Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  AFTER LIVY DIED, CLEMENS SUMMERED at a retreat near Mount Monadnock, in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he had hoped the setting would help his daughters recover from their own grief. Poor Clara, who had been closest to her mother, had suffered several nervous breakdowns and spent a year in sanatoriums in New York and Connecticut, and Jean, tossed from a horse in a trolley accident, which could have easily killed her, continued on in ailing health, and bouts of violent hysteria and epilepsy had prompted her own stays at various institutions. And Clemens, despite the fact that he spent many a day fighting depression and wishing himself dead, found that he had risen to new heights in the public’s affections. Steamboats and cigar brands had been named after him, and, as with Stanley in his heyday, he was often approached by strangers on the street who simply wanted to shake his hand or to pose beside him for a photograph. His friends were the most important people in America: Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Edison. Numerous invitations to luncheons and dinners proliferated—the banqueting life, as he called it, taking up many of his days.

  BY THE TIME HE HAD been informed that he would be given an honorary doctorate in letters by Oxford University, in the spring of 1907, his ardor for the political arena had somewhat abated, for with his dedication had also come endless invitations to speak before various groups on behalf of the Congo Reform Association—travel commitments that he, at his age, found exhausting.

  Withdrawing from such duties, save for producing the occasional foreword to a book or pamphlet about Africa at the behest of the American Anti-Imperialist League or the Congo Reform Movement, Clemens continued work on his autobiography. Having no preconceived plan or scheme for the narrative, he began each session in his Fifth Avenue home by simply talking about whatever memories or images happened to come into his head, much as he had done while sitting for Dolly during their portrait sessions. Often he did so while shooting billiards. Meandering to wherever his mind took him, he began, bit by bit, to improvise the long and digressive narrative of his life. No particular event was more important than another, and his method was founded on the premise that anything he spoke about would be later configured into a meaningful sequence. Intending that the book would be published posthumously, he would take liberties with the truth sometimes, especially in the segments regarding his days during the early Civil War and the period of time—only three or so weeks—when he accompanied his friend Stanley to Cuba, a subject he was never to mention to anyone except Dolly. It happened on an afternoon in late June of 1907, when, wearing his newly acquired Oxford robes, he once again sat before her in her studio at Richmond Terrace.

  A FEW WEEKS PRIOR to their meeting again, Lady Stanley—having married that past March 21, nearly three years after Stanley’s death—read with delight the news of Clemens’s arrival in England, for his landing at Tilbury aboard the SS Minneapolis on June 8 was met by a considerable crowd of admirers and journalists; harbor bells had rung, and even the stevedores were whistling and cheering as he made his way onto English soil. But that acclamation was just the beginning. As he stood on the dock, waving his derby and umbrella at the crowds, he thought that such attentions had come about from his London publisher’s efforts to make known his return, for he had many events to attend to and publicize; but he had no inkling that his writings against the wrongs of the world—the very same that had been met tepidly by the American public in regard to Africa and other places—were so in tune with the general mood of the English public, who, in any case, already revered him for his books.

  Indeed, from the moment he took up residence at Brown’s Hotel in London, Clemens found himself constantly besieged by people. Within a few days of his arrival its lobby had become a second American embassy. While on most ordinary afternoons one would enter the public room and find most of the club chairs and sofas unoccupied—except at four o’clock tea—they were now all filled, and dozens of people were always standing about with books or gifts in hand, anxious to speak to or get a glimpse of the famous man. He received a steady flow of illustrious visitors, and once his address was known, letters poured in from all over England, along with numerous gifts. So great was England’s welcome that the papers were comparing his popularity to that of Charles Dickens at the height of his fame, when he could only get around London anonymously, wearing a theatrical disguise—a false beard, an eye patch, and an oversize top hat pulled low over his brow. Holding court and consenting to many an interview, Clemens only found peace when he lay in bed at the end of his long and busy days.

