Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

by Oscar Hijuelos

  A lifetime of journeys has left me chronically indisposed, and while I do not relish the lapse in my physical powers I rather enjoy the concentrations of thinking that come to one with such limitations.

  —STANLEY

  STANLEY NEVER SAW CLEMENS AGAIN. His world, in those years, was largely reduced to the grounds and surrounding woods of Furze Hill, and his moods, along with his health, were becoming more and more unpredictable. On certain days Stanley seemed beyond fatigue and spoke happily of future journeys and the years he had yet to savor with his wife and son, but just as often, he would become forgetful and irascible. The household staff would avoid him whenever possible, and even Dolly suffered from his sudden outbursts of anger—such as when Stanley, for no good reason, accused her of being a dilettante, an overindulged lady of leisure. Alternately he became extremely pious, spending entire nights rereading his favorite sections of the Bible; just as abruptly, he would grow gloomy at the “nonsense of thinking there is a God.”

  Even his stays in London during the winters had not made much of a difference to him, for he kept getting sick, and though he managed to visit some of his old club haunts, his had become the life of a recluse.

  That his vision continued to grow weaker troubled him, as did the deterioration of his once fine handwriting. As for his own work, the great autobiography: That had long been abandoned. Even his daily habit of keeping a journal fell by the wayside—for after December 19, 1901, he never made another entry. What he otherwise produced—short letters to dear old friends—he had to painstakingly write out, his right hand afflicted with a trembling that required him to steady his forearm with his left hand just to sign his name. The elegant flourishes of his youth were gone forever. Convinced that he had perhaps suffered a mild stroke, he consulted with various doctors and after subjecting himself to a complete physical examination was presented with the news that he might at best have another ten years to live, the prospect of which left him even more covetously disposed toward time and the reassuring surroundings of Furze Hill.

  He had maintained a correspondence with Clemens, his letters conveying the general drift of his quiet days at Furze Hill, the progress of his son’s growth, and the ordinary pleasures of the domestic life he had always wanted (as well as his continuing bouts of illness). By then, Stanley had intuited that Clemens was in his past for good.

  FOR HIS PART, Clemens was undergoing his own mounting tribulations—for in tandem with Stanley, his beloved Livy had also begun to enter her final decline in those years. But despite his great distractions, Clemens, in thinking about his friend, had made several attempts to entice Stanley into crossing the Atlantic. The first had come by way of a letter that arrived at Furze Hill one morning in the spring of 1901.

  Stanley sat down on a high-backed chair, looking about the room, tapping the floor with a silver-headed cane, a gift from Lord Marlborough, as Dolly stood reading the note by the window.

  19 May, 1901

  West 10 Street, New York

  Sir Henry—or would you prefer Sir Hank?

  I bid you a respectful hello from the shores of your old digs.

  In case you haven’t heard, I am a newly elected vice president of the American Anti-Imperialist League, and, given the powers of my august position, I have decided, for reasons of mutual interest and friendship, to invite you to this fair city to address the league at the Century Club on whatever range of subjects you so desire. I would be lying if I tried to conceal from you my truest motive, which is to publicize our good cause—yours is a name to be reckoned with, and any discourse, I am sure, would draw attention to our concerns. Lest you should feel that our adversarial opinions on many a matter would drown our friendship in venom, I assure you that you will be treated in the manner to which you have become accustomed—and paid well for your troubles to boot.

  Of course, I hope you will forgive the impertinence of this invitation. We’ll put you up at the Waldorf-Astoria, take you around town to mingle with my literary crowd, and, should you decide to honor me with your and your family’s presence, I would be happy for you to stay as long as you like in my town house if that would suit you. Whatever you should decide, we send you and Dolly all our love.

