Mark Twain's Other Woman (eBook)

Laura Skandera Trombley (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2010 | 1. Auflage
352 Seiten
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (Verlag)
978-0-307-59325-2 (ISBN)

Infos

Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain's last personal secretary.

For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White's chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring audience. But after a dramatic breakup of their relationship, Twain ranted in personal letters that she was 'a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drunkard, a sneak, a humbug, a traitor, a conspirator, a filthy-minded and salacious slut pining for seduction.' For decades, biographers omitted Isabel from the official Twain history at his decree. But now, the truth of the split is exposed at last in a story that sheds light on a lionized author's final decade.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Textauszug

'Too Perfect for Life' THE LATE 1880s TO FALL1905 Today has been very full of the joy of living--I wrote letters and read some in the morning. Looked out of my window just in Time to see Dear Mother look up at me on her way home from Church and in the afternoon she came over. Later I played cards with my chief. Some day the penalty for having such perfect living will come. --ISABEL VAN KLEEK LYON 1 By all rights no one should have ever heard of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He should have lived and died a cipher of rural nineteenth-century America. Certainly his modest beginnings presaged a difficult, abbreviated existence. Yet life takes unexpected turns, and the course that his journey took as Mark Twain would have strained the credulity of the most dedicated fiction reader. Born two months prematurely, red-haired Samuel Langhorne Clemens arrived to his parents, thirty-two-year-old Jane Lampton Clemens and thirty-seven-year-old John Marshall Clemens, on November 30, 1835. His birthplace was a tiny two-bedroom rented cabin with an outdoor lean-to kitchen in the village of Florida in Monroe County, Missouri, located at a fork of the Salt River. He joined four young siblings: ten-year-old Orion, eight-year-old Pamela, five-year-old Margaret, and three-year-old Benjamin. Another brother, Pleasant, had died in infancy six years earlier. For a time it looked as though he would suffer Pleasant's fate. No one in his family much expected him to survive. His mother later wrote, 'he was a poor looking object to raise.' Of Florida, Twain joked that the dusty little settlement 'contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town. It may not be modest in me to refer to this, but it is true. There is no record of a person doing as much--not even Shakespeare. But I did it for Florida, and it shows that I could have done it for any place--even London, I suppose.' Yet in the midst of these decidedly inauspicious surroundings, there was an augury that hinted that this child just might be special. For weeks prior to his birth, the bright trail of Halley's Comet crossed the nighttime sky. After a departing shower of sparks and the passage of years, interest in the comet's appearance receded. But not so for Jane Clemens, who told and retold the story of the mysterious visitation and how it foretold great things, and most important, not for Twain, who by the end of his life embraced the notion that Halley's Comet had heralded his coming. He possessed a strong affinity for the celestial body, expressing his hope that he would make his exit when it returned during its seventy-five-year cycle: 'I came in with Halley's Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year (1910), and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don't go out with Halley's Comet.' Maybe Twain felt that a passing comet provided the best explanation for his remarkable life. That this son of Missouri would grow up to be the most famous author in the world and the first global celebrity was so implausible that even Twain had difficulty making sense of his rise: 'The Almighty has said, no doubt: 'Now here are these two unaccountable freaks, they came in together, they must go out together.' ' The accomplishments of this 'freak' were so many and his fame so enormous that by the end of his life he had come to be considered by those who knew him well as otherworldly. According to a close friend, 'He always seemed to me like some great being from another planet--never quite of this race or kind.' The family failed to prosper in Florida, and so...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 16.3.2010
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 0-307-59325-8 / 0307593258
• ISBN-13: 978-0-307-59325-2 / 9780307593252