Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“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 something 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.