An enduring mystery in Mark Twain’s life concerns the events
of his last decade, from 1900 to 1910.
Despite many
Twain biographies, no one has ever determined exactly what
took place during those final years after the death of
Twain’s wife of thirty-four years and how those experiences
affected him, personally and professionally. For nearly a
century, it was believed that Twain went to his death a
beloved, wisecracking iconoclastic American (“I am not
an American,” Twain wrote; “I am the
American”), undeterred by life’s sorrows and challenges.
Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain
scholar at work today, suspected that there had to be more
to the story than the cultivated, carefully constructed
version that had been intact for so long. Trombley went in
search of the one woman whom she suspected had played the
largest role in Twain’s life during those final years and
who possibly held the answers to her questions about Twain’s
life and writings.
Now, in Mark Twain’s Other
Woman, after sixteen years of research, uncovering
never-before-read papers and personal letters, Trombley
tells the full story through Isabel Lyon’s meticulous daily
journals, the only detailed record of Twain’s last years
that exists, journals overlooked by Twain’s previous
biographers.
For one hundred years, Isabel Van Kleek
Lyon has been the mystery woman in Mark Twain’s life. Twain
spent the bulk of his last six years in the company of
Isabel, who was responsible for overseeing his schedule and
finances, nursing him through several illnesses, managing
his increasingly unmanageable daughters, running his
household, arranging amusements, as well as presiding over
the construction of his final residence. Isabel Lyon also
served as Twain’s adoring audience (she called him “the
King”), listening attentively as he read aloud to her what
he’d written that day. She was Twain’s gatekeeper to an
enthralled public.
Trombley writes about what
happened between them that resulted in the dramatic breakup
of their relationship; abouthow, in Twain’s final
months, he gave bitter, angry press conferences denouncing
her; how he ranted in personal letters that she had injured
him, calling her, “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.”
Trombley writes that Twain’s invective bordered on obsession
(he wrote about Isabel for hours every day, even while
suffering from angina pains and gout attacks) and about how,
despite the inordinate attention he gave her before his
death, Isabel Lyon has remained a friendless ghost haunting
the margins of Twain’s biography.
For decades,
biographers deliberately omitted her from the official Twain
story. Her potentially destructive power was so great that
Twain’s handpicked hagiographer, Albert Bigelow Paine,
allowed only one timorous reference to her in his massive
three-volume work, Mark Twain: A Biography (1912).
Isabel Lyon was a forgotten woman, “so private,” she
wrote in her journal, “that the very mention of me [was]
with held from the world. . .”
This riveting, dark
story that “the King” determined no one would ever tell is
now revealed at last.
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