  WITHIN A WEEK he had to engage two additional secretaries to handle his correspondence. For about sixteen hours a day, his assistants went through the mail, reducing the massive influx of letters and requests to the few that Clemens might directly answer. Among them—because he had left instructions that anything from Richmond Terrace should be put aside—was a missive from Lady Stanley.

  2 Richmond Terrace

  June 12, 1907

  Dearest Samuel,

  G. Bernard Shaw has told me that he recently made your acquaintance on a platform of the station at Tilbury upon your arrival and that you later spent a few hours with him, James Barrie, and Max Beerbohm at Claridge’s. I imagine that he must have told you about my marriage ceremony, since he was one of the few guests invited. It was an austere affair, and since then Dr. Curtis and I have been living quietly at home. And while I am joyfully embracing my new circumstances, I have been very aware of your presence in London, the papers being full of accounts about your every doing. (Even our little Denzil has been excited!) I know that you are impossibly busy, but here I must remind you of your promise to visit me at Richmond Terrace. I still want to continue painting you and have been savoring the thought of a new session all these years: As always, I would like to present the “Mark Twain” whom I have known and been greatly fond of in all his glory. Can you come here, and soon?

  And there is the matter of the manuscript I sent you. As much as I wish to address its curious contents—for Stanley is still always foremost in my mind—you must know that I want to see you and join right hand to right hand. I must see your dear face again. Otherwise you will have no peace, rest, or leisure during your stay in London, and you will end by hating human beings. Please do come and see me before you feel that way, my dear sweet man.

  Yours,

  Dolly

  WHEN HE THOUGHT ABOUT LADY STANLEY, with all his admiration for her as an artist and friend, he never once forgot that she was quite a woman. Tall, buxom, and with a great handsomeness about her Pre-Raphaelite features, she had always seemed the opposite of Livy, who even in her prime, before gauntness and severity arrested her features, had never been a voluptuous beauty.

  At night in his hotel, when he was finally alone in his bed, after shooting billiards—the hotel had installed a table exclusively for his use—and exhausting himself to the point where he might finally sleep, he sometimes wondered what drew him originally to a creature who was so frail, for from the day he first met her Livy had never been in robust health and was often ailing. But he remembered looking at her and thinking, “This woman is as elegant and austere as a poem.” And he, loving literature, though he did not know what it was, became enamored enough to marry her.

  And yet at his ripe old age, Clemens sometimes thought about Dolly. He had always imagined that her breasts would be full and pendulous, her physical persona forward in a “Western” kind of way. Her femininity had always reminded him of the blunt physicality of the brothel women of the West and New Orleans, the salons of which he, in his youth, with his curiosity about life and youthful vitality, had enthusiastically explored. He found himself, in his old age, sexually curious again.

  Though he had never uttered as much as a word about such doings to Livy, long before their honeymoon he had been an experienced lover. If he never told her of these experiences, it was because he had his pious husbandly image to preserve. Before he met her, his favorite consorts had not only come from New Orleans, Denver, or Fo
rt Collins but also, to his chagrin, from many a mining camp and from San Francisco, where he would play cards and drink until the early hours of the morning in the back room of a brothel. As those ladies were friendly and inviting and gentle and accommodating, and prone to kissing a card player’s neck, how could one resist? He’d further amused himself with some Polynesian consorts in the Sandwich Islands, their seedy boudoirs situated in long palm-thatched houses along the beaches. Once, those many years ago—1867—he had nearly gone into a brothel in Jerusalem after a day’s excursion to the holy sites, but by then he had fallen in love with the image of Livy, which her brother, Charles, a fellow passenger on that journey, had shown him in a cameo; she seemed to be purity incarnate. And because he knew that Charles was somewhat aware of his doings, as they and his fellow “pilgrims” kept nearly constant company, he had not only abstained from his curiosity but also swore thereafter to reestablish a vow of chastity, which he mainly kept to during the years of their courtship and never once violated in their many years of marriage.

