One on One

He is led into a big, dark drawing room. There, in a huge chair, he finds the fifty-three-year-old author of Tom Sawyer with ‘a mane of grizzled hair, a brown mustache covering a mouth as delicate as a woman’s, a strong, square hand shaking mine and the slowest, calmest, levellest voice in all the world … I was shaking his hand. I was smoking his cigar, and I was hearing him talk – this man I had learned to love and admire 14,000 miles away.’

Kipling is transfixed. ‘That was a moment to be remembered; the landing of a twelve-pound salmon was nothing to it. I had hooked Mark Twain, and he was treating me as though under certain circumstances I might be an equal.’

The two men discuss the difficulties of copyright before moving on to Twain’s work. ‘Growing bold, and feeling that I had a few hundred thousand folk at my back, I demanded whether Tom Sawyer married Judge Thatcher’s daughter and whether we were ever going to hear of Tom Sawyer as a man.’

Twain gets up, fills his pipe, and paces the room in his bedroom slippers. ‘I haven’t decided. I have a notion of writing the sequel to Tom Sawyer in two ways. In one I would make him rise to great honor and go to Congress, and in the other I should hang him. Then the friends and enemies of the book could take their choice.’

Kipling raises a voice of protest: to him, Tom Sawyer is real.

‘Oh, he is real. He’s all the boys that I have known or recollect; but that would be a good way of ending the book, because, when you come to think of it, neither religion, training, nor education avails anything against the force of circumstances that drive a man. Suppose we took the next four and twenty years of Tom Sawyer’s life, and gave a little joggle to the circumstances that controlled him. He would, logically and according to the joggle, turn out a rip or an angel.’

‘Do you believe that, then?’

‘I think so; isn’t it what you call kismet?’

‘Yes; but don’t give him two joggles and show the result, because he isn’t your property any more. He belongs to us.’

Twain laughs. They move on to autobiography. ‘I believe it is impossible for a man to tell the truth about himself or to avoid impressing the reader with the truth about himself,’ Twain says. ‘I made an experiment once. I got a friend of mine – a man painfully given to speak the truth on all occasions – a man who wouldn’t dream of telling a lie – and I made him write his autobiography for his own amusement and mine … good, honest man that he was, in every single detail of his life that I knew about he turned out, on paper, a formidable liar. He could not help himself.’

As Twain walks up and down talking and puffing away, Kipling finds himself coveting his cob pipe. ‘I understood why certain savage tribes ardently desire the liver of brave men slain in combat. That pipe would have given me, perhaps, a hint of his keen insight into the souls of men. But he never laid it aside within stealing reach.’

Twain talks of the books he likes to read. ‘I never cared for fiction or story-books. What I like to read about are facts and statistics of any kind. If they are only facts about the raising of radishes, they interest me. Just now for instance, before you came in, I was reading an article about mathematics. Perfectly pure mathematics. My own knowledge of mathematics stops at “twelve times twelve” but I enjoyed that article immensely. I didn’t understand a word of it; but facts, or what a man believes to be facts, are always delightful.’

After two hours, the interview comes to an end. The great man, who never minds talking, assures his disciple that he has not interrupted him in the least.

Seventeen years on, Rudyard Kipling is world famous. Twain grows nostalgic for the time he spent in his company. ‘I believe that he knew more than any person I had met before, and he knew I knew less than any person he had met before … When he was gone, Mr Langdon wanted to know about my visitor. I said, “He is a stranger to me but is a most remarkable man – and I am the other one. Between us, we cover all knowledge; he knows all that can be known, and I know the rest.”’

Twain, now aged seventy, is addicted to Kipling’s works. He rereads Kim every year, ‘and in this way I go back to India without fatigue … I am not acquainted with my own books but I know Kipling’s books. They never grow pale to me; they keep their colour; they are always fresh.’

The worshipped has become the worshipper.

MARK TWAIN

BIDS FAREWELL TO

HELEN KELLER

Stormfield, Connecticut

February 1909

As Helen Keller’s carriage draws up between the huge granite pillars of Mark Twain’s house, the most venerable author in America is there to greet her, though she can neither see him nor hear him. Her companion Annie Sullivan – her eyes and ears – tells Helen that he is all in white, his beautiful white hair glistening in the afternoon sunshine ‘like the snow spray on gray stones’.

Twain and Keller first met fifteen years ago, when he was fifty-eight and she was just fourteen. Struck deaf and blind by meningitis at the age of eighteen months, Helen had, through sheer force of will, discovered a way to communicate: she finds out what people are saying by placing her fingers on their lips, throat and nose, or by having Annie transpose it onto the palm of her hand in letters of the alphabet.

