Huck's Hannibal: One Hundred Years On

What would Mark Twain make of all the hoopla (from May to November) in Hannibal, Missouri honoring the sesquicentennial of his birth (November 30, 1835) and the American centennial of his most famous book, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"? (It appeared in Britain in 1884, to comply with British copyright law.)

The answer, of course, depends on whether the aspiring squire called Samuel Langhorne Clemens or the demotic tale teller dubbed Mark Twain (after the minimum depth of water it was safe to navigate in the Mississippi) was doing the reacting.

The Twain side of his character would have thrilled to the news coming into the Hannibal "Courier Post" (oldest continuously published paper in Missouri, circulation 12,200) that the Beach Boys would star at the Labor Day finale (for a cool $75,000). The celebration has been a success mainly due to the largest audiences ever assembled in Hannibal (by two rock groups, first Air Supply followed by an even more successful Survivor) and by the blandishments of two popular trumpet players, Al Hirt and Doc Severinsen.

He would be amused by the 23 (count them!) different commemorative items being hawked at the Frog Pond, the open air tent on Main Street (plain old Second Street in Twain's less hyped time), where the festival's logo, a simpering green frog announces to one and all the theme, "Hannibal's Hoppin'".

He'd have cracked up at the way the politicians almost wiped the whole shindig out in April. The new mayor Richard Cerretti unseated the incumbent John Lyng over the issue of spending $175,000 of city money to finance the festivities. Cerretti won the battle but lost the war--when the City Council overruled him--and appointed Lyng chairman of the Sesquicentennial Commission to boot.

Southwest Bell and Anheuser Busch, those two benign monopolies of talking and guzzling, put up the bulk of the corporate cash--and Mark Twain fans have done the rest by visiting and spending. Sales tax receipts and gas tax figures are up 25% over 1984 for the month of May, and things approached gridlock over the Fourth of July weekend. Once sceptical businessmen are beginning to kick in their fair share, and it appears that the Sesqui will be a fiscal as well as a metaphysical success.

Mr. Clemens (to use Justin Kaplan's telling disjunction in the best biography of the author) would be pleased by other aspects of the celebration. Hannibal/Lagrange College (a 550 studnet Southern Baptist-related four-year college, recently escalated from junior college status) fielded a really impressive week-long writer's conference in June. Fifty-five full-time and twenty part-time students followed a series of international calibre lectures (Duke's Louis Budd and Cambridge, Mass.'s Justin Kaplan, to cite the superstars) leavened by how to do it workshops for aspiring writers. The Sesqui kicked in $7,000 of the $12,000 budget, practically guaranteeing that the College will make an annual affair under the aura of Mark Twain local genius.

And the local public library has taken the bequest of a heavy reading doctor who died last year to set up a Mark Twain Book Fund. The most significant single esthetic happening was the appearance of Barry Moser's brilliant new illustrations for the University of California's Centennial Edition of "Huck Finn" ($24.95, with foreword by no less a Twainophile than Berkeley's Henry Nash Smith). The Hannibal Arts Council mounted a Hannibal as History exhibit which is going to rest permanently in the new Missouri Territory Restaurant (a recycled 1901 Empire Post Office). And the Sesqui displayed the original Moser prints (as well as one $1,000 set of the prints from Moser's Pennyroyal Press in Northampton, Massachusetts). So the intellectual side was classy enough to make even Twain's fussy wife Livy satisfied.

There is the kitschy side--I noted a produce company, a motel, a dinette, a book store, an antique store, a hotel (derelict) named after the writer. But there is no big boom in Twain reading as far as I could determine. He is still more commodity than culture in his home town. On the other hand, the Mark Twain Museum (and Boyhood home) gives a very intellectually credible ten-minute slide lecture orienting visitors; and it has ingeniously saved the crumbling floors of the old (1830-40) house by slicing a side of it off and building new viewing peekaboo galleries for the 140,000 who come even in non-Sesqui years. Amazingly, to beleaguered cultural accountants, the Museum lives off its visitors donations ($160,000 last year, with a $90,000 annual budget).

The town itself (population 18,800) is rather grungy. One can see where Mark Twain came up with his aphorism, "The trouble with American architecture is that it has Queen Anne fronts and Mary Ann behinds." The town is chock-a-block with such harmless architectural duplicity. But the Marion County Court House is a glory in that genre of provincial Beaux Arts, and at Eleventh and Broadway there are two late nineteenth century churches facing each other (the First Christian and the Pentecostal Church) that would warm the cockles of Henry Hobson Richardson, the great innovator in rusticated Romanesque.

Taking a new way back to the Greyhound station, I stumbled on so-called "Millionaire's Row", a plethora of HighVic frame houses that are a joy just to remember. Cathing a Yuppie lawyer nooning at #301, I asked him how much a fine house like his cost, less sweat equity. "$25,000," he gaily replied. "Nine rooms, and a whole hell of a lot of work." So there are monetary compensations for living three hours North of St. Louis, and twenty miles South of Quincy, Illinois. The living is easy. I relished the easy humor at the Donut Shoppe on Mark Twain Avenue at 5:30 a.m. The men teasing the 44-year-old waitress could have been Huck's Pap and Nigger Jim. The local newspaper is as full of the tensions over economic development as the Big City papers. And the morning news on clear channel KHMO (5,000 watts daytime; 1,000 directional after sunset) talked of high suicide rates among Missouri farmers.

Hal Halbrook will end the festivities on the author's birthday in November with "Mark Twain Tonight". Arguably that piece on national TV has done more to widen American appreciation of a much revered but rarely read author (he's a seventh grade required unit in the Hannibal schools! this misanthrope who is palmed off as a boy's writer). So. Win some, lose some. I even ran into a businessman waiting for Nick to open his barber shop on Broadway grousing, "I'll be damned glad when it's all over. The traffic is disgusting. People all over the place."

He believed that Cannon Dam, which was just opened an hour's drive to the west, is really what Hannibal needs. The dam is making, you guessed it, Mark Twain Lake, for those who would rather float themselves in the sun than read about Huck and Nigger Jim doing it on a raft down the ambiguous Mississippi. They figure 150,000 new tourists a year will pass through Hannibal on their way west, lighting out for the territory of a new mad-made lake. Twain would understand, even if Mr. Clemens tsk-tsked himself all the way to the two banks in Hartford, CN.