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Redding Conn.

Charles Ives’ New England Holidays, A Danbury Childhood Set to Music

Charles Ives never forgot the sights and sounds of the village cornet band marching to the cemetery in Danbury, Conn., on Decoration Day. His father, George Ives, had served as a bandmaster in the Union Army and led the town bands after the Civil War.

Charles was born in 1874, soon enough after the war to understand the pain and loss the town still felt. He lived a typical life for a boy from a prominent old New England family. He starred on the baseball diamond, graduated from Yale, married, played the organ in church on Sunday and got rich on Wall Street.

But he led an unconventional life at night and on weekends. Charles Ives composed avant-garde orchestral music, much of which evoked the memories of his boyhood. He revived those early Decoration Days in the second movement of his symphony, New England Holidays, which also included Washington’s Birthday, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving.

Charles ives

Ives’ colleagues knew him as a successful insurance man and were surprised to learn he composed music. No one performed his orchestral music until late in his life. He didn’t care; he wrote what he wanted to write without worrying what his listeners thought. His compositions had dissonance and complexity, wild noises and what conductor Michael Tilson Thomas called ‘confrontational crunches.’

Charles Ives’ Decoration Day

He worked on New England Holidays for years, even decades for the last movement, Thanksgiving.

The Danbury of Charles Ives’ youth.

Ives used hymns, folk songs, marching bands, country fiddlers, a blacksmith’s hammer, church bells and fireworks to paint a musical picture of perfect childhood days. In Decoration Day he evokes the overgrown lilacs in front of the homes abandoned by Civil War soldiers and the sounds of the cornet band. Ives explained what he was getting at with Decoration Day in a written preface to the musical score:

[1]In the early morning the gardens and woods about the village are the meeting places of those who, with tender memories and devoted hand, gather the flowers for the Day’s Memorial…

[2]After the Town Hall is filled with the spring’s harvest of lilacs, daisies and peonies, the parade s slowly formed on Main Street. First came the three Marshalls on Plough horses (going sideways); then the Warden and Burgesses in carriages, the Village Cornet Band, the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic) two by two, the Militia…the inevitable swarm of small boys following.

[3] The march to Wooster Cemetery is a thing a boy never forgets. The roll of muffled drums and “Adeste Fidelis” answer for the dirge. A little girl on the fence post waves to her father and wonders if he looked like that at Gettysburg.

[4] After the last grave is decorated, “Taps” sound out through the pines and hickories, while a last hymn is sung.

[5] When the ranks are formed again and “We all march back to Town” to a Yankee stimulant–Reeves’ inspiring “Second Regiment Quick-Step” — though to many a soldier, the somber thoughts of the day, underlie the tunes of the band.

[6] The march stops — and in the silence, the shadow of the early morning flower-song rises over the Town and the sunset behind West Mountain breathes its benediction upon the Day.”

Charles Ives

Charles Ives was born to a prominent Danbury family on Oct. 20, 1874. His family home, built in 1780, held several generations of Iveses. George Ives, his father, helped found the Savings Bank of Danbury and the Danbury and Norwalk Railroad, now a branch of Metro-North’s New Haven Line.

Charles Ives, left, baseball star

Charles played drums in his father’s marching band in Danbury. George liked to experiment with music. He used to direct two bands to march toward each other playing different songs. He also made his son sing well-known songs while he played something different in a different key. Those experiments would appear later in the work of Charles Ives.

A Conventional Life

His father’s unconventional approach to music were perhaps the only indication Charles Ives would become a path-breaking composer of music. His life did not defy convention.

He composed Symphony No. 1 for his senior thesis at Yale, but his advisor’s reaction convinced him he couldn’t make a living writing the kind of music he wanted to. So he went to work for an insurance company, and eventually founded a successful insurance agency. In 1908, he married Harmony Twichell, whose father had a close friendship with Mark Twain.

Young Charles Ives

His choice of a wife with the first name Harmony seems especially apt. So is the fact that she presided as president of the Mark Twain Society. Ives championed ordinary people over elites in his music, in his memory and in his politics.