Taken up as a prodigy by the great and the good,

she formed a special friendship with Twain. ‘The instant I clasped his hand in mine, I knew that he was my friend. He made me laugh and feel thoroughly happy by telling some good stories, which I read from his lips … He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me and how it felt to be blind and not to keep up with the swift ones – things that others learned slowly or not at all. He never embarrassed me by saying how terrible it is not to see, or how dull life must be, lived always in the dark.’

Unlike other people, Twain has never patronised her. ‘He never made me feel that my opinions were worthless, as so many people do. He knew that we do not think with eyes and ears, and that our capacity for thought is not measured by five senses. He kept me always in mind while he talked, and he treated me like a competent human being. That is why I loved him …’

For his part, Twain is in awe. ‘She is fellow to Caesar, Alexander, Napoleon, Homer, Shakespeare and the rest of the immortals. She will be as famous a thousand years from now as she is today.’ Shortly after their first meeting, Twain formed a circle to fund her education at Radcliffe College, which led to her publishing an autobiography at the age of twenty-two, which in turn led her to become almost as celebrated as Twain himself.

But the intervening years have struck Twain some heavy blows. One of his daughters has died of meningitis,

another of an epileptic fit in a bathtub, and his wife Livy has died of heart disease. Throughout Helen’s stay he acts his familiar bluff, entertaining old self, but she senses the deep sadness within.

‘There was about him the air of one who had suffered greatly. Whenever I touched his face, his expression was sad, even when he was telling a funny story. He smiled, not with the mouth but with his mind – a gesture of the soul rather than of the face.’

But for the moment, he welcomes them into the house for tea and buttered toast by the fire. Then he shows them around. He takes Helen into his beloved billiard room. He will, he says, teach her how to play just like his friends Paine, Dunne and Rogers.

‘Oh, Mr Clemens, it takes sight to play billiards.’

‘Yes, but not the variety of billiards that Paine and Dunne and Rogers play. The blind couldn’t play worse,’ he jokes.

They go upstairs to see his bedroom. ‘Try to picture, Helen, what we are seeing out of these windows. We are high up on a snow-covered hill. Beyond, are dense spruce and firwoods, other snow-clad hills and stone walls intersecting the landscape everywhere, and, over all, the white wizardry of winter. It is a delight, this wild, free, fir-scented place.’

He shows the two women to their suite. On the mantelpiece there is a card telling burglars where to find everything of value. There has recently been a burglary, Twain explains, and this notice will ensure that any future intruders do not bother to disturb him.

Over dinner, Twain holds forth, ‘his talk fragrant with tobacco and flamboyant with profanity’. He explains that in his experience guests do not enjoy dinner if they are always worrying about what to say next: it is up to the host to take on that burden. ‘He talked delightfully, audaciously, brilliantly,’ says Helen. Dinner comes to an end, but his talk continues around the fire. ‘He seemed to have absorbed all America into himself. The great Mississippi River seemed forever flowing, flowing through his speech, through the shadowless white sands of thought. His voice seemed to say like the river, “Why hurry? Eternity is long; the ocean can wait.”’

Before Helen leaves Smithfield, Twain is more solemn. ‘I am very lonely, sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my friends have departed. My thoughts trail away into the past. I think of Livy and Susy and I seem to be fumbling in the dark folds of confused dreams …’

As she says goodbye, Helen wonders if they will ever meet again. Once more, her intuition proves right. Twain dies the following year. Some time later, Helen returns to where the old house once stood: it has burnt down, with only a charred chimney still standing. She turns her unseeing eyes to the view he once described to her, and at that moment feels someone coming towards her. ‘I reached out, and a red geranium blossom met my touch. The leaves of the plant were covered with ashes, and even the sturdy stalk had been partly broken off by a chip of falling plaster. But there was the bright flower smiling at me out of the ashes. I thought it said to me, “Please don’t grieve.”’

She plants the geranium in a sunny corner of her garden. ‘It always seems to say the same thing to me, “Please don’t grieve.” But I grieve, nevertheless.’

HELEN KELLER

AND …

MARTHA GRAHAM

66 Fifth Avenue, New York

December 1952

Before she taught Helen Keller each new word and phrase, Annie Sullivan used to say, ‘And …’

‘AND open the window!’

‘AND close the door!’

Everything life had to offer began with this little word.

The first word Helen ever learned was w-a-t-e-r. In Helen Keller’s dark, silent childhood, her teacher placed her hand beneath the spout of a well.

‘As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers. Suddenly I felt a misty consciousness as of something forgotten – a thrill of returning thought; and somehow the mystery of language was revealed to me. I knew then that “w-a-t-e-r” meant the wonderful cool something that was flowing over my hand. That living word awakened my soul, gave it light, hope, joy, set it free! … I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me.’