The Twainian Vol 25 No 4 (1966)
“ONE AFTERNOON WITH MARK TWAIN”
By GEORGE ADE
It was in the late summer or early autumn of 1902, as nearly as I can fix the date, when Dr. Clarence C. Rice, a long-time friend and traveling-companion of Mark Twain’s, came to me at my hotel in New York City and invited me to accompany him on a pilgrimage to the One and Only.
Of course I accepted the invitation. Probably no person, then alive and gifted with a pair of movable legs, would have done otherwise. And especially so myself. For a good many years I had been waiting and hoping to meet Mark Twain, I think I had read everything he ever wrote. With great admiration and respect I had witnessed his “come-back” in the early nineties, during which he repaid a mountainous debt as a matter of honor, not of personal legal responsibility.
How unappreciative we often are, at the time, of the red-letter days in our lives! I cannot say that I was not impressed with the importance of the invitation to visit Mark Twain. I certainly was. But what was in my mind at the time was the belief that he would live for many more years, and that, having met him on this occasion with Dr. Rice, I would later visit him alone and at greater length.
My recollection is that I planned to have the next visit take the form of a newspaperman’s interview. I knew that such an article would be in ready demand at a good price. But it was not the money I wanted; it was the honor of having written an article about Mark Twain, all-time Dean of American Literature, commanding figure in this country and throughout the world. Kipling had done a fine job of his interview with Twain at Elmira in 1889, as published in “From Sea to Sea” in 1899. Probably I was just enough conceited in those days to make a try at outdoing Kipling. I can’t remember as to this. Time mercifully blots from our memories many of the follies of early life.
Although, at that time, I was regarded in some quarters as being a bit of a humorist myself, I do definitely recall that I had no thought of conferring with Mark Twain as a fellow fun-maker. Beside his towering fame, my own stature was something like that of a child’s mud-pie man, placed alongside the statue of Rodin’s “Thinker”.
And thus it happened that I made no notes recording the details of the most momentous meeting of my life. I went; I saw and heard; I came away. The tragic events of the few remaining years of Mark Twain’s life made it impossible for me ever to talk with him again. I never wrote that masterpiece of an interview I was going to write. I have never before set down on paper the few impressions of our one meeting that still remain fixed in my mind.
Yes, if I had known that I was never again to meet Mark Twain, I would have come provided with a handful of pencils and my pockets bulging with copy paper. I would have carefully recorded the date, the state of the weather—every word he spoke, every trifling detail of that pilgrimage to the shrine of this immortal American.
Vaguely, I can recall that Dr. Rice and I journeyed up the Hudson by rail and alighted at a station which should have been named Riverdale. I was being escorted by Dr. Rice and paid little attention to the route. I don’t even remember what kind of a vehicle it was that met us at the station and carried us up to a delightful, rambling, homey-looking old house on a hillside, surrounded by huge, wide-branching trees.
He stood alone on the porch, waiting to greet us. I can recall that he wore a white or tan-colored suit, loose and comfortable-looking, but not ill-fitting. From the moment that he took my hand in his firm clasp, he was the soul of kindliness, cordiality and affability. I can recall only his eyes. I lack words to describe them. Probably the word “imperious” comes close to describing the calm, penetrating, unwavering gaze he enveloped me with during the first few moments of our meeting. I was several inches taller than he, so that he must have looked upward into my eyes; yet I did not sense the difference in height. It seemed, indeed, as if he were looking downward on me.
We seated ourselves in roomy rocking-chairs on the porch. Courteously, Mark Twain asked about my trip to New York. He remarked that he and I would have been born in adjacent states if the damned geographers had not maliciously thrust Illinois between Indiana and Missouri. From then on, Dr. Rice and I did little talking. Our host was happy, expansive. He began his discourse by warning me that I was soon to be made the victim of a fantastic plan, evolved by a woman of family acquaintance, to translate some of my “Fables in Slang” into French.
“She cannot possibly find any French equivalents for your specimens of American vernacular,” said Mr. Clemens, “but she is determined to make the effort and I am waiting until it is done so that I can watch some Frenchman go crazy while trying to read it.”
I mentioned to him the fact that the “Jumping Frog” had been done into French, with disastrous results, and I said that I would not be party to turning the “Fables” into that language.
Mr. Clemens advised me to keep quiet and let her go ahead and tackle what he, too, knew to be the impossible. Somehow, I gained the impression that, by keeping the lady occupied, indefinitely, with the task of turning the “Fables” into French, Mr. Clemens would be grateful to me. Possibly she had been pressing him hard to turn some of his own tales, in the vernacular, into that language.
Evidently the translation of the “Fables” was never attempted. I never heard from the lady, who would need to secure my permission to undertake a translation that would no doubt become the world’s champion linguistic monstrosity.
