Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  During that meal, Samuel brought up a quite touchy subject: It began with a discussion of the Boer War. Samuel had mentioned a recent visit to London’s docks, where teeming crowds gathered daily to bid farewell to the British regiments as they boarded ships bound for South Africa, all in defense of the empire’s citizens residing in Kruger’s realm, the Transvaal. Their relief was a matter of liberation: Already many brave British young men had died, but Stanley, a die-hard British nationalist, saw it as a just cause, even if he thought it was already lasting too long, for, as he told Clemens, “we have overwhelming armaments.” He added, “If it is dragging on, it is because of the incompetence of our unseasoned generals, who are perhaps not used to fighting against forces who will fight and die for their beliefs in the way that a Yorkshire infantryman in a strange land might not.”

  But Clemens saw it differently: “As much as I love England and the way it has treated me as a writer—far more kindly than America—and as much as I believe in the queen and in my Stewart forebears, my heart goes out to the underdog Boers. They are farmers mainly and will surely be crushed sooner or later. And that makes me weep.”

  Then, to Stanley: “Do you not see the injustice of a militarily superior nation like Great Britain invading some backwoods territory like South Africa? Whatever momentary defeats are suffered, we all know that Britain, with its Maxim machine guns and cannons, will prevail, and in the meantime, many lives—both Afrikaners and British—will be lost. It disgusts me.”

  “My dear Samuel,” Stanley said. “Profess as loudly as you will the very best of sentiments toward people with whom you desire to be on amicable terms, but do not forget, for even a single minute, that human beings are not angels or children to be restrained by sentiment alone. Ours is a predatory world: To invade, to consume, to conquer—and then to rewrite history—is in every people’s blood. Even this war, viewed years from now, will be considered but a step toward the progress of civilization. I, for one, have seen such disputes played out again and again. Believe me, Samuel, however noble you may feel about a cause, there is a contrary and just as adamant opinion. These conflicts just go on and on.”

  Then, as he was quite fond of Clemens, he added: “I can see your point, but just remember that however benevolent the intentions of any nation, the actual course of action is inevitably influenced by human failings. Or, to put it differently, Samuel, no matter how noble the cause, once the d—d twits take over, greed presides and morality goes out the window.”

  RUMINATING OVER THIS SUBJECT, as Mother and I were trying to cheer the proceedings by pouring a very good port into their glasses, Samuel said:

  “But consider Cuba. We invaded the country with good and noble reasons in 1898—to save the long-suffering Cubans from Spain. We overran the island with troops and heavy armaments, and, of course, we eventually won. But in the meantime we—I mean the American forces—by way of a ridiculously abstruse diversion to the Philippines, provoked a war of endless carnage in the name of American imperialism: I can think of no other reason. That we crushed Spain is a fact; but that we had ‘noble reasons’ I doubt.”

  “But Samuel, the Philippines will provide the United States with a major port into Southeast Asia—that’s all you have to know. In the end, regardless of the casualties, both liberty and trade will benefit that godforsaken region.”

  “Stanley, as much as I respect you, I think you’re a bit narrow in your thinking sometimes! Don’t you care about the innocent people who are hurt and killed during such so-called liberations?”

  “I do, but no amount of good sentiments will protect them from the difficulties of war. Whatever you may think, that is the way of the world, Samuel.”

  “Nevertheless it’s our flag that is now stained; the eagle of freedom has become a predator.”

  Later Clemens referred to himself as an anti-imperialist, a statement that perhaps should have greatly offended Stanley, but he seemed not to mind it at all and gently told Clemens: “Just remember that what is called imperialism today will be meaningless in a hundred years, when the world will be changed in ways that neither you nor I can begin to imagine. What happens now, in our lifetimes, will, in the context of history, only occupy a footnote for future generations, who will by then have long forgotten the events that made their world. History just goes its own way, and all one can wish for is that it proceeds onward with a minimum of human suffering—and in that, I am in total agreement with you, Samuel.”

