Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  We held our reception in our back garden on Richmond Terrace. Tents had been erected in the event of bad weather, which was a good thing, as it had rained most of the day. Stanley, I should regretfully say, was not up to the occasion. When he had first come onto the green, assisted by Dr. Parke, he had simply said hello to a few folks, then retired inside to rest. After a while, Mother, being a determined soul and very aware of formality, went in to give my husband a rousing talk about his responsibilities. And so my husband, summoning his strength, chose to address the gathering from a lawn chair. For about five minutes, he named, from memory, nearly everyone in attendance and thanked them, ending his oration with these words:

  “This is the very finest day of my life. Who would think that this old soldier would be so lucky as to have, at this stage of his life, a woman as good and lovely as Dorothy? How strange it all seems that I now, so unexpectedly, possess a wife.”

  HERE THE NARRATIVE BREAKS OFF; at the time of writing, her mother entered her study to remind her of an impending luncheon appointment, and so she put down her pen, withdrawing into her dressing room.

  Part Two

  MEETING MR. CLEMENS

  SHE SITS TO WRITE on an early spring day in 1908. Near her writing desk is a cabinet photograph that Samuel Clemens had given her in 1891, signed “With kindest regards to Mrs. Stanley, Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut, Jan. 29”; in the picture, Clemens was posed on his porch, his arm wrapped around a pillar, his legs crossed—a most intense expression on his face. The occasion of this gift, coming during Stanley’s last tour of America in late 1890–91, when he and Dorothy, or Dolly, as he had come to call her, and her mother, the pestiferous Gertrude Tennant, had met up with Clemens in New York City.

  From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir

  DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of our marriage, when Stanley began to move his most valued effects and books into my house on Richmond Terrace, we turned one of the large guest chambers into his study; as crates arrived by wagon from his New Bond Street flat, he would spend part of his days carefully unpacking them, and shortly that room, filled with those objects and books, became the one he found most inspirational to his thinking. Elsewhere in the house, we found space for numerous other photographs of Stanley in Africa and allocated one of the empty servants’ quarters for the storage of his travel podium, portable writing desk, medicine trunks, and the piles of tribute plaques and coffins and other commemoratives that came nearly daily.

  Once he’d put his large and formidable writing desk, which resembled a preacher’s pulpit, near the fireplace, and once he had installed a correspondence cabinet, he attended to his books—one such crate, marked THE ONE HUNDRED WORTHIES, bore those volumes necessary to a gentleman’s essential education. There were also geographical books, books in Latin and Greek, books on ornithology, many books on religion and theological thought, and numerous biographies. (“It is my intention,” he told me in those days, “to write my autobiography so as to get the record of my life straight.”) For his pleasure, there were novels. In fact it was my observation that, when he was not writing, he considered the companionship of a book—nearly any book at all—indispensable to his well-being. He read everything, from the cheapest shilling novels—the kinds of shockingly bad yellow-backed romances one would find in the kiosks of railway stations—to books written by the great past masters, such as Cervantes, as well as authors of current interest—Kipling, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky among them. (It was a habit, I would learn, that he did not share with Mr. Clemens, who was not quite as well read as my husband, particularly in the realm of novels.) But among the books that he most cherished he included the works of Mark Twain, to which, I noticed, he returned again and again.

  Despite the great acclaim that had met his initial return from the Emin Pasha expedition, it was not long afterward that his actions were being daily condemned by missionaries and humanitarian groups in the newspapers. One of the officers in his party, a certain Lieutenant Troup, with whom Stanley had a falling-out, had written to the newspapers describing the expedition as a “mad mission, supposedly dedicated to the spread of civilization but really about exterminating the natives in the way the Americans had exterminated the red man.”

  “My dear,” he once told me, “it is one thing to command the physical body of a man to do such and such a thing: But to command the mind and the soul is not so easy at all. The conditions of such an unearthly world produce in normally civilized and reasonable men many a strange response, which no one man can predict or control once soul-altering madness has descended. In a place like Africa, where the ‘wilds’ quickly find a man out, there is no substitute for fortitude and character.”

