March 11 Thursday — In Redding, Conn. Sam began a letter to daughter Clara that he finished Mar. 14, expressing concerns about her suspicions of theft by Isabel Lyon from household accounts. Some time previously, while Lyon was recovering from her breakdown in Hartford, Clara began investigating for irregularities in the household finances. Sam’s reference to losing sleep “again” indicates Clara had voiced her suspicions sometime prior to this day, and Ashcroft had been asked for a reporting of the books. Since Ashcroft and Lyon had recently become engaged, the shadow of suspicion also fell on him, but Clemens voiced caution until Ashcroft’s reports could be examined. At this point Clemens asked his daughter for evidence, not conjecture, further, he defends the character and actions of Lyon and Ashcroft,a defense he would ultimately drop into the acid of betrayal. What led to Clara’s suspicions? Secondary studies usually suggest jealousy for the attentions of her father, yet if this were the cause, she might have expressed concerns a year or more before. The source of the conflict stemmed primarily from restrictions placed on Clara’s spending—restrictions Lyon put in place based on austerity demands from Col. Harvey and Frederick Leich of Harper’s. and Clemens himself. Hill suggests a further motivation:
But underlying the financial charges were moral ones. Miss Lyon had apparently been willing to point out that some of Clara’s activities with Will Wark [Charles E. Wark (“Will”) her accompanist] were of dubious propriety—indeed, of the identical sort that had prompted Clemens to withdraw his support of Gorky and to regret having Elinor Glyn print his convictions about human instincts [219-20]. Note: Wark was a married man.
Sam’s letter to daughter Clara:
Strictly PRIVATE, If these contents must be revealed to Mr. Jackson, I am willing, but no detail of them must go to any other person.
March 11/09
1/2 past 2 in the morning:
Clara dear, I am losing sleep again over this matter.
When I wrote you, I believed I had placed it in a sound & effective way of settlement—a clear & understandable way, I believed that an itemised report to me, covering a year or two, of income & outgo, would furnish the information required. I am of that opinion yet.
The materials are all here: Publishers’ statements; Bank deposits, checkbooks, &c. And so I had asked Ashcroft to get up that report. The report for the past 12 months will be gotten up now; the previous 12 to follow,
I supposed everything was peaceful & serene again. But your letter abolished that dream. It indicated that you & Mr. Jackson are not satisfied. You had asked for something which Ashcroft had met with a couple of objections. That surprised me. I had already asked him for all the essentials & had encountered no objections.
(To-night he explained.) In formulating an answer to your letter I had already set down as one of its items an objection on my own part: I would not allow the checkbooks to go out of the house.
Yes, Ashcroft objected. It had been proposed to put my affairs into the hands of professional accountants. That is premature, & must be postponed till there is occasion for it. That is to say,
When Ashcroft hands me the two reports I have asked for. They can be examined by competent friends of mine & yours, & compared with the check-books & bank deposits. If they fail to tally; if there are discrepancies that look suspicious, let the accountants take hold of the matter.
To put them on the work now, argues suspicion of Miss Lyon’s honesty, & Ashctoft’s—charges it, substantially. I have no such charge to offer, there being no evidence before me to found it on, & there being no suspicions in my own mind to base it on.
We will wait for Ashcroft’s reports. Unless you can furnish evidence. Not theory, not guess, but evidence.
If you can do this, we will proceed. If you cannot, we will wait for the reports, & see what competent friends have to say after examining them.
And so you have no further use for a lawyer until the reports arrive. Say that to him when you get this letter.
In my belief, you will not need a lawyer’s services again.
[new page: |
Continuation,
Among the notes I made (for letter) this was one: “While we are hunting eagerly for disservice, are we forgetting to hunt for service?”
It is a thought which does not make me feel very comfortable. Miss Lyon came to your mother as secretary, at $50 a month, She has never asked for more. Yet she has been housekeeper 4 or 5 years, with its many vexations & annoyances. She could not have been replaced at any price, for she was qualified to meet our friends socially & be acceptable to them. This service has been beyond computation in money, for its like was not findable.
And she has been a housebuilder. In this service—a heavy one, an exacting one, & making her liable to fault-finding—she labored hard for a year. I would not have done it at any price, neither would you. Would you have undertaken that job? I think not. Could we have found anybody, so competent as she, to take it? Or half so willing, or half so devoted? There isn’t a decorator in New York who can compare with her for taste & talent. These services of hers have been very valuable; but she has charged nothing for them. [bottom half of one page and top half of another torn away to cancel ] I never know nor asked what we paid our idiot in New York, but Mrs. Littleton has paid her $4,000 for her grotesque services in planning her parlor floor suite. She must have studied mainly from the nude; the place looks naked.
Anybody can get his mind poisoned, & I have not wholly escaped, as regards Miss Lyon, But it is healthy again. | have no suspicions of her. She was not trained to business & doubtless has been loose & unmethodical, but that is all. She has not been dishonest, even to a penny’s worth, All her impulses are good & fine. She makes friends of everybody, & she loses no friends. The Whitmores & the Danas she served under their roofs for years, & they have nothing but affection & praise for her. She has several talents, & they ate much above common; & in the last three or four years she has developed literary capacities which are distinctly remarkable. She has served me with a tireless devotion, & I owe her gratitude for it—& I not only owe it but feel it. 1 have the highest regard for her character.
She has wrought like a slave for that little library & has set it firmly on its feet—almost alone, & without charge,
And all by herself she has beaten the game that was to have robbed a poor old neighbor of ours of his homestead.
