Twain

June 22, 2020

Forty-one years ago, for one afternoon, Sandy and I visited Hannibal, Missouri, the hometown of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain. It was a detour, we were on our way from Nashville to St. Paul. Our month-old daughter, our first, was packed in the back of our cramped Toyota in one of those early baby restraint baskets.

I had read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as a kid and had to make the stop. Twain’s history there is a tourist attraction. We walked down to a pier to look at the Mississippi, brown, fast-flowing, nearly a mile wide. Barges crawled up the channel. It’s not much of a place, I thought. It probably wasn’t much of a place when he lived there, either.

Clemens, or Twain, is famous because he told us something about the country, and about ourselves. Huckleberry Finn resonates in American literature and American history, for some in the wrong way. Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain.” That book is a haunting, dark tale of America. So was Twain’s life.

Twain was an American hero. He was loved, admired, applauded. Oxford gave him an honorary degree. You can read his books, but they tell you nothing about his suffering. Four of his six siblings died before reaching 20. His son died at 19 months. His oldest daughter, Susy, died at 22, another daughter, Jean, drowned at 29. His wife Olivia, devastated for years by Susy’s death, passed at 58.

You can look all that up. But you don’t need research. Right now in America we need to be reminded that a sweet spot exists between heroism and pain, called dignity. Dignity is a function of moral strength—courage, if you like. Twain is remembered as a writer and a “humorist.” But he showed the America of his time the dignity of moving forward in spite of grievous personal loss. The novelist Oscar Hijuelos reveals Twain without the mask of the humorist. Hijuelos worked for 12 years on his magical Twain book, Twain and Stanley Enter Paradise.

Hijuelos isn’t a household name and never will be one, although he wrote nine novels and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1990. He worked on Paradise until the day before he died of a massive heart attack in 2013. He was 62.

Today the pandemic is ravaging western and southern states. Some people in those places are chucking their masks, if they ever owned them, pushing into each other in bars and restaurants. Maybe they think they’re lucky. They should read Hijuelos’ books. They won’t, but they should.

Paradise invokes two heroes, Twain and British explorer Henry Stanley. Twain, in his novels, stories, and countless public talks, helped America understand its rich and tragic history. Stanley spent years blazing trails in Africa.

Clemens and Stanley were two of the most famous men in the world. Hijuelos conjures up a chance meeting on a Mississippi steamboat in 1859 that binds them together for life.

Stanley won fame for finding the missionary David Livingstone in present-day Tanzania in 1871. He grew up an orphan in Wales. While still young he shipped out to New Orleans. He served a short stint in the Confederate Army, was captured, and ended up in the Union Army. He then bounced around as a reporter and later was sent to Africa by Belgian King Leopold, then searched for the headwaters of the Nile. His story is controversial. But he returned to Britain a giant, called Bula Matari, “Breaker of Rocks.” The name is inscribed on his headstone.

Clemens’ novels, stories, and down-to-earth humor made him rich for a while. Bad investments bankrupted him. He crawled back by writing and traveling endlessly to give talks.

Hijuelos reports all that, but spins a tale of decades-long friendship between them that spanned continents and political beliefs. After hitting it off on the steamboat, Twain, then still Clemens, and Stanley traveled to Cuba. The Civil War separated them, they didn’t meet again for years. Stanley was a devout Anglican, Twain a dedicated agnostic. He hated the cruel march of European colonialism in Africa, which killed thousands. Stanley showed the colonizers the way, although historians differ over whether he was implicated in the abuses. He became wealthy and was knighted by the Queen. Twain battled financial ruin for years.

In Paradise, Stanley never fully recovered from the malaria he contracted in Africa. Eventually he suffered a stroke that incapacitated him. His wife, the painter Dorothy Tennant, kept Twain advised of his friend’s condition. Their friendship, in Hijuelos’ telling is elegiac—a bond of two Victorian gentlemen of letters who placed their pain and their political differences aside to remain gentlemen. Twain visited Stanley and Dorothy when he was in London, drank whiskey with Stanley, posed for Dorothy in her studio, reported on his globe-trotting adventures, and passed along his irreverent opinions on nearly everything. Their decades-long friendship represented mutual admiration, respect, love. Over the years, Dorothy develop a complicated, stirring affection for her husband’s best friend.

In Hijuelos’ story, Stanley dies a drawn-out, agonizing death. He knows it’s coming, his wife knows, Twain knows. He lapses, then recovers, then grows weak, then weaker. Twain is in America, mourning the loss of Susy and caring for Livy, who like Stanley is slipping away. Dorothy writes Twain with the news.

Seven years later Twain returns to visit Dorothy, scarred by grief, still the erudite, old-school gentleman. Dorothy feels a mystical, unmistakable spark in his presence, the presence of a great man. Clemens looks back, telling her the story of that riverboat meeting. Finally he says, “Lest I get teary-eyed, I better go now, Dolly.”  He dies three years later.

Religious faith plays a small role in Hijuelos’ story, yet faith always is present. Twain carps about religion and the idea of an afterlife as he observes the suffering of the poor in America’s Gilded Age and Europe’s greed in exploiting its colonies. He struggled to pay bills while coping with searing pain. Yet he offered America the gifts of dignity and reverence for human life. Dignity and courage, when we find them, offer solace, peace, hope.  Hijuelos’ story, Mark Twain’s story, through all his darkness, becomes a beacon.