  Some accused him of being power-driven and merciless in his treatment of the Africans. This, I knew, was far from the truth. Henry had believed Léopold when he said his goal was to modernize the Congo and bring enlightenment to the backward nation, thereby eliminating the brutal slave trade. Only now did he begin to question the Belgian king’s motives.

  Nor was he pleased to find himself the butt of jokes. One evening, out of curiosity, we had occasion to attend a theatrical venue in the East End and saw a play called Stanley in Africa. To my husband’s dismay, he was portrayed by a baboonish actor who played Stanley as a daft British officer, oblivious to the sufferings of the column in his charge. The guffaws of the audience when his character would bellow out, “March on through the dismal swamps to find the snippety pasha—and ivory, too!” so upset him that we left quickly.

  “What I did was for the good of the future of Africa,” he told me again and again from his sickbed one day. “Those who do not believe me can go to H—s and stay there forever.”

  THANKFULLY, IN NOVEMBER of 1890, just as he had begun to grow overly testy and weary of the public atmosphere in England, we traveled to a far more evenhanded place where such controversies did not exist: America. The reason for our sojourn was a lecture tour of that country arranged by one Major James Burton Pond (who, I should add, happened to be Samuel Clemens’s agent). With my mother, Gertrude, two of our Swahili servants, and in the company of Lieutenant Jephson and my cousin, we set sail from Liverpool to New York, aboard the SS Cuba.

  Upon our arrival, Stanley’s mood, dour in recent weeks, greatly improved: A military band had gathered on the chilly, windblown dock, performing both “God Save the Queen” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” As we passed into the customhouse, there was a contingent of press on hand to ask friendly questions, most of them having nothing to do with Africa. But then, for whatever reason, it seemed a funny thing to the local press that Stanley had escorted my mother down the gangplank and across the pier to the customhouse, his elbow locked on her arm while she, with her other hand gesticulating toward his person, seemed to be expressing some strong opinions. Then an argument between them erupted over a trivial matter: I can remember that the stevedores and dock workers found this incident quite funny and began calling out many foolish things. Just then, I had counseled my husband to remember the glory awaiting him, and he resumed escorting my mother with courtesy. But a seed was planted: By the time we had finished our progression to the customhouse, the press had formed the unfair opinion that Stanley was under the sway of a nagging mother-in-law, a motif that would follow us, to his annoyance, in humorous newspaper accounts throughout the land.

  WE STAYED AT THE PLAZA HOTEL, just off Central Park, a large suite of rooms at our disposal. Telegrams and notes lay in piles upon the desk of Stanley’s temporary study, including an invitation from Thomas Edison to visit with him at his laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey, one of the few outings that Stanley seemed to genuinely look forward to. Stanley on that occasion also received a great number of telephone calls—among them one from Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, and one from Mrs. Astor, who had arranged a dinner in her Fifth Avenue mansion in his honor. Thoroughly prepared for the lectures that he would be giving in New York—at the Century Association, the Cooper Union,
and in Steinway Hall, among other places, he would address both geographical societies and ordinary audiences on “The Founding of the Congo Free State”—he still felt hard-pressed to make a good impression about his activities there.

  With so many engagements, dinners, lectures, and luncheons and such, we were always making our way through the streets of the city by carriage. Stanley found the city barbarically noisy and in a state of disorder: The elevated trains he despised; the many posters and advertisements that were thrown up everywhere, without regard to any aesthetic concern, troubled him as well. He on one occasion took the time to count the telegraph and telephone wires that crisscrossed above the street outside one of our windows—some one hundred and seventy four, he counted: a web of wiring; an ugly scene.

  Late one Sunday afternoon, Stanley mentioned, with some delight, that he wanted me to meet someone who was waiting below in a lobby sitting room with Stanley’s American agent, Major Pond. “And who is this?” I asked.

