Mark Twain's Other Woman

by Laura Skandera Trombley

  Isabel Van Kleek Lyon and Ralph W. Ashcroft’s wedding day, March 18, 1909, in front of the Church of the Ascension, at Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street

  On April 15, Clara sent her father a note demanding he “give Miss Lyon her notice right away.” That same day, Twain sent a notice of termination to Isabel, via a housemaid, which was delivered to her in her bedroom in Stormfield. In a moment, their relationship ended. Everyone ran about in mutual states of confusion and anger. Doris Webster recounted that Isabel told her that upon opening the envelope, “she found it was a very kind letter discontinuing the secretaryship, and enclosing two months pay.” That would be the last generous word Twain would ever offer her.

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  Despite his initial defense of Isabel, Twain ultimately decided to succumb to his daughter’s need for retribution. Tellingly, he warned Isabel shortly after her marriage, “Remember, whatever I do is because of a promise I have made to Clara.” What Isabel failed to fully appreciate was that Twain would always be primarily concerned with protecting his daughter’s social reputation as well as his own, and that she herself was utterly expendable. After receiving her notice of termination, Isabel moved from Stormfield into her renovated farmhouse while Ash-croft continued his employment with Twain. That Isabel was fired and Ashcroft was not certainly underscores the supposition that Clara’s animosity was initially directed at just one individual: Isabel. However, in Clara’s mind—and soon in Twain’s—Ashcroft had joined forces with the enemy, and he would enjoy just a temporary reprieve.

  The only person who appeared to benefit from these tumultuous events was Jean. Isabel’s leave-taking resulted in Jean’s finally being reunited with her father. On April 26, 1909, just eleven days after Isabel’s ouster, Jean came to Stormfield from Montclair. A reluctant Dr. Peterson tried to limit her to only a week’s visit; however, despite her physician’s misgivings, Jean remained. With Clara refusing to live with her father, Jean was the only family member willing to attend to him. Ecstatic about finally having a purpose to her life, Jean happily assumed her new duties as mistress of Stormfield. Twain gave his youngest daughter a farm, called the Italian Farm, with an accompanying 150 acres. (Ashcroft had purchased the Italian Farm on behalf of Twain as part of Stormfield’s total acreage just a few weeks before their falling out.) Twain hailed Jean’s return, and he marveled to friends and family about her excellent heath. “Wisdom, judgment, penetration, practical good sense,” Twain crowed in a letter sent to Clara, “like her mother—character, courage, definiteness, decision; also goodness, a human spirit, charity, kindliness, pity; industry, perseverance, intelligence, a clean mind, a clean soul, dignity, honesty, truthfulness, high ideals, loyalty, faithfulness to duty—she is everything that Miss Lyon isn’t.”

  Although Twain chose to represent his daughter’s disease as cured, this was only wishful thinking on his part. Writing to Nancy Brush in July, Jean expressed her longing to see her; however, she recognized that doing so would entail taking an attendant who could mind her during her seizures: “They would not want me to go far alone. Now if it is going to be in the least inconvenient for you to have two people when you asked one, be absolutely outspoken in saying so.” Certainly Jean’s return to her father and to the countryside, which she loved, had a soothing effect upon her health, but her dreadful affliction would continue.

  Just over a week after Isabel’s dismissal, Clara paid a visit to Henry Rogers to alert him to “her troubles” and to ask him to become personally involved in the situation. This was a bold move in that it meant Clara’s enlisting Twain’s closest and certainly most powerful friend to become part of her vendetta. Evidently terminating Isabel’s employment was not enough to satisfy Clara. A sympathetic Rogers agreed to look into the matter, writing an enigmatic letter that he sent to Twain the same day:

  Jean Clemens with Prosper le Gai

  I had a call this morning from Clara, when she told me of her troubles, and after she had said you knew of her coming to me, I ventured to say that I would be very glad to take up the matter, if you desired it, and see if I could straighten it out to your entire satisfaction.

  I think I have read between the lines. In the last two or three years I had my suspicions of things, which you in your good natured way have overlooked. You may be sure I shall be glad to serve you, as ever, if you will but give me your approval. My judgment is that you should call in a competent lawyer and accountant to overhaul your entire affairs. This should be done with but little annoyance to you, and if you will but say to those people that you have decided to ask me to look into things, I am quite sure you will not have further trouble.

