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Blackmail. Slander. Sex toys.

Those are just some of the highlights of Mark Twain’s last years, according to Laura Skandera

Mark Twain (Photo courtesy of Pitzer College)

Trombley, a noted Twain scholar who this year published “Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Story of His Final Years,” a book 16 years in the making about the last decade in the life of the preeminent American novelist, and about Isabel Van Kleek Lyon, the woman who endured it. Trombley will speak and sign her book this Sunday afternoon at the Autry.

“Just the juxtaposition of Mark Twain and the phrase ‘sex toys’ is something that you wouldn’t particularly link to him,” Trombley said. “People are surprised and they think it’s kind of funny. It makes them like Twain more. It’s

Laura Skandera Trombley at a booksigning in St. Louis earlier this year (Photo courtesy of Pitzer College)

quirky. It renders him more human, because he’s become such an alabaster statue.”

Trombley, the president of Pitzer College in Claremont, is credited with discovering the largest known cache of Mark Twain letters, something that occurred while she was on her way to becoming a Wordsworth scholar and made her switch her specialty.

Her latest book presents a distinctly less genteel image of American raconteur Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain was his pen name) than we are used to, complete with accounts of how he mistreated his daughter, threatened his personal assistant with blackmail, and recommended to friends an electric handheld vibrator Lyon had purchased for him as a gift.

Twain in his trademark white cashmere suit and white velvet cape (Photo courtesy of Pitzer College)

“Really? Mark Twain owned a vibrator?” you say. Trombley writes matter-of-factly that he owned two. On The Daily Beast website in June, she called the creator of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer a “famously sexual man.”

“Prior to his marriage, he asked his good friend Frank Fuller to send him condoms: “Please forward one dozen Odorless Rubber Cundrums—I don’t mind them being odorless—I can supply the odor myself”,” Trombley wrote, adding that Twain’s 1601, published anonymously in 1880, has been called the most famous piece of pornography in American literature.

There’s no way to know exactly how Twain used his vibrator, but Trombley says it’s highly unlikely he didn’t know its conventional use. In the book, she writes Twain was so delighted with the gadget that he purchased a second, battery-operated one.

And Twain’s possible sexual proclivities are only a sidebar in the book. In fact, Trombley places the whole episode in the context of an era in which electricity was more and more becoming a tool of daily life, and Twain was fascinated with its innovative uses.

Most of the volume aims to uncover the details of the last 10 years of Twain’s life, in

Isabel Van Kleek Lyon (Photo courtesy of Pitzer College)

which Lyon played a major, if largely silent, role.

Hired in 1904 as his personal assistant and a companion to Twain’s daughter Clara Clemens, Lyon was devoted to Twain. She nursed him through illnesses, managed his money, kept his social calendar, and even oversaw construction of Stormfield, his final home. Twain relied on Lyon and spoke well enough about her that they might have married.

Isabel Lyon at Stormfield, Mark Twain's final residence. Lyon oversaw the design, construction and decoration of the home. (Photo courtesy of Pitzer College)

But Clara Clemens, already jealous of her father’s limelight, vented her frustration on Lyon. She accused the woman of embezzeling $4,000 during the construction of Stormfield, causing Twain to fire her in April 1909 and, later, take back a home he had once given Lyon as a present.

“He fired her and then, really with Clara’s repeated hammering away, his position toward Isabel became increasingly sour,” Trombley said. “Over the course of the summer, he decided he would take back the house. By that time, she was on verge of a nervous breakdown and signed the papers.”

Twain’s hatred of Lyon was so great that he held press conferences to slander her and spent five of his last 12 months of life writing a 429-page document — his last completed narrative — attacking her and Ralph Ashcroft, his former business manager and now her husband. In it, Twain claimed Lyon for three years held him in a hypnotic state. Never mind that in another earlier manuscript, he recounted a childhood encounter with a hypnotist and concluded that he could not be held in such a thrall.

“It was Twain at his best when it comes to lying,” Trombley said. “He was very good about conveniently forgetting or editing out what was contradictory or unpleasant to him.”

Twain’s death in 1910 by no means ended his publishing career. In November, the University of California at Berkeley will publish the first of a three-volume, 5,000-page autobiography of Twain that he specified should not be published until a century after his death. The tome will include the so-called Lyon-Ashcroft manuscript, finally revealing in sordid detail Twain’s final passions and obsessions.