Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  Villa di Quarto, Firenze

  May 11, ’04

  Dear Lady Stanley,

  I have lost a dear and honored friend—how fast they fall about me now, in my age! The world has lost a tried and true hero. And you—what have you lost? It is beyond estimate—we who know you, and what he was to you, know that much. How far he stretches across my life! I knew him when his work was all before him, fifteen years before the great day when he wrote his name faraway up on the blue of the sky for the world to see and applaud and remember. I have known him as friend and intimate ever since. I grieve with you and with your family, dear Lady Stanley. It would be “we,” instead of “I,” if Mrs. Clemens knew, but in all these twenty months that she has lain a prisoner in her bed, we have hidden from her anything that could sadden her. Many a friend is gone whom she asks about and thinks is still living.

  In deepest sympathy I beg the privilege of signing myself,

  Your friend,

  S

  Wherever she was there was Eden.

  —SAMUEL CLEMENS, “EXTRACTS FROM ADAM’S DIARY,” 1904

  Not a month later, a shout was heard coming from Livy’s sickroom: “Come quickly, Mr. Clemens!”

  And with that Clemens rushed to her side. Not a few moments before, she had said to Katy Leary, “I’ve been awful sick.” And while Miss Leary, holding Livy in her arms, told her, “You’ll be all right,” she gasped, then slumped forward, her chin resting on her housekeeper’s shoulder. Samuel knelt before her; as her eyes were still open, he hoped she would recognize him. But she said not a word, neither did she move; in that instant, as it occurred to him that she had been released into her final peace, his heart began to beat rapidly; then his right eye and cheek began to twitch and his stomach went into knots, and while he could hear what was going on around him—his daughters, now beside him, wailing out in grief—he felt himself at a far remove from that room and only came around when Clara and Jean huddled near him, weeping. Then indeed, when he realized she was gone, he staggered from the room, opened a liquor cabinet, his hands shaking, and bolted down two full glasses of whiskey. Her visage, with her lips so tightly pursed, neither smiling nor contorted into a frown, haunted him in its lifelessness. Everything seemed lifeless then; though he knew that a mantel clock was surely ticking, its hands seemed frozen in place, and through the windows he could see that the gardens were absolutely still—in those moments, he wondered if he had been the one to die; but this was not the case, and he began to weep and weep. What else could he do but go back into that room and sit helplessly before her throughout the night and into the next day? The doctor had come in at five with all manner of arcane devices and closed the doors as he made preparations to embalm her. At least, in those hours, he consoled himself by thinking that in the repose of sleep and release from her sufferings, the gauntness of her features had faded and she became, in his eyes, beautiful again—an angel.

  “Just remember, if you can, wherever you have gone, that I adored you, and not only for the way you helped me raise our children but also because you never abandoned me; not once did you falter, and I will never forget that. And when you are in the other world, with Susy, I hope that you will always remember the day we met, in New York City in 1867, when an organ grinder was playing ‘In the Sweet By and By’ on the sidewalk across from the St. Nicholas Hotel, and the way you, in your beauty and quiet ways, looked at me, as if I would certainly be your man.”

  SUFFERING A SEVERE DEPRESSION, Clara did not leave her mother’s bedroom for days; Jean was visited by a sudden epileptic seizure. Clemens occupied his time writing letters, among them this one to Lady Stanley in London.

  Villa Reale di Quarto

  June 10, ’04

  Dear Lady Stanley,

  As you no doubt already know, Livy is gone, and I am numb, as you must have been over Stanley. Even now we are preparing for her transport to America—to Elmira, where she will rest beside Susy and others of our family. What can I say but that hers was the best heart that ever beat beside my own? I blame myself for her premature passing. She should have had a much easier life than the one I gave her. But she put up with me, my irascible personality and all, and her reward for so many kindly efforts was nothing less than heartbreak. At least her death was instantaneous: I do not think that even after twenty-two months of suffering (by my count) she expected it to come so suddenly, but it did.

  As to your deeply held beliefs in spiritualism, though I am numbed, I still see Mrs. Clemens in my every waking thought. I dream about her—perhaps she is a ghost, but I doubt it: I don’t sleep much in any case. But she comes to me all the same, not so much as a spirit who might be contacted—what I know you believe in, with your spiritualistic societies—but as a calming note during my nights. And so I thank you for the abundance of your thoughts in that regard.

  Yours,

  Samuel

  TOWARD THE END OF JUNE, when the Clemenses finally departed for America on the steamship Prinz Oskar, they arranged to transport the two gray mares that Livy had bought for her daughters. Their Italian butler and maid had also come along with their party. On that journey his daughters’ faces remained hidden behind mourning veils so thickly meshed that one could not see their eyes. Clemens spent much of the transatlantic journey stretched out on a lounge chair on the deck, bundled up against the high winds, ever aware that his wife, in a lavender dress and velvet slippers, lay in her coffin in the ship’s hold. Looking out over the horizon and the endlessness of the churning waters, he was so stunned by the depth of his sadness that he hardly ever spoke.

