Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

LADY STANLEY HAD BEEN PAINTING Samuel Clemens, a visage she most wanted to have remembered by posterity. With his many sharp features, he was a perfect subject — flaring eyebrows, a shock of white hair, a stony and regal face; the sharp, slightly crooked nose; the intense eyes, their lids drooping like a hawk’s. For all the years she had spent contemplating his face, and for all the renderings that would eventually be judged excellent, she, looking him over, as he sat before her one afternoon in 1907, realized that this would probably be the last time he would ever grace her studio.

“All that you have said to me I will consider, Samuel, but I will leave Stanley’s account as he wished it to be. The pity, I think, is that neither you nor he ever wrote about one another.”

“We didn’t. Maybe I will one day.”

Samuel Clemens never did, and what was written about their friendship came by way of some brief mentions in the memoirs of Major Pond and Stanley’s manservant Hoffman as well as a few newspaper articles referring to appearances Stanley and Clemens made together. But a few days after he left Dolly’s company, Clemens appeared before an audience at the famous Savage Club in London, where he spoke of the fact that Stanley had taken one of his books with him to Africa; though he lamented Stanley’s passing greatly, that was the last mention he ever publicly made of him.

ON THE AFTERNOON WHEN HE PARTED from Dolly, Samuel Clemens moved slowly, his limbs, his body weighed down with age and drink. Occasionally, as he would pause along the hallway to look at some photograph or portrait of Stanley, he would pass his hand over it, as if to bid him farewell. And when Dolly escorted him from the mansion, where, by the curb, Lady Stanley’s chauffeur and Daimler motorcar awaited him, Clemens looked at her tenderly and said, “As you must know, at my age this will definitely be my last visit to England. In another world, I might come back again and again, but for now, I think this will be it.” Then, taking her white-gloved hand in his, he added: “I hope you did not mind my disclosures about Stanley,” at which Dolly smiled and shook her head slightly. And with that he embraced her, the scent of his soap, tobacco, and whiskey rising into her nostrils: It was the only time he had ever been so demonstrative with her, but it only lasted for a moment.

“Lest I get teary-eyed, I better go now, Dolly.”

With that Clemens climbed into the Daimler’s backseat and, to the driver in his top hat and duster, said: “To Brown’s Hotel, if you will.”

As the motorcar pulled out into the curving flagstone driveway and Clemens waved to her, Lady Stanley, in those moments, was overcome with a melancholy that stayed with her for some days.

WHEN THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Sir Henry Morton Stanley was published in 1909, five years after his death, its only reference to Stanley’s friendship with Clemens came by way of a footnote that Dolly had added to a chapter entitled “I Find a Father,” about his years on the Mississippi. Occurring on page 246, it read:

“During such riverboat journeys with the merchant trader, Stanley made the acquaintance of a young pilot named Samuel Clemens — later the famous Mark Twain — with whom he remained a good and steadfast friend for the rest of his life.—D.S.”

The book was received tepidly by a public whose interest in Africa and the great explorers of the Victorian age had long since waned. Though its sales were disappointing, Dolly remained most proud of her efforts, for at long last, the noble and selfless Stanley with whom she had first fallen in love would be known to all. In her enthusiasm she had taken the trouble to have several special editions printed on handmade paper with elaborate morocco bindings — ten in all. One went to the Royal Geographical Society, another to the royal family. One was sent to Samuel Clemens at his new home in Redding, Connecticut.

With it, she attached a note:

Dear Samuel,

Well, here it is — a book for the ages! I do hope you understand its omissions, but when you see how I have inscribed it, I hope you will do so with the understanding that Stanley was by my shoulder as I wrote it.

With sincerest love,

Dolly

A frothy shaving brush in hand, Clemens was in his new house — Stormfield — when his housekeeper handed him a parcel from England. In it was one of the special editions of the aforementioned book. The inscription read:

To my dear friend Samuel,

Here is my life, contained in some few pages. And tendered to you with love and admiration.

Henry Morton Stanley

In those moments, reading it, Clemens was amused that Dolly had taken the liberty of signing Stanley’s own name, her script exactly as his own, including the florid underswirls that Stanley had always used in his better days.

Well, in a nutshell, he thought, that is the spiritualist in Dolly; later, he wrote her a long note of appreciation.

From Lady Stanley’s Journal, April 22, 1910—A Variation on a Letter to Her Long-Dead Father

Dearest Henry,

This morning’s papers — Friday’s — have been filled with the sad news of Samuel Clemens’s passing last night. When I learned of it, I was sitting in our dining room at breakfast. At first I could not accept the news and threw the paper down. Denzil, in from Eton and sitting beside me, retrieved the paper in his gentlemanly manner and asked, “Mother, why are you so upset?” But all I could do was lower my head and weep as privately and discreetly as possible. But in seeing that his “uncle Mark” was gone, Denzil withdrew into the privacy of his room. Then Mother came in, and, seeing my distraught state, also read the news; she, too, lamented the death of that great light, calling him “a dear young man.” (But she did not weep.)

Once I cleared my mind of the immediate shock, I clearly saw his circumstances. According to the accounts, he had retreated to the freeing pastures of his home in Redding, Connecticut, at twenty-two minutes past six last night. With him were his loved ones — his daughter Clara, her husband, Ossip, and several others. He went peacefully, from heart failure, and among the effects by his bedside was the same wedding gift he once sent us — a copy of Carlyle’s book on the French Revolution. Though his passing grieves me, I remain confident that he has not only found his peace but is also now standing by your side.

Do tell me if it is so.

But the fact remains, I will miss him. Since I last saw him, a few years ago, I’d heard from him rarely. A Christmas card to our family was all, but then, just this past winter, he wrote me about the loss of his beloved daughter Jean. It was Christmas Eve. She had finished decorating their tree when she went upstairs to take a bath; while soaking in the water, she suffered a seizure and drowned. How he must have felt, Henry, I cannot say, but this past mid-January I received a letter from him, and among his words were these lines in particular, which moved me to tears:

“It was snowing the next morning, on Christmas Day, as I stood by my window watching the hearse take her off into the great silence. Life can be so painful that in those moments, I found myself envying the dead.”

It was clear to me that he would not be long for this world — and yet I had hoped it would not be so.

DROWSILY, IN THE WAY THAT PEOPLE sometimes scribble down a dream, Lady Stanley envisioned a happier alternative to the notion that the spirits and strong intellects of such formidable men should lie buried, extinguished, forever in the ground, existing only as memories. Drawing with pencil a quick sketch of some celestial place, patterned after the visions of heaven that she knew from the etchings of Gustave Doré, she saw Twain and Stanley meeting again at the foot of some great marble stairway from whose highest step one could see every pleasing element of the universe — every star, every planet and galaxy, a great swath of starry light, the radiance of life itself streaming down upon them. (She considered for this fantastic drawing a concept of the two of them, hand in hand, Stanley depicted as the warrior Mars and Twain the father-head and statesman, Zeus — with herself as Venus, representing wisdom and impulse and love — proceeding together into a place that transcended the conditions of this world.)