Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

“Well, I am taking this one step at a time,” Samuel gloomily answered.

(Privately Stanley thought that Clemens’s altruistic views about saving mankind from itself were half-baked; by his lights, any solution to the world’s problems would only spring forth from a universal moral order — sadly, based on his experience in the Congo, I don’t think he really believed such an order was possible.)

During that meal, Samuel brought up a quite touchy subject: It began with a discussion of the Boer War. Samuel had mentioned a recent visit to London’s docks, where teeming crowds gathered daily to bid farewell to the British regiments as they boarded ships bound for South Africa, all in defense of the empire’s citizens residing in Kruger’s realm, the Transvaal. Their relief was a matter of liberation: Already many brave British young men had died, but Stanley, a die-hard British nationalist, saw it as a just cause, even if he thought it was already lasting too long, for, as he told Clemens, “we have overwhelming armaments.” He added, “If it is dragging on, it is because of the incompetence of our unseasoned generals, who are perhaps not used to fighting against forces who will fight and die for their beliefs in the way that a Yorkshire infantryman in a strange land might not.”

But Clemens saw it differently: “As much as I love England and the way it has treated me as a writer — far more kindly than America — and as much as I believe in the queen and in my Stewart forebears, my heart goes out to the underdog Boers. They are farmers mainly and will surely be crushed sooner or later. And that makes me weep.”

Then, to Stanley: “Do you not see the injustice of a militarily superior nation like Great Britain invading some backwoods territory like South Africa? Whatever momentary defeats are suffered, we all know that Britain, with its Maxim machine guns and cannons, will prevail, and in the meantime, many lives — both Afrikaners and British — will be lost. It disgusts me.”

“My dear Samuel,” Stanley said. “Profess as loudly as you will the very best of sentiments toward people with whom you desire to be on amicable terms, but do not forget, for even a single minute, that human beings are not angels or children to be restrained by sentiment alone. Ours is a predatory world: To invade, to consume, to conquer — and then to rewrite history — is in every people’s blood. Even this war, viewed years from now, will be considered but a step toward the progress of civilization. I, for one, have seen such disputes played out again and again. Believe me, Samuel, however noble you may feel about a cause, there is a contrary and just as adamant opinion. These conflicts just go on and on.”

Then, as he was quite fond of Clemens, he added: “I can see your point, but just remember that however benevolent the intentions of any nation, the actual course of action is inevitably influenced by human failings. Or, to put it differently, Samuel, no matter how noble the cause, once the d — d twits take over, greed presides and morality goes out the window.”

RUMINATING OVER THIS SUBJECT, as Mother and I were trying to cheer the proceedings by pouring a very good port into their glasses, Samuel said:

“But consider Cuba. We invaded the country with good and noble reasons in 1898—to save the long-suffering Cubans from Spain. We overran the island with troops and heavy armaments, and, of course, we eventually won. But in the meantime we — I mean the American forces — by way of a ridiculously abstruse diversion to the Philippines, provoked a war of endless carnage in the name of American imperialism: I can think of no other reason. That we crushed Spain is a fact; but that we had ‘noble reasons’ I doubt.”

“But Samuel, the Philippines will provide the United States with a major port into Southeast Asia — that’s all you have to know. In the end, regardless of the casualties, both liberty and trade will benefit that godforsaken region.”

“Stanley, as much as I respect you, I think you’re a bit narrow in your thinking sometimes! Don’t you care about the innocent people who are hurt and killed during such so-called liberations?”

“I do, but no amount of good sentiments will protect them from the difficulties of war. Whatever you may think, that is the way of the world, Samuel.”

“Nevertheless it’s our flag that is now stained; the eagle of freedom has become a predator.”

Later Clemens referred to himself as an anti-imperialist, a statement that perhaps should have greatly offended Stanley, but he seemed not to mind it at all and gently told Clemens: “Just remember that what is called imperialism today will be meaningless in a hundred years, when the world will be changed in ways that neither you nor I can begin to imagine. What happens now, in our lifetimes, will, in the context of history, only occupy a footnote for future generations, who will by then have long forgotten the events that made their world. History just goes its own way, and all one can wish for is that it proceeds onward with a minimum of human suffering — and in that, I am in total agreement with you, Samuel.”

Thankfully, the Congo was a subject that Clemens never brought up, though it must have been very much on his mind. If he and Stanley did not speak about the controversy it was, I think, because neither man cared to risk endangering their friendship with a discussion that could easily turn adversarial. In general, however they may have felt about each other’s views on politics — that decidedly complicated and dreary subject — a kind of gentlemanly neutrality based on their friendship and mutual admiration seemed to be the rule, at least publicly. (I am not sure if they were really far apart on that many issues.) And, in any case, my husband, at that point in his life, after spending so many years in the midst of various debates about Africa, and frankly preferring to savor his newfound domesticity, had little fight left in him and not much of a taste for the venom of such arguments, certainly not with such a close friend. Besides, except for the letters he sometimes angrily sent off to one newspaper or another, most of which were toned down by the editors, he had largely given up on the struggle to extricate himself from what I had heard him call “Léopold’s mess.”

“One day,” Stanley once told me, “People will look back and think what I did was a good thing.”

SUNDAY EVENING FOUND THEM GATHERED in the parlor, Clemens, to everyone’s joy, performing spirituals on both the piano and guitar. The songs he played (“Go down, Moses,” “I got shoes, you got shoes,” “I know the Lord has laid his hands on me”) seemed to take him and the family back to better times, when such performances were part of any gathering of friends, for this was something that Samuel had not done in years. Then the evening took a turn toward literature, for Lady Stanley asked Clemens if he might read something aloud to them; he did so — first, a curious bit of fiction in which a man is transformed into a microbe and travels through the innards of a distressed intestine, a clever tale that, however imaginative, left Livy mortified. But then he followed it by reading from one of the chapters of his Huckleberry Finn book, prevailing upon Stanley to retrieve his copy for him. (Knowing it to be the very one that Stanley had taken with him to Africa, he was impressed by its pristine condition, as if it had been cared for tenderly — although it did not smell neutral, having a foreign fragrance to it. He was also quite intrigued by Stanley’s penciled notations in the margins of certain pages, and though he did not mention it, his expression conveyed an interest in reading all of them.) He chose one of Stanley’s favorite sections, the chapter (23) wherein Nigger Jim recounts the story of how he learned that his daughter ’Lizabeth was a deaf mute. Throughout this recitation, for reasons he did not know, Stanley could not take his eyes off Clemens. When Samuel, in his mimicry of the Negro dialect, recounted how Jim slapped the girl’s face for not responding to an order, and then, standing behind her, yelled “Pow!” in her ear and discovered that she was deaf — enunciating carefully the passage, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Amighty fogive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!”—Stanley was overcome with emotion, and Dolly noticed the first glimmerings of tears in his eyes. Whether it was Jim’s grief or ’Lizabeth’s suffering that Stanley related to we will never know.