Twain's End (44 page)

Twain scholars have drawn up sides as to what caused this rift between Twain and the closest person in his life. One camp takes Twain's diatribe against Lyon at face value, believing that Lyon actually stole from him . . . when she wasn't trying to seduce him—unsuccessfully, according to the indignant Twain, who painted himself in an almost virginal light. The other position speculates that Clemens's daughter Clara was behind his abrupt betrayal of the most important woman in his life at the time. Twain approved of Isabel's sudden engagement to Ralph Ashcroft even as reporters were speculating
about his own engagement to her; could Isabel's hurried wedding to another man have been part of a plan to cover up his daughter Clara's affair with her accompanist, Will Wark?

In this scenario, Twain had struck a deal with Clara: he would cease cohabitating with Isabel (who had an adjoining bedroom in his house) if Clara would give up the married Wark and let Ossip Gabrilowitsch make an honest woman of her, thus saving the reputations of both Clemens and his daughter. I believe that Clemens fully intended to keep Isabel as his secretary when she married Ralph, and fooled himself into believing that he could continue his close relationship with her after she was another man's wife. Interestingly, he told Isabel shortly after her marriage, “Remember, whatever I do is because of a promise I have made to Clara.”

Meanwhile, Clara had started a letter-writing campaign against Isabel, as well as asking Standard Oil magnate H. H. Rogers to audit Isabel's accounts for possible embezzlement. On April 15, 1909, Clemens fired Isabel, yet he still had not made a public statement against her. The breaking point in Clemens's ability to go along with the scheme, it seems to me, was Ashcroft's letter sent two weeks after Clemens had fired Isabel, admonishing Clemens “to be a man” and defend Isabel against his daughter whose brain was “diseased with envy, malice, and jealousy.” Already a prideful man, Clemens might have been especially sensitive to attacks on his virility, in particular from a man who was forty years his junior and had just married his beloved secretary. Twain hints in “Letters from Earth,” written during that period, about disappointment in his own sexual capabilities:

[
M
]
an is only briefly competent. . . . After fifty his performance is of poor quality; the intervals between are wide, and its satisfactions of no great quality to either party; whereas his great-grandmother is as good as new.

In questioning Clemens's manhood, Ashcroft might have chosen the worst possible tack to rally Clemens behind him.

From this point on, Clemens's effort to distance himself from
Lyon took on the roar of a wounded beast, as if he were striking back after believing he had lost her to his virile young business associate.

To understand the relationship between Isabel Lyon and Sam Clemens, I had to understand the man. I went on pilgrimages to the places Clemens traveled or lived in while in the company of Isabel Lyon: New York City; Redding, Connecticut; Bermuda; and Florence, Italy. However, it was my stop at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut, that altered the course of my book. The director there, Cindy Lovell, presented an overview of the two factions on the Lyon-Twain affair, then told me to go to the Mark Twain Papers in Berkeley, California, read Isabel Lyon's diary, and make up my mind for myself. I did so, and had my eyes opened.

From the pages of Lyon's daily reminder leapt a vibrant, intelligent, artistic woman who knew from the start that she was in a unique and historic position and was determined to make the best of it. From her first entry in 1903—“God does not put many such days into a woman's life”—she describes, over a six-year span, Clemens's actions and moods, the people who came to visit, and her own reactions. These observations became the road map for my story. Often I based the action on Isabel's entries, fleshing out the scenes with my imagination and nuggets from my research. In some cases, I used snippets of Lyon's and Clemens's own words. Clemens's incomparable gift for clever sayings was a novelist's dream; at times I plugged them into my characters' conversations, then embroidered around them.

As did the lion's share of events in
Twain's End,
the visit by Helen Keller, Anne Sullivan Macy, and John Macy actually happened. Isabel recorded that Helen was “plainly in love with Macy” and “he encourages this emotion and Helen not quite understanding it, makes no concealment of her feeling.” Mrs. Macy seemed “distressed” by it, telling Isabel that “in some ways Helen was still a child.” After reading hints in other sources about Helen's relationship with John Macy, I whooped out loud (in the very quiet Bancroft Library) when I came across this eyewitness account of its actuality in Isabel's diary. John Macy permanently left Anne Sullivan five years later, although she wouldn't
grant him a divorce. He subsequently fell in love with a deaf woman, with whom he had a daughter.

