From the Archives: The Last Laugh

By Pamela | September 2, 2022

We had a wonderful time in Hannibal, Missouri, the childhood home of Mark Twain, aka Samuel Clemens.  But I was a little disappointed that the museums didn’t barely touched on his later life, which was fascinating and heartbreaking.  For any of you who are curious about Mark Twain after he became Mark Twain, I offer this book review, which originally ran in May, 2016.

###

I realize that my United States citizenship may be revoked for saying this, but I am not a fan of Mark Twain’s work.* I am, however, eternally fascinated by Mark Twain’s career, which was a roiling broth of ambition, depression, and innovation. Consequently, I was much happier to read Richard Zacks’ newest book, Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour , than to read Twain himself.

In 1896, Mark Twain was sixty years old, the beloved author of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and the United State’s highest paid writer. He was also on the verge of financial disaster, most of which he had brought on himself through a combination of cock-eyed optimism and impatience with details. Determined to keep a larger percentage of the proceeds from the sale of his books, he had founded his own publishing company, which proved to be a cash drain rather than a source of income. He poured money into James Paige’s innovative typesetting machine, which was eclipsed by the Merganthaler Linotype in the nineteenth century’s version of the technological duel between Beta and VHS–and encouraged others to do the same. He signed documents he didn’t understand. He filed for bankruptcy, but continued to be pursued by creditors who refused to believe the luxury-loving author had nothing. Finally, Twain saw only one solution: to go back on the public speaking circuit, which he had happily left twenty-five years before.

In Chasing the Last Laugh, Zacks turns the circumstances that led Twain to undertake a year-long tour of the English-speaking world and the tour itself into a combination of high drama, black comedy, and occasional tragedy. The result is a lively and insightful study of the claims of celebrity, the value of controlling the public narrative, and the mercurial figure of Twain himself.

*Those of you who are sharp-eyed may remember that I also recently expressed my lack of enthusiasm for Ernest Hemingway. In case anyone is getting the impression that I am uniformly “agin” male American authors from the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, I would like to point out that I am a big fan of F. Scott Fitzgerald (the short stories) and Dashiell Hammett. (Choosing two off the top of my head. )

 

Road Trip Through History: In Search of Mark Twain in Hannibal MO

By Pamela | August 30, 2022

Unlike most of the places we’ve visited on our expeditions along the Great River Road, I had been to Hannibal, Missouri, before. But it had been a long time—decades in fact. When we drove into town on this trip, I carried two sharp memories—a recreation of the famous scene in which Tom Sawyer tricks other boys in whitewashing the fence and the thrill of seeing Mark Twain’s typewriter*—and a vague recollection of heat, dust, and shabbiness.

Although the town itself still is a bit shabby, the official Mark Twain interpretive center is not. The center uses a cluster of buildings related to Twain’s boyhood—or more accurately, to Samuel Clemens’ boyhood**—to tell the story of the man who became Mark Twain. (The museum’s emphasis on his boyhood is entirely appropriate. Clemens left Hannibal twenty years before he wrote Tom Sawyer.)

The museum uses names and imagery from Tom Sawyer to orient the visitor***—the Becky Thatcher house, for example—but the exhibits draw a clear distinction between Twain and his fictional alter-ego. While the exhibits are family-friendly, they take a close look at hard subjects, both within Twain’s life (his father’s death, his family’s fluctuating financial position, his apprenticeship as a printer’s assistant at the age of twelve) and in society as a whole (slavery, class differences, mortality rates). I was particularly taken with the exhibits in the “Huckleberry Finn” house, which looked at the life of the boy on whom Twain based the character, comparing the poverty in which he was raised with Twain’s romanticism about the boy’s freedom in Tom Sawyer. The exhibit did an excellent job of examining how Twain wove real-life details into the novel—always fascinating to a writer.

The only thing I was disappointed by was the way the interpretive center dealt with Mark Twain’s life after he became Mark Twain. His later life was complicated and in many ways unhappy. Instead of looking at that with the same clear-eyed focus they gave to his boyhood, they used the books as a chronology, with very  little information about the man. And while the books are the important thing when looking at any writer, I was not taken by the combination of life-sized dioramas, long quotations, and brief synopses that they used to discuss the books. On the other hand, they show a 90-minute video on Huckleberry Finn and its importance in American literature in an earlier part of the museum that was fabulous.