He once proposed a Constitutional amendment that would allow citizens to propose bills in Congress. Each year, Congress would pick 10 proposals and put them to a national ballot referendum. Ives printed a pamphlet about the plan and sent it to the 1920 Republican National Convention, but it arrived too late.

By then, Charles Ives had already had his first heart attack during World War I. An argument with Franklin D. Roosevelt, then assistant secretary of the navy, triggered the attack. Ives had suggested financing the war effort with war bonds as low as $50. Roosevelt “scorned the idea of anything so useless as a $50 bond,” but later came around to the idea.

Musical Legacy

He bought a camp in Redding, Conn., which he eventually expanded into a home and studio. There he could retreat for the weekends composing his music, which he didn’t expect to be played in public.

Ives composed prolifically, especially from 1907-1918. Then one day in 1927 he came downstairs with tears in his eyes and told Harmony he couldn’t write music anymore. “It just doesn’t sound right,” he told her. He continued to revise his music, however. He worked on Thanksgiving, the final movement of New England Holidays, for 30 years.

Ives also secretly financed the careers of up-and-coming composers as Lou Harrison and Nicolas Slonimsky. In 1931 and 1932, Slominsky conducted the first three movements of New England Holidays.

In 1947, Charles Ives won the Pulitzer Prize for his Symphony No. 3, The Camp Meeting. He didn’t care, calling prizes ‘badges of mediocrity.’ He gave away his prize money, saying, “Prizes are for boys and I’m a grown-up person.”

Leonard Bernstein, who called Ives the greatest American composer, premiered Ives’ Symphony No. 2 in 1951. Ives heard it over the radio.

Charles Ives’ boyhood home

Ives moved around, but often returned to his family home for gatherings. As Danbury grew from a town to a city, commercial buildings and their clutter grew around the Ives house. The Danbury Museum and Historical Society now owns the house, which it is trying to restore as a museum.

Charles Ives died on May 19, 1954.

To see a documentary about Charles Ives and New England Holidays, click here. With thanks to Music of the First World War by Don Tyler

Album cover of Charles Ives, CC by 2.0. Charles Ives’ house By Daniel Case – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11377562. This story last updated in 2022.

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The Mark Twain Fantasy Menu

Mark Twain liked a good meal, a good cigar and a good cocktail. During a trip to Europe in the 1880s, he had a hard time finding a good meal, or at least one to his liking. The hotel food he reluctantly ate in European hotels inspired the Mark Twain fantasy menu.

Twain was actually known in his day as a travel writer rather than a novelist. He spent 12 years outside of the United States, traveling to the Nevada Territory, Canada, Hawaii, Europe, India, the Holy Land and Australia. Twain experienced different cultures and customs through his taste buds as much as through his eyes and ears.

Today he could pass for a food writer.

The Secret of Success

“Part of the secret of success in life is to eat what you like and let the food fight it out inside,” Twain once wrote.

But during his trip to Europe in the 1880s, he had a hard time finding what he liked. Twain later wrote withering descriptions of European hotel food in his book about the journey, A Tramp Abroad.

Most European hotels offered pretty much the same thing, he noted: characterless soup, a tasteless roast and some of last year’s potatoes. He complained of insipid lentils, indifferent asparagus, decayed strawberries and roast chicken ‘as tasteless as paper.’

He singled out the Hotel de Ville in Milan, where the meals would ‘create an insurrection in a poorhouse.’

And he especially hated European breakfasts. “In Europe, coffee is an unknown beverage,” he wrote, “feeble, characterless, uninspiring…the milk used for it is what the French call “Christian” milk — milk which has been baptized.”

After he dined for months in European hotels, The Mark Twain fantasy menu came to fruition. He made the outrageous claim that he would eat it all when he got home.

Illustration of the Schloss Hotel in Heidelberg, from A Tramp Abroad

“It has now been many months, at the present writing, since I have had a nourishing meal, but I shall soon have one—a modest, private affair, all to myself,” he wrote. “I have selected a few dishes, and made out a little bill of fare, which will go home in the steamer that precedes me, and be hot when I arrive.”

