Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise
Such kind words, however, seemed to make Clemens uncomfortable, as he kept shifting about in his seat and looking around the room, as if glancing over at our curio cabinet would change the subject. But once Stanley had decided upon a friendship, there was no limit to his capacity for adulation. In any event, cutting Stanley off just as he began to list the many admirable qualities of Clemens’s work, I had thought to broach the subject that Clemens had brought up earlier at Claridge’s: “And may I ask, Mr. Clemens—you mentioned a collaboration between you and my husband. What have you in mind, sir?”
“Well, it certainly wouldn’t be about Africa. I would say it might be something along the lines of a dialogue between two grizzled codgers, talking about the old days on the Mississippi, just before the Civil War: Your husband, in a previous incarnation, madame, plied those waters for several years, as often as I did: In fact, it was on the boiler deck of a riverboat that we met as young men, isn’t that so, Henry?”
“Yes,” Stanley said. “But Sam, surely you have written of it in Life on the Mississippi.”
“I have indeed, but you and I—well, did we not make a journey together that might be somewhat interesting to our readers?” Then, for my sake, he added: “That was before I became Mark Twain and just when Henry became Henry.” But then as my husband’s face began to turn red, as sometimes happened with him in moments of discomfort, Clemens, seeing him so, dropped it. “What I mean, Dorothy, is that Stanley and I could make some kind of book together. My own company would give it a first-class treatment, of course. It’s just something to consider. I understand if you would not want to tie your fortunes to me, as lately I seem to attract disasters, businesswise. But with our names on such a book, whatever it might be about, I am certain that we could sell at least one hundred thousand copies of it by subscription.” Then, gloomily: “On the other hand, I could be wrong.”
“Should I end up winning this election in Lambeth, I doubt I would have the time to give this book you propose the proper care; but then if not—we will see.” Getting up, he said: “Come, Sam, to the billiard room.”
“Just one thing before you gentlemen resume your evening of revels,” I said as they were about to leave. “May I ask you, Mr. Clemens, how long you will be staying here in London?”
“Just a week,” he said. “I’ve got a few talks to give at several clubs and a meeting scheduled with my publisher here. I’ve heard some rattling about a reception with the queen, but I’d rather wriggle out of that one.”
“Would you,” I asked, “have any time to sit for me as a subject? I’ve already got several portraits in the National Gallery and a show coming up at the Royal Academy next year: It would be an honor that would please me greatly.”
“Well, I know how long such portraits take. I haven’t much free time,” he said warily. “I suppose I could give you a few hours. But if you begin it now, I can’t say when I’ll be able to sit for you again.”
“Two hours would be fine for now. Would tomorrow at two be possible?”
He thought on it briefly.
“I can’t tomorrow. But Wednesday, maybe.”
“At two p.m., then,” I said to him. “You’ve made me happy—and you will be pleased with what I do.”
IT WAS ABOUT TEN-THIRTY AT night when Lady Stanley finished writing: Her three hounds had started barking at some disturbance in the yard; she put down her pen to attend to it one evening in 1907.
A Note by Samuel Clemens on Meeting with the Stanleys in London, 1892
ABOUT FOUR, MET WITH HMS (His Majesty Stanley) over at Claridge’s for tea and found the chap cantankerously happy, as he had his new bride along with him, the beautiful and gifted Miss Dorothy Tennant, as she’s known in London; real society dame, a little haughty but not quite the snob, like a lot of the ladies who hang around the queen’s stiff upper-crust circles, the title-crazy dames who never really get around to looking you straight in the eye. But Mrs. Stanley was different. For lack of a better word, I would say that her eyes “sparkled” with friendliness and interest, as brightly as the pearl-studded choker she was wearing around her neck. As a matter of fact, I would say that she was a pretty attractive lady altogether—swan-necked, full-bosomed, with an ingratiatingly full head of lovely hair, which she wore in the coiffure of Empress Eugénie of France. Her first reaction at my approach was to surprise me by kissing my cheek, even when I had a cold. She said: “Oh, Mr. Clemens! A delight! It’s so wonderful to see you again!”
