Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

But while Stanley believed he had many a devoted admirer, from the highest lord to the most common man, he always felt that Clemens enjoyed the greater measure of the public’s affection and esteem. Still, he never conveyed any sign of being envious around Clemens.

“MY DEAR FRIENDS,” STANLEY SAID before the crowd, which included Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. “I begin by asking, ‘What is literature?’ Our world is founded on deeds, but it is by words that we remember them. But deeds cannot be relived except through words: Written history is but a reminder of things that happened. Even the myths as recounted by Homer and Ovid reflect what we must know.” Here he cleared his throat. “All that has been lost to us is certainly a pity, but what we do have of living vital records we can cherish because someone cared to write them down. What is literature but the record of men’s lives? No less can we cherish the infinite numbers of authors whom we will never know; and yet the effort is vital, worthy of us as civilized persons, for without them the past would be vacant, meaningless, except as a shade we would be vaguely aware of. Imagine now, as we are gathered here, that some many years later — even a hundred or two hundred years later — you and I, each one of us, will be in some way seen again. Even as I stand before you, I am fairly certain that our age and its deeds are being known in the future. We are being read about in the same way that we as children once read of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is a fact: Years from now someone will be reading about us, of that I have no doubt. But this”—here he coughed—“is no mere matter of tautology; for our lives, once written down, are simultaneous with another time. Our literature is our legacy, and if there is such a thing as ghosts, literature will be the only verifiable version of them.

“There are many dead authors from whom we will never hear. But fortunately there are living authors among us as well. Tonight we have the special privilege of having a very great friend speak before us — a man of letters, of goodwill, of mirth and charm; a man from America, now residing in Berlin: Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, as he is also known. One of the finest — if not the finest — exemplar of a writer. Surely he will be remembered as most of us will not be. He is a library of wisdom, a pantheon of insight: He is, I am grateful to say, a dear friend of mine, but he is a friend to us all just the same. All of us, fortunate to have been there at the time, can remember his splendid debut in London, in 1872, and I know he will equal if not surpass that early impression tonight. I know not what he will be speaking about, but I know that surely they will be words for the ages. Ladies and gentlemen, the inimitable Mark Twain.”

Clemens looked at Stanley; smiling, they shook hands, and applause followed.

Clemens shifted from foot to foot at the podium.

“To begin with, a writer makes books. In that we are like undertakers; as we put things into places where they will never be touched or changed — a kind of timeless limbo, or heaven, to be a bit more cheerful about it — we are like those Swiss tinkers who fidget around with little gears and make clocks. For each book, whether novel or travelogue, history or memoir, ticks according to its own time: Its gears run perpetually as long as there is someone to wind it up and scan his eyes over its creamy papers. The beauty of it all, as Stanley has pointed out, is that books will last as long as there are men to read them — far longer than any one individual. Shakespeare’s gone, and so is Cervantes, their bones have long since turned to dust, and yet their books bring them back: Even now, as I speak, the youthful Cervantes, a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire after the Battle of Lepanto, sits in a cell in some dank Muslim dungeon in Constantinople, dreaming up Don Quixote . Shakespeare, drinking ale in a tavern in Stratford-upon-Avon, looks up and sees the face of Ophelia in the tavern keeper’s buxom daughter; one idea leads to another; a single expression, a moment, a patch of thoughts, amounting to one splendiferous idea or person. Added up and written down, they become a book.

“What books I make — any of us makes — are expendable in the face of the actual rumblings of history, yet without them, imagine how dull and listless life would be. Think about it — a world without books, with nothing to remind us of how other men thought and lived. I’ve once dreamed of such a world, and the very thought left me so gloomy that I could not speak to anyone for days and was only resuscitated by reading Carlyle’s history of the French Revolution. Books, I then concluded, are my water, my evening and morning meal, my sunlight and garden, and what words spill from my pencil are my gestures of thanks for that fact.

“I could speak of the greatest literature, but because you all know me as a man of simple tastes, and because many of you are gainfully employed artisans of the word, as I am, I thought I would confine myself to my own life, with which I should be familiar by now.”

He shuffled past a few pages.

“Now, I only meant the aforementioned thoughts as a kind of preface, not to put you all to sleep. But about one of my books I will briefly speak— The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It took me seven years or so to write, maybe more. I had at the moment of its conception been sitting in my study in Connecticut and daydreaming about Hannibal when in a moment’s flash I saw the story about the adventures of a crafty boy, Huck Finn, and a runaway slave who set off on the Mississippi together, heading north to freedom. Just as a context, the story was set in the late 1840s; at the time I wrote it, though, the Underground Railroad and the Civil War were receding into memory, and slaves, ostensibly freed — I will not discuss the failures of the Reconstruction in the South — were of the past; but I still could not keep myself from telling their story.

“In that book I confined myself to the boys’ life on the Mississippi because that had a peculiar charm for me and because I knew the slave’s world a little from my youth. Out on my uncle John’s farm near Florida, Missouri, where I spent many a glorious summer, the slaves were my friends. I played with their children, went tramping through the woods with them, heard their songs, and felt bad when one of them cried over some little misfortune. I knew them as part of my uncle’s extended family and was not aware of the low regard in which they were held by the outside world. I knew nothing of their standing in society. But they were slaves. I had no aversion to slavery; I didn’t know there was anything wrong with it. But years later, once I knew that it was wrong, and after a whole unholy war had been fought over the issue, I thought to put my feelings about that mighty subject into a book. Jim — he was based on one of my uncle’s slaves, a fellow I loved and respected. Huck was based on an old friend from Hannibal, Tom Blankenship, a knockabout and young heathen whom I knew well. His pappy was a drunk, and his life was low, which, in my eyes, made him an especially sympathetic fellow.” There was laughter, which Mr. Clemens, scratching his head, did not quite understand.

“Liking Jim, I rooted for him in every part of the tale. They were friends and mutually respectful, as imperfect a pair as they might have been.

“Setting them adrift on a raft, I peopled the river with the confidence men I knew from my days as a pilot on the Mississippi and made a book that I hoped would be seen as an homage to the idea of freedom — and friendship. It sold well in America, but the critics did not like it. Since I used a vernacular kind of language, it confused folks. Some critics found it wanting in ‘literary quality’; some said I was trying to elevate the lowliest subject to some high pinnacle of honor. In several places it was banned, for the coupling of a sassy white boy and a befuddled, freedom-craving Negro did not sit well with some. Having poured so many years and my deepest understanding and affection for my subject into the book, I was perplexed. Is it literature? I hope it is.