The Mark Twain Company.
It"s my opinion that everyone I know has morals, though I wouldn"t like to ask.
Mark Twain.
HAVING DECIDED TO KEEP his permanent residence in Redding, Twain looked around for a way to give something back to the community. He settled on the idea of helping to start a public library. If Carnegie could build hundreds of them across America, Twain reckoned that he could at least establish a small one somewhere in his new hometown. In October 1908 he became the first president of the Redding Library a.s.sociation and informed its members that "by and by we are going to have a building of our own." To the surprise of Dan Beard and a local retired businessman named Theodore Adams, Twain suggested that one of them should donate the land for the library. (Adams accepted the challenge and gave the town a convenient site on the main road below Diamond Hill.) For his part, the author said he would donate books from his own shelves and would collect money for the building fund by hosting several charity events. He also intended to impose a visitor"s tax at Stormfield for the benefit of the library. "Every male guest who comes to my house," he declared, "will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage."2 Some of his neighbors may have doubted his sincerity in this matter, especially after he spent most of his speech to the library a.s.sociation joking about his burglars instead of explaining how to pay for a new building. But in the coming months he would raise thousands for the library, persuading all sorts of people to donate to the cause, including Andrew Carnegie himself, who gave $500. In addition, Twain put aside for the library more than 1,500 books from his own collection, selecting works of biography, fiction, history, poetry, science, self-help, and travel. He got rid of old novels he never liked, including several by George Eliot ("I can"t stand George Eliot, & Hawthorne & those people; I see what they are at, a hundred years before they get to it, & they just tire me to death"). But he also contributed copies of many works that he treasured, such as Alice"s Adventures in Wonderland ("the immortal Alice," as he called her) and Thomas Macaulay"s History of England ("A library can not justly be called dull which has that in it"). At the top of his list of donations was a copy of the Bible. The books he donated would form the core of the holdings at Redding"s Mark Twain Library, as it would eventually be called. (In 1911 it opened at the site provided by Theodore Adams and is still going strong in the twenty-first century.)3 In late November, Twain invited practically the whole town to come up to Stormfield for a library benefit. He was the featured speaker and charged twenty-five cents admission. Chairs were borrowed from the undertaker and placed in rows from the living room to the loggia. By the time Twain rose to speak, there was standing room only. One man walked five miles to be there.
In the audience that afternoon was Twain"s companion from his last visit to Bermuda, Elizabeth Wallace. A guest at Stormfield for a few days, she suddenly found herself playing hostess at the benefit performance, but was happy to help out. She was amused by the old New England farmers who sat up front and remained so quiet and serious. They were reluctant to make themselves comfortable in a stranger"s house, she recalled, and "held on grimly to fur overcoats and fleece-lined jackets." Looking down on the expressionless faces of these farmers, Twain tried his best to make them laugh.
"Once in a while stern features would relax for a moment," Wallace remembered, "but the effort seemed to hurt, and the muscles would become fixed again." Twain had better luck with the younger generation at the back, "who suffered from occasional apoplectic outbursts." Wallace had the impression that the older people enjoyed listening to their famous neighbor"s jokes, but that they considered it unseemly to laugh. "They were proud ... proud almost to sinning, of their ill.u.s.trious fellow-townsman, and they would have shouted with laughter, if only they could."
At the end of the talk, which lasted an hour and a half, they responded with generous applause and lingered afterward to acknowledge Twain"s generosity with silent handshakes, appreciative nods, and simple words of praise. When the crowd was gone, Twain discussed his performance with Wallace and offered a good excuse for the silence in the front rows. "They weren"t used to laughing on the outside," he explained.
The event raised only a modest amount for the library, but the real point of it was to show the town that Twain wanted to be a good neighbor, and that he intended to be active year-round in the life of the community. Though he had rubbed shoulders with some of the richest and most powerful people on earth, he considered it a privilege to open his home to "100 of the sterlingest farmers & their families encounterable anywhere" and to spend a cold November afternoon entertaining them in white.4 No one was happier to see Twain enjoying Redding than his biographer. "I confess I had moments of anxiety," Paine was to recall, "for I had selected the land for him, and had been more or less accessory otherwise." It"s a tribute to Paine"s understanding of his subject that he picked a place Twain liked so well, and that he did it without the advantage of showing him the area first. "I did not really worry," he was to write, "for I knew how beautiful and peaceful it all was; also something of his taste and habits."
Indeed, even when the frosts came and the hills turned brown, Twain lost none of his enthusiasm for the look of the place. "Although the beginnings of winter are here," he wrote a few days after the library benefit, "& the trees are more or less bare, the landscape is still astonishingly beautiful."5 Perhaps fearing that the coming winter might be too harsh, Paine tried to interest him in taking a break from Redding to see other scenic parts of America. One suggestion was the Grand Canyon.
"I should enjoy that," he replied, "but the railroad journey is so far, and I should have no peace. The papers would get hold of it, and I would have to make speeches and be interviewed."
When Paine suggested a disguise, Twain showed no interest in hiding his famous face, and didn"t think it would work anyway. "I might put on a red wig and false whiskers and change my name," he said, "but I couldn"t disguise my drawling speech, and they"d find me out."6 The idea of staying at home was more appealing now because he finally had a home where he was content to stay. For a good part of his life he was a wanderer and had already seen much of the world. Before marrying Livy, he had been on the go almost constantly. Besides his adventures in the Mississippi Valley and in the mining towns of California and Nevada, he had traveled from one end of the Mediterranean to the other, climbing to the top of Mount Vesuvius, touring Egypt"s pyramids, and swimming in the Sea of Galilee. After his marriage, he had lived for extended periods in the European capitals of Berlin, London, Paris, and Vienna, and had visited such faraway places as Australia, India, and South Africa. Despite the often formidable difficulties of travel in his time, he covered a lot of territory and saw many of the world"s wonders.
But now there was nothing that fascinated him more than Stormfield. After taking Elizabeth Wallace on a tour of his land on a "bright, crisp, cold day" in November, he told her, "I never want to leave this place. It satisfies me perfectly."7 One Sunday in early November he spent an hour "drifting about the ground-floor noting the enchantments." In room after room he studied the way the sunlight played on various objects, observing how a copper vase glowed on a black mantel, and how a gleaming vase of red flowers in the dining room was "reflected like a miniature sunset cloud in the polished dark-wood of the table." As he gazed outside at his avenue of cedars, they looked to him like thrones, "graceful, symmetrical, beautiful." With winter approaching, he was grateful that these evergreens would continue to provide flashes of color on the landscape throughout the season. "If I should plant trees they might die and wound me," he wrote poignantly, "but these will still be green & lovely & full-flushed with life when I have been dead a century."8 ...
