Sunday was their main day for excursions, when Clemens and his daughters took their constitutionals in the city’s parks. Upon occasion during the week, they visited one museum or another. In the great hall of the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, Clemens, in seeing the skeletons of animals as they lay in their glass cases, thought about coffins. The truth that everything living in the world was meant to die configured sadly in his fecund mind into a vision of his daughter as she lay in her final rest. That he had not been able to bring himself to travel back to Elmira, New York, for the funeral of his most favored daughter, Susy, he put down to its being unbearable to his soul. To contemplate her sufferings so pained him that, as he once wrote in a note to Stanley, he thought about taking his own life—and he might have had he not Livy and his daughters to look after.
What pleasures he had were of an intellectual sort. When he was not holed up working from seven in the morning until seven at night, without so much as breaking for a meal—the heavy fumes of his cigars, smoked one after the other, clouding his study—he tended to read voraciously, as if words would smother his sad emotions.
Often he raged about God, or the foolishness of believing in God, mainly around his daughters, who had to contend with this sentiment every time they went out with him, for their father, at this point, was bent upon obliterating from their minds the idea of any presiding deity.
“There is nothing there, no kindly being attending to us. What is called God is but a projection of a dismal mankind hoping for more.” And what were churches to him? “Artifices of superstition, monuments of ignorance, the refuge of the dim-minded and gullible.” On their walks, he spent much of his time lamenting the “damned human race,” eternally corrupt, privately likening life on earth to living in hell. (“Even my well intentioned H.S. doesn’t, in his blindness, see or want to believe what he has set in motion in Africa: In his well-protected shell, he hardly grasps that the natives, whose lot he might have sought to improve, are being enslaved, mutilated, murdered at whim. Now, I ask you, if as moralistic a chap as Stanley, who seems to really believe in all that stately fluff one hears from the pulpits, and if even he, who cares, in his way, for those Africans, can allow the wool to be pulled over his eyes—then what hope is there for this world?” he wrote.)
“I AM FAR FROM a perfect man,” he wrote to Stanley. “I blow my top over a lot of things. I suppose it’s the effect of Susy’s death on me, but there’s more: I’ve still got some debts to settle—perhaps I might have to take on yet another wearisome tour, but then Livy has so withdrawn from life these days that I doubt if she could bear the idea; and she, in any case, is not so well. I think her heart has somehow been damaged by all this, and she seems bent on becoming an invalid, sitting all day and doing nothing except staring out at empty space. Neither books nor the prospect of even taking a walk holds much interest for her. I am thankful for my own work, and she has been helpful as my editor—it’s the only labor she undertakes—but even then I don’t think she ever stops thinking about Susy for a single moment of the day. I, at least, can lose myself in the recollection of distant climes and the research attached to my writing: Still, I am almost afraid of finishing the book for that reason alone. And my daughter Jean’s epilepsy has been acting up—she hardly leaves the house because of it, and, aside from my own work, I really don’t want to leave her or Livy alone, so I rarely go out myself; which is to say, dear Stanley, that there are innumerable reasons why we have not seen you and your own. I keep hoping, at any rate, that future months will bring better things with them, mentally speaking.”
Dear Samuel,
During my recent voyage down to South Africa, I often thought about what you said to me—that no worse a thing can happen to a father than losing a child. I know that this is true. In adopting our own little boy, Denzil, a Welsh orphan, the fact that he is hardly of my own flesh hasn’t mattered very much to me or my wife. He has become the light and center of my world, as your daughter had always been to you. Though he was far from me during my journey, I spent most of my time trying to find a semblance of Denzil among the young passengers on deck. On the way back to England, I saw his sparkling eyes in every child’s face. Thus reminded of the beauty of innocence and the fineness of the beginning of life, I became forgetful of my own self-importance and made it a habit to speak to the little ones during my constitutionals along the deck, each smile, each laugh, lifting my great loneliness away. Sadly, during that voyage, one of those fair children died suddenly of a fever, and as the customary funeral at sea was held, with the ship’s chaplain saying the appropriate words, I watched solemnly as the little casket, wrapped in the Union Jack, was committed to the sea and nearly wept thinking of my Denzil and how thin is the fabric that separates all such children—and all of us—from an uncertain, perhaps glorious, destiny.
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 mi
ld, 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.”
“You are being harsh with yourself, Stanley; even if you had given him In Darkest Africa it would not have made any difference in the long run. How many copies of the Africa book did you sell with the Scribner’s company in America?”
“Sixty thousand in the first two weeks alone.”
“And how many do you think you would have sold through Clemens’s door-to-door salesmen, with their clientele of farmers and backwoods people?”
