The Longest Way Around Is the Shortest Way Home

On Martha's Vineyard, where my family has vacationed for many years, the locals have a wry, mildly derisive term for anyone not born and bred on the island: you're a “Washashore.” It doesn't matter how long or how often you visit, or even if you own property there (alas, we do not)—you are forever and always an outsider. As fate would have it, I'm a “Washashore” not only on the Vineyard, but also in Mark Twain studies. I began my academic career as a specialist in modern American poetry, steeped in (and stoked by) the likes of William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens. My imagination ran to the heady days of the 1913 Armory Show when the European avant-garde took New York by storm and American expatriates caroused late into the night, downing absinthe with James Joyce, Pablo Picasso, and Man Ray in 1920s Parisian bars. Then I happened to stumble across Mark Twain's troubling 1870 sketch, “The Noble Red Man.” Its strange, hyperbolic venom—so thoroughly uncharacteristic of the humorist I thought I knew—piqued my interest and realigned my focus, opening up a circuitous path of exploration that culminated in Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples nearly two decades later. For the longest time, I was filled with trepidation about this new research focus: What did I know about the nineteenth century or Mark Twain? Was I writing an essay or a book? And most vexingly, what authority did I—a modernist interloper—have to weigh in on such a vast (and politically fraught) topic? Plagued by these uncertainties, as well as the daunting fact that I knew no one in the field of Twain studies, I slogged on. Then, one day—literally—my life changed.It was August 2005, and I was standing on stage in a darkened auditorium, reading a paper on “Mark Twain and Native Religion” at Elmira College's Fifth International State of Mark Twain Studies conference. Afterwards, as I hurried across the quad to the next session, I was approached by a tall, distinguished, silver-headed man, who extended his hand and introduced himself with a smile: “I'm Bob Hirst. That was one of the best papers I've ever heard at a conference—you're doing important work.” He gave me his card, invited me to visit the Papers, and said he'd be happy to assist in any way possible with my project. The encounter left me thunderstruck: had I really just landed on the radar screen of the preeminent figure in Mark Twain scholarship? Might this mean I wasn't a “Washashore” after all?Soon thereafter, Bob and I began a robust email exchange, and he generously forwarded me a steady stream of documents—unpublished letters, obscure newspaper clippings—once even prefacing his largesse with the modest statement, “This may be like carrying coals to Newcastle, but . . . . ” Infinitely grateful, I devoured it all. Through Bob's mentoring, the structure and thesis of my book eventually began to take shape. He even introduced me to Laura Cerruti, the acquisitions editor at the University of California Press in charge of their Mark Twain series.Every time I visited Berkeley, I came armed with a lengthy list of questions, which Bob fielded in his office with infinite patience and good cheer. He became my de facto sounding board as I tested out occasionally crackpot theories on a wide range of subjects, from Clemens’ relationship to the progressive racial politics of the 1860s Nevada Territorial elite to his refusal, some two decades later, to join the ranks of the Connecticut Indian Association, an organization eagerly embraced by his Nook Farm neighbors. Along the way, Bob occasionally dropped Solomonic pearls of wisdom, once mentioning offhandedly: “If you really want to understand Mark Twain, read his letters.” For the most part, however, he was never prescriptive, instead encouraging me to devise my own interpretation of the archival record: “In the end, I may disagree with you—in fact, it's highly likely that I will—but that's okay.” I've never met anyone who wears his erudition as lightly (and disarmingly) as Bob.It's often been said that “The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don't tell you what to see.” I can think of no more apt description for Bob. On one occasion, for instance, he pointed me to Clemens’ heavily annotated copy of Francis Parkman's The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, which deepened and clarified my understanding of Mark Twain's fascination with Native spirituality and became the eventual linchpin of my argument regarding his abandonment of “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer among the Indians.” On another visit, Bob came into the reading room bearing a large bound scrapbook, one of many housed in the MTP vault which had been kept over the years by various members of the Clemens family—his sister Pamela, sister-in-law Mollie, brother Orion, and occasionally Sam himself. “They're an interesting mixture of stuff,” he said with characteristic understatement, placing it in a book cradle in front of me. And of course, he was right; within minutes, I came upon an early unsigned editorial advocating for the more humane treatment of Nevada's Indians. I jumped up, ran down the hallway and burst into Bob's office, saying I needed to show him something. “Could this be by Mark Twain?” I asked excitedly. “Well, to determine authorship of an anonymous text,” he explained, “we editors look for ‘stylistic signatures’—distinctive diction and creative turns of phrase that identify it as his.” I'd never even heard of such a thing before. Bob skimmed the piece, then delivered a quiet, but decisive verdict: “Nope. Not him.” “But I want it to be!” I wailed petulantly. Leaving the reading room, he glanced back with a twinkle in his eye and added: “Walter Blair didn't think so either. That's why it didn't make the cut into Early Tales and Sketches.” Deflated, I continued halfheartedly flipping through the scrapbook and eventually found something else entirely: an 1892 poem Orion had published in the Chicago Tribune called “The Reformed Savage” that forcefully condemns the violence of colonial conquest against indigenous tribes. It was contextual gold, fleshing out the ideological divide that had emerged between the Clemens brothers some thirty years earlier in Nevada Territory—and I would never have encountered it without Bob's gentle guidance. He did much the same when I was researching the Australia and New Zealand chapters of my book, suggesting that I examine Mark Twain's unpublished notebooks from 1895–96. Those cryptic, staccato entries yielded an amazing trove of information, such as the writer's dinner with a Maori politician in Wellington during which he received an impromptu lesson in indigenous etymology—and cultural imperialism: “Pakeha—white man (equivalent to foreigner). Genesis of it: pakepakeha, white fairy—the fairies were white. When the white man came, they took him for a fairy because of his complexion.”1In the introduction to Mark Twain among the Indians and Other Indigenous Peoples, I described it as a “work of literary archaeology, sifting through the strata of diverse, often obscure, primary sources to recreate the cultural milieu” of the diverse local environs that had shaped the writer.2 Bob Hirst, in the profoundest sense, oversaw that dig. His scrupulous commitment to accuracy is a benchmark that I continually seek to achieve in my own work.In the fall of 2019, when I began working as an Associate Editor at the Mark Twain Papers and Project, one of the first assignments Bob gave me was to double-check the transcriptions a previous editor had made of the so-called “Vassar Fragments,” unused passages from The Innocents Abroad. I wasn't quite sure what I was doing; however, as I began comparing the transcriptions against scans of the original handwritten documents, I soon discovered an error. The typescript read, “He [referring to Col. J. Foster Heron, a fellow passenger on the Quaker City] was a firm friend & a genuine comrade,” when in fact what Mark Twain had written was that Heron was a “genial comrade.” Once again, I trooped into Bob's office (a well-worn path at this point) and showed him what I had found. He closely examined the scan, then looked up and said: “Hmmm . . . you're right. Do you know how many people have reviewed this document before you and never noticed that?” At that point, a grin slowly spread across Bob's face and he said with pride, “Now you're thinking an editor, Kerry!” I think that may be the best compliment I've ever received.