“But memory is a funny thing. Lately certain things still come back to me about her as clearly as if they had happened this morning. Some come as clear as a photograph. One picture I most vividly remember is fifty years old: I was six, my mother forty. We were in a bedroom of our house in Hannibal, Missouri, where my older brother Benjamin—he was ten—lay dead, the poor boy having succumbed to a fever; my mother had brought me in to say good-bye, I guess. We knelt down by the bed, my mother holding my hand, when all at once she began to weep and moan in a way I had never seen before. I can remember feeling ashamed of myself for not crying along with her and ashamed that I was powerless to stop her tears. And as for my poor brother, well, being so little I wasn’t completely convinced that he was gone. And that’s perhaps why my mother, in her wisdom, had me lay my hand against his brow. It was cold and still and so sad a thing that I could not understand why it was so. He hardly seemed a person at all anymore: I can remember feeling a terrible guilt about it—you see, Mrs. Stanley, I had been the sickly child of the family. I had been born two months premature, and so frail, slight, small-boned, and prone to diseases that until I was about six or so, little hope had been held that I would survive childhood. But there I was beside her, with my hand held against my brother’s face, somehow thinking—for I was so young, just six, when everything in life seems a paradise—that it should have been me and not Benjamin in that bed. Somehow I believed that I had been spared and he had taken my place. It’s the kind of reverse thinking that comes to children, I suppose. But just the same, all the occasions when I had acted the brat out in the yard and wished him dead over some stupid thing landed on my conscience so badly that for the longest time I suffered terrifying nightmares from it. That kind of thing never leaves you. Even now, when I see a late morning sunbeam drifting in through a window, I can close my eyes and, ever so fleetingly, find myself in that room again, my brother lost to the world, my dear mother by my side.”
In that moment Mr. Clemens’s expression, as I recall it these years later, was nearly beatific. He seemed caught up in a distant moment, his face taking on an air of concentration, as if he were composing something inside his head. But then the spell left him; he shifted in his chair and drew from his jacket pocket a cigar—“My own brand, Mark Twain,” he said. Lighting it, he went on:
“Even when I know that I was not at fault, there’s a part of me that still thinks it is so. And it’s not a feeling that I’ve since become immune to: Folks say that we should count our blessings—and I have had many, Mrs. Stanley. I’ve been blessed to have been raised in Hannibal. Blessed to have a good wife and three precious daughters. I’ve had my share of fame and fortune, along with all the nonsense that goes with it, and I have seen a lot of this world along the way. But for all that, as many blessings as I can count, I am always aware of how weakly tethered they are to this life. As I said, I’m lucky to have three precious daughters, but my first child, Langdon, born premature, like myself, in 1870, was a different story.
“As newlyweds, Livy and I had moved from Buffalo, New York, to Hartford, Connecticut, and were living in our first house in that pretty town—a wonderful cottage set down in the midst of a quite literary neighborhood called Nook Farm. Livy was then in mourning over her father’s death the year before, but my spirits were high, as I was just managing to make something of a living as a writer by then, but my main livelihood depended on the lecture tour, as I was in some demand, having become the next best thing after Bret Harte. But a cloud followed me around just the same.
“For the first year of his life Langdon was so sick that he cried and cried to the point where I thought I would go mad. Livy was sick constantly, too, with colds and the flu, and she came down with typhoid fever, which almost killed her—of course she recovered—but for the longest time I was both a writer and a nurse in a gloriously comfortable sick house. A beautiful sick house that had to be paid for. And so when Livy finally recovered from her various maladies, that second year of our marriage mainly found me out on the road traveling by rail from town to town in the northeast, lecturing. I hated that life—the late trains, the bad weather, the cold and graceless hotel rooms. I worked so much that I missed my second Christmas with Livy because of it. All in the name of making money, and not much, at that. But in the midst of that drudgery, something wonderful happened: Our little Susy, a healthy baby and fat as butter at birth, came to us in March of 1872, a very great blessing and joy indeed, but a joy that—and forgive my entangled way of speaking, Mrs. Stanley—was short-lived. A few months later, on a raw and chilly morning, I took little Langdon out with me in an open barouche for a ride through the countryside. Wrapping him up in furs, I believed that I had attended to him with the best of care, and as our coachman drove us, I fell into a reverie of thoughts about some story or other, which I went to jotting down in my notebook, and while I was thusly occupied, for such thoughts envelop all my attentions, I had failed to notice that the fur wrappings had fallen away and exposed his little legs to the cold air. By and by the coachman noticed this, and I covered him up again, but by then it was too late, as he had caught a chill. And shortly this turned into a cold and the cold turned into diphtheria and he died at nine one June morning in his mother’s arms. He was only nineteen months of age.”
Clemens’s face flushed, and he sneezed, still suffering from a cold. Why he was being so candid with me I cannot say, but in my experience I have found that when persons sit for you and are allowed to speak freely, the small talk that passes for conversation under ordinary circumstances does not do: There is something about being looked at carefully that induces in a subject a profound starkness of feeling. Clemens, in fact, seemed quite willing to share his thoughts with me on this occasion: I can note here as well that he spoke very much as he wrote—a searching and sometimes meandering course was traveled before he came to a stop. These sentences I have been trying to capture.
