Transatlantic Collaborations

We are writing collaboratively to mark Bob's role in helping us as we prepared and published our co-edited book, The Letters of Mark Twain and Joseph Hopkins Twichell (University of Georgia Press, 2017). But we also use our initials to signal our separate—and always rewarding—experiences out at Berkeley with Bob and his great team. We wish also to acknowledge the work of our co-editor Hal Bush, now sadly deceased, in the preparation of the book.PM. I am pretty sure he will have no memory of this, but I first met Bob almost fifty years ago in 1978 when I was Visiting Professor and Fulbright Scholar at California State University, Sacramento. A still-callow 31-year-old lecturer at the American Studies Department at the University of Nottingham in England (think Robin Hood, D. H. Lawrence, and for any soccer enthusiast Nottingham Forest), I had swapped jobs for a year with an American peer. I don't really need to say that I got the better end of the deal.In those days, research was not at the foreground of my concerns. But as I had done my master's dissertation on Mark Twain and knew that the Twain Papers were only about an hour away from Sacramento, I arranged to go to Berkeley for a week to see what I could find. I was interested in the then-popular subject of ‘black humor’ and thought I might explore that further in the Twain archives. I was, however, an innocent abroad, with little clue of what I was doing or how to go about it. I had written ahead to the Papers and when I first got there, Bob Hirst came out to meet me and asked how he could help. After hearing my stuttering and unconvincing reply, he disappeared to fetch a manuscript of an unpublished text which he thought might fill my brief. It is with some shame that I say that I then spent very little time in the library preferring instead to explore Berkeley, San Francisco and the Bay area—and I'm not sure I talked to Bob again. I still remember though his courteous manner and the time he took initially to help me, and my own astonishment at sitting in the Mark Twain Papers visitors’ room leafing through a handwritten manuscript by Twain himself. Again to my shame, nothing much became of this so-called “research.” (I cannot even remember now what the Twain text was) either then or later. But I would be back!Maybe some seeds had been planted in my 1978 Berkeley trip. Certainly, by the beginning of the new millenium, University life had changed and a research culture was now the required norm. I had written a general survey of Twain's work (Mark Twain, 1996) and went on to write The Short Works of Mark Twain (2001) and Mark Twain and Male Friendship (2009). Courtesy of the British Academy, I was able to spend good three- to four- week stretches on both the latter projects at Berkeley. Bob and his team could not have been more helpful. I was given automatic entry to the archive and whenever I had a query regarding information or resources, Bob or Vic Fischer or another member of the team would point me in the right direction—a direction I often never would have found if left to my own devices. This meant I was able to complete an extensive amount of work in my limited research time. And working in the limited confines (as was the case at that time) of the Papers’ research center was an absolute pleasure. I was never less than astounded by the depth of the team's encyclopaedic knowledge. It was like having an (entirely accurate) Wikipedia at my beck and call. Any question I asked was almost always immediately answered and Bob or Vic would reappear with a manuscript or letter with a “you might have a look at this”—material vital to my project. The whole atmosphere (led by Bob) was absolutely conducive to generous scholarly interchange and, what's more, was Twain-saturated, with the extraordinary collection of letters, manuscripts, Twain editions, critical works, photos, used (Clemens-signed) cheques etc., spilling out of every corner of the place. And I and the other various researchers there were treated as equals, entrusted to treat the valuable original materials with the same care and integrity shown by Bob and his colleagues. In the case of the Short Works book, Bob also read part of the manuscript and gave valuable advice on what I had got right or—all too often—wrong. On all my trips, too, Bob would make a point of taking me out to lunch, often with Vic beside him—an absolutely unnecessary but hugely-appreciated gesture.SC. I first met Bob in the men's lavatory at the Mark Twain Papers. I was a neophyte in the role of Mark Twain scholar, having been drawn to the author in childhood via the usual two literary suspects (Tom and Huck) and entranced by Roughing It when I lived in San Francisco. (I'd also visited Mono Lake with my wife and infant son and noted the same band of insects around the moonscape alkaline lake that Clemens did.) I first snorted with laughter at The Innocents Abroad around the same era, and marveled at Clemens’ descriptive powers. A proud college dropout, I landed in journalism and in the ’90s was involved with a Hartford Courant Sunday magazine project—“Twain's World”—in partnership with the Mark Twain House and Museum. Writing on Gilded Age Hartford I came upon Asylum Hill Congregational Church, still the “Church of the Holy Speculators,” and of the Holy Insurance Company CEOs, and other Holy elites. The then-pastor of the church, Jim Kidd, did not want to be quoted about his parishioners’ wealth but quietly passed me a copy of the church membership directory, where