Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years (Hardcover)

by Karen Lystra (Author) "IN 1895 MARK TWAIN was one of the most famous men in the world..." (more)
Key Phrases: epileptic temperament, original diaries, New York, Miss Lyon, Mark Twain (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Among the vast archive of documents in the Mark Twain Papers at UC-Berkeley is Twain's memoir fragment about his former personal secretary and his exâ€"business managerâ€"whom he accused of turning him into "another stripped & forlorn King Lear." While Twain left this scathing piece unpublished, and his surviving daughter drew a posthumous veil over the near-scandal that had erupted when Twain fired the two amid accusations of financial impropriety, Lystra (professor of American Studies, California State University at Fullerton) recounts the family drama that took place during Twain's last decade. Isabel Lyon joined the Clemens household in 1902 as the writer's secretary, a few years before her future husband, Ralph Ashcroft, started managing Twain's business affairs. Using Lyon's diaries and notebooks, which have been mostly neglected by previous scholars, Lystra shows how ardently Lyon tried to make herself indispensable and implies that she was instrumental in alienating Twain's affections from his daughter Jean, who was institutionalized for three years for her poorly understood epilepsy; the book's saddest chapters explore the state of psychiatry and the prejudices of the time. Twain's eventual reliance on Lyon and Ashcroft brought them into conflict with his daughter Clara, who finally accused them of embezzlement. Although an independent audit turned up no evidence, Twain turned on them for supposedly tricking him into giving them power of attorney over the Mark Twain Company. Despite Twain's Lear-like railings (to which Lystra gives more credence than other scholars), Lystra brings no proof that Lyon was Machiavellian. 21 b&w photos not seen by PW.
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Review
"A brilliant literary detective, Lystra is also particularly good at presenting the prejudicial myths." - Anthony Glavin, Irish Times "Explores a chapter in the life of America's greatest storyteller, one he deeply regretted to the day he died. It is a chapter full of Victorian melodrama. At times, it reads like a steamy romance novel; at other times, like a textbook on power by Machiavelli." - Hartford Courant "Lystra's narrative moves quickly, and offers an illuminating portrait of an aging Twain. The research is thorough, the personalities colorful." - The Jerusalem Post "This gripping examination of Twain's later life recounts a family drama so fantastic it reads like the subplot of a daytime soap.... For all its intrigue and melodrama, this is a remarkably powerful and moving study." - Library Journal" --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 363 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520233239
• ISBN-13: 978-0520233232
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,107,891 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Flawed, Yet Powerful Study of Twain's Final Follies, November 5, 2005

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Karen Lystra might be the very first scholar to study, systematically, the diaries of Jean Clemens, Mark twain's epileptic daughter whom he kept institutionalized for many years. Jean seems like a lovely young woman, with lots of character and a sweet streak that seems truly remarkable when one considers how awful her life was. (She was the least favored of the three daughters of Samuel and Olivia Clemens, and it seems that her father blamed her somewhat for bringing on the catastrophe in "Livy's" health.) All these matters are gone into with a thoroughness and a sensitivity that makes the book a fine document on illness and social pressure regarding treatment and cure.

What then prevents this book from attaining a higher place on the shelf of Twain scholarship? Somewhere in the years it took to research and write this book, the author seems to have lost her objectivity. That's understandable, but an editor might have helped her to tone down her continuous sneering at Isabel Lyon, Twain's onetime secretary whom Lystra seeks to portray as a combination of Lady Macbeth and Mata Hari. Twain thought highly of Isabel Lyon, but when she married Ralph Ashcroft, one of his financial advisers, he turned on both of them and charged them with embezzlement. Previous scholars have seen this episode as one of Twain embittered, lonely, paranoid and suspicious; and certainly Karen Lystra is within her rights to re-evaluate the evidence and to argue that, indeed, Lyon was an embezzler. But she cannot persuade me that Lyon "schemed" to marry Twain. The evidence just isn't there.

Perhaps Isabel was attracted to him sexually, though Lystra treats Lyon's sexuality as a thing of shame. She used to like to watch Twain half-naked, in his white silk undershorts; but maybe the age difference between them (nearly thirty years) disgusts Lystra, for she does her best to make this sex attraction repulsive.

Worst of all is her tone and the way she distorts all the evidence, major and minor. In one passage she pokes fun of Isabel's flattery of the Twain family, citing one of Isabel's diary passages in which she compares Clara Clemens to an angel. Excuse me, but a diary entry is not flattery! Flattery is when you tell somebody something nice about themselves which you don't believe! It is not when you write something nice in a secret diary which the other person will never see.