  “Come; you will see.”

  Descending to the Plaza lobby, Stanley and I found the supremely tall and bearded Major Pond sitting at a banquette in a dark corner of a salon. Beside him was a quite pleasant and genteel, rather angelic-faced woman who immediately smiled upon our approach. Just as Major Pond stood up to greet us, the gentleman by her side struck a match for his cigar, his distinguished face, with its high, curling brows and handlebar mustache, glaring like sculpted stone in that sudden flaring light—like a jack-o’-lantern, perhaps; the very sharp features of his face, with its aquiline nose and deep-set, hawkish eyes flashed brilliantly white and yellow, then faded low into a sudden bluish shadow as the match went out. In that moment I knew that he was none other than Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain, the lady at his side being his wife, Livy.

  “Hello, Stanley,” he said. And, looking at me, he added, “And so this is the one and only gracious lady?”

  We spent that evening together; throughout I saw in Stanley certain qualities of behavior that I had not seen before. He seemed much relaxed in the company of his friend and quite willing to allow the great man the floor when it came to conversation. In truth, after a week of engagements Stanley was feeling somewhat fatigued, but he also seemed relieved to be hearing about subjects other than Africa, about which he was continually expected to hold forth.

  Of that felicitous occasion I can remember asking Mr. Clemens by which name he liked to be addressed.

  “Our dear friend Major Pond here treats Mark Twain like a nom de plume, which it is, of course: In his letters, he puts Mark in quotes, even in his salutations to me—which is a professional idiosyncrasy that I have not yet figured out. I don’t mind Mark—I’ve done well by it—yet sometimes it sounds too short by itself, while ‘Mark Twain’ doesn’t: Now, Livy calls me Precious and Youth so often that I have been known to accidentally sign my letters to complete strangers in such a way; whereas Henry here refers to me as both Samuel and Mark, depending upon how biblical his mood is. Personally, if I am feeling lazy, I will use the short form, Mark, to sign my notes; because it has two fewer letters than Samuel it conserves great amounts of minute energies when added up over the years. Now, with you, dear Madame Stanley, I would consider it an honor to be addressed by whatever name you choose to call me, just as long as it’s one of them, so as to avoid future confusion.”

  TO HAVE WALKED ARM IN ARM with Mr. Clemens along Fifty-Ninth Street that evening would remain for me a greater honor than would meeting the American president, Benjamin Harrison, and many an illustrious senator at the White House the following week. With a woolen cape slung over his shoulders and a Russian trapper’s bearskin cap upon his head, Mr. Clemens (to this day I cannot think of him as Mark or Samuel), though of medium height (he was by his own account five feet, eight and a half inches tall), seemed taller in his cowboy boots. Passersby recognized him, and even carriage drivers doffed their hats or whistled to greet to him, calling out: “Hello, Mr. Twain!” We made our way along toward the cobblestones by Central Park, a light snow falling. My husband, escorting Livy in the company of Major Pond, following behind us, I inquired of Mr. Clemens just how he and Stanley had met.

  “My husband told me that you became acquainted long before you became known as writers. Stanley has never described the exact circumstances, other than that it happened long ago. I don’t understand his reluctance to discuss it.”

  “Madame Stanley, among us writers there is a sacred code that prohibits us from revealing too much about certain things.”

  Parting congenially after a nightcap at our hotel, I presented Mr. Clemens and his wife a gift of my book London Street Arabs, and we expressed the mutual wish of seeing each other again. I told him that it was my hope that he would have the opportunity to one day meet my mother, who was an admirer of his writings; and perhaps, I had asked him, he would sit for me as a portrait subject, as Stanley had—he said he would.

  Later, I mentioned to Stanley my complete enchantment at meeting Mr. and Mrs. Clemens, but when I voiced my curiosity as to why he remained so secretive about his early friendship with Clemens, he was curt in his answer: “Do I have to tell you everything? Cannot a man have his own private thoughts?”

