Authors: Dan Simmons
“It’s an amazing book,” continued Clemens as if Howells had not spoken. “But in our conversation in Florence, William James elaborated even further than his seminal book does on the definitions of—and differences between—‘I’ and ‘me’.”
Oh, my
, thought James, trying to calm his thoughts by looking out toward the distant gazebo once again.
“Mr. Holmes,” cried Clemens, leaning toward the thin man in his black suit and long black scarf despite the warmth of the day. “Do you enjoy being a detective?”
“It is what I do,” said Holmes after the briefest of pauses.
Clemens nodded as if the answer satisfied him deeply. “The published stories of your adventures are becoming very popular both here and, as I understand it, in England.”
Holmes said nothing to this.
“Are you satisfied with the way Dr. Watson and Mr. Doyle present your adventures?” pressed Clemens.
“I’ve never had the pleasure of making Mr. Doyle’s acquaintance,” Holmes said softly. “As for Watson’s writing—many is the time I’ve told him that his little romances based on my cases mistakenly emphasize drama, and sometimes, I admit, melodrama, rather than the cold, sure science of deduction that he could have shared with interested and intelligent readers.”
Holmes leaned forward on his walking cane. “Furthermore,” he said, “both Watson and his editor and agent, Mr. Doyle, have a deep fear of mentioning any well-known public names—or even private ones, or even the accurate place or time—in the published tales. More often than not it leads to a great confusion in the tales themselves. The published versions hardly ever match the original notes in my case files.”
“But you enjoy being a detective?” Clemens asked again.
“It is what I do,” repeated Holmes.
Clemens laughed and slapped his knee. “By God, I am going to write a book called
Tom Sawyer, Detective
. Between my beloved literary character and your profession, sir, we shall sell a million copies.”
Holmes said nothing to this.
“Enjoy your pipe and cigarettes, gentlemen,” cried Clemens. “For I am now going to explain Mr. William James’s brilliant definitions of the quite different ‘I’ and ‘me’ in all of us and should show Mr. Holmes why he might be correct in thinking that he does not exist!”
O
ur friend Henry James’s brother William sees the ‘I’ in each of us as the active agent, the first-person doer, as it were—that part of our consciousness or being which sets our goals and initiates our actions in quest of those goals, whether the goals be getting closer to a pretty girl or being seen as the best writer of our generation,” said Clemens between deep draws on his cigar. “Does anyone here disagree with such a definition?”
No one spoke for a moment and James returned his attention to the sound of the breeze in the nearby trees. Then Holmes said, “This seems somewhat self-evident, perhaps to the point of being obvious.”
“Quite so!” cried Clemens. “Then perhaps you will also agree with Mr. William James’s definition of ‘Me’ as being the third-person object of self-reflection . . . reflecting on one’s own traits, as in
‘Am I a friendly person?’
or pondering our own beliefs, as in
‘Do I really believe in an all-powerful God?’
or
‘Do I really like chocolate?’
as well as querying our states . . .
‘Am I angry that Clemens is wasting my time like this?’
and so on.”
“What does this have to do with the question of whether Mr. Holmes exists or not?” asked Howells.
Clemens put a hand on his old friend’s knee. “Be patient, Howells. Be patient.” Clemens removed his hand and clasped both hands over his stomach while he began to rock again. Then he removed the cigar and flicked ash on the wooden floor of the porch. “Our friend Henry James’s brother William explained to me that these two parts of each of us, the self as known—the ‘Me’—and the self-as-knower—the ‘I’—are in constant interplay, sometimes actively competing with one another.”
“How can this be?” asked Holmes. “A man’s deepest self, his soul as it were, cannot be divided against itself.”
“Can it not be?” said Clemens. “Are we not, each of us in our deepest selves, divided against ourselves? The ‘Me’ asks
‘Am I not a kind man?’
and hopes it to be so, even while our ‘I’ commits selfish or thoughtless actions which hurt our spouses, our children, our closest friends. Have you not encountered, Mr. Holmes, rogues who committed the worst of actions—murder even—yet insist they are good people, decent people, and that their heinous crimes were mere temporary aberrations, done, as it were, against their will?”
