by RICK DANLEY // October 21, 2016
Death proved no hurdle to the man, Mark Twain, who made a special appearance at the Iola Public Library Tuesday night.
Shuffling up to the stage, wearing an all-white Stacy Adams suit and a satin cravat bundled under his chin, clutching a pipe, and casting a quizzical look round the drab library conference room in which he’d found himself, the literary celebrity of the Gilded Age — once a Missouri urchin by the name of Sam Clemens — turned toward the silver-headed crowd of about 15 and in a loud, reedy-raspy drawl…well, he let ‘em have it.
Yarn after yarn, spun from the finest Pike County silk, Twain braided for his Iola fans a daisy chain of comic anecdotes and backwoods bon mots. Delivered in a raised voice and galloping cadence, his voice box whirred like a turbine for dang near an hour.
Twain paced the carpet in squeaky leather shoes. He roared and bellowed and yodeled and cooed, he wheezed and laughed and grunted and whooped; but then, on a dime, he’d drop into a whisper and the crowd would lean in to see what private fable this teller would recount next.
He dabbed at his beaded brow with an old kerchief and paused at times to sip from a cup (water, we presume). He twice ignored the monotonous trill of an audience members’ cell phone and only once reached into his pocket for a look at his notes. He used his mobile face and resonant timbre and gesticulating limbs to great effect, and for the duration of his lecture he held the Iola audience in the very cup of his hand.
And so it was that, on this balmy autumn evening in downtown Iola, the man before them was Mark Twain.
IN REALITY, he was Ken Church, a retired school teacher from Leavenworth.
In 2011, swept up in the coverage surrounding the newly published the “Autobiography of Mark Twain,” a surprise bestseller, the New York Times called ours a “golden age” for Mark Twain impersonators.
But Ken Church, who’s been perfecting his shtick since 1973, has been at it far longer. (Church actually took his wife to Hannibal, Mo., his subject’s hometown, for the couple’s honeymoon.)
Like the great, but now prehistoric, Hal Holbrook — who is still enacting his one-man show “Mark Twain Tonight!” after its debut 60 years ago — Church’s monologue consists almost entirely of Twain’s own words, drawn from his many novels and essays and travelogues, with an emphasis on the short, comic tales.
IN THE person of Twain, Church snorted at politicians: “As a young man, I worked as a reporter in Washington D.C. and every day I would go over to Congress, that grand old benevolent National Asylum for the Helpless, and I’d report on the inmates there. It was very entertaining. I had never seen a body of men with tongues so handy and information so uncertain. Why, they could talk for a week without getting rid of an idea.”
And commerce: “Ladies and gentlemen, that California get-rich-quick disease that captured my youth spread o’er this country like wildfire. It has created a civilization that has destroyed the repose and simplicity of life, its soft romantic dreams and visions, and replaced them with money-fever, sordid ideals and vulgar ambition. It has created a thousand useless luxuries and turned them into necessities and satisfied nothing.” (In truth, the subject of money churned, like a paddlewheel, in the real Mark Twain’s head until the day he died.)
He recalled his time as special correspondent to the Sandwich Islands: “I guided my horse along a stretch of sandy beach, where I noticed a bevy of nude young native ladies bathing in the sea. This was the sort of local color I was after. So, I went down and set on their clothes — to keep them from being stolen, of course — and begged them to come out, because it seemed to me the sea was rising and they were running some risk. But they just went on lolling and splashing. It was heartwarming spectacle.”
He told a ghost story. And a story about a woman who used to lend her glass eye out to a friend, Flora, another eyeless lady, on the days that Flora was scheduled to receive company. Unfortunately, their sockets didn’t match and “when Flora would get just a little bit excited, that handmade eye would give a whirl. … Grown people didn’t mind it, but it would always make the children cry.”
BUT CHURCH’S Twain lingered longest on the author’s late-masterpiece, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” He acted out a riveting encounter between Huck and his abusive, alcoholic “pappy.”
Had time allowed, though, the very excellent Church might have attended to the knottier question that burns at that book’s center.
Twain was, throughout his life, an intensely moral, if at times moralizing, writer, and there’s probably no better assertion of this aspect of his art than “Huck Finn.”
The short novel remains the shadow under which American novelists still labor. In the thirties, Ernest Hemingway, a man as stingy with praise as any, claimed that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’”
For one, it replaced the borrowed diction of European literature with the patter of the American vernacular — “You don’t know about me,” says the boy-hero in the book’s first line, “but that ain’t no matter” — and showed that great art could be made from “low” material.
But, more importantly, it dramatized the sin that burdened — and still burdens — a country which for centuries regarded an entire group of people as chattel.
There’s a famous scene halfway through the novel that one recent critic referred to as the “moral hinge of American literature.” Huck faces the opportunity to escape trouble himself by turning in his friend and protector, Jim, the runaway slave. He believes, because of the social and religious instruction that would have weighed on any Missouri boy in 1840, that to aid Jim is a mortal sin.
Huck prays on it some and attempts every other method of hardening his heart against his friend. After a few minutes, he begins a letter to Miss Watson that would reveal Jim’s whereabouts. Huck thinks about what a relief it will be to give Jim up and “how near I come to being lost and going to hell.”
But then he reflects on it some more. “And I got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me, all the time, in the day, and in the nighttime, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we floating along, talking, and singing, and laughing. … I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; … and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; … and he said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around, and see that paper.”
Huck picks up the letter to Miss Watson. “I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell,’” and he tore up the letter.
Huck recognized in the wounded expression of a friend something more profound than anything the world could muster in a thousand religious abstractions.
Twain’s message, emphasized Church, is useful still. It’s the reason Hal Holbrook took his show to Oxford, Miss., in 1962, just following the violence that ensued after the University of Mississippi allowed in its first black student. And the reason he performed Twain in Hamburg, Germany, in 1961. And in Prague, behind the Iron Curtain, in 1985.
In inhabiting Twain since 1973, Ken Church performs his own form of literary service. If, however, for some reason you can’t make it out to see Mark Twain in person, there are always his books, available at any library.
This article originally appeared in The Iola Register on October 21, 2016.