“And I can go on in this vein,” he continued. “If you’ve read Life on the Mississippi you will already know that my brother Henry’s death came about because of a riverboat accident. A boat he would not have been on except for me. There had been an explosion of steam and fire… He was too heroic for his own good… tried to save others instead of himself and paid dearly for it. All these years later my recollection of him, as he lay scalded and in pain upon a hospital bed in Memphis, remains with me as another picture I’d rather forget. Somehow I blame myself for these things. Somehow I feel ashamed of myself when I allow myself to have such thoughts: But when they come I do not relish them.”
“Surely you know, Mr. Clemens,” I said to him, “that these incidents were not your fault. Some things simply come about because, as Stanley himself has told me, they are a matter of Providence. Fate. But I understand such feelings of loss; my own father left us twenty years past; and yet not a day goes by when I do not think of him. I know it may seem a silly thing, but I have kept him so close to my heart that I have made it my habit to think of him when I am addressing my diary at night: Whether he is really there or not—for we can never know, really—I like to believe it is so, for the lack of his companionship, in spirit, is unimaginable to me.”
“So you believe in an afterlife?”
“Of a kind. Yes, I do.”
“And what is that? I suppose you see Elysian fields, do you?”
“Not quite, Mr. Clemens: I imagine that the very many memories we have of our lives—what you called the million photographs of the mind—come with us when our souls are released from our bodies. The body passes, and the soul does not.”
“And what proof do you base this on?”
“Faith, Mr. Clemens. Simple faith.”
“Well, the idea of lurking about for all eternity doesn’t particularly enthrall me, though a bit more time with our beloveds, or at least some evidence that all is well with them and the world, does appeal to me. Probably something like that happens anyway when the brain shuts down at the end—it’s supposed to be somethi
ng like a fine and whimsical drunkenness, filled with numerous dreams—and possibly nightmares. What does Stanley think about that, anyway?”
“I don’t really know. He’s religious but not superstitious; he’s a bit too much of a realist in his thinking and not very imaginative in that way. When I have asked him about this, he has tended to wonder what difference it would make. As he told me, ‘We’ll find out anyway, won’t we?’”
“Sounds like him,” Clemens said. Then, after sitting for a time, he began to grow restless and asked how much time remained: He had only been with me for an hour, but it had been sufficient for my preliminary sketch. Releasing him from his servitude—I knew that he was a busy man—I showed him the drawing so far. “Egad, but I’m getting old!” he declared. And then, as I led him out, I asked if he could return again on another day.
“Day after tomorrow, around the same time,” he said. “But only for an hour, you understand?”
Dear Father,
This afternoon I had sit for me the great American writer Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain. He is a congenial but very sad man with many burdens upon his shoulders. Though he does not speak of such things openly, both Stanley and I are aware of his troubles, but we say nothing to him, as he is so proud as to never seem in want, which he would consider a great shame. As a subject he is fine to draw: Unlike a child, he has much history written on his face—his life experiences and his many hours of labor show in its furrows and wrinkles. He is an interesting and pleasant-looking man: His hair, white, shoots out in a shock that he seems proud of; his nose is aquiline, and his eyes, very intelligent, are narrow, like an eagle’s. I am somehow reminded by them of an American Indian. His brows are hairy and shoot upward, as if he had been charged with electricity, and he wears a thick mustache that does little to conceal the delicacy of his lips, which are as finely shaped as a woman’s. He spoke to me of touching and personal things, I suppose in an effort to befriend me. I would further say that, like Stanley, he is at heart a shy man, perhaps even melancholic, quite different from his famous persona. With Stanley and Kipling, he is one of the best-known writers in the world. My sense of him is that he is a man of boundless and dogged energy, like Stanley, who would prefer to enjoy his life but is pressed by financial circumstances to take on many labors. He is in London for only a few days more, as he must return to America on business: Stanley considers him a good friend.
Our Second Sitting
MY HUSBAND GREETED CLEMENS at the door, and they spoke of meeting up later to visit some bookstalls or head out to a club for a drink. As Stanley excused himself, Clemens, finding me lingering in the hallway with a paintbrush, said he would shortly come into my studio. As I stood moving from side to side to perceive the angles of his head, he sat down on a high stool and, lighting a cigar with a vesta that he struck on the heel of his boot, began to speak again.
“Seems that I got carried away the other day, Mrs. Stanley,” Mr. Clemens said to me after he had settled down. “Being away from my family gives me too much time to think about things that I should not be thinking about. As much as I carry on to myself about the distractions of family life, my wife and daughters are my greatest solace. Without them I can’t imagine how I would get along. It’s unimaginable to me. For what is any man without his family, his little kingdom? Not even the amenities of fame—meeting the queen herself or having lunch with the kaiser—can fill the heart the way a simple conversation with your daughter can. But it goes too quickly, Mrs. Stanley; the years slip by as quickly as the summers once used to.
