There are few things that can prepare a person for a first meeting with a volcano.
You approach the natural phenomenon slowly and carefully after doing sufficient research to ensure you are properly booted and spurred. You spend hours each day preparing body and mind for the rigors ahead; determined to waste not a second of the invaluable experience but convinced you will not only survive but return to your mundane and ordinary world a wiser and blessed individual.
Your correspondent can attest to all of the above after being granted an interview with America’s foremost literary treasure, Mr. Samuel Clemons. Those few people on the Earth who are unfamiliar with that name will certainly know the Mississippi steamboat vernacular term under which his beloved books are published, the cognomen of Mark Twain.
Mr. Clemons met me on the eve of his eighth voyage to the Caribbean isle of Bermuda. Although he has kept a small white wood-frame cottage on the St. John’s River in which to escape the Connecticut winters, his recent holidays were sadly interrupted by the death of his daughter, Jean, on Christmas Eve after she apparently suffered an epileptic seizure in the bath.
The arrangements for my meeting with Mr. Clemons specified that I was not to question him in any way about his family in order to avoid depressing him further. This was not a difficult request to honor not only because of the circumstances but also in view of standards of common decency. I was also cautioned not to press Mr. Clemons to extend the interview once he decided his patience or energy had been expended. These were the sole conditions put upon me and I readily agreed to them.
As I walked up the tidy gravel path to the cottage, I observed a figure of medium height and build seated in a tall-backed rocking chair. With the famous all-white clothing, seated in a white chair with that remarkably untamed white hair bristling around his head; Clemons looked like a child’s ideal of the Almighty. Not the raging, vengeful God of the Old Testament or even the holy diplomat of the Gospels but rather a shining amalgam of the two, ever-willing to comfort a soul in distress but with pikestaff at the ready for dispatching evildoers to a place much warmer than Bermuda.
I write the above paragraph with the serene knowledge that the subject of such purple prose vowed that he was done with reading anything written about him and anyway, his thoughts regarding interviewers include the barbed benediction that “…he is not conscious of harm even when he is dusting a continent with your remains, but only thinks he is making things pleasant for you; and that therefore the just way to judge him is by his intentions, not his works.” (21 July 1895, The (Petoskey) Daily Reporter)
It was mid-afternoon when I arrived at the Clemons residence and as soon as he noticed me walking up the drive, he bent over slightly and set something small and dark on the porch in front of him. When I was within a few feet, I observed a tortoise shell kitten scampering over his shoes on its way to a quiet sunlit spot on the porch step.
‘I’d like you to meet Concatenation,’ said the great man, ‘but you’ll have to wait for him to begin introductions. He considers himself royalty as one of the descendants of Blatherskite and Sour Mash out of Quarry Farm. He doesn’t stand on ceremony once he gets to know you but he has his own particular timetable. I’ve always been partial to cats. Of all God’s creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with the cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat. (Notebook, 1894)
Both of us chuckled and he gestured toward a small glass-topped table that contained a pitcher of lemonade, two tall glasses and a small turquoise plate of sugar cookies. I sat across from him on a wide cushioned bench while he poured lemonade.‘Mr. Clemons, it’s been many years since you wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Do you feel that the races have learned anything over the years?’
‘I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being—that is enough for me; he can’t be any worse. (“Concerning the Jews”)
I asked him whether he considered himself a valid representative of the entire human race and if he believed others shared his thoughts. ‘All I can tell you is what I know of myself and what I have seen others do. With regard to the behaviors of whites and coloreds of any hue and nationality, the best thing I can say is that an antipathy with a reason back of it has no advantage in lasting qualities over an inherited antipathy whose origin has been forgotten.’ (Unpublished letter to the editor of The American Hebrew, 1890, reprinted in Fables of Man)
We discussed the ‘small mercies and lasting abominations’ perpetrated on and by the races and somehow ended up on the subject of politics and whether or not newspapers were a benefit or a misfortune to a decent Society.
‘Well, now, that is the kind of statement that could lead to you being invited to consider a new line of work,’ he said, tilting one of those eyebrows heavenward.
‘I am personally acquainted with hundreds of journalists, and the opinion of the majority of them would not be worth tuppence in private, but when they speak in print it is the newspaper that is talking (the pygmy scribe is not visible) and then their utterances shake the community like the thunders of prophecy.’ (‘License of the Press’, speech, 31 March 1873)
‘Let me give you another example. A private should preserve a respectful attitude toward his superiors, and should seldom or never proceed so far as to offer suggestions to his general in the field. By the etiquette of war, it is permitted to none below the rank of newspaper correspondent to dictate to the general in the field.’ (‘The Benefit of Judicious Training,’ 8 June 1881)
I then asked if he thought newspapers had any effect at all on those in power.
‘The devil’s aversion to holy water is a light matter compared with a despot’s dread of a newspaper that laughs, ‘he replied, as his eyes narrowed and I caught a second’s worth of a flash of temperament. (‘The American Press’)
Just then I was stricken with an attack of sneezing and Clemons commiserated with me about the unseasonable heat that had stirred up great quantities of dust.
‘That’s what comes of generations and generations burning coal and oil and what-all, throwing foul-smelling smoke and other garbage into the air and confounding the regular patterns of winter and summer and rain and drought. Yes, the weather is bad, and if I were dealing in weather it is not the brand that I’d put up in cans for future use. No, it is the kind of weather I’d throw on the market and let it go for what it would fetch, and if it wouldn’t sell for anything I would hunt up some life-long enemy and present it to him. Failing in this, as a last resort I should probably take it out on the big bridge, dump it into the Mississippi and start it to Europe via the jetties. I’d unload it someway, and that quickly, too.’ (‘A Day with Mark Twain’ by John Henton Carter)
We stopped to finish the last of the lemonade in our glasses and I noticed that Clemons glanced at his watch. Not wanting to tire him and hoping for another interview on his return from Bermuda, I asked one final question. ‘Mr. Clemons, one of my favorite books but the one that is the most difficult to read, is ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’. Can you help me understand why this is so?’
He paused and rocked in his chair for a few moments and then stopped suddenly, tilting his head to one side before answering. ‘When people let Huck Finn alone he goes peacefully along, damaging a few children here and there and yonder, but there will be plenty of children in heaven without those, so it is no great matter. It is only when well-meaning people expose him that he gets his real chance to do harm. Temporarily, then, he spreads havoc all around in the nurseries and no doubt does prodigious harm while he has his chance. By and by, let us hope, people that really have the best interests of the rising generation at heart will become wise and not stir Huck up.’ (Mark Twain’s Autobiography)
As if on cue, the kitten on the porch step stretched full length in the sunlight and then walked over to the rocking chair, jumping into Clemons’ lap. I stood up, walked over to shake the hand that wasn’t petting the kitten and thanked him for his time and hospitality and wished him a safe and enjoyable voyage.
The last I saw of Samuel Clemons he was as I had found him; seated comfortably in his white rocking chair, rocking slowly back and forth, a shining figure waiting in the quiet of a late winter’s afternoon. And I thought how prescient and personal his words in Notebook #35: ‘A book of mine where a sound heart and a deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers defeat.’ Ostensibly a description of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn but in reality the summation of a life well and truly lived.
Bluntedhedgehog 