All right, then, I'll <i>go</i> to Hirst!

You don't know about me without you have read a bargaphy book by the name of “Mark Twain: A Life”; but that ain't no matter. You probably wouldn't have knowed about “Mark Twain: A Life” if not for a jaybird named Mister Robert Hirst. Mister Hirst knows everything there is to know about Mister Mark Twain, and he helped me to know the rest.See, I'd never writ no bargaphy before. But I thought that me growin up in Twain's hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, might get me over. I might haul in twenty, thirty pages of quotes out of that connection alone. Yet by the time I got back there to interview him, he'd done already left town.Did I mention I'd never writ no bargaphy before? I'm a rough sort. Whenever anybody asked me how I was fixin to write this bargaphy, I was always proud to answer promptly and I would. I'd say I didn't know.So I went on a hunt for experts that could help. The sort of experts that show up in the Acknowledgments sections of a book, where the author comes clean about all the other authors he cribbed off of.’Twarn't as easy as I'd reckoned. Most of the experts was too busy feudin with one another about whether Mister Clemens employed deceptions and evasions in his work so as to fool everybody. Lordy only knows why he'd want to go and do a thing like that. Or whether he was so mixed up in his dualities that he subverted his own text. Or something like that. It sure beat the hell outta me.But finally I struck it rich. I come upon this lady expert that got up on her high horse and said she wasn't givin’ me no information at all. She ’lowed that since I wasn't an expert like her and everybody else, I didn't have no bidness tryin to write a bargaphy of Mark Twain. Then she delivered what she must've thought was the coo de grace. She said nobody who was not an expert on Mark Twain should ever have any truck with tryin to write a bargaphy of him. Then she put on airs an said I should leave that to somebody that knows what they're about.Then she made a blunder. She let on that in fact there was only one gent in all the world that should be writin such a book. Then she said his name. His name was Mister Robert Hirst and that he was the general editor of the Mark Twain Project out there at that University of California. So there. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. Now scram.Well, I did scram. I scrammed all the way out to the Mark Twain Project at the University of California. (The Widow Douglas didn't raise no fools, I reckon.) And there (if you'll forgive me from stepping out of character for a moment) I found the man to whom American culture owes a laurel wreath for his heroic preservation of the American sublime, expressed through words.I ambled into the Bancroft Li'bery at Berkeley. And there before my eyes sat His Eminence at his desk: Mister Robert Hirst hisself, lookin almost as righteous as Judge Thatcher at a hangin. White hair, white whiskers, white shirt. Mark Twain on the half-shell. Stacks of papers on his desk. And all around him, teeterin on bookshelves and file-cabinet tops and I don't know what-all, were just loads and loads of stuff he'd picked up over his forty-odd years at the Project: Mark Twain's book manuscripts and his essays and his notebooks and his journals and the talks he give, and even his drawings on napkins. And sweetest of all, thousands upon thousands of letters to and from Mark Twain in his lifetime!1Mister Hirst he looked up and shot me an appraising glance. I was scairt to the point that I could hardly move a muscle to scratch the itch that had come up in my nose. I almost blurted out, “Well, Mister Hirst, I'm embarrassed! Are you?” Instead, I up and tole him my bidniss. Said I needed his help. Then I ducked.But instead of getting sore at me, Mister Hirst he turned into my sidekick. He stood up from his desk and rolled up his sleeves and turned into my sidekick.For three years Mister Hirst done what any good editor would do. He helped me dig up facts, and steer clear of “facts” that warn't nothin but stretchers. He corrected my slip-ups. He showed me these big thick books he'd edited via the Mark Twain Project—books that contained just heaps of them letters that Mr. Twain had wrote and received. And at the bottom of nearly every page, footnotes that give the reader a sense of what was goin on in America at the time.And this ain't to mention the books of his talks, and his notebooks, and his ruminations, and I don't know what-all. Or of the many conversations we shared in Thai restaurants that dotted the area. Although none of em served corn on the cob. Great conversations from a great mind. I listened, mainly.Mister Hirst give me nearly every one of these books to take home with me. And it didn't cost me a cent! What he never done was write a word of my text. He just unscrolled the life and let me take it from there.Three years after that first encounter, “Mark Twain: a Life” showed up on the bookshelves. I dedicated that bargaphy to Mister Hirst, “The best friend Mark Twain ever had.” I wish I could count myself as the best friend Mister Hirst ever had. But that would be a stretcher. I never did return them books, and he might be sore.