"Mostly He Told The Truth": The Mystery of Mark Twain's Lioness Part 2

Well, this post has been a long time coming. Part 1 sketched out the dispute, and noted that there have been three versions of the story of Isobel Lyon and Mark Twain: Lyons's version, ably laid out by Laura Skandera-Trombley in Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years (2010) (as I'm giving Trombley something of a hard time on this, it's a pleasure to be able to unstintingly praise her Mark Twain in the COmpany of Women); Jean Clemens's version, told equally well in Karen Lystra's Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years (2006). Lystra has two advantages over Trombley: she delves more into the financial records, and is not saddled with a primary source (Lyon) whose credibility she defends even while acknowledging that she rewrote her own diary to make herself look better.

As of my last writing, I had not read the Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript ("A-L Ms"), in which the great wordsmith's own account is finally published. Now--well, it's complicated. You can dismiss Hamlin Hill's blanket rejection of the A-L Ms and of Clemens's acuity when he write it. The heart-wrenching essay, "The Death of Jean" he wrote after the A-L Ms had already made me skeptical of Hill's view. The A-L Ms itself is far more complex than Hill is willing to allow. Boxed as she is into her role as Lyon's champion, Trombley must likewise reject it; she does so, but also rejects Twain's political musings of the same era, which shaped my own political outlook and are some if the best parts of the Autobiography. Lystra is closer, I think, focusing on Twain's profound guilt for his daughter Jean's incarceration in medical treatment facilities, and banished from her family. (Clara, more fortunately, was sent to Europe to spend money.)

The A-L Ms is a strange document, and reflects its author's ambivalence toward sexuality in women--he could idealize "My Platonic Sweetheart" while writing admiringly of women's greater sexual prowess than men's in pieces posthumously published in Mark Twain in Eruption(1940). And his complex attitude towards women can be seen in his half-admiring, half-contemptuous dissection of Mary Baker Eddy. Max Geismar's observation that Twain seems a little fascinated, even a tad drawn to Eddy, rings true, even as he denounces her.

So too in the A-L Ms, Twain veers from contemptuous to admiring of Lyon. He acknowledges the pleasure he took in her company, he acknowledges her attractiveness to him. In a particularly memorable passage, he berates Ashcroft for marrying her without love, as a convenience. He in one breath accuses her of complicity in this loveless marriage, and in the next reproaches him for his coldness, her for her self-deception.

Trombley in her book, and in an interview reprinted on her Amazon page says that "The two were emotionally intimate confidants. Isabel was charged with handling every aspect of Mark Twain’s life. Isabel decided who was allowed to see Twain, what he would eat, what he would wear, etc. Twain was utterly dependent upon her--physically, intellectually and emotionally." He admits as much in the A-L Ms. Explicitly.

The A-L Ms is interesting because of how Twain must dance around the story. He revs himself up to the great admissions, but then backs off to the subsidiary issues--how Lyon used far more of his money for her clothing needs than the admittedly low salary he paid her, instances of her obtaining control over his life, and those of his household staff. And then starts revving himself up to a big disclosure--that he valued her so much that he slighted his own children. He says it again and again, but struggles with it, and dances away from it. Vituperation, as I mentioned in an earlier post, was a way he could work of his less-acceptable emotions, like guilt or shame. And he was famous for it--there are cruel passages and even scurrilities in his notebooks about others who he felt had wronged him--Elisha Bliss, who published him, James Paige, to name but two. He was a good hater, and gets off some cruel lines about isabel Lyon. And yet has a tenderness toward her in other passages.

Reading between the lines, I think it's clear that he loved Lyon in a way, not necessarily a consciously romantic way, a way that he felt that he couldn't acknowledge without betraying his life-long love for his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens ("Livy" to the family.) He couldn't move on, and she seems to have desired marriage to him. She was, in effect, urging him to move on and he punished her for that.

That Ashcroft used her--that seems to be a unanimous opinion; nobody gives him a good press--was her second misfortune.

Lyon appears to have appropriated, with Clemens's tacit consent, some money, and some more without it. If she though that he was going to marry her, as she seems to have for some time, she might have viewed it as doing nothing wrong.

We'll never know, of course. It might have been all very different. yet Lyon was loyal to him after his death, never speaking harshly of him.

For what it's worth Lyon denied that use was in love with Clemens or he with her to Hal Holbrook--yet she still smoked, 48 years after his death, the pipe he gave her, and, as Holbrook writes, and Trombley notes, Lyon spoke warmly of him, and helped him more than anybody else to gain a sense of her. As Trombley quotes Holbrook, Lyon insisted that the reformer employer be remembered "as a very serious-minded man. A man who felt deeply about the world around him and the people in it, an extremely sensitive man, and that his sense of humor came from this well of seriousness." (Trombley, 261)

As Plautus wrote, "Love is very fruitful, both of honey and gall."

