Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

I did not see my dear friend Clemens again for six years.

Here the manuscript ends.

READING THE “CABINET” MANUSCRIPT over several evenings, Samuel Clemens gathered his own recollections regarding those days with Stanley, distant though they were to the seventy-one-year-old writer. Though he well understood the improvisational nature of memory, he found the latter part of Stanley’s account a mostly imaginative interpretation of what, so many years before, had transpired in Cuba. Clemens also thought his old friend had taken liberties in his portrait of his American “father.” Having read it over, with one or another of his half a dozen cats purring on his lap, at a time when his own writings seemed hopelessly beyond achieving the continuity of memoir — or, for that matter, the concentrated expression of the self required in novels — Clemens, who knew how difficult such writings were, deliberated endlessly about his response to Lady Stanley, “an aristocrat as nice as any he had ever known.”

In the end, Clemens wrote a gentle note back:

May 27, 1907

21 Fifth Avenue, New York City

Dear Dorothy—

I must thank you for Stanley’s manuscript, and therefore thank you as well for the opportunity to comment upon it. It does, indeed, cover some terrain of my life — and opening such old doors brings to mind how much I miss your late husband — but as I would like to fill you in and can’t right now, on account of the fact that I am getting ready to leave for England next week, I would prefer to wait and discuss it with you in person when I come to London. In the meantime, as always, on behalf of myself and my daughters, I send you our love.

Samuel

FOR THOSE WHO KNEW NOTHING of their Cuban journey, it was assumed that Twain and Stanley’s first meeting had taken place one evening at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis in 1867. By then, in one of the more satisfying symmetries of their friendship, each had entered into the profession of writing, though by that time, Samuel Clemens, as Mark Twain, was by far the more successful and better known. While the years of the Civil War had found him attempting other occupations — as a miner, as a printer, and as a typesetter — he, with his love for colorful yarns and sharp eye for details, had gravitated to a life as a wandering “cowpoke” journalist. He plied this trade for various Western newspapers — the Missouri Democrat , the Territorial Enterprise out of Virginia City, and the Morning Call in San Francisco, where his colleagues included the likes of Ambrose Bierce and Bret Harte. Aside from a brief period of unemployment (he had been fired from his staff position in San Francisco for reporting too faithfully on the corrupt doings of the local police and other officials), his journey had been altogether easier than Stanley’s, whose route had been far more circuitous and filled with danger.

STANLEY’S OWN CAREER SEEMED TO have started at a Confederate camp at Corinth, Mississippi, as a private with the Sixth Arkansas Volunteer Infantry, under the command of Generals Pierre Beauregard and Albert Sidney Johnston, awaiting deployment into the Battle of Shiloh. Even though he worked as a provisions clerk and was known for his sharp marksmanship on the firing range, he was most valued for his informal role as an amanuensis for the illiterate soldiers of Company E, who were mainly veterans of the Mexican-American War of 1847, Stanley writing, on their behalf, what in many cases would turn out to be farewell letters to loved ones and family.

And so it was that Stanley, wishing to leave some word of his whereabouts, drafted several letters for himself to the only “loved ones” he knew: Thomas and Maria Morris in Liverpool, with whom he was in occasional correspondence. In one missive, he sent his regards and assurances that all was well; in another, he wrote to a young woman he had known at Cypress Bend, expressing some exaggerated feelings of impending glory or doom:

Either I will rise one morning after the coming battle, ablaze with dignity like the sun, or I will perhaps be dead, like a moon dropping into the sea.

And he wrote to his friend Samuel Clemens — whom, at this point, he had not seen or heard from in more than a year — in care of his sister in St. Louis.

March 22, 1862

My dear friend, Samuel — wherever you may be — I imagine you are with your brother Orion somewhere West — I just wished to tell you of my kindly thoughts, regarding our friendship, for the clerk you put up with is now about to go off with his regiment into a very great battle. Should this be the last you ever hear of me, I want to let you know that I am hoping that every good wish you have comes true, and that yours will be a long and happy life. Should we find one another at some distant point in the future — and even if we do not — I have valued your kindness and sage advice. I do miss our conversations about books, and your funny tales as well, the memories of which, in the dreariness of these days, with their incessant drills and pointless mustering of the ranks, has relieved me from the melancholic state I often find myself in. This is nothing more, then, than a simple note of gratitude, and it would be longer, except for the fact that I do not know if you will ever receive it. Should that be the case and you wish to let me know of your doings, a letter addressed to the Confederate camp in Corinth, Mississippi, Company E, Sixth Arkansas Volunteer Infantry, in my name, should suffice to reach me, though by then I may well be in some other unearthly locale.

Henry Stanley

And before he set out with his regiment toward the banks of the Tennessee River to fight against the forces of one General Grant, Stanley, by then much exposed to the florid and heartfelt sentiments of other soldiers toward their families, came to reflect upon the elusive presence of his own. He’d heard from Liverpool that his mother had married a certain Robert Jones, by whom she had several children; they ran a small inn called the Cross Foxes in the village of Glascoed, in Monmouthshire, not far from where he’d been born — that was all he knew.