  THE CABINET MANUSCRIPT AND OXFORD 1907

  When you and I are dead and forgotten, the name of Stanley will live!

  —DOROTHY STANLEY TO A RIOTOUS MOB DURING STANLEY’S FIRST CAMPAIGN FOR PARLIAMENT, 1895

  IN THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED Stanley’s passing, his widow lost her taste for visiting Furze Hill but continued to do so in good weather for Denzil, who had grown fond of the outdoor life. Not far removed in temperament from Stanley, he was a lonely-seeming child, despite the tutors and the smothering attentions of his mother and grandmother. Delicate in his manners, and already better educated than most children of his age, he seemed to come to life only when he was out in the countryside and free to consort with the farmhands and their children and roam the property’s gardens and woods. Even if his father had once survived the most rugged terrains in the world, Denzil, their precious treasure, was guarded closely, as if he were a young prince. He was never allowed to climb trees or swim in the pond Dolly had named Stanleypool, and he could not venture out without a servant trailing behind him at a discreet distance. But he was already an enthusiastic, if not entirely accomplished, horseman, having been taught to ride at the age of seven; his equestrian pursuits were always conducted under the vigilant eye of a footman who led him along by the reins.

  Still, he was turning into the kind of fine and well-bred adolescent that Stanley would have wanted him to be—not too foppish or spoiled or overly aware of his high social standing. Never told by Stanley that without his and Dolly’s intercession he would likely have ended up as a ward of some parish orphanage in Wales, he moved through his childhood as humbly and happily as possible for a boy who’d witnessed his own father’s gradual death. Among his interests were the language of French and collecting cartes de visite: he wrote to many a family friend requesting such items and amassed a great variety of stamps and butterflies as well. While lacking any genetic link to the drawing talents of his adoptive mother and father—she’d always admired Stanley’s hand-drawn maps and illustrations of the various arcane objects he wished to record in his travels—Denzil seemed to possess some natural ability of his own. It helped that his mother had taken considerable joy in teaching him the rudiments of drawing with pencil and watercolors and that he had had much exposure to the artistic habits she resumed after the upheavals of her husband’s final illnesses.

  Even in her widow’s life, she rarely refrained f
rom spending at least an hour or two every day in the room known as the birdcage, working on some unfinished portraits or scenes; and while she did not take long strolls around the city, as she once used to, Dolly, commissioned by friends to make new illustrations for books and articles about the life of poor children in London, still visited her favorite squares by coach, looking for more urchins to sketch. Dressing in black for a year, she had not allowed her sadness to keep her from renewing that practice, nor did she abstain from wearing jewelry, for, while wanting to seem in mourning, she never wanted to appear drab or commonplace. And while her mother, Gertrude, continued to disapprove, as she always had, of bringing such children into the mansion—“It is below your station,” she would say—when those often unruly children came into her studio, Dolly remained open-minded enough to allow Denzil into the room while she drew her subjects. She even allowed him to make his own sketches and talk with the children, though they did not have much in common. They were the children of beggars or washerwomen or garbage pickers, while he, as she was wont to remind him, was the son of one of the greatest men who’d ever lived in England.

  Only ten years of age, this slight and long-nosed boy seemed to understand this. The hours he had spent with his father, listening to him describe the “dark” regions he’d traveled, listening to his lectures about the making of maps or where a particular spear or arrowhead had come from—all these he had not forgotten. And there were his father’s books in the library—rows and rows of them, in many languages, and while he had not yet developed the taste or patience for actually reading them, he sometimes picked one of them off a shelf and would sit, its pages opened before him, astounded by the sheer magnitude of words and thinking that his father was still alive because of them.

  Dolly remembered how well composed Denzil had been through all the eulogies at Westminster; he sat without moving for most of the service, only turning once when the shadow of some bird traveled across the stained-glass windows and seemed to cross the floor toward the altar. Afterward, during the recessional, he slowly marched out of the church with his family, clouds of incense preceding him, his hand in his mother’s. Then their progress toward Waterloo station: On public buildings the Union Jack fluttered at half-mast, and the streets were lined with people, many of them working-class folk who counted Stanley as one of their own. Most were standing on the curbs solemnly; some applauded, and some dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs. Through all this Denzil had been well behaved, even stoic; but even so, he asked his mother, “Where will Father go?”

  BY THE SPRING OF 1907, Dolly had not only overcome the loss of Stanley, whom she believed still lingered around her, but had decided, being a social creature and thinking of Denzil’s welfare, to marry again. The object of her attentions was the Harley Street surgeon Dr. Henry Curtis, whom she had met while accompanying Stanley to the doctor’s office for treatment of gastritis. She found it a pleasant coincidence to discover, in the course of several conversations with Curtis, that he had a great interest in the general field of psychic research; the doctor had attended, in his time, various séances through which he had hoped to contact his late mother. But there was something else: While not a handsome man, and somewhat stout, and rather upright and self-effacing in his demeanor, he seemed the sort of well-heeled gentleman, eleven years younger than she, who, with a practice to keep him busy, would not impinge upon her independence.