  WHEN CONTEMPLATING THE PRIVATE SEXUAL LIFE of a man, especially famous men such as Stanley and himself, Clemens recalled a conversation he once had with Stanley, God bless his soul, regarding the untarnished image of David Livingstone. They were at Richmond Terrace on a Sunday in 1899 when Dolly, Gertrude, and Livy had gone off to church.

  That Stanley remained behind to partake of a leisurely breakfast with Clemens had surprised him.

  “How is it that you, of a most pious bent of mind, are abstaining from the service?”

  “Oh, I never go. My church is in here,” he said, touching his heart. “Besides, I did not want to leave you alone.”

  “I would have been fine.”

  “That is so. The truth is, Samuel, as often as I have spoken to church groups from the pulpits, I’ve tired of the stuffy doings of the services.” Then: “Here, have some Champagne.” And Stanley poured him a glass.

  “Isn’t it a bit early?”

  “Samuel, if you must know, given a period of sound health, I begin every morning with a glass of Champagne, followed by a shot of brandy, in the Spanish fashion. It brightens my spirits and in its way brings me closer to God than any dreary service. In fact, if I have attended church at all in recent times it’s because of Denzil, but mainly I leave it to Dolly and Mrs. Tennant to take him: As I think a boy should know about such practices, I allow it. You see, Samuel, even though I was raised in that way and had salubrious teachings rammed down my throat as a boy at St. Asaph’s, my once naive views on divinity and the necessity of churches have long since become artifacts of my past.”

  “But when we first knew each other, you were different.”

  “Yes, I would say so: But I was then an innocent to the world—we both were.”

  “Now, tell me, Stanley, do you really believe in God?”

  “Ah, that great subject. Before addressing it, let me fill your glass.” Then: “Cheers!”

  “But do you believe it, Stanley?”

  “To be truthful, Samuel, even as we sit here, I do. And do not. Which is to say that even at the highest-pitched moments of belief, it has sometimes slipped away from me. And yet I have still always aligned myself with the faith, I suppose because of a few encounters with truly devout men. My father, Mr. Stanley, was one of them, as you know, but even his influence faded gradually with the passing years. How could it not when I have seen so much carnage? But then, as such things have a way of working themselves out, just when my faith was at its lowest ebb and I was as cynical and selfish as any man can be, it was my destiny to know Dr. Livingstone. If you have read my book about him—”

  “I have, Henry.”

  “Then you will know of the profound change in my person that transpired. But here is the twist: While in his company, I saw that even the most pious of men, like Livingstone, can have a side that seems contradictory to the usual expressions of belief in a Christian God.”

  “How so?”

  “A little bit of history for you: In all his years of wandering through central Africa, Livingstone’s survival often depended upon his honoring of local tribal customs, becoming a ‘blood brother’ with chieftains, which I did many times myself. But Livingstone, it has been said, also took concubines among the native women. The queens of these tribes thought him possessed of special powers because he was a white man and would, as the Bible might say, ‘lie down with him.’ This was considered a special honor, and he, to stay in their good graces, could not refuse it. But if these rumors are true, he had no problem with this practice. For Livingstone would have put such sensate activities as… well, to put it bluntly, copulation into the same category as eating and digestion—a bodily affair, to say the least, one kept separate from the effort to bring Christ’s teachings to the savages.

  “In that way, Livingstone was of two minds, but his religious side was so great and inspiring that after I had gone slogging through the swamps and jungles to reach him, and had despaired so often that in my malarial states I thought God a bit of a myth, it was his faith that revived my own.

  “Mind you, he was an endlessly restless man—a foot tapper, like me, even when he tried to sit still—how else could he have trekked through uncharted regions for so many years? That energy and his appetites were one side of him; the other, the religious, was absolutely serene. He hung on to his faith even after watching his wife die of malaria in Africa just a few months after she had arrived to join him in his missionary work. One would think he would have resented the idea of a God then, but he did not. And when he died, after years of solitude in some desolate village in the Congo, he was found pitched face forward to the ground, his hands held in an attitude of prayer.