The Mark Twain Fantasy Menu

Radishes. Baked apples, with cream
Fried oysters; stewed oysters. Frogs.
American coffee, with real cream.
American butter.
Fried chicken, Southern style.
Porter-house steak.
Saratoga potatoes.
Broiled chicken, American style.
Hot biscuits, Southern style,
Hot wheat-bread, Southern style,
Hot buckwheat cakes.
American toast. Clear maple syrup.
Virginia bacon, broiled.
Blue points, on the half shell.
Cherry-stone clams.
San Francisco mussels, steamed.
Oyster soup. Clam Soup.
Philadelphia Terapin soup.
Oysters roasted in shell-Northern style.
Soft-shell crabs. Connecticut shad.
Baltimore perch.
Brook trout, from Sierra Nevadas.
Lake trout, from Tahoe.
Sheep-head and croakers, from New Orleans.
Black bass from the Mississippi.
American roast beef.
Roast turkey, Thanksgiving style.
Cranberry sauce. Celery.
Roast wild turkey. Woodcock.
Canvas-back-duck, from Baltimore.
Prairie liens, from Illinois.
Missouri partridges, broiled.
‘Possum. Coon.
Boston bacon and beans.
Bacon and greens, Southern style.
Hominy. Boiled onions. Turnips.
Pumpkin. Squash. Asparagus.
Butter beans. Sweet potatoes.
Lettuce. Succotash. String beans.
Mashed potatoes. Catsup.
Boiled potatoes, in their skins.
New potatoes, minus the skins.
Early rose potatoes, roasted in the ashes, Southern style, served hot.
Sliced tomatoes, with sugar or vinegar. Stewed tomatoes.
Green corn, cut from the ear and served with butter and pepper.
Green corn, on the ear.
Hot corn-pone, with chitlings, Southern style,
Hot hoe-cake, Southern style,
Hot egg-bread, Southern style,
Hot light-bread, Southern style.
Buttermilk. Iced sweet milk.
Apple dumplings, with real cream.
Apple pie, Apple fritters,
Apple puffs, Southern style.
Peach cobbler, Southern style
Peach pie. American mince pie.
Pumpkin pie. Squash pie.
All sorts of American pastry.
Fresh American fruits of all sorts, including strawberries which are not to be doled out as if they were jewelry, but in a more liberal way.
Ice-water—not prepared in the ineffectual goblet, but in the sincere and capable refrigerator.

The Squalid Table d’ Hôte

Americans intending to spend a year or so in European hotels will do well to copy this bill and carry it along. They will find it an excellent thing to get up an appetite with, in the dispiriting presence of the squalid table d’hôte.”

– Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880

Twain occasionally found something in Europe he enjoyed putting in his mouth. During an earlier trip to England, for example, he discovered a cocktail recipe he liked. He then wrote to his wife Olivia in January 1874.

Livy my darling, I want you to be sure & remember to have, in the bathroom, when I arrive, a bottle of Scotch whisky, a lemon, some crushed sugar, & a bottle of Angostura bitters. Ever since I have been in London I have taken in a wine glass what is called a cock-tail (made with those ingredients) before breakfast, before dinner, & just before going to bed.

In case you wondered, Mark Twain died at 74 of a heart attack at his home in Redding, Conn.

This story was updated in 2022.

Image of Mark Twain: CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0)

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Alfred Winslow Jones, The Unlikely Inventor of the Hedge Fund

Alfred Winslow Jones had been a spy, a sociologist, a magazine writer and a Communist before he invented the modern hedge fund in 1949.

He began investing $100,000 from a shabby office on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange. When he died at his home in Redding, Conn., he was worth many, many, many times that.

People who caught on to his methods and adopted them also made king’s ransoms. And after wresting their profit from their lightly regulated activities, they paid lower taxes than their secretaries did – another Alfred Winslow Jones innovation.

Financial journalist Sebastian Mallaby called him an ‘unlikely Wall Street patriarch.”

Alfred Winslow Jones

He was, noted Mallaby, “an erudite dandy, a onetime Marxist who hiked to the frontlines of the Spanish Civil War with the writer Dorothy Parker—where they shared a bottle of Scotch whisky with Ernest Hemingway.”

