“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.)
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.