ABSORBED IN THE PLEASURES of his new home, Twain failed to heed the signs of a worsening conflict between Clara and Isabel Lyon. Under strain for several months, the relationship between the two women fell apart soon after Clara moved into her New York apartment. Having been left on her own to run a household disrupted by the burglary, Lyon resented Clara"s unwillingness to stay and help, especially since so much money and effort had gone into making the Nightingale"s Cage as comfortable as possible. At the end of October she was still struggling to complete the changeover from the old group of servants to the new one. On October 20 she wrote Samuel Moffett"s widow, "We have been busy fitting in new servants to take the place of those who think they were frightened away by the burglars." As her tone suggests, she didn"t have much sympathy for anyone in the household who had run away, and that included the privileged daughter.9 Yet Clara kept coming back to Redding for short visits, usually accompanied by Katy Leary. Each time she acted as though she-not Lyon-was the mistress of the house. The two women began getting into arguments over minor problems related to the servants, meals, or furnishings, and they soon dropped any pretense of friendship, trading increasingly nasty insults behind Twain"s back. After one especially traumatic argument, Katy Leary watched Clara storm away and then whispered to Isabel, "She hates you, and don"t you forget it."10 It didn"t help that Clara"s worries about her relationship with Charles Wark may have made her suspect Lyon of spreading rumors about it. On October 26 Lyon bitterly complained in her journal that her very soul was being destroyed by Clara"s antagonism. She was up to her "ears in mud," she wrote, "the mud of criticism-no, misunderstandings fired by C.C." Her only consolation was that Ashcroft shared her feeling of being misunderstood, for Clara had also begun insulting him. "Benares went hurtling away to day," Lyon noted on the 26th, "glad to get clear of the mud."
Lyon told herself not to be disheartened, but to bear the criticisms patiently and to rise above them for Twain"s sake. "I"m a coward to not know that mud can clarify things in time, and can build a foundation from which I"ll be the better able to see the King." At this stage, she was still hoping to settle her differences with Clara in a way that wouldn"t upset Twain or harm his reputation. She regarded Ashcroft"s support as crucial. "I am unafraid, for always there is Benares to be near me, and to help me."11 But Ashcroft wasn"t impressed by her idea of pa.s.sive resistance. He wanted direct action to strengthen his position in the event that Clara ever gained the upper hand. Having failed to interest the press in her relationship with Wark, he decided to try an even bolder plan. For months, he had been waiting for the right moment to make his relationship with Twain pay, and now he saw a chance to gain control over not just some of the author"s wealth, but all of it-from the copyrights to Stormfield itself. Less than three weeks after "hurtling away" from the petty bickering in Redding, Ashcroft prepared a breathtakingly comprehensive doc.u.ment allowing him the power to manage every penny of Clara"s inheritance. The trick was to get Twain to sign the doc.u.ment without giving him the chance to understand its significance.
Ashcroft had spent enough time with Twain to know that such a trick wouldn"t be hard to pull off. The author had come to place so much trust in him that he treated him like a member of the family. Ashcroft had worked hard to win that trust, always looking for ways to please the older man. In August Twain had noted, "Ashcroft plays the orchestrelle for me a great deal; & he has improved so much that if I am out in the loggia & don"t see him I think it is Miss Lyon. And he plays good billiards now. Not as good as Col. Harvey or Mr. Paine, but better than formerly." Ashcroft even began wearing white suits like Twain"s. Walking around Stormfield in their identical dress, they might easily have been mistaken for father and son. Ashcroft was always eager to be of service, no matter how small the job. When Twain idly remarked one day that "it would be nice to have some gorse around the place," Ashcroft raced back to New York and "combed the city for seed."12 Having worked closely with Twain during the troubles at the Plasmon Company and the Knickerbocker Trust, Ashcroft knew how imprudent and confused he could be in business matters. He may even have heard Twain comment on his general inability to understand contracts and keep track of their requirements. It was a common complaint. "I am a pretty versatile fool when it comes to contracts, and business and such things," Twain had observed in 1904. "I have signed a lot of contracts in my time, and at sometime I probably knew what the contracts meant, but six months later everything had grown dim and I could be certain of only two things, to wit: One, I didn"t sign any contract. Two, the contract means the opposite of what it says."13 On Sat.u.r.day, November 14, Ashcroft took advantage of Twain"s carelessness to get him to sign a doc.u.ment extending the power of attorney granted earlier to Isabel Lyon. The new arrangement included Ashcroft as one of the author"s "true and lawful attorneys" and included a long list of privileges in the kind of legalese that Twain often preferred to ignore-"to sell, a.s.sign and transfer any and all stocks, bonds and mortgages belonging or which may at any time belong to me; to change any or all of my investments and to make any investment of any or all of the moneys belonging to me; to draw checks or drafts upon any banks, banker or Trust Company. ..." And on it went, covering every possible way that Twain"s wealth could be used, and making sure that Ralph Ashcroft and Isabel Lyon possessed the authority to control all of it.14 True to form, the author later would say that he couldn"t recall signing this doc.u.ment. When it was shown to him in the late spring of 1909, he surmised that Ashcroft had slipped the paper in among ones he had read and approved, and that he had signed it without realizing what it was. In retrospect, he couldn"t believe that he had been fooled so easily, sarcastically describing the doc.u.ment as "a stately one, a liberal one. ... By it I transferred all my belongings down to my last shirt, to [Ashcroft and Lyon], to do as they pleased with. ... Ashcroft had had this fraudulent doc.u.ment placed on record in New York, just as if it had been a deed."15 In fact, because Justice John Nickerson at the Redding Town Hall was familiar with the author"s signature, and with Ashcroft"s privileged standing at Stormfield, he notarized the doc.u.ment without the author being present. Ashcroft was then able to file it in New York, and to put it away in Twain"s safety deposit box at the Liberty National Bank in Manhattan. With such a doc.u.ment on record, it wasn"t necessary for Ashcroft to raid the Twain treasury right away. He simply needed to move the a.s.sets into a company where his power would be strong enough to oppose Clara"s, and where he could enrich himself in a quiet way over time.