The Mystery of Mark Twain's Lioness Part 1 Redux

[I don't normally do reposts, but what follows is a revised version of a post from March 17, 2010, in which I address issues that would be illuminated by the publication, as part of the complete Autobiography of Mark Twain, of the long-suppressed Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript, in which Mark Twain gives his perspective of the events discussed below. Ironically, while Jean Clemens and Isabel Lyon have had the tale told from their perspective, each by an able scholar, only now, more than 5 years after the post I optimistically labelled Part 1, can the great writer's voice be heard. So this post will provide context for my reaction to the Ashcroft-Lyon manuscript, which I hope to post by Friday, if not before.]

The recent (2010) publication of Laura Skandera-Trombley's book,
Mark Twain's Other Woman is significant in that it presents a well-sourced, sympathetic account of Twain's relationship with Isabel Lyon who started out as his wife's social secretary, and subsequently became his personal secretary in a relationship that was both unconventional and intense--on both sides. The relationship ended with charges of embezzlement and more on Twain's part, and ferocious countercharges by Lyon's recently-acquired husband, Twain's business manager, Ralph Ashcroft. Lyon, interstingly, never spoke out against the man she called "the King." After making the papers, and causing a social scandal, it was forgotten for 60 years after Mark Twain's death.

Trombley's book is well written, and her use of Lyon's voluminous papers adds details to a period in Twain's life that his too often been relegated to the unremitting darkness portrayed by Hamlin Hill's overtly hostile biography God's Fool (1973) (which revived the Lyon story) or the equally unrealistic sunniness of Albert Bigelow Paine's important but hagiographical authorized biography, published in 1912. Hill's bleakness and blithe assumption that the unfortunate Miss Lyon was herself without any flaw is a lovely myth, with Twain as a doddering, drunken Lear and Clara and Jean Clemens vying for the roles of Goneril and Regan. Trombley's book is not myth; it cuts the story down to mortall side, and works in shades other than primary colors. Trombley is, like Hill, a supporter of Lyon's, but, unlike Hill, has an abiding affection for Twain.

Still, Trombley to some extent buys into Hill's paradigm; she is rather prone to disparage Twain's later writings in a way that denies their political influence on antiwar protestors as late as the Vietnam era. Where she disparages these works, such as "The War Prayer" and "King Leopold's Soliloquy" as "shrill" and marred by a "constant note of misanthropy" (pp. 64, 62), writers such as Maxwell Geismar found them bracing and inspirational enough to compile a book length anthology of them, which I have owned since I was a teenager, and which helped me form my own political outlook.

More to the point, though, Trombley's overt championship of Lyon leads her to make all credibility calls in Lyon's favor, even though Lyon's own diaries (as Trombley notes) were heavily edited by her, and her 1906 daily reminder, at least, exists in multiple, inconsistent forms, devised "with the intention of either misleading anyone who would read he reminder or as a backup in case the original was stolen." (Trombley, p. xvi). Lyon is thus that well-recognized literary (and legal) figure, the unreliable narrator (or witness). Yet Trombley by and large trusts her, in a manner that in places borders on the naive. The same can be said for the actual financial transactions at issue. For example, Trombley dismisses the Clemens's statement that a power of attorney Twain executed in favor of Lyon and Ashcroft (before their marriage) had been given to him to sign among a batch of papers, and he had just done it, relying on his business manager and secretary, like Henry Blake relying on Radar O'Reilly. She dismisses this account relying on the boilerplate statement used in all notarizations that the document was signed in the presence of the notary as conclusive. Now, Trombley wrote in 2010, and although it isn't her field, the systemic prevalence of fraudulent "robo-signed" mortgage assignments and other documents--all notarized--might have given her pause.

In other words, Trombley's book, good though it is, is an advocate's piece, and needs to be read in conjunction with a corrective. Fortunately, there is one.

A more skeptical view of Lyon's account is taken by Karen Lystra in her 2004 book Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years. Lystra rebuts Hill's uncritical acceptance of Lyon's last version of events, and deploys the unpublished diaries and a manuscript by Twain's youngest daughter, Jean Clemens, whom she asserts Lyon banished from her father's house in order to maximize her chances of marrying him. Lystra's book is an important corrective to Trombley's championship of Lyon. In championing Jean, Lystra carefully examines the transactions between Twain, Lyon, and Twain's business manager Ralph Ashcroft (who married Lyon in 1909). Lystra is both more detailed and skeptical on these transactions than is Trombley; where Lystra asserts that Twain's notary who notarized his power of attorney in favor of Lyon routinely notarized documents without Twain's presence (an inappropriate, but not uncommon, practice even today, and one which one finds especially extended to "special" clients--the rich and famous, for example).