their occupations made things pretty clear.My research quickly unearthed the fact that Clemens’ best pal in Hartford was Reverend Joe Twichell, which didn't jibe with the Mark Twain I thought I knew. This led to a story about their friendship in the Courant's Sunday magazine, Northeast, framed by the tale of their frequent companionable walks to Bartlett's Tower on the crest of Talcott Mountain just west of Hartford. The story included a re-enactment of sorts: a rainy walk along their approximate route with Kidd and John Boyer, then the director of the Mark Twain House.I eventually found my way to the Twichell papers at Yale's Beinecke library, where the personality of this appealing man was revealed in the mass of stuff he kept—journals, letters, photos, scrapbooks. Twichell stuck in my mind, and having picked up a bachelor's degree on the fly along the way, I thought I might do a master's thesis on the Reverend. But being pretty well along in my journalistic career, I soon abandoned the idea in favor of simply researching and writing a biography. This led me to Bob and the encounter in the men's room.This was about 2002. I had arrived in Berkeley in search of Twichell material, and was awed by the hushed, nearly monastic atmosphere of the Papers and Project. Neda Salem, the administrative assistant, was terrific at helping me find things, and all the editors were as gracious as Pete has described, but let's just say there was not a lot of small talk. Every once in a while Bob, a Falstaffian figure, would walk past, but I never found an opportunity to introduce myself. Finally, Vic Fischer took me aside and recommended that I take the initiative. I finally did so, as mentioned, as we washed our hands in our respective sinks.It was the beginning of a friendship that, like many male friendships, has involved perhaps only a couple of communications a year; nonetheless, it has been an invaluable one. Bob has often made some quiet suggestion that sent me in an important direction. I was stunned at an Elmira symposium on travel when he asked for a copy of a short Twichell-related paper that I read for the Papers. Subsequent visits to Berkeley included lunch with Bob and time to sit in his famously cluttered office. In that office, during the hoo-hah over the Autobiography, he handed me a copy of “Encounter with an Interviewer” as a comment on the media assault he was experiencing. We both appeared on a radio show at the time, and Bob let drop a typically memorable line about the Autobiography: “It's Mark Twain doing Hal Holbrook.”Of course, he showed up at the Mark Twain House from time to time after I got there, with wonderful explications of the editorial process for that massive work. His style on the online Mark Twain Forum is typical: He is not a frequent commentator but will jump in deftly and briefly to clarify a point that has muddled others. He is a firm believer in the idea that a public university has a public role, the reason so much of the material the Project has produced is free to find at anyone's fingertips. Those in the field are eagerly anticipating the results of his and the Project editors’ current work on Innocents.As Pete goes on to relate below, Bob's role in the publication of the Twain–Twichell letters was extraordinary. I will only add that when he once, in a conversation, quietly questioned a detail of how we presented the letters’ texts, and I explained the reasoning, he immediately deferred. “You're the editors,” he said.PM. This co-edited project, published in book form in 2017, could not have reached completion without Bob Hirst's generous help. In its early stages we learned that we would not be allowed to publish the Clemens part of the correspondence in full—but gathered that large amounts of direct transcription would be permitted. As the person most directly shaping the project, I worked to that brief. But I suspect some crossed wires had previously occurred for when the draft manuscript was presented to Bob to process for official approval, it became clear that I had overused Clemens’ own words in a way unacceptable to the University of California Press and the Bancroft Library.Then Bob worked behind the scenes to ensure the book could go ahead. What's more, he somewhat magically managed to obtain permission for us, after all, to use the Clemens letters we needed in direct transcription in their entirety! Steve, Hal and I received this news, as one can imagine, with jubilation, even though it meant preparing the book anew. But that wasn't the end of Bob's good work. Many of Clemens’ letters to Twichell from 1880 onward, though available in transcribed form on-site at the Papers and Project, had not been finally and authoritatively checked and edited. Bob volunteered to go through all these letters and send them to me in their final edited form, a massive task which he completed in good time and with both good humor and a graceful modesty, with no recognition of his crucial part in the book's making either expected or called for. This, indeed, is typical of Bob, with his tendency to keep his important presence in the background.SC and PM. To sum up: We owe an enormous amount to Bob. Under his leadership, the offices and research center of the Mark Twain Papers and Project became a space where academic collaboration and generous good-fellowship were always fostered. It was (and is) a place where the depth of knowledge among all its staff (and especially Bob) for all things Twainian could not be rivalled. His presence there will be hugely missed.