My previous interest in Africa mainly consisted of curiosity about an unknown region; Stanley’s spoken and written tales about his exploits and the peoples and trials he had encountered have always fascinated me — and I am still tickled by the notion that he took my Huckleberry novel with him during one of his journeys. And of course I have always believed in your late husband’s stance in opposition to the slave trade there; as to his “preaching” about Christianity, I have been neutral, trusting in his faith in the missionaries, whom he knew well. However, I have been not at all convinced that Leopold wanted to accomplish anything except the enrichment of himself and his own small nation through the exploitation of the Congo and its hapless people.
However you may view Leopold, he should be called into strict account for his actions. As you know, such actions were forbidden by the proclamations of the Berlin Conference of 1884, in which Stanley was a participant — the natives were to be protected and their well-being was to be advanced in various ways. But in all this the International African Association has failed miserably — I believe that even Stanley knew this, deep down.
As I know that England is already somewhat outraged by the news that has been consistently coming out, I hope you will understand my intention in publishing this pamphlet, which is to motivate the American people to press our government into doing something about the situation. Whether this will happen I cannot say, but Dolly, I want you to understand that my pamphlet is by no means intended to implicate Stanley in any way. He was a great man — and my friend — and because of that something has been stirred in me that refuses to see the seeds of what your brave husband planted turned into a sham.
I intend that the pamphlet shall go into the hands of every clergyman in America and therefore to their pious congregations, with the hope that our ordinary citizens will move to make our government use a firmer hand in relieving Leopold of his profitable satrapy.
There is not a single word in the pamphlet that would implicate Stanley. His deeds, I believe, will always stand apart and above the tawdry machinations of this world.
With fervent admiration and affection,
Yours always,
S.C.
If Dolly had any regret, it was that she had witnessed Stanley’s misery at hearing his name associated with such reports, for he had lived and breathed and loved Africa. As for the pamphlet itself, she had nearly written to Samuel to verify that his portrait of the indignant king, with whom she had spent some time, was truer than he might realize. Yet there was something that ultimately disturbed her about the photographs. Their inclusion somehow felt offensive to her husband’s legacy.
Still, she was grateful that Clemens had waited until after Stanley’s passing before going public with his long-brewing feelings.
ONCE CLEMENS FINALLY CAME OUT of his deepest mourning, he shed his dark serge suits, with their sagging frock coats, and his stiff black bow ties for snow-white swallow-tailed outfits. An instantly recognizable figure on the streets of Manhattan, he’d walk up and down Fifth Avenue in an “efflorescence of white,” as a local paper described the impression he made on passersby. In his beatific quest to purge the world of imbecilities, he may have wished to present himself as the purest of spirits or as an angel with a flaring shock of whitening hair and lightning-bolt eyebrows; but he may have picked up that manner of dress in Bermuda, where white linen was supremely practical, during one of his journeys to the Caribbean with H. H. Rogers aboard the Kanawha, the same yacht on which he had visited Cuba in 1902. And he may have thought white more hygienic, or he may have simply tired of his mourning, but whatever his reasons, he thereafter rarely appeared in public, save for formal occasions, in anything else.
AFTER LIVY DIED, CLEMENS SUMMERED at a retreat near Mount Monadnock, in Dublin, New Hampshire, where he had hoped the setting would help his daughters recover from their own grief. Poor Clara, who had been closest to her mother, had suffered several nervous breakdowns and spent a year in sanatoriums in New York and Connecticut, and Jean, tossed from a horse in a trolley accident, which could have easily killed her, continued on in ailing health, and bouts of violent hysteria and epilepsy had prompted her own stays at various institutions. And Clemens, despite the fact that he spent many a day fighting depression and wishing himself dead, found that he had risen to new heights in the public’s affections. Steamboats and cigar brands had been named after him, and, as with Stanley in his heyday, he was often approached by strangers on the street who simply wanted to shake his hand or to pose beside him for a photograph. His friends were the most important people in America: Andrew Carnegie, Teddy Roosevelt, and Thomas Edison. Numerous invitations to luncheons and dinners proliferated — the banqueting life, as he called it, taking up many of his days.
BY THE TIME HE HAD been informed that he would be given an honorary doctorate in letters by Oxford University, in the spring of 1907, his ardor for the political arena had somewhat abated, for with his dedication had also come endless invitations to speak before various groups on behalf of the Congo Reform Association — travel commitments that he, at his age, found exhausting.
Withdrawing from such duties, save for producing the occasional foreword to a book or pamphlet about Africa at the behest of the American Anti-Imperialist League or the Congo Reform Movement, Clemens continued work on his autobiography. Having no preconceived plan or scheme for the narrative, he began each session in his Fifth Avenue home by simply talking about whatever memories or images happened to come into his head, much as he had done while sitting for Dolly during their portrait sessions. Often he did so while shooting billiards. Meandering to wherever his mind took him, he began, bit by bit, to improvise the long and digressive narrative of his life. No particular event was more important than another, and his method was founded on the premise that anything he spoke about would be later configured into a meaningful sequence. Intending that the book would be published posthumously, he would take liberties with the truth sometimes, especially in the segments regarding his days during the early Civil War and the period of time — only three or so weeks — when he accompanied his friend Stanley to Cuba, a subject he was never to mention to anyone except Dolly. It happened on an afternoon in late June of 1907, when, wearing his newly acquired Oxford robes, he once again sat before her in her studio at Richmond Terrace.
A FEW WEEKS PRIOR to their meeting again, Lady Stanley — having married that past March 21, nearly three years after Stanley’s death — read with delight the news of Clemens’s arrival in England, for his landing at Tilbury aboard the SS Minneapolis on June 8 was met by a considerable crowd of admirers and journalists; harbor bells had rung, and even the stevedores were whistling and cheering as he made his way onto English soil. But that acclamation was just the beginning. As he stood on the dock, waving his derby and umbrella at the crowds, he thought that such attentions had come about from his London publisher’s efforts to make known his return, for he had many events to attend to and publicize; but he had no inkling that his writings against the wrongs of the world — the very same that had been met tepidly by the American public in regard to Africa and other places — were so in tune with the general mood of the English public, who, in any case, already revered him for his books.