A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man:
But yet I call you servile ministers,
That have with two pernicious daughters join’d
Your high engender’d battles ’gainst a head
So old and white as this. O! O! ’tis foul!
—SHAKESPEARE, KING LEAR, ACT 3, SCENE 2
Mark Twain at Stormfield with Ralph Ashcroft, W. E. Grumman (stenographer), and Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, 1909
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Having outlasted most of his contemporaries and immediate family members, Mark Twain was encircled in his last years by individuals with vested interests who wanted a piece of his person, his fame, his possessions, his writings, and his wealth. Clara later rhapsodized that the last years of her father’s life could be characterized as a constant “atmosphere of adulation,” with “the most sensational kind of cordiality from the public, press, and friends.” The happy result, according to her, was that every day resembled a kind of “great festive occasion.”
Celebratory though it might have been in her halcyon reminiscences, in actuality, Clara’s and Twain’s temperaments were incompatible, eliminating any possibility of a peaceful life together. Father and daughter had argued for years over Clara’s choices and what Twain regarded as her indecorous behavior. Theirs was a history of long-fought battles, with one argument in the summer of 1905 resulting in Twain’s writing to his absentee daughter demanding that she return home while assuring her that he had “broken my bow and burned my arrows.”
As a result, they were unable to remain for any prolonged period within the same physical space. For years now Clara had absented herself from her father’s presence. She politely excused her exits as fulfilling the wanderlust that she had inherited from him. She declared that she loved the luxury of “being in one place in the morning, & then suddenly making up her mind to go to another place,” and rationalized her constant departures as “like having a wishing carpet.”
Her incessant travel away from her father in effect constituted a magic carpet of escapism, all of which her father grudgingly underwrote. While initially compliant with his daughter’s absences and requests for travel funds, by the end of 1907 Twain complained to the always sympathetic Isabel that “he didn’t get much good out of Clara. When she is in N.Y. he never sees anything of her & when he goes to her rooms he feels like a stranger making an untimely & unwelcome visit. Poor King! It is all Too True.”
In addition to their personal friction, Clara found it onerous to be the daughter of such a renowned man. In a 1908 interview with The New York Times, she was shockingly open about how burdensome she found it to be his child: “I have just come to the conclusion that things want readjusting in this old world of ours. Need I mention the fact that I refer to the glaring injustice of having to go about labeled ‘Mark Twain’s daughter’ when I am doing my best to pursue a musical career? Father is, of course, a genius—and that is what makes me so tired. My fatigue is directly caused by the incessant strain—prolonged over some years and induced by trying to find a secret hiding place where I can shroud my identity.”
Part of Clara’s drive to establish a singing career can be found in her desire to earn her father’s respect as well as to create a sense of purpose for her life. What also contributed to her professional resolution was an individual new to Clara’s circle, the handsome pianist Charles Edwin (nicknamed Will) Wark. Wark was highly desired as an accompanist for opera singers, and The New York Times noted on November 10, 1907, that Wark would be playing piano at a recital by the internationally famous Myron W. Whitney, Jr. Wark had begun accompanying Clara on piano during the winter of 1906 and quickly became her constant consort. Twain thought very highly of Clara’s new friend, telling his daughter in February 1907 that he liked “Mr. Wark and his honest blue eyes ever so much. I think you are fortunate to be in his guardianship.”
By this time Clara was leading a determinedly bohemian lifestyle, and Will Wark made the perfect companion. Will was Canadian, born on December 1, 1877, in the village of Cobourg, east of Toronto, situated along Lake Ontario. Cobourg’s clear Canadian skies were advertised as having the “highest quality ozone” in the world, a delightful change from the sooty surroundings of the industrial northeastern United States, and the town quickly became one of the most popular resort communities for wealthy Americans. Enormous homes were constructed on huge estates, and elaborate summer parties, regattas, and horse shows were held throughout the season.
