Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

I hope it will interest you (for I have no one else who would much care to know it) that here lately the dread of leaving the children in difficult circumstances has died down and disappeared. I am now having peace from that long, long financial nightmare and can sleep as well as anyone. It seems that with one thing and another and with much good management and advice from my benefactor, Mr. H. H. Rogers (head of Standard Oil), I have finally come out of debt. Every little while, for these three years now, Mrs. Clemens has sat down in the evenings with pencil and paper to tally up our accounts. Two nights ago I was still a worrier, but last night, she reminded me that we own a house and furniture in Hartford; that my English and American copyrights pay an income that represents a value of $200,000; and that we have $107,000 cash in the bank. What a boost to my spirits! I suddenly feel like a free man again.

Lovingly,

Samuel

P.S. I have been out and bought a box of six-cent cigars; I was smoking four-and-a-half-centers before.

Hotel Krantz

August 24, 1898

To the Stanleys,

We’ve enjoyed Vienna to a point, but since the war in Cuba has ended, and on the heel of our “liberating” invasion of the Philippines, most folks around here (including myself) have gotten the notion that the United States is playing the empire game. The Austrians, who once flocked to our parlor — and have not been shy about heaping admiration upon me, despite my known disapproval of their local politics — have been receiving us far less warmly than before, even coolly. As we are being lumped in with the brutish notion of American aggression, and as Clara has finished her piano studies (her teachers have concluded that her hands are too small to overcome the technical demands of certain pieces, so she has decided to become a singer instead), we are planning on leaving soon enough — to sightsee, take some cures (Livy and I and Jean) where we can, and eventually to settle in England again, for a short time, at least.

Of course, we will see you then, dear friends.

Lovingly yours,

Samuel

From Lady Stanley’s Journal, Regarding the Years 1898–99

DURING OUR YEARS OF MARRIAGE, for our occasional escapes, we had prevailed upon the respite of inns at seaside resorts such as Brighton and Llandudno or upon the generosity of friends who would invite us out to their estates, where Stanley indulged in hunting small game and I made studies from nature, Denzil always by my side. Stanley, however, had grown dissatisfied with our life in London and, seeking a permanent retreat we could call our own, decided to look for a property in the countryside. Mother was none too happy about the proposed change; Stanley felt otherwise. While there were certain advantages and comforts to be had in the capital, with its societies, theaters, and gentlemen’s clubs, he had lost his taste for the public life and perhaps wished to put some distance between himself and his detractors, of which there were many. After a long period of professional torpor, in which he seemed to move through his days with little interest in the tedious duties awaiting him in Parliament, Stanley awakened one morning to announce his intentions. Mainly he desired, at long last, “a home to call my own,” a home that he could configure in his own image and where he might spend his last years, whenever they might come, in peace amid his family and the things he loved the most — his books, his artifacts, and his maps, all of which brought him comfort.

Much as Mother disliked the idea, Stanley stood firm.

“By God, woman, do you not know that it is now my time to find some peace at last? Do you not know that I am tired and in need of a rest?”

Over the summer and into the first weeks of autumn in 1898, when Parliament was in recess, he spent many days looking at various properties, some fifty-seven of them in total, outside London, in the Home Counties, mainly in Surrey. But there was one estate of some seventy acres, near the town of Pirbright, thirty-five miles southwest of London, in the midst of farm country, that he returned to again and again: Furze Hill.

A “real beauty,” he said, “but one in need of a little care, I will admit.”

The photographs of that place were, frankly, a bit off-putting, for the house, a rather grotesquely overwrought Tudor ruin some two hundred years old, seemed to be falling apart. With its overgrowth of ivy, and with trees and bushes that practically enveloped the whole premises and crept up its turreted towers — for the grounds had apparently not been attended to for years — it seemed the kind of dwelling where a coven of witches might live; yet Stanley had his heart set on it.

“The price is quite reasonable,” he told me. “Besides, it seems like me.”

Whatever my original reservations about the property were, they were only enhanced by the journey we made there one day by train in the early autumn of 1898, just before Stanley was about to purchase it. (“Of course I will buy it only if you approve,” he said.) When we arrived at the Brookwood station from Waterloo, and made our way by hired carriage to Furze Hill, as we entered the grounds, not only did the stony mansion seem more dilapidated and gray than it was in the photographs (it did not help that the weather was grim), the surrounding property seemed covered with an oily greenish scum. At least it seemed to be a quiet sort of place. But then, too, on that day, we heard from the distance the firing of cannons. “What is that?” I asked Stanley.

“Oh, the cannons? Just a bit of a military exercise in progress. You see,” he said rather happily, “the properties surrounding us belong to the British Army: they come out here every several months to drill. The main thing is that we will be absolutely left alone, with few neighbors to disturb us.”

Mother was speechless. Proceeding toward the ruins, she looked at me several times, as she sometimes did, as if to say, “Stanley is mad,” but as much as this suspicion also occasionally entered my mind, I realized that for the first time in years, Stanley seemed happy. Taking us through the house itself (some forty rooms), up half-collapsed stairways and into musty chambers whose ceilings had fallen down — many a room filled with piles of debris as well as the remains of private belongings, including beds, cabinets, and chamber pots — he seemed not at all perturbed. What most enchanted him was the evidence of craftsmanship, which he, with his sharp eye for detail, found everywhere.

Whatever it lacked in aesthetic grace, the mansion must have been a solid enough structure to have lasted so long — like Stanley — and the amount of stonework in the entranceways, the fireplaces, and the friezes seemed fantastic to him. Every room had an elaborate wrought-iron gate in the doorways, and, rusted though they might have been, Stanley delighted in swinging them open. “Can you imagine the man-hours involved?” he asked. Of course Mother was aghast at the thought of anyone except ghosts living there, but I remained tolerant of his interest.

“Can’t you see,” he said to me one day, “that with a little work it could be as fine as any house I have ever seen — as fine and individual a house as what Sam Clemens built in Hartford?”

I did not particularly like that place, but then, to that point, Stanley had never denied me anything I had wanted. And so when he asked me, “What do you think?” even when I found it one of the gloomiest houses I had ever visited, I told him, “It’s wonderful.”