He was a pragmatist, and it was in a spirit of bowing to the inevitable that he survived, not without dishonor and embarrassment, the agonizing farce staged by Maxim Gorky’s American hosts in April 1906. The speed with which this celebrated episode moved only strengthened Clemens’ conviction that public opinion was as delicate a fabric as “the webs of morning” and shriveled at the lightest touch. On April 10 Gorky arrived on a mission to solicit money and support for the Russian revolutionary movement. He was accompanied, according to the newspapers, by his “young charming wife.” Despite the rain he was greeted at the pier in Hoboken by thousands who hailed him as another Kossuth or Garibaldi. Wearing boots and a blue peasant blouse, he was feted the day after at a dinner at which plans were announced for a great gala fund-raising banquet; its sponsors were, among others, Clemens, Howells, Finley Peter Dunne, and Jane Addams. “If we can build a Russian republic to give its persecuted peoples the same freedom which we enjoy,” Clemens said that evening, with the guest of honor seated at his right, “let us by all means go on and do it.” “Let there be light!” said a cartoon in the New York World on April 12; it showed the Statue of Liberty bending down to light Gorky’s torch. The World’s cartoon the next day showed Mark Twain, a “Yankee in Czar Nicholas’ Court,” toppling the Romanov throne with a mighty push of his pen. (“The Czar’s Soliloquy,” Clemens’ most extended statement on the subject, had appeared in March 1905 in the North American Review.) But by Saturday, April 14, just four days after Gorky’s arrival, the honeymoon was over. In reprisal against Gorky, who, after all these nice gestures, had just signed an exclusive contract with a rival paper, Hearst’s American, the World broke a story apparently based on information supplied by the Russian Embassy. “Gorky Brings Actress Here as ‘Mme. Gorky.’” the headline ran. Gorky’s “young charming wife,” as his inner circle of supporters had known and worried about from the start, was his mistress, Maria Andreyeva, an actress (he had been separated from his legal wife for years). The scandal reverberated. Gorky and Madame Andreyeva, turned out of one hotel after another by irate managers, finally found a place to stay with friends on Staten Island (the Sun warned that “the purity of our inns is threatened”). That Saturday afternoon Paine ran into Howells coming out of Clemens’ house at 21 Fifth Avenue. Howells was wearing “an unhappy, hunted look” upstairs was Clemens, agitated and brusque. Paine wondered if the two had quarreled; they had only been trying to solve the problem of what to do with the reporters downstairs. “I am a revolutionist—by birth, breeding, principle, and everything else,” Clemens finally told them, but he explained that Gorky’s “efficiency as a persuader” was now seriously “impaired”—“I was about to say destroyed”—by his violation of certain “laws of conduct.” Soon after this he and Howells resigned as sponsors, and the fundraising banquet was abandoned.
It had been a remarkable week, the sociologist Franklin Giddings wrote in an article which Clemens found uncomfortably, remorselessly severe: In Missouri three innocent Negroes had just been physically lynched, in New York two visiting Russians had just been socially and morally lynched, and no one protested. There was no doubt that as advance man for the revolution Gorky had botched his job. He should have had a guardian to keep him out of trouble, Clemens said—“The man might just as well have appeared in public in his shirt-tail.” Soon, in an attempt to justify his own uncomfortable retreat, he was saying that Gorky had violated custom and that this was worse than violating the law, because law is only sand, while “custom is custom; it is built of brass, boiler iron, granite; facts, reasonings, arguments have no more effect upon it than the idle winds have upon Gibraltar.” Still, it was humiliating to have to postpone the liberation of 150,000,000 Russians just because one of them had left his pants at home; it was humiliating to say hurrah for Gorky’s program of bloodshed and dynamite and then balk at what was only a domestic irregularity (the Russian divorce laws prevented Gorky from marrying Madame Andreyeva). And Clemens had cause to worry that his own “efficiency as a persuader” had been seriously impaired by the episode. It took nothing less than an act of God, the San Francisco earthquake on April 18, to spare him and the other amateur revolutionists further mortification in the newspapers.