  Rogers’s politic comment about reading “between the lines” indicates that the most desirable outcome for everyone would be the silencing of “those people.” To effect that end as quickly as possible, a week later Rogers summoned Ashcroft to his office for a private conversation. But if Rogers’s intention was intimidation, he failed. After his meeting with Rogers, Ashcroft sent Twain, still his employer, a letter imploring him to do the impossible: turn against Clara, publicly disagree with her, and openly support Isabel. Ashcroft maintained that Rogers concurred with their circle of friends, that Isabel had received “ghastly—treatment,” and reminded Twain that he had already privately volunteered that Clara’s “charges emanated from a brain diseased with envy, malice and jealousy, and it is only when one forgets this fact that one views them seriously.” Ashcroft urged Twain to “exercise your prerogatives of fatherhood and manhood in a way that will be productive of the greatest benefit to yourself.” He closed by recognizing that the contents of his letter might have an adverse effect upon the relationship he had previously enjoyed with Twain.

  Ashcroft could not have imagined the enormity of the effect his words would have. If his intention was to bring Twain to his senses and convince him that he should drop the matter, he profoundly underestimated the old man’s vanity. Ashcroft and Isabel were both left incredulous by Twain’s following hysterical and utterly irrational response. Infuriated about being lectured by an employee about restoring his “manhood,” Twain received additional dismaying news at the beginning of May. Rogers had turned over the responsibility for an audit of the books to a woman in his office, his “second secretary,” Miss Watson. Twain had expected that Rogers would assign the audit to “a man who had been in his employ twenty-five years.” Twain bemoaned this unexpected development because he was convinced that Miss Watson would support Isabel in sympathy with her sex (the fact that Clara was also a woman undercuts his argument). His fears about Miss Watson were heightened when an audit document indicated that the total amount of money used to renovate Isabel’s farmhouse was $3,435.24, with only $281.01 not traceable to checks. Twain then decided that the time had arrived to take matters into his own hands.

  By this point Twain realized that Clara’s vindictive accusations might cause repercussions. Ashcroft’s aggressiveness in business matters, a trait Twain had once found admirable, now was a serious liability. Clara’s destructive agenda might just prove to be the factor that would make Ashcroft and Isabel decide to disclose to the public the details of her adulterous affair as well as the true nature of Jean’s illness. To ensure that the two would never step forward with tales certain to disgrace himself and his daughters, Twain relied on his best weapon of all, his writing, to mute them. He wrote the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” over the course of five months, beginning on May 2, 1909, and concluding on October 21, 1909. The manuscript is 429 pages long and contains letters (both sent and unsent), newspaper clippings, and various exhibits of “fact.” The manuscript, in effect, is a poison-pen epistle dedicated to destroying any credibility Isabel and Ashcroft might ever claim.

  The first lines Twain composed were directed toward William Dean Howells in the form of a letter (thankfully never sent—one can only imagine what Howells’s appalled response would have been). Writing from Stormfield, Twain told his old friend that thanks to Clara the Ashcrofts’ perfid
y had finally been exposed. Falsely claiming that such good friends as “Harvey, Dunneka, Major Leigh and David Munro” had been aware for at least a year of underhanded dealings, Twain also threw his support toward Paine, telling Howells that Paine had known about them for “two years—but Clara & I remained peacefully asleep.” In a mention surely intended as the final stroke, Twain declared that no one less than “H. H. Rogers read ‘fraud’ all over Ashcroft the first time, he saw him.” Why such a large group of supporters had never bothered to alert Twain or his daughters about such “rotten eggs” in their midst apparently was a bothersome detail best left unexplained. Recollecting a fictional, halcyon past, Twain declared that Clara and Isabel had once been so close that they “were like lovers,” although despite their bonhomie all it took for Clara’s suspicions to be aroused a few months earlier was Dr. Quintard supposedly telling her that he suspected the pair of skimming. Twain mockingly refers to Ashcroft’s “manhood” letter and demands that his friend agree with his estimation of Ashcroft’s character: “I suppose you see he is a cad? He is 34 years old & a cipher in the world; I am nearly 74 & a figure in the world, yet he blandly puts himself on an equality with me, & insults me as freely & as frankly as if I was his fellow-bastard & born in the same sewer.”

