Dan Simmons - The Fifth Heart

“I’ll never be his Boswell,” James said flatly.

“Have you ever thought, James, of the relationship between you and the characters you’ve created?”

“I’m not sure what you mean,” James said, knowing full well what the humorist meant.

“I mean that you’re God to them,” said Clemens, “just as I am God to my small worlds of fictional people. You create them. You put them through their fictional paces. You decide their emotions and you decide when it’s time for them to die. In other words, we’re God to our characters.”

James shook his head. “My characters have a certain life of their own,” he said softly.

“Oh,” said Clemens and surrendered to a spasm of phlegmy coughing. “Does that mean that Isabella Archer is having tea in England or Europe right now?”

“No,” said James, “but it means there are depths to her . . . to Isabel’s . . . character that I haven’t explored.”

“This is writers’ doubletalk,” said Clemens, drinking deeply from his glass. “We love to pretend that our characters have some lives of their own . . . but they don’t, James. You know it and I know it. We move them around like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. Have you read any of my books, sir?”

“I’ve not yet had that pleasure,” said James, surprised by the question. Writers didn’t ask other writers for opinions of their work. It just wasn’t done.

Clemens laughed. “Well, I’ve tried to read yours,” said the white-haired author. “I declare, James, reading your prose is like translating medieval German. You have forty-two freight cars loaded with subordinate clauses being pushed along by a tiny cluster of underpowered engine-verbs tucked in at the end of the sentence. Reading your books is like listening to a man on a soapbox argue with himself, interrupting himself every few seconds.”

James smiled thinly. “My brother William would agree with you.”

“But still . . . with Isabella Archer and a few of your other characters . . .” Clemens’s voice trailed off. He turned to stare fiercely at James again. “Do you know why Isabella Archer made that damned-fool self-destructive decision at the end of the book? Was that your plan all along or did the character take on some autonomy and make her life-ruining decision on her own?”

James lifted his hands, palms up. He was not going to discuss Isabella Archer or any of his other books or characters with this laudanum-addled American.

“You hear your characters’ voices in your head or you don’t,” said Clemens, speaking to himself. “Do you happen to remember that I published a book called The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn about five years ago?”

“I remember,” said James.

Clemens looked at him again. “For months—years, really, since I’d set the book aside for a long time—I heard Huck’s voice in my head as clearly as I heard my beloved Livy calling me to dinner. Huck was with me when I went to sleep at night and he was waiting for me when I woke up. And then . . . near what should have been the end of the story when they’re off the raft for the last time and Huck’s slave friend Jim has been captured . . . Huck just left me. He just lit out for the territory without me. I could no longer hear his voice, no longer look through his eyes. I was just a man putting words on paper.”

“What did you do?” asked James, more interested in this topic and in the answer than he could show.

Clemens licked his lips. “I brought in Tom Sawyer from his book, turned Huck into the shallow supporting character he’d been in that Tom-Sawyer book, and essentially let the most important book I’ve ever written turn into another boy’s book,” said Clemens. “All games and coincidences and no-harm-done-to-anyone with Tom, a character whom I knew shouldn’t even be in this novel , making the decisions.”

“That sort of situation is unfortunate,” James said softly. “And I am sure that it happens to all of us in writing one novel or the other.”

Clemens shook his head. “Have you read the novel Robert Elsmere ?”

“I’ve heard the title but haven’t had the pleasure of reading it,” said James.

“It created quite a sensation about five years ago and caused the rumpus,” said Clemens. “It was written by Mrs. Humphry Ward. It advocated a Christianity based on social concerns and help for one’s fellow man rather than on Scripture or theology. She made a lot of devout enemies.”

James waited.

“Anyway,” continued Clemens after some coughing and expectorating, “I copied a sentence from that long, sometimes dismal book because it relates to what we’re discussing. Mrs. Ward wrote—and I remember it clearly—‘I cannot conceive of God as the arch-plotter against His own creation’.”

“That doesn’t sound very radical,” said James.

Clemens rounded on him again. “But we’re God to the world and characters we create, James. And we plot against them all the time. We kill them off, maul and scar them, make them lose their hopes and dearest loves. We conspire against our characters daily. But in the Huck Finn book, I lost my nerve, James. I lost Huck’s voice and then I lost my nerve. Or maybe—probably—it was the other way around. I so loved Huckleberry Finn that I failed to plot against him and the rest of my creation as I should have. If Huck’s voice had stayed with me—if I’d had the courage to listen to it—I would have had nigger Jim captured and sold down the river to endless slavery in front of Huck’s eyes and in spite of all of Huck’s efforts—or at the very least had the decency and mercy to kill Jim and Huck—rather than bring Tom Sawyer into the tale to end it as a mere boy’s book .”

Clemens spat out the last two words.

“What has this to do with the question of whether Sherlock Holmes is fictional?” James asked bluntly. He hated writers’ self-pity and detested watching it.

Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”

“Do you have any idea who that God-Writer might be?” asked James. “I’ve thought about this. Conan Doyle would never use living contemporaries in his tales . . . certainly not use their real names or make them so recognizable. Holmes said that Watson had to disguise the Prince of Wales as the King of Bohemia in one story.”

“It doesn’t have to be Conan Doyle,” said Clemens, his chin almost on his chest as he poured the last of the laudanum from the bottle into the glass. “It’s almost certainly some lesser mind, lesser talent, than you, perhaps even lesser than me, certainly lesser than Arthur Conan Doyle, which is saying a lot. And it might be written thirty years hence, or fifty, or a hundred.”

“Well,” said James, trying for a light tone despite the heaviness in his heart, “at least that would mean we’re still being read thirty or a hundred years from now.”

There was a long silence broken only by street sounds some fourteen floors below and the raspy, phlegm-filled effort of Samuel Clemens to breathe.

“If we are only fictional constructs, brought in to give the fictional-construct Sherlock Holmes company, what do we do next?” James finally asked.

Clemens laughed. “I’m going east to New York tomorrow, stopping at Elmira if I feel up to it. I’ll probably be too sick to watch the procession of Great Ships scheduled for this weekend in New York Harbor, but I’d give two toes to see that. No sir, if the God-Writer of this tale . . . hack that he probably is—wants to kill this Sam Clemens off, he will have to do it offstage, the way Shakespeare killed Falstaff.”‘