Next Saturday, March 9, Hal Holbrook will present his legendary one-man show, “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Balboa Theatre. For almost 60 years Holbrook has been performing this Tony Award-winning portrayal, a luminous homage to the fountainhead of American literature.
In “Mark Twain’s Autobiography,” Samuel Langhorne Clemens tells us that he “was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Missouri.” As a barefoot boy sitting on the banks of the Mississippi River, he watched stern-wheeler boats churning the muddy water, and he heard the leadsman sounding the depth of the river by calling out to the captains, “By the deep six … by the mark five … by the deep four … by the mark three.” When the river bottom was only two fathoms, or 12 feet down, he would hear the lusty cry “by the mark twain.”
Long after he left the Mississippi, and after various careers as a riverboat pilot, prospector and printer, Sam Clemens, now a journalist, contributed an article to the Nevada Territorial Enterprise on Feb. 3, 1865, and signed it with a new name — Mark Twain.
Twenty years later, on Feb. 18, 1885, Twain gave us “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The novel turned out to be his masterpiece, and it changed the direction of American letters. Ernest Hemingway spoke for generations of our writers when he said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” With “Huckleberry Finn” American literature came of age.
Using seven distinct dialects to reflect the speech patterns of his characters, Twain became the first important American author to capture the freshness and vitality of the newly hewn American idiom in narrative as well as in dialogue.
Twain once wrote in his notebook: “My works are like water. The works of the great masters are like wine. But everyone drinks water.” His novels, stories and essays are suffused with an unalloyed American folk poetry freed from the straitjacket of literary prose and stripped of all illusions and puffery. Has any other writer ever tapped as deeply into the easy grace and direct simplicity of American speech?
Of all the witty statements that Mark Twain said or wrote, none has been quoted more often than his terse response to an alarmist report. He was to be the guest of honor at a London literary club dinner, but early that day the secretary of the club was shocked to hear that Twain had died suddenly. The distraught officer sent a diplomatic inquiry to Mrs. Clemens seeking to verify the whispers of her husband’s demise. Twain got hold of the note and telegraphed the now-famous riposte: “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” The inscription appears on his gravestone in Elmira, N.Y.
On April 21, 1910, Mark Twain did, without exaggeration, pass on. The night before his death, Halley’s comet shone in the skies as it made its closest approach to the earth. Just a year before, Twain had told a friend, “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. The almighty has said, no doubt, ‘Now here go those two unaccountable frauds; they came in together; they must go out together.’” And so they did.
In “My Mark Twain,” published the year after his dear friend’s death, William Dean Howells wrote, “Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes — I knew them all — sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one other and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature.”
Just as Abraham Lincoln helped forge our identity as a truly united United States, Mark Twain — humorist, storyteller, lecturer and social commentator — gave a young nation a voice to sing of itself.
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