Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

He had at this point in his life changed the face of Africa, his mark having been made through various explorations into previously unknown regions: Among his most notable achievements were the circumnavigation of Lakes Tanganyika, Victoria, and Albert and the discovery of the location of the Mountains of the Moon. He followed the course of three of central Africa’s greatest rivers, the mysterious Lualaba, the Aruwimi, and, most epically, the treacherous Congo, the second-longest river in the world. He was the first man to have navigated and mapped that body of water from its source at Lake Tanganyika to its outflow on the Atlantic Ocean.

Such a summary cannot even begin to convey the extent of what Stanley and his men suffered on those journeys — countless attacks by natives, episodes of starvation, various mutinies, and repeated bouts of malaria, contracted in the leech-, crocodile-, and snake-infested swamps through which his expeditions often waded. An endless purgatorial darkness, too, had he endured, spending months at a time forging a path through the great and lightless forests of the Congo (a woods the size of France and Spain combined). Stanley’s sometimes harsh discipline, his relentless drive, his extraordinary luck (“the Providence of God,” he called it), and his stoicism in the face of physical pain and adversity made such feats possible.

Of course, he had been changed greatly by his travels. While he had looked like a lad of fifteen during the Civil War, Stanley was, at forty-four, somewhat prematurely aged; he resembled a man in his late fifties. His hair was gray, his pockmarked face, tightened by years of exposure to the tropical sun and an addiction to tobacco — thank you, Samuel Clemens — was lined with wrinkles, and his gray-blue eyes were often slightly yellow from jaundice. By then his formerly trusting countenance had been overtaken by a somewhat stern and solemn air, his gaze regarding the world with suspicion. Beset by episodic bouts of sudden illness, he passed through life awakening each morning without knowing if, by nightfall, he might be doubled over in agony from the torments of his chronic gastritis or, worse, find himself enduring the fevers, chills, and waking hallucinations of malaria, which by his own count had already struck him more than one hundred times. Never taking any imposition upon his health lightly, for he felt that he had a ticking bomb of blood-and bowel-feasting parasites inside him, he was most wary about cleanliness, rarely shaking hands without a glove; and when it came to food, he would only eat in the finest and most well-scrubbed establishments, for he knew that once he got sick, he would lose days, if not weeks or months, of his life.

But sometimes, too, when he was in the pink of health — as he was, fresh from a month’s rest in the Swiss Alps, in 1885—there was about him a general robustness, his cheeks bright red, his eyes wildly alert, and his physique sturdy. Despite the man’s diminutive stature — five feet five — to shake Stanley’s hand with one’s eyes closed was to feel the powerful grip of a blacksmith or a quarryman, more akin to stone than flesh. He had a broad chest, wide shoulders, and strong and well-muscled limbs. Which is to say there were two Stanleys — one, helpless as a baby, eased his gastric pains by chewing a mild opiate called “dream gum”; the other, according to the popular imagination of England, was a “modern Hercules.”

By his own account — his newspaper dispatches and the picaresque narratives that made up his books — he had trekked thousands of miles through the great forests and plateaus of central Africa and, along the way, had often wielded machetes and axes to cut a narrow trail through the dense jungle, foot by foot; he had scaled cliffs, hustled over great rock barriers, and had slipped or fallen so many times on rough terrain that his limbs were covered by scars. He wore a mustache whose waxed tips spiraled upward in the manner of a Bikanir sergeant, and his eyes burned with the intensity of a man who, having come close to death on many occasions, sometimes felt himself immortal. Whatever else could be said about him, for all his demureness around the ladies, he was known as a fearless man.

HIS CHARMS WERE MANY, BUT as a social creature he felt far more comfortably disposed around a cannibal chieftain of the Congo than around a woman, and less nervous facing a hail of poison-tipped spears in the African bush than facing Cupid’s arrow. During the short periods of time when he was not actively adventuring as a journalist and explorer, what love affairs he had managed to pursue had come to nothing. His courtship of a girl from Greece, whom he encountered in a small village on the island of Syra, in 1868 or so, while he was a reporter at large for the New York Herald covering the Cretan rebellion, ended with rejection. His affections for a well-landed Welsh girl, Katie Gough-Roberts, whom he had been introduced to during one of his quick visits to Denbigh in the late 1860s, had also turned to air. His surest romance, however, had been with Alice Pike.

Just remembering the particulars of that affair would depress him, for while she, lively and flirtatious, had loved to parade about the city with him (the celebrity of the day) and had, in a sacred pledge, accepted Stanley’s proposal of marriage in the back garden of her Fifth Avenue mansion some months later, during one of his visits back to America — once he had taken off to Zanzibar it was not long afterward that she began to go her own way. While Stanley had been off traveling through equatorial Africa, naming a mountain and then a lake after her—“the shimmering play of light, blue upon blue, upon its surface, glorious as her eyes”—and while the men of his expedition were hauling along, in four heavy sections, the components of a forty-foot wooden boat he had named the Lady Alice over all kinds of difficult terrain, she had been in the midst of enjoying a most carefree life as a social flower in New York. By the time Stanley, back in England after three malaria-ridden years of travel in the Congo, had gone to the Herald ’s London office on Fleet Street to collect his mail, he found awaiting him a letter from Alice: In it he read that, during his absence, his beloved had married someone else.

“If you can forgive me, tell me so; if not, do please remain silent.”

From then on, Stanley had acquired the air of a man who had been bitterly disappointed, his fame, to which he had never become accustomed, no assurance of earthly happiness.

TIME PASSED, HIS MEMORIES of that false romance still rankling his soul. If he found himself thinking about the prospect of love, he simply preferred to put it from his mind. “If it should enter my life, it will not be forced,” he would say. Gossiped about by women in whatever city he happened to meet them, whether in London or Paris or Brussels, he became known for his shyness and for blushing at a lady’s first approach; and if he noticed the comeliness of her figure, his ears turned red, so fully did his blood rush; to look at a woman closely was in his mind the same as touching her. A kind of uncontrollable bodily fidgeting followed by many exaggerated arm gestures, as well as a habit of shifting from foot to foot, accompanied a change in the tone of his voice, his baritone rising into a series of squeaky utterances that some took for shouting, as if he thought the woman he was addressing had gone deaf. He was judged as being a sad and remote sort, and his conversations — or so it seemed to the ladies of his passing acquaintance — were somewhat pedantic and dull, reminiscent of a schoolmaster giving a lecture. For around such ladies, he seemed to believe that his own true personality—“that softer side that leads to nothing”—would be of no interest to them. On those occasions, Stanley, to his detriment, took refuge behind the fame and bluster of his life as an explorer.