Missourians

Twain's Ammunition

Updated at April 02, 2008 11:13

By Roberta Moores
 

Missouri boasts movers and shakers in American political, literary, and cultural history. However, only one figure represents all three: Samuel Clemens, whose pen name, Mark Twain, has taken on mythical proportions. Columbia will be fortunate on April 29 to receive a return visit, of sorts, from Twain, in actor Hal Holbrook’s one-man show at a performance in the University Concert Series at Jesse Hall.

In a 2005 interview, Holbrook talked enthusiastically of the show’s more than fifty-year run and pulled no punches in relating how Twain’s work gives him ammunition to take on the world.

 

RM: Did you ever imagine that your show would go so far?

HH:  No! I had no idea! In 1953, my wife and I were putting on a morning show, playing historical characters in New Jersey high schools in an effort to make thirty-five to fifty dollars a week. She had to quit when she was expecting our child. I knew I could get booked doing the Twain “lecture” (that’s what we called them back then), by the same people who’d booked the two-person show. In January of ’54, I auditioned for a soap opera, and after five auditions, I got offered a job for two hundred dollars a week. I started crying. This was at a time when we didn’t have two hundred dollars in the bank! But an interesting instinct, probably born of my native New England instinct to be careful, caused me to ask if I could keep one of my dates doing the Mark Twain show,

The first time, I was so surprised by the laughter. I didn’t know it was funny – I was scared to death! Then I got to thinking, a person could actually do this. Nine or ten months later, when my story in the soap dimmed down, I got a call asking me to play him in a nightclub act. Ed Sullivan saw me, and Steve Allen, and put me on their shows. In 1957, we’d saved up nine thousand dollars to produce the show off-Broadway. The critical fraternity of the U.S. went nuts. They wrote astounding reviews. It was absolutely frightening. It was awesome; it could have grabbed ahold of my whole life, but the cautious side said, “Don’t let this take over your whole life. Keep it on the side.” Since then, I’ve done at least twelve shows every year.

 

RM:  Performing that number of shows can take its toll.  How do you stay fresh and excited about the show?

HH:  Two things help. As I get older, I get more — what is the word — angry, angry or frustrated, about the world I live in, in many, many ways. I see a change in ideals, behavior, standards—an apparent weakening of the moral plane according to what I was raised to believe in. In politics, which everyone is concerned about now, the press has taken over the job of thinking for us. So second, this material becomes my “machine gun,” my opportunity to shoot down all the deceitful, crummy things I want to knock out, fired out of this material written by someone who was also fired up. He questioned our thinking.

 

RM:  Do you add to the show?

HH:  I do add to the show all the time, anywhere from ten minutes to a half-hour. This year I’ve added quite a bit. But what is very important — and this is very important to me — I do not update, modernize, or rewrite. I select the material; if I edit, I edit by selection. The point is: I don’t want to change what he wrote, because the original is much more powerful. That way, the audience gets a “double whammy”; they hear the words, and they laugh because it’s funny, and it’s true, but then they’re also thinking, “My God, this guy wrote that over a hundred years ago!” I do occasionally simplify some words to take the “literariness” out. Clemens did the same thing in preparing his lectures to make it seem more extemporaneous…but what I don’t do is edit a political position.

 

RM: For example?

HH:  [Twain] hated war, but we don’t know what he’d think about the war in Iraq. He’s not here, so we don’t know. But I found a piece last spring to make people think — to question — and that, I think, I can honestly do with Twain. I create a piece on a topic to pry our mind open and put a little fresh air in there.

 

RM: On the topic of political positions, you perform excerpts of Huckleberry Finn in your show.  The book is often banned in schools for being racist. What do you think about that?

HH:  It’s obvious that Twain uses Huck Finn to attack violence and racism by its continuous and widespread popularity in countries such as India, Japan, and China…On a panel at an American Literature conference, I talked about re-reading [Huckleberry Finn] recently, and I kept hitting up against the word “nigger.” I put the book down and asked myself, “Hold on, Hal, let’s use our common sense. Was Mark Twain a good writer? Did he know what he was up to? Why did he use the word when he knew it was unpleasant. Because if he didn’t know, he was stupid. Well, he’s not stupid, so if he used the word to the point it felt like you had bugs crawling all over you, he was doing it on purpose—he wanted you to feel disgusted.” Like other things—a ringing bell, or a sledgehammer—that word acquired such a distasteful sound for blacks and ninety-nine percent of whites, that it helped Twain’s purpose. We know he hated slavery; I don’t know if he knew the effect Huck Finn would have. I like to think so.

 

RM:  Have you ever performed in Hannibal?

HH:  I played in Hannibal in 1956 or ’57, before the show was well known. It was in the Star Theatre; they had to cancel the Saturday movie. Fifty-eight people showed up. I’ve been a few times since then.

Sometimes I think Missouri lets “Show Me” get out of hand. I wonder if they know what they produced in Mark Twain. Hannibal has to keep working Tom Sawyer, and it pays off, but they need to get beyond Tom Sawyer, and get all of [Twain] in; shake themselves loose.

 

RM:  What influences do you think Missouri had on Mark Twain?

HH:   When Mark Twain said, “I am not an American; I am The American,” he picked his words carefully. He reflected both the good and bad in our national character. He came from this little place, and like anyone who comes from a small place, you get spots on you, and those spots are mostly wrong. But he left there and absorbed this panorama with his extraordinary memory and literary view, and it altered him. 

 

RM:  While there are many imitators, no one gives us Twain quite the way you do.  Do you worry that your legacy will live on?

HH:  Mark Twain is an endless fountain of reason and truth … no one is indispensable. All we can do is begin to stand in his light. We reflect and absorb great power from certain human beings. Mark Twain belongs to that platoon of great Americans.

 

April 2008 MissouriLifeLines

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