“I have,” said Holmes after a moment. “But I fail to see how this has anything to do with the question of whether I am real or a fictional construct, existing only within the confines of some author’s imagination.”
Clemens nodded and flicked ash. “Our little bark is heavily loaded, but we trust that it will reach shore by and by, Mr. Holmes. The ‘I’ in us acts; the ‘Me’ in us weighs those actions as we reassure ourselves that we are really fine fellows after all. And since the ‘Me’ becomes what your brother called our ‘empirical selves’—the ones people see and know—it becomes the one the world knows.” He exhaled a small cloud of smoke and pulled a folded slip of paper from his vest pocket.
No one spoke as Clemens unfolded the page and held it at arm’s length to read. “As your brother writes, Mr. James—‘I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well-dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher, a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike, possibly to a man. To make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All the other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs are real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them.’ ”
There was a long silence—common to groups who have just had a long passage read to them—and then Howells said plaintively, “Sam, how on
earth
did you just
happen
to have that page at hand to read?”
Clemens grinned. He looked at Henry James. “I tore it out of this man’s brother’s book,
Principles of Psychology
, in my library not ten minutes ago.”
“For shame,” said Howells.
“It is better to break the spine of a man than of a book,” murmured James.
“Oh, its spine is intact,” said Clemens. “But I confess to the crime of ripping a page out of the guts of William’s beautiful book. Page . . . ah . . .” He peered at both sides of the page. “Pages three hundred and nine and three hundred ten.”
“Unforgivable,” said Howells.
“I shall do my best to repair it,” said Clemens. “I am, you know, in the book-binding business myself.” He turned to Sherlock Holmes. “Did that passage not reassure you that even though you are a fictional character, your failures would be your own, your triumphs would be your own?”
“It did
not
,” said Holmes. “If I am some hack author’s pawn, then neither my triumphs nor failures can I call my own.”
Clemens sighed.
Howells said, “That’s all very well for this theoretical ‘Me’ that is, at any given moment, the sum of all behaviors, decisions, and possessions. But what about the ‘I.’ Where is it all this time?”
When no one spoke, James cleared his throat and said, “The ‘I’ knows all past thoughts and appropriates them—but outside of time, as it were—since the ‘I’ itself is a thought from moment to moment, each different from that of the last moment, but appropriative of the latter, together with all that the latter called its own.”
The other three men were staring at James as if he’d broken wind. Howells ground out his cigarette underfoot. Holmes was holding his pipe in his lap.
“You see,” continued James, knowing that he should say no more, “William’s logic is that since the stream of thought in each of us is constantly changing, there is no reason to suppose some fixed entity beyond the stream itself. No soul. No central spirit. No ego, as such. Rather, there are pulses of consciousness—thoughts which are unified in and of themselves—involving among other things the immediate awareness of the body. And William thinks that these thoughts . . . as sovereign ‘I’s . . . can remember and appropriate prior thoughts to the stream. But the ‘I’ is always in motion, always in flux—part of a greater stream of consciousness, one might say.”
Sam Clemens tossed his stub of a cigar over the porch railing. “Yep. That’s pretty much what Mr. William James and I thrashed out in Florence—at least by the time the espresso had come.”
“You explored
all this
with my loquacious brother over the course of a mere dinner?” asked James.
“Never in your life!” cried Clemens. “It was over a long
Italian
dinner, then brandy and coffee, and dessert and cheese, and then more brandy and then the espresso. The World was created in less time. Or at least its peninsulas and fjords were.”
“But you are speaking of identity, Sam, not of reality of existence,” said Howells.
“Are they not the same thing?” asked Clemens. “My little dog knows me, therefore I am myself. Identity, good sirs!”
“My little dog knows me, therefore I am?” James asked drily. “
This
was the depth and breadth of my brother’s philosophy?”