And what shall I say of Ashcroft? He has served me in no end of ways, & with astonishing competency—brilliancy, I may say. During 4 years he has fought my Plasmon fight against desperate odds—a night-&-day month-in-and-month-out struggle, through lawsuit after lawsuit & machination after machination, never complaining, never losing hope, & has won out at last, scoring victory all along the line. In not a single suit did the old company of thieves win their case. It has not cost me a hundred dollars. The result is a rescued property which is now solely in the hands of himself, myself & the London Company, He has always reported to me every move he made, & its result. He has persistently kept after Sir Thomas Lipton (who greatly admires him) for two years, with steady progress toward success, & to-day it looks as if he is going to land him. In any case he has pulled that great property out of what seemed to me & to others a disastrous & hopeless hole, & it is safe & secure now.
He (first, I think—certainly independently of Larkin) invented the Mark Twain Co—a stroke of genius, & this family owns all of the stock. It may supersede copyright-law some day. [in margin: P.S. I am empowering Mr. Duneka to examine the Safety Deposit box & report to me its contents, together with the nature & scope & ownership of the Mark Twain Co. I will keep this letter until I can add his report to it. Till Saturday or Sunday.]
He has now completed the purchase (this is not to be mentioned for a while yet, till the deed is recorded) of the adjoining farm of 125 acres, farm buildings & stock, for $7,200 & saved us $600 thereby.
He has put my London Plasmon interest in good shape, & that concern has begun to prosper again.
However, his services have been absolutely endless—& they are daily, & constant. OVER [on the back]
I think I told you how near he came to making $100,000 house bulding cost & more for me at the storm centre of the panic. I was sending an order to buy copper stock at 25 – it was selling at 27. He advised me not to risk losing a small fortune by trying to get the last cent out of the chance he said give the order to buy at market. If I had done it I’d have gotten 27 but I didn;t. It took me 24 hours to get wise, then it was too late. The Trust Co failed & swallowed nearly all my cost, & by & by I had to sell good securities below cost, to get money for my necessities & obligations. It was my own fault alone that he didn’t make the small fortune for me. The purchase at 27, of 2,000 shares would have increased my holding to 3,750 shares & leveld the whole cost down to 38. When I owed 500 shares (cost 53) he wanted me to sell at 65; I took Mr. Rogers’s advice & bought instead. I would buy that stock today at 47 (the last quotation I have noticed) if I had the money to spend. For it will be back at 65 & maybe 70 before the year is out. I once bought it at 43 & sold it at 69.
I know Ashcroft & Miss Lyon better & more intimately than I have ever known any one except your mother, & I am quite without suspicion of either their honesty or their honorableness.
Miss Lyon is a sick & broken-down woman, & I want her to be left in peace until the Ashcroft reports exhibit evidence to go upon in exposing my private affairs to the professional accountants, & her to unnecessary & unjustifiable humiliation, Dismiss your lawyer until then——unless, as I have suggested, you have in your hands something definitely & demonstrably incriminating.
I wouldn’t let Jean (four years ago), charge Brush’s Italian servant with theft upon suspicion & demand his arrest. Jean was resentful at the time, but felt better about it when Mrs. Brush (3 months later) found the silver where she had put it herself & long ago & forgotten it. Meantime the man—dismissed, with public reproaches—was gone. Also his character.
Good-bye, dear heart, it is half past 6, & I am tired.
With lots of love
Father
[MTP]. Note: between this day and Mar. 14, it would seem Clara’s suspicions led to evidence of misappropriation by Lyon and/or Ashcroft; see Mar. 14 when Sam added a PS. Note also that this letter took Sam four hours to draft, from 2:30 to 6:30 a.m. The reference to Brush, George de Forest Brush, painter, might have been in 1904 in Florence (see Jan, 22, 1904 entry) or in 1905 or 1906 at Dublin, N.H. Jean was friends with Nancy D. Brush.
Later in the day Sam also wrote to Maud W., Littleton (Mrs. Martin W. Littleton) in N.Y.C. about his forthcoming trip to NYC for the Lotos dinner honoring Andrew Carnegie:
Dear Mrs. Linthicum: / It is lovely of you to invite me. It stands thus: I seem to be due at H.H. Rogers’s, but maybe I ain’t. I shan’t know absolutely until I reach the Grand Central at noon the 17th, If I am due, there'll be an auto waiting for me there. If there ain’t no auto I shall think there’s been a misunderstanding, & I'll get a cab & rush to your house. If I find you bedless, don’t bother a bit about me, I’ll fly to Mr. Coe’s or Dr. Rice’s & break in.
Between now & the 17th I shall expect to be able to send you a definite word. / With love to you all/ … [MTP].
Clara Clemens had an interview with Dr. Frederick Peterson, Jean’s physician, about the possibility of Jean returning to live at Stormfield [Hill 225].
Edgar D. Russell wrote from New Haven, Conn. to Sam. “As a competitor for a position on the editorial board of the YALE NEWS, I want to ask you for an article on the value of a college education to a literary man” [NTP].
John Wanamaker wrote from NYC to advise that his dept. store opened an account for Clara Clemens [MTP].
H.E. Watters for the Hall-Moody Institute, Martin, Tenn. wrote a question to Sam that he was sending to “a number of America’s strongest men in all walks of life’ —“What do you consider the most conclusive proof of the inspiration of the Scriptures?” [MTP].