Grace under (Hydraulic) Pressure

One scary morning from thirty years ago speaks volumes. Having flown to Berkeley from Chicago late the night before, I escaped early from some nearby motel and wheezed up the campus's immaculate green slopes, eager for a serene week of prowling in the Mark Twain Papers. As I came in range of the mighty Bancroft, however, I saw a cluster of emergency-cleanup and document-rescue trucks at the annex where the archive was then housed. Yikes! Sure enough, sometime in the preceding wee hours the top-floor's antique fire-suppression systems had misfired, soaking the attic rooms where thousands of manuscript pages, and letters, and other precious Mark Twain documents were stored.Figuring I'd be rightfully shooed back to the prairies, I went upstairs anyway to offer condolences and steal a glance at the damage. From experience, folk in humanities trades know of bibliothèques and special-collections places where legit patrons can be blockaded on almost any pretext: busted copier, random local holiday, mice in the café downstairs. And under those now-dubious ceilings the lair of the Papers was indeed in frightening shape. Box-fans, dehumidifiers, desiccators, long snakes of power cable, tarps draped over manuscript cabinets in case of an encore spritz—and here was Bob in the midst of all this, arrayed for a day of fun in a white tee shirt and shorts, already busy, strangely buoyant, and also flatteringly pink, as the temperature and humidity in that attic at 9 am were already in high double-figures. I got an incongruously warm welcome, a daunting rundown on what had happened last night and how the consequences were being coped with, a stunning reassurance that I could indeed stick around, and guidance to a dryish alcove where I could set up shop. Essentially in our underwear, everyone got to work. While Bob and his team oversaw the complex rescue of one of the country's most extensive and valuable collections on a major writer, they also managed to keep me entertained with documents and insights that have lastingly transformed my thinking, not only about the career of Sam Clemens, but also sixty-plus years of American literary and cultural history.Those were my days of closest interaction with Bob; but before and after, I've experienced what I've felt were other connections, though few words have passed between us directly. As I continue to teach and write about Mark Twain, I haven't vexed Bob or his team with lots of questions simply because answers I need are usually and exhaustively right in front of me—on the shelves in my office, those packed, meticulous editions produced by the Project during his years of leadership, and also in the massive exemplary online resources which have taken shape on his watch. As a scholar I've seen nothing to compare with them. Much is said about the research that subtends nearly every page in these editions of the Notebooks and Journals, of the Letters, and above all the Autobiography, these Sumo volumes containing several different substantial books gracefully inter-braided. By this I mean not only Sam's actual writings and dictations pulled into order and verified, but also the thorough history of how they came about; and in these streams of annotation there's the additional parallel life story, setting all the dates and facts straight when Sam's recollections go astray or blur, and relentlessly expanding and cross-referencing and clarifying contexts. Beyond all those achievements, however, there's something more. If you've kept company with what the Mark Twain Project has produced in Bob Hirst era, you've apprehended, whether intuitively or straight out, the extraordinary patience, the poise, the unpretentious dignity, and the generosity of energy and spirit that these prodigious books and web resources exemplify. I can't think of Bob without thinking of those qualities.Because things worked out happily for the Project, which eventually moved to new and much nicer digs, a yarn about soggy days in the old place is harmless fun to re-tell, yet perhaps also instructive. If overseeing and sharing precious holdings and historical fact suggests a serene way of life, that ain't so. Pop-up crises and chronic challenges are part of the overhead. Big campuses can turn fractious and unpredictable, and Cal-Berkeley has sometimes led the nation with such amusements; scholarly presses can spice up years of productive collaboration with outbreaks of mindless resistance; money to keep the lights on and core initiatives alive has to be chased, negotiated, and defended. Moreover, this vast legacy of a writer who was, and remains, an American first-magnitude pop-star can require from curators foul-weather diplomacy and public interactions that guardians of other bygone worthies are rarely called on to match. Bob Hirst and the Project staff have not only boosted countless scholarly careers and endowed us with trusted, treasured editions; they have made this repository a world-class landmark and resource in all the right ways. What we owe him is beyond measure.