1 of 3
Americans of a certain age associate "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" not with Henry Morton Stanley but with Ernie the Muppet. In a 1983 Sesame Street sketch, Ernie and Bert trudge "hundreds of miles through the hot steaming jungle, hungry, thirsty, tired" to "find Dr. Livingstone." Ernie eagerly shouts his greeting to a fireman, then a cab driver, before finally finding the elderly blue physician ("Sam Livingston, jungle doctor," rather than the explorer-missionary David) giving a young girl a checkup. Finally, Ernie asks the question that has sent him on his quest: "What's up, doc?"
|
|
Stanley's phrase remains, for many people, the only thing they know of either man. It was a punchline almost as soon as his account of finding Livingstone appeared in the New York Herald on July 2, 1872. "The fact that Stanley would be ridiculed and patronized as a direct result of this greeting, which he almost certainly never uttered, is painfully ironic," Tim Jeal writes in his new biography of Stanley. "He invented it [later] because of his old insecurity about his background. Ill at ease among the British officers in Abyssinia, he had admired their laconic, understated style and had hoped to emulate it … . Henry had thought this the height of gentlemanly insouciance. Of course, many English gentlemen would have thought it unfriendly and absurd. But how could the insecure outsider have known this?"
Jeal does not gloss over Stanley's many errors, exaggerations, and lies, starting with the man's very identity; the Welsh-born John Rowlands invented his name and history as Stanley after a painful childhood. And that childhood, in Jeal's account, comes to explain nearly everything in Stanley's life, from his relationship with Livingstone to his exaggerated capital punishment of deserters to his giving in to his wife's pressure to become a Member of Parliament.
Jeal's use of "Henry" is telling. In his 1973 Livingstone—still the definitive work by which all other Livingstone biographies are measured and fall short—Jeal referred to "David" only in childhood, distinguishing him from his family members. That volume begins with Jeal's promise to strip away heroic myth: "Livingstone appears to have failed in all he most wished to achieve. He failed as a conventional missionary, making but one convert, who subsequently lapsed. He failed as the promoter of other men's missionary efforts." As an explorer? "Portuguese and Arab traders had already reached the center of the continent." He wasn't able to make the Zambezi navigable, he was wrong about the source of the Nile, he was a "failure as a husband and a father," and so the indictment proceeds.
Still, Livingstone was "far more extraordinary than any of the Victorian stereotypes of him," Jeal wrote, and in his conclusion he admitted, "That any man could voluntarily have undergone such hardships seemed, and still seems, so remarkable, that to ask whether he achieved his aims or deceived himself appears in the end almost churlish." In an updated preface to the book in 2001, Jeal says "nothing that has come to light in the interim has led me to alter any of my conclusions," but there is a new emphasis on Livingstone's heroism. "Despite his character defects and his failures, Livingstone remained a very great man whose overall achievement was unique," he wrote. If his 1973 book "differed significantly from depictions of him in all previous biographies," it was "partly because my three predecessors had been clergymen in the thrall of the 'Livingstone myth.' … The picture of Livingstone presented in biographies published after mine has in all factual essentials resembled my own."
RSS Feed