I sat down with Stanley and this gracious lady. With them was Mrs. Stanley’s famous and cranky mother, a grande dame of a bohemian, who still wears the widow’s black—but velvet—and all kinds of outlandish jewelry, including rings that would choke a horse and a cameo of her late husband prominently displayed beneath her goosey neck.
As for Stanley, he was looking well, considering his ailing health and a fall he had taken. He was fairly bronze-skinned; and while he seemed more tranquil, even content, in his matrimonial state, his eyes were unmistakably his own—the eyes of a caged lion, I would say. His mother-in-law seemed to put him on his best behavior, but in certain moments he was his old grim self. How I have often wondered what he was really thinking around me, but like a shrewd card player—even if he didn’t play cards—he remained a good actor, never revealing much about himself, at least in public. But his hair had turned so white, like dove feathers, that I wondered if it had come about from Africa, as he always said, or if it had come about from putting up with his mother-in-law. Though we had a butler standing by our banquette, she kept asking him to pass this and that over to her, as in, “Henry, would you ever so kindly please pass me the cream?” And: “Henry, my son, a few sugar cubes, please.” He seemed to be suppressing a lot of sighs—seemed fidgety, too, around her, as if he would rather be out in the wilds of Africa with the cannibals than having tea and crumpets on a rainy London afternoon. In any case, I had the impression that he was intensely bored by the whole business of dealing with Dame Gertrude, but upon his wife he truly doted. Seems that the domestic life was softening him up a bit: Now and then I caught him just staring at her in admiration, even affection. His transformation left me touched.
We made some small talk—I filled them in on my situation, more or less; these teas can be awkward, sort of like being trapped in a corner at a party. One has no choice but to yap and yap. But I must say I was happy to see Stanley doing so well. Of course, neither of us felt like bringing up the goings-on in Africa.
I haven’t felt too happy about the news out of Africa: It is true that Stanley had inadvertently set up for King Léopold a quite unpleasant and cruel colonial regime down there, brutal to the natives. I can’t imagine that Stanley would have done so on purpose. That’s one thing, and I can’t fault the man, though I have to often hold my tongue around him on the subject—that is, until we’ve had a few drinks, and then we come down to the brass tacks of it all. Still, I want to believe him when he tells me, as he has done on occasion, that to bring “civilization” to the wilds is going to be a long process, at some cost to native lives; that even if things might be bad right now, the longer view of history will have proved him and folks like Léopold correct. (Yet I dislike that king!) In any case, it’s not a subject that we care to discuss in public.
After a while Stanley and I left the ladies to have a few drinks in the gentlemen’s bar and billiard room. We were in the middle of a game when a gent, a stringy fellow in a dark, rumpled suit, a porter of some kind who had been sweeping the floor, came over to us—or, more precisely, to Stanley.
“Have I the honor of addressing Mr. Stanley, the great explorer?”
“Yes?”
“Eh, then I should say, it’s a great day for me, and one that I will share with my family for all time to come.” Then: “Is it true, eh, I dunno, without meaning to question your ’complishments, sir—but me cousin, a confectioner on Waterloo Road, seems to think you’ve been quite wrong in the handling of the African savages; I, of course, do
n’t believe so, but some do. Can you tell me wot I can say to ’im in that regard?”
Stanley bristled: “Cannot you not see that my friend and I are simply shooting billiards?” But as Stanley continued to play, the same fellow stood about, somewhat forlornly, grieved to have offended him.
“I’m so sorry, sir. Myself, I am your admirer. Can you forgive my intrusion?”
“Yes. Now go away!”
“But begging you pardon, again, sir, I was just asking you a civil sort of question. I meant no disturbance.”
“My dear fellow,” Stanley said. “I do not know you; I do not want to know you. And I do not care to begin any form of conversation with you. Is that clear?”
“Ah, then,” he said. “I guess I have been mistaken about you. It wasn’t much that I asked of you, was it?”
Bowing, he left to take his broom again, muttering to himself.
“IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME,” he said to me. “Once I am asked such a thing, I am robbed of time, as surely as flour passes through a sieve.” But then he began to sulk about it. “Samuel, do you think I was unfair to the fellow?”
“A few words to soothe him might have been all right.”
He made no further mention of the incident until later. He had perhaps realized his rudeness or, thinking of his electioneering, had thought about how such a trivial incident could hurt him, but when he saw the same man solemnly polishing some glasses behind the bar, Stanley did the right thing, which was to approach him with a kind word.
“Dear sir, now that I am done with my billiards, to address your earlier query… the situation in Africa, and this information you should share with your relations, is of such a complicated nature that there is no way for me to provide any easy answer, except to say I am absolutely certain that, as surely as you and I are standing here, Providence is seeing to the evolution of better conditions in that place. Whatever falsehoods are bandied about, it is civilization—and by that I mean railroads and hospitals and civil order—that is being established in the Congo. It is for the greater good of all the people there, Europeans and Africans alike, that my efforts have been made.” Then: “Now, how can I be of further service to you?”
The porter stammered some words of thanks, then asked Stanley to sign a piece of paper as an autograph; as Stanley did so he heard a litany of praises, his few phrases having made the right impression.
That afternoon we’d probably had a few more drinks than was necessary, but I had hoped to persuade a relaxed Stanley to publish a book with me. The subject I had seized upon was a journey we had made together to the Antilles as young men, the story of which Stanley, for stubborn reasons of his own, had never wanted to convey. But as so many years had since passed—more than thirty—I found it surprising to see that he had kept the same strong feelings against such a book.
“Why not, Henry?” I said.
“If I should decide to write of this, it will be in my autobiography. Besides, Samuel, it is something that still pains me all these years later. I have not even told Dolly about it.”
I understood, to a certain extent, his desire for privacy, but I could not understand his apparent shame about what had happened in Cuba—and so, for the time being, I dropped the subject but considered it an out-and-out pity.
BACK IN HIS HOTEL ROOM, in an establishment not quite up to the standards of what he was used to, Samuel Clemens drank a warmed whiskey and, putting aside his notebook, went to bed.
PORTRAITS WITH TWAIN
Third Fragment from Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, while Stanley was out at a meeting, Clemens made his way to our home. He brought roses for my mother, and after he had refreshed himself with chilled water—he had been tramping around from office to office, and it was unusually warm in London that day—I brought him to the place where I had set up a row of easels on which I displayed my paintings of street children; the most well known of them he had seen before, and another, Sprites at Sea, had been reproduced widely as a print. The others were reworkings of drawings I had done for the magazines Little Folks and The Quiver. I also had some of my drawings and paintings of Stanley to show Mr. Clemens. It is a funny thing: No matter how often one has looked at and attempted to draw a subject, something always seems to be missing; and yet with Stanley, I felt that I had captured everything about him, even the particular way his brow furrowed when he was having a special thought. But he never smiled.
Clemens was very courteous and generous in his praise of the Stanley portraits. I had made three: one of Stanley standing, one of Stanley sitting with a book open before him, and a more conventional portrait of Stanley contemplating a map of Africa, which the National Gallery liked very much.
“Goodness,” Clemens said pleasantly. “These are all fine. Well done. You’ve even captured the opaqueness of Stanley’s eyes.”
“Opaque? But they are blue and green, like yours.”
“I meant opaque in that they are hard to read: He’s like a sphinx, that husband of yours. He never shows what he has seen or sees, does he?”
“He doesn’t, but he expresses himself in other ways.”
“Oh, but I know that.” Looking about, he asked, “Where do you want me to sit?”
“Just there, in front of the hearth.”
“You mind if I smoke?”
“Not at all.”
I was used to Stanley smoking whenever he sat for me: Thusly anticipating my new subject’s similar habit, I had my butler put out an ash urn beside the chair for Clemens to use. Wearing my smock, and with a fresh sheet of paper on which to draw my preliminary study of him, I tried to determine the position in which Mr. Clemens would be most comfortable and which pose would be advantageous to him.
“Just relax, as if you were talking to me, but sit generally still.”
“That’s something I generally aspire to, madame,” he said.