II
At York Harbor, Maine, in the summer of 1902, Clemens watched hopelessly as Livy lapsed into her last illness. They had traveled from Riverdale in Rogers’ yacht shortly after Clemens returned from Hannibal, and, in a rented house overlooking the York River and only a few miles away from Howells at Kittery Point, they expected a quiet time with a few visitors. Nonetheless, by the beginning of August it was apparent that a breakdown was coming on; in order to breathe, Livy now sat upright in her bed most of the night. Clemens blamed it on the accumulated strain of five years of anxiety about Jean. On August 12, a day after she entertained at tea for what proved to be the last time—among the guests were Howells and a singing teacher named Madame Hartwig who came with a letter of introduction from Queen Elizabeth of Rumania—she had a choking fit, brought on by a combination of asthma and heart strain. She and Clemens believed she was dying. For weeks afterward, while the Kanawha waited for orders to take them back to Riverdale, she hardly improved, seemed once or twice again to be dying. The doctors said her collapse was due to organic heart disease and nervous prostration. In between their visits, while they did what they could, appeared the inevitable Dr. Helmer, the osteopath, who came over from his vacation in Vermont to give her a treatment that left her aching all over. By the middle of October she had recovered sufficiently to be taken to Riverdale in a special through train, with a locomotive on either end, that Clemens had gone to Boston to arrange for. Howells spent a “ghostly afternoon” with him there lunching at Young’s Hotel, where Redpath’s lecturers used to meet at the start of the season, and fighting off the specters of the old days.
From that day in August until she died in Florence twenty-two months later, Livy declined steadily. She often thought she was suffocating, and after she was revived by oxygen or injections of brandy she lay back haggard and quivering with fright. “I don’t want to die,” she said to Clemens. The time had come for a heroic ruse. He told her, “I more believe in the immortality of the soul than misbelieve in it,” and at first she was reassured and grateful. But by this time her orthodoxy had been too deeply eroded by him to give her much comfort; she knew he said this only for her sake. “Almost the only crime of my life which causes me bitterness now,” he told Clara after Livy’s death, was to violate the sanctities of her “spiritual shelter and refuge.” And it was certainly one of the bitter ironies of their marriage that after all these years he should be singled out, by Livy’s doctors and implicitly by Livy herself, as the chief external cause of the nervous states that went along with hyperthyroid heart disease. In Riverdale during the fall and winter of 1902 she was isolated in her room, and Clemens was prevented from paying her even a brief visit. On December 30 he saw her for five minutes, the first time in three months, and on their thirty-third wedding anniversary in February he again had only five minutes with her. He communicated with her by notes, playful, affectionate, some of them written in a private code: “Sozodont and sozodont and sal ammoniac synchronously pax vobiscum, S.L.C.”—by which he meant to say that he was ever passionately hers.
“Poor Livy drags along drearily,” Clemens had written to Twichell in October, just as her long isolation from him was beginning. “It must be hard times for that turbulent spirit. It will be a long time before she is on her feet again.” Without her he felt “helpless” in literary matters. He now had “no editor—no censor,” he told Frederick Duneka of Harper; even Howells failed him, for after reading a story (“Was It Heaven? Or Hell?”) in manuscript, Howells said it was “all right—whereas it wasn’t.” It was Clara who told him there was too much sermon in it, and he took the manuscript back from the magazine and revised it. In Clara and Jean and a little later in his private secretary, Clemens looked for a symbolic replacement for Liv
y, just as Livy had replaced Mary Fairbanks. During the sixty-seventh-birthday dinner given in his honor at the Metropolitan Club, Clemens spoke about old friends who were present, about the “great and beautiful country … a delectable land” where he had spent his boyhood, and finally about his debt to Livy, “the larger part, the better part” of him. Three days later, writing to Livy from Elmira, where he attended a niece’s wedding in the Langdon parlor, he recalled for her the joy and excitement and hilarity of their own wedding, and then he told her about the “grand and flattersome” birthday banquet. “It was the last name and the last praise (yours) uttered that night that brought the mighty burst” of applause, he wrote, and he added Howells’ comment that it was the best speech he ever made. “It was splendid to close, like that, with Mrs. Clemens.” But in Livy’s state such jubilance had to be handled with care. “Clara dear,” he wrote at the head of the page, aware that a strange spirit sometimes possessed him even when he was vigilant, “this is to your mother but you must not risk showing it to her without reading it first yourself.”
