Twain in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

“Mark Twain” (1929)

[308] === Among the visitors to Stormfield during the winter of 1909–10 were Helen Keller (1880–1968) and her tutor, Anna Sullivan Macy (1866–1936). See also Chambliss. “Mark Twain” (1929) Helen Keller one of the most memorable events of my life was my visit to Mark Twain. My memory of Mr. Clemens runs back to 1894, when he was still vigorous , before the shadows began to gather. Such was the affection he inspired in my young heart that my love for him has deepened with the years. More than anyone else I have ever known except Dr. Alexander Graham Bell and my teacher, Mrs. Macy, he aroused in me the feeling of mingled tenderness and awe. I met him many times at the home of my friend, Laurence Hutton, in New York, and later in Princeton; also at the residence of Mr. H. H. Rogers and at his own home at 21 Fifth Avenue, and last of all in Stormfield, Connecticut. Now and then I received letters from him. We were both too busy to write often, but whenever events of importance in our lives occurred we wrote to each other about them. He knew with keen and sure intuition many things about me; how it felt to be blind and not to be able 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. He wove about my dark walls romance and adventure which made me feel happy and important. Once when Peter Dunne, the irrepressible Mr. Dooley, exclaimed, “God! How dull it must be for her; every day the same, and every night the same as the day,” Mr. Clemens said, “You’re damned wrong there. Blindness is an exciting business, I tell you. If you don’t believe it, get up some dark night on the wrong side of your bed when the house is on fire and try to find the door.” The second time I met Mr. Clemens was in Princeton during a spring vacation when we were visiting the Huttons in their new home. We had many happy hours together at that time. One evening, in the library, he lectured [309] to a distinguished company—Woodrow Wilson was present—on the situation in the Philippines. We listened breathlessly. He described how six hundred Moros—men, women, and children—had taken refuge in an extinct crater bowl near Jolo, where they were caught in a trap and executed by the Americans. A few days afterwards, the Americans captured Aguinaldo by disguising their military marauders in the uniform of the enemy and pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s officers. Upon these military exploits Mr. Clemens poured out a volume of invective and ridicule. Only those who heard him can know his deep fervor and the potency of his flaming words. All his life he fought injustice wherever he saw it in the relations between man and man, in politics, and in war. I loved his views on public affairs, perhaps because they were so often the same as my own. He thought he was a cynic, but his cynicism did not make him indifferent to the sight of cruelty, unkindness, meanness, or pretentiousness. He would often say, “Helen, the world is full of unseeing eyes—vacant, staring , soulless eyes.” He would work himself into a frenzy over dull acquiescence in any evil that could be remedied. True, sometimes it seemed as if he let loose all the artillery of Heaven against an intruding mouse. But even then his “resplendent vocabulary” was a delight. Even when his ideas were quite wrong they were expressed with such lucidity, conviction, and aggressiveness that one felt impelled to accept them—for the moment at least. He was interested in everything about me—my friends and little adventures and what I was writing. I loved him for his beautiful appreciation of my teacher’s work. Of all the people who have written about me, he is almost the only one who has realized the importance of Mrs. Macy in my life; the only one who has appreciated her “brilliancy, penetration, wisdom, character, and the fine literary competences of her pen.” He often spoke tenderly of Mrs. Clemens and regretted that I had not known her. “I am very lonely. Sometimes, when I sit by the fire after my...