'Scandalous memoirs' unsealed after a century reveal true Twain
Saturday June 12 2010
Mark Twain's scandalous relationship with his "filthy-minded and salacious" secretary is to be revealed in memoirs published 100 years after the author's death.
The unedited 5,000-page autobiography will lay bare his feelings for Isabel Van Kleek Lyon. The book is also likely to shatter the myth that America's great writer and humourist was a cheerful old man.
Before his death in 1910, Twain decreed that the full manuscript should not be published for a century so that he would be "dead, and unaware, and indifferent" and could speak his "whole frank mind".
His opinion of Lyon is certainly frank. The "comely" brunette was hired in 1902 to manage Twain's correspondence. The pair became inseparable after the death of Twain's wife, Olivia, two years later.
She adored Twain, referring to him as "the King" in her diaries. She dreamed of marrying him, but to no avail, and ended up marrying his business manager, Ralph Ashcroft.
Twain sacked Lyon in 1909, claiming she had tried to steal from him, had "hypnotised" him for three years and tried to seduce him by lying around the house in "silken dainties".
More than 400 pages of the manuscript are given over to Lyon, who Twain denounces as a "filthy-minded slut".
Laura Trombley, the author of 'Mark Twain's Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years', said: "He spent five of his last 12 months writing about Isabel. He was obsessed with her. It's Twain at his nastiest. There's this popular conception of him being pure. But he smoked an average of 300 cigars a month, and he drank every day. He was very sexual."
The first volume of the memoirs will be released on November 30. Twain, the author of 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn', was a towering figure in his own lifetime, lauded as the greatest American humourist of his age and the father of American literature. (© Daily Telegraph, London)
- Nick Allen in Los Angeles
Irish Independent