Beyond Isabel's diary and Mark Twain's writings,
A Lifetime with Mark Twain: The Memories of Katy Leary, for Thirty Years His Faithful and Devoted Servant
by Mary Lawson,
Mark Twain, Family Man
by Caroline Thomas Harnsberger, and
My Father: Mark Twain
by Clara Clemens provided important insights into my characters, especially when read between the lines.
Mark Twain's Other Woman
by Laura Skandera Trombley and Karen Lystra's
Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years
were illuminating reading as well. The volumes of the
Autobiography of Mark Twain,
especially Volume 3, which contains the infamous “Ashcroft-Lyon Manuscript,” informed my story greatly.

I first learned of one of the persons who I think greatly influenced the boy Sam Clemens in Ron Powers's
Mark Twain: A Life.
Jennie, the Clemens's house slave, was a character that I neither concocted for my book nor was her beating and subsequent sale “down the river” fictitious, although the story Clemens dictated to Isabel about Jennie came from my imagination. One has only to read Mark Twain's work to wonder what kind of mark his parents' treatment of someone so precious to him might have left upon him as a boy.

Isabel Lyon died at the age of ninety-four in New York City, working until her last few years as a secretary. She divorced Ashcroft after seventeen years of marriage. Actor Hal Holbrook consulted her in 1958 while developing his show,
Mark Twain Tonight,
recognizing her unmatched knowledge of Twain. She agreed to meet Holbrook on one condition: that he not repeat their conversation.

In the few months before she died, they met in her Greenwich Village basement apartment. There she would prop up her feet, pour herself a whiskey like she drank with Clemens, then talk of old times while puffing on the meerschaum pipe that Clemens had given her. She never did publicly speak out against Sam Clemens, nor would she address her character assassination at his hands. Perhaps she thought that innocence was enough.

W
HEN I VISIT STUDENTS,
I often address them in their school libraries. I tell the kids to look around at the books and imagine that behind each one is a person trying to speak to them. I realize now that I have understated the number. In reality, behind each book is a
crowd
of people, helping the author to get the story out.

In the front of the pack in the case of
Twain's End
is my agent, Emma Sweeney, who has stood with me since the book was just the wisp of an idea. Right with her is Karen Kosztolnyik, who has provided her patented kind-but-firm editorial encouragement and wisdom from the very start, and who has insisted, in her patient, dear way, that I give every last drop to the cause. I am thankful for their belief in me and my book.

I'm grateful as well for the tremendous support of the dream team at Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster: Carolyn Reidy, Louise Burke, Jen Bergstrom, Jennifer Robinson, Stephanie DeLuca, Liz Psaltis, Wendy Sheanin, Liz Perl, Michael Selleck, Lisa Litwack, and Becky Prager. This book would not be in your hands, friend-readers, without them.

I am indebted to the next group of people for making the staggering amount of field research necessary for this book an adventure and a pleasure: Cindy Lovell, executive director of the Mark Twain
House in Hartford; tour guide Daniel Sterner of the Mark Twain House; Neda Salem at the Mark Twain Papers at the University of California, Berkeley; Michael Wiertz and Carolyn Liv of Wave Hill, Riverdale, New York; Beatrice Simoni at the Pensione Bencistà in Fiesole, Italy; and Susan Boone Durkee, for the unforgettable day touring the Lobster Pot and the grounds of Stormfield, as well as for sharing her insights on Isabel Lyon and Twain and a chance to view the originals of her extraordinary portraits of the pair. I'm thankful for friends Ruth and Steve Berberich, Stephanie and Michael Connolly, and Stephanie Cowell, who were great helps and companions on various fact-finding missions. Thank you also to Diane Prucino and Tom Heyse for providing their mountain house as my writer's retreat.

Back home, I'm indebted to Karen Torghele, Jan Johnstone, and Thiery Goodman for their weekly infusions of support, and to Sue Edmonds, who not only is the most generous of cheerleaders, but the founder of this book. Thank you, Sue, for suggesting for the past few decades that Mark Twain would be a “really good subject.” It took me awhile to get the hint, but I'm so glad that I took your advice.

Behind the crowd, giving me a lifelong push, are my sisters and brothers, Margaret Edison, Jeanne Wensits, Carolyn Browning, Howard Doughty, Arlene Eifrid, and David Doughty, and my wonderful nieces and nephews, in particular Linette Edison and Mary Streshly, who so often shelter their traveling aunt. But most of all I am indebted to my husband, Mike, for applying support on a daily basis, and to my daughters, Lauren, Megan, and Ali, whose love is the rock upon which I write.

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