What a wonderful review! Thank you.


Caroline x
http://www.carolinelawrence.com 


> Date: Thu, 15 Sep 2011 11:25:50 -0400
> From: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: BOOK REVIEW: _Harold, the Boy Who Became Mark Twain_. Hal Holbrook.
> To: [log in to unmask]
> 
> BOOK REVIEW
> 
> _Harold, the Boy Who Became Mark Twain_. Hal Holbrook. Farrar, Straus and
> Giroux, 2011. Pp. 468. Hardcover. $30. ISBN 978-0374281014
> 
> Many books reviewed on the Forum are available at discounted prices from the
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> benefit the Mark Twain Project. Please visit <http://www.twainweb.net>
> 
> Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
> Kevin Mac Donnell.
> 
> 
> Hal Holbrook has explained that he is drawn to Mark Twain because Mark Twain
> tells the truth and because we all need somebody who tells the truth. Even
> Huck Finn fails to give Mark Twain such high praise as Holbrook, pointing
> out that "there was things which he stretched" but Huck would approve of
> Holbrook's new book. It frankly tells some painful truths and attains a
> confessional level that Mark Twain himself never achieves in his own
> autobiography. Hal Holbrook has been Mark Twain longer than Sam Clemens was
> Mark Twain, but it took decades for Harold Holbrook to become Hal Holbrook,
> and then find Harold again. Holbrook's book, the first volume of a planned
> two-volume autobiography, chronicles the first thirty-four years of that
> often painful and sometimes hilarious journey.
> 
> Try to imagine a little boy whose mother leaves the family when he is six
> years old and whose father is soon sent to an asylum, leaving him and his
> sisters to be raised by grandparents. The little guy is continually beaten
> and abused by a schoolmaster, and one of his sisters later dies from a
> botched abortion. As a young man during World War II he watches an army
> drill sergeant work an older recruit to death and his best friend is killed
> in action in Belgium. After the war he drinks too much and has an affair.
> His marriage fails and he belatedly realizes that he has failed his
> children. Years later he has an epiphany and realizes he was an abused
> child. I've skipped the grimmest details, but you've just met Hal Holbrook,
> who describes in a matter-of-fact manner how these events shaped his life.
> He recalls his feelings at the time, and brings you back in time with him as
> he evokes the sounds and smells, the very texture of being in each of these
> moments. Mark Twain once described biography as the "clothes and buttons" of
> a man, not the man himself. Holbrook gives himself.
> 
> Faced with cruelties and tragedies beyond his understanding, Holbrook tries
> to escape into mere "clothes and buttons." He craves attention, at one point
> holding his breath under water until frightened onlookers dive in to save
> him, pushes himself to run beyond his limits in track, and fears meeting a
> fate like that of his own father. But two things save his life. During the
> long intervals of confusion and unhappiness he experiences brief acts of
> kindness by others and he discovers the contents of the trunk his mother
> left behind.
> 
> Holbrook recalls a simple hug by a piano teacher who sensed that her young
> student had reached the end of the tether and could not go on. So, she sat
> quietly beside him as any mother would, hugging him as he cried out his
> heart, a moment her student has never forgotten. These small moments of
> kindness punctuate Holbrook's story with a power far beyond their temporal
> allotment in the narrative. There is the poised girl at the dance who has
> the priceless grace to pretend not to notice that Holbrook, her dancing
> partner, can barely dance and is stepping on her feet. There is Holbrook's
> buddy Ace, who talks him through a crisis like a true friend. All are
> testaments to the power of kindness.
> 
> In the cellar of his grandparent's house Holbrook made a discovery that
> would change his life. First, he found his mother's record collection and
> established a connection to her as he listened to her favorite music. Next
> he found mementos of his mother's career in show business. He enrolled in a
> drama class and soon found comfort in pretending to be somebody else. His
> early life on stage was not an easy one, with long road trips, frequent
> rejections, and some hilarious blunders. The funniest moment in the book may
> be when Holbrook, playing an army captain delivering a telegram to President
> Wilson, rushes onto the stage to make his delivery, forgetting to bring the
> telegram with him, dashes back off-stage to get it, and then returns to the
> stage so flustered that he forgets to give it to the other actor, and all
> the while the other actors are adlibbing their lines to cover for him, and
> trying not to laugh as a thoroughly bewildered Holbrook sweats off his
> makeup, bringing down the house. For thespians, Holbrook also provides
> candid insights into how an actor practices his art. Mark Twain became part
> of Holbrook's repertoire when he included Twain among the pieces he and his
> first wife performed in a traveling show for schools in 1949.
> 
> Before Holbrook, there had been a history of Mark Twain impersonators and
> imposters. They plagued Sam Clemens from the 1860s to the very last years of
> his life. While the imposters were an affront to Twain's dignity,
> impersonators were not exactly flattery personified. A Brooklyn dentist, J.