  Yours in friendship,

  Samuel L. Clemens

  IT WAS DOLLY who made the reply, citing innumerable projects awaiting them at the estate and expressing the wish that she and her mother might make a trip to New York without Stanley, if that would interest him, but for the time being, it was Stanley’s failing health that made all the difference. He added his own note to the same effect:

  Dear Samuel,

  The plain fact is this: In another time I would do it, but, old friend, my health prevents me.

  I send you my devotion.

  STILL, A YEAR LATER, there came yet another invitation from Clemens, and this one, greatly intriguing Stanley, was very hard for him to turn down.

  Dear Stanley,

  I send you this brief note to mention a leisure cruise of the Caribbean I will be making with my good friend (and financial savior) Henry Rogers in April, to which you are herewith summarily invited. We are planning to head out next month. I mention this because it is our plan to make Cuba a part of our route, and I thought you and I, sailing there, might find it of quite special interest. I am making this journey sans Livy, who is not at all well. (In fact, as I have written to Dolly, I am only allowed to see her for brief periods of time, so I guess I will not be missed if I am gone for some few weeks.) I know you are nailed down to your estate these days, but do let me know if I can tempt you. It would be a nice way to pass the time.

  Regards,

  Sam

  Stanley truly lamented that he could not go; a fall while roaming the estate had badly twisted his ankle, and, in any case, he never knew when he would be visited by an attack of gastritis. He had become afraid to leave the estate, as if it were keeping him alive. And yet it took him several days to make up his mind.

  April 1, 1902

  Havana, Cuba

  Dear Stanley,

  A note from Havana—en route to Nassau and New York—to say once more that I wish you had been able to join us. But here I will report my journey. We sailed down to Santiago de Cuba (port city on southeastern tip of island, nestled in a bowl between two mountain ranges), a fine and most ornate place; we spent a day there, and with my very distinguished party were given a first-class tour and taken around to the most interesting sights—the old cathedral, etc., with a side trip to San Juan Hill, where Teddy Roosevelt made his famous charge and where stands the Peace Tree, where US general William Rufus Shafter accepted the Spanish general Toral’s surrender in July of 1898. Aside from a little sun-baked Spanish fortress at the top of the hill, along with some pieces of eighteenth-century ordnance, there wasn’t much to see. Nevertheless, this was the place where the Spaniards defended against the charge made by the Rough Riders. There were many florid trees about—the air perfumed—and yet what most lingered was the sense that the hill was a roadway of death, of lives wasted. Of ghosts. For as the Rough Riders advanced up the hill they were met with a fusillade of bullets from the Spanish trenches around the fort, a slaughter on both sides ensuing. You can feel the dead around you, as you do at places like Gettysburg.

  Later, we were hosted at a dinner at our hotel by some of the more distinguished persons of the city: On hand was an admiral who gave a vivid description of the naval battle that had taken place between the US fleet and the Spaniards. To make a long story short, the Spaniards, while trying to escape the Santiago harbor, were trapped between two flanks and bombarded; they lost four hundred men, with many more wounded, while the United States only suffered one casualty—what a score! And so there it is: In the ocean, along the coast east and west of Santiago, lay the husks of numerous Spanish ships, the bones of their men at the bottom of those blue and beautiful waters.

  I would have liked to have visited more places—at my age, I don’t think I will ever have the c
hance again—but, as with everything in my life, I was locked into a schedule of receptions, press interviews, etc. As I was traveling in the company of Mr. Rogers and T. B. Reed, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, the fluff of much of that business fell equally on them, to my relief, though I ended up drinking too much rum, attributable mainly to intermittent periods of boredom and resentment. (You know what I mean.)

  Most interesting was our cruise over to Havana. From our yacht, the Kanawha, as we came along the south coast toward Matanzas—remember it?—I could not wait to see that Moorish city’s pearly buildings glowing in the distance, but as we passed its harbor, I saw that much of it had been destroyed. There were ruins everywhere, a result of one of our superior fleet’s bombardments during the war. That depressed me: I nearly came to tears with the unique melancholy that old folks like me get when they see things so dreadfully changed. But then we passed on, along the stretch of coastline toward Havana, with its many coves and beaches and harbors—which you once likened to the snout of a crocodile—and lo and behold, as we approached the city of Havana itself, whatever feelings of melancholy I had were amplified tenfold! For looking out, I saw the mangled, twisted, rusting carcass of the battleship Maine rising out of the water—it was dark and ugly and protruding in so many directions that I was reminded of a dying crab: a strange sight.