Another questionable move on Trombley's part which is her acceptance as if uncontroversial of Lyon's claim that Jean Clemens attacked on two occasions the family's long-time servant and friend Katy Leary. (82, 96-97) Lyon's account is questioned quite acutely by Lystra, who suggests that Lyon misinterpreted Jean's own statement of what happened, and embroidered it based on stereotypes of epileptics which were common in these years. Trombley simply treats Lyon's observations as self-evidently true, and suggests it indicates that Jean suffered from postictal psychosis. (82; see also here). Well, perhaps. If it happened--it is unhelpful that Trombley does not address Lystra's critique of Lyon's account, which is uncorroborated by Jean's papers, or Katy Leary's account of life with the Clemens family--then Trombley's explanation fits the facts. But when only Lyon establishes the facts, we have the problem of the unreliable narrator again, and those altered diaries are especially disturbing.

It doesn't do to overstate the matter; it's not that Lyon cannot be right absent corroboration; however, the fact that she is a somewhat unreliable narrator and the unpleasant denoument of her relationship with Twain suggest that Lystra's critique deserves to be considered. It's Trombley's decision not to do this which is troubling, especially as she is certainly aware of Lystra's critique--she cites Lystra as a source at least twice in her footnotes, and in fact provided a blurb for the book's jacket in 2004. And yet, she never engages with Lystra's rather powerful critique of the Hill-Lyon perspective.

While both Jean and Lyon have modern champions, the one voice which has not been heard in all of this is Mark Twain's. He left behind a 429 page manuscript, commonly known as the Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript," which has not been published to date. It is only known in snippets, when quoted by Hill, Lystra or Trombley. They have widely varying estimations of it; Hill cites it as evidence of senility, Trombley calls it "bizarre" (p. xiv), while Lystra defends Twain's accuracy and acuity in writing it, as well as depicting it as a great effort to come clean about his own guilt in banishing Jean for years while under the sway of Lyon. Until the manuscript is published, there is no way to know whose characterization is more apt; the great writer, one hundred years after his death is voiceless in this riveting drama.

One thing I'd say about his mental capacities in his last months (assailed by Hill), however is this: Twain's last essay, The Death of Jean, written in the days after her death on Christmas Eve 1909, and a mere five months before his own death, is powerful, moving, and has all the hallmarks of Twain at his finest.

(edited and expanded)

Next: A Tentative View of L'Affaire Lyon

The Death of Jean: Mark Twain's Autobiography Volume 3, Part 1

Many years ago (ok, 1987. Leave off, willya?), I wrote my senior thesis on the Autobiography of Mark Twain, which had not been, at that time, published in its entirely, but only in fragmentary editions that were either left unfinished: Albert Bigelow Paine's 2 volume Mark Twain's Autobiography (1924)--which at least tried to keep faith with the author; Bernard DeVoto's 1940 culling of excerpts Mark Twain in Eruption; Charles Neider's fundamentally fraudulent, and appallingly mislabeled The Autobiography of Mark Twain (1960),which betrayed the author by scrapping his stream of consciousness structure, political musings, and other controversial content, in favor of a warm, Reader's Digest youth-to-old-age series of anecdotes. (Since then, the late Michael J. Kiskis released an admittedly incomplete version, the sections Twain published in his own lifetime in the pass of the North American Review, called Mark Twain's Autobiography. Unlike Neider, who boasted that he had improved Twain's writing (!), Kiskis Professor referred to his own book, in a letter he kindly sent me, as a useful introduction until the definitive University of California edition was out. He also quite reasonably defended its value in its own right as the last extended piece Twain presented the public, and the most poliched version he reached of the admittedly much longer Autobiographical Dictations.)

One of the few touches I admired in Neider's volume was his addition, in its proper place, of Twain's touching--one might say heart-breaking--tribute to his daughter Jean, the essay The Death of Jean, originally published by Paine in his collection What is Man? Neider's restoration of the piece was right. In his edition--like Paine's publication of the piece--is edited. It's powerful and moving, and more full than Paine's--bit still cut, in two significant aspects.