Alfred Winslow Jones was born Sept. 9, 1900, in Australia, the son of a General Electric executive. At four his family moved to Schenectady, N.Y., the home of a large GE manufacturing facility.

Like his father, he graduated from Harvard, but unlike his father he didn’t go into business. He got a job as a purser on a tramp steamer. He worked as a statistician for an investment house for a little while, but tired of it. Then he took the Foreign Service exam, and got posted to Berlin.

Alfred Winslow Jones, from his Harvard yearbook

From Berlin he reported to the State Department on the rise of Hitler, but he secretly married a left-wing Jewish socialite named Anna Block. Jones then quit the State Department, stayed in Germany under an assumed name and studied at the Marxist Workers School. He also spied for a left-wing group called the Leninist Organization. His clandestine activities may have trained him to operate under the radar on Wall Street.

Back in the USA

Alfred Winslow Jones’ marriage lasted only a few months. He returned to the United States and enrolled in Columbia University, where he studied for his PhD in sociology. He married again, this time to Mary Carter. The newlyweds took their honeymoon in Spain during the Spanish Civil War, and Jones reported on civilian relief for representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker peace group.

They hitchhiked across Spain, met up with Parker and Hemingway and, according to some sources, worked for the OSS, the forerunner of the CIA.

They returned home so he could write his thesis, an analysis of labor unrest in an Akron, Ohio, rubber plant. Jones wanted to figure out if fascism could take hold in the United States. He had assistants conduct 1,700 field interviews, which he analyzed statistically. His thesis, Life, Liberty and Property, A Story of Conflict and a Measurement of Conflicting Rights, concluded it could not.

Fortune, a fledgling business magazine, printed part of the thesis and hired him as a staff writer. Eventually he wrote an essay for Fortune on forecasting the stock market, arguing that investor psychology drives the market’s rise and fall.

The article gave him an idea.

Wall Street

In 1949, the names ‘Fidelity’ and ‘Prudential’ embodied the virtues associated with money managers: sober, prim, formal and conservative. Certainly not a 48-year-old ex-communist who used to drink whiskey in a war zone with Ernest Hemingway.

But Alfred Winslow Jones founded A.W. Jones with $40,000 of his own money and $60,000 from friends. His investor friends included Louis Fischer, a former Communist who wrote a biography of Vladimir Lenin, and Sam Stayman, a textile executive and famous bridge player.

Jones described his fourth career choice as managing a ‘hedged fund.’ His big idea was to reduce risk by buying stocks he believed would rise and short selling stocks he believed would fall.

Alfred Winslow Jones had some other ideas as well.

Clandestine Operation

Drawing, perhaps, on his experience as a spy he created his firm as a partnership to avoid regulation. He didn’t register his fund, nor did he advertise it.

In his obituary, the New York Times wrote,

Mr. Jones preferred to remain almost invisible. ‘Hedging,’ he once said, ‘is a speculative tool used to conservative ends,’ but he did not as a rule discuss what he did, let alone how he did it.

He also borrowed money to leverage his bets that certain stocks would rise. And he invented the 20 percent plus two percent performance fee, in which fund managers received a share of profit rather than salary.

Jones claimed his fee structure had to do with the way Phoenician merchant ships kept 20 percent of profits from a successful voyage. The real reason: so the IRS would tax their profit at the capital gains rate of 25 percent, rather than at the top marginal rate (at the time) of 91 percent.

The New York Stock Exchange

Big Daddy

By 1966, a number of hedge funds imitated Jones’ methods on a small scale, according to Fortune. New York magazine in 1968 called him the “big daddy” of the hedge fund business in a story, The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With.

In 20 years he had a cumulative return of 5000 percent, and over 34 years his investors lost money in only three.

He had several homes, on tony Sutton Place in Manhattan and in Redding, Conn., where he liked to garden. International affairs lured him away from the office; at times he would take leave to work on summer projects for the Peace Corps.

Alfred Winslow Jones eventually untangled himself from the business and devoted himself to the Peace Corps. He tried to create a reverse Peace Corps in which people from poor countries would come to aid the poor in the United States. It would be a hedge against creating a sense of inferiority among poor nations.

