Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

But in those days, his orderly manner attracted the attention of the Union commanders: His achievements — keeping inventory of the meager food rations that were appropriated for his barracks, a list of which he maintained in neat columns in his careful script (he was, after all, a clerk) — impressed them very much, as did his skills as a marksman. Such officers, thinking that he might be of some use to the Union cause, and reviewing his status as a British national, offered him a way out, which was to enlist as a soldier on the Union side. And while his sympathies for the South were mainly a matter of geography — it had been four years since he had arrived in New Orleans — and because he feared for his own life, he, after some six weeks in that hellish place, took the Union oath of allegiance and signed on with the Illinois Light Artillery. Sent south, to a camp near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, he had a short-lived stint in a blue uniform: Collapsing during a drill, he was deemed unfit for service. For two weeks he lingered in a Union hospital, and, released from his duties, wandered, deathly ill, on foot, traveling some twenty-four miles over the course of a week into peaceful Maryland, where, finding refuge at a farm, he recovered well enough to partake, with some gratitude, in the apple harvest.

(How beautiful that was, so long ago, he thought, to be walking in the shady groves of those trees, a patch of blue to be glimpsed now and then through the briary cross-hatching of branches, as he serenely went about practicing the peaceful activity of picking apples and dropping them into a basket in the spring sun.)

In that time a terrible homesickness for Wales came over him, a longing for the quietude of dulcet vales, and so upon his recovery (and with the help of the kindly family he stayed with) he left for Baltimore, finding work on an oyster schooner in Chesapeake Bay. Later, as a hand on a ship bound for England, he spent a month in the crossing, then walked some forty miles from Liverpool to north Wales to Denbigh. There he sought out the company and welcoming embrace of the mother who had long ago abandoned him: Seeing him in rags, she — Mrs. Robert Jones, née Betsy Parry — put him up for a night, and then sent him away from her door the next morning.

Then followed a year of further travels as a hand on various ships — water, like paper and disease, always playing a part in his life: Girgenti, Italy; Marseille, France; and Athens, Greece, being among his ports of call. On one of his journeys, he was shipwrecked in the seas off Barcelona. October of 1863 found him in New York City, working as a clerk in a legal office on Cedar Street, in lower Manhattan, his employer an alcoholic judge with whom he boarded in Brooklyn. Some six months later, young Stanley, at twenty-three, cooped up in an office and craving further adventure, enlisted again, this time in the Union Navy, as a clerk and admiral’s secretary on the warship Minnesota . It happened that he had been aboard the Minnesota on December 24, 1864, during the Union fleet’s bombardment of Fort Fisher, a Confederate stronghold on the coast of North Carolina, one of the last great naval engagements of the Civil War. Witnessing this conflagration and deciding to write some news dispatches, he later sold several of his descriptions of the battle to notable newspapers, among them the New York Herald . By the following February, bored again and judging the record-keeping facilities of the Union forces haphazard enough to risk taking an unauthorized leave, Stanley shed his uniform and, in the company of a fellow mate, slipped off the war brig as it lay in harbor one night at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, awaiting repairs. For a time he lingered in New York; by May of 1865, hearing much about the frontier lands and thinking that he might become a journalist, he headed west.

On that journey, recalling that Samuel Clemens had once worked at the Missouri Democrat , he turned up at those offices, in St. Louis, and offered his services. At the time he brought along several of the dispatches he had written during the war, and these, along with a mention of his friend Clemens, who had by then, writing under the name Mark Twain, become something of a legend to the Western newspaper community, helped the young Stanley procure a position as an attaché (or freelance stringer).