  Everywhere I looked there was row after row of American battleships along the harborside, and many soldiers and sailors, too: Stanley, the country is occupied 100 percent!

  But we had come into port for no more vital mission than to meet with some local officials and then have lunch, so we dined in a mansion in El Cerro—a neighborhood on a hill. Journalists were on hand to interview Mr. Reed, who declared the island “safe and sound.”

  Afterward I visited the plaza: I found an English-speaking bookseller there, and when I asked him to recommend a volume of Cuban literature, he came up with a book of poetry called Versos sencillos by one José Martí. It’s a funny thing, Stanley—apparently the poet is considered a very great Cuban patriot, for he died in an early battle against the Spaniards, but as I looked over his poetry, in Spanish, which I will take pains to translate, it occurred to me that I had once met him before, perhaps in New York or Boston, where he was said to have lived for a time.

  In any event, old friend, I wish that you had been able to come along. We might have fooled ourselves into thinking we were young again and could have traipsed about Havana like Huck and Tom along those streets, beautiful as ever.

  Faithfully,

  S. L. Clemens

  Furze Hill, April 17, 1903: Another Special Spring Day

  STANLEY HAD NOT BEEN FEELING particularly well when he took Denzil for a walk; they had gone out into a meadow to fly a box kite, as there had come some good winds that late morning—the British and American flags Stanley kept on the lawn were flapping gloriously in the breeze—but he should have known better, for just the day before, while coming down the mansion staircase with a drink in hand, on his way to take the hounds out and shoot some birds, he had experienced a bout of giddiness. His face had heated up, and all at once the walls around him suddenly turned a bright red, as if he had been staring into a sunny lake for too long; for a few moments he had to steady himself on the banister. Sitting on the landing, as he looked around the mansion and saw his many possessions, and as he looked through a window at the fields and woods, ever so radiant at dusk, he began laughing, his joy so pure and timeless that, in those moments, he considered himself nearly immortal. One of the servants found him there, and no sooner did he inquire after his master’s well-being than this brief ecstasy passed. Helped up to his feet and insisting that he was perfectly fine, Stanley took a stroll through his gardens. Their loveliness inspired him to believe that he was an especially blessed man and that Providence had, for whatever reason, rewarded his difficult life with that little moment of earthly happiness.

  Walking the grounds that evening he had felt deeply contented; the months he’d passed apart from London society he had spent peacefully—reading when his eyes were up to it; forgetting all the bad news about Africa; choosing only to remember his good experiences. And he spent as much time with Denzil as the boy could tolerate, teaching him about plants and the nature of gardens—in short, behaving with him in a manner that Stanley had missed as a child.

  He considered his friendships. In the previous few years he had become quite amicably disposed to the company of Henry Wellcome, and his amity with Edwin Arnold and Frederic Myers, for all their eccentricities, provided him with more pleasure than annoyance. And when he reflected upon his other friends, like Samuel Clemens, whom he considered a unique and kind man of astounding talents, he smiled at the thought. In such moments, when he felt that all was good with the world, he wished that his old American friend were by his side and that he could somehow magically convey his wondrous feelings to him, for he knew that the poor fellow had suffered so much. It was as if, in an unexpected way, he could feel a “benevolence” all around him. And this benevolence made him feel nearly saintly. For all his grumblings to Dolly about feeling unappreciated by the world—for by then he had become a relic of the past—he found himself, in fact, feeling no malice toward anyone—not even King Léopold, who had deceived him with his sanctimonious prattle about bringing peace and prosperity to the Congo. Suddenly he was so charitably disposed that were his mother-in-law present, he would have shocked her with a bounty of kisses upon her face. It was as if he had been suddenly freed from all self-restraint: He felt young and loving, dashing and wildly handsome; and though he knew he could not, he wanted to celebrate. And there was Dolly. When he last saw her, in the late morning, she was sitting in her studio at Furze Hill, at work on one of her paintings—it happened to be one of the portraits of Clemens she had been working on—and although he sometimes felt a slight twinge of jealousy about her fascination with him, for she had always behaved coquettishly around Clemens, it did not bother Stanley. Instead he wanted to seek her out and sing the praises of her talents and beauty—and then, in imagining that alternate self, he wanted to overwhelm her with the long-recessed powers of amore that he’d always known he had within himself.

