STANLEY TOOK HIS SEAT in the House of Commons in August of 1895. The atmosphere at Parliament he found asphyxiating. To be herded in, like sheep, in the mornings — to sit in an airless, overcrowded room among some three hundred and fifty members, listening to addresses, mainly about the “Irish question,” in which he had no particular interest — was beyond him. Even when issues pertinent to his knowledge about Africa were being debated, he rarely caught the Speaker’s eye: his raised hand, his thumps on the table, and his cane clacking the floor went unnoticed. Worse was the absence of light, which he found depressing, and for a man who had spent endless hours walking in the open air of the wilds, the atmosphere of those chambers, with their closed windows — the Thames stank — was stifling. The river’s bilious and unsanitary miasmas were kept at bay by panes of glass, but the air inside, defined by body smells, colognes, tobacco smoke, and hair tonic, was nearly nauseating. He’d come home at a late hour feeling more exhausted, he’d say, than he had been on his marches.
He might have had a future as a statesman had he the patience for the consuming intricacies of parliamentary procedures, but it all bored him: Further, he felt himself a loner, and he found the clubbishness of the house’s members, who separated themselves along class lines, irritating. Prone to the nostalgia of a man who thought his best years were behind him, and missing his adventures, he often felt that his life was over.
YET DOLLY SEEMED CONTENT, and, all in all, during those rare moments when Stanley had a few hours to do as he pleased, which was to sit in his study and read, the enterprise of matrimony seemed to him reasonable enough. Dolly, however spoiled she had been in life, seemed to truly care for him; on many an afternoon, that thought alone was enough to assuage his occasionally bitter feelings of containment and the sense that the domestic life he’d always longed for was nothing more than a prison.
He rarely wrote anything that he considered important — countless notes relating to social engagements; a few letters to the newspapers (but mainly his old fire and indignation had left him); lectures he would give here and there about Africa — but in those years, with his original glory faded and with his reputation somewhat eroded by increasing reports about native abuse in the Congo, he did so as a relic of the past, the specter of greatness having faded from the public’s perception of him. Even his attempts at writing his autobiography stalled: Relegating the pages he had once written during his tour of the States and Australia to the bottom of a trunk, Stanley managed, during several bouts of concentrated writing at quiet seaside resorts, to produce the portion of manuscript relating to his youthful years through the Civil War that would serve as the official version of those years. But once he had reached that point, wherein he much enjoyed the process of describing just how Henry Morton Stanley came to be, it was as if he could write no more on the subject, his will to do so sapped by emotions he found unbearable.
At fifty-five, as much as he tried to, he could never forget that, once upon a time, he had been an unwanted child, a lowly sort loved by no one. With each new line he wrote, that awareness came back to him: That he still felt himself an “orphan” rankled him. It was an illusion, of course — all men end up being orphaned by death — but as he ruminated over the fact that his life had been spent in the servitude of others and in the pursuit of “empty glory,” he searched his mind for the single thing that might make him happy — to give someone what he had wanted himself: a father.
HERE FOLLOWS A LETTER Stanley wrote to Samuel Clemens at that time of his ruminations: Clemens, then staying at Quarry Farm in Elmira, New York, was about to embark on a worldwide tour to pay off his debts; Stanley had helped Clemens with arrangements for the Australian leg of his journey by introducing him, by mail, to his own promoter in that country, Carlyle Greenwood Smythe.
June 12, 1895
Dear Samuel,
It seems our correspondences as of late have had much to do with business and the details of tours and lectures.
I am, as you may deduce, a little weary from my post-Africa life. I am now declining, without a doubt, in vitality: My marriage has been the best of it, but in other ways, Samuel, I have been feeling restless. It’s not that I do not enjoy the company of people, but there is so much small talk and so little time for the important things that I have been feeling robbed: If I were an hourglass, I would be one for whom most of the sands have run out. Time — what is it but a measure of mutually agreed-upon units marking our passage through the world? I have little doubt that the endlessness of it all, or our illusion of its endlessness, is just a psychological device that we humans employ to keep ourselves sane. How else can one bear the quickening of the gap between the dawn of one’s consciousness in infancy with the indifferent and rushing present?
At least in the days when we met, back before the pleasant illusion that was the South crumbled and became what it is today, before the romantic caprice that said slavery was a noble thing as long as it was conducted equitably and with concern for the slaves’ “human comforts”—as long as “civilization” flourished splendidly — you and I could enjoy our youth. Remember then, Samuel, how lovely the Mississippi once looked to us? It was not so much the actual physical nature of the river itself, lovely as it was — with its luminous moons at night, the shredded violet skies at dusk, the scent of marsh flowers and burning campfires wafting over the waters — as the aspect of the river unfolding endlessly before us, a symbol of our own endless-seeming youth.
How could we have known, as young men, what life held for us? Two famous budding writers were we: on the one hand there was you, the steamboat pilot Samuel Clemens, whose occasional ditties and observations about river life found their way into the region’s newspapers, and on the other hand there was me, a common sales clerk from New Orleans by way of England whose only jottings were of numerical things, such as would concern the commerce of a riverboat trader like my adoptive father, Henry Stanley. Neither you nor I knew anything about what awaited us in the world of letters, and yet from the beginning, our mutual respect and liking for books brought us together. I can still remember your general amusement at the fact that you found me reading a Bible by the riverboat railing. That you deigned to speak to me, out of a hunger to converse with someone besides bored widows, was the beginning of a friendship.
Of the Bible you have always had your opinions: You have always regarded that “Good Book” as a great mythic fantasy — heartening to human resolve, moralistic, etc., but a tall tale — whereas I, in my innocence, believed in those words deeply. Since then — in the years, nearly forty, that have passed — I have generally come to agree with you: The Bible, in its sweetest and highest-aspiring parts, is wholly inapplicable to actual humanity. By Providence, we human beings simply fall short of the idealized way of living laid out before us. And what is God? You have told me that, at best, you have a general idea that God exists in the world only when “luck” or “destiny” falls in stride with a person’s good fortune and that His absence from most events speaks to His general indifference if not nonexistence. I agree with you insofar as “God” is an impassive veil over our lives. I think He watches us from afar and does not intercede, as most people want Him to: The violent and needless deaths I have witnessed over the years, in regions where life is cheap and as exchangeable as an English pound, have been the proof.