Alfred Winslow Jones died at his home on Poverty Hollow Road in Redding on June 2, 1989. A.W. Jones is still in business.

With thanks to More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite, by Sebastian Mallaby. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Mark Twain Burglary Goes Comically Awry

The Mark Twain burglary of 1908 is remembered for the witty notice the author tacked onto his dining room door for the next home invader. However, the reminiscences of the burglar – a Mark Twain devotee – had their own entertainment value.

Mark Twain

In the fall of 1908, Mark Twain was a widower with two grown, unmarried daughters. He had just built an Italianate mansion in Redding, Conn., where he enjoyed a respite from his labors in New York City.

Stormfield, Twain’s house in Redding

Henry Williams and his partner Charles Hoffman decided to rob the Twain mansion. On Sept. 17, 1908, they boarded a train from New York for Redding to do just that.

Years later, Williams wrote an account of the botched Mark Twain burglary that was worthy of Twain himself.

Mark Twain Burglary

It was dark, wrote Williams, and when they got off the train at Redding Station they weren’t sure of the way. So they knocked on a farmhouse door to ask directions. Wrote Williams,

This was the first mistake which I made that night. The farmer, seeing that we were strangers, came out and directed us on our way, lantern in hand.

They reached the Twain mansion, where the lights were ablaze, so they waited for it to go dark. Hoffman climbed through an unlocked kitchen window and then opened the door for Williams. “I entered by the front door like a gentleman,” he wrote.

1909 newspaper photo of Isabel Lyon

They found the heavy, old-fashioned oak sideboard where the family silver was kept. On top of it was a brass bowl. Williams put the bowl on the floor, as it had no value to them and they had plans for the sideboard. That was their second mistake.

The sideboard was locked, and they didn’t want to make a noise breaking it open. So they carried the sideboard out of the house and 500 feet down the road, where they broke it open and emptied the silver into a black bag. Then they returned to the house to see what else they could steal:

When we entered the dining room the second time, my partner, walking rather carelessly, stumbled and fell heavily over that brass bowl.

In the stillness of the night it seemed to me as if an earthquake had suddenly struck the house. Such a noise that rolling brass thing made!

Twain’s secretary, Isabel Lyons, came down the stairs and said, “Hello.”

No. 3

Williams and Hoffman turned and ran – and made their third mistake. Had they walked to Danbury, they probably wouldn’t have been caught, he wrote. Instead, they decided to walk to Bethel and wait for the early train to New York. A passenger who had heard of the Mark Twain burglary spotted them in the smoker and, suspecting they were the culprits, notified the sheriff when the train stopped at the next station. There, the deputy sheriff and a posse of farmers had assembled.

Wrote Williams,

A dozen men, armed with pitchforks, shot guns, clubs, and other weapons, boarded the train just as it was pulling away from the platform… they entered the smoker by the rear door. My partner, seeing the armed men entering and that we were greatly outnumbered, jumped up from his seat and ran quickly to the front platform, where he succeeded in dropping off from the rapidly moving train.

The posse turned on Williams, who pulled out his revolver and began to blaze away at the ceiling to cause a panic. In the melee that followed, he shot the sheriff in the leg before a blackjack knocked him unconscious.

Hoffman was caught, and the two burglars were handcuffed together and marched to the farm where they had asked directions the night before:

The old farmer came out of the house and, recognizing us as we drew near, greeted us with a sneer and snicker, saying: “Wall, boys, glad t’see yer ag’in!”

Close the Door, Please

That day, Twain wrote a note ‘to the next burglar’ and had it permanently attached to his dining room door.

NOTICE.

To the Next Burglar:
There is only plated ware in this house now and henceforth.
You will find it in that brass thing in the dining room over in the corner by the basket of kittens.
If you want the basket, put the kittens in the brass thing.
Do not make noise – it disturbs the family.
You will find rubbers in the front hall by that thing that has the umbrellas in it – chiffonier, I think they call it, or pergola, or something like that.
Please close the door when you go away.