We know that, now that The Autobiography of Mark Twain volume 3 is, at long last, out. I just received it, and flipping through, noticed that in the new edition, "The Death of Jean" begins with the author--writing on Christmas Eve, shortly after Jean's death in her bath after an epileptic seizure--writing that with her data, the Autobiography is closed, its purpose in leaving his children a source of income after his death moot, as Clara was now well off, and Jean beyond his help. (Pp. 310-311) (Clemens vacillated on the purpose of the Autobiography--at times he loved it for itself, attires he saw it as a self-help copyright extension, at times he saw it as a literary stroke of genius. He contained multitudes, what can I say?)

There are other passages that were new to me, too, including the suggestion that Jean's "disease, and its awful convulsions, wore out her gentle mother's strength with grief and watching and anxiety, and caused her death, poor Livy!" (P. 316). As Resa Willis notes, earlier he blamed himself for her death--the strain of the round-the-world tour, the loss of their Hartford home, his visiting her too often in her sickroom. Willis also notes that Jean had not had a seizure for 13 months before her mother's death.

Here, in his renewed grief, he offloads some of his guilt onto Jean, simultaneously absolving her; mourning her sincerely, but trying to shed a burden too long carried. (Again, Willis notes that Olivia Langdon Clemens had suffered from heart trouble and hyperthyroidism, among other medical problems, for years.)

All of which is to say that Clemens was a complicated man, and that his editors tried to smooth out his jagged edges. A mistake, I think; we need Mark Twain, but we need him in all his complexity and human frailty. And that's what he tried to give us, and why he was "speaking from the grave."

As From the Grave...

In the first volume of 1the 1924 edition of "Mark Twain's Autobiography" (to use the title employed by his editor, Albert Bigelow Paine used for his edition), a little preface begins the work:

AS FROM THE GRAVE

In this Autobiography I shall keep in mind the fact that I am speaking from the grave. I am literally speaking from the grave, because I shall be dead when the book issues from the press.

I speak from the grave rather than with my living tongue, for a good reason: I can speak thence freely. When a man is writing a book dealing with the privacies of his life--a book which is to be read while he is still alive--he shrinks from speaking his whole frank mind; all his attempts to do it fail, he recognizes that he is trying to do a thing which is wholly impossible to a human being. The frankest and freest and privatest product of the human mind and heart is a love letter; the writer gets his limitless freedom of statement and expression from his sense that no stranger is going to see what he is writing. Sometimes there is a breach-of-promise case by and by; and when he sees his letter in print it makes him cruelly uncomfortable and he perceives that he never would have unbosomed himself to that large and honest degree if he had known that he was writing for the public. He cannot find anything in the letter that was not true, honest, and respect-worthy; but no matter, he would have been very much more reserved if he had known he was writing for print.

It has seemed to me that I could be as frank and free and unembarrassed as a love letter if I knew that what I was writing would be exposed to no eye until I was dead, and unaware, and indifferent.

MARK TWAIN

Despite this, preface, the Autobiography is not as confessional as all that. Oh, a bit here and there--more so in the (at last!) unexpurgated edition University of California Press has been publishing--than in Paine's edition, and as to the sanitized, anecdotal, de-fanged botch released by Charles Neider--well, the less said the better. But there is a mystery at the end of his life--his relationship with Isabel Lyon--and Twain's long-suppressed account will be included in the forthcoming volume 3:

The surprising final chapter of a great American life.

When the first volume of Mark Twain’s uncensored Autobiography was published in 2010, it was hailed as an essential addition to the shelf of his works and a crucial document for our understanding of the great humorist’s life and times. This third and final volume crowns and completes his life’s work. Like its companion volumes, it chronicles Twain's inner and outer life through a series of daily dictations that go wherever his fancy leads.

Created from March 1907 to December 1909, these dictations present Mark Twain at the end of his life: receiving an honorary degree from Oxford University; railing against Theodore Roosevelt; founding numerous clubs; incredulous at an exhibition of the Holy Grail; credulous about the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays; relaxing in Bermuda; observing (and investing in) new technologies. The Autobiography’s “Closing Words” movingly commemorate his daughter Jean, who died on Christmas Eve 1909. Also included in this volume is the previously unpublished “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” Mark Twain’s caustic indictment of his “putrescent pair” of secretaries and the havoc that erupted in his house during their residency.

Fitfully published in fragments at intervals throughout the twentieth century, Autobiography of Mark Twain has now been critically reconstructed and made available as it was intended to be read. Fully annotated by the editors of the Mark Twain Project, the complete Autobiography emerges as a landmark publication in American literature.

The closing words--published as The Death of Jean by Paine, wisely added to end the Autobiography by Neider, in his one improvement to the text, is heart-rending. Seriously, almost everybody who thinks they know Mark Twain--or Samuel L. Clemens, for that matter--is about to learn something.

I've pre-ordered my copy. This is the big one.