Livy’s doctors told him to take her to Florence to stay the following winter. His friends guessed they would stay indefinitely. That summer, in between business trips to New York, he worked in his study at Quarry Farm for the last time. At the beginning of October he visited Susy’s grave in Woodlawn Cemetery and placed some flowers there. Later that month he and Livy sailed from New York. With them were Clara and Jean; a trained nurse; their maid, Kate Leary; and Miss Isabel V. Lyon of Hartford, thirty-five years old, Clemens’ personal secretary. At Genoa, on the orders of the Italian ambassador, they were passed through customs without examination, and they moved into Villa di Quarto on the outskirts of Florence, an enormous, gloomy, and unsatisfactory house with the comforts of a fortress. Soon Clemens was hunting for a better place and all the while carrying on a vendetta against their American-born landlady, Countess Massiglia, who seemed as determined to get him out as he was to leave. They quarreled at first because she had removed some furnishings that were supposed to go with the villa. He suspected her of cutting the telephone wires, locking the gates, turning off the water, even smearing her large dogs with kerosene and then loosing them to rub up against his visitors. By April he had begun a suit against her for breach of contract and failure to maintain her cesspools properly; in the same litigious mood, after Livy’s death he planned a campaign against the Hamburg-America Line and accused the doctor who attended her in Florence of overcharging and of maliciously withholding the death certificate.
Throughout the cold and rainy winter, no improvement over the climate of Riverdale, Clemens was allowed to see her once a day; she continued to grow weaker. She was worried about their medical expenses, which were prodigious. To set her mind at rest he turned out about thirty-seven thousand words of magazine material for Harper’s in less than a month, and then, beginning in January, he dictated his autobiography to Isabel Lyon for two hours each morning. After a winter of hard work, bronchitis, and rheumatism, he was beginning to look older than his sixty-eight years. “I am passing off the stage,” he joked with William Lyon Phelps when they met at a concert of Clara’s in April, “and now my daughter is the famous member of the family.” When Phelps called at Villa di Quarto a few days later he noted a constant twitching in Clemens’ right cheek; Clemens seemed nervous and restless, smoked three cigars during an hour’s talk. The old triumphant slow-paced drawl came back only when Phelps asked him how he felt about his legendary rise from obscurity. “Well,” he answered, “I do look back upon my career with considerable satisfaction.”
By May, although Livy talked about moving to another villa for the summer, it was clear that she had given up. She talked to Kate Leary about being buried in the lavender satin dress she had bought in New York. After a brief remission, when she suddenly looked bright and young again, Clemens saw in her gaze “that pathetic something,” he wrote to Gilder, “which betrays the secret of a waning hope.” It was what he had learned to expect, and when she died on the evening of June 5, sitting upright in bed with the oxygen tube in her mouth, it came to him not like the thunderclap of Susy’s death but as inevitable, and a portent of his own. Looking at her for the last time, he remembered the face he had first seen in Charley Langdon’s ivory miniature, and he was “full of remorse for things done and said in the 34 years of married life that hurt Livy’s heart.” A few weeks later he made note of “a calamity”: “I cannot reproduce Livy’s face in my mind’s eye.” He described himself, characteristically, as feeling penniless and fifty million dollars in debt. After an accident in which he nearly fell out of one of the Countess’s second-story windows he felt certain that “in my bereaved circumstances the world would have been sure it was suicide.” But it was his daughters who were in a state of shock. Jean had had her first epileptic seizure in over a year; during most of the five years after Livy’s death and before her own in 1909 she would be in and out of various sanatoriums. Clara had a nervous breakdown, and she kept to her bed for the trip home from Naples to New York at the end of June. That fall she entered a rest home on Sixty-ninth Street and saw no one but a trained nurse and a specialist. The pattern of Livy’s last years was ironically, perhaps vindictively, repeated: for a year Clemens was not allowed to visit Clara, telephone her, or even write to her.
