—just two years earlier a woman had been arrested on Fifth Avenue for smoking in an automobile) and drank sherry alone late into the night, on one occasion lingering, “waiting for the electric lights to go out at midnight.” She also began to dose herself regularly with Bromidia, a popular all-purpose patent medicine. Bromidia was an extremely potent tonic containing extract of Cannabis indica (marijuana), 10 percent alcohol, chloral hydrate (a sedative and hypnotic), extract of hyoscyamus (a powerful narcotic and hypnotic), and potassium bromide (a salt used as an anticonvulsant and sedative). The recommended dosage was a stout eighth of a fluid ounce every hour until sleep occurred. With the volume of alcohol and narcotics contained in the mixture, it is little wonder that people taking it felt dramatic relief from their aches and pains. Patients quickly grew dependent upon its restorative powers, increasing both the frequency and the amount of dosage. The Clemens family, with their host of illnesses, also regularly availed themselves of this miracle elixir. Yet despite Isabel’s determined attempts at self-medication, she was unable to find peace: “[Crossed out: I have to sleep on Bromidia. The loneliness here this year is enough to do one a damage. And the loneliness is not because one is alone, either].”

  Bromidia, a popular all-purpose patent medicine

  While dealing with Jean, Isabel also increasingly worried about her status with “the King.” Someone Isabel had thought she had come to know quite well was proving to be frustratingly enigmatic. While she kept determinedly pretending that Twain was much younger than his chronological age, claiming at one point in her daily reminder that “he is overflowing with a buoyancy belonging to a man of 45,” in truth he felt and looked every day of his hard-fought seventy years. Although his health was relatively stable, he suffered frequent bouts of bronchitis and gout. A return of the gout to his feet would guarantee irritability on his part and require Isabel to kneel and repeatedly paint the offending area with iodine. In an October daily reminder entry that she later tried to obliterate, she expressed her frustration: “Now I’m not sure that I understand the King at all. Or, rather, there is such a deep side to him that I know I don’
t understand him, & that I never can. But I don’t want to. It’s the side of him that is unfathomable that helps to make his Sweet greatness.”

  While it was thrilling to Isabel that Twain freely shared his thoughts with her, it did not seem to increase their personal intimacy. Twain’s constant swearing was disconcerting to everyone within earshot, yet Isabel tried to ameliorate the effect of his language. The “lovable” one would launch into tirades about religion so frequently that Isabel had become indifferent to “his disgust at those who worship ‘a Tarbaby of a Jesus Christ—’ or the ‘dangling carcass of a virgin.’” She laughed away Miss Hobby’s horrified reaction to his mocking the idea of Immaculate Conception, noting that when it came to sex, “discussion of the Immaculate Conception doesn’t leave much uncovered—Not if Mr. Clemens is doing the discussing.” Even Isabel’s capacity for the denial of Twain’s dark moods failed upon occasion. At the conclusion of another bleak session when he proclaimed the failure of the human race, her benign mask finally slipped: “After a talk like the ones he gives me I grope all the rest of the day with my soul spirit weak with the terrible mental weeping that is with me, & then when every one is sleeping the real tears come—It’s always like that. Ever since the night in June when he read the Apostrophe to Death—one of his best values is that he doesn’t ever pay you a compliment, but helps you to see your raw quivering faulty self.”