“At my age, time itself becomes the greatest trickster in one’s life: I, for one, cannot understand what has happened to that unit of measure we call an hour. Once a single hour seemed an endless thing, passing as slowly as a shadow shifting in the sunlight in mid-July. But now it zips by—tumbles into the next hour and then the next—until before you know it five or six hours have passed, and yet those hours don’t seem to possess the same richness as a single hour from childhood. Lately I have been puzzling over this. As an experiment I have mentally listed the things I can remember from a single hour during an afternoon on my uncle John Quarles’s farm while I lolled about under a shady tree, lazily reading Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Do you want to hear about this?”
“Of course.”
“It goes like this: Let’s say I’m hearing the mantel clock chiming the hour of three. It goes ping, ping, ping, and I’m looking across the yard and watching a female slave beating the dust out of a rug slung over a rope, each whap of her stick like the ticking of a clock, but one that ticks ever so slowly. I can remember watching as some hands put bridles on a team of horses and hitch them up to a wagon. Then my uncle John, as fine a man as any I have ever known, comes out onto the porch, lights his corncob pipe, looks around, then slips back into the house. And my mother’s sister, Aunt Patsy, comes out to that same porch and calls to me to ask if I am thirsty, then reminds me that she would be grateful if I didn’t bring any more garter snakes home—these I liked to slip into her workbaskets. Then Aunt Patsy tells me that if I am a good boy I might be rewarded later with some fresh-baked apple pie, the kind of bribery I generally ignored. Then I see my little brother, Henry, out by the fence near the road, flicking stones into some cans. He has a little bowl of sugar by his feet and is surprised to find it overrun with ants. This he brings over to show me, then runs away to play some more: I can remember thinking that I loved my brother but had to be on my best behavior around him, as he was as righteous as my mother and tended to report my wanderings and mischief to her. I’ve since immortalized him, I suppose—if being in a book is that—as the do-gooder Sid in Tom Sawyer.”
With that he paused for a moment, looking out through my window at a patch of sky. Then he continued:
“Some slaves come along—my uncle had some fifteen or twenty of them—taking a cart to the barn; they are followed by a pack of little children, one of whom stops to greet me and says that they will be playing hide-and-seek in the woods and asks if I want to come along. But I’m into my book and much enjoying its tales of the knights of olden days when I notice the green and curious-looking head of a centipede peeking at me; he’s crawled up the spine of the book and seems intent on exploring the valley between the pages. He’s a cute fellow, and I jiggle him onto the palm of my hand and set him down, gently as possible, among the blades of grass and watch him go off to wherever such creatures wander. My good deed—for some boys would have killed it for fun—makes me feel virtuous and at one with nature. Then I’m back into my idyll and am reading some more when I hear a purring: One of the yard cats, a calico, has for some reason decided to accompany me and lies down by my side, happily licking his paws, his ears moving like antennae whenever he hears a bird chirping in trees. I pet him a few times, scratch the fat part of fur under his neck, and he’s purring even more loudly, then I make the mistake of scratching at his belly, which he doesn’t like, and suddenly he bounds away. I eat a piece of licorice and am chewing it happily when Henry comes back and decides he wants to play the Indian with me. Whooping, he puts his arms around my neck and starts slapping the top of my head as though it were a tom-tom, and we wrestle around for a bit, both of us giggling. Then I read to him for a spell, and a drowsy feeling comes over him, and the next thing I know he’s asleep, his head settled against my shoulder, his breathing ever so quiet and gentle-like. It’s just then that I hear the mantel clock chime, ringing in the hour of four.”
He then pulled a cigar from his jacket, lit it, and said: “And that’s just from a single hour, and even if I’m mixing up a bit of the details, for they come back to me in a scramble, I am certain my recollection is true.”
THAT NEXT FRIDAY EVENING Stanley and Mr. Clemens appeared together at the Garrick Club in Covent Garden, where a great many persons had arrived for the occasion. In the afternoon Stanley had prepared a little introductory speech for his dear American friend. He had jotted down notes and paced about his study in a state of apprehension, a
s he hated the idea of his words seeming like something sloughed off. And he seemed anxious about his stage bearing. Though I had reminded him that he would be at the podium for only a few minutes, he seemed very aware of Clemens’s power and wished to do him justice.
Indeed they were a study in contrasting styles—my husband preferring to make quite deliberate, long, rehearsed statements and Clemens relying upon an improvised and colloquial manner of speaking. It was in that realm that Henry envied Mr. Clemens, for in his persona as Mark Twain, he always displayed a lively sense of humor, a quality that my husband perhaps wished he had himself. For all his virtues of character, and despite his prolific writings and the grandeur of his accomplishments, he was ill at ease in public settings. Giving speeches had never come easily to him: He suffered from a kind of stage fright, and though he was very much a man of action, afraid of few things, he was an awkward and self-conscious speaker—stiff and overly formal, some would say. But Clemens knew how to work a crowd: While he spoke privately of his weariness with tours and public events, he approached his presentations with the aplomb and confidence of a seasoned stage actor. His charismatic qualities and funny way with words, which he translated successfully into the warmth of his prose and language onstage, constituted the greatest advantage that Clemens had over my husband in the public arena.
Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise Page 30