Amid this heady atmosphere of Gilded Age wealth and status, Wark came of age. The contrast between his working-class family and the glamorous life led by the summer visitors left a deep impression upon him. One of eight children and already described at age five as a piano prodigy, he left Coburg in 1898 to seek his fortune south of the border. Two years after he came to the United States, Wark stayed for a time at the Jackson Sanatorium, located in Dansville, New York. While it is unknown what ailed Wark, male patients were treated there for various kinds of dissipation, including alcoholism. It appears that Wark moved to New York City sometime in 1901; in the 1901 edition of the American Guild of Organists, he is listed as “Teacher of Piano, Accompanist, Coach. Concert Direction.”
In addition to his exceptional talent at the keyboard, Wark’s special gift lay in his ability to charm and attract patrons. In March 1907, Isabel expressed her gratitude to Wark for giving her and her mother passes to attend a performance of Verdi’s Requiem. By the summer of 1907, Wark was shuttling between New York City and Tuxedo Park to see Clara. In the softness of an early summer’s evening on June 1, Isabel heard singing from her third-story room. Going downstairs to the second floor wearing “a long thin black gown that made a little swish,” Isabel found Twain standing in the hallway wearing only “his under-drawers in the 2nd hall, to hear &…[he looked] up at me with his eyes shining with delight.” Rather than being shocked, Isabel enjoyed the view: “So there he stood in the hall listening to Santa—He had slipped off his trousers & stockings—& he had his yellow calabash pipe in his hand—It is so true—that the ruts people complain that I am in because I don’t holiday more, are far higher than their greatest heights.” Standing in the hallway side by side, Twain and Isabel listened to Clara and Wark make beautiful music together.
By the end of the month, Wark was dining with Clara at Tuxedo Park “every night,” and Isabel bore witness to their romantic relationship. “I have been dreaming a wonderful love story in these days,” Isabel mused wistfully, “A story all of beautiful colors, and it makes me so very lonely and so sad.” Isabel understood only too acutely that her moments of human connection were limited to happenstance, late-night meetings in hallways listening to the sounds of life taking place at a considerable remove.
After an August visit to Boston, where Clara and Wark were staying, Isabel observed that Clemens’s daughter “is beautifuller than she had ever been for Boston agrees with her & her intense happiness in her life & in her art, are making for her an existence that is ideal.” Wark sent word to Twain that same month informing him of the good news that Clara had gained weight, and how he wished Twain “could hear Clara’s voice and notice the great improvement—it has the true ring and I am confident she will do really great work this coming winter, and the dear child gains confidence with every new work she undertakes.” No longer a child at age thirty-three, Clara was three years older than her beau.
Mark Twain, Clara Clemens, and Marie Nichols at the piano, 1908
During the early months of 1908 Clara gave several performances in New York, one, as The New York Times reported, at the home of Dr. Edward Quintard, where she was accompanied, in addition to Wark on the piano, by Miss Lillian Littlehales on the cello. By spring Clara and Wark were full of plans for a European tour. On May 16, 1908, Clara, along with Wark and Marie Nichols, a Boston violinist, sailed from New York on the Caronia bound for England. Over the summer, both Clara and Wark would regularly send ebullient letters to Isabel, assuring her of their musical success w
hile simultaneously asking for additional funds. Shortly after the trio had arrived in England, Isabel received notification from the bank that “the fourth letter of credit for Miss Clara Clemens” had been issued in response to her request.
Clara made her English singing début in early June at Queen’s Hall and Bechstein Hall, now known as Wigmore Hall. Wark wrote a chummy letter to Isabel at the end of the month from the Grand Hotel in Broadstairs, Kent, using the nickname the two had bestowed upon her, Nana. He explained that his exhausted songbird had spent the past week in Kent recovering from her recital. Wark informed Isabel that he and Clara were planning to travel to France “very soon” because “London is more than expensive.” The two would “settle down in some cheap country place (probably Barbizon) in about two weeks.” He noted that Clara’s weekly expenses averaged approximately twenty-two pounds, and he asked Isabel to “please tell me frankly if you think Clara is spending too much.” Before closing, Wark excitedly noted that a concert was being planned near London the following year, “on shares so that Clara won’t be under any expense,” and that the two of them missed “Nana” terribly “and would give anything to have you here—several times a day one of us will say, ‘Now I’m sure Nana would like this place or Nana would like that’—or ‘Nana must have some of these cigarettes.’”
