WHEN HE WAS NOT ILL, he remained as energetic as any man. The lack of a great challenge had left him restless. As he easily tired of London society, Mother and I, thinking it an honorable profession that Father would have approved of, persuaded Stanley to give up his American citizenship and stand for a seat in the House of Commons as a Liberal Unionist candidate for the North Lambeth district in London. Ours was a rushed decision, and Stanley entered the contest just ten days before the polling would take place, in late June. Refusing to go door to door, to call personally on voters, or to loll about in pubs and meetinghouses, he preferred to rely upon the carefully prepared speeches that he, as a son of the working class, would give at labor clubs and assemblies. Such experiences, however, did not go well at first. During a speech at Hawkstone Hall, Lambeth, it seemed not to matter what he said, for he was heckled by an organized rabble from the opposition, his every word shouted down.
“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.
Stanley was delighted to receive it, searching, as he always did when receiving anything from Clemens, for an inscription on its title page: Reading it over to himself, he showed it to me. It said: TO THE HAPPY NEWLYWEDS. MAY IT ALWAYS BE SO FOR YOU. SAM CLEMENS.
“This is fine indeed: I will read it tomorrow,” Stanley told him. Then: “I do not know if you have received my latest on the Emin Pasha expedition, In Darkest Africa,” he said. “I know that I asked Major Pond to make sure that you had a set.”
“I do.”
“And your opinion of it?”
“You know I like your writing, Henry; you must work harder than anyone—I was in on the birth of it. I remember your letter from Cairo about the book and how quickly it was written. How many words are in it?”
“About six hundred thousand, more or less.”
“In how many days?”
“Eighty-six.”
“My God! And all the things you put in it—maps, drawings, letters, lists—how on earth you did it I cannot imagine, but you did! It reads like a novel, almost—but some new kind of novel, I should say. Closest I ever got to something like that… well, it was Life on the Mississippi. Of course I admire it for the sheer audacity of the thing. Well done, Henry: And I am saying that despite my own feelings about the situation there. But as a work, well, I’ve got to hand it to you. I am admiring of it.”
“Thank you, Samuel. Coming from you, that means a lot to me.”
Stanley’s face had flushed, and he looked into Clemens’s eyes, which had briefly but intensely focused on his own.
“I do mean it. You’ve turned into one of the most muscular writers in the world. But I couldn’t help noticing that you dedicated that book to King Léopold: I don’t like him, Henry.”
“That is a pity. He is a well-intentioned man in a difficult situation: The Congo does things to men’s souls. Unkind things sometime happen.”
(HERE STANLEY DAYDREAMED for a moment. He remembered the first time he spoke with Léopold. One evening in 1878, in the wake of his second expedition, after the most lavish of dinners, they had gone strolling in the gardens of his palace at Ostend, and the king, humbled by Stanley’s explorations and lavishly praising him, a “common churl,” as the greatest of explorers, had broached the subject of retaining his services in the Congo. The king had an immediate advantage. At some six feet four, he towered over Stanley, but despite this, he continually dropped his head low and slouched his shoulders; at every other moment he seemed to pause, bending low to pick at some blossom, his sentences coming when he, at a lower altitude, met Stanley eye to eye. That night he confessed his personal failings.
The sky was a dark blue, and the silhouettes of cypress trees, punctuating the horizon, dozed under the stars.
“What am I but a king who looks around and sees the world in a state of sorrow? I see the suffering all around me, and I become ashamed of my easy life. What is the purpose of mankind other than to better the condition of the lower orders?” Then: “What have I, a master of a great but modest land, to gain from risking my wealth to help some heathens, unless it would come to some good? No, Monsieur Stanley,” he said as he slipped into French. “Je suis sincère.” That very night, as the king paused to sniff some blossom’s fragrance, Stanley told him that, upon returning to England, he would give the matter about Africa some thought. It involved Stanley returning to the Congo, with the aim of acquiring, by lease, native territories that the king would oversee. England—and, for that matter, the United States—with other territorial ambitions, had no interest in such enlightened expansions. When Stanley looked at him somewhat apprehensively, the king, a merry fellow who loved the fellatios of Paris brothels, laughed. “Besides, I will pay you well.” Then: “Come, now: You are already greater than any other explorer—why not become the Alexander of Africa?”)
CLEMENS, NO DOUBT, had been exposed to certain exaggerated reports of violence done to the Africans in that region, a subject that always soured Stanley’s relish of his own accomplishments. Even I sometimes imagined that my husband despaired that he could not do more to control the cruel actions of men, which were far out of his control. It was the one thing that made him regret his decision to disengage himself from the activities there—for even if a small percentage of such reports were true, it would reflect badly upon his legacy as a man who had sought to bring good to the region.
