Building a Dry Stone Wall

Having spent a year at the Mark Twain Papers as early as 1963–64, I first met Bob Hirst during a brief return visit to the Berkeley campus in the late 1970s. He was then a graduate student in the English Department, working alongside Ed Branch on the first volume of Early Tales & Sketches. Bob surprised me by confiding that he had read the manuscript (on deposit at the Papers) of my book, which was published in 1981 as Mark Twain and “Life on the Mississippi.” In 1980, Bob succeeded Henry Nash Smith and Frederick Anderson as Curator of the Mark Twain Archive and General Editor of The Works of Mark Twain, and in both these capacities his assistance proved invaluable as I was seeing the book through the press from Germany. Over the ensuing decades, I have profited immensely from Bob's expertise as much as from his kindness, both during stays in Berkeley and also in email correspondence. He patiently fielded my many questions in connection with my research on the sources, composition, publication, and influences of Huckleberry Finn, A Connecticut Yankee, Pudd'nhead Wilson, and The Mysterious Stranger, among others—inquiries that invariably called for much documentary verification as well as recourse to archival material.We last met in person at a Mark Twain Conference in Elmira in 2013, where I heard Bob give a talk on The Innocents Abroad, touching on the author's fellow passengers aboard the Quaker City and drawing on genealogical material obtained through Ancestry, a research tool that he had long since recommended to me, and which I have used with much success in my own work. At this same conference, Bob was present when I gave an informal paper on a letter of 1890 which had customarily been referred to as “To an Unidentified Person.” Speaking up from the audience, Bob extemporaneously supplied pertinent information about the document, thereby enhancing both its status as well as the point that I was trying to make. Our latest email exchange occurred in 2020 when I had sent him birthday greetings and Bob responded by telling me that he was thinking about retiring.Bob's generous help has always been much more than merely academic. He would find lodging for me at the Faculty Club, always provide a desk for me at the Papers, grant me free access to all files, and even let me work in the archives after hours—a great favor for someone who had traveled over five thousand miles to do research on Mark Twain. We shared an occasional bottle of wine, a Merlot at his home, a Chardonnay at the Faculty Club, and once shared a fine dinner, along with our wives, Margaret and Ursula, at a downtown Berkeley location. On one of these occasions, as we were discussing the beginnings of our careers, Bob confided that, for complicated reasons, he had also spent a summer building a dry stone wall to earn the money to pay for his tuition. So I ventured the conclusion that the edifice of his academic career was securely grounded on a solid stone foundation. It has come to me since, however, that building a dry stone wall is in fact an apt metaphor for all of the scholarly work that Bob has done. Such a wall is built from stones chosen with care so as to stay in place without the use of any mortar to bind them together and to hide small or large gaps. The construction of a dry stone wall requires perfect judgment regarding the quality and the shape of the material as well as expertise and experience in stacking rocks and boulders, and in placing pebbles even, so as to create a structure that will endure. This is a perfect analogy to the scholarly work that Bob has been pursuing all along, as well as encouraging and overseeing:—to establish and ascertain facts, to describe and evaluate their relevance in relation to other facts, to draw incontrovertible inferences, and finally to publish such facts and conclusions in their bare validity, wholly without using the “mortar” of either guesswork or embellishing prose. An achievement, truly, that we have every reason to be grateful for.