We must have spent a couple of hours there on the front porch, rocking and smoking. Dr. Rice and I answered an occasional question, but our answers served only to start Mr. Clemens on a new train of thought. He dwelt for some time on the theme of the great middle west. In me he knew he had an appreciative listener; A product of Mississippi Valley soil like himself; one who spoke his language and who was in full understanding of his tales of life on the River.
We talked for a time about William Dean Howells, in whom Mr. Clemens and I had a mutual friend. Probably no man was closer to Mark Twain, during his active writing career, than was Howells. And it chanced that I had formed an overwhelming regard for Mr. Howells because it was he who “discovered” me and who was the first to encourage me at the time when my realistic little yarns in The Chicago Record first began to appear. I have sometimes wondered if it were not Mr. Howells who secretly engineered that surprise invitation given me by Dr. Rice to visit Mark Twain.
Then, drawling and puffing slowly on his pipe, Mark Twain was again in Hannibal. I wish I could remember only a few of the many tales he poured forth with scarcely a pause between them. Never was there a show of haste or evidence of a desire to speed the arrival of the point of a story. That was reserved, (frequently for several slow puffs) until the listener became half-maddened with curiosity. Twain was the world’s supreme master of suspense in oral delivery. He knew how to make one second of silence outweigh a hundred words. But the trick is to know just how to build up to that period of silence; and to inject it between exactly the right words. I suppose in these days it is called “timing”. I tried the device once at a banquet in telling an anecdote. The audience is still wondering as to where the point of the tale came in.
One boyhood escapade he told us about that afternoon I do remember. It concerned Sam Clemens and his associate Tom Sawyers and Huck Fins, I have since seen the story in some of Twain’s books, but at that time it was new to me and no presentation of the tale, in cold type, can picture the incident as did Mark Twain in his oral recitation of it.
Atop a high hill that hangs over Hannibal there was a large boulder, partly imbedded in the earth. Sam Clemens and his gang, after hours of labor, managed to loosen this boulder and topple it over the edge of the hill. Down it went, a huge, irresistible engine of destruction. It hurdled a half-sunken roadway on which a horse and wagon were then passing. It kept on until it crashed into one wall of a planing-mill and came out through the other.
Mr. Clemens here paused in his recital, his eyes narrowed to slits, his gaze fixed on the shining expanse of the Hudson River that lay before us. He seemed to be thinking of those far-off days of his boyhood on the Mississippi. Dr. Rice and I waited until the silence had endured beyond the point where it could be regarded as the familiar suspense device. We were burning with curiosity to learn the rest of the story.
“Where did the boulder stop?” I ventured to ask.
“I lost so much interest in that boulder after it hit the planing mill that I never took the trouble to ask,” answered Mr. Clemens.
“Anybody killed?” asked Dr. Rice.
“Not in the mill,” he answered, “but it has brought a lingering death to those boys on the hill. Several of us half-died with fright right on the spot. Others have since completely died. I will probably be cut down somewhere around my one-hundredth birthday. We were so frightened that we entered into a solemn vow never to reveal the source of the agitation causing that boulder to act the way it did. I have kept my vow to this day.”
If any other members of the Clemens family were at home during the period of our visit, we did not have the pleasure of meeting them. We merely sat and listened to that matchless, unhurried recital of fact, fancy and philosophizing on men and affairs as it issued from Mark Twain.
Why can’t I recall more of the things he said! I can explain my failure only by saying that I must have fallen completely under the spell of his bewitching personality. And I was a traveled citizen of the world at that time. I had met many celebrities in this country and abroad I came into Mark Twain's presence with the realization that I was to meet an exceptional individual. I came away with the realization that I had just met and talked with the individual then alive.
In one respect, Mark Twain did not conform to my expectations. Like all the rest of the world, I had come to regard him as an ever-jovial humorist; judging him solely by his writings. But Mark Twain in the flesh was grave, almost solemn. His flashes of wit, the tales that he told that afternoon, were unaccompanied by the slighest trace of a smile. Except occasionally, when his eyes seemed to be afire in discussing some incident of man’s inhumanity to man, his slow, thoughtful manner of speaking was tinged with plaintiveness, almost sadness.
It is an idle gesture for me to comment on Mark Twain as an author. Despite all that analysts may write, the final correct estimate of his is established by the fact that he has become a beloved, permanent tradition in the hearts of the people of this country and throughout the civilized world.
That is the only yard-stick by which a man or an author can be measured. Does he continue to live in the hearts of the people? Mark Twain does; and I believe that, centuries hence his writings will be found preserved alongside of those of the great authors of all time.
GEORGE ADE