Very truly yours,
S. L. Clemens

While languishing in prison, Williams at least had the satisfaction of knowing the burglary provided a new subject for the humorist. He wrote in his memoirs,

…while dedicating the little new library which he had founded for the residents of the town of Redding, Mark Twain took occasion to make characteristic fun of the affair as follows:

“I am going to help build this library with contributions – from my visitors. Every male guest who comes to my house will have to contribute a dollar or go away without his baggage. If those burglars who broke into my house recently had done that, they would have been happier now; or if they had broken into this library, they might have read a few good books and led a better life. Now they are in jail, and if they keep on they will go to Congress. When a person starts down hill, you can never tell where he is going to stop…”

Happy Ending to the Mark Twain Burglary

The story has a happy ending. Though the burglar served 10 years in the Connecticut State Prison, he rebuilt his life afterward. On Dec. 28, 1924, the New York Times printed an interview with him. He said,

Since my release from prison some nine years ago, I had the privilege and pleasure of meeting the only living member of Mark Twain’s family, Mrs. Clara Clemens Gabrilowitsch. It is to the generosity and practical assistance of Mark Twain’s talented daughter that I owe my real chance to make good and to become a useful and law-abiding citizen and member of the society I hated and fought so long.

This story last updated in 2023.

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Mark Twain Refuses To Succumb to the Silken Dainties of Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain made a painful confession that didn’t come to light until 100 years after his death, in 2010. He’d been flattered, manipulated and fleeced by a seductress: his personal secretary, Isabel Lyon.

Twain included the confession as part of his 5,000-page autobiography and ordered that it not be published for a century after he was “dead, and unaware, and indifferent.” He wanted to speak his “whole frank mind.”

Mark Twain

He wrote a scalding, often funny, 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon, who had been in cahoots with Twain’s self-appointed business manager, Ralph Ashcroft.

Scholars disagree about Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft. Was she Twain’s best friend, a devoted employee who relieved him of every care only to be attacked by a jealous daughter? Or were they really, as Twain called them, “a pair of degraded & sufficiently clumsy sharpers?”

Whatever the case, the 429-page screed, written as a letter to his friend William Dean Howells, had a specific purpose. A few months after Twain died in 1910, the letter accomplished its purpose.

Mark Twain Meets Isabel Lyon

Mark Twain met Lyon at a party in 1892, when she was 29 and working as a governess for a Hartford family. Paired with her at cards, he found her charming. At the end of the evening he was invited to return. “I’ll come only if I can play with the little governess,” he said.

She was the daughter of a Columbia University classics professor who died when she was 19. His death forced her to support herself and her mother.

Ten years after that card game, Twain’s wife Olivia hired Isabel Lyon to handle his correspondence, as she was too frail to do it herself anymore. Twain described her as “slender, petite, comely, 38 years old by the almanac, and 17 in ways and carriage and dress.” At first, she rarely saw the great man.

In 1903, Isabel Lyon and her mother traveled with Twain’s family to Italy and stayed in a cottage on the grounds of their villa outside Florence. Olivia then died in Italy in 1904.

Grieving, Mark Twain returned to the United States. Isabel moved in with the family in New York City, summering with them in Dublin, N.H., at the house of artist Abbott Handerson Thayer. Twain had sold the house in Hartford because the family found it too painful to live where his daughter Susy had died in 1896.

The Main Chance

Isabel Lyon in a 1904 newspaper photo

Isabel Lyon realized the opportunity presented by her closeness to Twain as his secretary. She revered him, calling him the ‘King’ in her diary. She grew closer to him and gained more authority over his affairs.

Eventually, Lyon ran the household, handled his finances, edited his writing and acted as his social secretary. She also chaperoned his two surviving daughters, Clara, rebellious and difficult, and Jean, seriously ill with epilepsy.

Everyone, Twain later wrote, knew Isabel Lyon wanted to marry him. He knew it too. He described how she tried to seduce him in her silken dainties:

She would get herself up in sensuous oriental silken flimseys of dainty dyes, & stretch herself out on her bepillowed lounge in her bedroom, in studied enticing attitudes, with an arm under her head & a cigarette between her lips, & imagine herself the Star of the Harem waiting for the eunuchs to fetch the Sultan.