  But all that, too, turned out to be an illusion, for shortly the elation he had been experiencing was followed by a severe headache, which laid him so low that he dropped down onto a walkway bench, remaining there until one of his farmhands found him slumped over in agony and helped him back to the mansion, where he spent the evening in bed, a strong dose of brandy, along with some grains of quinine, which he had taken as a precaution against malaria, seeing him through the night. Yet by the morning, as that severe pain had seemed to have receded to a mild ache, and as his son had a rejuvenating effect upon his waning vitality, Stanley, never wishing to disappoint Denzil, went to find him in his nursery, where he had been playing with a set of wooden grenadiers, a gift from the king.

  “Come, my boy,” he had said to Denzil. “Let’s go outside. This time, we will get it flying.”

  In his hands was the box kite that he had constructed for his son from a kit. And so, even if he could only move ever so slowly, and even if the effort of keeping his head up taxed him, he did not let on. Denzil, in the joy and sprightliness of youth, could barely keep himself from leaping up and down even as he ran forward.

  They had come to one of the meadows somewhat east of the house. As Stanley stood, watching the boy scamper forward with the string and kite floating over his head, his father wished that a strong breeze would come along and lift it upward—and it did. As the kite ascended, low clouds drifting along the horizon, Stanley again felt himself fading—a sudden paroxysm so numbing his left hand that he let the string he was holding fall away. The kite pulled up on the current and slowly rose over the fields; Denzil watched it lift beyond the clouds and out of sight.

  SOMEHOW HE MANAGED to make his way back to the mansion, where, begging his son’s forgiveness—“I am sad that I cannot play mor
e with you, but I will get you another kite soon enough”—he retired to his bedroom. Along the way Dolly, seeing his pallid face and drunken manner of walking as he entered the front hall of the mansion—for even with the assistance of a cane he swayed slightly from side to side—was so alarmed that she wanted to send for the local doctor. But Stanley, who had grown tired of doctors and treatments and medicines, told her: “With a little rest I will be better.” Then, to further ease her mind, he added, a slight slur in his voice: “Haven’t I always gotten over things? I may be worse for wear, but I will recover; perhaps it was something I ate.”

  He managed to sleep for several hours, and as the dinner hour came and went, with Stanley only taking a few sips of broth in bed, Dolly, as was her habit when he was indisposed, came to sit by his bedside and read aloud from whatever he might desire. Lately he had wanted to hear passages from his book about Livingstone, but that evening, Stanley could barely sit up and open his eyes, and though she had begun to read to him, Dolly decided there was no point in continuing, as he had hardly noticed that Denzil had come into the room to sit beside him. When he asked, “Is there something wrong with Daddy?” she thought it best to tell him that he was simply napping; then, as Stanley indeed had seemed to have fallen asleep, she left him in the company of their nurse and went off to attend to Denzil’s bath.

  Later she sat down in her small study to write several letters, and then, at around ten, when most of the servants had gone to bed and with silence prevailing, save for the ticking of the mansion’s many clocks, she also retired for the night, in the large boudoir next to Stanley’s, hopeful that he would be better in the morning.