  Ashcroft’s penchant to go for the jugular was now of enormous concern, and Twain expressed his uneasiness to Howells: “But I know about this, for he fell upon John Hays Hammond two or three years ago, with his pen, & rained filth & fury and unimaginable silliness upon him during two or three weeks—daily? No—almost hourly.” Twain was convinced that he and Ashcroft had entered into a rhetorical battle: “Man, let me tell you, Ashcroft would consider himself quite competent to carry on a literary war with me. Now that is true; I am speaking seriously. He is clever—& in many ways, too—but not with his pen. He does not suspect this.” The “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” became Twain’s trump card and would top all the best hands Ashcroft could muster.

  After a year of infrequent and unfocused autobiography dictations and the embarrassing extended essay “Is Shakespeare Dead?” (a manuscript Isabel had hoped in vain that Twain could be persuaded not to publish due to its poor quality), Twain’s creative juices were flowing once again. The words, in fact, gushed—after all, Twain had a “literary war” to win. Having permitted himself free license to say anything he pleased, he proceeded without compunction to cast Isabel as an unscrupulous alcoholic, a hypnotist, a thief, a drug addict and an embezzler. He accused her of spreading a rumor that Clara was insane, and he claimed that Isabel’s “one great crime, cruel & unforgivable crime” was deliberately keeping Jean “exiled in dreary & depressing health institutions a whole year & more after she was well enough to live at home without damage to her well-being.”

  While all of these charges were sensational in kind, the most fantastic was the accusation that Isabel had made unwanted, sexually aggressive advances. Isabel had repeatedly tried to seduce him, Twain confided to Howells, although he swore that he had refused to succumb to her licentious ways:

  She would … stretch herself out on her bepillowed lounge in her bedroom, in studied enticing attitudes, with an arm under her head & a cigarette between her lips, & imagine herself the Star of the Harem waiting for the eunuchs to fetch the Sultan & there she would lie by the hour enjoying the imaginary probabilities.

  Here Twain borrowed the language of yellow journalism from William Randolph Hearst’s New York Morning Journal and Joseph Pulitzer’s The World; all he needed to do was mention a red velvet swing and he could have been describing the infamous seduction of Evelyn Nesbit by Stanford White, rather than of himself by his emotionally overwrought, forty-five-year-old former secretary. Indeed, this supposed description of a coquettish Isabel would have stood perfectly for any number of photographs taken of Evelyn Nesbit in her heyday. Much of the vitriol contained in the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” could have been directly lifted from the melodramatic and sensational press coverage of White’s murder and Thaw’s subsequent trials. Twain, at certain points, reflexively caught himself and confessed to William Dean Howells just how much like fiction his entire tale was.

  Doesn’t it sound like print? Isn’t it exactly the way it would happen in a book? Howells, the whole great long Lyon-Ashcroft episode is just as booky as it can be; so booky that sometimes its facts & realities seem more cheap commonplace shopworn artificialities to me & as if they hadn’t ever happened, but had straggled into my half-asleep consciousness out of some paltry & fussy & pretentious old-time novel of that hallowed ancient day when. … well, you see, yourself, how dam stagey the whole thing is!

  The genesis of the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” is not entirely surprising. For some time, Twain, having run out of experiences from his life to include in the dictations for his autobiography, had resorted to commenting on daily events depicted in the newspapers. He had, in a sense, lost his subject: himself. His deciding to create a fiction about his family’s squabbles while drawing upon the sensationalistic prose employed by the press was a fusion that he hoped (strangely enough, considering the subject) would provide gripping and convincing reading. Truth in the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” was abandoned for impact.

  Any possibility of a quiet, negotiated resolution between the angry parties was extinguished when Henry Rogers died suddenly from a stroke on May 19, 1909. Twain received the news the next day from reporters when he arrived with Clara at Grand Central Terminal from Redding. He had come to the city to spend the day with Rogers. “This is terrible, terrible, and I cannot talk about it,” Twain burst out when told. “I am inexpressibly shocked and grieved. I do not know just where I will go.” Emotionally devastated, Twain served as a pallbearer at Rogers’s funeral service and returned to Stormfield a broken man in ruined health. His chest pains were increasing in frequency and intensity, and doctors diagnosed angina pectoris, which Paine tried to ease by placing hot-water bottles on his chest. As a distraction from his grief over losing his cherished friend, Twain pursued Isabel and Ashcroft with even more fervent zeal. To his dismay, Rogers’s son, Harry, quite rationally declined to continue the investigation of Isabel’s financial records, so Twain hired John Stanchfield’s accountant, W. J. Weiss, to conduct an audit.

