Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Whatever I have achieved in life has been achieved by my own hard work, with no help from privilege or favor of any kind. My strongest sympathies are with the working classes… and as such I see myself endeavoring to better the conditions of the masses…” He had just finished saying these words when the stage upon which we were seated was stormed and we were forced to flee to our carriage.

Despite our late entry into the fray, Stanley, on the strength of his reputation and great patriotism, lost by only one hundred and thirty votes. And while he had no great love for electioneering, he promised to continue on as a candidate for the next election, Along the way came other interludes of travel, mainly for reasons of his unsteady health, which by then had begun to trouble me, as these affected his mood. We rarely argued, but what arguments did take place seemed to come about from his continuing discomforts, which enfeebled him, and putting him in the care of others seemed to shame Stanley. In that state, he preferred to be left alone; he would enter into weeklong periods of isolation, when he would rarely venture from our house. Otherwise, even when good health found him, it was only an exceptional person who could rouse him from his seclusion, as happened one June afternoon in 1892, when we learned that Samuel Clemens had arrived in London from Berlin, on his way back to America.

On Mr. Twain

WHAT I UNDERSTOOD FROM STANLEY of Mr. Clemens’s situation in those days was that the great American writer had been undergoing some rather difficult times in regard to his finances and health. An entrepreneur, Clemens had started his own publishing house in the 1880s, Charles L. Webster and Company, through which he put out his own books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn being the first. His greatest success came with the publication of the autobiography of Ulysses S. Grant, in 1885, which sold many hundreds of copies. Despite profits from it, Clemens had taken a ruinous loss through a gamble on another book, Life of Pope Leo XIII, as neither Catholics nor Protestants bought that pious volume, and several other of his publishing ventures had also failed or not come to fruition. But what money he had made over the years from his own popular writings and from the Webster publishing company turned to air, for he had poured huge amounts into the development of a typesetting machine, the completion of which its inventor — a certain Mr. Paige — much delayed, at great expense to Clemens.

Clemens had written Stanley a few letters that mentioned these reversals, but never had he prevailed upon my husband for any funds and referred to his decision to move with his family to Europe as one made out of a concern for his wife’s health. Since we had last seen them, two years before, Livy had begun to suffer from a crippling rheumatism and heart palpitations that left her faint, short of breath, and listless. And one of their daughters, the youngest, Jean, at the age of twelve, had come down with some unusual symptoms of her own, her sweet personality suddenly changing. Clemens himself, in the urgency of his financial need, was driven to write many hours each and every day to raise money, to the point where his right arm became practically paralyzed. One of the letters that awaited Stanley on our return from Australia, in mid-1892, had arrived from Berlin, where Clemens and his family had been staying for some months. Clemens’s script was unrecognizable, as he had taken to writing with his left hand.

“What’s hardest,” he had written to Stanley, “is that we have decided to leave our beloved house in Connecticut. When we will return I do not know — I hope it will be soon; but I have found positions for my coachman of twenty-one years and my butler, George, and have left behind my two most trusted servants to look after the place. You may ask if I am happy to be traveling again: The answer is no! But do I find it necessary. The ‘cures’ of Europe will be good for us all; and it’s a cheaper way of living, to be sure.”

It is a curious thing that while we were vacationing in Switzerland, Clemens and his family were at Marienbad, taking the bath cures. Knowing Clemens, he had become convinced that his old friend, with so many pressures in his life, had entered into a melancholic state.

“Were I in a better condition,” he told me, “I would go to him tomorrow.”

THEY FINALLY ARRANGED TO MEET at Claridge’s for four o’clock tea, with my mother and me coming along. Stanley took a place beside us at a banquette, his hands cupped over the head of a cane, which he still needed, looking about each time someone entered the room. When Clemens walked in, some few minutes after the hour, he was instantly recognized by the patrons, who applauded his entrance. Clemens, majestic in a white linen suit, his hair streaming madly from his head, nodded and smiled at them as he made his way toward us. Stanley got up immediately and seemed genuinely moved to see him again. Not one to smile, Stanley easily did so then.

“Samuel Clemens, how the deuces are you?” Stanley happily said.

Clemens was affable that afternoon, quite complimentary of me, and actually doting on my mother. He seemed to find it amusing that Stanley was running for Parliament—“A dark rumor I heard at the Blackfriars Club; is it so?”—but he also seemed rather weary, even apprehensive. I do not recall if he made a joke about being in reduced circumstances, but as he sat with us he mentioned that his trip to America was necessary because of “urgent business matters.” His right arm seemed somewhat better than what we had expected: The cures he had taken had improved his condition to the point where he could lift his elbow above his shoulder, something he said he could not do for the longest time: “Made me feel like an injured bird,” he told us. The baths in mud are messy but remarkable, he allowed. Another help to the bodily maladies, he mentioned, was something he called the mind cure.

“Do you folks know of it? Learned it years ago from a governess we once had. It works by sheer willpower. But you have to really concentrate on putting the malady out of your thoughts. Anyway, this method seems to work nicely with stomachaches and such, if you can stop thinking about your troubled innards.”

“I doubt it would work with malaria,” my husband said. “Many is the time I have been stricken and wished it would go away. It just doesn’t happen.”

“Everything is harder in our years, Henry. We are no longer at an age when such things come easily. Even my memory is lagging lately: Don’t know if it’s business that does it, or just plain worries, but names leave me more easily these days. It’s getting old, isn’t it?”

“I think not,” my husband said. “The longer you live, the more things you have to remember, and I would imagine there’s only so much room in the human mind.”

“I’ll allow that might be so, Henry, but why is it — and I address this to Mrs. Tennant as well — that it is easier to remember some things from childhood than the name of a gentleman you just met in a crowded room?”

“You will always remember persons of interest,” my mother said. “Most individuals are not worth remembering.”

“I can see that — and yet even the best-remembered and fondest things get all scrambled up when you remember them, don’t they? How I wish in these days to recall only the things that make me happy. It would be a kind of paradise, wouldn’t it?”

HE TOLD US that he would be giving a lecture at the Garrick Club in London, and he asked if Stanley would be kind enough to introduce him. (Stanley said he would.) He said that he was writing travel letters for a New York paper, the Sun , as I recall, and working on a book, a historical novel, the subject of which he would not mention, having some superstitious sense of secrecy about it. (This I would read years later; the book was about Joan of Arc.) And, as a gift, he had brought along “another ditty that has somehow tumbled out from my pen,” a copy of his latest novel, The American Claimant , which had just been published in May. “A humble effort for your library,” he told us.