Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Such musings led, by and by — a phrase he often used — to further discussions of theology. It seemed to him that the whole of the heavens functioned under one “inventive” intelligence, in the way that the gears of clocks have their own unwavering patterns. The few times I tried to expound the religious point of view he would snort or snore, as the man had no patience for such ideas; though he allowed that the order of the universe could not be an accident or the result of arbitrary events—“What that amounts to, I cannot say.”

It happened that he had recently read portions of a book by someone named Darwin called The Origin of Species , which held that modern man was derived from the apes. Based on his experience with men — no better than apes — he had no trouble believing this. I often laughed as he held forth, turning every thought into a matter of humor, a skill that intrigued me. He seemed to find it impossible to take his own erudition seriously — I thought him far better cultured and knowledgeable than most men, save for Mr. Stanley, yet he seemed to have a disdain for pretension: “I am just a lucky fellow from Hannibal, Missouri, nurtured by the dreams that come with growing up on the banks of a great river, the Mississippi. If there’s a heaven, it’s behind us, in early youth… mine was a paradise, to be sure.”

On several occasions during the day, he would come looking for me in the general meeting rooms, where I often sat beside Mr. Stanley and some businessmen, drawing up invoices and making entries into our accounting ledger books as my father went about his commerce. Usually, if he saw that I was occupied, Clemens would simply tip his cap at me, but one afternoon, as I had wanted him to make the acquaintance of Mr. Stanley, I asked him to join us. My father was cordial enough, commending Mr. Clemens for his many skills and thanking him for having taken an interest in me.

“Well, sir,” Mr. Clemens said, “you have a fine boy on your hands.”

“And he has spoken highly of your befriending him.”

They shook hands, my father looming over Clemens, the pilot looking him over carefully and coming to some appraisal of mind.

“Well, good day,” Clemens said.

Afterward, gentlemanly as he had been with Mr. Clemens, my father looked at me askance, and he shook his head ever so slightly, as if to remind me of the discussions we had had in the cabin about the dangers of assuming friendships with strangers on riverboats.

“Just remember,” he told me. “Riverboats are places for commerce and fleeting relations; a hundred other men you will befriend before long, and few, if any, will care for you as I do.” It had not helped that I had let drop, in my description of his character, that Mr. Clemens was not one for religious thoughts: “Such men, fine as they may be in many other respects, are lacking in the fundamental virtues. To mingle with such folks can only have a detrimental effect on your own pious thoughts; to be in the company of doubters is to open the door to doubt itself,” he told me one night in our cabin.

“Your job,” he continued with bite in his voice, “is to care after the books and accounts and to make all the arrangements pertaining to what dealings I undertake: whereas mine is to create a congenial atmosphere for such things to happen.”

The very afternoon he met Clemens, my father and his business acquaintances had sat drinking steadily between the hours of noon and five o’clock, at which point I had to escort him from that public room to our cabin. It was a remarkable thing to see how such a profound change of personality could take place because of these liquors, for the very man who, at some riverside settlements, felt the need to gather a crowd around him and speak of the “Word,” and who had often mentioned how proud he felt that I was his son, told me that his business was his own and that it would be best for me to keep my objections over “some harmless social tippling” to myself. Mindful of my promise to his wife, as she lay like an angel on her deathbed, I told Mr. Stanley that, as he had saved me from some inglorious fate, I would save him from his own lapses, no matter his objections. For a moment, my words seemed to have a good effect upon him. He sat on his bed.

“Just allow me some peace… leave me alone in my mourning.” Then: “Go off and do as you please — and forget all this, for whatever I am now, I will be as sound and good as I have ever been tomorrow.”

IN A STATE OF PUZZLEMENT, and in a low spirit, I made my way out onto the boiler deck, my mind too troubled to attend to my usual studies: My hands were shaking. Wandering up to the wheelhouse, I found Clemens at his post, and while I felt too ashamed to mention the momentary disharmony in my life, he was in a lively mood.

“Come and join me, my friend,” he said. “And take the wheel, Henry: Hold it steady as we go.” Then, as we approached a broadening of the river, he said: “Tug the wheel slightly downward and to your left.” As I began to turn the wheel downward — its enormous weight and the force necessary to move it surprising me — the steamer, heading out over clear waters, glided west. I was not long there at that wheel, but my successful operation of the craft, momentary as it had been, proved salutary to my soul.

BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED in St. Louis, some days later, all was mended between me and my father.

As for Clemens, at journey’s end, when all the passengers were disembarking, he sought me out on the deck: “I’ll be heading back to New Orleans day after tomorrow,” he told me. “You can always look for me in the pilots’ association rooms of that city, but if you should like to write to me, this is my sister’s address in this city.”

And he gave me a slip of paper that said:

Mr. Samuel L. Clemens, c/o Mrs. Pamela Moffett, 168 Locust Street, St. Louis

And that was how we left things for the time being.

FOR SOME NINE MONTHS IN 1860, my father and I traveled up and down the river, such journeys, of a two-month duration, broken up by month-long interludes in New Orleans, where we carried out the efficient running of Mr. Stanley’s various enterprises. I had gotten over our little differences by then: Whatever may have happened, I could not forget that Mr. Stanley had taken a boy — short of figure, poorly clad, and of little interest to the world — and made him into a gentleman.

AFTERWARD, EVERY NOW AND THEN I would receive at Mr. Stanley’s residence a letter from Mr. Clemens, some including clippings of the short and humorous articles he had written under the name of Sergeant Fathom and several somewhat older ones written when he was a youth that were credited to a certain W. Epaminondas Adrastus Blab, which were of a highly imaginative nature. Among them was an article he’d published in the New Orleans Daily True Delta , a satire about a riverboat pilot named Captain Sellers, to which he affixed, for the first time, I believe, the name Mark Twain, the pilot’s term meaning the safe depth of two fathoms, or twelve feet. He even sent me a few pages of what he considered a preliminary bit of autobiography regarding his early training and initiation as a pilot — for he thought such things might be good one day for a book and asked my impression of it. River gossip regarding the possibility of Southern dissent toward the North he also reported to me; his fellow river pilots shared his apprehension that the shipping trade might be disrupted in the event of a war—“unlikely as it would be to have white men fight one another over slaves.”