  Thankfully, the Congo was a subject that Clemens never brought up, though it must have been very much on his mind. If he and Stanley did not speak about the controversy it was, I think, because neither man cared to risk endangering their friendship with a discussion that could easily turn adversarial. In general, however they may have felt about each other’s views on politics—that decidedly complicated and dreary subject—a kind of gentlemanly neutrality based on their friendship and mutual admiration seemed to be the rule, at least publicly. (I am not sure if they were really far apart on that many issues.) And, in any case, my husband, at that point in his life, after spending so many years in the midst of various debates about Africa, and frankly preferring to savor his newfound domesticity, had little fight left in him and not much of a taste for the venom of such arguments, certainly not with such a close friend. Besides, except for the letters he sometimes angrily sent off to one newspaper or another, most of which were toned down by the editors, he had largely given up on the struggle to extricate himself from what I had heard him call “Léopold’s mess.”

  “One day,” Stanley once told me, “People will look back and think what I did was a good thing.”

  SUNDAY EVENING FOUND THEM GATHERED in the parlor, Clemens, to everyone’s joy, performing spirituals on both the piano and guitar. The songs he played (“Go down, Moses,” “I got shoes, you got shoes,” “I know the Lord has laid his hands on me”) seemed to take him and the family back to better times, when such performances were part of any gathering of friends, for this was something that Samuel had not done in years. Then the evening took a turn toward literature, for Lady Stanley asked Clemens if he might read something aloud to them; he did so—first, a curious bit of fiction in which a man is transformed into a microbe and travels through the innards of a distressed intestine, a clever tale that, however imaginative, left Livy mortified. But then he followed it by reading from one of the chapters of his Huckleberry Finn book, prevailing upon Stanley to retrieve his copy for him. (Knowing it to be the very one that Stanley had taken with him to Africa, he was impressed by its pristine condition, as if it had been cared for tenderly—although it did not smell neutral, having a foreign fragrance to it. He was also quite intrigued by Stanley’s penciled notations in the margins of certain pages, and though he did not mention it, his expression conveyed an interest in reading all of them.) He chose one of Stanley’s favorite sections, the chapter (23) wherein Nigger Jim recounts the story of how he learned that his daughter ’Lizabeth was a deaf mute. Throughout this recitation, for reasons he did not know, Stanley could not take his eyes off Clemens. When Samuel, in his mimicry of the Negro dialect, recounted how Jim slapped the girl’s face for not responding to an order, and then, standing behind her, yelled “Pow!” in her ear and discovered that she was deaf—enunciating carefully the passage, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!”—Stanley was overcome with emotion, and Dolly noticed the first glimmerings of tears in his eyes. Whether it was Jim’s grief or ’Lizabeth’s suffering that Stanley related to we will never know.

  When Clemens finished, he looked around and asked: “Who’s next?” Then to Stanley: “My dear man, please: Why not grace us plebeians with something from your own pen? Otherwise I’ll read more, and who would want that?”

  Stanley, deeply touched and perhaps emboldened by the reminder that there was something noble and beautiful and deeply human about literature, then stood up, and, with his
eyes most sad, excused himself from the parlor and headed into his library, where he kept some sections of his autobiography in a drawer. Written in longhand and converted into typescript, those pages were much expanded from the days when he had first begun them, in the early 1890s (that version proceeding after his “cabinet” manuscript), and though he had since rarely added anything more than a few sentences a day, despite the hours he had devoted to the book, he chose, in an effort to please Clemens, to plunge forward and read from its beginning. But it was no easy thing. When, after some fifteen minutes, and after gulping down two shots of a fine Napoleon brandy, Stanley returned to the parlor, the discoverer of Livingstone and the conqueror of the Congo—“the new Alexander,” as Léopold had once called him—sat down humbly and, with his hands shaking, began to read a section involving his own youth titled “Through the World.”