  Even when we eventually made our way to the cities of St. Louis and New Orleans, where he had once worked and lived as a young man, he never went into detail about Clemens.

  Another Journal Recollection, from January 27, 1891, a Tuesday

  ON A DATE WHEN STANLEY was scheduled to give a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, Mother and I had an invitation, received some days before, to visit Samuel Clemens’s home in Hartford, Connecticut.

  We arrived in Hartford at about 9:30, and Mr. Clemens was awaiting us in a carriage, his youngest daughter, Jean, by his side. Along the way we stopped at a country store to pick up various vegetables to be cooked for supper. He called me My Lady, and he could not have been more courteous. He seemed quite delighted to play the host, though he missed Stanley’s presence.

  “Well, I’m happy that you’ve come,” he told us.

  As I had imagined, and as described by Stanley, his house was majestic, a fairy-tale-like place with turrets that suggested witches’ hats, great hallways, and winding stairs. Its shape reminded me of a riverboat. In his parlor was a large Gothic fireplace transplanted from a Scottish castle, and one of the ceilings had been inlaid with mariners’ stars, I believe. And though there was a sense of gaiety about the place, Mr. Clemens seemed more solemn than he had been when we saw him in New York. Nevertheless we had a pleasant discussion that day about the novelist Anatole France—Mr. Clemens was reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard, a book that greatly impressed him. He seemed to dote on Mother, who took an immediate liking to him. His daughter Clara performed songs for us on the piano; and Jean, having experimented with some poetry, declaimed several new verses for us. Mrs. Clemens was still in mourning over her mother’s recent passing and was laid low with what Clemens hoped was a “mind problem.” She did manage to muster herself from her bed for most of the day, and it was obvious to both Mother and I that our company was a burden on her: Yet she was cheerful and grateful, filling us in on the latest caprices of one of their famous neighbors, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, who lived just next door and would, even while we were there, arrive unannounced and wander through the rooms of the house in her bedroom slippers, whooping and howling at times. She would sit down at the piano and even as we were in the midst of a conversation begin to play and sing, and then, just as suddenly, she would get up and leave the room. She returned with some flowers cut from the Clemens’s own greenhouse, which she presented as a gift to Livy; then she began to question Mother and me as to whether we had read her most famous novel. When we told her that we had, she asked if we had a copy of it to reread on our journey. When we told her that we did not, she insisted on bringing over a copy. We went along with it, taking into account that she was obviously plunging into senility—Mr. Clemens made several discreet comic gesture
s with his eyes at her eccentricity, and Mrs. Clemens told us that as a general practice the neighbors in Nook Farm had grown accustomed to her waywardness. Clearly she had descended into a second childhood of sorts. I could not help but wonder if the solitude that writers experience day in and day out, with work that does not bring them into close intercourse with “society,” might hasten such mental decline.

  In this regard I would say that Clemens was about as well balanced as Stanley, who looked upon his writing duties as plain work, disturbed as he might be by its tedium. Like Stanley, Clemens, on the whole, seemed remarkably grounded: a famous family man, pestered by responsibilities, moody—I had seen him shouting at one of the cats in a sudden spurt of anger—but generally even-tempered.

  As I wanted to make a painting of him eventually, I took the liberty of making some pencil sketches of Clemens as we sat by the fine fireplace. Sitting before the hearth, he had dozed for some minutes, but then a snort, when one of his cats jumped up on his lap, awakened him. He apologized: We laughed. I showed him my rudimentary sketch. Pleased, he said: “I don’t hate it, which is a good thing for me.”

  After dinner, a sleep of quietude—a welcome change from the incessant clamor of New York. In the morning, after breakfast, he drove us to the station; shortly we arrived back in New York, where I rejoined my husband and his colleague Dr. Parke. A few days later, we embarked on our tour.