Not by coincidence, he was busy in November organizing such a firm. For much of the summer and fall he had been discussing with the author a plan to make the name of Mark Twain the property of a corporation. Ashcroft"s idea was that the company would use licensing rights of the author"s name to control publication of the works even after the copyrights had expired. It was an effort to make Mark Twain a brand and to sell books and other items under that name for decades to come. "When this name is the property of a perpetual corporation," Ashcroft later explained to the press, "Mr. Clemens"s heirs will be in a position to enjoin perpetually the publication of all of the Mark Twain books not authorized by the Mark Twain Company."16 The author praised Ashcroft for coming up with this idea, calling it "a stroke of genius." He gave it his full blessing and was so enthusiastic that he didn"t bother to study it carefully. Like the Paige typesetter, it looked better on paper than in practice. Was it realistic to a.s.sume that the courts would allow copyright law to be circ.u.mvented so easily? When his copyrights expired, wouldn"t publishers be able to thwart his scheme by issuing books under Sam Clemens"s name instead of Mark Twain"s? If the author had insisted on getting answers to such questions before plunging ahead, he might have saved himself a lot of trouble. When the press later raised just one of these questions, Ashcroft couldn"t provide a good answer. As the New York Times reported, "Mr. Ashcroft was not prepared to say at present whether the incorporation of the Mark Twain name would prevent any publisher, after the expiration of copyrights on the books, from printing the books under the name of Samuel L. Clemens. He said that this was a matter for the courts to decide." If the courts didn"t rule against the plan, declared the New York Sun, "We fancy that it would not be long before the Legislature intervened."17 Twain seemed to be the only one who took Ashcroft"s plan seriously. Some newspapers treated it as an excuse to make jokes. "Mark Twain, Incorporated is all well enough," remarked the Washington Times, "but everybody hopes it may never become Mark Twain, Limited." The Washington Post had fun imagining a board meeting run by the author and his most famous characters, with Huck Finn and Hank Morgan making speeches while the Jumping Frog croaked his approval. After the business matters had been discussed, the paper said, "The corporation then shook its own hand and adjourned."18 Ashcroft knew that Twain would approve of the new firm because he understood how much the copyright issue meant to the author. By promising him a way to protect his books forever, he misled him into creating a business whose chief beneficiary was meant to be-as Twain later put it-"Ashcroft, disguised as the Mark Twain Company." At the end of December, when the incorporation papers were filed in New York, S. L. Clemens was named as president, but the real control lay in the hands of the secretary-treasurer, Ralph Ashcroft, who also had the satisfaction of knowing that Isabel Lyon would serve as one of the directors.19 With stunning speed, Ashcroft was able to turn the tables on Clara, leaving behind his humble position as the author"s unofficial business manager to become an officer in a corporation in which he controlled the purse strings, and to which he could begin quietly transferring Twain"s money and property. After setting this plan in motion, it had taken him only two months to create the legal and financial structure that would put him in charge of Clara"s inheritance. She didn"t know it yet, and that was the way he meant to keep it until either his hand was forced or her father died. In the event of Twain"s death, he had the power to seize control of the company because-through some trickery or the author"s own carelessness-the stock certificates in the firm were fully negotiable. Twain had endorsed them before asking Ashcroft to store them in the safety deposit box.
As Twain later realized, this foolish act made it possible for Ashcroft to convey the ownership to himself in a completely legal way. "It would have been difficult for a court to find any objection to it," Twain was to write in retrospect. "The Mark Twain stock was worth a million dollars, & the other stuff about two hundred thousand. ... The children would have been paupers. However, I didn"t die."20 Asked in her old age whether Twain had liked Ashcroft, Isabel Lyon replied, "Yes, very much. ... He was a great help in every way. ... But all the time he was laying his own plans." Lyon"s mistake was to allow herself to be drawn into them. He couldn"t have done much at Stormfield without her cooperation, and he knew it. So he found her weak spot and exploited it, just as he did Twain"s. Because she was hungry for affection, it was easy for him to go from being her confidant to her lover. While he was busy winning Twain"s trust, he was also seducing Isabel, and she fell completely under his spell. After devoting her best years to the service of others, she thought she saw a chance to have a life of her own with a bright, hardworking man determined to move up in the world. The fact that she was forty-four and he was only thirty-three didn"t seem to concern her. Not long after the Mark Twain Company was established, she wrote a friend in Hartford that she was so much in love with Ashcroft she couldn"t "live without this dear & wonderful man."21 In the weeks immediately following the burglary Ashcroft would sometimes sneak down to Lyon"s room after dark and spend the night with her. Twain didn"t realize this was going on, but the servants did. As he was later told, some of the servants had heard a loud noise one night and had gone for help to Ashcroft"s room, fearing another break-in. But they didn"t find him there. What they discovered was an empty bed that had not been slept in, and they soon figured out that he was in Lyon"s room.
Lyon"s devotion to Ashcroft inevitably led her to betray Twain"s trust. Until November 14, 1908, she had been able to convince herself that she was always trying to do what was best for him. In her efforts to undermine Paine"s credibility or to keep Jean at a safe distance from home, she could tell herself that she was helping Twain by protecting him from, on the one hand, an overambitious biographer, and on the other, a supposedly unstable daughter. Even when she used his money to renovate her house or to buy a new dress, she could justify it on the grounds that improving her image was also good for his. No doubt Ashcroft told her that his own plans were also designed to safeguard Twain"s interests (and theirs) by preventing spoiled and reckless daughters from squandering their father"s fortune. But Lyon was too intelligent not to realize that Ashcroft was taking advantage of Twain by getting him to sign a power of attorney that went far beyond any reasonable requirement. Yet she turned a blind eye to it because her loyalty to Ashcroft was now greater than her loyalty to Twain.
She was upset by her betrayal, and it showed. For reasons that Twain couldn"t have understood at the time, she had a nervous collapse on November 14 and spent the day suffering silently in bed.
ON A MONDAY MORNING in December two young men arrived at Stormfield for a short visit. One was Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw"s biographer and Twain"s fellow pa.s.senger on the voyage to England the year before. The other was a bearded twenty-six-year-old photographer whose work was much in demand on both sides of the Atlantic. Though he was a native of Ma.s.sachusetts, Alvin Coburn felt more at home in England, where he had been a frequent visitor since he was eighteen, and where his talent for photography had earned him many admirers, including Shaw and Henry James. The playwright called the young man "one of the most accomplished and sensitive artist-photographers now living," and had posed for him several times. Having become acquainted as a result of their mutual friendship with Shaw, Henderson and Coburn were now working on a new project together, and it was this job that brought them to Mark Twain"s door.22 Because his earlier offer to write a full-scale biography of Twain had been rejected, Archibald Henderson planned to write a shorter study that would focus more on the career than on the private life. Without giving his consent to this new idea, Twain decided that it would do no harm to be photographed for the book and to have an informal chat with Henderson. Perhaps because it would annoy Paine, Isabel Lyon was happy to welcome this rival biographer to Stormfield and went out of her way to make his visit a pleasant one. She even took Henderson and Coburn down to her own small cottage to show it off. "Such rich, darling folks do come here to see the King," she wrote on December 21. "Today Prof. Archibald Henderson and Alvin Langdon Coburn came. ... We had a charming day with plenty of talk & Hearts & a walk down to my house."23 Twain relaxed with Henderson in the living room, sharing random stories about his life, including a recollection of Livy"s efforts to make him a more serious writer. "After I had written some side-splitting story," he told his guest, "something beginning seriously and ending in preposterous anti-climax, she would say to me: "You have a true lesson, a serious meaning to impart here. Don"t give way to your invincible temptation to destroy the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity. Be yourself!" For the sake of Livy"s memory, Twain was inclined to say that she had been right. But he disproved the point every day in his refusal to let high moral purpose deflate his impish, irreverent free spirit. The problem wasn"t that he lacked seriousness, but that almost everyone else had too much of it.24 The three dozen photographs taken of Twain on this visit reveal more of the author than anything he said to Henderson. About twenty of Coburn"s pictures were taken in the living room, billiards room, and Twain"s bedroom, and the rest were shot outdoors in the garden pergola. Most show Twain in conventional poses, standing erect in his white suit or Oxford gown, playing pool or relaxing in bed wearing a colorful dressing gown. But several of the outdoor shots capture the playful side of the author and look more spontaneous.