“Not half as many, but we will never know. In the meantime my friend came to financial ruin, and he is suffering for it still.”
“Stanley, you are tormenting yourself over something that cannot be changed. Besides, he has remained your friend, despite your fears.”
“Oh, Dolly, if you only knew the number of times he wrote to me about the matter. He even sent me telegrams about my book as I was writing it in Zanzibar. Look here,” he said, and he pulled from his correspondence cabinet a slew of telegrams and showed me a handful of them.
“It would have been an easy enough thing to do at that time; he even sent his partner, Charles Webster, over to see me, but after he had gone to the trouble and expense, I still turned him down. Why, Dolly, I cannot say, but I have sometimes sensed his disappointment over the matter. Even if it is something that he has not since mentioned, I know that he must have felt let down by me: Had I a way to make it up to him I would, but he has no company now with which to publish anything, and, in any case, I have lost my desire to write.”
“Then you must forget the whole matter.”
“I wish I could.”
CLEMENS AND HIS FAMILY ARRIVED at half past seven. The first to come in was Livy, in black and wearing a veil of mourning. She was followed by her elegant daughters, each also dressed solemnly. Then Mr. Clemens himself entered, with his top hat in hand and dressed finely in a dark frock coat and silk necktie. Mother and I greeted him. “Better late than never, goes the adage,” he said. “It’s been too long, hasn’t it?”
Most evident at first sight, after a scant six months or so, was how much Clemens seemed to have aged, for he seemed to have many more lines of grief about his eyes, and his brow was more furrowed than before: Like Stanley’s, his hair had turned white. As for Livy, that sweet, dear woman was thinner than ever and tentative in her movements, though for the sake of her children, she put on a good face, encouraging her daughters to enjoy themselves.
Shortly I escorted Mr. and Mrs. Clemens into the parlor, where our other guests had gathered for drinks, among them Gladstone, who had also just arrived. There Clemens found Stanley engaged in conversation with Bram Stoker, whom Clemens apparently admired and knew somewhat. Mr. Stoker, a short stick of a man with an unforgettable, darkly featured face, had in those days just finished writing a gothic fantasy—some tale about vampires, ghosts, and other spirit creatures entitled Dracula. (Stanley had read the thing and dismissed it as a captivating bit of arcane fluff that played upon people’s superstitions and fascination with death and their belief in ghosts; he had seen enough truly horrid things in this world to think that reality was cruel enough without help from the spirits.) However, I noticed that Mr. Clemens, who had also apparently read the book, was quite complimentary of it, telling Stoker that “the simple vampire’s sleep, out of sight from people and the sunlight,” held rather an appeal for him.
“A wonderful fantasy, my dear Stoker, of people coming back from the dead—a physical impossibility, but one that has its appeal in a Christian, Lazarus-back-from-the-grave kind of way. Still, even if the idea is nothing new, I like your book, Mr. Stoker; it fits my mood these days.”
“That resurrection business,” Stanley said, “goes back long before the days of Christ—to Egypt, of course, but even the ancient Greeks had a number of folktales relating to the risen dead.” Then: “Come, Samuel, meet our other companions.”
As with all things, certain evenings that start in one direction end up going in another. While we had hoped to avoid any discussion ab
out Susy or the supernatural, and although we had conceived the evening as a belated Christmas for the Clemenses, the specter of Susy’s passing came suddenly into our house. As merriment was the first order of business, we played some charades, which Clemens’s daughters and some of the other young guests enjoyed; but even as we were in the midst of these parlor games, there arrived Lady Winslow and her daughter Lily, whose resemblance to Susy was so great that Mrs. Clemens fell back into her chair in a swoon.
“It is her way these days,” Mr. Clemens told me. “She is in an emotional state lately, I’m afraid to say.”
But if our original promise to avoid the subject of Susy’s passing was forgotten, I owe this to Mother: When Livy, fainting, had been attended to by her daughters, Mother, beside her on a couch, poured out her sympathies—and this, I am afraid to say, opened a floodgate of tears on Livy’s part, for she wept unabashedly in Mother’s arms. Then, to settle Livy, Mother took her off for a “private talk” in her own study about the spiritual realms.
I was a little peeved—and Stanley was furious. He seemed to feel that Mother had opened a “can of worms,” while my reasons were different. Mother only had a wishful belief in such things, whereas my own conviction was based on a careful study of hard scientific facts as pursued by the Society for Psychical Research. Mother had little more than a passing interest in those facts, but she based her general belief in such things on some rather reassuring visits with spirit mediums and on what she claimed were several visitations from Father’s ghost when she was first widowed. But I take issue with the idea that Father is a “ghost,” in that it implies that he is “dead”—no, I say he is very much alive!
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