I began to draw him in pencil, and, as I did so, I noticed that he had started to hum to himself; looking out through my studio window to a great chestnut tree, he took on a tranquil expression.
“And what is that you’ve been humming?”
“Oh, an old Negro spiritual taught to me by slaves on my uncle John’s farm, back when I was a boy. He lived about four miles out from Florida, Missouri, he did. A finer man there never was.” Then: “Do you know, Mrs. Stanley, that whenever I am troubled I think of my days there and in Hannibal?”
“Are you troubled now?”
“Madame, I am like a cucumber soaking in a vat of vinegar, but I am still optimistic enough, I suppose.” Then: “It is a funny thing, Mrs. Stanley: The older I get—and I will be fifty-seven come November—the more aware of the minutiae of my past I become. As your wise husband told me the other day, there’s so much to remember that, as the years go by, there’s hardly any room left in the brain for something new. Each day I ask myself, ‘How are things remembered, Sam?’ Then I say that I remember things as if my brain were some kind of camera—a camera that has taken a million photographs. Why some of those pictures stick in the mind more clearly than others, after so many years, is a mystery to me. Take my mother, Jane Lampton. She passed on two Octobers ago, in 1890, at a mighty age, her eighty-eighth year. That she lived so long was miraculous in a way, for she was as frail and delicate in her youth as my own wife, Livy, is now; and yet if there is such a thing as the spirit keeping the body sound, despite its maladies, she did so, year after year.”
Then he fished out from his vest pocket a watch: Within its top encasement was an image of his mother.
“Here she is, Mrs. Stanley—my little reminder of the great lady that was my mother, Jane Lampton. It’s just a photograph, but each time I see her I am both warmed and grieved. How can it be that one simple thing can bring so much to mind? She’s about fifty in this picture, slender and petite, but she was so sturdy of heart that she always stood as a great example to me. If I have a kind bone in my body, it’s because of her. You see, she was one o
f those rare Presbyterian souls who actually cared about the condition of her fellow humans: She loved people and animals—took in every poor bewildered cat in our neighborhood when I was a boy—and was always a lively sort, despite her infirmities. Far from being an invalid who allowed herself to wither away, she relished every opportunity, whatever her misfortunes, to enjoy life. She danced and loved music, loved the circus and minstrel shows that came to town; she was kind to our slaves, and she taught me something about books.
“Once, we had a little slave, brought to Hannibal from Maryland, a gentle and cheerful boy named Sandy. He was always singing and whooping, whistling and yelling—so noisily that he drove me to distraction. One day when he had been singing for an entire hour without stopping, I lost my temper and went to my mother in a rage asking her to please shut him up; but instead of becoming angry with the boy, tears came to her eyes and she said, with much kindness: ‘Sam, when the poor thing sings, it’s because he doesn’t want to remember he’ll never see his family or mother ever again; if he’s quiet, then he will surely think of them and become very sad. So just remember this when you hear that friendless child’s voice again.’ After that, I kind of took comfort in hearing him, and his carrying on never bothered me again, for in my selfish boyishness, I had forgotten his sad situation; that he was so terribly alone in the world and trying to cheer himself up with songs and all kinds of wild whistling suddenly made sense to me. Thereafter I went out of my way to befriend him—later I put him in my book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But that was the kind of thing in which my mother instructed me.
“All in all she was one of those proper churchgoing ladies for whom every occasion, whether it was a Fourth of July celebration or a revival meeting, a lecture or even a funeral, was an opportunity to turn out and show her sunny side. To the day of her death, she remained fair-minded and compassionate—that’s the word, ‘compassionate.’ What I am, what good qualities I have, I believe I owe largely to her. Her strength of spirit is what sustained her for so many years, and it is something I have tried to summon up for myself in times of darkness: For despite the downturns and tragedies of her life, she never allowed herself to get beaten down. It was faith, I suppose, that made the very great difference in her attitude. A faith in a God I have never seen any evidence of but whose imaginary presence in so many lives, like her own, has been a solace. Needless to say, Mrs. Stanley, I miss her.