On the whole, well worth a visit.

*The only historical fact that I held on to from that visit was the fact that Twain was an early adopter of the typewriter. Neither that fact nor the typewriter itself were part of current Twain exhibits.

**I’ve chosen to refer to him as Twain for the rest of this post instead of flipping back and forth.

***As does Hannibal as a whole.

Travelers’ Tips

  • If possible, organize your visit to include Mark Twain Himself, a one-man show in the Planters’ Barn Theater. We stayed in town an extra night so we could see it and were very happy we did.
  • We missed a smaller museum that looks like it would have been well worth seeing: Jim’s Journey: The Huck Finn Freedom Center.  The museum uses Dan Quarles, the real-life prototype for the character Jim in Huckleberry Finn, as a lens for looking at the African-American experience in Hannibal and the surrounding region. We may need to pass through Hannibal again.

Road Trip through History: The George M. Verity Riverboat Museum

By Pamela | August 23, 2022

I will admit that I had my doubts about the George M. Verity Riverboat Museum in Keokuk Iowa. We have visited, and enjoyed, riverboat museums in the past and I didn’t expect that we would learn anything new about the boats and their relationship to the river. Besides, it was the end of the day and it looked like a storm was brewing over the river.

But if we have one rule of the road, it is that we leave no historical marker unread* and no museum unvisited.* (Okay, two rules.) So I huffed a little and changed my shoes for a pair that would be safer on a wet metal deck. And I am glad we did. It was fascinating. (We have that “no museum left behind” rule for a reason. You never can tell.)

In 1927, the United States government built four new steamboats, including one then known as the S.S. Thorpe, to revive barge traffic on the Mississippi*** As the S.S. Thorpe, the boat moved barges between St Louis and St. Paul. In 1940, the boat was sold to Armco Steel and renamed after the company’s owner and founder, George M. Verity. (According to the tour guide, he liked to put this name on things.)

For the next twenty years, the boat plied the Ohio River, carrying coal from the mines in West Virginia to the steel mills in Cincinnati. But technology changed. In the 1950s, diesel replaced steel and the steamboats were scrapped. The Geroge M. Verity remained in operation until 1960, when the city of Keokuk bought it for a dollar.

While some of the material was familiar, the museum explored two topics that I had not seen before: the life of the crew on the boat and the workings of the steam engine. I was particularly taken with the explanations of how the steam engine worked not only to power the boat but to make life easier for the crew. (You might not find this as interesting as I did. I have a nerdy interest in steam boilers left over from the days when I managed old buildings with steam heat. But it was, honestly, very well done.)

Here are the bits that stayed with me:

• The 17 person crew included three women: two cooks and a laundress. My impression was that someone was eating pretty much all the time.
• The boat distilled its own water from the river, which was used for hot and cold showers, laundry, and drinking water.
• The boat created its own ice, which was used to send cold air into a walk-in cooler. (They carried lots of food supplies because, ahem, someone was eating pretty much all the time.)
• The boat included passenger cabins that were available for the families of the crew.

If you are interested in how people live and work in small spaces, mechanical stuff, or riverboats in general, put this one on your list. (A word of advice if you poke around on the internet looking for more information about the boat or the museum: www.geomverity.org does NOT have the info you are looking for. Trust me on this.)

*Assuming we can find it.

**Assuming that it is open. One of the costs of taking a road trip with no particular schedule is that sometimes we miss the one day a week that a small museum is open.

***My notes say 1297, but I’m pretty sure that’s wrong. (Perhaps we could call it a writo—like a handwritten typo.****)

****Having written this, it occurred to me that names for such errors probably exist in the context of medieval manuscripts. Which led me to wander off from the topic at hand for a moment or ten. Turns out there are technical names for entire categories within the larger universe of “scribal errors.” Two of my favorites: eyeskip, when the scribe missed an entire line, and dittography, when the scribe copied a section. Alas, my own scribal error above goes by the dull name of transposition. Perhaps I’ll stick with writo.