Excerpt from Mark Twain's Other Woman
Sitting alone in a little room in an old house in Montreal, I am thrown back through the years—by a single packet of written matter, which proves to be the 'forms' dictated by Mr. Clemens to me as his private secy. For answer to letters, invitations, the gifts of books—His private secretary—so private that the very mention of me is with held from the world by the turn of fate—Private—
—Isabel Von Kleek Lyon
An enduring mystery in Mark Twain's life concerns the events of his last decade, 1900 to 1910. Despite a multitude of published biographies, no one has ever determined exactly what took place during those final years and how those experiences affected him, both personally and professionally.
Writers have speculated on whether his final decade was ruled by a growing misanthropy, or whether he retained his keen sense of humor as he made his incisive social commentary. The public version for nearly a century has been that Twain went to his death a beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American, undeterred by life's sorrows and challenges. "I am not an American," Twain defiantly wrote, "I am the American." However lives are complicated, Twain's extraordinarily so, and as one long intrigued by the vagaries of Twain's life, I sensed that there had to be more to the story than the carefully cultivated, homogenized version that had been intact for so long.
The key that turned the lock and helped reveal the answers to these questions and many more was Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. For almost one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twain's life. After the death of his wife, Olivia Langdon, in 1904, Twain spent the last six years of his life largely in Isabel's company. To free himself from having to deal with professional and business matters, he willingly delegated the management of his schedule and finances to her. She was slavishly devoted to Twain: running the household staff, nursing him during his various illnesses, arranging amusements to keep boredom at bay, managing his increasingly unmanageable daughters, listening attentively as he read aloud what he'd written that day, acting as the gatekeeper to a enthralled public, and overseeing the construction of his final residence, Stormfield.
And then something happened that led to the dramatic breakup of that relationship. This book is an exploration of those events. In his final months, Twain resorted to giving vituperative press conferences and ranting in personal letters about how Isabel had injured him. He was obsessed with her and wrote about her for hours every day, all the while suffering from angina pains and gout attacks. His feelings were so strong that he needed almost a ream of paper to express them. Yet despite the inordinate attention Twain gave her before his death, Isabel has remained a friendless ghost haunting the margins of Mark Twain's biography. For decades, biographers deliberately omitted her from the official Twain story. Her potentially destructive power was so great that Albert Bigelow Paine, Twain's handpicked hagiographer, allowed only one timorous reference to her in his massive three-volume work, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912).
My curiosity was further piqued when I visited the Mark Twain Project at the University of California Berkeley in the early 1990s and examined their Isabel Lyon materials. Robert Hirst, the director of the Project, patiently carried out stacks of dusty boxes and folders. No formal cataloging of the collection had ever been done. In a cardboard box, I discovered Isabel's original daily reminders, diary, notebooks, date book, and letter book. She had exhaustively recorded the events of each day she had spent in Twain's presence. In a manila folder, I found letters written by Twain scholars decades earlier and without exception they agreed that Isabel was "a slovenly writer and not a perceptive observer." This was a forgotten woman.
What had been her attachment to Twain, I wondered? How had her writings come to be part of the Mark Twain Project? I was intrigued that she had kept such a voluminous and eloquent personal record of her years with him although it seemed to be held with little regard by the scholarly establishment. Isabel's is the only such detailed record of Twain's last years that exists. Yet, why had her papers been dismissed? Could it be that as a member of the working class, a secretary, she had been considered unimportant by members of the scholarly community? Perhaps there was something more to all of this, a deeper reason that no one had discovered. Intrigued, I decided that I would read through all of her writings.
I soon realized that there were some unusual aspects to Isabel's ephemera, beyond just being scattered all over the country. There was the sheer size of the collection; Isabel wrote constantly during her years with Twain. Also, her daily reminders and diary are heavily edited and in some cases hunks of pages have been ripped out. There is no mention of when this editing took place or why. In addition, Isabel made an undated, edited, handwritten copy of her 1906 daily reminder. It appears she made this second version with the intention of either misleading anyone who would read the book, or as a back up in case the original was stolen. Finally, as I discussed this project with various scholars, archive directors, and memorabilia collectors, I heard repeated rumors of a 1909 diary that had mysteriously vanished.
It took years to transcribe the personal writings that Isabel left behind—my eyes straining to decipher the handwriting she had scratched out. Thoughts obscured, in order to protect her inner life from voyeurs like myself. For Isabel was a possessor of secrets about the Clemens family so enormous that Twain and his daughter Clara were determined that she would be forever silenced. There is irony in the fact that one of America's greatest writers devoted the end of his life to insuring that one woman would never be able to tell her stories.
After Isabel had been summarily "fired" by Twain, he lived one year longer, full of malice and terribly lonely. Mentally and emotionally he could never let her go. Twain finally delivered his coup de grace in a letter sent to his daughter Clara, branding his former companion "a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded & salacious slut pining for seduction."
Twain had spent decades ruminating over how to control future depictions of his life. He had chosen Albert Bigelow Paine as his official biographer in part because of his tractability, and went so far as to direct that parts of the autobiography he dictated remain unpublished until one hundred years after his death. With no one left to contest him and with his authorized biography and autobiography representing his final say on the subject, Twain's monolithic version of his life would stand forever. Paine ever so delicately noted in the preface to his biography that "certain happenings" included within would "differ materially from the same incidents and episodes as set down in the writings of Mr. Clemens himself," volunteering that in his autobiography Twain "made no real pretense to accuracy of time, place, or circumstance—seeking... 'only to tell a good story'." Paine was quick to reassure the reader that his biography was unfailingly accurate as it was "supported by a unity of circumstance and conditions, and not from hearsay or vagrant printed items." Isabel, with her intimate knowledge of the family's secrets, had become an infuriating annoyance that was the only obstacle standing in the way of Paine's account and Twain's "good story."
The purpose of this book is to lift the layers of what has come to be accepted as truth about Mark Twain's life and to explore what actually existed in the beginning and what finally remained at the end. Indeed this account directly contradicts the well-established, genteel and genial image of one of America's literary icons. This is a story that Mark Twain was determined no one would ever tell.
Used by permission. Copyright Knopf.
