BOOK REVIEW

_Harold, the Boy Who Became Mark Twain_. Hal Holbrook. Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 2011. Pp. 468. Hardcover. $30. ISBN 978-0374281014

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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_.

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