It started with the trip to Maui, but, in all likelihood, it began long before that. For now, that’s a little more metaphysical than I want to get, so let’s just say the trip to Maui was the puncture that opened up the can of worms, because that’s what it feels like to me right now. Like I’m writhing in a mass of information that’s taking forever to untangle.
“It” is this book I’ve decided I just have to write: In Search of Mark Twain in Hawaii.
You see, it’s on the trip to Maui that I discovered Mark Twain beat me to the punch. He visited and wrote about Maui in 1866—almost 140 years ago. It wasn’t a six-hour plane ride from the West Coast then. It was a journey aboard the newly-minted passenger steam ship, Ajax—and you’d a thought they’d discovered electricity. Instead of 21 days under sail, it now took 10 powered by steam. Twain was ecstatic. He prophesied great riches for trade with the “Orient.” Still, 10 days? That was a commitment. It’s obvious the standard vacation of the day wasn’t one week.
Before I left for Maui, I picked up a tattered and yellowed copy of Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii at my local, used bookstore (Tin Can Mailman) and fell in love with—not Twain but his sidekick—Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown was always saying and doing the wrong thing. He was cad to Twain’s gentleman—as if Twain could ever be considered a gentleman. That last thought should have tipped me off.
Imagine my sick heart then when after reading Twain’s 25 letters, I went back and read the introduction by A. Grove Day and discovered Mr. Brown was an invention—an artifice of the author’s.
Not only was I disappointed that the irascible but likeable Mr. Brown didn’t exist, but I was mad at Twain. Mad because this Mark Twain of 1866 was a journalist. He hadn’t published a single book of any kind and was a good 10 years away from the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. When he disembarked the Ajax in Honolulu Harbor on March 18, 1866, Mark Twain was a writer of nonfiction, although I now understand that Twain’s nonfiction was always fiction from the start. At the time, the journalist in me was aghast.
And so that’s how it all started, this journey of writing a book about Mark Twain. There’s more to it, of course, and we’ll get to it. For now, I shake my head and question, who’d have thought 20 years ago when I posed outside the same academic building as Mark Twain had 75 years before in acceptance of his honorary diploma from my alma mater, the University of Missouri (he beat me to this, too), that I’d write a book about such an overwritten man?
I invite you to check back periodically and see how I sort and align my worms end to end in one coherent storyline. (Let's hope.)