Wark was ideally suited to attend to a woman of Clara’s enormous emotional needs. Indeed, a newspaper profile later underscored his sympathetic playing, reflecting his accommodating personality:
He understands perfectly how best to accompany the prima donna. He knows what volume is required, what shading is desirable, how much of it, and he follows every motion of the singer to detect her next requirement in the manner of piano support. He not only knows these things, but he does them. That is why he is such an excellent accompanist.
HELPFUL, CLEVER, AND GOOD-LOOKING, Wark had found himself a fragile little heiress and quickly realized that with the right amount of pampering and coddling he could accompany her in more ways than just musically for a long while. Will and Isabel were simpatico in that they were both trying to accomplish the same end by appeasing their more affluent partners. By the time of their European idyll, Wark and Clara were certainly enjoying more than a professional relationship, and they most likely were sexually involved. In July Clara sent Isabel a letter in which she confided that “dear old W. is more wonderful all the time but I can’t bear the many many months still that separate us from freedom and frank expression of the truth.” What Clara did not mention in her letter was that the chief impediment between the two and the “truth” happened to be none other than his wife, Mrs. Edith Cullis Wark. Edith had married Wark five years earlier, on October 10, 1903, at Grace Church Chantry in lower Manhattan, just a few blocks away from 21 Fifth Avenue. On her wedding day the bride wore a lovely white crêpe de chine dress with a long tulle veil and carried a bouquet of white anemones. Will’s best man was Francis Rogers, a well-known baritone soloist. The couple was blessed with twins.
Charles Wark and Edith Cullis’s wedding day, October 10, 1903. Francis Rogers is at top left, beside Charles Wark. Edith is seated between two flower girls.
Clara’s tour with Wark did not go unnoticed by either his wife or the press. Shortly before the two were due to sail into New York Harbor, the papers were full of news about them. On Monday, September 7, 1908, the World reported to curious New York City readers:
Miss Clemens will give a reception in her old home on Saturday to her many friends. It is expected that at the reception her engagement to Mr. Wark will be announced. After his daughter’s marriage, a friend of Mr. Clemens said yesterday, the novelist will be virtually alone; and this, it was said, influenced him strongly in deciding to make Redding his home throughout the year.
An appalled Isabel read the story in the morning paper along with the rest of the public; later that same day she met with reporters and vehemently “contradicted that & many things.” Either Isabel was not very convincing or the story was just too good to let die, because the next day The New York Times elaborated.
Miss Clemens … has been traveling abroad with friends. With the party is Charles Wark of New York, whose engagement to Miss Clemens has been rumored. Mr. Clemens will come to town from Redding today to be on hand when the Caronia comes in. … Miss Clemens will give a reception at the old house on the evening of her arrival. It has been suggested that her engagement will be announced at that time.
There was no party. Immediately after docking on September 9, Clara departed for Stormfield with her father and Isabel.
Clara’s artistic and sexual affair with a married father contained all the lurid characteristics that New York newspapers craved. For the previous two years, the press had provided hysterical daily accounts of what was popularly called the “Crime of the Century,” the murder of New York’s most prominent architect, Stanford White, by the deranged Pittsburgh millionaire Harry K. Thaw; the public was obsessed with the scandal. Thaw claimed that the reason he shot White three times in the head in front of nine hundred witnesses was that White had “ruined” his wife, the gorgeous nymphet Evelyn Nesbit. Martin Littleton, Thaw’s head counsel for his second trial, kept his friend Mark Twain well informed about the details. Thaw’s second trial commenced at the beginning of January 1908, with Littleton providing a spirited defense. In early January, Twain complained about having to spend a listless night without his billiards partner because “Mr. Littleton is submerged in the Thaw trial, & has to work Every Evening.” Littleton’s schedule was more accommodating later in the month, and Twain and Isabel enjoyed lunching with him and his wife just ten days before the end of the trial. On February 1, Littleton won his case. Thaw was acquitted of murder by reason of insanity.