  By the end of May, Twain had decided that he wanted Isabel to return her farmhouse with its accompanying twenty acres to him. He had convinced himself that the amount agreed upon for Lyonesse’s renovation had been maliciously and deliberately exceeded. At the same time, Clara and Paine discovered that Isabel and Ashcroft held the power of attorney over all of Twain’s affairs and demanded its immediate revocation. Twain devised a unique twist that absolved him of any need for honest explanation of why he had excluded his daughters from the legal document. According to Twain, it was Clara who offered him the reason why he gave his employees so much power: “Clara finally said—‘It’s hypnotism! It accounts for it all.’” This rationale was certainly convenient: “I had never thought of that. The suggestion looked reasonable—particularly since no other plausible way had been discovered of accounting for the enslaved condition I had been in for the past two or three years.”

  Twain argued in the “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript” that he had been held in a hypnotic trance since approximately 1906. Ignoring that a person cannot be hypnotized if he does not wish to be and that hypnosis cannot make a person do anything he does not want to do, Twain claimed that he was rendered helpless before the power of suggestion and that his free will had been taken over by Isabel and Ashcroft. Saved by the kind intervention of his loving daughter, he was finally able to regain his senses—that would be his story, no matter how implausible. What made this assertion utterly senseless is that on December 1, 1906, in an autobiograpy dictation, Twain recalled a mesmerizer’s visit to Hannibal in 1850, when he was fifteen years old. “I had a burning desire to be a subject myself,” he asserted, although, despite attending the show three nights in a row, all his efforts failed. Longing to be selected to come o
nstage and perform the mesmerizer’s commands, on the fourth night Twain faked that he was under hypnosis.

  Nevertheless, in mid-June, the Clemenses started a letter campaign to friends representing their version of events. In a letter sent to William R. Coe on June 16, Twain declared that the November power of attorney was the “most amazing document that has seen the light since the Middle Ages. … Until June 1st I had never heard of that paper—yet I signed it. Come—match me this mystery if you can.”

  Jean wrote a long explanatory letter to Twichell on June 14, declaring that Isabel “took large quantities of whiskey & bromide, reducing herself pretty close to insanity at times.” She also backed her father’s claim that he knew nothing about the power of attorney: “Father swears he never saw [the power of attorney document] which was put on file here & in New York last November.” The controversial document was finally revoked on June 1, 1909, signed by Twain and notarized by John Nickerson, the same notary who had signed the November power of attorney. Twain could spin as many stories as he liked, yet the incontestable fact was that Nickerson swore in writing that on November 14, 1908, “before me personally came Samuel L. Clemens, to me personally known to be the individual described in and who executed the foregoing instrument, and he acknowledged to me that he executed the same.”

  Throughout the summer, the squabbling continued over the cost of Lyonesse, as did Twain’s determination to claim it. After Ashcroft’s April meeting with Rogers, Ashcroft contacted Clara and warned that doing an open audit of expenses would expose the large amounts of money her father had invested in “papering” her tours to make them appear successful as well as the excessive sums of money she had paid out to Wark. Ashcroft’s threat was real. Twain had repeatedly complained about the cost of Clara’s concerts. In the audit report, prepared by Weiss, under the heading “Clara’s Expenses,” it is noted that in 1909 Wark was paid $100 on January 29 and $400 on April 21. In just four months he had earned $54 more than the average American’s annual income. But Ashcroft’s warning only made Clara more determined to strike back. She began making her case to the press, falsely claiming that Isabel had stolen $10,000 in cash in 1907 and 1908. Clara repeated Twain’s story that he had never “knowingly” signed the November power of attorney and that “two witnesses [a] former gardener and stableman, when shown the document, said positively they had never seen it before.” Naturally Clara excluded mention of Nickerson, the notary.