XIII.

Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no
doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man's
falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own
abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and
then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing
to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
die; he would have liked the rapping back.

He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He
dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often