Twain as disillusioned patriot

Holbrook's half-century of Twain

ROBERT ZALLER

Democracies always need a funnyman--which form of government is more naturally hilarious?--and each generation produces its own: a Will Rogers, an H. L. Mencken, a Lenny Bruce. (Only ours has managed to do no better than Garrison Keillor, sad commentary on our declining republic.) But there has never been a talent remotely like Mark Twain’s. Not only was he the wit of the Gilded Age, the most corrupt and venal epoch since ancient Rome, he was also the author of Huckleberry Finn, the most heartbreaking book in American literature. It’s as if Einstein could not only play the fiddle, but play it like Heifetz.

Twain was naturally much in demand on the lecture circuit. In his day, the spoken word, being still a principal form of entertainment, was far more seriously regarded than it is today. He flourished just before the moving camera could capture him or the phonograph record him, and so we can only imagine what he was like in the flesh. Fortunately, we have Hal Holbrook. Holbrook was still in his twenties when he created Mark Twain Tonight! in 1954. It was an instant success, and now, 50 years later, it is an American classic, the most famous and enduring one-man show in American theater history.

It is no denigration of Holbrook to say that the chief effect of his show is to make one regret the unavailability of the original. As a young man playing a codger of 70, Holbrook won praise for impersonating age, and now, 80 himself, he plays a younger man with undiminished vigor and panache. It is a tribute to his professionalism, and no doubt to his gratitude for such an enduring meal ticket, that he keeps his show so fresh and sharp. Above all, though, Holbrook seems to wear the character so close to his skin that he not only impersonates Twain but, as far as one may say it, and as far as we can have it, he incarnates him.

Mark Twain Tonight! requires only the barest of props, of which the most important is a cigar. A puff of smoke precedes Twain’s post-intermission entrance onstage, and other puffs punctuate his punch lines. A treatise needs to be written on comedy and the cigar, an inseparable combination that passed from the scene only with Groucho Marx and George Burns.

The cigar is the wand of comedy, both lewdly and magically potent. Its possessor immediately strikes the pose of wit, as under other circumstances that of power; and the expressiveness of holding, gesticulating, and puffing a cigar is one of the stage’s lost arts. Holbrook’s Twain resurrects it. He pats and twirls his stogie, points it to hone an argument, and gazes after a puff-cloud as if admiring a syllogism. He is 70, and has seen enough of the human comedy to fill several lifetimes; he hopes, he says, to last out until the return of Halley’s Comet in 1910 (he did). In the meantime, he is obviously going to enjoy the company of a good cigar.

All of this might suggest the mellow sage, but Holbrook’s Twain is that least genial of citizens, the deeply disillusioned lover of his country. If he takes his audience into his confidence, it is only to give it a good and wholly unflattering look at itself. Since there is no point in trying to outdo the master, Mark Twain Tonight! consists entirely of material drawn from Twain’s own writings. The failings of democracy and the foibles of homo sapiens being timeless, he needs no updating to sound contemporary; Washington is still “a stud farm for jackasses,” and we all still know the Congressman who “served two terms in the Congress and one in the penetentiary.”

The centerpiece of the show, though, is an extended reading of Huck and Jim’s ride upriver on the raft, for Huck an adventure but for Jim a desperate bid for whatever a black man might call freedom. No apter metaphor for the tragedy of American race relations has ever been coined, and none makes clearer the immense gulf between black and white that we still face. The Merriam audience fell utterly silent, and Holbrook/Twain, looking up from his text at the end, let out another puff of his cigar.

The real Mark Twain, at 70, had just returned to America from a stay in England. Slavery was 40 years behind the country, but its effects were not; and, meanwhile, America had embarked on a new imperial career in the Spanish-American War and its aftermath, the brutal conquest of the Philippines. The Iraq War of today would come as no surprise to Mark Twain, nor would the latest Congressional scandals, nor the new corporate robber barons. He would have little to learn from us, and we, it seems, have had little profit from him.

It is good to keep hearing his voice, though, and there is always the chance we might pay it some heed. Thanks be to Hal Holbrook for that. Holbrook no doubt thinks of himself as an entertainer rather than a moral resource, but the man who stole All the President’s Men as Deep Throat has been, wittingly or not, an edgy conscience of the republic for a long time. Long may he flourish.

Robert Zaller is a history professor at Drexel University, a playwright and poet, and a critic whose contributions have appeared in the New York Times and The Nation and locally in the Inquirer, Seven Arts, the Welcomat, Philadelphia Forum and Schuylkill Valley Journal. He lives in Bala Cynwyd.