Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

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, as 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.

(A note: In this aplomb, Clemens was distinctly linked to his predecessor in letters, Charles Dickens, whose own stage presence was remarkable. I knew this firsthand, having seen him perform in London when I was a little girl, a fact that I think Stanley somewhat envied. Clemens himself had attended a Dickens lecture years before in New York with his future wife, Livy, or so he had told me at some point: The irony of it is that Clemens, a great performer in his own right and the “American Dickens,” as Stanley has called him, found the performance flat and uninteresting. Dickens “muttered through the whole thing,” Clemens told me.)