Biography: Ernest Hemingway once famously remarked that all of American literature begins with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.
Fans of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter might demur, but there is no gainsaying the elevated position that author, humorist and American folk hero Samuel L. Clemens (as he was christened) commands yet in American letters.
The long-established literary reputation of Clemens, author also of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Life on the Mississippi, makes the revelations in Karen Lystra's Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years all the more remarkable. Struck by the engaging voice of Clemens's youngest daughter, Jean, in diaries kept over three years during which she lived apart from her beloved father, Lystra revisited the written record of Clemens's last years, including an unpublished 429-page autobiography penned by Clemens the year before his death. Drawing also on the memoirs of Clara Clemens, Twain's middle daughter, and the diaries of Isabel Lyon, Clemens's private secretary, Lystra reconstructs a lurid and ultimately heartbreaking tale that frequently reads more like pulp fiction than fact.
Lystra's major thesis is that following the death of his favourite daughter, Susy, in 1896, and the death of his beloved wife, Livy, in 1904, Clemens fell increasingly in thrall to his younger and attractive secretary, Isabel Lyon, daughter of a Columbia classics professor, who was herself utterly besotted by, and indeed keen to marry, "the King", as she called Clemens in her diaries. In cahoots with his crooked business manager, Ralph Ashcroft, who waited upon Clemens like a valet, Lyon reduced the author to a state of dependency that saw the scheming pair nearly gain control of Clemens's fortune and estate.
Especially harrowing is the account Lystra provides of how Lyon, by manipulating both Clemens and his daughter's doctor, managed to send Jean, who suffered from epilepsy from the age of 15, into exile - first to a sanatorium and later to various residences - before her and Ashcroft's larcenous plotting was uncovered, and daughter and father reunited for a largely idyllic eight months prior to Jean's sudden death in 1909.
A brilliant literary detective, Lystra is also particularly good at presenting the prejudicial myths, such as a proclivity for criminality and violence, attached to epilepsy a century ago, and how Clemens himself never managed to come to terms with his youngest daughter's condition. Persuaded by his secretary that Jean would fare better in a sanatorium, Twain's abdication as a father even went so far as to allow his secretary to read aloud to him all letters that Jean wrote home, thereby sparing him any "unreasonable complaints" or requests "impossible to grant".
Clemens himself recorded the Odalisque-like poses that Lyon struck on couches, the playful pats on his hand, while Lyon's diaries tell how Clemens would visit her bedroom wearing "only his silk underclothes". It was a sexual pas de deux no doubt, but it seems neither bedded the other, and shortly before their scam unravelled, in a twist worthy of a true potboiler, Lyon and co- conspirator Ashcroft wed, much to Clemens's shocked disapproval.
Lystra also details Clemens's disturbing infatuation with what he called his "Angelfish", a coterie of young girls whom the author corresponded with, when not indulging them with day trips and other treats. Per Lystra, there was no erotic subtext to Clemens's interest in these children; rather the writer once again appeared to be pursuing the kind of emotional bonding that he could not entirely manage with his own two surviving daughters.
Although Ashcroft succeeded in securing a power of attorney over Clemens's estate, Lyon, who abused both alcohol and sedatives, made the fatal mistake of alienating Clara Clemens by trying to diminish her allowance from her father. Angered and increasingly suspicious, Clara gradually convinced Clemens of the degree to which he had been hoodwinked by his household pair. Both Lyon and Ashcroft were sacked, and Clara's sister Jean allowed to return home, where she and her father effected a rapprochement in what proved be her final year of life.
Known as the Ashcroft-Lyon MS, Clemens's unpublished autobiography, written in part as a letter to his close friend and fellow writer, William Howells, has heretofore been dismissed as the rambling, paranoid delusions of an increasingly cynical and despondent man. By cross-referencing it with her other largely ignored sources, however, Lystra shows the narrative to be rather Clemens's own cogent, albeit tortured, acknowledgement of both his unwitting beguilement by Lyon and his unpardonable treatment of his youngest daughter.
The stranger-than-fiction fabric of the tale was not lost on Twain, who compared it himself to "an old-time machine-made novel". In fact it's more Shakespearean than that - given the magnitude of love and betrayal therein. Lyon and Ashcroft thought "they would be indisputably supreme here", Clemens wrote of his former helpmates, "& I another stripped & forlorn King Lear".