“Not quite,” said Clemens. “Your brother William explained to me that in its widest sense, a man’s Self is the sum total of all that he can call his: not only his body and its ailments and his psychic powers, such as they are, but also his clothes and his wife and children, his ancestors and friends, his competitors and sworn enemies, his reputation and works, his lands and horses and yacht and bank account.”
“I have no yacht,” Howells said softly.
“Non navigare, ideo non esse.”
James and Holmes both surprised themselves by laughing. Howells did not sail, therefore he was
not
.
“Ego navigare, ergo sum,”
said Holmes. “Except that I don’t. Sail, that is.”
Now even Sam Clemens joined in the laughter.
Suddenly Howells cried “Look!” and pointed.
A deer bolted across the shade-dappled lawn behind Harriet Beecher Stowe’s home. It disappeared into shrubs to the north, and the men on the porch remained quiet. James was wondering whether he should suggest that they go; he and Holmes had a long train ride ahead of them.
Clemens spoke and his voice had a strange, strained, changed, distant tone to it. “Just before I sailed from Genoa last week,” he said softly, no longer rocking, “my daughter Susy celebrated her twenty-first birthday. It bothered me for some reason—in more ways than having a father’s daughter grow up and thus never again be his little girl, which is bothersome enough, God knows.
“My own birthday was last November—I turned fifty-seven years old—and I remember thinking, I think it to this day, that I wished it were seventeen or ninety-seven, any age but fifty-seven.”
When no one else said anything, James found himself thinking of his own fiftieth birthday—less than two weeks away now—and how he had long vowed that he would be recognized as Master in his field by the time he was fifty. Instead, he could barely get a new short story published. He was attempting to start over as a writer—at age fifty!—to make his fortune in writing for the stage. His enthusiasm for that self-transformation had waned a little more each day since he had left Paris and steamed to America.
He knew that Howells was 56 years old. Clemens, as he complained, was soon to turn 58 years old. Holmes was the relative youngster in the group, only 39.
“People wonder why I’ve traveled back to the United States so much—and why I shall continue to do so, no matter how long our European exile lasts,” Clemens was saying, “so when they ask, ‘Why do you go so much, Mr. Twain?’ I say to them . . . ‘Well, I go partly for my health, partly to familiarize myself with the road.’ But mostly I go, gentlemen, primarily to convince the ‘Me’ in me that I truly exist, that there is something more to Mr. Samuel Clemens than his clothes and his wife and his children . . .”
All four of them had ceased rocking now and three of the men were looking at the white-haired humorist.
“You see, I dreamed that I was born and grew up and was a pilot on the Mississippi, gentlemen,” said Clemens, his voice little more than a whisper. “I dreamed that I was a miner and journalist in Nevada and a pilgrim in the good ship
Quaker City
and wrote a very popular book about those travels abroad and that I had a wife and children, yes, and went with them to live in a villa just outside of Florence . . . and this dream goes on and on and on, and sometimes it seems so real that I almost believe it
is
real. But there is no way to tell . . .
no way to tell
, Mr. Holmes, Mr. James, my dear Howells . . . for if one applied tests, then they would be part of the dream, too, and so would simply aid in the deceit. I wish I knew . . . I wish I knew . . .” Clemens looked down and, for a terrible moment, James thought he might be weeping.
“Knew what, Sam?” asked Howells.
Clemens looked up at them and his eyes were dry. Distant, with a tired and haunted look, but dry. “I wish I knew whether it all was a dream or real,” he said.
“Livy is real,” said Howells. “You have that indisputable point of reality to cling to when the black dog and blue devils try to pull you down.”
“Livy . . . Olivia,” said Clemens and nodded. “I wrote, not long ago, about Adam and Eve . . . about how Adam had no name for this new creature taken from his rib and how he became bewildered by all these new events over which he had no control. He resented her, you see. She was an intrusion on the placid perfection of his life alone in the Garden.