Authors: Dan Simmons
“And Paige doesn’t have a working model?”
“He tells me almost every other week that he has a perfect working model,” said Clemens. “But when I rush to see it and get within fifty miles of him, the machine either quits working or Paige decides to dismantle it and improve it in some arcane mechanical way. He’s in Chicago to set up a second factory to produce the things while the first factory has yet to spit out a model that works for more than two minutes at a time.”
“Did you see Mr. Paige while you were here?”
Clemens drank deeply from his glass of laudanum and refilled the glass from the bottle. “He’s been wonderfully attentive, visited my sickroom at least six times, staying hours each time.”
“And?” said James after a silence that had Clemens staring at nothing.
“And do you remember,” said Clemens, glaring at James from under his bushy white eyebrows, “how I said that Paige could convince a fish to come out of the water and take a walk with him?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this time he convinced this particular fish to come out, take a walk with him, climb a tree, and make noises like a parakeet.”
James didn’t know what to say to that so he remained silent, trying to breathe the fresh air from the open windows rather than the odious air from Clemens’s cheap cigar.
“I came to demand—not request, not ask nicely for, but to
demand
,” continued Clemens, “that Paige immediately refund me the last thirty thousand dollars I’d put into this project. I need it. I’d borrowed from my little publishing venture to pay for the investment in the typesetter and now circumstances demand that I borrow from the typesetter investment to keep my publishing house afloat. So I came to demand, in no uncertain terms, thirty thousand dollars of the hundred and ninety thousand dollars that I’ve poured into Paige’s bottomless pit.”
“And did he pay up?” asked Henry James.
“It ended with me writing him a check for fifty thousand more dollars,” grumbled Clemens. “So that he can make those ‘last few little improvements’ before the automatic typesetting machine sets the publishing world on its ear and I become a millionaire.” Clemens coughed fiercely and, when he’d caught his breath and drunk some laudanum, said, “I finned myself far up and out of the crick this time. Livy will kill me.”
“I hope it works out,” said James who had never invested in anything save for his own talent.
“Say, where’s your friend Sherlock Holmes these days?” asked Clemens.
“Today he went to meet various people at the White City,” said James.
“Have you seen the Exposition yet, James?”
“Not yet.”
“The White City is yet another thing in this life that I shall never see,” sighed Clemens. Then, without any preamble, Clemens said, “Does Holmes still believe that he might be a fictional person rather than real?”
Taken back a bit, James finally said, “I believe he does.”
“He may be right,” said Clemens.
“Why do you say that, sir?”
“I’ve read the stories in
The Strand
and the novellas, and the Sherlock Holmes there strikes me as a particularly unrealistic fellow. His adventures sound contrived.”
“You may remember Holmes saying in New York that he wasn’t totally happy with Dr. Watson’s representations of either him or his science of deduction,” said James. “The tales may be true, but written by a mediocre mind.”
“In the past weeks I’ve been thinking,” said Clemens. “I doubt that there is any ‘Dr. Watson’. It’s all that Conan Doyle fellow creating a fictional narrator to relate the fictional tales of a fictional detective.”
“Holmes says that Conan Doyle is his friend Watson’s agent and editor,” said James. “He says that Dr. John Watson shuns the spotlight and that he allows Doyle to represent him.”
“But what if Holmes
is
a fictional character and this whole assassination plot is part of some melodramatic tale? All make-believe?” said Clemens, coughing more and drinking more of the laudanum mixture. “Where does that leave you and me, Mr. Henry James?”
“How do you mean?” said James, knowing full well what Clemens was leading up to.
“It would mean that
we
are fictional characters in this instance as well,” said Clemens, staring balefully out from under his shaggy eyebrows. “You chosen as his Sancho Panza . . . or perhaps as his Boswell . . . and me as occasional comedy relief.”
“I’ll never be his Boswell,” James said flatly.
“Have you ever thought, James, of the relationship between you and the characters you’ve created?”
“I’m not sure what you mean,” James said, knowing full well what the humorist meant.