  Tracing the beginnings of his lowly childhood in north Wales, it was a rather fanciful collage of vaguely remembered people and scenes from his earliest days—the interior of a peasant’s cottage, with its ordinary objects: some Chinese pictures, a window set in lead, a teapot hissing, an old clock with chains and weights beneath it, a fly alighting near his cradle—all such things described with care and read in a halting but clear voice. The progress of those pages was marked with various hesitations, his words hardly audible as he stated that he had no father, the man having died a few weeks after his birth, and, with his gut tightening and breathing laborious, his pace slowing whenever he came to any references to the mother who had abandoned him. His face would redden whenever he mentioned that shadowy presence in his narrative.

  Then, with the apparent exhaustion of a man who had marched out of a swamp, he simply stopped. “However well, mechanically speaking, I may write, and however many books I have sold—for I have earned my living mainly from literary output—nothing I ever create will be as heart-wrenching as Mark Twain’s tales.” In a solemn mood, he added, “Still, this is what your humble servant has been doing.”

  He may have felt bad about his writing, but there was much excitement among his listeners. Clemens’s daughters, although spoiled by their exposure to famous people, knew that it had been a special moment, and they applauded his efforts: Gertrude had often nodded approvingly, and Dolly, greatly pleased and wanting to see and hear more of his autobiography, hoped the recitation would be the beginning of a new phase, one in which he might feel emboldened to finish the “chimerical story of his life.” And Clemens? Touched by Stanley’s timidity in reading from that work aloud, drew him aside and said: “Look here, Henry, if you should need me in any way to assist you, then I am at your disposal. If you care to, I would be glad to be your editor.”

  Stanley, shaking Clemens’s hand, answered, “Thank you, Samuel, but this book feels like it will be my coffin. What I have written of it will remain where I left it. It is just my way.”

  With that, he and Stanley went out onto the veranda with some brandies and cigars in hand, and there, while luxuriating in the beauty of the night sky, Stanley bared his soul to Clemens.

  PERHAPS HE HAD INTUITED that he might never see Clemens again, but on that Easter Sunday evening, Stanley, not feeling long for the world, said:

  “Now, Samuel, may I ask you something?”

  “Surely.”

  “What do you really make of the doings in the Congo?”

  “I’ve heard both good and bad things about it, like most folks.”

  “But the bad things—do you believe them?”

  He thought for a moment and said: “I do, sometimes.”

  “You know it’s the ivory and rubber trade behind it. I’ve been made sick over the whole business. And yet some people are saying I’ve profited greatly from it. But what money I have, Samuel, I’ve earned from my lectures and books, mainly.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Then why do I think you don’t?”

  “Sir Henry, I have my own highly developed peeves. The likes of Léopold, your friendly king; the Russian czar; the missionaries in China. America as well these days. I would sooner drink piss than fall in line with the acquisition-mad parties who have made the world a misery for so many. But even if I distrust the motives behind the Africa game and deplore imperialism—well, I’ve said it: Not once have I ever thought you implicated as the planner of such things.”

  “Some have accused me of cruelty.”

  “You’ve told me that, but do I believe it? My God, Henry, I would imagine that, in the circumstances you’ve been in, you did what you had to do.”

  “I’ve never awakened any one morning and thought I would have to kill someone to survive the day, but I have killed again and again.”

  “So your conscience is bothering you?”