Leaving St. Louis for the frontier, he, without knowing it at the time, followed in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens, his travels taking him to St. Joseph, then by stagecoach across the Rocky Mountains and onward to San Francisco, California. Eventually, he based himself in Denver, but because his earnings as a journalist were not guaranteed, he found work as a part-time bookkeeper in Central City, a mining town where he entertained (like Clemens and many others before him) the notion of striking it rich by prospecting for gold. But as money to buy the needed supplies was scarce, he became an employee of the Daily Miners’ Register , not as a journalist but as an apprentice typesetter — as if Samuel Clemens’s own past had come to shadow him. Finding no gold in the hills around that city, he returned to his fledgling skills as a writer, keeping notebooks filled with observations and successfully selling many an article on the doings of the rugged cowboys and miners he encountered on his travels.

In those days, while on a trip down the Platte River to the Missouri, through hostile Indian Territory (this never bothered Stanley, for he was handy with a Colt revolver and loved to practice his aim, shooting birds out of the sky), he, with his own great ambitions, hatched a scheme to travel the world. Confident that he could recoup his expenses by writing an account of it, he arranged to set out with several companions by way of Omaha and St. Louis to New York, then to Boston, toward Asia Minor. Paying for his passage to Smyrna (modern Izmir), in western Turkey, as a hand aboard the ship, he planned his route during the fifty-one-day voyage: He would cross the expanses of Anatolia into Georgia, then go through Kashmir toward China and ultimately Tibet, where few foreigners had ever traveled.

Unfortunately, not some few days out from Smyrna, as this small party — a seventeen-year-old former shipmate of Stanley’s aboard the Minnesota named Louis Noe; a journalist whom Stanley had met during his Central City days, William Cook; and Stanley himself — was crossing the mountains east of that city they were waylaid and taken captive by a band of twelve Turkish brigands. They might have lingered in that place indefinitely or been killed were it not for the intercession of a Turkish banker sympathetic to their plight who secured their release and safe passage to Constantinople.

Some months afterward, in mid-February, Stanley, late of Constantinople, Athens, Marseille, Liverpool, and Denbigh, Wales, arrived at the offices of the Missouri Democrat in St. Louis. Received gladly by the editors, and put on a staff salary of fifteen dollars a week, he counted among his first duties, during his renewed tenure with the newspaper, an assignment to report upon some dreary legislative proceedings in Jefferson City. Later on in that early April of 1867, he was on hand at the Mercantile Library in St. Louis to cover a lecture by the latest literary sensation, Mark Twain — whom Stanley remembered, as he always would, as Samuel Clemens.

BY THEN, IN THAT CLIMATE of a recovering post — Civil War America whose public was hungry for amusement, Clemens had achieved much renown for his humorous, homespun writings and for his cheerful and rather theatrical public presentations of his works. The first gleanings of his fame came with the publication of a short story called “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” in the New-York Saturday Press in 1865. In much demand, his reputation preceding him, and wildly popular for his travel articles, Clemens, somewhat bemused by his ability to draw a crowd, had packed the auditorium. For several hours, Clemens, as Mark Twain, ever resplendent and dapper, held forth from the stage about his recent six-month stay in the Sandwich Islands — Hawaii. His written lecture and improvised asides filled the premises with laughter, and the fine quality and detail of his prose much impressed Stanley, who stood quietly in the back observing him. While dutifully recording in his notebooks the contents of Twain’s lecture, Stanley had somewhat jealously studied his friend’s techniques at stagecraft, for, upon his own initial return from Turkey some months before, Stanley himself had tried his hand at lecturing. He had rented a hall in Jefferson City, printed flyers and tickets, and advertised the subject as the adventures and perils encountered by the American traveler in Asia Minor. He had promised to recite aloud the Islamic call to prayer, which he had memorized in Constantinople and heard from every mosque, to sing Turkish songs, and to speak of other cultural eccentricities. (When that night arrived, Stanley — dressed in a Turkish naval officer’s uniform and with props and souvenirs to display, among them a scimitar and a Saracen coat of chain mail — mounted the stage to find that only four people had shown up. He later burned the box full of remaining tickets in a stove.) So while attending the St. Louis lecture, he had perhaps envied Clemens’s popularity with the audience — but he showed no signs of it. He sought out Clemens backstage.