The snow helped. Several inches had fallen over the weekend in the first storm of the season, turning the grounds into a sparkling white backdrop for Coburn. After the servants shoveled the walkways, he and Twain went down in the early afternoon to the pergola, where the photographer positioned his tripod at the edge of the brick terrace and began shooting as the author roamed among the pergola"s stately columns or paused beside one to strike a pose. With his hair tucked under an ill-fitting cap, a dark overcoat flapping at the sides of his white uniform, and a crude walking stick under his arm, Twain looked like a giant snowman come to life. Coburn photographed him from the side and the rear, catching him in motion as the author retreated behind one pillar or strode between two with a cigar in the corner of his mouth.
Enjoying the chance to show off, Twain kicked up his heels and almost broke into a dance as he circled the empty basin of the low fountain that stood in the middle of the pergola. Then, seized with an idea, he pointed to a small pedestal at the center of the basin where a statue was supposed to go at some later date. "Why should not I be the statue?" he suggested proudly.
Coburn liked the idea, answering, "Why not indeed!"
"So he mounted the pedestal," the photographer was to recall, "cigar in one hand and staff in the other, an erect and dignified figure. The sun shone on the background of snow-mottled yew trees, and thus was made a unique picture of Mark Twain as a living statue."25 To make sure that all went well, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft waited at the edge of the pergola and watched Coburn work. Lyon had a small camera with her and took a few shots of her own, while Ashcroft tried to stay warm wearing only a thin overcoat with a white suit that matched Twain"s. Coburn didn"t mind having them around and was happy to take a picture of Ashcroft standing with Twain and Henderson by the empty fountain.
An amiable man, Coburn was easy to work with. He had a knack for putting his subjects at ease, and for encouraging them to reveal their inner selves. George Bernard Shaw trusted him so much that he revealed perhaps more than the world wanted to see, posing in the nude as "the Thinker." Thanks to introductions from Shaw, Coburn was able to photograph many other literary figures, including H. G. Wells and W. B. Yeats. After only a short acquaintance with Coburn, Henry James was sufficiently impressed to offer the young photographer the commission of a lifetime, hiring him to provide the frontispiece of each volume in the collected edition of his works.
In 1906, James had sent him to Paris and Venice to photograph places a.s.sociated with his novels. On a similar a.s.signment in London he had accompanied him for long periods as they walked the streets in search of suitable scenes. In Coburn"s presence, James was uncommonly relaxed and informal. On one scouting expedition in London, the photographer thought that James acted more like a schoolboy than a distinguished novelist. He never forgot the image of the great man happily sharing Bath buns with him as they walked home after a long day of work.
While he was at Stormfield, warming himself by a roaring log fire after dinner, Coburn showed his host some of his recent portraits of famous literary and artistic figures. It was obvious that the young man was an expert at his craft. Such ability always fascinated Twain. Though the author may not have been aware of it, Coburn was already being singled out by critics as a master of technique. As early as 1904 a New York journal of photography had praised him as a "very promising talent" who "has solved various pictorial problems which even would set a Stieglitz or a Steichen thinking." Like his mentor, Alfred Stieglitz, Coburn was a pioneer of color photography, having learned the new autochrome process shortly after the Lumiere brothers introduced it in Paris in 1907. "I have the color fever badly," Coburn had confided to Stieglitz later that year.26 About the time that autochromes first appeared in Europe, Twain had chanced to remark to Dorothy Quick that a photograph of her wearing some fanciful costume would look better if only "there was such a thing as color photography so that those rich reds and that heavenly shade of turquoise blue need not be lost." Now, to his delight, one of the best of the early color photographers was a guest in his home. Coburn came prepared to use the new process at Stormfield and shot two autochrome portraits of Twain indoors. They turned out brilliantly, even though the long exposure time meant that the author had to hold his pose for about twenty seconds without moving a muscle. He wore his academic gown in one of the pictures, and the scarlet cloth still looks dazzling.27 A courteous guest, Coburn repaid Twain"s hospitality by making a point of losing to him at cards and in a game of billiards. As he recalled in his autobiography, "An important rule of the household, which was secretly imparted to newly-arrived guests, was that the host must always win, but by the narrowest margin so as not to be too obvious." At the billiards table, he was fascinated by Twain"s fervent desire to win and wondered why such an ordinary game should matter to a man of such great importance in the world. But as he watched the author taking so much pleasure in every successful shot, he decided it was more fun to lose to him and to watch his face light up than to beat him and see his look of disappointment. "He wanted to win so eagerly that it was a positive pain for him not to do so," Coburn observed. "To see his intensity and determination as he leaned over the table, his face pink with excitement, was to understand something of why he had succeeded in life."
Pleased with the warmth of his welcome at Stormfield, Coburn came away with the impression that it was a peaceful home where Twain had few cares. Even fifty years later he could still recall "the expression of perfect contentment" on the author"s face as they listened to Clara sing a beautiful melody beside the grand piano in the living room. He had not noticed any sign of tension in the household, but he didn"t have any reason to look for it, just as he didn"t have any reason to think twice about the guest at Stormfield who played the piano while Clara sang for her father. If he had known more about her career, he might have wondered why it wasn"t Charles Wark instead of a famous foreign musician who was no ordinary accompanist-Ossip Gabrilowitsch.28 ...