> Jay Villers (1836-1912) made a career of performing "twenty-five comic
> impersonations" including Mark Twain. In 1874, Alfred P. Burbank was doing
> the same in Saco, Maine, and about that same time a self-styled "Professor,"
> R. L. Cumnock, was killing audiences in Great Falls, Montana with his
> impersonations presented under the banner "a night with Shakespeare and
> Dickens." Twain got third billing. In 1878, George Lyon was doing the same
> in Iowa, with the help of supposed testimonials from appearances in New
> York, Missouri, Nebraska, and Kansas from the previous two years. One W. W.
> Cranes of Kansas City advertised his Mark Twain impersonations in the 1880s,
> promising to make his audiences "laugh or cry!"
> 
> On the evening of June 5, 1877, at the Seminary Hall in Hartford, a Twain
> impersonator made a debut that changed everything. William Gillette
> (1853-1937) who later became famous playing Sherlock Holmes in the movies
> impersonated Twain that night and recited the story of the jumping frog.
> Having delayed his annual summer departure for Elmira for a few days, Mark
> Twain himself sat in the audience, and said Gillette's performance gave him
> "one more reason for being sorry I [Gillette] was born" (Zecher, _William
> Gillette_, pp. 528). This was a compliment. Twain and Gillette were friends
> and neighbors, and spent a good deal of time together. The combination of
> Gillette’s talent at mimicry and his familiarity with Mark Twain’s speech,
> were a boon. Twain and his wife helped Gillette in his stage career, loaning
> him $3,000 to get started, and got him a role in the stage version of "The
> Gilded Age" with John T. Raymond. Gillette went on to more enduring fame,
> but continued performing his impersonation of Mark Twain into the 1920s and
> 1930s.
> 
> When Holbrook heard a recording of Gillette’s impersonation of Twain for the
> first time, he’d recently debuted his own show, "Mark Twain Tonight!" He'd
> met Bim Pond, the son of Mark Twain's lecture agent, James B. Pond, who'd
> once worked for James Redpath, Twain's previous lecture agent, and who later
> managed the Twain-Cable tour of 1884-85, and the first leg of Twain's world
> tour in 1895. Bim had known Twain and he helped Holbrook with his act. Bim
> Pond provided Holbrook his first direct link to Mark Twain. Pond
> demonstrated Twain's drawl for Holbrook and encouraged him. Soon Holbrook
> was reading all of Twain's books he could get his hands on as well as
> critical works about Twain by Dixon Wecter, Bernard DeVoto, Arthur L. Scott,
> Philip Foner, and Fred Lorch. A ride on a steamboat gave Holbrook insight
> into Twain's unusual gait which was confirmed when he later watched the
> Edison film of Twain sauntering around Stormfield. He also met Madame
> Charbonnel, who had known Twain in Vienna. She reminded Holbrook that
> Twain's humor was drawn from a deep well of seriousness. Until then,
> Holbrook’s impersonation of Twain was just a generic imitation of a funny
> old man. It wasn’t long before Holbrook was using Twain’s own words to deal
> with hecklers and choosing pieces for his show that would relate to then
> current issues like McCarthyism and Civil Rights.
> 
> In 1958, Holbrook met with the elderly Isabel Lyon several times in her
> Greenwich Village home, where she would prop herself up with a pillow, pour
> a Scotch, and smoke a pipe given to her by Twain as she told Holbrook things
> that she made him promise never to "publish." She denied being in love with
> Twain, or his being in love with her, but Holbrook has previously said it
> was from Lyon that he got a better feel for Mark Twain than from any other
> person he ever met who had known the great author. On April 12, 1961
> Holbrook visited Clara Clemens, who praised his impersonation and then
> startled him with the suggestion that after mastering Mark Twain he should
> give Jesus a try. Accounts of these encounters with Bim Pond, Isabel Lyon,
> and Clara Clemens have been published elsewhere and although this book adds
> some information about his meetings with Bim Pond beyond what Holbrook had
> already written in his first book, _Mark Twain Tonight!_ (1959), he does not
> mention his meetings with Clara or Isabel. Those encounters will hopefully
> be described when Holbrook publishes the planned second volume of his life
> covering the years 1959-2011.
> 
> This first volume of Holbrook’s life story is rightly subtitled "the boy who
> became Mark Twain" and deserves a reading by every Twainian. The events of
> Holbrook's early life led him to the act that has brought him an enduring
> fame for more than fifty years, a recognition that stands entirely separate
> from his many distinguished achievements on stage, television, and motion
> pictures. In this single volume Holbrook does for himself what it took the
> last four decades of Mark Twain biographies to accomplish for Mark Twain -- 
> he humanizes himself. He does this by bravely stepping out from behind the
> mask that every actor uses as a shield. And like Mark Twain, who is more
> fully understood thanks to the biographies by Hamlin Hill, Ron Powers, Karen
> Lystra, Jerry Loving, Laura Trombley, and Michael Shelden, we are drawn to
> Hal Holbrook for the same reasons he is drawn to Mark Twain. Holbrook's
> experiences will remind readers of the joys and terrors Tom experiences in
> _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_, and when Holbrook tells the rest of his life
> story, that next book could be his own _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_.
> 
> <end>