“I mean that you’re God to them,” said Clemens, “just as I am God to my small worlds of fictional people. You create them. You put them through their fictional paces. You decide their emotions and you decide when it’s time for them to die. In other words, we’re God to our characters.”
James shook his head. “My characters have a certain life of their own,” he said softly.
“Oh,” said Clemens and surrendered to a spasm of phlegmy coughing. “Does that mean that Isabella Archer is having tea in England or Europe right now?”
“No,” said James, “but it means there are depths to her . . . to Isabel’s . . . character that I haven’t explored.”
“This is writers’ doubletalk,” said Clemens, drinking deeply from his glass. “We love to pretend that our characters have some lives of their own . . . but they don’t, James. You know it and I know it. We move them around like puppets in a Punch and Judy show. Have you read any of my books, sir?”
“I’ve not yet had that pleasure,” said James, surprised by the question. Writers didn’t ask other writers for opinions of their work. It just wasn’t done.
Clemens laughed. “Well, I’ve tried to read yours,” said the white-haired author. “I declare, James, reading your prose is like translating medieval German. You have forty-two freight cars loaded with subordinate clauses being pushed along by a tiny cluster of underpowered engine-verbs tucked in at the end of the sentence. Reading your books is like listening to a man on a soapbox argue with himself, interrupting himself every few seconds.”
James smiled thinly. “My brother William would agree with you.”
“But still . . . with Isabella Archer and a few of your other characters . . .” Clemens’s voice trailed off. He turned to stare fiercely at James again. “Do you know
why
Isabella Archer made that damned-fool self-destructive decision at the end of the book? Was that your plan all along or did the character take on some autonomy and make her life-ruining decision on her own?”
James lifted his hands, palms up. He was not going to discuss Isabella Archer or any of his other books or characters with this laudanum-addled American.
“You hear your characters’ voices in your head or you don’t,” said Clemens, speaking to himself. “Do you happen to remember that I published a book called
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
about five years ago?”
“I remember,” said James.
Clemens looked at him again. “For months—years, really, since I’d set the book aside for a long time—I heard Huck’s voice in my head as clearly as I heard my beloved Livy calling me to dinner. Huck was with me when I went to sleep at night and he was waiting for me when I woke up. And then . . . near what should have been the end of the story when they’re off the raft for the last time and Huck’s slave friend Jim has been captured . . . Huck just left me. He just lit out for the territory without me. I could no longer hear his voice, no longer look through his eyes. I was just a man putting words on paper.”
“What did you do?” asked James, more interested in this topic and in the answer than he could show.
Clemens licked his lips. “I brought in Tom Sawyer from
his
book, turned Huck into the shallow supporting character he’d been in that Tom-Sawyer book, and essentially let the most important book I’ve ever written turn into another boy’s book,” said Clemens. “All games and coincidences and no-harm-done-to-anyone with Tom, a character whom I knew
shouldn’t even be in this novel
, making the decisions.”
“That sort of situation is unfortunate,” James said softly. “And I am sure that it happens to all of us in writing one novel or the other.”
Clemens shook his head. “Have you read the novel
Robert Elsmere
?”
“I’ve heard the title but haven’t had the pleasure of reading it,” said James.
“It created quite a sensation about five years ago and caused the rumpus,” said Clemens. “It was written by Mrs. Humphry Ward. It advocated a Christianity based on social concerns and help for one’s fellow man rather than on Scripture or theology. She made a lot of devout enemies.”
James waited.
“Anyway,” continued Clemens after some coughing and expectorating, “I copied a sentence from that long, sometimes dismal book because it relates to what we’re discussing. Mrs. Ward wrote—and I remember it clearly—‘I cannot conceive of God as the arch-plotter against His own creation’.”
“That doesn’t sound very radical,” said James.
