Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

When we left Westminster, rose petals tossed from the balconies of surrounding houses were falling upon the pavement and street like snow in our wake. And as the tower’s bells were ringing and the bystanders lining the street were waving miniature Union Jacks — as well as a few American flags, in honor of Stanley’s American association — I realized that my new husband had quickly fallen ill again. As we made our brief but jubilant procession by carriage to my family’s town house in Richmond Terrace, he let out a shallow breath and slumped back into his seat. Eventually, the carriage compartment, jostling along the cobblestones, brought him enough discomfort that he doubled over. But then he would open his eyes and ask, “Are we there yet?”

We held our reception in our back garden on Richmond Terrace. Tents had been erected in the event of bad weather, which was a good thing, as it had rained most of the day. Stanley, I should regretfully say, was not up to the occasion. When he had first come onto the green, assisted by Dr. Parke, he had simply said hello to a few folks, then retired inside to rest. After a while, Mother, being a determined soul and very aware of formality, went in to give my husband a rousing talk about his responsibilities. And so my husband, summoning his strength, chose to address the gathering from a lawn chair. For about five minutes, he named, from memory, nearly everyone in attendance and thanked them, ending his oration with these words:

“This is the very finest day of my life. Who would think that this old soldier would be so lucky as to have, at this stage of his life, a woman as good and lovely as Dorothy? How strange it all seems that I now, so unexpectedly, possess a wife.”

HERE THE NARRATIVE BREAKS OFF; at the time of writing, her mother entered her study to remind her of an impending luncheon appointment, and so she put down her pen, withdrawing into her dressing room.

SHE SITS TO WRITE on an early spring day in 1908. Near her writing desk is a cabinet photograph that Samuel Clemens had given her in 1891, signed “With kindest regards to Mrs. Stanley, Mark Twain, Hartford, Connecticut, Jan. 29”; in the picture, Clemens was posed on his porch, his arm wrapped around a pillar, his legs crossed — a most intense expression on his face. The occasion of this gift, coming during Stanley’s last tour of America in late 1890–91, when he and Dorothy, or Dolly, as he had come to call her, and her mother, the pestiferous Gertrude Tennant, had met up with Clemens in New York City.

From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir

DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of our marriage, when Stanley began to move his most valued effects and books into my house on Richmond Terrace, we turned one of the large guest chambers into his study; as crates arrived by wagon from his New Bond Street flat, he would spend part of his days carefully unpacking them, and shortly that room, filled with those objects and books, became the one he found most inspirational to his thinking. Elsewhere in the house, we found space for numerous other photographs of Stanley in Africa and allocated one of the empty servants’ quarters for the storage of his travel podium, portable writing desk, medicine trunks, and the piles of tribute plaques and coffins and other commemoratives that came nearly daily.

Once he’d put his large and formidable writing desk, which resembled a preacher’s pulpit, near the fireplace, and once he had installed a correspondence cabinet, he attended to his books — one such crate, marked THE ONE HUNDRED WORTHIES, bore those volumes necessary to a gentleman’s essential education. There were also geographical books, books in Latin and Greek, books on ornithology, many books on religion and theological thought, and numerous biographies. (“It is my intention,” he told me in those days, “to write my autobiography so as to get the record of my life straight.”) For his pleasure, there were novels. In fact it was my observation that, when he was not writing, he considered the companionship of a book — nearly any book at all — indispensable to his well-being. He read everything, from the cheapest shilling novels — the kinds of shockingly bad yellow-backed romances one would find in the kiosks of railway stations — to books written by the great past masters, such as Cervantes, as well as authors of current interest — Kipling, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky among them. (It was a habit, I would learn, that he did not share with Mr. Clemens, who was not quite as well read as my husband, particularly in the realm of novels.) But among the books that he most cherished he included the works of Mark Twain, to which, I noticed, he returned again and again.

Despite the great acclaim that had met his initial return from the Emin Pasha expedition, it was not long afterward that his actions were being daily condemned by missionaries and humanitarian groups in the newspapers. One of the officers in his party, a certain Lieutenant Troup, with whom Stanley had a falling-out, had written to the newspapers describing the expedition as a “mad mission, supposedly dedicated to the spread of civilization but really about exterminating the natives in the way the Americans had exterminated the red man.”

“My dear,” he once told me, “it is one thing to command the physical body of a man to do such and such a thing: But to command the mind and the soul is not so easy at all. The conditions of such an unearthly world produce in normally civilized and reasonable men many a strange response, which no one man can predict or control once soul-altering madness has descended. In a place like Africa, where the ‘wilds’ quickly find a man out, there is no substitute for fortitude and character.”

Some accused him of being power-driven and merciless in his treatment of the Africans. This, I knew, was far from the truth. Henry had believed Léopold when he said his goal was to modernize the Congo and bring enlightenment to the backward nation, thereby eliminating the brutal slave trade. Only now did he begin to question the Belgian king’s motives.

Nor was he pleased to find himself the butt of jokes. One evening, out of curiosity, we had occasion to attend a theatrical venue in the East End and saw a play called Stanley in Africa . To my husband’s dismay, he was portrayed by a baboonish actor who played Stanley as a daft British officer, oblivious to the sufferings of the column in his charge. The guffaws of the audience when his character would bellow out, “March on through the dismal swamps to find the snippety pasha — and ivory, too!” so upset him that we left quickly.

“What I did was for the good of the future of Africa,” he told me again and again from his sickbed one day. “Those who do not believe me can go to H — s and stay there forever.”

THANKFULLY, IN NOVEMBER of 1890, just as he had begun to grow overly testy and weary of the public atmosphere in England, we traveled to a far more evenhanded place where such controversies did not exist: America. The reason for our sojourn was a lecture tour of that country arranged by one Major James Burton Pond (who, I should add, happened to be Samuel Clemens’s agent). With my mother, Gertrude, two of our Swahili servants, and in the company of Lieutenant Jephson and my cousin, we set sail from Liverpool to New York, aboard the SS Cuba.