SINCE HIS LAST AMERICAN TOUR in the winter of 1907, Gabrilowitsch had seen his reputation continue to grow. Impressed by his power to excite audiences, the Boston Symphony Orchestra had invited him to return to America and serve as its featured soloist for a short tour in late 1908. The highlight of that tour took place only a few weeks before Coburn"s visit to Stormfield. It was a concert at Carnegie Hall on December 3. Gabrilowitsch gave a strong performance of Rachmaninoff"s Second Piano Concerto and won some of the best reviews of his career. The New York Sun praised him for his "singularly charming style," and the Times said of him, "He is an artist who has steadily grown greater since his first coming to this city some years ago, and his art is now bearing its full fruition." His performance was described as "full of power, of delicacy, of all imaginable contrast ... admirably seconded by the orchestra."29 With this triumph behind him, and with several solo appearances scheduled in the coming year-including a recital in Carnegie Hall on January 10-Gabrilowitsch needed a quiet place in the country where he could relax during the holidays, and where he could have the use of a good piano. He was invited to stay at Stormfield, apparently because Clara had decided it was more sensible to renew her relationship with this rising star of the music world than to continue her risky affair with Charles Wark. By the end of the year the rumors about that affair had become too widespread for Clara to ignore. Even old family friends in Hartford were gossiping about her, and it appears that she was warned of this by Reverend Joseph Twich.e.l.l. At some point in late November or early December, she quit seeing Wark, abruptly ending both their affair and their professional relationship.
After his brief but pa.s.sionate fling with Mahler"s wife, Ossip may have thought that courting Clara again was his safest bet. But, as he would discover, she was still uncertain of her feelings about him, wavering between love and friendship. Even during his stay in Redding over the holidays, she felt free to leave him at Stormfield for short periods while she went back to her apartment in New York.
On New Year"s Eve day he and Twain were the only ones left in the house. Isabel Lyon had gone to New York on business, but before leaving she had asked Twain to be on his best behavior. She was afraid that the two temperamental artists might get on each other"s nerves. Specifically, she urged Twain to avoid cursing in his usual exuberant way. But he was having too much fun indulging in various outbursts of "profanity and rage and pleasure over the morning mail," and didn"t care what anyone else thought. "I tell the King that Gabrilowitsch hearing such wondrous blasts of cursing will be afraid to stay," Lyon noted in her journal. "The King likes just such suggestions and blasted forth another volley of cursing."30 There was little chance that he would frighten the pianist, who had learned long ago that the moods of the Clemens family were volatile and unpredictable. Obviously, these qualities held some appeal for Gabrilowitsch, who couldn"t seem to stay away from the family. It had now been ten years since he had first fallen under Clara"s spell, and despite all his success and artistic growth, she still held some strange power over his emotions that kept him pursuing her no matter how elusive she seemed. At this point in his career, with New York at his feet, he didn"t need to be waiting around for Clara to make up her mind about him. But the applause of his audiences and the praise of the critics weren"t enough to make him abandon an obsession that his teacher Leschetizky had long ago defined as "Delirium Clemens."31 Early in his stay at Stormfield he was given a chance to prove to Clara that he had lost none of his devotion to her. On the very morning that Coburn and Henderson arrived at the house, there were dramatic reports in the New York papers that Ossip had saved Clara from certain death in an accident the previous day. It was difficult to overlook the story. It appeared on the front pages of both the Times and the Tribune, and was soon picked up by the wire services and published nationwide. "Miss Clemens Hurt," said the headline in the Boston Globe. "Says Her Escape Was Marvelous," reported the Washington Times.
According to the press, Ossip and Clara went for a sleigh ride around Redding on Sunday morning, December 20. About three miles from home, as they were going uphill on a narrow country lane, their horse bolted when it was frightened by "a wind-whipped newspaper." Ossip wasn"t able to control it and the sleigh overturned, throwing Clara to the side of the road but leaving her dress tangled in the runner. Just to the right of her was a ravine and a drop of fifty feet. As the horse began to drag the sleigh and Clara toward the edge, Ossip ran forward and grabbed the animal"s head, pulling it back to the road and holding it fast until Clara could free herself. He performed this feat despite having sprained his ankle when the sleigh overturned. Though his injury was "painful," he was able to comfort Clara and drive her home. Besides suffering from shock, she was unhurt.32 It is difficult to imagine how someone with Gabrilowitsch"s slight build and delicate hands was able to regain control of a horse in the snow at the top of a hill. With a sprained ankle, he must have had a hard time staying upright on the slippery incline. It isn"t clear who reported the accident to the newspapers, but the only witnesses were Ossip and Clara, and the press accepted the story without question. n.o.body came forward with any corroborating evidence, and the incident isn"t mentioned in family doc.u.ments or in Coburn"s account of his visit to Stormfield. But, to reporters, the tale of a damsel in distress and a heroic rescue by a romantic Russian pianist was simply too good not to print.
There is evidence to suggest, however, that the accident never happened or was simply a minor mishap. Among Coburn"s photographs taken the next day is one that includes a full-length shot of Gabrilowitsch. He is posed beside Isabel Lyon"s cottage, which she had volunteered to show Coburn and Henderson. Wearing buckled overshoes and standing normally without any a.s.sistance, he doesn"t look like a man who has recently suffered a sprained ankle. In fact, he was fit enough to have walked all the way down to Lyon"s house in the snow with the others.
But why would he and Clara have wanted to invent an accident and pretend that he had rescued her? For one thing, it was good publicity for a man who wanted to fill Carnegie Hall for his solo performance in a few weeks. For Clara, it provided an excellent way of curtailing speculation by gossipmongers that she was going to wed Charles Wark. The same papers that had linked her name to a married man were now obliged to report that she was involved with a perfectly respectable, and very eligible, bachelor. And how could anyone suspect her of wanting to marry Wark when the new man in her life was a dashing young star of the music world who had rescued her from certain death?
There is no doubt that the news reports helped Gabrilowitsch. His publicity agent in New York made sure of that, though as the time of the recital grew closer, the agent hastened to rea.s.sure music lovers that the pianist"s injury was minor and wouldn"t affect his performance. On the morning of the recital the New York Tribune reported, "The hands and arms of Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the Russian pianist, are solemnly p.r.o.nounced "as good as ever" by his publicity agent, despite his recent experience in a runaway accident with Miss Clara Clemens near Redding, Connecticut. The wrench to his ankle is reported as not severe enough to interfere at all with his playing this afternoon in his recital."33 The turnout on January 10 was everything Gabrilowitsch could have hoped for, and the enthusiastic response to his performance was overwhelming. Cast now as a heroic figure in music and life, he was mobbed at the end of the recital and the crowd refused to leave the theater, demanding encore after encore. "The Gabrilowitsch enthusiasts," wrote an amazed critic, "were still clamoring for encores after a two-hour long recital." The pianist gave them three encores, yet they stayed and shouted for more. "Audience Only Leaves Carnegie Hall When Lights Are Put Out," said the headline in the Times the next day.34 So the episode of the runaway horse served Ossip well, but didn"t put an end to the gossip about Clara"s relationship with Wark. That problem would continue to haunt her for many months to come, even though she scrupulously avoided any contact with him. Meanwhile, her father must have learned the truth about Wark. When Joseph Twich.e.l.l visited Stormfield in January, the Reverend probably told his old friend of all the rumors going around Hartford. But there is no evidence that Twain tried to interfere in his daughter"s love life by demanding that she stop seeing Wark. Though he grumbled about all her comings and goings, he may not have known what to make of her renewed interest in Gabrilowitsch or the improbable tale of her rescue in the snow. Understanding that she was as stubborn as he was, he knew that there was no point in trying to bend her will to his. Like him, she was a force unto herself.