III
The furniture from the Hartford house was unpacked and installed at 21 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Ninth Street, and in the fall of 1904 Clemens moved into what was to be his home for the next four years. The loneliness of his life here was only deepened by the melancholy music of an Aeolian Orchestrelle, a sort of player organ for which, as Clemens later told Clara apologetically, he had paid $2,600. He always had a passion for the hurdy-gurdy, for ballads and jubilee hymns; now, at least, his taste was being elevated, he told her, for among the composers of the sixty pieces of music that the machine rendered were Beethoven, Wagner, and Schubert. Lying back on a sofa, smoking and musing, he listened for two or three hours every night while Isabel Lyon worked it for him. With Clara away and Jean unpredictable, he had come to depend on her. She had his entire confidence. He had, after all, dictated to her portions of that autobiography which he believed was the most truthful book ever written, which would show him nakeder than Adam and Eve and would tell what Howells said could never be told about any man—“the black heart’s-truth.” In his dressing room or at the dinner table he spoke to her with a freedom he would not have dared with Livy or his daughters. (At dinner early in 1906 he remarked to her about the estrangement between Taft and Theodore Roosevelt, “I thought Taft was Roosevelt’s miscarriage preserved in alcohol.”) She supervised his social and business affairs and ran the house at 21 Fifth Avenue; the living expenses were over fifty dollars a day by 1906, Paine was shocked to realize, and Clemens never questioned anything.
Isabel Lyon had also taken over some of Livy’s role as editor. During the summer of 1905 Clemens went back to his old habit of working on a number of projects almost simultaneously, abandoning one in the middle when his interest flagged and jumping to another; he had always worked this way, he told Colonel Higginson, and he liked it. That summer, with his customary suspension of self-criticism, he was working sporadically on The Mysterious Stranger, on Three Thousand Years among the Microbes, on a revision of “Adam’s Diary,” and, at the farthest end of the scale, on a sentimental story about cruelty to animals, “A Horse’s Tale,” whose human heroine was Susy. One of the constants running through this gamut of quality was the editorial voice of Isabel Lyon. “Miss Lyon voted against the revision,” Clemens noted after he had worked over “Adam’s Diary,” “but she wouldn’t vote against it now.” “Miss Lyon likes it nearly as much as I do,” he told Duneka about “A Horse’s Tale.” She had a voice in family affairs, too. It was because of her, Clemens later said, that he believed Jean was crazy and should live in an institution instead of at home, where, he mourned, she had belonged all the while. Miss Lyon followed the family pa
ttern of “nervous collapses,” needed isolation and rest, had hysterics and tantrums; later he claimed that all her disturbances came out of the whiskey bottle. He also claimed later that she had sexual designs on him. Whether this was true or not, it was certainly true that she became possessive of her influence over him and jealous of others, and that she was largely responsible for creating a court atmosphere in which “the king” was surrounded by plots and counterplots straight out of Saint-Simon’s Versailles if not Graustark itself. It took a palace revolution to depose Isabel Lyon in 1909, when she went into permanent banishment.
To celebrate Mark Twain’s seventieth birthday, men and women of letters and of eminence in general were invited to attend a great banquet at Delmonico’s, the society sanctum, on December 5, 1905. After meeting the guest of honor at a reception, they filed into Delmonico’s red room to the music of a forty-piece orchestra from the Metropolitan Opera House. Surrounded by potted palms and huge gilt mirrors, they dined on fillet of kingfish, saddle of lamb, Baltimore terrapin, quail, and redhead duck washed down with sauterne, champagne, and brandy. Then they settled back to absorb five hours of toasts, poems, and speeches, every word of which, together with photographs of the guests by Byron, was preserved in a special thirty-two-page supplement to the Christmas issue of Harper’s Weekly. In the small hours the guests started for home carrying as souvenirs of the occasion foot-high plaster busts of Mark Twain.
Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography Page 54