  IN THOSE DAYS, DOLLY WAS SAD to realize that Samuel and his surviving daughters had become distant figures in her life. It sometimes stunned her to think that she had not seen him in seven years, and while they had exchanged Christmas greetings, much of their correspondence seemed to consist of letters of condolence. Though the familiarity with which they had once written each other had given way to a more formal tone, her affection for Clemens had never faded. Following his political writings, as she received from friends copies of “Mark Twain’s” articles and open letters to the public, she was quite aware of his outspokenness about certain matters, for since Livy’s passing his patience for the insane cruelties of the world had ended; what had been private opinion had become public. She knew that he supported an anticzarist revolution in Russia, that he deplored the partition of China by Western powers, and that he blamed the Boxer Rebellion on the missionary influence there. She also knew that he strongly disapproved of the British war against the Boers in South Africa and had felt ashamed by America’s slaughter of innocent people in the Philippines in the name of bringing them democracy.

  Without a doubt he had grieved over the loss of Stanley, but with his friend’s death had come a certain liberation; while he would have never written such a thing on the chance of offending his old friend while he was alive, once Stanley had gone to the peace of his grave (or the constant wanderings of a spirit) Clemens took up his pen and addressed, most caustically, the situation in the Congo by means of a pamphlet entitled King Leopold’s Soliloquy, which was published by the Congo Reform Association in Boston.

  One day, Dolly received a copy of the pamphlet from Samuel Clemens himself. With it came a letter.

  21 Fifth Avenue

  May 2, ’06

  Dear Lady Stanley,

  Inasmuch as my anti-Leopold pamphlet seems to have gone into the world, I thought you should receive a copy from me if you have not received one already. I wrote it as an American citizen with the intention of simply asking its American readers to realize how misguided and greedy and callous the Belgian king has been in regard to the Congo. Knowing that he was Stanley’s friend, I hope you do not find its contents too upsetting, but by my lights, the greater truth about what has been going on in that region, as reported by various eyewitnesses—and by the greatest witness of all, the camera—is well worth telling.

  My previous interest in Africa mainly consisted of curiosity about an unknown region; Stanley’s spoken and written tales about his exploits and the peoples and trials he had encountered have always fascinated me—and I am still tickled by the notion that he took my Huckleberry novel with him during one of his journeys. And of course I have always believed in your late husband’s stance in opposition to the slave trade there; as to his “preaching” about Christianity, I have been neutral, trusting in his faith in the missionaries, whom he knew well. However, I have been not at all convinced that Leopold wanted to accomplish anything except the enrichment of himself and his own small nation through the exploitation of the Congo and its hapless people.

  However you may view Leopold, he should be called into strict account for his actions. As you know, such actions were forbidden by the proclamations of the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which Stanley was a participant—the natives were to be protected and their well-being was to be advanced in various ways. But in all this the International African Association has failed miserably—I believe that even Stanley knew this, deep down.

  As I know that England is already somewhat outraged by the news that has been consistently coming out, I hope you will understand my intention in publishing this pamphlet, which is to motivate the American people to press our government into doing something about the situation. Whether this will happen I cannot say, but Dolly, I want you to understand that my pamphlet is by no means intended to implicate Stanley in any way. He was a great man—and my friend—and because of that something has been stirred in me that refuses to see the seeds of what your brave husband planted turned into a sham.

  I intend that the pamphlet shall go into the hands of every clergyman in America and therefore to their pious congregations, with the hope that our ordinary citizens will move to make our government use a firmer hand in relieving Leopold of his profitable satrapy.

  There is not a single word in the pamphlet that would implicate Stanley. His deeds, I believe, will always stand apart and above the tawdry machinations of this world.

  With fervent admiration and affection,

  Yours always,

  S.C.

  If Dolly had any regret, it was that she had witnes
sed Stanley’s misery at hearing his name associated with such reports, for he had lived and breathed and loved Africa. As for the pamphlet itself, she had nearly written to Samuel to verify that his portrait of the indignant king, with whom she had spent some time, was truer than he might realize. Yet there was something that ultimately disturbed her about the photographs. Their inclusion somehow felt offensive to her husband’s legacy.

  Still, she was grateful that Clemens had waited until after Stanley’s passing before going public with his long-brewing feelings.

  ONCE CLEMENS FINALLY CAME OUT of his deepest mourning, he shed his dark serge suits, with their sagging frock coats, and his stiff black bow ties for snow-white swallow-tailed outfits. An instantly recognizable figure on the streets of Manhattan, he’d walk up and down Fifth Avenue in an “efflorescence of white,” as a local paper described the impression he made on passersby. In his beatific quest to purge the world of imbecilities, he may have wished to present himself as the purest of spirits or as an angel with a flaring shock of whitening hair and lightning-bolt eyebrows; but he may have picked up that manner of dress in Bermuda, where white linen was supremely practical, during one of his journeys to the Caribbean with H. H. Rogers aboard the Kanawha, the same yacht on which he had visited Cuba in 1902. And he may have thought white more hygienic, or he may have simply tired of his mourning, but whatever his reasons, he thereafter rarely appeared in public, save for formal occasions, in anything else.