Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Another Journal Recollection, from January 27, 1891, a Tuesday

ON A DATE WHEN STANLEY was scheduled to give a lecture in Trenton, New Jersey, Mother and I had an invitation, received some days before, to visit Samuel Clemens’s home in Hartford, Connecticut.

We arrived in Hartford at about 9:30, and Mr. Clemens was awaiting us in a carriage, his youngest daughter, Jean, by his side. Along the way we stopped at a country store to pick up various vegetables to be cooked for supper. He called me My Lady, and he could not have been more courteous. He seemed quite delighted to play the host, though he missed Stanley’s presence.

“Well, I’m happy that you’ve come,” he told us.

As I had imagined, and as described by Stanley, his house was majestic, a fairy-tale-like place with turrets that suggested witches’ hats, great hallways, and winding stairs. Its shape reminded me of a riverboat. In his parlor was a large Gothic fireplace transplanted from a Scottish castle, and one of the ceilings had been inlaid with mariners’ stars, I believe. And though there was a sense of gaiety about the place, Mr. Clemens seemed more solemn than he had been when we saw him in New York. Nevertheless we had a pleasant discussion that day about the novelist Anatole France — Mr. Clemens was reading The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard , a book that greatly impressed him. He seemed to dote on Mother, who took an immediate liking to him. His daughter Clara performed songs for us on the piano; and Jean, having experimented with some poetry, declaimed several new verses for us. Mrs. Clemens was still in mourning over her mother’s recent passing and was laid low with what Clemens hoped was a “mind problem.” She did manage to muster herself from her bed for most of the day, and it was obvious to both Mother and I that our company was a burden on her: Yet she was cheerful and grateful, filling us in on the latest caprices of one of their famous neighbors, Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin , who lived just next door and would, even while we were there, arrive unannounced and wander through the rooms of the house in her bedroom slippers, whooping and howling at times. She would sit down at the piano and even as we were in the midst of a conversation begin to play and sing, and then, just as suddenly, she would get up and leave the room. She returned with some flowers cut from the Clemens’s own greenhouse, which she presented as a gift to Livy; then she began to question Mother and me as to whether we had read her most famous novel. When we told her that we had, she asked if we had a copy of it to reread on our journey. When we told her that we did not, she insisted on bringing over a copy. We went along with it, taking into account that she was obviously plunging into senility — Mr. Clemens made several discreet comic gestures with his eyes at her eccentricity, and Mrs. Clemens told us that as a general practice the neighbors in Nook Farm had grown accustomed to her waywardness. Clearly she had descended into a second childhood of sorts. I could not help but wonder if the solitude that writers experience day in and day out, with work that does not bring them into close intercourse with “society,” might hasten such mental decline.

In this regard I would say that Clemens was about as well balanced as Stanley, who looked upon his writing duties as plain work, disturbed as he might be by its tedium. Like Stanley, Clemens, on the whole, seemed remarkably grounded: a famous family man, pestered by responsibilities, moody — I had seen him shouting at one of the cats in a sudden spurt of anger — but generally even-tempered.

As I wanted to make a painting of him eventually, I took the liberty of making some pencil sketches of Clemens as we sat by the fine fireplace. Sitting before the hearth, he had dozed for some minutes, but then a snort, when one of his cats jumped up on his lap, awakened him. He apologized: We laughed. I showed him my rudimentary sketch. Pleased, he said: “I don’t hate it, which is a good thing for me.”

After dinner, a sleep of quietude — a welcome change from the incessant clamor of New York. In the morning, after breakfast, he drove us to the station; shortly we arrived back in New York, where I rejoined my husband and his colleague Dr. Parke. A few days later, we embarked on our tour.

THEY WENT FROM NEW YORK to many cities on the East Coast, then they came back for a banquet at the New York Press Club; then they went to Chicago (on February 14), then on to California (Los Angeles) on March 21. On Sunday, March 29, Stanley reached New Orleans after a thirty-two-year absence.

From Stanley’s Journal, circa 1893, Relating How He Later Came to Write about His Early Days with Samuel Clemens

HAVING JOURNEYED TO NEW ORLEANS by private train in early 1891 as part of an itinerary of some one hundred engagements across the United States, with several stops in Canada, I had not expected how touched I would be by those distant yet familiar surroundings. The tour itself had, to that point, been a matter of fulfilling an obligation. Though I was still exhausted from my recent Africa travels and would have been content to stay home with my new bride in England, I had undertaken this tour to make amends to my American agent, Major Pond. Four years earlier, in the autumn of 1886, while lecturing in the northeast — after having attracted some very good press notices, a result of successful engagements in Hartford and Boston, where I had been introduced to my audiences by old friend Samuel Clemens — I was soon flooded with offers from all parts of the country; so many, in fact, that Major Pond was kept quite busy in his New York office making adjustments to my schedule day by day. By that mid-December of 1886, just as the offers continued to pour in and I had completed my eleventh lecture, in Amherst, with some eighty-nine more to come — as per my original contract with Major Pond — a telegram from William Mackinnon arrived at my hotel. It was an urgent summons to England, advising me to drop everything and move forward with the final preparations for an armed expedition to relieve the Emin Pasha, governor of the southernmost province of Equatoria, then under siege by the forces of the Mahdi in a stronghold near Lake Albert, his life being in imminent danger.

As it had been a condition of my original agreement with Mr. Pond that I could cancel my tour at any time given such an emergency, I quickly booked passage back to Southampton — to Mr. Pond’s heartbreak, but not without having first given him my word that I would later return to complete my contractual obligations should I survive the ordeal that awaited me.

So it was that after four years of rigorous travel I found myself in the limelight again. It was no easy thing for me to face the public at that time (or any time), for though my return from Africa had been at first received with great jubilation, some rather severe and startling attacks on the nature of my command had begun to appear in the press within a few months. One particular aspect of my account in In Darkest Africa —in regard to the cruel and irrational behavior of the officer commanding my rear column, the late Major Barttelot, who was responsible for many unnecessary native deaths — had come under question. His family, rushing to the dead man’s defense, and naturally wishing to restore his good name, had launched a campaign to discredit my reputation and abilities. Joining them were others, principally Lieutenant Troup, who not only made claims against my moral character but also reported on the unsavory activities of certain of my other officers. Altogether, though I ultimately made a successful case in my defense, it remained an ordeal, for I had to spend countless hours, in England and in America, submitting myself to long and tedious interviews with journalists, answering every kind of inquiry, and living under magnified scrutiny, as if I were in court and under indictment for a crime.