In the haven that he was trying to create at Stormfield, there wasn"t supposed to be any intrigue or scheming or deception. He was explicit on that point, warning against such things in the guestbook, where he had written on the first page these lines adapted from Shakespeare"s t.i.tus Andronicus: In peace and honor rest you here, my guest; repose you here,
Secure from worldly chances and mishaps!
Here lurks no treason, here no envy swells,
Here grow no d.a.m.ned grudges; here are no storms,
No noise, but silence and eternal sleep:
In peace and honor rest you here, my guest!
Though he took these sentiments seriously, the people in his home who were closest to him did not. As 1908 came to an end, he persisted in believing that he had found a place of beauty and repose, but all the while envy was swelling and "d.a.m.ned grudges" were growing among Ashcroft, Lyon, and Clara. In the next few months they would create more turmoil than he could bear and make his house seem a "stormfield" indeed. Yet he may have long suspected that some such trouble was brewing under his nose, for his adapted quotation from Shakespeare isn"t as comforting in the original as it may have seemed in the guestbook. In the play the words are spoken by the bloodthirsty General Andronicus at a tomb where he is burying his sons who have fallen in battle (Twain replaced "sons" with "guests"), and where he is attended by other sons who have just returned from killing a man.35 In December it would have been difficult not to see that something was troubling Lyon, whose nerves were increasingly on edge. More and more, she complained of headaches and would lock herself in her room and ask not to be disturbed. Ashcroft made excuses, saying that she was suffering from overwork. Annoyed, Twain decided that she was just being lazy. "Laziness was my own specialty," he later remarked, "& I did not like this compet.i.tion."36 She was easily upset and always seemed worried that something was going to go wrong. One day Robert Collier sent a note saying that he had found an unusual Christmas present for Twain. It was a baby elephant, and would arrive at Stormfield as soon as a freight car was available to bring it to Redding. Collier also said that a trainer was needed, and that he was going to find one at Barnum & Bailey"s winter headquarters in Bridgeport. Instead of realizing that this was one of Collier"s harmless pranks, Lyon took him seriously and panicked. Mary Howden-a stenographer who worked for a short time at Stormfield-brought the note to Lyon, who was in bed with one of her headaches. Howden recalled that the secretary read it, then "dropped back on the pillows and indulged in what appeared to be a near-apoplectic fit," asking in a desperate voice, "And where are we going to keep it?"
When Howden suggested that Collier was only joking, Lyon shook her head and said that she knew him "all too well ... he was a man of his word, and if he a.s.serted that an elephant was forthcoming, an elephant undoubtedly would arrive."37 Lyon telephoned and tried to talk him out of it. He managed to keep from laughing and cheerfully pretended that the little elephant would be as easy to manage as one of Twain"s cats.
"Put him in the loggia," he suggested. "That"s closed in, isn"t it, for the winter? Plenty of sunlight-just the place for a young elephant."
"But we play cards in the loggia," she answered. "We use it for a sort of sun-parlor."
"But that wouldn"t matter. He"s a kindly, playful little thing. He"ll be just like a kitten. I"ll send the man up to look over the place and tell you just how to take care of him, and I"ll send up several bales of hay in advance."38 No one at Stormfield seemed to think Collier was in earnest except Lyon, whose worries grew with each new message from him about his efforts to reserve a freight car and to find a trainer. She dreaded the thought that the first Christmas at the new house would be ruined by a rich man"s whim. For the first time in years Twain was actually looking forward to the holiday, and was planning to celebrate it in the loggia, which had been decorated in greenery so that it could serve as "a Xmas-present show parlor," to use his words. "It is very comfortable, and very handsome, and is much the showiest room in the house," he said of the newly decorated room. "I haven"t seen such a display since the old, old times in Hartford-gone, to return no more."39 Two days before Christmas, Lyon was alarmed when a shipment of ten bales of hay, several bushels of carrots, and a few baskets of apples arrived at Stormfield. Then, on Christmas morning, a man claiming to be Professor May, professional elephant trainer, telephoned and asked to look around the place before transporting the animal from the station.
"The day of doom was at hand," Paine later joked in his account of the elaborate prank. Mary Howden recalled that the trainer "was received by the social secretary, also the financial secretary [Ashcroft], who had come out from New York for the occasion; and he solemnly instructed them in the art of entertaining an elephant, told them what the animal liked to eat, how to treat him when he was ill, and which end of him to avoid when he was angry, etc."
Harry Lounsbury had driven the man to the house and had quickly concluded that he was an impostor. In fact, as Collier would soon reveal, "Professor May" was his butler. But Lyon and Ashcroft listened to the instructions and waited anxiously for the man to return with the elephant.
"Lounsbury came back by and by," Paine recalled, "bringing the elephant but not the trainer. It didn"t need a trainer. It was a beautiful specimen, with soft, smooth coat and handsome trappings, perfectly quiet, well-behaved and small-suited to the loggia, as Collier had said-for it was only two feet long and beautifully made of cloth and cotton-one of the finest toy elephants ever seen anywhere."
Twain enjoyed the prank and fired off a response of mock indignation, complaining to Collier that the animal had come to life and had insisted on observing Christmas, "and now we have no furniture left and no servants and no visitors, no friends, no photographs, no burglars-nothing but the elephant."40 Everybody had a good laugh. But Lyon wasn"t laughing on the inside. She felt foolish and depressed. Over the next few days, as she tried to go about her usual duties, her depression deepened. It wasn"t helped by the sad pieces that Gabrilowitsch rehea.r.s.ed at the piano. "I have worked hard," she wrote in her journal on December 30, "but life has lost something vital, accentuated by a minor theme that Gabrilowitsch plays very much. Snow must be coming for the sky looks very big and very grey."
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn"t.
MARK TWAIN.
PART FOUR.
