Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Surely I know that your grief must be a thousand times greater than what I felt that day, but I must tell you that not all is over with her, that for those of us who truly believe in the compassion of heaven, she is surely in His hands and in that realm where there is neither pain nor suffering but only love: And though her physical absence from this world presses upon your waking days, I suspect that she is the very air around you at every moment, watching and loving you as surely as any fine daughter would her loving father.

BY THE TIME CLEMENS VISITED the Stanleys again, in mid-1897, he had already reluctantly made the decision to rejoin the world. In April, allowing that it would not be so bad for his daughters to get about without him, he purchased two bicycles by mail order from Manchester so that the girls might ramble through London, as young girls should. (Clara took to her new freedom, attending London piano concerts, but Jean, with her delicate health, confined herself to ambles around the square.) He tried to encourage Livy to get out as well, but she, save for a few excursions to a local market to pick out cuts of beef and some vegetables, preferred to stay home. Despite the secrecy surrounding him, his whereabouts were eventually discovered: While only a handful of people knew where he was residing in London, he had been in correspondence with Stanley’s old employer James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald , for whom both men had written, about a few lucrative assignments (one was to cover the queen’s upcoming Diamond Jubilee), but there was also, to Clemens’s embarrassment, the matter of a subscription fund that Mr. Bennett, perhaps for the sake of publicity (Stanley said of Bennett that he “did not have one kind or selfless bone in his body”), had started up on Clemens’s behalf in America. Reacting to the secrecy that shrouded his life, the newspapers published rumors that Clemens was living in great poverty and illness, or that he had been abandoned by his family; at one point Clemens was rumored to be dead. To all this, Clemens put an end in an interview he gave at his home on Tedworth Square to a reporter who had tracked him down by making inquiries at the Chelsea Library that late spring: “For someone said to be dead I am doing reasonably well. I am writing; my family is indeed with me; and if I am dying I do not know it yet, and in any case I am not doing so any faster than anybody else.” And, most famously, he was quoted as saying: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.”

From Lady Stanley’s Journal, circa June 3–4, 1897

WE DID NOT SEE MR. CLEMENS or his family until the late spring, when, at long last, with the weather much improved and with his newest work nearly completed, the harshest period of his mourning had seemingly passed, for after months of notes passing back and forth between us (I often corresponded with his wife, Livy, who was in a laconic state in those days, but she seemed interested in hearing about our doings), there came to us a missive in Mr. Clemens’s own hand saying that they would indeed come to visit us for supper — news that my husband regarded with joy. It relieved him greatly to hear that Mr. Clemens would be getting around again, for his own state of mind during the previous few months was somewhat melancholic, mainly because of matters of health. In that period he had come down with two bouts of malaria, one mild, the other, in early May, agonizing. Lost to the world for weeks at a time, his body burning with fever and his speech slurred and rambling, his greatest solace remained the company of Denzil, whom, during periods of distress, I would carry into the room and place on the bed beside my husband.

“Ah, it is worth getting well now!” he’d say.

In contrast to my own disposition, he professed little interest in social engagements. As much as I liked to go out, my husband did not, and I made it a habit to attend many a function without him — whether in the company of Mother or one of my platonic male friends (Henry James, John Singer Sargent, and the recently departed John Everett Millais among them).

ON THE OTHER HAND, I came to dislike the quarrels that we, like all couples, had. We particularly argued about what he considered my snobbish and prissy crowd; there were days when he, somewhat put off by the joy I had for life and its gaieties, as he called them, would lash out at me with such venom that Mother and I feared he might actually strike me. When such disruptions took place in hotel rooms, and were overheard by bellboys, the outbursts were communicated to the snooping press, which explained the rumors that haunted Stanley during our early tours — that he was a wife beater. He shouted at me but never lifted a finger against my person; and in the multiplication of such fables, it was said that he was an adulterer as well — all rumors against which he had to defend his reputation.

WHEN THE CLEMENSES came to our home for supper we were, of course, determined that Samuel and his wife should pass the evening without hearing any mention of their late daughter and were resolved to avoid the subject. Filling the parlor and dining room with freshly cut flowers, we removed from plain sight any reminders of death, such as an early Renaissance painting from Siena that I had always fancied, which depicted Lazarus rising from his tomb. Among other guests, we invited the author Bram Stoker, who had been most charming at our Christmas fete. And as Livy had once expressed to me an interest in spiritualist matters, I took the liberty of inviting my brother-in-law Frederic Myers and my sister Eveleen, should there arise the possibility of Livy’s broaching the subject.

Stanley awaited their arrival in his study, mulling over his autobiography, but mainly he rested, having awakened the night before anxiously. That morning, when I had inquired as to what had distressed him so, he told me about a curious dream in which he was a clock boy whose job it was to crawl about inside the great works of Big Ben, smearing its gears with grease. In the midst of crawling about, while the gears of the machinery were turning, his sleeve got caught in one of the machine’s teeth, and he found himself on the verge of being mangled before his own cries of anxiety awakened him.

“Surely as I sit here before you, I am being swept up by time: Dolly, please, let us make the best of what I have left of my life.”

He took it as a presentiment that this dream should coincide with the impending arrival, after an extended absence, of a longtime friend whose sufferings had been many. In his heightened awareness of the passage of time, he wondered if he had indeed always acted toward Samuel as a good friend should.

“Dolly, have I ever let him down in any way?” he asked me that afternoon.

“No, I think not.”

“We did go to see him at Guildford; this I would not have done for anyone else. Surely he must know that.”

“He values your friendship.”

“But why do I sometimes doubt my standing with him?”

“You have that strain in you — a doubtful nature.”

“As of late I have been troubled over the way I turned down his offer to publish my last book; perhaps it might have saved his business.”

“As you know, Stanley, his list was overloaded with esoteric titles; it was bound for bankruptcy.”

“I should have helped him. The truth is that I could have given him something, even a children’s tale; or I could have written something with him in tandem — he had often spoken to me of that, but I always turned a deaf ear to that idea. And now I wish I hadn’t.”