Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

AS HE HAD PROMISED DOLLY that his days of exploration were over, Stanley became an election campaigner again. Giving speeches in social clubs, pubs, and meeting rooms throughout the North Lambeth district — just across the river, over Westminster Bridge — he never deigned to canvass his constituents door-to-door or to shake a single hand if he could avoid it. However he stood on the issues — regarding Africa or regarding the ongoing debate about whether Ireland should be given home rule (he was against it) — and despite the lackluster nature of his speeches, because of his fame, and because he was running as an “illustrious son of the working class,” he won. The very night his victory was proclaimed — at midnight, by way of a red flare fired over the rooftops of North Lambeth, the sky flushing pink — his wife, Dorothy, dozing on a lounge in the attic of the Liberal Unionist Club, awakened to the cheers of Stanley’s constituents, who, gathered as a great and frenzied crowd below, had carried Stanley into the hall on their shoulders. Rushing down the stairs, she was on hand to see Stanley, ashen-faced and listless, as his supporters set him down atop a table. In contrast to the jubilance of his constituency, he was neither excited nor happy in his bearing, as he regarded the whole business as a mistake, another burden to contend with. His expression was solemn, and though just a few scant years before he might have attempted to make a stirring speech — as if such fleeting moments of glory were of importance — he simply looked around and, thanking the boozy crowd, bid his constituents good night. No speech, no flowing rivers of appreciation — he just wanted to go home and smoke. His hands were cold, his manner sullen, and when he and Dorothy rode a hansom cab to Richmond Terrace, the subject of his election had already settled in his gut as a most disagreeable thing. En route home, he told Dolly that he did not wish to discuss it. Settled into a chair in his library, he sat alone until the early hours of the morning, smoking Havana cigars — his only movement to dash out a cigar and light a new one. Occasionally he would reach out for some book or other to leaf through it — but he did not speak to anyone for days.

STANLEY TOOK HIS SEAT in the House of Commons in August of 1895. The atmosphere at Parliament he found asphyxiating. To be herded in, like sheep, in the mornings — to sit in an airless, overcrowded room among some three hundred and fifty members, listening to addresses, mainly about the “Irish question,” in which he had no particular interest — was beyond him. Even when issues pertinent to his knowledge about Africa were being debated, he rarely caught the Speaker’s eye: his raised hand, his thumps on the table, and his cane clacking the floor went unnoticed. Worse was the absence of light, which he found depressing, and for a man who had spent endless hours walking in the open air of the wilds, the atmosphere of those chambers, with their closed windows — the Thames stank — was stifling. The river’s bilious and unsanitary miasmas were kept at bay by panes of glass, but the air inside, defined by body smells, colognes, tobacco smoke, and hair tonic, was nearly nauseating. He’d come home at a late hour feeling more exhausted, he’d say, than he had been on his marches.

He might have had a future as a statesman had he the patience for the consuming intricacies of parliamentary procedures, but it all bored him: Further, he felt himself a loner, and he found the clubbishness of the house’s members, who separated themselves along class lines, irritating. Prone to the nostalgia of a man who thought his best years were behind him, and missing his adventures, he often felt that his life was over.

YET DOLLY SEEMED CONTENT, and, all in all, during those rare moments when Stanley had a few hours to do as he pleased, which was to sit in his study and read, the enterprise of matrimony seemed to him reasonable enough. Dolly, however spoiled she had been in life, seemed to truly care for him; on many an afternoon, that thought alone was enough to assuage his occasionally bitter feelings of containment and the sense that the domestic life he’d always longed for was nothing more than a prison.

He rarely wrote anything that he considered important — countless notes relating to social engagements; a few letters to the newspapers (but mainly his old fire and indignation had left him); lectures he would give here and there about Africa — but in those years, with his original glory faded and with his reputation somewhat eroded by increasing reports about native abuse in the Congo, he did so as a relic of the past, the specter of greatness having faded from the public’s perception of him. Even his attempts at writing his autobiography stalled: Relegating the pages he had once written during his tour of the States and Australia to the bottom of a trunk, Stanley managed, during several bouts of concentrated writing at quiet seaside resorts, to produce the portion of manuscript relating to his youthful years through the Civil War that would serve as the official version of those years. But once he had reached that point, wherein he much enjoyed the process of describing just how Henry Morton Stanley came to be, it was as if he could write no more on the subject, his will to do so sapped by emotions he found unbearable.

At fifty-five, as much as he tried to, he could never forget that, once upon a time, he had been an unwanted child, a lowly sort loved by no one. With each new line he wrote, that awareness came back to him: That he still felt himself an “orphan” rankled him. It was an illusion, of course — all men end up being orphaned by death — but as he ruminated over the fact that his life had been spent in the servitude of others and in the pursuit of “empty glory,” he searched his mind for the single thing that might make him happy — to give someone what he had wanted himself: a father.

HERE FOLLOWS A LETTER Stanley wrote to Samuel Clemens at that time of his ruminations: Clemens, then staying at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, was about to embark on a worldwide tour to pay off his debts; Stanley had helped Clemens with arrangements for the Australian leg of his journey by introducing him, by mail, to his own promoter in that country, Carlyle Greenwood Smythe.

June 12, 1895

Dear Samuel,

It seems our correspondences as of late have had much to do with business and the details of tours and lectures.

I am, as you may deduce, a little weary from my post-Africa life. I am now declining, without a doubt, in vitality: My marriage has been the best of it, but in other ways, Samuel, I have been feeling restless. It’s not that I do not enjoy the company of people, but there is so much small talk and so little time for the important things that I have been feeling robbed: If I were an hourglass, I would be one for whom most of the sands have run out. Time — what is it but a measure of mutually agreed-upon units marking our passage through the world? I have little doubt that the endlessness of it all, or our illusion of its endlessness, is just a psychological device that we humans employ to keep ourselves sane. How else can one bear the quickening of the gap between the dawn of one’s consciousness in infancy with the indifferent and rushing present?

At least in the days when we met, back before the pleasant illusion that was the South crumbled and became what it is today, before the romantic caprice that said slavery was a noble thing as long as it was conducted equitably and with concern for the slaves’ “human comforts”—as long as “civilization” flourished splendidly — you and I could enjoy our youth. Remember then, Samuel, how lovely the Mississippi once looked to us? It was not so much the actual physical nature of the river itself, lovely as it was — with its luminous moons at night, the shredded violet skies at dusk, the scent of marsh flowers and burning campfires wafting over the waters — as the aspect of the river unfolding endlessly before us, a symbol of our own endless-seeming youth.