TEMPEST.
Helen Keller visits Twain at Stormfield, January 1909.
SEVENTEEN.
Hannibal-on-Avon.
I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.
Mark Twain.
OF ALL THE VISITORS to Stormfield none wrote a more vivid description of the place than a young woman of twenty-eight who was Twain"s guest for a weekend in early January 1909. Almost nothing was lost on her, beginning with the "tang in the air of cedar and pine" as her carriage came up the drive, and then the smell of burning logs in the fireplace, and the orange pekoe tea and toast with strawberry jam served shortly after her arrival. Even twenty years later she could still recall the dried wildflowers-cattails, goldenrod, and thistles-adorning vases in the loggia, the distant views of snow-clad hills and stone walls from the icy terrace, the bright spectacle of Twain reading aloud by the firelight in his white suit, the sweet aroma of his favorite desert-apple pie-coming to the table fresh from the oven, and his restless manner at dinner as he got up and paced between courses, talking and gesturing and ignoring his food.
All these things and many more were included in a memoir written in her late forties by Helen Keller, who had famously learned in girlhood that the loss of her sight and hearing couldn"t stop her from finding other ways to connect with the world. On her visit to Stormfield, her teacher, Annie Sullivan-the "miracle worker" who had helped her to discover the power of language-was at her side, and enabled her to converse with Twain and to "see" his house by spelling words into her hand. Helen was also amazingly proficient at reading lips with her fingers and could remember conversations word for word. Her "deliberate, measured speech"-as Annie"s husband, John Macy, once described it-was difficult for many adults to understand, but not for Twain, who could communicate with her even when her teacher wasn"t present. She would "listen" to him by placing her thumb against his throat, her forefinger to his lips, and her middle finger against his nose.2 Twain was fascinated by her extraordinary abilities, and was in awe of her confidence and courage. He once called her "the most marvelous person of her s.e.x that has existed on this earth since Joan of Arc," which was about the highest praise he could offer. He was a great admirer of her writing. When her first book-The Story of My Life-came out while she was finishing her degree at Radcliffe, Twain wrote to congratulate her, saying that he was "enchanted" by it. He added that he was especially proud of their friendship, which began when she was fourteen and had remained strong ever since-"without a break, & without a single act of violence that I can call to mind."3 They had met in March 1895 at a Sunday luncheon held in Keller"s honor at a tall red-brick house in New York on West Thirty-fourth Street. It was the home of Laurence Hutton, an editor and critic who was Twain"s friend and one of Helen"s early benefactors. Henry Rogers came with Twain, and the two men joined about a dozen other guests in a receiving line to wish the girl well during her stay in New York, where Annie had brought her to study speech at a school for the deaf. The poet Margaret Sangster, who was standing near Twain when he caught his first glimpse of Helen, remembered seeing him "impetuously dash the tears from his eyes as he looked into her sweet face."
Helen had read some of his work and asked him to explain the origin of his pseudonym. After telling her what "Mark Twain" meant to steamboat pilots, he said the name suited him because he "was sometimes light and on the surface, and sometimes-"
"Deep," she interrupted, surprising him with her quickness and intelligence.
She seemed to feel more at ease with Twain than with any of the other guests. He was the only one whose face and hair she examined with her hands in order to form an idea of his appearance. As Laurence Hutton said of him afterward, "He was peculiarly tender and lovely with her-even for Mr. Clemens-and she kissed him when he said good-bye."4 At the end of the luncheon Helen astonished all the guests when she shook their hands and addressed them by name as they went out. When he left, Twain had merely patted her on the head, yet she also recognized him. "Perhaps someone else can explain this miracle," he later remarked, "but I have never been able to do it. Could she feel the wrinkles in my hand through her hair?"
He was always intending to ask her for an explanation, but never managed to do it until she came for her first and only stay at Stormfield.
Did she remember him patting her on the head? he asked. She smiled and said yes.
How did she know it was his hand?
"I smelled you" was her honest reply.5 She must have found it a pleasing smell because she loved to cling to him and touch his face and feel the power of his voice through her fingers. "His voice was truly wonderful," she recalled. "To my touch, it was deep, resonant. He had the power of modulating it so as to suggest the most delicate shades of meaning, and he spoke so deliberately that I could get almost every word with my fingers on his lips."6 It was not generally known that Keller had a great sense of humor, but it was one of the things Twain liked best about her. She could take a joke as well as make one. "If she does not know the answer to a question," John Macy observed, "she guesses with mischievous a.s.surance. Ask her the color of your coat ... [and] she will feel it and say "black." If it happens to be blue, and you tell her so triumphantly, she is likely to answer, "Thank you. I am glad you know. Why did you ask me?" "7 Knowing how much she liked to laugh, Twain was always finding some excuse to tease her. When he showed her to her room on the first night at Stormfield, he told her that if she needed anything, she would find an ample supply of cigars and bourbon in the bathroom. When he gave her a tour of the billiards room, he offered to teach her the game.
She took the bait and replied innocently, "Oh, Mr. Clemens, it takes sight to play billiards."
Not the way his friends played, he answered. "The blind couldn"t play worse."8 It was the publication of Keller"s second major work-The World I Live In-that had prompted Twain to invite her to Stormfield. The book-which came out in October 1908-was dedicated to Henry Rogers ("My Dear Friend of Many Years"), who had continued giving Keller financial help after paying her way through Radcliffe. The copy Twain received was warmly inscribed, "Dear Mr. Clemens, come live in my world a little while/Helen Keller." In response, he had said that she must come to his world first, and to bring Annie and John Macy with her. He teased her by pretending to be dictatorial. "I command you all three," he wrote, "to come and spend a few days with me in Stormfield." (As he was well aware, Helen and her teacher were rarely apart. Even after Annie"s marriage in 1905, the two women continued living together.)9 The highlight of Helen"s visit came one evening when Twain read to her from his short book Eve"s Diary, which had been published three years earlier. He sat in a big armchair by the fire with a pipe in one hand and the book in the other, while she and Annie Sullivan sat in lower chairs beside him. John Macy and Isabel Lyon stood apart and watched as Keller followed the story with an ecstatic expression that turned tearful when Twain read the last line. It was Adam"s lament at Eve"s grave (as well as Twain"s tribute to Livy): "Wheresoever she was, there was Eden." In her journal Lyon described the emotional effect of this reading on both the famous guest and the author: "She quivered with delight, and he was shaken with emotion. Could hardly find his voice again. It was a marvel to behold."10 Twain"s Eve has a gift for language and prides herself on knowing immediately the correct name for each new thing she encounters. Adam is often at a loss for words. "I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands," she says, "and this has been a great relief to him, for he has no gift in that line. ... Whenever a new creature comes along, I name it before he has time to expose himself by an awkward silence. ... The right name comes out instantly, just as if it were an inspiration, as no doubt it is, for I am sure it wasn"t in me half a minute before."