Twain’s path crossed in other ways with the “Crime of the Century.” On January 12, he was an honoree at a dinner at the Lotos Club, which he frequented in celebration of his Oxford degree. On that evening members feasted on Innocent Oysters Abroad, Roughing It Soup, Fish Huckleberry Finn, Joan of Arc Filet of Beef, Jumping Frog Terrapin, Gilded Age Duck, Hadleyburg Salad, Life on the Mississippi Salad, Prince and the Pauper Cakes, Puddin’head Cheese, and White Elephant Coffee. In his brief after-dinner remarks, Twain announced to the assemblage that he had embarked upon a new hobby of collecting compliments directed toward himself. On proud display at the Lotos Club was Frederick Church’s painting of an underage, nude Evelyn Nesbit, in which, as she described it, she was portrayed as “an Undine [water nymph] with water lilies in [my] hair, running down my bare limbs, [with] two striped tigers at [my] flanks.” In an interesting coincidence, Twain and Evelyn Nesbit had been photographed by the same prominent New York photographer, Gertrude Käsebier.
Careless and rebellious, Clara was on very dangerous ground. While no murder had been committed, if the unforgiving newspapers caught wind of the facts of her complicated love life, as the daughter of America’s most famous citizen, her reputation would be ruined. Isabel did not record in her daily reminder any particular reaction or concern voiced by Clara or Twain over the newspaper articles, and it is unclear how the story reached the press. Twain’s silence is particularly curious as it stands in stark contrast to the prim stance he took regarding Maxim Gorky’s rather complicated marital arrangements just two years earlier. Unable to divorce his wife in Russia, Gorky had secured a decree in Finland. The American press declared that his Finnish divorce was not legally binding and reported the sensational story that Gorky had traveled to America in the company of his mistress. Despite the social reformer Jane Addams’s urging that Twain should ignore Gorky’s tangled personal relationships for the greater good of helping the Russian people, Twain immediately distanced himself. He rationalized that because Gorky had come to the United States as a diplomat and not a revolutionary, the niceties of social etiquette bound him. Isabel’s insightful analysis of Gorky’s situation, coming just two months after Stanford White’s murder, was that Americans “are readier to wink at the hor
rors & debaucheries of men who live as Stanford White is said to have lived; they will condone immoralities, but not illegalities.” The operative word here is “men.” Women at the time were allowed no such leniency when it came to the issue of morals. It is impossible that Wark would have passed Twain’s litmus test as a suitable escort for Clara if he had known about Mrs. Wark and the children.
The lurid newspaper details of Stanford White’s dalliances with underage chorus girls likely influenced Clara’s vehemently negative reaction to any mention of her father’s Angelfish and was, in part, the reason that she rejected the name Innocents at Home in favor of “Stormfield” for the Redding house. White collected “protégées” by the dozens; he elaborately seduced them, wrote loving letters to them, and kept their names in a little black book. Clara’s skin must have crawled at the sight of her father’s Angelfish billiard room at Stormfield.
At long last supremely happy both personally and professionally, Clara was in no mood to pay attention to her father’s standards of decorum, if indeed he expressed concern. The likeliest scenario is that Twain did not know that Wark was married, and Clara was not about to tell him. Based on Isabel’s personal interactions with the two and the nature of the confiding letters that Wark and Clara sent her, it seems clear that she knew they were intimately involved, and that she was also aware of Wark’s marital status. Isabel thus possessed powerful information that placed her in an extremely tenuous position: if she informed Twain about the true nature of the situation she would earn Clara’s undying enmity; if she kept the information secret and Twain eventually discovered that she had known it, he would consider her a traitor. The dilemma was in her knowing it, not his discovering it.
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Mark Twain's Other Woman Page 19