Touchy-Feely Isabel Lyon

She was always touching him, he complained to Howells:

…Miss Lyon is good company, agreeable company, delightful company … but there is nothing about her that invites to intimate personal contact; her caressing touch –& she was always finding excuses to apply it–arch girly-girly pats on the back of my hand & playful little spats on my cheek with her fan — & these affectionate attentions always made me shrivel uncomfortably–much as happens when a frog jumps down my bosom. Howells, I could not go to bed with Miss Lyon, I would rather have a waxwork.

“In all my (nearly) seventy-four years I have seen only the one person whom I would marry, & I have lost her,” he wrote. “Miss Lyon compares with her as a buzzard compares with a dove. (I say this with apologies to the buzzard.)”

Twain, calling himself “a born ass,” blamed himself for liking the attention.

Stormfield

Stormfield

By 1907, Mark Twain wanted to move out of New York. His biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, lived in Redding, Conn., and persuaded Twain to buy land, sight unseen, in the town. The property included a two-story saltbox house called the Lobster Pot. Twain gave it to Lyon in gratitude for her service.

Twain was touring, and left it to Lyon and an architect to build and furnish an 18-room Italianate mansion called Stormfield. (See a video of Mark Twain with Clara and Jean taken by Thomas Edison at Stormfield here.)

It was at Stormfield that Isabel Lyon met her Waterloo. She grew increasingly high-handed, spent Twain’s money lavishly and grew intimate with Ralph Ashcroft. Ashcroft had insinuated himself into Twain’s life as his business manager. But Lyon managed to alienate Clara and the servants.

Biographer Laura Skandera-Trombly, who is sympathetic to Lyon, writes:

… the most likely explanation for Clara’s ending Clemens and Lyon’s relationship was that it was beginning to resemble, much too closely for her comfort, a type of permanent union.

Putrescent Pair

Karen Lystra, though, writes that an audit showed Lyon had used Twain’s money to renovate the Lobster Pot without his permission. Lystra also had evidence that she and Ashcroft duped him into granting her power of attorney in November 1908.

Matters came to a head in 1909 when the family doctor told Twain to ask Lyon and Ashcroft to account for their stewardship. Twain was indignant. Ashcroft was indignant. Clara persisted in the accusations. Finally Twain grew suspicious when he broached the subject of an audit and Ashcroft and Lyon resisted.

Twain had an audit done.

Isabel Lyon then married Ralph Ashcroft in March 1909. The next month, Twain fired her and evicted her from the Lobster Pot.

She fought back in the press and in the courts. They battled until Twain settled out of court in 1909. Ashcroft got some money and Twain got the Lobster Pot. Just before he died, Twain sent a letter to John Hays Hammond:

First & last, in one way & another, that putrescent pair cost me $50,000 — & yet I have come out ahead. For they are tied together for life, & I was the unwitting reason of it.

And he denounced Isabel Lyon bitterly. Twain called 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.”

Father’s Weapon

Twain penned his 429-page attack on Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft between May and October 1909. The Ashcrofts moved to Chicago. Twain died on April 21, 1910.

Clara Clemens

Three months later, Isabel Lyon and Ralph Ashcroft tried to sell a manuscript they had taken from him. They wrote a letter to Clara threatening to blackmail her if she stopped the sale. Lyon knew about Clara’s affair with her married accompanist. Clara wrote to a friend:

But Father left me one weapon to use in case they troubled me any more & I used it. –He wrote out a full description of their entire story of dishonesty which I was to publish if there was no other way to keep them quiet.

Clara sent an attorney to Chicago, who retrieved the other manuscripts they’d stolen.

The Ashcrofts moved to Montreal in 1913 and separated in the 1920s. They divorced in 1927. Isabel Lyon died December 4, 1958 in New York City.

This story last updated in 2022.

Image: Portrait of Mark Twain ca. 1905 owned by the Mark Twain Library in Redding, Conn. From Terry Ballard via Flickr. CC By 2.0.

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