Like His River, He Rolls On

You don’t know about Mark Twain unless you have read his books about Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Or maybe someone read them to you. Or somehow you heard a wily Twain quote that makes people smile still. But that ain’t no matter. There was things which Mr. Twain stretched, but he told the truth, mainly.

And therein lies the enduring power of this American icon in the white suit. This weekend, the reports of his demise no longer premature, we mark his 167th birthday in an era of corporate corruption, conflict and social change when, Twain might observe, honesty is by far the best policy if convenient.

Raised by his widowed mother on the Mississippi River in Hannibal, Mo., Samuel Clemens made the observations and absorbed the details of American life in the 1800s. Later, as Mark Twain, he imaginatively reassembled them into stories that revolutionized American literature, freeing it and later writers like Hemingway and Faulkner from the copycat propriety of British literature.

Twain’s controversial style was realism. Having lived a real life as a wanderer, a journalist and river pilot, he wrote about real-life issues with real people speaking as they really did outside proper parlors. One historian called him the Abraham Lincoln of American literature.

Twain’s books, sold door to door, established a pre-TV international celebrity one house at a time. He wrote and lectured widely at home and abroad. We picture this mustachioed man, cigar in hand, regally presiding over a porch in his trademark white suit, actually worn only in his last four years so he’d know when his clothes were dirty.

Hal Holbrook, who has lived in Twain’s persona onstage since 1954, senses his resurgence in an age of spin. “Twain is scathingly, comically honest,” says the actor. “He says everything like it is, never excluding himself.”

In some 55,000 letters and writings, Twain left a thoughtful treasure. “Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.” “Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to.” “In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made school boards.” “Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence in society.”

Clemens is long gone, having arrived with Halley’s comet in 1835 and, as he predicted, departing this world on its return in 1910. His words, however, survive.

There’s a postscript: A few miles west of Hannibal, where Clemens lived the childhood he chronicled later as Twain, the tiny Big Creek Cemetery sits beneath shady cedars. A granite headstone marks the grave of Laura Hawkins, a pretty little playmate of the awkward Sam Clemens. As she requested, her tombstone carries two names. One is Laura Hawkins, who died in 1928. The other is Becky Thatcher, who, like Huck and Tom and Twain himself, lives on. And that ain’t no stretcher.