“Hello, Stanley,” he said. And, looking at me, he added, “And so this is the one and only gracious lady?”
We spent that evening together; throughout I saw in Stanley certain qualities of behavior that I had not seen before. He seemed much relaxed in the company of his friend and quite willing to allow the great man the floor when it came to conversation. In truth, after a week of engagements Stanley was feeling somewhat fatigued, but he also seemed relieved to be hearing about subjects other than Africa, about which he was continually expected to hold forth.
Of that felicitous occasion I can remember asking Mr. Clemens by which name he liked to be addressed.
“Our dear friend Major Pond here treats Mark Twain like a nom de plume, which it is, of course: In his letters, he puts Mark in quotes, even in his salutations to me — which is a professional idiosyncrasy that I have not yet figured out. I don’t mind Mark — I’ve done well by it — yet sometimes it sounds too short by itself, while ‘Mark Twain’ doesn’t: Now, Livy calls me Precious and Youth so often that I have been known to accidentally sign my letters to complete strangers in such a way; whereas Henry here refers to me as both Samuel and Mark, depending upon how biblical his mood is. Personally, if I am feeling lazy, I will use the short form, Mark, to sign my notes; because it has two fewer letters than Samuel it conserves great amounts of minute energies when added up over the years. Now, with you, dear Madame Stanley, I would consider it an honor to be addressed by whatever name you choose to call me, just as long as it’s one of them, so as to avoid future confusion.”
TO HAVE WALKED ARM IN ARM with Mr. Clemens along Fifty-Ninth Street that evening would remain for me a greater honor than would meeting the American president, Benjamin Harrison, and many an illustrious senator at the White House the following week. With a woolen cape slung over his shoulders and a Russian trapper’s bearskin cap upon his head, Mr. Clemens (to this day I cannot think of him as Mark or Samuel), though of medium height (he was by his own account five feet, eight and a half inches tall), seemed taller in his cowboy boots. Passersby recognized him, and even carriage drivers doffed their hats or whistled to greet to him, calling out: “Hello, Mr. Twain!” We made our way along toward the cobblestones by Central Park, a light snow falling. My husband, escorting Livy in the company of Major Pond, following behind us, I inquired of Mr. Clemens just how he and Stanley had met.
“My husband told me that you became acquainted long before you became known as writers. Stanley has never described the exact circumstances, other than that it happened long ago. I don’t understand his reluctance to discuss it.”
“Madame Stanley, among us writers there is a sacred code that prohibits us from revealing too much about certain things.”
Parting congenially after a nightcap at our hotel, I presented Mr. Clemens and his wife a gift of my book London Street Arabs, and we expressed the mutual wish of seeing each other again. I told him that it was my hope that he would have the opportunity to one day meet my mother, who was an admirer of his writings; and perhaps, I had asked him, he would sit for me as a portrait subject, as Stanley had — he said he would.
Later, I mentioned to Stanley my complete enchantment at meeting Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, but when I voiced my curiosity as to why he remained so secretive about his early friendship with Clemens, he was curt in his answer: “Do I have to tell you everything? Cannot a man have his own private thoughts?”
Even when we eventually made our way to the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans, where he had once worked and lived as a young man, he never went into detail about Clemens.
Another Journal Recollection, from January 27, 1891, a Tuesday
ON A DATE WHEN STANLEY was scheduled to give a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, Mother and I had an invitation, received some days before, to visit Samuel Clemens’s home in Hartford, Connecticut.
We arrived in Hartford at about 9:30, and Mr. Clemens was awaiting us in a carriage, his youngest daughter, Jean, by his side. Along the way we stopped at a country store to pick up various vegetables to be cooked for supper. He called me My Lady, and he could not have been more courteous. He seemed quite delighted to play the host, though he missed Stanley’s presence.
“Well, I’m happy that you’ve come,” he told us.
As I had imagined, and as described by Stanley, his house was majestic, a fairy-tale-like place with turrets that suggested witches’ hats, great hallways, and winding stairs. Its shape reminded me of a riverboat. In his parlor was a large Gothic fireplace transplanted from a Scottish castle, and one of the ceilings had been inlaid with mariners’ stars, I believe. And though there was a sense of gaiety about the place, Mr. Clemens seemed more solemn than he had been when we saw him in New York. Nevertheless we had a pleasant discussion that day about the novelist Anatole France — Mr. Clemens was reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, a book that greatly impressed him. He seemed to dote on Mother, who took an immediate liking to him. His daughter Clara performed songs for us on the piano; and Jean, having experimented with some poetry, declaimed several new verses for us. Mrs. Clemens was still in mourning over her mother’s recent passing and was laid low with what Clemens hoped was a “mind problem.” She did manage to muster herself from her bed for most of the day, and it was obvious to both Mother and I that our company was a burden on her: Yet she was cheerful and grateful, filling us in on the latest caprices of one of their famous neighbors, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who lived just next door and would, even while we were there, arrive unannounced and wander through the rooms of the house in her bedroom slippers, whooping and howling at times. She would sit down at the piano and even as we were in the midst of a conversation begin to play and sing, and then, just as suddenly, she would get up and leave the room. She returned with some flowers cut from the Clemens’s own greenhouse, which she presented as a gift to Livy; then she began to question Mother and me as to whether we had read her most famous novel. When we told her that we had, she asked if we had a copy of it to reread on our journey. When we told her that we did not, she insisted on bringing over a copy. We went along with it, taking into account that she was obviously plunging into senility — Mr. Clemens made several discreet comic gestures with his eyes at her eccentricity, and Mrs. Clemens told us that as a general practice the neighbors in Nook Farm had grown accustomed to her waywardness. Clearly she had descended into a second childhood of sorts. I could not help but wonder if the solitude that writers experience day in and day out, with work that does not bring them into close intercourse with “society,” might hasten such mental decline.
In this regard I would say that Clemens was about as well balanced as Stanley, who looked upon his writing duties as plain work, disturbed as he might be by its tedium. Like Stanley, Clemens, on the whole, seemed remarkably grounded: a famous family man, pestered by responsibilities, moody — I had seen him shouting at one of the cats in a sudden spurt of anger — but generally even-tempered.
As I wanted to make a painting of him eventually, I took the liberty of making some pencil sketches of Clemens as we sat by the fine fireplace. Sitting before the hearth, he had dozed for some minutes, but then a snort, when one of his cats jumped up on his lap, awakened him. He apologized: We laughed. I showed him my rudimentary sketch. Pleased, he said: “I don’t hate it, which is a good thing for me.”