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.
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?”