When he wrote of Eve"s delight in naming things, Twain may have been thinking of Keller"s The Story of My Life. At several points in her book she recalls the joy of learning the names of things after she had acquired the gift of language just before she turned seven. "I did nothing but explore with my hands and learn the name of every object that I touched; and the more I handled things and learned their names and uses, the more joyous and confident grew my sense of kinship with the rest of the world." Whether or not her story influenced Twain"s, she instantly recognized something of herself in his portrait of Eve. In his guestbook, as she was leaving Stormfield, she wrote that she had been in "Eden three days," and signed herself "A daughter of Eve, Helen Keller."
He understood her meaning so completely that he wrote under her entry his own explanation of it. "The point of what Helen says above, lies in this: that I read the "Diary of Eve" all through, to her last night; in it Eve frequently mentions things she saw for the first time but instantly knew what they were & named them-though she had never seen them before."11 In Twain"s view, what made Keller such an important figure was not simply that she had learned to communicate in spite of being both blind and deaf, but that, for her, the imagination and the world had become one. Without the distractions of sight and sound, and protected by her devoted teacher, she was indeed the author of "the world I live in," transforming everything around her into a reality only she could imagine. Twain understood that she was the artist of her own life, and he envied the pure state of an imagination unfettered by ordinary perceptions. "A well put together unreality is pretty hard to beat," he once observed, responding to a friend"s remark that Keller"s "concept of things ... must lack reality."
In Twain"s best book-written long before he knew Helen-Huck and Jim are given a brief glimpse of that miracle of a "well put together unreality." On their raft as it floats down the big river, they enjoy a free life of their own making where the hard realities of poverty and slavery can be forgotten for a while. When Huck says, "It"s lovely to live on a raft," he means not only that it"s a relief to escape the troubled lands on both banks, but that it"s a rare chance to imagine his own world and to live in it. In fact, the boy"s satisfaction with this isolated existence is greatest at night when the river is a sea of darkness or when, in daylight, it is a blank canvas with, as he says, "nothing to hear nor nothing to see." At such moments, when he is absorbed in watching "the lonesomeness of the river," he must-like Helen-rely on his imagination to fill the void.12 As a way of thanking Annie for helping to bring Helen"s imagination to life, Twain handed her a small souvenir just before she left Stormfield. It was a postcard with a picture of him dressed in white, and on the top margin he wrote, "To Mrs. John Sullivan Macy with warm regard & with limitless admiration of the wonders she has performed as a miracle-worker."
It was a kind gesture, but it would take another fifty years for that term "miracle-worker" to catch on as the best description of Annie. Playwright William Gibson liked it so much that he used it for the t.i.tle of the drama he wrote in the 1950s about Helen and her teacher. The Miracle Worker was a Broadway hit and later a successful film. "I like to fall a little in love with my heroines," Gibson told the New York Times, "and the t.i.tle-from Mark Twain ... was meant to show where my affections lay." When the play debuted, Keller was still alive, but Sullivan had been dead for many years, and her extraordinary work as a teacher was in danger of being forgotten. "This stubborn girl of twenty," said Gibson of the young Annie, "who ... salvaged Helen"s soul, and lived thereafter in its shadow, seemed to me to deserve a star bow."13 ...
DURING HIS VISIT to Stormfield, John Macy showed Twain a new book on the old question of whether Shakespeare"s plays were written by someone else. Macy knew the book"s author-a former librarian named William Stone Booth-and thought Twain would be intrigued by its claims that Francis Bacon wrote the plays. At six hundred pages, Some Acrostic Signatures of Francis Bacon wasn"t exactly bedtime reading, but Twain took Macy"s galley proofs of the book to bed with him and stayed up late trying to follow Booth"s complex method of deciphering signatures and other clues supposedly hidden in the plays by the crafty Bacon. This nighttime study, Isabel Lyon later noted, didn"t work out "very successfully."
Though the book was published by a respectable Boston firm-Houghton Mifflin-it reads like a technical manual written by a mad scientist, with bewildering references and codes scattered everywhere. Many of the acrostics are arranged on the page in diagonal lines, circles, triangles, or zigzag patterns. As one annoyed and frustrated reviewer later complained, "Mr. Booth has eaten of the insane root that takes the reason prisoner." Yet Twain"s curiosity was aroused, and he would keep returning to the book in the coming days in the hope of understanding it. He never did. "He confessed that his faculties had been more or less defeated in attempting to follow the ciphers," Paine recalled, "and he complained bitterly that the evidence had not been set forth so that he who merely skims a book might grasp it."14 But Booth"s strange book was merely the spark that set Twain"s imagination going on the larger subject of Bardolatry, which had interested him for decades. Though he admired the plays, he didn"t think much of the man from Stratford whom he once called "that third-rate actor who never wrote a line in his life." A born debunker, he had long wanted to explain to the world why he considered Shakespeare the playwright a myth. After discussing the subject with Macy, who encouraged him to write about it, Twain suddenly decided that it was indeed time to air his views. "It always seemed unaccountable to me," he said, "that a man could be so prominent in Elizabeth"s little London ... yet leave behind him hardly an incident for people to remember him by. ... Not even a distinguished horse could die and leave such biographical poverty behind him."15 As someone who was in the process of leaving quite a long biographical trail behind him, he was amazed that in three hundred years no one had been able to produce a single letter or literary ma.n.u.script that was indisputably in Shakespeare"s hand, or even a book that had belonged to him. For Twain, the vast amount of conjecture needed to flesh out Shakespeare"s life made the Bard resemble a reconstructed dinosaur-"nine bones and six hundred barrels of plaster of paris." Refusing to join "the Shakespearites" or "the Baconians," he preferred to call himself a "Brontosaurian," explaining that even though he wasn"t able to say who wrote the plays, he was "sure that Shakespeare didn"t," and "strongly suspected] that Bacon did."16 Isabel Lyon was shocked when she overheard Twain and Macy hotly denouncing Shakespeare"s authorship of the plays. "You"d think both men had Shakespeare by the throat ... strangling him for some hideous crime."
As soon as Keller and the Macys left Stormfield on the morning of January 11, Twain started writing the little book that would become Is Shakespeare Dead? "There was silence in his room all morning," Lyon recalled. "About noon he came swinging down the hallway to my study, waving some sheets of ms. and read what he had written. ... It is disturbing. His attack is not gentle, and not very clever. He has Shakespeare in shreds, just where he wants him to be."
Lyon tried to talk him