If she can't directly connect Jean's expulsion from Twain's home to Isabel's so-called plots, she will instead say, "Skillful ventriloquists do not move their lips," as if a lack of evidence was itself evidence. No, sorry, it's not.

When Twain turned against Lyon and Ashcroft, he threw himself into writing a diatribe against them that ran to nearly 430 pages. Lystra would have us believe that this is a great piece of writing. The passages she quotes from it are pretty grim. I don't know, maybe it's this King Lear-like late greatness. He seems to have persuaded her, at any rate. Lyon was a "brute," wrote Twain. "Just a plain, simple, heartless brute, and rotten to the spine." She's a prostitute, a buzzard, a superannuated virgin. Well I for one think the story might have been a bit more complex than the one Lystra relates.

Her acidity extends even to the captions of the photos in the middle of the book. Most of the captions are non-judgmental ("Albert Bigelow Paine and Mark Twain playing billiards, 1908"). Then you get to a photo of Isabel, and it's "Isabel Lyon posing dramatically." Get it? The woman can't even tell the truth when she's not even speaking.

I mean the Lyon woman of course.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Mark Twain's moral reckoning, May 25, 2004

By A Customer

This is a fascinating, well written and painstakingly researched book. Finally, a book on our friend Mark Twain that tackles new terrain. It reads like an exciting, suspenseful mystery. Lystra sifts through all the evidence surrounding Twain's last years and his tangled relations with his secretary, Isabel Lyon and his daughters, Clara and Jean. It is sad to read about Twain, the
widower, hungry for love and a real home, succumbing to the flattery and duplicity of his unscrupulous secretary. She schemed to marry him and seperate him from his daughters. She almost succeeded. Plainly, he never would have married her. His unwavering love for his late wife stopped that folly. But she did manage to build a wedge between him and his daughters. Twain was manipulated and lied to and encouraged to give in to his worst weaknesses. This led to his sad betrayal of his epileptic daughter, Jean. It is interesting to compare his wife Olivia with Isabel Lyon. His wife had a powerful strength that belied her often frail health. It is obvious that she brought out many of his best qualities. She was a true helpmate and companion to him. She expected him to live up to his moral and familial responsibilites. She kept him centered and clear thinking - no easy task! Without her as his emotional and moral anchor - he gave in to human weakness and selfishness. Yet, it is inspiring and uplifting to witness him looking deep within himself and unflinchingly recognizing his character faults and their terrible consequences. It is a truly courageous act. He makes amends to his daughter , who he really does love and who loves him. Father and daughter experience happiness during their final days together. You come away from their story with admiration for both of them.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Revisionistic, eye-opening view of Twain's final years, January 7, 2006

By	J. Burns (Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Having recently completed Fred Kaplan's "The Singular Mark Twain" and Ron Powers' far better recent biography "Mark Twain: A Life," which each refer to this book, I was delighted to receive a copy for Christmas. As Karen Lystra points out, virtually every biography of Samuel Clemens describes his final years as unremittingly bitter, while the truth is not quite so one-sided. More importantly, unlike biographers who characterize Clemens' eventual attacks on Isabel Lyon, his secretary during most of his final years, and her helpmate and eventual husband, Ralph Ashcroft, as hyperbolic fantasies, Lystra takes Clemens at his word. She details how Lyon and Ashcroft insinuated themselves into Clemens' world, preying on his loneliness and enormous ego to give themselves power and legal authority over his affairs. Most powerful of all, Lystra focuses as no one else ever has on Clemens' youngest daughter, Jean, including both the heartbreaking story of the prejudice she faced because of her epilepsy, as well as how her father abandoned her. Although that separation was urged on Clemens by Lyon, who even went so far as to intercept letters Jean wrote to her father begging for his attention and visits, Clemens himself acknowledged some years later, when he fired Lyon and Ashcroft and brought Jean back into his life, that he himself was unforgivably to blame. All of this is told is a way that gives new insights into Clemens and the considerable imperfections that accompanied his unparalleled talent and fame as an American author.

My only complaint -- making this a four- rather than five-star review -- is that Lystra is a pedestrian writer. The book truly comes alive only when she quotes the primary source material -- the diaries of Jean and Clara Clemens, the letters of friends and family, and of course Twain's own autobiographical writings. But she finds wondrous excerpts from all of these to quote, and for that, her thesis, and shining a light on Clemens's failings, this book is a must for anyone who wants to know more about Mark Twain.