Clemens rounded on him again. “But
we’re
God to the world and characters we create, James. And we plot against them all the time. We kill them off, maul and scar them, make them lose their hopes and dearest loves. We conspire against our characters daily. But in the Huck Finn book, I lost my nerve, James. I lost Huck’s voice and then I lost my nerve. Or maybe—probably—it was the other way around. I so loved Huckleberry Finn that I failed to plot against him and the rest of my creation as I should have. If Huck’s voice had stayed with me—if I’d had the courage to listen to it—I would have had nigger Jim captured and sold down the river to endless slavery in front of Huck’s eyes and in spite of all of Huck’s efforts—or at the very least had the decency and mercy to kill Jim and Huck—rather than bring Tom Sawyer into the tale to end it as a mere
boy’s book
.”
Clemens spat out the last two words.
“What has this to do with the question of whether Sherlock Holmes is fictional?” James asked bluntly. He hated writers’ self-pity and detested watching it.
Clemens laughed until he began coughing again. “Don’t you see, James?” he said at last. “You and I are only minor characters in this story about the Great Detective. Our little lives and endings mean nothing to the God-Writer, whoever the sonofabitch might be.”
“Do you have any idea who that God-Writer might be?” asked James. “I’ve thought about this. Conan Doyle would never use living contemporaries in his tales . . . certainly not use their real names or make them so recognizable. Holmes said that Watson had to disguise the Prince of Wales as the King of Bohemia in one story.”
“It doesn’t have to be Conan Doyle,” said Clemens, his chin almost on his chest as he poured the last of the laudanum from the bottle into the glass. “It’s almost certainly some lesser mind, lesser talent, than you, perhaps even lesser than me, certainly lesser than Arthur Conan Doyle, which is saying a lot. And it might be written thirty years hence, or fifty, or a hundred.”
“Well,” said James, trying for a light tone despite the heaviness in his heart, “at least that would mean we’re still being read thirty or a hundred years from now.”
There was a long silence broken only by street sounds some fourteen floors below and the raspy, phlegm-filled effort of Samuel Clemens to breathe.
“If we
are
only fictional constructs, brought in to give the fictional-construct Sherlock Holmes company, what do we do next?” James finally asked.
Clemens laughed. “I’m going east to New York tomorrow, stopping at Elmira if I feel up to it. I’ll probably be too sick to watch the procession of Great Ships scheduled for this weekend in New York Harbor, but I’d give two toes to see that. No sir, if the God-Writer of this tale . . . hack that he probably is—wants to kill this Sam Clemens off, he will have to do it offstage, the way Shakespeare killed Falstaff.”‘
I need to leave, too
, thought James.
Regain my autonomy. Regain myself
.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” asked Clemens.
“Holmes said that he wanted to take me on a boat tour of the White City.”
“Well, enjoy what I’ll never see,” said Clemens.
“I’ll look in on you tomorrow after my boat tour,” said James. “See if there’s anything you need.”
“You could tell the porter—the little one with the hare lip—to tell the house doctor that I need a new jug of laudanum,” said Clemens. “And a straw.”
James nodded.
“As far as looking in on me tomorrow,” said Sam Clemens, “there’s no reason to. One way or the other, I’ll be written out of this story by then.”
E
ven though Friday morning was gray, chilly, and threatening rain, Holmes had hired an open landau for their carriage ride to the Exposition. James brought along his umbrella. Holmes was wearing the bright red scarf that he favored whenever the temperature dropped below 70 degrees. The driver was bundled in wool up on his perch.
Holmes was as taciturn this day as he had been voluble on their boat tour the day before. When James questioned him as to whether he’d driven to the Fair this way before, Holmes said that the mayor of Chicago had driven him this way on Wednesday.
“What is Mayor Harrison like?” asked James.
“Talkative,” said Holmes. But then, after a moment of silence broken only by the sound of horses’ hooves and passing carriages, he added, “And strangely likeable. Almost certainly corrupt, but loved by his constituencies, I think.”
“What is the object of our outing today?” asked James.
“We’re deciding where Lucan Adler will lurk to carry out his assassination,” Holmes said so softly it was almost a whisper.
“I know nothing about the mental processes of assassins,” hissed James.
“All right,” Holmes said in a regular voice, “but I thought you might like to see the Exposition grounds before you leave Chicago tomorrow.”