“At any rate, Henry: As you know, I have a publishing venture back home; it’s often occurred to me that we should do something for it. Perhaps a book about the ‘old days’ of our youth. Does this hold an interest for you?”
“It is something that we can surely discuss.”
This was followed by a silence.
“And how do you find Germany?” I asked Mr. Clemens.
“Oh, it’s a fair enough place. The food is so-so. Not as good as the French make. But the culture is high, though wasted on lowbrows like me. Wagner operas are pretty but too long. A few months ago we went to a ten-day opera festival in Bayreuth. I slept through most of them—they work like a knockout potion on me. But note for note, you get your money’s worth. Still, I have to say the Germans are a civilized people. And they are into pomp: I’ve taken my older daughters to the kaiser’s fetes—grand balls held in his palace. I’ve signed books for him—‘to William II’: Imagine a boy from Hannibal doing that. We meet everyone of importance but live humbly there. At our hotel in Berlin, we can see the kaiser’s carriage passing by on the street in the mornings—we’re on the first floor, as Livy’s not much on climbing stairs these days.” Then: “She hasn’t been well of late.”
The thought subdued him.
“Is she all right?” my husband asked.
“I would like to say that she is, and she works hard to seem like she is. She never wants to bother me with her condition—and she has some days better than others. But it makes one start to feel old.”
Then: “Anyway, Livy has gone from one thing to the other. She has something called erysipelas, a skin infection; and worse, she suffers from Graves’ disease, which has a bad effect in weakening her heart. I have only left her out of the most urgent necessity. It’s not been an easy time.” Then: “And you, Stanley? How goes your health?”
“It goes as always, Sam. I never know from month to month if something will trigger my malaria.”
“If that’s the worst of your troubles, it deserves a toast. Let’s find the bar.”
And with that, Clemens asked our leave. He and Stanley went off to the men’s billiard room of the hotel. As I left I heard Clemens toasting, “To malaria and all the goddamned things in this world!”
WHEN STANLEY LATER RETURNED HOME, sometime past seven, with Clemens in tow, I should say they were in rather high spirits. Clemens was singing some old spiritual, cheerfully; at first Stanley brought him into our parlor to show him the Edison cylinder machine we had received as a wedding gift from the inventor. Then he took him into his study to show off the many African artifacts he had mounted on the walls—spears and war axes, necklaces and pieces of primitive art (among many other things), as well as the great many volumes of books in his library. Clemens sat smoking, with a whiskey in hand, looking over one book and the next while Stanley, excited as a child, pulled some special and very old volumes off the shelf.
“That is an original edition of Suetonius’s Twelve Caesars, as published by Bettesworth and Hitch
in 1732.” Then: “Here is De Quincey.” And: “Gladstone’s Gleanings, signed for us. Not a bad book at all; quite Christian in its outlook.” Then: “These are my Dickenses: David Copperfield. Great Expectations. A Christmas Carol, each bearing the great writer’s signature!”
I was standing by the door to my husband’s study to call them in for dinner—for Clemens had agreed to stay—when I heard Stanley saying: “Old friend, do you mind that I show you these things?”
“Mind? I’d rather sit here comfortably with these books than anywhere else in England,” he answered. I felt slightly intrusive as I reminded them that dinner was waiting: I had not seen Stanley quite so enthused about anything in quite a while. “If there are any of my books that you would like for your own,” he declared as we made our way to the dining room, “feel that they are yours to take with you.” I’d never heard Stanley say such a thing before, not with any other visitor. “You are my friend, after all. A brother in letters, if not more.” Then, tenderly, Stanley said: “You know, Samuel, I will never forget some of the things you have done for me.”
THE DINNER—WHAT COULD BE SAID of it? Roasted quail and potatoes with a pottage of vegetables—our usual kind of fare. My husband, enlivened by having shown Clemens his new study, could not restrain himself from describing more of it. It was as if he were a boy rather than an explorer that evening, so happily disposed was he to Clemens’s presence. He’d even gotten up to bring a large framed montage of explorers’ photographs he’d made from the likenesses of Baker, Speke, Burton, and Livingstone. And if Mr. Clemens’s wineglass went empty, Stanley filled it himself; and he loosened his collar and spoke highly of his friend: “Yes, you are the best that America has to offer in letters—there’s no finer writer than you.”