  “Now, dear Samuel,” Stanley continued. “If he was an undeniably great man—a much greater man than I—who am I to dismiss his final opinion? And so it is that even when I have little faith, his influence changes my mind.”

  “Do you suppose he was praying to clear himself for Judgment Day?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And the afterlife, Stanley?”

  “Ah, now, I know you don’t believe in it. As for me, when I am in my cups, I will say there is one. But in my everyday waking life, I don’t imagine it exists, although I really don’t care—at heart, as much as I have come to love certain human beings, I think the human race so despicable that I almost welcome the idea of having no more dealings with it.”

  “I am with you on that.”

  “But who is to say?” said Stanley, filling Clemens’s glass with more Champagne. “What I most often believe, dear friend, is that what awaits me will be a merciful darkness.”

  “That cheers me up,” Clemens said. “As you and I are sitting here on this beautiful morning, another sacred day commemorating the hearsay about the risen Christ, I remain as skeptical as I have ever been, much as I have tried lately to put on a good face about all that business for Livy. Simply put, I am a reluctant atheist, and as much as I wish it were otherwise, it is so.”

  ON HIS NIGHTS BY HIMSELF, a terrible loneliness overwhelmed Clemens. Restlessly he would think about Susy and his beloved Livy, then of his remaining daughters—his little family. Clara had not accompanied him to London because he had insisted that she make the journey with Isabel Lyon, his secretary, whom she had come to dislike; Jean was then in a sanatorium, and in any case her doctors seemed to believe that, as with Livy, Clemens, in his moodiness, would only aggravate her symptoms of hysteria and epilepsy. Mainly he brooded about death and reflected unwittingly upon the passing of old friends, Stanley among them.

  AS FOR STANLEY and the general subject of sex, Clemens remembered asking him once about the wilds of Africa and whether he had ever consorted with any women there. He recalled an evening in 1900, when Stanley, mumbling, had said, “Yes, I suppose I have.” At first he was guarded, but after some questions, and with Samuel filling Stanley’s glass with brandy again and again, the great explorer elaborated: “As much as I would not like to
admit it, in my early middle age, I have lain with African voluptuaries. Mainly in Zanzibar. But what I say to you, Samuel, should not be known. As beautiful as these women were sometimes, I was as a shepherd would be with his flock: I attended to them as briskly as possible.” (At that, Clemens laughed.) But then Stanley added, “These were only occasional events undertaken at moments of great boredom and torpor. I do not regret them, nor do I particularly remember them.”

  And had he ever lain with Lady Stanley? This, of course, he could never ask. Clemens imagined not, for in those years, when Stanley’s luck with the female sex seemed to finally have changed, he had often been sick; but to imagine what Dolly might have been like intrigued Clemens. Sometimes, as he shot his billiards in the middle of the night, he saw her stretched out naked in a chair, like La maja desnuda—her Rubensesque form a pure enchantment. Of course, he was too old to linger long on such thoughts, but for a few moments, he envied Stanley for having found such a vivacious specimen of good health for a wife.

  But all in all, as much as his mind drifted, he wished that Livy were still alive to ease his passage through those lonely nights and to share in his glory.

  Often he drank until he began to miss his shots and could barely see across the room.

  June 14, 1907

  Dear Lady Stanley,

  First of all, forgive the tardiness of this reply. And yes, I absolutely intend to visit you, but as I am like a fish in a barrel and up to my neck in engagements, our reunion must wait until after the Oxford ceremonies, to be held, as you know, on the 26th, at the Sheldonian Theatre: Will you be coming? I hope so. Otherwise, why do we not set aside the afternoon of the 28th? I promise to clean off the slate of my engagements.