  “No, my conscience is clear. Yet… in the midst of my days, even when I am taking a stroll with little Denzil, some part of my mind is always racing and taking account of the number of lives I have personally brought to an end. Some days I come up with a modest figure—thirty-seven; then the next day I will remember another incident. The number shoots up to one hundred; then on yet other days, I tally up five hundred and more graves and fall into a vague sense of remorse. That’s not counting the hands I’ve lost to malaria and other diseases and those who have starved to death or been shot with poison darts or rifles or drowned, like my poor Kalulu. Nor does it account for the many animals who’ve died on my expeditions—hounds, donkeys, horses, and birds. I don’t lose sleep over it, mind you, I just have odd dreams, in which I am a harbinger of death. Yes, I know that my efforts have contributed to making central Africa what it is today, but never did I dream possible the sufferings that have been reported. Even if only ten percent of the stories are true, as I know them to be, that is hard for me to live with. And though I do not feel at fault—for I was never given a chance to run things there—I have some moments of misery just the same.”

  Then: “And here I will tell you how I get beyond it. The first way is through prayer.”

  “You sincerely pray?”

  “Yes, but sometimes I feel I pray to nothing. Then I think of my family and how I am blessed, and I ask, if I had brought evil into this world, as some accuse me of doing, then how can it be that I am now more or less a happy man?”

  “Are you?”

  “For a good portion of my days; but then the other moments creep in, and that’s when, Samuel, I must tell you, I will chew on my dream gum and otherwise prevail upon the resources of my wine and spirits cellar. The fact is that it is the rare day when I am not, let me say, in a more or less salubrious state by supper without such spirits.”

  “It is your business.”

  “Yes, I know, but then even as I count my blessings, I still feel preyed upon by my worst doubts. Along the way I am reminded that I am no longer much of a writer. Tonight you heard a bit of my so-called autobiography, but as I’ve told you, it is something I never expect to finish. You see, I’ve been unable to progress beyond a certain point; if you must know, I have been barely able to proceed beyond the years when you and I knew each other and journeyed to Cuba.”

  “So you’ve told me. Why don’t you just get on with it?”

  “I have lost the celestial spark for such ruminations.”

  “Is it the story of your American father that halts you?”

  “I sometimes think so, but it was such a distant thing. How can that be?”

  “The truth cannot proceed if it’s distorted. Have you told the truth of that tale?”

  “I could, but I have chosen not to.”

  “Then how,” asked Clemens, “can you pass through a door if you do not even describe it? My God, Stanley, do you not see that?”

  “I do, but my own history, outside of Africa, which I have written about endlessly, should be of my own making. Do you think me a fool for declining to state every hard fact about my past?”

  “No; I have done the same myself.”

  “Then let me ask you another question. As I don’t thin
k I will ever live to see that book completed—the truth is that whatever I write one day I undo the next—can I still feel confident in my trust that you will never betray me by writing your own account of our journey to Cuba?”

  “As I promised you many years ago, despite the times you have annoyed me immensely, I will always keep to it.”

  “That relieves me, Samuel. I never want my son, or any future generation, to read what I do not consider the truth about myself.” And then, to lighten the discourse, Stanley added, “For that I will be eternally grateful. Should there be something to Dolly’s speculations about the spirit world, I promise that should you outlive me, Samuel, and I come back as a ghost, I will be as a tail to your back, protecting you in every way.”

  “Good, my dear fellow,” he said. “Come now and accompany me while I shoot some billiards.”

  Later, as Samuel was happily shooting billiards, he heard a high-pitched voice coming from behind one of the wood-paneled walls: “Find me!” With it came what seemed to be the giggles of a small child; then the voice again. “Come and find me if you can!” it said. And so Clemens, putting aside his cue and bridge (for he had been in the midst of lining up a shot when he heard the voice), moved about the hall, which was lined with elaborately carved seats and cabinets, tapping here and there on the walls. But even when he came to the place where the voice seemed to have originated, it would sound again from somewhere else; and while he had been momentarily intrigued, Samuel, wishing to return to his game, finally said: “All right, Stanley, where are you?” And with that a high glass-fronted cabinet, which was filled with mementos of Stanley’s illustrious past, swung out from the wall; behind it, in what seemed to be a passageway, stood Stanley and Denzil, who, with great pride, exclaimed, “We fooled you!”

  STANLEY’S LATER DAYS 1901–4