Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Sipping a glass of warmed whiskey and smoking a cigar to relax before heading out to greet the crowd of well-wishers, Clemens, lounging in a chair, looked up and, through the swirls of smoke, saw a much-changed Stanley approaching. When he got up, Clemens said, “My God, Henry, is that you?” in apparent surprise over the very fact that Stanley was still alive. They briefly embraced, neither man prone to overt expressions of affection. Later, after Clemens had partaken of a salon reception and fulfilled his duties to the crowd, he and Stanley repaired to a hotel bar, where, with the abundant enthusiasm of youth — clocks were irrelevant then — they stayed up until three in the morning recounting the events of their recent pasts to one another, for they had been long out of touch.

In the years since they had parted in New Orleans, Stanley, never knowing of Clemens’s meandering whereabouts, had managed to send but two brief letters to him, in care of Clemens’s sister in St. Louis, but these, apparently because of the war, Clemens had never received. For his part, Clemens had never known Stanley’s transient addresses, though he had over the past several years occasionally read some of Stanley’s dispatches in the Missouri Democrat (often signed with a simple S ) and admired them without knowing their authorship. Mainly, he was grateful that Stanley had not been killed in the Civil War, and to that sentiment they toasted.

That same evening, Stanley, in his cups, knowing that Clemens, as Mark Twain, was turning into something of a prolific memoirist, broached the subject of their journey to Cuba. “What was it but a disappointing journey for me? Can you, Samuel, knowing me as your friend, agree to forgo any mention of it in your prolific writings, simply because it is a friend’s request?”

“Well, to be truthful, Henry, I had not thought about it one way or the other, our journey being so old.

“Though I much enjoyed our brief travels there, Henry, and though I found many a fascinating thing about the place, I have come to know where my bread and butter comes from. My stock seems to remain in the presumed charm of an ironically determined small-town southerner who grew up along the banks of the Mississippi and happens to describe his surroundings in a humorous way — an endlessly humorous way that does not allow too easily for seriously intended digressions. Our time in Cuba resulted in my own longing for home, and while I have considered writing about it— A Southerner in the Land of Mosquitoes being a title I considered — I have long decided against it.”

About three in the morning, they, filled with drink, and, practically leaning on one another, parted.

IT WAS ONLY A FEW DAYS LATER, however, that Clemens, while perusing a copy of the Missouri Democrat , found that Stanley had published, nearly word for word, the entire contents of his lecture on the Sandwich Islands, thereby ruining the freshness of it for the local public. Clemens was left so peeved that, despite his warm feelings for Stanley, he withdrew his friendship for a very long time, choosing not to answer any of Stanley’s notes of apology—“I had been put under much pressure by my editors to report it”—and forestalling any meaningful continuation of their professional or private relationship for some five years, when they would be reunited again in Brighton, England, in 1872.

ABOUT STANLEY’S PROGRESS in the years after that St. Louis event, we can learn from his own words — an address he gave before a gathering of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1890:

“My dear and gracious friends,” he began, his eyes a little teary, his voice fluctuating from strength to weakness. “Gathered dignitaries, brothers of the letter, brothers of the cloth, my fellow explorers, lords and ladies of the realm… For a man like myself, who’s come up in the hard ways of life, to be standing here before so august a gathering is a very great honor indeed — and something of a miracle, if you ask me. I stand before you having already lived enough for several lifetimes. I have known the life of common Welsh farmers and the loathsome trials of the workhouse, to which I was remanded as a boy. I have known the life of a butcher’s assistant, a schoolteacher, a sailor, a shop clerk. I have lived in America for many years. I have traveled the Mississippi River and have fought in the American Civil War…. As a journalist I have traversed the great American plains to report on the Indian Wars — I have even ridden alongside the famous Wild Bill Hickok over plains still brimming with vast herds of buffalo. I have accompanied the very great General William Napier in pursuit of King Theodore during the Abyssinian campaign and witnessed the bloodshed of the antiroyalist insurrections in Spain…. I have journeyed up the Nile to Philae, in the ancient land of Kush, then across Persia, where, following the example of many illustrious men before me, I carved my name upon one of the monuments of Persepolis. At Jerusalem, I descended into the excavations of the Temple of Solomon, then walked in the malarial marshes by the Sea of Galilee, in the footsteps of Jesus. I have been no stranger to the Russian realm, nor am I unfamiliar with the vast distances and peculiarities of India. In short, like the proverbial Hebrews of the Bible, I have wandered widely to places that I could never have imagined as a young boy. Along the way, Africa was placed on my plate of experiences.

“My challenges began there with a great task, which was to find the devoted missionary Livingstone. Took me a bloody and arduous year, but I bloody well succeeded where others had not. [Applause] And with Livingstone, I undertook an exploration of the northerly reaches of Lake Tanganyika with the aim of determining it as the source of the Nile. We made many good discoveries, but nothing was greater than my contact with that saintly man, who became something of a father to me…. Upon my return to England from the company of that gracious soul — whose pious life my efforts had extended by some years, I do believe — I was received with much skepticism by our most prominent geographical and exploratory bodies. That a lowly reporter, sent on assignment by the illustrious James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald to a place he did not know, without any prior exploring experience beyond his morning searches for a comb [laughter], had indeed succeeded, against all odds, seemed, on the face of it, an improbability. And yet because few believed me, the savor and delight of my exertions were so much tainted by petty jealousies that for a very long time it was difficult for this humble servant to bear foremost in his mind the nobler fruits of those travels. And these, as I think must be by now well known, were in regard to my revulsion over the evil practice of slavery….

“It was during the flourishing of this ravishing and immoral practice that Dr. Livingstone first undertook his meandering missionary wanderings through the region. Mind you, he witnessed much of these natives’ sufferings — for the Arabs at that time were putting in neck and ankle chains some eighty thousand or one hundred thousand Africans a year, and that is counting only the ones who survived. By the time I reached Ujiji on my historic encounter, Livingstone, after more than a decade of witnessing such evils, emaciated and forlorn as he was, thought first of only two things: the glory and immanence of God and the deliverance of the poor souls thusly afflicted. He was a saint, I should say again. [Applause]

“It is an irony that I found him in an Arab slave-trading town, Ujiji, along the shores of Lake Tanganyika, but however he had settled there, it was surely from desperation. He was nearly dead then, suffering much from malnutrition and malaria: He had very little food, other than the scraps the slave traders would throw him, but his lack of medicine, particularly quinine, a box of which had been lost or stolen by one of his porters during his travels, was worse. We had marched in, my armed Zanzibaris sending off a fifty-gun salute; we had a drummer beating on a snare, another bloke blowing on a trumpet; we held up two flags — the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack — and, as for myself, though I had barely survived the great march, I appeared in a clean white uniform and sparkling boots, a pith helmet upon my head. That I take relish in reciting this to you, please forgive me, but on that day, November tenth, 1871, as I moved through a tumultuous crowd of Ujiji inhabitants to reach him, at my first sight of Livingstone — thin and feeble, with gray whiskers on his haggard face — I had my first moment of encountering true greatness.